In the Tibetan region, a slightly different method was used, called Ge Sar mda’mo, after the semi-mythical King Gesar. These arrows would be shuffled in the quiver, and the first to be drawn would reveal the answer.īelomancy was common in Asia, too. One method used three arrows – one blank, one marked with the words ‘God orders it me’, and one with ‘God forbids it me’. Belomancy, or telling the future through drawing arrows from a quiver, was an ancient practice used by the Babylonians, Greeks and Scythians, among others. In the Quran, arrows are mentioned with a warning about using them for divination. Travellers will find metaphorical ‘qibla’ arrows on the ceiling of most hotel rooms across the Middle East and Asia, directing anyone needing to pray toward Mecca. On Lag Baomer, the mid-year Jewish festival, children are sent to play with bows and arrows, with the bow symbolising a rainbow and the arrow symbolising the ‘power of inwardness’, a mystical part of qabbalistic tradition.Īrchery is present in many Islamic texts as well, with the prophet Muhammed recommending archery for its benefits and praising archers several times (you can see one of the six bows ascribed to him in the Topkapi Palace in Istanbul). In Jewish symbolism, King Jehoash, commanded by the prophet Elisha, shot arrows from an open window into the air to symbolise the destruction of his enemies. One of the best-known passages includes Samuel 20:20, where Jonathan used an arrow, purposefully sent off-target, to send a message to David, in hiding. Crossed arrows were said to mean friendship.Īll of the Abrahamic religions – Judaism, Christianity and Islam – mention archery both real and metaphorical.Īrrows are mentioned almost 60 times in the Bible (and quivers seven times), often as metaphors. Two horizontal arrows in different directions might mean war, whereas a broken arrow meant peace. On your keyboard at work, your microwave or any other situation that you need to convey the concepts of up, down, left, right, forward or back – there is no better way than with an arrow.Įarly Native American cultures, reliant as they were on archery, even developed an extended symbolism for the arrow as part of a variety of non-verbal communication methods needed on a continent with hundreds of spoken languages. Every day, millions of people find their way around the world without stopping to think that they are guided by an arrow. In the modern urban world, they are an essential part of the landscape on signposts for roads and paths. As a directional marker, it has been around for millennia. As one of the first pieces of technology – and one of the simplest to understand – it was an essential part of communication.Īn arrow as depicted in two dimensions has a pointy end and a fletched end, which implies movement. A crucial element of the stories humans tell themselves.Įarly in history, the arrow developed an effective and quite separate symbolic existence from the bow. The cave paintings of Iberia might have been the first – but not the last time – that the arrow would become a metaphorical tool. This would make bows and arrows some of the earliest symbols that represent ideas larger than themselves. (Intriguingly aligning with the competition visualisation techniques elite archers use to prepare for events.) A common explanation is that they represented a form of ritual magic – and that visualising a successful hunt would make a real on more likely to happen. Many have speculated why these images were drawn, given that cave paintings usually represent animals. In Villafranca, also in eastern Spain, an ancient painting depicts an archer with a drawn bow holding a sheaf of arrows in his bow hand, a sight familiar to modern traditional archers. The images in this cave are some of the first depictions of humans in art. The simple stick figures, clearly in motion, give us a sense of the scene and we can even understand the direction of the arrows from just a few marks on the wall.Įven though it was drawn potentially 7000 years ago, we understand the metaphor of the drawn bow while other, more abstract, images made in the same period are more difficult to decipher. Etched on a wall of the Cova dels Cavalls rock art site in eastern Spain there is a prehistoric image of archers hunting deer.
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