An individual re-connects with ancient roots, ancestral voices and tradition. Through affinity with the word religere there is additionally the sense of diligence and caring, the opposite of negligence. Rods symbolize the diverse tribes who find strength only when bound together for the common good. My spiritual personhood equally found highest definition within the honored bond of a loving relationship. Our ancestors were as intelligent as we are today, and they were thinking, carving, painting, and spinning verse ages before the crystallization of writing systems.
Symbols are themselves a kind of linkage as is evident in the word.
Words, as we know them are symbols as well, markings or sounds which represent material realities or abstract concepts. This is the nature of the Emerald Lady of my childhood dreams. I found her within me, sometimes hidden and sometimes powerfully manifest, as if leading me though a confusing labyrinth of experiences sensible only with the perspective of time. It seems much as in Goethe's novel, Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship . At some early age I must have recognized her in depictions of Cybele, Magna Mater, once deified as a meteoric fragment from the starry heavens.