Kevin's Watch

Just a moment of open contemplation here. As SRD often receives inspiration from actual existing myths and religion I have often wondered if the rukhs of the Clave might be connected to the Gnostic and Qabalistic concept of the Ruach, which is, among other things, the feminine aspect of the Creative Will. This force was also conceptualized as the Goddess Shekinah, and is a part of the ancient concept of the trinity of creation; (interesting that the rukh is a triangle.) In these myths about Creation the Feminine force is what motivates the Creator toward descent, i.e. the act of Creating the manifest world. This is sometimes conceived of as a Fall. I thought I saw a connection here with the Rede of the Clave talking about the archetypal Fallen Woman, (whose name eludes me at the moment) trysting with a-Jeroth, and this bringing about the Fallen state of the world.
As for Linden Avery, I can relate to people hating her, but strangely, though I used to feel that way I am more ambivalent about this now...In the second chronicles there were times when I really despised her, but not always because of any wrong doing on her part. My thing was that I intensely disliked what I preceived as her imposing herself on Covenant and the pardigm that he had hewn out of his experiences in the Land. I was enraged at the prospect of anyone but him being able to use wild magic. It was one of those very opinionated things...The first chronicles took you through this incredible process of personal alchemy by which Covenant became the Unbeliever and defeated Foul, and then all of a sudden there was this pushy, inexperienced outsider trying to get into the story. But, in time I grew to like certain things about her, and of course the story just swept me along.
The way I look at it is that I actually really hated Covenant for a long time, and I eventually saw his merits, so I kind of look at Linden the same way.

Rukh wrote:As SRD often receives inspiration from actual existing myths and religion I have often wondered if the rukhs of the Clave might be connected to the Gnostic and Qabalistic concept of the Ruach, which is, among other things, the feminine aspect of the Creative Will.

Or it might be related to the word "rukh", which is a form of "roc", a giant bird.

Or it might be related to the Persian word "rukh", meaning chariot, which gave rise to the word "rook", a castle.

My belief is that he found the word from one of these references, but used it simply because he liked the way it sounded. There is also a similarity to the word ankh: the words have a similar sound, and their referents have a similar shape - he probably chose a word that had some ankh-ness to it.

Excellent post, Rukh! I love the way we can relate aspects of TCTC to outside things. Whether SRD had it in mind or not is irrelevant to me, I just like having new layers of meaning.

...damm the better TCTC dicussions are beginning to take place outside the TCTC discussion forum!