How to Semiotically Sex Up Your Campaign Setting With Celestial Symbolism

It's funny how you go down rabbit holes. Last week I happened to be in Lund, in southern Sweden, where there is a very grand and beautiful cathedral which is rightly famous. It contains a famous astronomical clock, first constructed some time around 1425, and which calls to mind CS Lewis's observation that the defining characteristic of the medieval mind was 'intricacy':

This is the clock's 'perpetual calendar'. Some more detail:

What you will notice about the calendar is that it is divided into four quadrants, each of which has a defining symbol. Going clockwise from the top, there is an eagle, a lion, an ox, and a man. Curious about what these referred to, I did a little research and discovered that these symbols are associated with the four evangelists, Matthew (man), Mark (lion), Luke (ox) and John (eagle). The first person to come up with this correspondence was apparently Jerome, writing in the 4th century, who derived the symbols from the first line of each gospel (Matthew's begins with Christ's genealogy; Mark's begins with a voice crying in the wilderness; Luke's begins with a sacrifice; John's begins with the eternal logos as an eagle flies to the sun). These in turn are supposed to also reflect aspects of Christ's character: as man, king, sacrifice, and son of God. 

It turns out, though, that Jerome himself borrowed the symbols from a passage in Ezekiel in which the man, lion, ox and eagle are decpicted as accompanying the divine chariot-throne of God. And this is further thought to be derived from the Babylonian 'fixed' signs of the zodiac, with Aquarius the man, Leo the lion, Taurus the ox and Scorpio the eagle (which was apparently the more usual depiction in the ancient world) ruling each of the cardinal points of the heavens.

I was fascinated by the concentric layers of symbolism here, like a nested table, and I was immediately drawn to a comparison with the Chinese 'four symbols' (which I wrote about long ago): the Azure Dragon of the East, the Vermilion Bird of the South, the White Tiger of the West, and the Black Turtle-Snake of the North. Here, the symbolism is again multi-layered; the different colours are supposed to represent the different hues of soil in the different regions of China, but they also map to the four seasons, four time of day, and so on.

I am sure that the two sets of symbols are unrelated, but I was struck by the odd commonality of investing four quadrants of the heavens, or four cardinal points, with symbolic meaning in this way. And it got me thinking about what might be called 'semiotic geographies' in RPG campaign settings - that is to say, making the terrain of a campaign world reflect or make reference to symbolic (or even real) figures or beings of some kind.

At the most extreme and hyper-fantastical, you could imagine a world in which each corner is literally ruled at its outermost extreme by a giant beast; I am picturing here a flat earth, where if you travel far enough from the centre you eventually reach one of four semi-mystical kingdoms whose ruler is an eternal demigod of some kind (dragon/bird/tiger/turtle-snake obviously works very nicely for a pseudo-Asian setting). 

At a slightly less fantastical level, it could just be that the entire world is divided ito four quadrants, each of which has its own flavour, flora and fauna, and so on. So you could have one quadrant ruled by 'Man' (which contains human civiliations), one ruled by the lion (filled with dangerous, belligerent creatures), one ruled by the ox (hulking gargantua) and one ruled by the eagle (flying creatures, obviously).

Or, at a slightly less fantastical level still, the four symbols of your choice could simply reflect something important about the nature of the campaign setting. Maybe each is a particular school of magic. Or character type. Or even pseudo-aligment. 

Or it could even be that each symbol represents a season, with very distinctive moods, dangers, and effects. Azure Dragon season is spring; it is when the world blooms into verdant life, but is correspondingly filled with aggression and danger; Vermilion Bird is summer, when there is intense heat and drought; White Tiger is autumn, when things slip into a kind of bacchanalian decay - rutting and 'tomorrow we may die' feasting being the order of the day; Black Turtle-Snake is winter, when come the snow and ice. Different types of magic are more or less powerful in the corresponding seasons, and different monsters come and go. 

You get the drift. Thinking up one's own four cardinal animals would be fun. Layering different variants of symbolism on them would be even more fun. You probably wouldn't want to have it permeate everything (I think probably deploying it as a subtle thematic motif in the background may be the best usage, keeping it largely implicit or unstated) as it would be easy to go overboard. But it is a way of giving a setting much greater depth than simply at the level of 'the orcs of mshjahsja live in the jungles of Ffnnnar and the dwarves of Eggegegg inhabit the Blood Mountains'.