Runester

For whatever reason, I looked up Oubliette in WikiPedia. I’ve always been fascinated by the concept. The beauty of the word itself – and the horror behind it’s meaning. As is often the case with WikiPedia … once you start, it’s hard not to keep finding something that catches your attention and one click after another and you’ve lost half the morning reading and learning.

Well, not a total waste, then!

The article on Oubliette lead to an article on Immurement – to be sealed up within a room or cave and left to die. While this is, itself, terrible to even consider what really struck me was the reference to immurement as a way for a mason or archetect to successfully complete a construction project. For example, a challenging bridge would keep collapsing until the master mason agreed to sacrifice his wife by sealing her into the stone bridge  – and then it stands firmly ever since.

What does this mean? On the one hand, these are not virgins being sacrificed or random women but specifically the wife of one of the men charged with building the project. Is this some kind of metaphor for the level of committment required of the builder that he sacrifices his marriage to his project? I’d like to think so, because while the dissolution of a marriage is sad, it’s not nearly as bad as bricking your wife up in the bridge or tower you were paid to build.

So, I am REALLY hoping that these stories are just very striking metaphors for men who lost their marriages to their jobs and of the (sometime) necessaty of doing just that in order to be the best at what they do. On the other hand, I have this nigling sense that there is more to it then that and that I am (perhaps) missing something obvious.

What do these stories mean? Why would a man be required to sacrifice his wife in order to complete a project? Why do the stories stay with us, generation after generation? Other then the striking and strikingly disturbing images, there must be something deeper that they touch.

Do we sacrifice our spouces to our pursuits? Is this a warning, something we should avoid at all costs … or (more disturbing still) is it a sort of promise that those that are willing to make that sacrifice are the succsessful ones that complete the great projects and live on in the glory of what they’ve accomplished?