Uruz

The picture

The aurochs was a real animal, and it was enormous.
It stood taller than a man at the shoulder, carried horns as long as your arm, and it was never farmed.
Where Fehu is the cow in the paddock, Uruz is the ox in the forest that nobody owns.
Hunting one was a test of a young man's nerve, and the horns ended up as drinking vessels at the feast.
The last one died a few hundred years ago, which tells you something about what we do with wild things.

So the picture is power before anyone has put a yoke on it.
Health in the body, the kind you do not notice until it is gone.
Stamina, muscle, the will to push through.
The energy that gets you out of bed before the alarm and the energy that puts your fist through a door.
Uruz does not care which.
It is raw material, and what it becomes depends on the hands it lands in.

I read it in Perth terms as the body first.
How are you sleeping, how are you eating, when did you last do something that made you puff.
Then as the untamed part of a person, the bit that has never been domesticated by a job title or a mortgage and would still walk off into the bush given half a chance.
Everyone has one.
Most of us keep it in a very small paddock.

When it comes up

When Uruz comes up I take it as a message about strength, and I ask whether you have been using yours.
Sometimes it says the strength is there and the moment has come to lean on it.
Lift the thing, make the call, have the hard conversation, start the physical work you have been putting off.
You are stronger than the question assumes.

Sometimes it says the opposite, that the body has been carrying the load for everyone and it would like a word.
Uruz is one of the runes I look at for health, and when it lands in a reading about work or family I will often ask when the person last had a proper rest.
The ox can pull all day, but it still has to be fed.

It can also announce a change you will have to meet with your whole self.
The old picture had a wildness in it, something you could not negotiate with.
Stand in Uruz by meeting what comes with the body as well as the head.
Breathe lower.
Plant your feet.
Do not try to think your way through a thing that wants to be pushed through.
And watch where the power goes, because the same strength that builds a house can flatten one.
If you are angry, go and dig a hole before you answer the email.

Reversed

Uruz reversed reads as strength that has gone missing or gone wrong.
Illness, exhaustion, a loss of nerve, or brute force used where a light touch was needed.
It can show someone being dominated by a stronger will, or someone who has mistaken stubbornness for strength and is pushing against a wall that is not going to move.
When it lands this way up I ask what has drained the body and what it would take to get the ox fed and rested.
Strength comes back.
It comes back faster if you stop spending it on the wrong fight.

Across the traditions

I put Uruz beside Strength in the tarot, the figure quietly closing the mouth of the lion, because both are about power that is at its best when it is held with a steady hand.
That is my own association and nothing stronger.
The Celtic Tree Astrology section has its own animals and trees, and The Ogham and the Tree Calendar page there is another old alphabet of the north read as pictures, if you want to see how a different people did the same kind of thing.

Where is your strength going at the moment, and is that where you want it?

If you would like this read against your own chart, my readings are here.