Bundle of Arrows

I was watching Pan’s Labyrinth over the weekend and spotted a symbol on one of the cars: a bundle of five arrows. This perked my interest because I’ve used a bundle of five arrows to symbolize the five royal families (on the Imperium flag). So today I did some research and found some interesting information about it: the symbol on the car in the movie was the so called “yoke and arrows” which was used by the fascists during and after the Spanish Civil war. At this point I grew a little concerned since I didn’t really want the five families to be associated with Fascism. However, I did some additional digging and found that the fascists had taken the symbol from the so-called Catholic Monarchs of Spain. This made me happier since of course the five families are royalty.

So what’s interesting here is that when I first created the symbol for the five families, I don’t think I had any previous knowledge of how this symbol was used in Spain. Yet, I discovered that indeed it had been used, in a very similar fashion as I had done. Not sure what any of this means, but I think it’s interesting.