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Celtic Tree Signs
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Origin 1948, the publication of Robert Graves's The White Goddess; elaborated into a birth-sign system by later popular writers
The Celtic tree calendar assigns a tree to each of thirteen lunar months and reads a character type from a birth date. It is a modern construction: Robert Graves set it out in The White Goddess (1948) from his own reading of the ogham letter names and medieval Irish material, and later popular writers turned it into a birth-sign system. The medieval Irish sources record ogham letters with tree names, but no calendar or zodiac of this kind.
Facts
Origins
Origin Period1948, the publication of Robert Graves's The White Goddess; elaborated into a birth-sign system by later popular writers 1 Creator / OriginatorRobert Graves (1895-1985), poet and novelist, in The White Goddess (1948) 1 Contested Use
Contested or Appropriated Modern UseMarketed as an ancient Celtic calendar. There is no evidence that any Celtic people kept a thirteen-month tree calendar: Graves built it from his own idiosyncratic reading of medieval Irish ogham letter-names, and Celtic scholarship rejects it. 1 Status
Standing as a Comparative CategoryLargely abandoned as a comparative category 1 Overview
Size of the Traditional Set Structure
StructureThirteen lunar months, each assigned a tree and a character type, keyed to Graves's reading of the medieval Irish ogham letter-names. 1 Learn More
The Celtic Tree Calendar
The Celtic tree calendar assigns a tree to each of thirteen lunar months and reads a character type from the month of a person's birth (the Birch, the Rowan, the Ash, the Oak and so on), in the manner of a zodiac. Each tree-sign carries a set of traits and associations, and the scheme is popular in modern Druidic, Wiccan and New Age circles.
It is a modern construction. Robert Graves set it out in The White Goddess (1948) from his own idiosyncratic reading of the medieval ogham letter-names and of a poetic "tree alphabet", and it was elaborated by later writers into the birth-sign system now in circulation.
Modern, not ancient
The atlas is clear that the Celtic tree calendar is a twentieth-century creation, not a calendar kept by the ancient Celts: it rests on Graves's personal and much-criticised interpretation rather than on evidence of Iron Age Celtic practice, though it draws on the genuine medieval Irish tree-lore attached to the ogham. The distinction is a service to both the modern system and the real history it borrows from.
The atlas gives each tree-sign its month, its tree, and its associated character. The ogham letters and their medieval tree-lore that Graves drew on are treated in their own categories, and the calendar belongs among the Modern Revivals.
Cross-Tradition Connections
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