Beith

Ogham is on much firmer ground than most divinatory alphabets, because it is attested twice over and in two quite different ways. Keeping the two apart is the whole discipline of reading it honestly.

The stones

Around four hundred ogham inscriptions survive, the great majority in Ireland, Kerry, Cork and Waterford above all, with a few dozen more in Wales, Scotland, the Isle of Man and the south-west of England. They are cut as strokes across or either side of an arris, the edge of an upright stone, and read from the bottom up.

They date to roughly the fourth to sixth centuries, and their content is monotonous in a way that is itself informative. They are almost entirely personal names, generally in a formula of the type X son of Y or X descendant of Y, marking a grave or a boundary or a claim.

Not one of them is an oracle, a spell, or a divinatory text. Nobody has ever found ogham used for anything but writing names on stone.

The manuscripts

The second body of evidence is later, larger and much stranger. Medieval Irish scholars wrote about ogham at length, and the principal collection is In Lebor Ogaim, the Ogham Tract, transmitted alongside the grammatical treatise Auraicept na n-Eces and preserved most fully in the fourteenth-century Book of Ballymote.

These texts supply things the stones do not:

• The letter names (beithe, luis, fern, sail, nion and the rest), and the division into groups called aicmi.
• The briatharogaim, three lists of two- and three-word kennings glossing each letter, ascribed to Morann mac Main, Mac ind Oc and Cu Chulainn. These are the earliest interpretations of the letters that exist.
• Something like a hundred alternative oghams, elaborate substitution schemes assigning the letters to birds, rivers, forts, colours, occupations, saints and much else.

Why the alternative oghams matter

Because they show what the medieval scholars were doing. This was grammatical and scholastic play, virtuoso systematising by literate men who found an alphabet and built taxonomies on it. Bird-ogham is not a bird oracle; it is an exercise.

The tree correspondences belong to that same body of scholastic material. They are genuinely medieval, and they are genuinely a later interpretive layer laid over letter names that had come from somewhere else.

That is the honest position: the letters are ancient, the letter names are early, the systematic tree scheme is medieval learned elaboration, and the divinatory use is modern.

Almost everything that circulates today as Celtic tree wisdom descends from one book by one poet, published in 1948, who did not claim to be doing history.

The White Goddess

Robert Graves published The White Goddess: A Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth in 1948. It argues for a single suppressed European poetic religion of a triple moon-goddess, and it reads ogham as one of the keys to it.

From it comes the thirteen-month tree calendar, thirteen lunar months of twenty-eight days, each ruled by a tree, which is now printed on posters, sold as jewellery, and taught in a great many places as ancient Druidic practice.

There is no such calendar in any Irish source.

Where Graves got his material

Not from nowhere. He was working from Roderick O'Flaherty's Ogygia (1685), a learned but pre-modern history of Ireland containing a chapter on ogham, and from the letter-name and tree material in the medieval tracts.

The calendar's common name gives the borrowing away. It is called the Beth-Luis-Nion calendar, after what Graves took to be the first three letters. But the manuscript order is Beith, Luis, Fern, Sail, Nion, nion is fifth, not third. The name preserves an ordering error inherited from his source.

What the scholars said

R. A. S. Macalister, the leading ogham scholar of the day, told Graves directly that the tree alphabet was late and not to be relied on. Graves proceeded anyway.

Damian McManus's A Guide to Ogam (1991) is the standard modern treatment, and it is unambiguous. Only a minority of the twenty letter names are demonstrably trees at all, somewhere around eight. The rest are abstract nouns, or words whose meaning is uncertain, or words that later scholiasts fitted to trees because a tree alphabet was the scheme they had decided on.

What this does not mean

It does not mean the ogham entries in this atlas are worthless, and it does not mean Graves was a fraud. He described The White Goddess as a work of poetic argument and analeptic reasoning, not of philology. His readers made the historical claim on his behalf.

What it means is that a modern reader has to know which layer they are standing on:

• Fourth to sixth century, the letters, on stone, writing names.
• Early medieval, the letter names and the briatharogaim kennings.
• Medieval scholastic, the systematic tree scheme and the alternative oghams.
• 1685, O'Flaherty's ordering.
• 1948, the calendar, the goddess, and the divinatory system.

Every one of those layers is in the material sold today as a single ancient tradition.