Ogham

What it is

An alphabet used to write early Irish, consisting of groups of strokes cut across or beside a central line — in practice, usually the edge of a standing stone.

Twenty letters, called feda, arranged in four groups of five called aicmí, distinguished by whether the strokes fall to the right of the line, to the left, across it diagonally, or straight through. A further set of five, the forfeda, was added later.

Each letter has a name: beith, luis, fearn, sail, nion, uath, dair, and so on. The first two give the alphabet its traditional name, the Beith-luis-nin.

Where it came from

Around four hundred ogham inscriptions survive — mostly in Ireland, with a substantial group in south-west Wales, and others in Scotland, Devon and the Isle of Man. They date from roughly the fourth to the sixth century, with later manuscript use continuing for centuries.

What they say is unglamorous and important. The overwhelming majority are personal names in the genitive: X son of Y, or X of the tribe of Y. They are memorial stones and territorial markers. Some Welsh examples are bilingual, with the same name in ogham and in Latin, which is how the script was deciphered.

There is no divinatory inscription. There is no oracle text. The corpus is names.

The tree association is real but more complicated than usually presented. Medieval Irish scholarly texts — the Auraicept na nÉces and In Lebor Ogaim — gloss the letter names and supply bríatharogaim, kennings or word-oghams, for each. Several letter names genuinely are trees: beith is birch, dair is oak, coll is hazel. Others are not, and are glossed as trees only by medieval commentators working to make the system tidy. The "tree alphabet" is partly authentic and partly the product of scholars several centuries after the stones were cut, doing what scholars do.

How it is practised

Modern ogham divination uses a set of staves or tiles, one per letter, drawn or cast and read for their tree associations and kennings, generally in spreads borrowed from tarot.

The system almost everyone is using comes from one book. Robert Graves's The White Goddess (1948) constructed a thirteen-month "Celtic Tree Calendar", assigning ogham letters to lunar months and building an elaborate mythic scheme around it. Birth-trees, tree astrology and most ogham divination descend from it.

Celticists reject it, and the objections are not subtle: the calendar does not appear in any Irish source, the letter order is rearranged to fit, and the underlying mythology is Graves's synthesis. Graves was not concealing this. He described his method as poetic and intuitive rather than scholarly, and said the book was written in a kind of possessed rush. It is a work of imaginative literature that has been read as history for seventy-five years.

What we can and cannot say

We can say ogham is entirely genuine as a script, that the inscriptions are real and important evidence for early Irish language and society, and that ogham studies is a serious field.

We can say divinatory use is not historically attested. As with runes, the absence is meaningful rather than an accident of survival: we have the medieval Irish scholarly literature about ogham, in quantity, and it discusses letter names, kennings, secret variants and cryptographic uses — but not a system for asking questions.

We can say the tree calendar is datable to 1948 and its author said what it was.

We can say — and this parallels the rune article closely enough to be worth stating — that a modern practice being modern is not the same as being worthless. Someone using ogham staves is doing something with a real alphabet, real medieval kennings, and seventy-five years of accumulated practice. The problem is only the claim of ancient continuity, which is checkable and false.

We cannot say what pre-Christian Irish practice involved, because the evidence does not reach there. The stones tell us who people's fathers were.

Further reading

• Damian McManus, A Guide to Ogam (1991) — the standard scholarly work.
• Robert Graves, The White Goddess (1948) — read as the poetry it is.
• The Ogham in 3D project, which has digitised the Irish inscriptions and put them online.