How did the Ogham script originate? In this post, I will put forward an origin theory for Ogham. Though controversial, this theory makes the most intuitive sense to me.
In 1948, English poet Robert Graves published his landmark book The White Goddess, in which he linked the Welsh legend Cad Goddeu or Battle of the Trees to a cultural conflict between the ancient arboreal hunter-gatherer tradition and the agricultural revolution slowly overtaking Europe. In the tale, a hunter named Amaethon happens into the Otherworld and, in violation of the hospitality he is given by King Arawn, steals the king’s prized animals: a roebuck, lapwing, and dog. These animals are keepers of the three secrets of agriculture. When Arawn learns of this betrayal, he summons his best General, Bran the Blessed. Arawn orders Bran to unleash the Cythraul, a world destroying monster, upon the mortal world, and to take an army to recover the stolen beasts. Amaethon, makes his way home and goes to his brother, Gwydion, for help. Gwydion is the most powerful druid in Cymru, next to Math ap Mathonwy. He goes to the forest and awakens the trees to form an army and fight on behalf of man. The trees do so and during the battle defeat both the Cythraul in its guise as a giant serpent with one hundred heads and the undead army of Bran. In the end, humanity wins the battle and adopts the three secrets of agriculture.
There are two equally relevant interpretations of the Battle of the Trees:
- As a cultural battle between the primitive arboreal tradition of the proto-Celts and the evolving mythology of the agricultural revolution, in which the arboreal tradition retained its dominance over the spiritual life of the people and integrated agriculture as a subordinate mythological system.
- As a mythological rendering of the annual forest cycle observed in nature, both on the level of the individual tree from seed and sapling to maturity, death, and decomposition; and on the level of the forest as a whole from spring awakening, summer foliage, autumn changing and winter slumber; and the cycle of forest succession, from open or cleared field to old growth forest.
The first interpretation is mainly historical in nature and occurred over several millennia. Thus, the Cad Goddeu is a cultural memory encoded in myth, recalling the tumultuous impact of the agricultural revolution on the land and the arboreal hunter-gatherer cultures of ancient Britain. The global climate warmed and stabilized about 10,000 years ago, bringing human society into a new interglaciation, the Holocene Era. The new climate allowed humankind to experiment with their environment in ways impossible during the ice age. The discovery of horticulture and animal husbandry posed a monumental paradigm shift in cultural evolution from ancient nomadic cultures that lived by following the game herds and practicing seasonal subsistence to sedentary planters and herdsmen. The Middle East, where the climate was more agreeable to sedentary agrarian lifestyle, witnessed the first permanent settlements and the first standing armies bent on plundering or defending their food stores.
Gradually, as the technology and methods of agriculture improved, the sedentary agrarian culture began moving north and encountered the nomadic hunters. The collision of these vastly different cultures resulted in a diffusion and eventual synthesis creating hybrid sedentary societies that practiced farming, animal-husbandry, and hunting. Likewise, the spiritual life that evolved from these hybrid cultures combined the evolving agricultural mythology and the arboreal hunting tradition into a single spiritual system. Among the proto-Celtic peoples, the arboreal tradition remained spiritually dominant and incorporated subsistence agriculture into its system. When the Celts arrived in the British Isles around the fourth-century BCE, they adopted the proto-Celtic arboreal tradition of the natives, and Celtic spirituality as we know it was born.
The Battle of the Trees can be understood within this historical context. The story begins with the theft of agricultural secrets from the sovereign King of the Otherworld, reminiscent of other sacred “thefts” such as the Greek Prometheus’ theft of fire from the gods, or the biblical theft of sacred fruit in the Garden of Eden. The “theft” implies that humanity has come into possession of forbidden knowledge possessed by the gods. Each “theft” results in humanity gaining a new ability to control and manipulate their environment, which upsets the balance. The ancient Northern Europeans held the forest and the grove as sacred, but agriculture required that large areas of forest be cleared and plowed so that domesticated crops might be sewn where only trees and wildflowers had once thrived.
Humans created the imbalance, and humans must repair it. Thus, Gwydion (druidic champion of the old arboreal tradition) awakens the trees and directs them to battle the foreign enemy, from whom the secrets of agriculture had been taken, and who now lays waste to the land. Whole forests were uprooted to clear the land for planting. The environmental destruction caused by the agricultural revolution was (and in our rainforests continues to be) severe. The battle ends only when the older forest tradition recognizes and incorporates the new tradition. This is demonstrated by the name guessing ritual in which Gwydion correctly identifies Bran. Through a prolonged period of conflict and cultural diffusion, a synthesis is reached between the two traditions, but the old order is irrevocably changed, reflected in the story by the ascension of a new sovereign King of Annwn. Gwyn ap Nudd rules over a new natural balance, incorporating both arboreal and agricultural traditions.
The second interpretation is a mythological analogy for the annual forest cycle. The trees form battle ranks according to their natural orders. Those trees that awaken first in the springtime take the front lines in the Tree Army. These produce new buds that foster the growth of the tree, contribute nutrients to the forest and supply animals, birds, insects and people with food, shelter and medicine. The early spring bloomers provide signs for farmers marking the beginning of the agricultural year. Likewise, the first succession trees that are the first to grow in a freshly clear-cut or burned area take their place in the front line. Some trees require the intense heat of a forest fire to open their seedpods, demonstrating that Mother Earth has produced species to fill every niche and ensure that the forest will continue to grow despite unfavorable conditions. Some trees bloom or come into full foliage later in the spring and are associated with the May Pole and Beltaine, and still others mature midsummer. Druids watch for signs throughout the year in the blossoming and maturing of the forest trees that inform when the seasonal ceremonies should be held, in addition to sowing and reaping crops. Thus, the Cad Goddeu may also be seen as an allegory for the struggle of life to survive and propagate itself throughout the seasons from year to year.
The Tree Army won the war at Goddeu Brig, and the Celtic arboreal spiritual system flourished for several thousand years alongside the new agrarian tradition, until it faced a new threat with the advent of Christianity. The agricultural revolution gave birth to a new mythology organized around the idea of a messianic savior deity conquering death, a sacrificed harvest god resurrected in the spring sowing. Twelve Middle Eastern tribes, known collectively as the Hebrews, gave birth to a new religion called monotheism, belief in one supreme deity. The Hebrews followed their Patriarch Abraham in the worship of Yahweh, who instituted a covenant or sacred relationship with His chosen people. Sin was defined as any violation of this covenant and required animal and herbal sacrifices to Him to restore it.
In approximately 4 BCE, as the story goes, a child was born in a manger in the small village of Bethlehem. This child, Jesus, became a teacher of sacred law who many identified as the promised Messiah sent to liberate the Hebrew people, except the salvation he promised was not from the political-military forces of Rome, but liberation from “the bondage of sin.” A minority of Hebrew people accepted Jesus as the promised messiah and became Christians after the messianic word Christ, meaning “Anointed One.” In time, Christianity spread throughout the Middle East and southern Europe, eventually becoming the official state religion of the Roman Empire. Christians were instructed by Jesus and his apostles Peter and Paul to convert the world’s masses.
By the fourth century CE, Christianity had reached Britain. The arboreal tradition faced yet another cultural collision in which a foreign spiritual system attempted to destroy it. The transition from paganism to Christianity in much of Northern Europe involved a piecemeal assimilation of pagan traditions to convert the local populations. Catholic dogma opposed Celtic Goddess worship. In the Christian tradition, a female (Eve) brought original sin into the world and therefore represents the sinful nature that must be brought into submission to the male patriarchal god Yahweh. This is accomplished, the Church taught, through the mediation of Yahweh’s “only begotten son”, Jesus, whom Yahweh offered to the world to be sacrificed for the sins of humanity and provide a means of redemption for whoever believes in him. Setting aside Yahweh’s questionable parenting, this leaves little room in the Christian order for the divine feminine, reserved only for Mary, Mother of Christ.
What the Church canonized was integrated into the evolving Christian tradition, while that which the Church deemed heresy was discouraged and forbidden. The elders who made this determination were male. To subdue the stubborn Goddess tradition in Ireland, the Church assimilated the Celtic Goddess Bridget by canonizing her as a saint, stripping her of any sexual qualities, and making her chaste. Meanwhile, the Church, which viewed human sexuality as innately sinful, transformed the horned fertility God Cernunnos into the horned, cleft-footed Devil, enemy of goodness and piety. Only in the Norse lands did the pagan traditions remain unscathed, and there only for a few more centuries.
The Celtic arboreal tradition was annihilated in England, Wales, and Scotland, and survived solely in Ireland, which became a repository for Druidic teaching. To save their belief system and culture from extinction, the druids encoded their sacred tree knowledge in the Ogham alphabet and preserved their lore and traditions by encoding them in stories recorded by Irish monks. The trees of the much older Cad Goddeu are present in the Irish alphabet, each given its own letter, with the whole being organized into four Aicme, representing the ranks of the Tree Army, the Chieftains, Peasants, Shrubs, and Bramble. Of the twenty sacred trees recorded in the Cad Goddeu and preserved in the ogham alphabet, there are trees associated with both the spring and autumnal equinoxes and the summer and winter solstices, as well as the four sacred elements, individual gods and goddesses, and cultural heroes of old. In this way, the druidic arboreal tradition was preserved in a physical form that would endure as long as the rocks and posts on which they were carved.
Featured Image cited from RedBubble.com
Spirit of the Alleghenies 