Well.
Druid Tree Lore and the Ogham
Approaching a tree we approach a sacred being who can
teach us about love and about endless giving.
S/he is one of millions of beings who provide our air,
our homes, our fuel, our books. Working with
the spirit of the tree can bring us renewed energy,
powerful inspiration, deep communion.
- From the teaching material of the Ovate Grade
As we have seen from the etymology given in The Elements of the Druid Tradition, Druids were wise men of the trees. One of the world's largest tree-planting movements is called The Men of the Trees and was started by a Druid, the late Richard St Barbe-Baker. Few, if any, of its members would realise that he had partly encoded the word 'Druids' in its title. One of the reasons why the subject of Druids fascinates us, is because there is such a strong association between them and trees. If we close our eyes and imagine a Druid, we will often see him beside a tree, or within a sacred grove of trees. We sense that Druids were at one with nature in a way that we no longer are, and those of us who aspire to become Druids do so because we want to attain that at-one-ment, that union, for ourselves. In a conscious way we recognise the beauty of trees and their value to us, but just below the surface of our consciousness lies the knowledge that they also possess keys and powers that, if we were to share in them, would enrich our lives immeasurably.
The Druids used a particular method for communicating and remembering their wealth of tree-knowledge. This is known as the Ogham [pronounced o'um]. It consists of twenty-five simple strokes centred on or branching off a central line. It is similar in purpose, but separate in origin from the Nordic runes. The Ogham characters were inscribed on stones or written on staves of wood. As a method of writing it is laborious, but as a language of symbolism it is powerful. It is probably pre-Celtic in origin, although most of the existing inscriptions have been dated to the fifth and sixth centuries. Whether Celtic or pre-Celtic we can sense that it carries with it some of the very earliest of Druid wisdom. Amongst our sources of information about its use, we have The Scholar's Primer from Scotland (transcribed from the oral tradition in the seventeenth century) and O'Flaherty's Ogygia from Ireland [published in 1793]. But it was the poet Robert Graves who, in modem times, brought the Ogham into public awareness once again, with his publication of The White Goddess in 1948.
Each stroke of the Ogham corresponds to a letter of the alphabet. This letter represents the first letter of the tree allocated to it, so that the sign ** represents the letter B, and the tree Beith, the Birch. The sign ** represents the letter L, and the tree Luis, the Rowan, and so on.
Although we know the letters that each stroke represents, and can translate the ancient Ogham inscriptions accordingly, we cannot be so confident when we come to associate the trees with particular months. There has been much controversy as to whether the Ogham really was used as a calendar by the Druids, linking each tree and letter of the alphabet to a moon month, as suggested by Robert Graves. Whilst it is important to be aware that there is controversy, it is also important to understand that Druidry is evolving, and that if they didn't correlate them in 500 BC they do now - if it was Robert Graves' invention, then he was acting as a Druid when he did so - he was inspired, in other words. Someone has to invent things, or 'receive' them from the invisible world, and just because he or she does so in AD 1948 rather than BC 1948 is in the final analysis unimportant to those of us who want to use Druidry as a living system, as opposed to those who want to study its origins for a purely academic purpose.
The essential point about the Druid use of Ogham is this - it provided and provides a glyph or system which is every bit as rich as the Tree of Life of the Qabalists. The Qabalists use one tree - the Druids use a grove, a wood - filled with many trees and woodland plants. By clearly building up this wood with the inner mind and by then associating each tree or plant with a different number, god or goddess, animal, bird, colour, mineral, star, divine or human principle, the Druid is able to retain in her mind far more information than she would normally be able to, if she simply learnt lists of such facts. This use of an image as a mnemonic (memory) device has been well known as an esoteric discipline through the ages. The ancient Greeks visualised a theatre, each part of which was associated in the memoriser's mind with an item that needed remembering.
But to see the Druid use of Ogham simply as a mnemonic for storing data is to fail to recognise its true purpose and value, for, having 'peopled the forest', having learnt the associations, the Druid is then able to use this network of data in just the same way that a computer can, with appropriate software, work on stored data to produce numerous combinations and recombinations. The associations start to interrelate and cross-fertilise of their own accord, even during sleep. The hard work of months and years of training starts to pay off as the Druid sleeps on (or perhaps in) her forest, and the various associations and connections between the storage points in her system start to communicate.
The method of free association used in psychoanalysis can provide a glimpse into the secret world of connections and associations that are made in the unconscious, and the particular contribution of esoteric disciplines is in providing a framework that exists partly in the conscious mind, but which also is immersed in the unconscious - allowing both aspects of the self to feed from it and to nourish it. In other words, by building a grove of trees in the imagination, or a 'Tree of Life' if one is a Qabalist, one creates a structure which operates not only in the conscious waking self, but also in the unconscious (some might say the superconscious) pulling to it, as it were, associations, ideas, images and experiences. In this way it acts as a bridge between these two parts of the self. At a deeper level the creation of such a structure allows the influx of transpersonal energies into the personal or individual psychic system in a way that is safe and structured because the channels for its reception and integration have already been built.
One of the most extraordinary things to contemplate is that as we think and make associations, our brains actually make connections and grow physically! The more we use our brain, the more dendrites (the 'arms' between brain cells) are grown, and the more synaptic connections are made (connections from the end of one dendrite to another). These neural pathways are called dendrites because they look like the branches of a tree, and dendrite is Greek for 'tree-like'. Photographs of sections of the cerebral cortex look like photos of a thicket of trees in winter. So as we imagine a sacred grove of trees in our minds and work with it over many months to create a network of associations, we are literally building a thicker, richer complex of connections at a physical level in our brains, as well as a structure on a subtler level in the psyche which can connect our conscious self with our unconscious self.
