During historical
contact with the Celts of Gaul, Caesar found that the
Druids had an apparent taboo against the use of
writing, a characteristic that Caesar remarked upon
when he wrote: "They commit to memory immense
amounts of poetry...they consider it improper to
commit their studies to writing...lest it should be
vulgarised and lest the memory of scholars should
become impaired". On those occasions when it was
necessary to correspond or maintain public records,
the Gauls used Greek letters instead of their own.
The Celtic alphabet
known as Ogham was invented, according to the
medieval Irish Book of Ballymote, by Ogma Sun-Face.
It comprises three sets of five consonants and one
set of five vowels, a total of twenty letters. In
actuality, the manuscript refers to more than one
hundred types of Ogham, each with unique names and
notches.
Ogma, or Ogmius as he
was known in Gaul, was described in the second
century by the Greek writer Lucian as the Gallic god
of Eloquence. He was variously described as
"honey mouthed" and "eloquent".
The golden speech of Ogmius was recorded in Gallic
artwork in the form of a fine gold chain linking the
tip of his tongue to ears of a group of followers.
In the Book of
Ballymote, written in 1391, the invention of Ogham
was achieved when "Ogma Sun-Face raised four
pillars of equal length", and it was upon these
pillars that the characters of the letters were
etched.
Ogham, and the
mysteries associated with it, were kept a strict
secret among the scholar/priest druids. Mider's abode
on Man was guarded by three cranes who called out to
all who approached "Enter not! Stay away! Go on
by!" Arawn king of Annwn, the Brythonic
Otherworld, and whose name also means Eloquence,
guarded his realm of secret knowledge with his pack
of hounds.
The Book of Ballymote
indicates that there were a number of secret ways in
which Ogham could be used to communicate
non-verbally. Finger ogham equates the five letters
of each pillar with the thumb and four fingers, such
that the first letter of each pillar (B, H, M, A) are
found from the tip to the base joint of the thumb,
and so on. Other 'oghams' include a shin ogham and a
nose ogham.
It was not until the
druidical colleges and their mysteries began to
decline that public displays of Ogham began to
appear, most of which appear on monuments together
with the corresponding Latin. These are mainly found
in Ireland, which remained relatively free from the
influence of the Romans, and date from the Christian
period.
The
Tree Alphabets
The Book of Ballymote
contains two lists of tree alphabets, which are often
discussed separately from the Ogham. Although the
initial letters of each tree and their order are the
same as the letters given for the Ogham notches,
these lists are intended to stand separately from the
Ogham script itself.
The two lists are
nearly identical, with some slight grammatical
differences in the use of letters. They have provided
the basis for many references to the Tree Ogham. We
no longer have any idea what, if anything, the
differences in the lists actually mean.
According to legend,
this alphabet and the order of its letters was
composed by Fein’s Farsaidh, with the assistance
of Goidel mac Etheoir and lar mac Nema. As the story
goes, Fenius was in the Holy Land at the time the
Tower of Babel was being constructed. The Bible
states that, at this time, there was a single common
language spoken by all the peoples of the earth. When
this language was changed and corrupted by God as his
punishment for the building of the tower, Fenius sent
seventy-two scholars out into the world to learn
every new language. When the scholars returned to the
tower after 10 years had passed, Fenius selected the
best of the world’s languages and created in
Berla tobaide, the ‘selected language.’
The name given to this new language was Goidelic,
named for Goidel mac Etheoir. This was the precursor
to Gaelic.
