Spiritual concepts
Ogham
See Word notation system also the Word and songlines.
Ogham was one of the means by which ‘spells’ were encoded. It is one of the many notation systems used to record the Word.
The Ogham script is connected to the Celtic God Ogma who had connections to the Sun. Ogma or Oghma is a character from Irish mythology, a deity related to the Gaulish god Ogmios. Ogma is linked mythologically with Hercules as champion of the gods.
Again, the sounds of the script have been long lost but the script itself is better preserved, although it suffered the same degeneration as the runes, as it became used in order to provide a written script to code ordinary everyday language.
Just as with the runes, experts state that the symbol system is much later than I believe. They say it was developed during Roman times and early Christian times, which it undoubtedly was as a form of human to human communication, so the scholars are probably right in human use, but I believe its use is much earlier in terms of its shamanic use.
Interestingly, there is a theory put forward by the noted Ogham scholar R.A.S. Macalister [which ‘finds little favour with scholars today’] which ties in with the believed origins of the runes. Macalister believed that Ogham first appeared or was invented in Cisalpine Gaul around 600 B.C. by Gaulish druids as a secret system of communication, and owes its origins to the Greek cuneiform system and the cuneiform system.
If this was true, and its history as a language of shamanic use ties in with the rune system, then the origin of Ogham is prehistoric.
This hypothesis is born out in Irish myth. According to the 11th c. Lebor Gabála Érenn, the 14th c. Auraicept na n-Éces, and other Medieval Irish folklore, ogham was first invented soon after the fall of the Tower of Babel, along with the Gaelic language, by the legendary Scythian king, Fenius Farsa. According to the Auraicept, Fenius journeyed from Scythia together with Goídel mac Ethéoir, Íar mac Nema and a retinue of 72 scholars to the Tower Of Babel in Babylon.
Scythia borders Parthia and Parthia contained modern day Iraq, the home of the Sumerian civilisation. Babel is the Hebrew equivalent of Akkadian Babilu (Greek Babylon), A Sumerian story with some similar elements to the Tower of Babel is preserved in Enmerkar and the Lord of Aratta.
If we tie all the mythological stories together therefore, one language was in use in mythological Babylon to represent both speech, music and communication with the gods.
This was a cuneiform language. Very gradually, as some of the members of the community in Babylon dispersed and as trade flourished – this shamanic language, possible language of communication and writing system dispersed. But because the human languages themselves started to diverge, the script gradually diverged. Each shamanic group managed to preserve the magic shamanic symbol sounds, through a closely guarded aural history, but the symbol system was probably adapted over time in each culture or simply evolved.
Genesis 11 - The Tower of Babel
1 Now the whole world had one language and a common speech.
2 As men moved eastward, they found a plain in Shinar and settled there.
3 They said to each other, "Come, let's make bricks and bake them thoroughly." They used brick instead of stone, and tar for mortar.
4 Then they said, "Come, let us build ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches to the heavens, so that we may make a name for ourselves and not be scattered over the face of the whole earth."
5 But the LORD came down to see the city and the tower that the men were building.
6 The LORD said, "If as one people speaking the same language they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them.
7 Come, let us go down and confuse their language so they will not understand each other."
8 So the LORD scattered them from there over all the earth, and they stopped building the city.
9 That is why it was called Babel—because there the LORD confused the language of the whole world. From there the LORD scattered them over the face of the whole earth.
The Lebor Ogaim ("The Book of Ogams"), also known as the Ogam Tract, is an Old Irish treatise on the ogham alphabet. It is preserved in the Royal irish Academy (AD 1390), Trinity College Dublin (AD 1511) and the National Library of Ireland (17th century). There are fragments in the British Museum.
The Ogham Tract is independent of the Auraicept, and is the main source for the Bríatharogaim, the two word kenning which explains the meanings of the names of the letters of the Ogham alphabet. [A kenning is a circumlocution used instead of an ordinary noun in Old Norse and later Icelandic poetry. For example, Old Norse poets might replace sverð, the regular word for “sword”, with a compound such as ben-grefill “wound-hoe”]
The Ogam Tract also gives a variety of some 100 "scales" of variant or secret modes of writing ogham.
No. 1 Aradach Fionn/Fionn’s Ladder: In this variety each letter has its own vertical stemline. This form of Ogham inspired the theory that Ogham was first invented as a means of musical or spell notation. According to Sean O’Boyle in his book ‘Ogam: The Poet’s Secret’, Fionn’s Ladder could be used as a fingering notation, a tablature to guide the player’s hand through the range of the harp. O’Boyle’s case has been examined from a musicological standpoint by Máire Egan (1983). I think that Ogham was designed as a system of writing and for recording music; spells and music go together. However, according to Egan, the lack of evidence of how exactly the traditional Irish harp was played means that the case cannot be proved one way or another
The training of the Gaelic poet or file involved learning one hundred and fifty varieties of ogham - fifty in each of the first three years of study, and it is clear that most of these are the varieties given in The Ogam Tract (McManus § 7.13, 1991).
Macalister sees them as evidence of ogham's cryptic nature, and as serious examples of how the alphabet was used for secret communication. According to McManus, the practical benefits of the alphabets are not so clear, which makes them far closer to a language of spells than a language of everyday use.
Ogham was a secret method of communication, again only known by the learned. Ogma was a poet and there is a strong link with the rhythmical rhyming sounds of a poem – a sort of music in language which is connected to Ogham. The language was the language of the Druids – the shamans of the celtic peoples and was ‘sacred’.
Druidic teachimgs were entirely oral just like they were for the rune and the Kabbala
The symbols were arranged in groups of five and it was known to be a language of spells and border markings.
Ogham was banned by the Christian church, so it must have been very powerful as a spell language.
Observations
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