Discover the fascinating world of Ogham divination and its meanings. This guide will teach you the historical background, symbolism, and significance of Ogham divination, while the video above will teach you how to create your own Ogham divination set (save it for the end!).
Lora O’Brien, founder of the Ogham Academy (and author of this article), has been studying and working with the Ogham for almost 30 years, while devoting the most recent of those years to a Masters in Irish History, and a thesis on the topic of the Ogham and Irish Identity.
What is Ogham Divination?
Ogham divination is a modern way in which Contemporary Pagans, and those generally interested in divination, may predict future happenings, communicate with beings or entities such as Gods or Ancestors, or gain deeper insight and understanding of past, present, and future situations and events.
You will hear elsewhere that ‘it is an ancient Celtic system of fortune-telling and symbols which has been used for thousands of years by Druids and Shamans’… but the reality is, we have no reliable historical evidence on whether the Ogham was used for divination or magical practice.
What we do have are tantalising archaeological hints, and manuscript references which were recorded at a much later date, and in a very different context, to the events, situations, or stories they purport to be telling us about.
There are those of us, even within academic settings, who believe that while we absolutely MUST clearly understand and study the archaeology, linguistics, and historical source material that does remain to us with regard to the Ogham… we can also extrapolate and develop a modern spiritual, magical, and divination practice that is fulfilling and authentic to what we do actually know, while organically growing from and beyond the admitted restrictions of the evidence.
Ogham Divination Meanings
Ogham Divination uses a set of 25 symbols, based on the letters of the ancient Irish Gaelic script. Each symbol represents the letter name, is related to the others within its original Aicme or grouping, and holds a key to many layered deeper meanings which can be used to interpret a person’s life.
Depending on the context, each Ogham letter or Fid can take on a different meaning. While we do provide suggested meanings below, we strongly encourage you to study the original source materials and develop your own ‘kennings’ for each of the Feda (‘letters’) of the Ogham.
Though most Neo Pagan and New Age sources will tell you that Ogham Divination meanings come from some sort of ‘Celtic Tree Oracle’, this is unfortunately, inaccurate.
Though very popular, this nonsense comes from a misunderstanding that the Ogham alphabet is ALL about trees, and each ogham divinatory meaning is related to trees, or worse, a ‘Celtic Tree Calendar’.
Though we can blame Robert Graves for much of this, as he published it in his pseudo academic (but actually fiction and romantic poetry) book, the White Goddess. (More on that by Morgan Daimler Here).
Even leading Ogham scholars such as Damien MacManus have been frustrated by this focus within academia, as he stated in 1988:
Click here to read the rest of this article Source: ogham.academy
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