The History of the Ogham
In ancient times it was noted by Julius Caesar that the Celtic Druids did not use the written language to store their knowledge. Instead, they committed every poem, and every story to memory and it was passed down from generation to generation by word of mouth.
This practice stemmed from a fear that the written word was too easily maligned and that their wisdom would become tainted, thereby leaving later scholars with a faulty recounting of their beliefs.
However, this does not mean that the Druids of old did not leave any records behind. The Book of Ballymote, which was written in 1391, speaks of an alphabet containing twenty original characters that was orginally designed by Ogma Sun-Face, the Gallic god of Eloquence. It is said that this alphabet, the Ogham, was created when Ogma raised four pillars of equal length and upon these pillars the characters of the letters were etched. In fact, today you can still find examples of these characters on the pillars located at Stonehenge and a few other scattered holdings in Ireland.
The Ogham provides modern day scholars with many questions. It seems its mysteries were a secret to all but the high priests and scholarly Druids amongst the circle, therefore, its exact function and usage in the Druidic society is still unknown. Furthermore, there are several different forms of the lists of letters/symbols associated with the Ogham. In later additions the alphabet was actually extended from twenty letters to twenty five. Today we can find the Ogham used as a form of Divination, where the characters of the alaphabet are written upon "yews" and cast to divine the past, present, and future. Each of the original twenty characters is associated with a tree, which in turn is associated with its own symbolism within the Druid community.
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