In this session, we’re going to dive into the alphabetical symbol sets of Indo-European culture. We’ll answer:
Question 4 of Magic for Priests in the ADF Clergy Training Program
Question 9 in Initiate Magical Theory and Techniques 1 in the Initiate Program
Question 4 in Magical Techniques 1 in the Magician’s Guild Study Program
This one needed a few more visual aids than previous ones, but I’m most happy with the runic merchant tags I was able to find (from R. I. Page’s fabulous introductory book on runes). I’ve included that image with the transcript.
This also sent me down a couple of rabbit holes. The first rabbit hole was creating a new casting-cloth design for Ogham, based on the Fege Find. I’m also attaching that here, so you can make use of it as you need. There are likely to be some altar cloths at The Magical Druid very shortly (they’re already on order).
The other rabbit hole had me digging for hours to find a reference. Here’s the story:
Basically, I stubbed my toe on an ogham reference that seemed initially to be entirely fabricated, but I couldn’t be sure: it was cited by trusted sources that I would not expect to miss a fabrication. So it was off to find an English translation of an uncommon recension of the Wooing of Etain to see if something in my script was correct or not before I recorded it.
This is commonly accepted as “true” in the corpus of “ogham divination” studies:
“In The Wooing of Étaín, the druid Dalan takes yew wands, writes letters upon them, and then uses them for divination.”
The problem is, I could not find the named Druid, the yew wands, the divination, or the ogham in the story. It wasn’t anywhere. Nada.
So I’m pretty sure, at this point, if it exists at all, it’s a minor recension of the story.
J. A. MacCulloch’s 1911 reference is the earliest one I could find, but there’s nothing, at least in the Yellow Book of Lecan’s version, which is the complete version of the myth, that seems to support any of that.
Which means it might be in one of the three recensions in the Book of the Dun Cow, but I might have to order a physical book to see if it’s in there, because it’s not online in English, or so it seems.
So, following on a breadcrumb from Wikipedia, I wonder if it’s a specific part of the Book of the Dun Cow, the Destruction of Da Derga’s Hostel, which includes a third recension that has a retelling of the Wooing of Etain.
And boom, I found it! I found it included in a book called Heroic Romances of Ireland, Vol. 1, and which happened to be archived on Sacred-Texts.org.
It is in the recension I couldn’t find before. Here’s the relevant passage:
“Then, at the last, king Eochaid sent for his Druid, and he set to him the task to seek for Etain; now the name of the Druid was Dalan. And Dalan came before him upon that day; and he went westwards, until he came to the mountain that was after that known as Slieve Dalan; and he remained there upon that night. And the Druid deemed it a grievous thing that Etain should be hidden from him for the space of one year, and thereupon he made three wands of yew; and upon the wands he wrote an ogham; and by the keys of wisdom that he had, and by the ogham, it was revealed to him that Etain was in the fairy mound of Bri Leith, and that Mider had borne her thither.”
And that’s how I found the reference to ogham divination in a weird, rarely-used recension of an Irish tale.
