Mystical systems
Ogham
Direct answer
Ogham is the earliest writing of the Irish language, an alphabet of twenty letters made of strokes and notches cut along a line, usually the edge of a standing stone.
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At a glance
- Also called
- celtic tree alphabet
- Found in
- Mystical Systems
- Related
- Runes, Elder Futhark, Cleromancy, Divination
Ogham is the earliest writing of the Irish language, an alphabet of twenty letters made of strokes and notches cut along a line, usually the edge of a standing stone.
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What is ogham?
Ogham letters are groups of one to five strokes set to the left of a line, to the right of it, across it or as notches on it. There are twenty original letters in four families of five. Some four hundred inscribed stones survive, most of them in the south of Ireland and others in Wales, Scotland and the Isle of Man. Nearly all record a name and a lineage: so and so, son of so and so.
Medieval Irish scholars gave each letter a name, and several of the names are trees, such as beith, birch, and dair, oak. From that came the modern habit of calling ogham the Celtic tree alphabet.
On the tree of the hidden arts: Tarot, runes, I Ching.
What sets Ogham apart
Ogham is built for an edge, not a page. Its letters are tallies: one to five strokes on one side of a corner, on the other side, slanting across it, or nicked into it, read on a stone from the bottom upward. The design groups sounds in fives so neatly that scholars think one person, who knew Latin grammar, invented it. Its words are an early form of Irish, older than any Irish manuscript. Everything oracular about it was added later, most of it after 1948.
- Letters: twenty, in four families of five, with five extra signs added later
- Surviving stones: about four hundred, most of them in the south of Ireland
- Period of the stones: mainly the fourth to the sixth century
- Usual content: a personal name with a father or ancestor
- Letter names recorded in: the Auraicept na nÉces and the Book of Ballymote, about 1390
- Tree calendar: devised by Robert Graves in The White Goddess, 1948
Often mistaken for something else: Runes are a Germanic alphabet of angular signs, each a distinct shape; ogham is an Irish one in which every letter is a count of strokes placed against a line.
The story behind Ogham
The stones date mainly from the fourth to the sixth century. The letter names and many invented variant scripts were set out in learned texts of the early Middle Ages, among them the Auraicept na nÉces, and were copied into the Book of Ballymote about 1390. The idea of a thirteen-month Celtic tree calendar based on ogham comes from Robert Graves's book The White Goddess, published in 1948, and has no earlier source.
Why Ogham matters
Ogham is one of the few alphabets used for modern divination whose real history is well documented, so claims about it can be checked.
How to read Ogham
Staves are drawn singly or in threes from a bag, and each letter is read through its tree and the lore later gathered around it.
Ogham in practice: an example
A reader draws the stave for dair, the oak, and speaks of strength that lasts, while a stone in County Kerry bearing the same letters simply names a dead man and his father.
Where readings of Ogham go wrong
No ancient account describes fortune telling with ogham letters. The tree calendar and most stave meanings are twentieth-century work.
Sources and editorial method
This entry summarizes the tradition in the Almanac's own words; where no source is listed, it is an editorial summary rather than a primary text, and symbolic readings are named as the tradition's, not as fact.
- Source
- The Great Almanac Dictionary
- Category
- Mystical Systems
- Aliases
- ogham alphabet, ogham meaning, ogham staves, ogham divination, celtic tree alphabet
- Last updated
- 2026-09-26
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Common questions
What is ogham?
It is an alphabet devised for early Irish, written as strokes and notches along a central line. It is found on standing stones of about the fourth to sixth centuries, where it records personal names.
Is ogham really a tree alphabet?
Only in part. Medieval tradition named the letters, and a number of the names are trees, but others are not, and scholars doubt that all twenty were ever tree names.
Did the druids use ogham for divination?
There is no contemporary record that they did. The surviving inscriptions are memorials or markers, and the practice of casting ogham staves took shape in the twentieth century.
