Crescent Shadows On-Line Newsletter of the Hudson Valley Pagan Network, Inc.

Throughout our existence, humans have found ingenious uses for trees. From shade, firewood, and food to dowsing, paper and rayon, we have incorporated trees into daily lives. Many cultures recognized the importance through their religious beliefs and practices. Perhaps most notable were the Celts. In fact, the Celts used trees to denote the months of the year, as well as communicate.

The Celtic tree months roughly correspond to the lunar months; and are represented by birch, rowan, ash, alder, willow, hawthorn, oak, holly, hazel, vine, ivy, reed, and elder. (Yes, I know, not all of these are trees, but that's what the research indicates.) This system does serve as a kind of horoscope, as people born in these months are thought to have characteristics similar to the representative trees.

But here's where the Celts, actually the Druids (which were the professional class of the Celts - priests, scholars, lawyers, bards, etc.) used trees as a basis for communication. Each tree represents a letter in the Gaelic alphabet, ogam, although there was a version based on birds as well. When they used it (sources report that to the Celts, the spoken word had much more signifigance than the written), essentially resembles a series of slash marks over a baseline.

Now, there were more than thirteen trees in the Celtic countries, and there are more than thirteen letters in the Gaelic alphabet, although Gaelic does not use all 26 that we do. there are also different versions of Gaelic (Scots, Welsh, Irish, Cornish, Manx, and Breton to name the last six extant version of spoken Gaelic). The letters were name associations with the tree species. For example, the tree months represent the following letters: B, L, N, F, S, H, D, T, C, M, G, Ng, R for beth, luis, nion, fern, saille, uath, duir, tinne, coll, muin, gort, ngtal, and ruis, respectively.

While these letters could be carved into the writing surface, or inked onto it, to pass messages, often covert messages were written in leaves. The writer would string the leaves together on a thread, with knots to demarcate punctuation. The message would then be bundled up, and sent on its way. If it was intercepted, the leaves would be meaningless to anyone unfamiliar with the code. Similarly, twigs of the trees could be slashed with the ogam glyph of the tree, and sent as a message. The twigs might also be used in a manner similar to casting run stones.

Beyond alphabets, trees have more often had spiritual and representational significance. That is, trees represent traits for us. For example, oak is often associated with strength; and apple with knowledge. Since my point here had been to whet your appetite for tree lore, and to represent the intriguing bit with communication by leaf (that does prompt speculation on the origin of "turning over a new leaf", hmm), if you want to know more about the various symbols of trees, please visit the Tree Lore Web site at www.treelore.com. The authors of the site are still adding new tree entries. Each tree article includes scientific information about the tree, practical uses for its various parts, including medicinal, as well as the spiritual considerations. One advantage of this site, is that the authors provided citations to the resources they have used in writing the tree articles, and there is a reasonably extensive bibliography page.

(If you are interested in learning more about trees in our area, you might join us for a nature walk sponsored by the Growing Things SIG. We generally walk on the fourth Sunday of the month, and will probably do another walk in May, although we meet monthly to share information about other aspects of nature.)

By the way, in writing this article, I relied primarily upon an article by J.A. Johnston, Keltic Tree Lore, and the articles on the Tree Lore Web site.

- Susan Grace Moore

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Last Updated: July 12, 2002
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