The Cauldron: A Pagan Forum

I didn't mean to pick on you and I'll sorry if it came across that way!  I really was just curious about what you meant -- if you meant it in a recon sense, or if you saw another kind of problem.

I think there are a lot of misconceptions about ogam out there. Like that it's only about trees or it's linked to some kind of "Celtic astrology", stuff like that.  Since I know you to be an intelligent, thinking person, I was just wondering if you were identifying something else along those lines.

Well, they were used as divination and in magical contexts in a couple of stories and manuscripts -- the Tain Bó Cuailgne, a version of The Wooing of Étaín, and at the beginning of the Ogam Tract where Ogma creates the feda to convey a warning/prophecy.

In the Tain, Cuchulainn inscribes a hoop (a "withe" in this translation) with an ogam riddle which halts the Connacht army until the druids can answer it (see the translation here via Mary Jones -- scroll down to p. 131; this is also mentioned in a footnote on p. 26 of Weaving Word Wisdom, sourced in Kinsella's Tain).

And in The Wooing Of Étaín, one of Eochaid's druids, Dallán, casts four rods of yew carved with ogam to determine where Étaín had been taken. (Also described in the same footnote as above on WWW, sourced in McManus' A Guide to Ogam; see the story here via Mary Jones -- paragraph 18. In this link it says three wands, but Laurie's book says four).

These of course date from the medieval period, so we can't really be sure of their authenticity or truth to what was going on before then, but it is suggestive.

Well, no, we don't, but I don't really care; the suggestion is good enough for me.