Just as nature was understood by the trees in the forest, language was understood by the characters in the words, and different combinations of characters, even if they didn’t actually make recognizable words, were still thought to have power, to make an impact. The creation of words and speech was seen as no different as the growth of flowers and trees, just another facet of nature. So if you cut a word short, you were cutting a spiritual growth process short. If you falsified statements, your words would turn against you as they had a spirit of their own.

Originally, the gift of blarney the Irish speak of, was not the gift of telling a convincing lie, it was the gift of storytelling. Those who had that gift had the power to sway their own fate or fortunes.

A narrative-centric culture. Yes, so their divinatory practices worked with this and functioned something like the Norse rune staves.

Even psychology today speaks on the importance of our own personal stories. Yes. There is a whole branch of neuroscience exploring the relationship of language concepts to brain function and health as well as cognition, so it’s really not all that “out there.”

To divine, the ogham characters would be carved into a collection of sticks, and put into a skin bag, mythically crane skin, but that wasn’t specifically a practice as much as spiritual symbolism. And without looking they would reach into the bag and draw out some of the sticks, and cast them out onto the ground. It was believed that both the spirits of the ogham characters, as well as the trees the sticks were taken from, still played a role in what happened with these items. So you couldn’t draw anything from the bag “by accident”, not unless you did so with deceitful intent. But if so that would become apparent as well, and then they would read what characters were drawn as well as the pattern they landed in, and from this intuit the message of the earth mother for the seeker.

Having a “coherent narrative” for oneself is one of the ways “sanity” is discerned supposedly. Even a severely abused person is “sane” if his story has coherence. Yes. Error is not itself mental illness, or there would be not a single soul on the planet who could be called sane.

This seems similar to the i-ching. It is similar to the i-ching, just less strictly elemental.

Your thoughts are welcome. Be well friends.

Travis Saunders
Dragon Intuitive
~science,mysticism,spirituality~