Thursday, April 23, 2009

Making a Set of Celtic Ogham Staves

Today I felt inspired to make a set of Ogham staves. I did some research about these over the past few days and wanted to try to make a set on my own. I created my set from the natural shed of four great trees nearby. It took a while to find appropriately sized pieces and to trim them to vaguely similar lengths. I'm happy that the trees were able to share some fine pieces.


From there I used a knife to carve open areas in which to inscribe each Ogham letter. While I did this, my cat explored around me and acted nasty when I finally decided she must go inside. Once back indoors I used a pencil to place the a letter on each stave with a dot at the bottom to indicate which side goes down. Finally, I went over my pencil inscriptions with a wood burning tool. They ended up looking pretty sexy.

Some handsome staves indeed!

Tonight I will do something special to get them ready for use. In order to get some practice with these, I have offered free Ogham readings on Etsy. Actually, I will post some of the basic information from that listing on here just for educational reasons. Here it is:

What is the Ogham?

The Ogham refers to the ancient Celtic Druidic alphabet. Each letter stave corresponds with one of the 20 sacred trees. Here, the Ogham is used to seek wisdom concerning a certain topic.

How does it work?

The questioner holds in their mind a question that they are seeking guidance about while the reader calls upon the wisdom of the Divine, the Land and the Ancestors. The reader then casts the staves. The placement of the staves and their symbols indicate a message for the questioner.

p.s. I swear I will wrap up my Djembe repair posts soon. They have been pretty popular lately.

No comments:

Post a Comment