Questions about the "Bardic origin of Tarot" theory

[Bernice]

VeniceBard: So let us take Ellis point by point: I'll do a bit at a time till I've touched on every point he makes, okay (if anyone is listening, that is)?

I'm listening. Also copied your long post to digest it - so allow time! I'm only responding to points that jump out at me at present.

Re. Peter Ellis: He says nothing survives of ogam beyond the stone inscriptions of the first millennium, which ignores both ogam consaine long before and the Book of Ballymote long after--no, he then mentions the latter but seems to dismiss it by mentioning it was a 14th-century copy, not the 7th-century original!

Now this does interest me. What is 'ogam consaine' (please just the basics). Also, in your next post re. the 13/15 constellations(Point 4); I've previously come across a zodiac with 13 signs - the now 'lost' sign being placed between Taurus & Gemini, constellation of Auriga (chief star Capella). No idea if this will have any bearing on your researches.

Point 1a:....because I have compiled far too much evidence of kinship between the symbolic structure of the tree alphabet and that of the Semitic, Tifinag, Libyan (Maurian, Numidian), runic, Meroitic, and even Egyptian hieroglyphic alphabets to be able to think it not a survival from the druid era.

As I have previously said, you have much knowledge. But many similarities exist between early 'writings' and marks. If you have constructed a theory that undeniably links them, then you should be writing a proper thesis and submitting it to appropriate persons/places. (Encyclopedia compilers come to mind as one avenue.). What about a writing a book? There are a great many people who are 'druidic' fans. Sadly, I'm not one them. I've not been convinced that they were of any importance to history. They've been 'revived' over the past 30 years or so with much invented or poorly researched material added. So, if you write a book with everything laid out in an easily digestible order, I would probably buy it.

What he does not say is that these are two different sets of letter-names, the Boibel Loth and the bethluisnion.

And again you mention something I'm not familiar with.... what is 'Boibel Loth'. Is there a chart/depiction of it online anywhere?

Point 6: Not all the letter-names are tree names, only some. Okay, but for the rest of this point we are made to wait.

And I'm still waiting...

Point 7: I thought only some (ogham) meant something other than trees: which is it?

So did I. I began a list of the BethLuisNion (the given 'original') meanings - incomplete because I have other interests to attend to.

To be honest VeniceBard, all this nit-picking of the article by Peter Ellis doesn't do you any favours. People can only respond constructively to your postings if they have knowledge of the basics that you are using as the foundation of your theory/theories. So if you know of any online (publicly accessable) infomation that supports your understandings, please post the links.

Had another idea! Get a website. A page for each subject with the last paragraph stating the 'link' to the next subject (next page).

Bee

 

[venicebard]

What is 'ogam consaine' (please just the basics).

(I'll address you first, then continue with Ellis.) In the Marseilles LeBateleur, you will notice the fourth leg of the table is missing, but only hidden. Likewise, in bronze age Scandinavia and points west, a form of ogham was used alongside Tifinag (in its pre-Berber form): instead of the later four staves of five letters each, the five vowels were omitted. So it went:

B L F S N . . . H D T K Q . . . M G Ng 'Z' R .

These appeared as 1-5 notches below, above, or across a line, respectively. The last five of these in later ogham were slanted across the line, to allow the vowels to be straight across. But in the earlier form, the M-sequence were themselves straight across, and the vowels were not used. (I of course eschew the idea the vowels were not known, as primitive northwest-European poetry was rich in sound figures, including assonance and consonance.)

I've previously come across a zodiac with 13 signs - the now 'lost' sign being placed between Taurus & Gemini, constellation of Auriga (chief star Capella). No idea if this will have any bearing on your researches.

No, but it may well be connected to the 'Celtic astrology' Ellis was lamenting the spread of; however I don't recall Graves himself mentioning 13 constellations (as Ellis charged).

So, if you write a book with everything laid out in an easily digestible order, I would probably buy it.

I have. It is. (You will.) But first I must find a publisher (I've already sent out a few chapters to one). Warning: it is not the full, 'scholarly' account, merely an outline of the big picture concerning Qabbalah's relation to bardic letters (and dependence on proper understanding of Ezekiel's wheels). The more scholarly version must await my being a 'previously published' author, so that a publisher would want to risk printing a longer tome.

And again you mention something I'm not familiar with.... what is 'Boibel Loth'. Is there a chart/depiction of it online anywhere?

Unfortunately, I do not get enough time online these days to chase any down, but I'm sure it's there somewhere. I will instead simply give you the Boibel Loth as Graves relays the names, along with his nearest (archaic) Greek equivalents and their translation, which I take to be a probable old Orphic hymn based on the letters:

BOIBEL
BOIBALION
I, the Roebuck fawn (or Antelope-bull calf)

LOTH FORANN SALIA NEIAGADON
LOTO-FORAMENON SALOOMAI NE-AGATON
On the Lotus Ferried Lurch to and fro New-born

UIRIA
URIOS
I, the Guardian of Boundaries (or the Benignant One)

DAIBHAITH TEILMON
DAVIZO T(E)LAMON
Cleave wood. I, the suffering one

CAOI CAILEP
CAIOMAI CALYPTOMAI
Am consumed by fire, Vanish.

MOIRIA GATH NGOIMAR
MOIRAO GATHEO GNORIMOS
I distribute, I rejoice, I, the famous one

IDRA RIUBEN (which he alters to RHEA [see note below])
IDRYOMAI RHEO
Establish, I flow away.

ACAB ACHAIVA The Spinner (title of Demeter)
OSE OSSA Fame
URA URANIA The Queen of Heaven
ESU (H)ESUCHIA Repose
JAICHIM IACHEMA Shrieking, or Hissing


What is especially interesting to me in the above is F being 'Ferried', as the Tifinag F is a coracle with one passenger (or trident without stem) Barry Fell figures was probably called (in Low German) far, 'ferry-boat'.

Note [added]: The Boibel Loth with Riuben for R is given in Graves's The White Goddess, on p.116f, prefaced by: "The names of the letters of the B.L.F. alphabet are given by Roderick O'Flaherty in his seventeenth-century Ogygia, on the authority of Duald Mac Firbis, a family bard of the O'Briens who had access to the old records, as follows[.]" The tradition of the "twenty-five noblest of the seventy-two assistants who worked on the language" under Feniusa Farsa (at the 'Tower of Nimrod'), given in The Hearings of the Scholars (Graves, p.121), is similar and thus reinforces O'Flaherty and suggests a certain degree of credibility for Hearings. Graves substitutes RHEA for RIUBEN because of the answers to riddles posed in the 'Romance of Taliesin' (given, with answers, on pp.119f). About this substitution, Graves says (p.138), "Gwion's version of the alphabet [i.e. the riddle-answers], with Rhea for Riuben, is older than O'Flaherty's if O'Flaherty's 'Riuben' stands for Rymbonao, 'I swing about again' -- a word first used in the second century A.D.; the difference between Gwion's 'Salome', and O'Flaherty's 'Salia' also suggests that Gwion had an older version. That he has altered 'Telamon' to 'Taliesin' suggests that he is offering Talasinoos, 'he that dares to suffer', as an alternative to 'Telamon', which has the same meaning." And so on.

To be honest VeniceBard, all this nit-picking of the article by Peter Ellis doesn't do you any favours.

I am point by point demolishing his entire argument, which is hardly 'nit-picking'.

 

[venicebard]

I am point by point demolishing his entire argument, which is hardly 'nit-picking'.

The argument in question:

http://cura.free.fr/xv/13ellis2.html

Point 6 (cont.): that only seven "correspond to Old Irish tree names."

First, he is (to the best of my knowledge, though I intend to research this further) going against the Book of Ballymote in this (which he admits is 14th-century, from a 7th-century original). In the copy of one passage therefrom that I happen to have with me, of the 13 (?) letters he takes issue with (along with Dr McManus), L, N, H, G, Ng, A, I, O, and U (it gives Up, but surely by mistake for Ur) agree with O'Flaherty; E is in the more 'correct' form Edadh; M has the form Medui (but still vine); leaving only T ("from Tine, Cypress, or from the Elder Tree") and R ("Graif [not explained]") in disagreement. And indeed R does seem about the hardest for me to pin down (though I surely will eventually, as one or two wrong would seem odd, even for Mr. O'Flaherty).

Now, to the individual letters.

L: luise (flame, blaze) or lus (plant, herb), we are told. Halfway between these is luis, the Rowan or Quicken no doubt, the latter term for which probably originated from its being used in whips to tame bewitched horses. Of course the rune leaves little doubt L is rowan, since this tree shelters young of other species till they displace it, and the rune shows the eaves of a roof (under which a homeless waif might take shelter).

N: nion or nin (fork, or loft), we are told. Well, Ash Tree in Old Irish is huinnius, not all that far from nion; and the rune is a vertical pierced by a diagonal, which is both the (ash-wood) oar going through the side of the vessel and the mast and cross-beam of same (a Danish warship was called an asc or ash), both signifying the motive power of the vessel; Tifinag has just a single (ash-wood) spear-shaft or vertical-line (though probably originally called 'nail' in Scandinavian).

H: uath (horror or fear), we are told. Well, he completely ignores the possibility of loan words having infiltrated into the speech of the quite nonprovincial Kelts (who died off in Britain from plague in the 6th century because they still traded with the outside world, unlike the Saxons, who farmed and pillaged). I will concede the Huath of Ballymote and O'Flaherty might be a shortened M.E. hawethorn or even O.E. haguthorn. This last is from haga, 'hedge, hawthorn', which shows why H is shaped like a section of fence (in runic also). But as for its position in the tree-calendar, this is in no doubt, as the month of May was named for it! (the H-month contains the sign Gemini).

T: tinne (a bar, rod of metal, ingot, etc.), we are told. I will let Graves defend this one (just to show he knew a thing or two). After identifying (pp. 180f of The White Goddess) the probable original tree for this month as the evergreen oak (kerm-oak or holly-oak), which shares holly's botanical name ilex, he continues: "Dann or Tann, the equivalent of Tinne, is a Celtic word for any sacred tree. In Gaul and Brittany it meant 'oak', in Celtic Germany it meant 'fir'; in Cornwall the compound glas-tann ('green sacred tree') meant evergreen holm-oak, and the English word 'to tan' comes from the use of its bark in tanning. However, in ancient Italy it was the holly, not the evergreen oak, which the husbandmen used in their midwinter Saturnalia. Tannus was the name of the Gaulish Thundergod, and Tina that of the Thunder-god, armed with a triple thunder-bolt, whom the Etruscans took over from the Goidelic tribes among whom they settled." Add to this the Old Goidelic *at-tenn-, 'sharp bush or tree', and I think we've cast some doubt on Ellis here.

 

[venicebard]

Continuing (see previous post):

M: muin (neck or throat), we are told, with 'vine' in O. Ir. finchi, from Latin vin. Does it not occur to him that muin is Latin vin? The insular Kelts (especially the Welsh) confused M with V (u,w in Latin), which is why I maintain the earlier Merlinus Ambrosius (not to be confused with the later Myrddin) is a distortion of Latin AVRELIENUS AMBROSIUS (especially since the earliest British historian, Nennius, makes no distinction but simply calls the prodigious child and later war-leader Ambrosius).

G: gort (field), we are told. Okay. I am intrigued, though, by the similarity to Greek chorde, which discribes ivy's most notable characteristic (its stringlike nature), especially since runic G and Greek Ch are identical in shape. Perhaps the meaning 'field' even relates to the idea of stretching a cord around a section of land. Moreover, a second serpentlike plant right after vine here in that part of the zodiac at the base of the spine calls to mind the kundalini or serpent-power coiled up there according to Yoga.

R: ruis (from the word for 'red'), we are told. Perhaps. Graves (p. 299) justifies red being the color for the R-month thus: "[rocnat, rook] wears mourning for the year that dies in this month. And Blood-red are the rags of leaves on the elder-trees, a token of the slaughter." Graves (p. 185): "In Ireland elder sticks, rather than ashen ones, are used by witches as magic horses." Indeed R in Semitic and Greek was a stick-horse (such as kids play on), and its rune, shaped like the animal mask of the shaman, is named 'ride' or 'journey'. (And R in Tifinag and Libyan is the empty circle, the year come full circle in need of a recharge to become the sun again, which is a circle with a dot in the center, with which Libyan begins the year as B but with which Tifinag, from the far north, begins spring, at S, since that is when the sun appears there.)

Ng: ngetal may be from gedal (broom), we are told. Okay, broom and reed are similar (both straw-like). (Reed suggests thatch, and Tifinag has roof-beams for this letter.) Irish for reed -- and possible substitute here -- is gilcoch or n'gilcach (Graves, p. 300). But even if it is broom, it is still a tree, and indeed this is the letter replaced by P in the bethluisnion anyway.

A: ailm as pine or silver fir is unattested, we are told. Then why is the rune clearly in the shape of the fir? (It is a vertical with two strokes branching down from that stem, on the same side.)

O: onn is ash, furze is aiteann [which it is not hard to see might well contract into onn], we are told. I believe it is 'broom' in modern Irish. Well, still a tree in either case; so that it might have been furze at some time in the past is not disproven. (The exact tree referred to even by Hebrew terms in the Bible is not always that certain, and idiomatic use can distort meanings also, perhaps based on local differences in flora.)

U: ur is "earth, clay, soil, sometimes as a green branch," we are told. Gee, we don't use the word heath for the very same thing, do we. Graves points out that the Gallic Heather-goddess Uroica is halfway between ura and the Greek word for heather, ereice -- indeed my Old Goidelic dictionary gives *vroiko-s for heather (and V is Latin U). There is little doubt in my mind that this is indeed heather, since this would symbolize summer's full moon -- coming of age, love's consummation -- and the rune is named 'aurochs' and shows one's horn upended: a drinking horn from the aurochs was once the Germanic warrior's 'coming of age'.

E: eadha as aspen unattested, but edad means aspen. Talk about 'nit-picking'.

I: idho unattested as yew, we are told. Then why is the corresponding rune called 'yew'? Indeed the only two runes to retain their tree-names are B and I, which are inscribed in ogham on a stone outside the entrance to New Grange and stood for birth and death, being the first and last letters of the bethluisnion and ogham. They also stood for the pillars Boaz and Jachin, which stood on either side of the entrance to Solomon's Temple (and at the front and back of man himself).

To cap off point 6, in a quote from "Calder's Hearings of the Scholars" (Graves, p. 204), muin is vine, gort is ivy, straif is blackthorn, onn is furze, or is heath, luis is rowan, nin is ash, huath is whitehorn [sic], tinne is 'whin', and quert is appletree. This indeed is in the context of an older classification of trees than Brehon Law, where 'chieftain' trees alder, willow , and birch were replaced by ash, yew, and pine, for religious reasons.

Point 10: that Graves said "he believes [P] simply stood for the Irish NG and arbitrarily substitutes the form nGetal claimed as a name of the dwarf elder." To clarify: Graves said the name peith or pethboc was dwarf elder or water elder. My own interpretation of P is that peith is related to peithynon (I believe was how Ellis spelt it in his book The Druids, I'll check), an ancient form of wheel-divination: for the rune is shaped like the rune-cup or rune-pouch turned on its side, as if having just disgorged its rune-dice in the act of divination. (The rune's name is also a mystery, this because being VII LeChariot -- the Merkavah -- P stands for the poetic-prophetic mysteries themselves.)

 

[venicebard]

To continue (see previous two posts):

Point 11: "Among Celtic scholars, the evidence has been clear since the time of Charles Graves' pioneering work, that the 'tree alphabet' is a nonsense." Here he again grossly overstates his case (as even if a few individual terms are in question, that would not make it 'nonsense'). He goes on to assume Robert ignorant of his grandfather's work, which strikes me as ludicrous! (I'll get back to you on this once I've read the biography of Graves I picked up recently).

Point 12: the Coligny calendar disagrees with Graves's astrology and calendar theories. So what? The Kelts were accomplished astronomers, so there were probably competing methods of figuring: the Coligny method is too complex to be elegant and does not look very sophisticated to me (complexity doth not equal sophistication). I also see no reason to assume (as some scholars have) Kelts were unaware of solstices and equinoxes (which are even referenced astronomically in certain Keltic inscriptions in the New World) just because they also had the 'cross quarter days (Samhain, Beltane, and so on). He is making way too fine a point here: Kelts would have been acquainted with other peoples methods as well. All in all, I have to reject Ellis's very narrow view of how Kelts reckoned time, based on a totality of considerations many of which are beyond his ken (relations between alphabets, and shapes of letters therein, to name two), just as I myself am not particularly familiar with calendar methods in India (and Ellis is).

Point 13: Graves misquoted Cormac's Glossary. I would be surprised if Graves invented the quote from whole cloth, and perhaps there are other versions besides the two Ellis owns. If Graves made a mistake, then good of Ellis to point it out; and certainly to be a thorough scholar one should check Graves's sources wherever possible. Unfortunately, it is not possible for non-accademics to find 1/10 the sources I'm sure Graves had perused, not to mention the lamentable fact that Graves himself did not always say where he cribbed information (I am still looking for his source for the numbers the Irish gave the letters, which form the key to my theory (but not its entire support); I have found evidence the same numbering was used in Wales, though. Anyway, warning taken, but hardly a fatal blow to the tree-calendar hypothesis.

 

[venicebard]

Point 13, addenda: The quote from Cormac, by the way, is utterly insignificant to Graves's hypothesis. It is on p.198 of the extended and enlarged edition, and reads (defining Dichetal do Chennaib, or 'recital from the finger-ends'): "In my day it is by the ends of his finger-bones that the poet accomplishes the rite in this manner: 'When he sees the person or thing before him he makes a verse at once with his finger ends, or in his mind without studying, and composes and repeats at the same time.' " I hardly think Graves would have manufactured a quote to make so fine a point.

Point 1b [I believe]: Again he berates Graves for "ignoring" (which of course he didn't) the advice sought from Professor MacAlister.

Point 0a: He returns to his opening thrust of lumping Graves in with those who have gone off on tangents "based" on his "false assumptions." (Not worth responding to.)

Point 12a: He returns to "Celtic cosmology and astrological forms were related to Vedic forms by virtue of the common Indo-European origin of the two civilisations," saying Arab learning supplanted it in the 12th century. Yes, and he might have mentioned that the insular Kelts -- especially in Ireland -- were more in touch with the vestiges of ancient learning than the rest of Europe during the three-quarters of a millennium preceding that (for example, the 10th-century Welsh manuscript he mentions in the very next paragraph, dealing with the zodiac, and earlier material in the paragraph after that).

He never makes a point 14, just ends (before speaking of ogham, which I'll deal with in a moment) by expressing the desire to see Graves's 'tree zodiac' burned.

 

[venicebard]

Ellis's A Note on Ogham Script (an alphabet he says was called the 'Beth-Luis Nion' even though ogham begins B L F, not B L N) begins: "Ogham inscriptions are not found outside the British Isles." Here he displays colossal ignorance of the field of epigraphy, especially the work of Barry Fell (and others inspired by him). Ogam consaine was used as early as (and probably far earlier than) the late first half of the second millennium BCE, by Scandinavians, mainly in southern Norway and (northern) North America. It was later used by the Kelts who accompanied Phoenicians on voyages to (and in small-scale colonization of) the New World: the ogam consaine of this era used three-stroke Ng for five-stroke N, out of convenience, but was otherwise identical.

Not only that, but several forms of ogham illustrated in the Book of Ballymote that are dismissed by scholars as fabrications have actually been found to have been used in earlier times -- mostly in inscriptions, again, in the New World. Fell discussed this, but precisely where I forget, so if anyone is interested in this particular factoid, let me know and I will hunt it down.

Meanwhile, given Professor Ellis's extremely blindered (though well-informed within those limits) view of the subject of tree-letters, I shall go on investigating them, glad in the fact that Ellis himself has pointed out to me certain weak spots in the argument that could use a bit of shoring up. Yes, I admit this. But as one can see from my penultimate paragraph, the Book of Ballymote, which he rather glibly dismisses, is a source unworthy of being glibly dismissed.

Th-th-th-that is all.

 

[Ligator]

I will read through the thread later on... But! Some of the foundation for this theory is based on Barry Fell and that makes me a bit afraid, ans sceptic, to say the least!

I happen to read old norse and have studied hieroglyphs and have read Fell. And his method is totally arbitrary. With his method one can make anything mean anything. One would be able to proove that the old ogham texts were written i 20th century russian, if one wants so, or chinese, or amerivan english with texan dialect...

Fell was totally incompetent! And it can be proven.

/T

 

[Bernice]

Hi VB,

Well I've read through all your postings - and also seen your website. To cut a long story short, I've finally concluded that your foundations are shaky.

I should make it clear though that my interests re. your bardic thesis lie with ancient Norse. I live in England - the 'land of Ing'. Many of our current words & place names are derived from them.

However, should your book be published, I will buy it. Much of what you say is haphazardly cross-referenced, so it's a 'question of digestion'. Far better to peruse it all curled up in a comfy chair.

Bee

 

[venicebard]

I happen to read old norse and have studied hieroglyphs and have read Fell. And his method is totally arbitrary.

(followed by a cheap ad hominem attack) You will have to produce an example, if you wish anyone of substance to take you seriously. It is merely that his knowledge of early Germanic and Keltic and Semitic and Egypto-Libyan and their variants was formidable, making his translations appear easy (like Joshua Bell's violin playing). It is true that some ogham is crudely etched, or badly aged, making his translations informed guesses--as when difference of spacing between notches is slight. But even this is a far cry from arbitrary if one has seen similar inscriptions elsewhere and recognizes some of the forms. And certainly this criticism does not hold for Tifinag, or Maurian (Libyan or Maori), or Iberian, or any of the Amerind scripts he analyzed, and so on. The most that could be said, it seems to me, is that since Tifinag can go in any direction, translation is even more dependent on familiarity with recurring patterns (a familiarity his critics invariably lack).

You (and others who dismiss Fell arbitrarily) simply do not know whereof you speak. Consult ESOP (Epigraphic Society Occasional Publications) for the first dozen-and-a-half years and then presume to dismiss Fell.

If you wish to criticize specific points of his, by all means do: I'm all ears (and tongue, of course)

I will read through the thread later on...

Why bother. It surely would be of little value to one who so glibly dismisses several major 20th-century advances in the field of epigraphy solely (seemingly) on the basis of the prevailing academic 'black-listing' of such as Fell and Graves. For in Fell's case, that is ALL it could be, as the Epigraphic Society published both sides of the debate on many contentious issues, and I can tell you Fell's critics did not fare well in the exchange. The most common sort of attack was that based on ignorance of documented variant forms the professors' often blindered viewpoint caused them to overlook (academia, for instance, has a tendency to overlook the efforts of scholars of previous generations, especially where these might call into question the currently favored dogma).