by Rev. Michael J Dangler, originally published on his Patreon
In this session, we’re going to dive into the alphabetical symbol sets of Indo-European culture. This video answers question 4 of Magic for Priests in the ADF Clergy Training Program, as well as Question 9 in Initiate Magical Theory and Techniques 1 in the Initiate Program and Question 4 in Magical Techniques 1 in the Magician’s Guild Study Program, as it stands at this recording. Those question prompts are:
Discuss the place of alphabetic symbolism as part of the symbolism of magical practice within one Indo-European culture.
Discuss the place of alphabetic symbolism (runes, Ogham, Greek letters, etc.) as part of the symbolism of magical practice within one Indo-European culture (if possible, your primary hearth culture).
Discuss the place of alphabetic symbolism (runes, Ogham, Greek letters, etc.) as part of the symbolism of magical practice within one Indo-European culture; examine how this symbolism will be used in your own magical practice beyond divination.
This one needed a few more visual aids than previous ones, but I’m most happy with the runic merchant tags I was able to find (from R. I. Page’s fabulous introductory book on runes).
This also sent me down a couple of rabbit holes. The first rabbit hole was creating a new casting-cloth design for Ogham, based on the Fege Find. I’m also attaching that here, so you can make use of it as you need. There are likely to be some altar cloths at The Magical Druid very shortly (they’re already on order).
The other rabbit hole had me digging for hours to find a reference. Here’s the story:
Basically, I stubbed my toe on an ogham reference that seemed initially to be entirely fabricated, but I couldn’t be sure: it was cited by trusted sources that I would not expect to miss a fabrication. So it was off to find an English translation of an uncommon recension of the Wooing of Etain to see if something in my script was correct or not before I recorded it. This is commonly accepted as “true” in the corpus of “ogham divination” studies:
“In The Wooing of Étaín, the druid Dalan takes yew wands, writes letters upon them, and then uses them for divination.”
The problem is, I could not find the named Druid, the yew wands, the divination, or the ogham in the story. It wasn’t anywhere. Nada. So I’m pretty sure, at this point, if it exists at all, it’s a minor recension of the story. J. A. MacCulloch’s 1911 reference is the earliest one I could find, but there’s nothing, at least in the Yellow Book of Lecan’s version, which is the complete version of the myth, that seems to support any of that. Which means it might be in one of the three recensions in the Book of the Dun Cow, but I might have to order a physical book to see if it’s in there, because it’s not online in English, or so it seems. So, following on a breadcrumb from Wikipedia, I wonder if it’s a specific part of the Book of the Dun Cow, the Destruction of Da Derga’s Hostel, which includes a third recension that has a retelling of the Wooing of Etain. And boom, I found it! I found it included in a book called Heroic Romances of Ireland, Vol. 1, and which happened to be archived on Sacred-Texts.org. It is in the recension I couldn’t find before. Here’s the relevant passage:
“Then, at the last, king Eochaid sent for his Druid, and he set to him the task to seek for Etain; now the name of the Druid was Dalan. And Dalan came before him upon that day; and he went westwards, until he came to the mountain that was after that known as Slieve Dalan; and he remained there upon that night. And the Druid deemed it a grievous thing that Etain should be hidden from him for the space of one year, and thereupon he made three wands of yew; and upon the wands he wrote an ogham; and by the keys of wisdom that he had, and by the ogham, it was revealed to him that Etain was in the fairy mound of Bri Leith, and that Mider had borne her thither.”
And that’s how I found the reference to ogham divination in a weird, rarely-used recension of an Irish tale.
What does the question mean?
Letters are a basic, symbolic unit of an alphabet, and for as long as there have been alphabets, there have been magical uses for the letters. It is hard for us to remember, but those of us with kids, and those of us who teach, can sometimes see the magic inherent in the learning of literacy. The sense of wonder and power that is drawn from the page, and the ability to create new things with letters is, itself, truly magical. The application of the symbols in alphabets to magical purposes, is remarkably easy to understand as you watch someone learn how to create with these symbols.
It’s important to note, however, that not every culture will have alphabetical symbols that factor into their magic; some do not even have alphabets. The Sanskrit of the Vedas is currently written in Devanagari, an abugida (abu-GEE-duh) which is descended from the Brahmic Scripts and technically an alphasyllabary rather than an alphabet; additionally, because the Vedas and their magico-religious formulae are primarily memorized texts that are never written down until after the Vedic period, there are no alphabetical symbols until later texts begin to arrive that were passed down in writing. Similarly, Mycenaean Greek (also known as Linear B) is a syllabic script, not an alphabetical one, relying on syllables and moras to create words.
This question is, thus, not going to apply to all Indo-European cultures or magical traditions, so let’s not make the error of assuming it will. But that’s okay.
So, what’s the question asking?
What we’re asking you to do is to dive into how these letters and symbols are used in magic; whether they form complete words, partial words, or nonsensical barbarous names doesn’t matter. What does matter is that for a number of cultures across the Indo-European world, magic, language, and alphabets connect, and we want you to understand the place of these alphabets in the broader scheme of magical work within those cultures.
The Magician’s Guild Study Program is also asking you to think about how you will use this symbolism in your own practice, so to that end, we’ll talk a bit about practical applications, as well.
Norse Runes
The obvious place to start is where most people start with magical alphabets in the Indo-European world: the Norse Runes. With several distinct alphabets generally bounded by time and geography, the runes cover a large swath of the Germanic-speaking world. The runes are, of course, alphabets, called a futhark or futhorc, depending on the first letters, and each letter can be associated with a word, and each word with a poetic meaning. There are “standard” rune poems out there, but I would be surprised if those standard poems were the only poems and words associated with each letter.
Runes, we know, were used for practical purposes; merchants wrote price tags in them, and phrases like “Thorrson was here” are the most common inscriptions we have. But there are intersections of nonsense and secrecy that can only be rationally explained by suggesting that these symbols were used in magic as well. When we find a complete alphabet, or words that don’t fit the context of where they were found, or words or letters that repeat over and over, the most logical assumption, sometimes, is that they are magical formulae. The word “ALU,” meaning “ale,” appears often as a magical formula; so often, in fact, that to make sense of some inscriptions, we have to jettison the mundane meaning of “ale” and replace it with “magic” or “magical power” as the understood meaning.
The most common modern runic divination practice is the casting of lots, or sortilege, which is described by Tacitus in his Germania. “They hold the casting of lots for omens in the highest regard,” he says, then describes the carving of symbols onto strips of wood from fruit-bearing trees, casting them onto a white cloth. The priest picks up three of the strips and reads the meanings of the symbols carved onto them. Whether Tacitus had any first hand knowledge of this practice, it’s hard to say, but his description of how symbols were cast in the Rhine valley in roughly the first century is invaluable to the development of modern practices that seek to reimagine ancient ones.
Sigils and magical staves are another place where we see letters and their esoteric meanings come into play. The sign for the Helm of Awe is typically represented with four to eight Algiz runes radiating from a center point. Of course, whether these connections to alphabetical symbols is coincidental or intentional is always hard to tell, but the connection between the “protection” of Algiz, and the desired impact of the Helm of Awe to protect the warrior so he may prevail in battle is also hard to overlook.
Greek Alphabet
The easiest place to point to the Greek alphabet’s magical use is, of course, the Greek Alphabet Oracle, where the letters are used in a way similar to runes for sortilege. On an inscription from Olympos in modern Turkey, each letter starts the first word of an oracular phrase; a similar oracle was also found at the top of a mountain at Adada, also in modern Turkey. You can cast them as shards of pottery, wooden tiles, or any similar process, or you can use knucklebones or even cubic dice to figure out which line of the oracle to read. There are sets you can buy online, including, of course, from The Magical Druid, if you want to support my work.
We also know that the so-called “barbarous names” of the Greek Magical Papyri are strings of transliterated names of foreign gods into Greek letters. Because Greek letters could hold the pronunciation of names better than other writing systems, they became the carriers of magical tradition, which I’ll come back to in just a moment.
Fascinatingly, and we’ll talk of native Celtic formats shortly, Caesar indicates that the Gaulish Celts used the Greek alphabet as a purely non-sacred alphabet, and that they used it for all things public and private, but nothing religious, because it prevented them from de-sacralizing sacred knowledge by making it commonly available. This doesn’t mean that the Greek alphabet was never used for divination or magic in the Celtic world, but rather that it filled a different niche, generally.
We see a slightly different shift in early Coptic Christian magic: the corpus of magical spells that we have from early Christiandom in Egypt makes heavy use of the Greek Alphabet as part of the alphabet for religious and magical use, allowing us to understand the pronunciation of those early texts (a likely reason for Old Coptic to use the Greek and Demotic alphabets directly was to ensure that pronunciations could be preserved in written works). So, in Hellenized Egypt, the Greek alphabet became central to a non-Indo-European language’s magic, religious, and sacred writing.
Celtic Ogham
Turning our attention back to the north of Europe, the Ogham developed late in Ireland, just at the end of Pagan Ireland, and are a bit younger than the runes. It’s likely that, even though it looks different on the surface from other alphabets, it also derives from the Phoenician and Greek alphabets.
We also know that it was sometimes used as a secret language, for communication between the wise: by laying a number of fingers across, beside, or about a straight object, such as your nose or shin, you could convey letters to someone else who knew the alphabet.
In The Wooing of Étaín, the druid Dalan takes yew wands, writes letters upon them, and then uses them for divination to learn that Étaín had been taken under the fairy mound. This particular portion of the story comes from the Edgerton 1782 manuscript, recension III of The Destruction of Da Derga’s Hostel, which is part of the Book of the Dun Cow, and written about 400 years after The Yellow Book of Lecan. Its late inclusion makes it slightly suspect, but there is no strong reason to discount it as a possible divinatory process drawn from other sources.
Text Onscreen: “[Dalan] made three wands of yew; and upon the wands he wrote an ogham; and by the keys of wisdom that he had, and by the ogham, it was revealed to him that Étaín was in the fairy mound of Bri Leith, and that Mider had borne her thither.”
Perhaps this is an alphabetical sortilege like we know of with the runes, or perhaps the ogham are carved into a particular form or order, but either way, it provides a somewhat concrete example of carving the letters for magical purposes.
The fege find, or Fionn’s Window, is another option for divination, and one of my favorites; in this, the ogham are aligned on concentric rings, with the forefeda arranged at the quarters. There are many theories about the arrangement, and it may just be that it looks really nice and that it flows well; my favorite theory is that the concentric circles are like the rafters inside an ancient Celtic roundhouse, and the hole at the center is like the smoke hole. If you were to lie on your back at night and gaze out at the cosmos through the smoke hole, with this perfect arrangement of magical letters surrounding your vision-eye, you might see the cosmos as it chooses to reveal itself to you. I think of it as a focusing device, and occasionally use it in trance to gaze through. I’ve seen some amazing things.
Palindromes and Gematria
One of the ways alphabetic symbolism has entered magical use is through palindromes. The Sator Square is one of the most visible of these, used in texts both modern and ancient for a variety of functions. It reads both horizontally and vertically as a palindrome, and its first appearance is in Latin letters in Pompeii. A palindrome doesn’t have to make a lot of sense to be magical: it can simply be an arrangement of powerful letters, made that much more powerful by their reflection. Abalnathanalba (abla-nathan-alba) is perhaps the most common ancient palindrome in magical literature, usually invoking blessings and good fortune.
Another interesting application is gematria, which is the process of creating a cipher by assigning a numeric value to letters in a word, which can provide a different or hidden meaning to someone who knows how to use it. Magic, being often the art of hiding things in plain sight, can make good use of this sort of cipher; in fact, as we mentioned in the section on Ogham, hiding messages with fingers across a shin or nose is an attested use of the alphabet.
Abecedaries
One interesting poetic alphabetical arrangement that touches use in magic are abecedaries, sometimes called in the singular an abecedarium. Two runic poems, the Abecedarium Nordmannicum and the Abecedarium Anguliscum, both in Codex Sangallensis 878, a ninth-century manuscript that presents a series of grammatical texts and alphabets, appear in this format, and give a bit of additional poetic context to the runes. Abecedaries do not need to provide additional context; a listing of the letters in order is enough to qualify. We also have some abbreviated abecedaries from Greece and north Africa that may have been magical or votive in nature, and the complete Elder Futhark is known from inscriptions that appear very likely to have a magical connection, as words appearing with the complete Futhark have no other apparent meaning, sometimes being simple palindromes.
The “Abracadabra” formula reflects the first few letters of the Latin alphabet, and slightly less well to the Greek, but it may also be a magical application of an abecedarium. An amulet against disease, misfortune, and evil, it is often used in a wing formation, reducing the word by one letter per line, and thus creating a visual trimming of the word (and its target) as the word is repeated.
Conclusion, and Building Into Your Practice
Modern divination, is, of course, the most obvious place that we can start to build our own practice from, but it’s not the only place that we can use the knowledge of ancient alphabets to our magical benefit.
One of the most common uses of magical alphabets has been to obscure magical writing or mysteries from those who might be able to read the common language. It would be perfectly aligned with ancient practices to use runes to obscure your journals and work, or to translate (or even transliterate, if you’re not ready to learn a full language) your work into another alphabet.
One of the things that the process of translation and transliteration does is it brings you into a contemplative state: you begin to consider more closely the work that you are doing, because it requires you to pay attention. We know, too, that the transliteration of foreign names into Greek characters created powerful new names for spirits to answer to; while we should probably be careful with that, it’s a fascinating line of contemplation to follow, as well.
Learning what magicians in the ancient world did also gives us the opportunity to expand our practices and find new ways to encounter powerful experiences through paths forged by those who both tried this stuff before us, and wrote it down. This information has passed to us through a remarkable chain of happenstance and luck, and we’d be wise to pay it some heed.
There’s also a great deal of opportunity to embrace experimental methods in seeking deeper practices. There is nothing in the lore that suggests that holding a wooden pocket token of Fionn’s Window to your eye while you trance might bring you a new vision, but the creative leap to experiment with the form and find an unorthodox function led me to a wonderful tool that I will always keep in my bag of tricks. It also led to the development of a similar device, which I call Oðin’s Eye, and is modeled to be reminiscent of the eye Oðin cast into Mimir’s Well to gain knowledge; the runes ride the ripples out, and the hole in the center grants you vision from within the well.
Find your way to deepen your practice. Read those manuscripts, and study the letters and their poetic meanings. You might be surprised what you find, yourself.
Find the items referenced, or your own divination set, at http://www.magicaldruid.com/
