October Ivy
Ogham is an ancient alphabet used to write old Irish as well as various Brittonic/Brythonic languages (including Pictish and Welsh) and appeared on monuments from around the 4th Century AD and in manuscripts from 6th Century AD but probably goes back much further.
Each letter of the ogham alphabet (sometimes know as the âceltic tree alphabetâ) is assigned a tree and Robert Graves, in his seminal work The White Goddess devised the Beth-Luis-Nion celtic Tree system which is a re-interpretation of the ogham.
Although written history is virtually non-existent from this period, it is known that the druids used this system to form a calendar based on the moon cycle and celebrating the four solstices. Using primarilyThe White Goddess, I have been researching the tree (actually plant) of my birth month, October: Ivy -Gort- which comes from the Irish word gorta meaning hunger or famine.
Ogham letter G (for Gort) Â Ruler of the 11th Lunar Month
Taken from The White Goddess:
âThe rivalry mentioned in mediaeval English carols between holly and ivy is not, as one might expect, between the tree of murder and the tree of resurrection, between Typhon-Set and Dionysus-Osiris; instead it represents the domestic war of the sexesâŚ
In parts of England the last harvest sheaf to be carted in any parish was bound around with Osirian ivy and called the Harvest May, the Harvest Bride, or the Ivy Girl: whichever farmer was latest with his harvesting was given the Ivy Girl as his penalty, an omen of ill luck until the following year.
Thus the ivy came to mean a carline*, or shrewish wife, a simile confirmed by the strangling of trees by ivy.
But ivy and holly were both associated with the Saturnalia, holly being Saturnâs club, ivy being the nest of the Gold Crest Wren, his bird; on Yule morning, the last of his merry reign, the first foot over the threshold had to be that of Saturnâs representative, called the Holly Boy, and elaborate precautions were taken to keep women out of the way. Thus Ivy Girl and Holly Boy became opposed; which gave rise to the Yule custom in which 'holly boysâ and 'ivy girlsâ contended in a game of forfeits for precedence, and sang songs, mainly satirical, against each other.â
*in Scots carline means â1.A woman, an old woman and often in a disparaging sense; âproperly a crone, but now generally in sense of a big woman. 2. A witchâ (www.dsl.ac.uk)
