Category
Celtic Tree Signs
13 entries. Click any to see everything it connects to.
The Celtic tree calendar assigns a tree to each of thirteen lunar months and reads a character type from a birth date. It is a modern construction: Robert Graves set it out in The White Goddess (1948) from his own reading of the ogham letter names and medieval Irish material, and later popular writers turned it into a birth-sign system. The medieval Irish sources record ogham letters with tree names, but no calendar or zodiac of this kind.
Facts
Overview
- Entries in the Atlas
- 13
- Size of the Traditional Set
- 13 tree-signs 1
Contested Use
- Contested or Appropriated Modern Use
- Marketed as an ancient Celtic calendar. There is no evidence that any Celtic people kept a thirteen-month tree calendar: Graves built it from his own idiosyncratic reading of medieval Irish ogham letter-names, and Celtic scholarship rejects it. 1
Origins
- Origin Period
- 1948, the publication of Robert Graves's The White Goddess; elaborated into a birth-sign system by later popular writers 1
- Creator / Originator
- Robert Graves (1895-1985), poet and novelist, in The White Goddess (1948) 1
Structure
- Structure
- Thirteen lunar months, each assigned a tree and a character type, keyed to Graves's reading of the medieval Irish ogham letter-names. 1
Status
- Standing as a Comparative Category
- Largely abandoned as a comparative category 1
Learn More
The Celtic Tree Calendar
The Celtic tree calendar assigns a tree to each of thirteen lunar months and reads a character type from the month of a person's birth (the Birch, the Rowan, the Ash, the Oak and so on), in the manner of a zodiac. Each tree-sign carries a set of traits and associations, and the scheme is popular in modern Druidic, Wiccan and New Age circles.
It is a modern construction. Robert Graves set it out in The White Goddess (1948) from his own idiosyncratic reading of the medieval ogham letter-names and of a poetic "tree alphabet", and it was elaborated by later writers into the birth-sign system now in circulation.
Modern, not ancient
The atlas is clear that the Celtic tree calendar is a twentieth-century creation, not a calendar kept by the ancient Celts: it rests on Graves's personal and much-criticised interpretation rather than on evidence of Iron Age Celtic practice, though it draws on the genuine medieval Irish tree-lore attached to the ogham. The distinction is a service to both the modern system and the real history it borrows from.
The atlas gives each tree-sign its month, its tree, and its associated character. The ogham letters and their medieval tree-lore that Graves drew on are treated in their own categories, and the calendar belongs among the Modern Revivals.
Enter a year to compare these entries as the atlas records them at that moment. Leave it empty for the present. A year before the common era is entered with a minus sign, so 44 BCE is minus 44.