to be (no doubt) the remains of an old magical alphabet, is called Beth-luis-nion na Ogma, or the alphabet of magical or mysterious letters; the first three of which are Beth, Luis, Nion, whence it is named.”[1] In my Celtic Druids I have maintained that our islands were peopled by two swarms from a common Eastern hive, one coming by Gaul, the other in ships through the straits of Gibraltar. This account of the appearance of the two alphabets of Ireland and Britain seems to support my system.
88. I am quite of opinion that the Welsh are right; but that not only their letters, but all letters, were once magical and astrological, and known only to the sacred caste of priests for many generations. I am of opinion that our common playing cards once formed an astrological instrument of the same kind.
89. The Greek, the Hebrew, and the Arabic systems are evidently the same, though in their latter letters, from some unknown cause, a change takes place, and the powers of notation vary; but they do not vary till they get to the nineteenth letter, as observed above, where the hundreds begin; and in the mode of variation after it takes place the same system is continued. From all this I am inclined to think, that the old Arabic language, which I shall shew is really Hebrew, as all the roots of Hebrew and Chaldee words are found in it, was a language before the present Hebrew, Greek, Sanscrit, and Deva Nagari letters were invented; that the first system of arithmetic was that now possessed by the Arabians, though not invented by them in their present country at least; and that the inventors of the first alphabet made it of right lines and lines joined at angles, and called its component parts after certain names of numbers, which, at that time, probably, in the first lost language, had the names of trees; and that from this came all the allegories of Gnosticism, respecting the trees in the Garden of Eden, held by the Valentinians, Basilideans, Bardesanians, &c., allegories which have been acknowledged by very learned men to have been the produce of a very ancient oriental system, in existence long previous to the birth of Christ—such as that of the tree bearing twelve sorts of fruit, one in each month, &c., &c. The alphabet was the wood or the forest—the tree was the system—the upright stem, the אלפא Alpha, the Chaldee name for the trunk of a tree (as I am informed by General Vallancey).—The words were the branches—the letters were the leaves growing out of the stem or branches—and the fruits were the doctrines and knowledge of good and evil, learned by means of receiving these doctrines from letters. In this manner a prodigious number of allegories were invented. In the old Irish, the words wood and alphabet are described by the same letters—Aos, which also signify both a tree and knowledge.
90. Taliesin, a Welsh bard of the sixth century, has written a poem on the battle of the trees, which is yet in existence, and in which he compares the words in the secret letters of the Welsh to twigs or branches of trees. The subject is the battle between good and evil, light and darkness, Oromasdes and Arimanius. Mr. Davies thinks this is an allusion to the original system.[2]
91. Apollonius Rhodius says, that when Orpheus played on the lyre, the trees of Pieria came down from the hills to the Thracian coast, and ranged themselves in due order at Zona.[3] This is a Grecian allegory, of the same kind, perhaps copied from the Orientals. Virgil has given an account of an elm-tree, which Æneas found growing at the side of the road to the infernal regions, loaded with dreams. This tree had the name of the elm, the first letter of the alphabet, the alpha, the trunk which bears all the rest, loaded with every kind of science and learning:
An elm displays her dusky arms abroad:
The god of sleep there hides his heavy head;
And empty dreams on every leaf are spread.
92. The following extract from a work of a Chaldean Rabbi is given by Kircher: Arbor magna in medio Paradisi, cujus rami, dictiones, ulterius in ramos parvos et folia, quæ sunt literæ, extenduntur: the great tree in the garden of Eden, whose leaves were letters, and whose branches were words.
93. It is agreed by all authors that the Druids pretended to perform various operations by means of sticks, sprigs, or branches of trees, which are commonly called magical. Some account of this may be seen in Tacitus de Moribus Germanorum. But, in fact, all the old native authors are full of these accounts: and it is impossible to read or consider them for a moment, without seeing the extraordinary similarity of the practice to that of Jacob with respect to the sheep of Laban, named in Gen. xxx. 37. The rod of Moses, and that of Aaron throwing out sprouts, &c., afford additional instances of similarity.
94. The letters of these magical alphabets, all which answered to the leaves of trees, were engraved on the surface of the rods, or sticks, cut square or triangular, to which the straight and simple form of the letters was peculiarly favourable. Hence the letters and the alphabets came to be considered magical, and the whole system of writing compared to a tree bearing leaves and fruits. And hence, also, came the celebrated Sortes Virgilianæ, which had this
