Keywords: Shape-shifting, transformation, changes, growth, fate and destiny, pathways, possibilities, options, potential. Cycles of change, evolution, crisis, expanded reality.
Reversed: lack of control, victim of circumstances, pawn to events, the need to take control.
Natural CharacteristicsOne of the ash’s greatest features is the massive height to which the tree grows... up to one hundred and fifty feet. It has a sheer trunk with widely spaced branches, and this pole-lie appearance contributed to its association in Celtic and Norse thought as the axis mundi: the central column and axis that supports the sky. As such it also appears as a type of bridge between the earth and the heavens. The ash also has a deep and widespread root system that tends to deplete the surrounding soil, ensuring that the tree inhabits its own space, thereby underlining its special character in Celtic imagination. Other notable features of the ash are its phallic-shaped buds at the tips of the branch stems and the fact that it is one of the last trees to leaf and so its bare gray remains prominent late into the season.
Ogham wands were originally made of ash, and the root-word ‘nin’ means ‘letters’. The Celts also favored ash as a wood for crafting spears and arrows. Its role in weaponry is reflected in the kennings ‘checking of peace’, and probably ‘maw of a weaver’s beam’, for weavers were sometimes identified with the fateful battle-hags or washerwomen of Celtic myth who choose those to be slain in battle. This links it on a more general level with fate and destiny.
StorylinesThe ash has a particularly strong correspondence with Gwyddyon, the master magician of Welsh legend famous for his magic wand, a Celtic equivalent of Odin. In Norse legend, Odin is associated with the ash-tree, Yggdrasil, which forms the central axis of the nine worlds. (In fact, the name of the World Ash actually means ‘Odin’s horse’.) As the Celtic Odin, the ash is one of Gwyddyon’s trees along with the birch.
In the Mabinogion tale ‘Math, the Son the Mathonwy’, we find the goddess Arianrhod has imprisoned the young Lleu Llaw Gyffes, a Welsh equivalent of the Celtic sun god known in Ireland as Lugh. Arianrhod has placed a geas (a curse, in this case) on the boy that will keep him from bearing arms and thus from his greater destiny. The powers of darkness are, symbolically speaking, holding the light at bay and Gwyddyon is forced to resort to trickery to rescue Lleu:
“In the early twilight Gwdyion arose and he called unto him his magic and his power. And by the time the day dawned, there resounded through the land an uproar, and trumpets and shouts. When it was now day, they heard a knocking at the door of the chamber, and therewith Arianrhod asking that it might be opened…”What Gwyddyon has done is employ his enchantments to create the sound of battle outside Arianrhod’s castle, a ‘checking of peace’ in the words of the Word Ogham of Morainn mac Moín. This ploy compels Arianrhod to unwittingly give a sword and shield to the youthful hero, for find that she ‘cannot see the color of the ocean by reason of the ships’, Arianrhod panics. By this deception, Lleu reclaims his true destiny and is finally armed as a warrior.
The tale is paralleled in Greek mythology, where the solar hero Achilles is so beautiful in his youth that he must be hidden amongst women, a possible source for the Word Ogham references to ‘flight or boast of beauty’ and ‘flight or boast of women’. He cannot be released until his coming of age, which is marked when he receives an ashen spear – an important ancestral weapon handed to him ritualistically by his father Peleus – as a wedding gift in his marriage to the immortal goddess Thetis.
In such tales, we see a symbolic transformation or rite of passage from childhood to adulthood and from being controlled by fate to having it in one’s own hands. The underlying there is the release of the sun (representing the new, growth-promoting, emergent order from the dark stronghold in which it has been imprisoned. From this flow Nion’s associations in contemporary divination as a tree-letter of empowerment in matters of transformation and destiny. In drawing Nion, it is as if you have been handed a magical wand of ash with which to work your will in the world.
Folklore and MagicThe Dindsenchus (Lore of Places) tells of five sacred trees of ancient Éire, three of which were ashes: Eo Munga, Daithi and Tortiu. The ashes are praised for their height, the shelter they provide, and their nobility. Eo Munga is celebrated in these terms:
Eo Munga, great was the fair tree,
High its top above the rest;
Thirty cubits – it was no trifle –
There was the measure of its girth.
Three hundred cubits was the height of the blameless tree,
Its shadow sheltered a thousand:
In secrecy it remained in the north and the east
Till the time of Conn of the Hundred Fights.
The holy tree, along with its companions, suffered the same fate as many of the sacred groves under Roman rule: it was felled by pious Christians, the ‘bright trunk laid low’ as the Church pursued its vendetta against pagan ‘idolatry’.
Pagan associations there are indeed with the ash. It was much famed as a Druid’s want – Gwyddyon’s wand was probably ash, just as his Norse counterpart Odin possessed a spear made of ash and used its twigs as runestaves in divination. The Druid’s rod in Celtic magic was a highly charged instrument that could raise storms, bring down curses, confer invisibility and, especially, shapeshift human beings into animals. Modern-day Druids and contemporary Pagans also make wands to use as channels for divine forces in magic and ritual, sometimes of ash. Such wands are often carved with spirals and are always treated with great reverence.