Originally, the gift of blarney the Irish speak of, was not the gift of telling a convincing lie, it was the gift of storytelling. Those who had that gift had the power to sway their own fate or fortunes.

A narrative-centric culture. Yes, so their divinatory practices worked with this and functioned something like the Norse rune staves.

Even psychology today speaks on the importance of our own personal stories. Yes. There is a whole branch of neuroscience exploring the relationship of language concepts to brain function and health as well as cognition, so it’s really not all that “out there.”

To divine, the ogham characters would be carved into a collection of sticks, and put into a skin bag, mythically crane skin, but that wasn’t specifically a practice as much as spiritual symbolism. And without looking they would reach into the bag and draw out some of the sticks, and cast them out onto the ground. It was believed that both the spirits of the ogham characters, as well as the trees the sticks were taken from, still played a role in what happened with these items. So you couldn’t draw anything from the bag “by accident”, not unless you did so with deceitful intent. But if so that would become apparent as well, and then they would read what characters were drawn as well as the pattern they landed in, and from this intuit the message of the earth mother for the seeker.

Having a “coherent narrative” for oneself is one of the ways “sanity” is discerned supposedly. Even a severely abused person is “sane” if his story has coherence. Yes. Error is not itself mental illness, or there would be not a single soul on the planet who could be called sane.

This seems similar to the i-ching. It is similar to the i-ching, just less strictly elemental.

Your thoughts are welcome. Be well friends.

Travis Saunders
Dragon Intuitive
~science,mysticism,spirituality~

So, the figures themselves (letters?) were thought to have power? Yes, the figures would be the equivalent of letters. I will explain that. Let’s say you seek a deep understanding of the natural world, especially one that reflects what you feel to be the sacred aspects of nature. Like any language you would have to start somewhere, yes? What would you say is nature’s most common landmark?

Tree? But trees were not seen as objects, not just as convenient landmarks.

Or stones. Stones were included also in druid lore, but ogham focused on trees.

In the druid lore, no single being created anything. The world arose as a part of a complex creative process with many creative agents and didn’t fall into a fixed form as most contemporary Christian thinking would seem to suggest. Many beings have a creative impact on the world, and trees have one of the oldest roles in the creative process. It wasn’t thought that a tree just accidentally grew near the river, it was thought to manifest its own power and character in the features of the area it grew in. Willows don’t just grow by the river, they help shape the river. Pines don’t just grow in the hills, they participate in the events that unfold in the hills. So much of the druids lore revolved around the relationship of trees to the land they grew in. Trees are even still commonly seen to have a preference for where they grow, where they “live.”

A grand ecology! Yes, and they understood the roles of animals and the seasons based on what trees they seemed connected to, or rocks, but mostly trees. Even the cycles of the seasons were understood by how they impacted the trees and the plants that grew among them. There was spiritual meaning in the fact that the oak seemed to “die” but the pine remained ever green.

Perhaps the Christmas tree was an extension of this? Yes, it was, and the figure of the Holly King. Druids role in their own communities was even described by the tree symbolism. A newly inducted druid would be a sapling, and elder druid would be a great old oak. This tradition shows up in a lot of names to this day, even though we often don’t recognize the name because it has deviated from its root word. Hawthorn is an obvious example though.

A common name where I live is “Upthegrove.” Likely of druidic origin.

Did the fact that a tree shows one particular elemental nature (i.e. earth, air, fire, water) also show up in their symbolism? It did. The elements and the seasons. Even growing patterns showed up in their math connecting a mathematical value to different trees. Some seem to grow in groups, other seem almost isolated, that sort of thing.

Your thoughts are welcome. Be well friends.

Travis Saunders
Dragon Intuitive
~science,mysticism,spirituality~

It is thought of as a “tree” script for two reasons. Many of its characters are named after trees, and the form the characters take resemble the forked branches of a tree. If this is all we knew understanding it would be hopeless. This is not all we know. We have a body of stories and lore which was the basis of the collective works of the Irish people and more specifically their druids.

Is this Gaelic or some other language? It ran parallel to Gaelic more or less, and actually shows signs of having been a cyphered form of a previous alphabet, if you can call it that.

Did Ireland and Wales share a similar culture? They did. Gaelic arose in the people who were originally native to what was then the nation of Gaul, which is what we today call France. The French language as we know it today didn’t exist, as French is a derivative of the Latin spoken in the Roman Empire.

The creation story of the druids is also the description of their understanding of magick in the world. For the Celts there was no real difference between the creation of a story or song, and the creation of the world itself. This is perhaps the primary reason their oral tradition was valued as highly as it was. In addition to being the collection of their understandings about all the life sustaining arts and practices they prospered in the world with, their stories, which were actually what we would today call poems, held the spirit of reality itself. So by relating and preserving the stories they were also acting to preserve the balance of the world.

In Celtic culture each member of a clan or tribe had their role to play in the well-being of their communities. Warriors and hunters had to fill their roles. Women acted as gatherers and crafters of the various things they needed, even the weapons used by the men, bows and arrows most commonly, and the druids were the keepers of their understanding of the seasons and the cycles as well as their law and communal rituals. What made druids stand out from the other branches of their society, was the fact that someone who became a druid would move out of their village. Druids lived in no single community, and thus were seen as impartial judges when communities came into conflict with each other.

Druids lived near regions known as sacred groves, and they met there for training in their various practices as well as enacting their own rituals.

Your thoughts are welcome. Be well friends.

Travis Saunders
Dragon Intuitive
~science,mysticism,spirituality~

I’m sort of lingering on the notion of self-expression when it is a reaction to so many external inputs. Almost like creativity has exhaust qualities to it like this is in some ways, unhealthy, that perhaps self-expression needs to be a focused choice rather than a bestial outburst. I fully agree with that insight.

The system has beat us down well enough that the only thing we can think to do is take the bait. We have been educated to believe that the only things we might ever want are things they can provide. There is one thing they need us to avoid at all costs. Can you guess what?

In the old days, people used to buy sheet music so they could play the piano together, being entertained took over, really. Being entertained is very different from being creative. If we are creative the hairless monkey stops taking shiny baubles and begins to consider whether the lab is really where they want to be, is this not so?

We want to escape. Actually, even that statement is a product of the system, binary thinking, and because our training makes us think in terms of wanting to escape, we never do. Escapism has another name.

Creativity? No, creativity is confrontational, adaptive, and experiential.

Entertainment. Yes. Now I am not saying that we should never be entertained, that we must always be busily creative. We need to rest and should, and if we are entertained by the creativity of others, that is ok. But understand what it is you are choosing to do or not do. Art is not something to be admired and then left alone. Art isn’t for strange and out of touch people living in low rent flats. Art is life. It’s been asked, “Does art imitate life or does life imitate art?” The answer is neither, both imitate you.

I need to show my writing off then. Swap some writing for some writing. I strongly recommend sharing writing with a friend, and in fact that is how it should start, just like this, artists sharing with and supporting artists.

Wondering what is real?

Real is anything you can imagine? Real is anything you can share.

Then why is it a mental illness? The mentally ill cannot share. They have instead been shared at, burdened by. They lose even the beaten animal centre most people still have.

They are often unaware of their imagination maybe? They’re unaware of their imagination for a reason. Their imagination is taken up by every other imagination.

The guy in “A Beautiful Mind” didn’t even know his best friend was only in his mind until many years later. His story is unfortunate. Magick actually has techniques that allow for centering and control of things like he experienced. He would have been taught to confront his experience without resisting it, and given guides for staying connected to his peers, symbols and concepts that reshape hallucinations, and he would have remained capable of using his mathematical gift as well.

We are a lot more sensitive towards mental illness than we used to be. More acceptance that they too can have control and be strong. Let’s hope increasing sensitivity continues.

And live as any healthy one would. Actually, they don’t have to live “healthy”, they just have to live well, not sick.

Your thoughts are welcome. Be well friends.

Travis Saunders
Dragon Intuitive
~science,mysticism,spirituality~

Art helps to make the ideas relatable? So they aren’t so frightening. Art is human nature. People make stuff up. They imagine everything. They will never be able, nor is it even necessary or good if they could be able, to remove that aspect of themselves, but they can ignore it. This is the ultimate ignorance.

Imagine is not the same as pretend. Imagine is theory of things that might work. Exactly. Science is making paint and spilling it on the ground. Religion is burning those few things that people have painted because they couldn’t help themselves, and I’m using paint as a metaphor.

Art can take science and religion and actually live with and through both of them, and even restore respect for the life and supporting essences that allow us to experience this existence.

Is it not fair to say that people are terrified of making things up today? Terrified of being wrong? Science itself has a term for this, paranoid schizophrenia. The belief that things you imagine are real and threatening you.

I hate having to prove myself or explain. I like explanation. It’s just further expression and the integrity will remain.

Seven billion brain disorders and rising. Seven billion dis-served daily.

Religion has its own word for the person who is afraid to make believe. Accept that they make things up. Apostate. Infidel is another religious word. They both spurn the same kind of person.

What is the difference between the artist and the lunatic? The artist creates. The lunatic is created, made, forced. Science is busy making the man. Religion also is busy making the man. Anyone going sane yet?

Art makes the person. Yes, art lets people be present.

People are expected to ‘make things up’ when looking at art. If the Coke symbol means something you don’t want, that is far more helpful than the tomes doctors use to describe mental illness.

I trace it back to Linnear, the Swedish guy who began cataloguing God’s creation for scientific purposes, and that’s probably a fair line of causality. He did it before Darwin, so the idea that animals were changing and the catalogue would ever be out of date never arose. A lot of scientific thought that is considered novel, if you look further back doesn’t look so novel. A lot of it shows up in magical tradition even. The idea that one life form gives rise to another, difference is just context, and that is changing even today as we engineer all sorts of strange living things, like glow in the dark kittens.

Your thoughts are welcome. Be well friends.

Travis Saunders
Dragon Intuitive
~science,mysticism,spirituality~

At war? Yes. Now I ask you, why is that?

As humanity grew in prosperity, it also grew in hubris. The more they seemed to be able to control, either through law or description or science, the more they lost sight of their original natures, swallowed up by their fascination with their various paths. Humanity stopped being human and started being art, and by art I mean artificial, a created, unnatural thing.

A collection of parts. That’s how western medicine sees us. Yes. Even art can translate you into abstract notions of beauty and philosophical concepts such as dignity and nobility.

I remember Marshall McLuhan’s idea that as soon as the first satellite went up, this world became a TV studio and we all became performers. I would agree with that. It just was an innovation in media. We were media well before satellites. In fact, orthodox religion requires we see ourselves as media, clay, or some other artistic medium.

And of course law sees us as units vs. humans. Yes, parts of a system. A citizen is a number, not a person. It’s a file and collection of data.

Numbers and bank ATMs. I don’t have a credit card slot. Well, that does raise the question of whether humans can be purchased even in this day and age. An Egyptian slave could not be purchased. They all belonged to their religious institution and were as sacred as their idols were.

So to get humanity back we need to re-integrate law, art and science? Yes. We didn’t actually gain control of anything. We still don’t have control. There are forces in the world that are much bigger than us, and their power serves as the precursor for human consciousness. The potential for life in the universe is now understood to be quite common. We can even create “fake” versions of our very own building blocks, and they still behave like real DNA does. Whether you want to see these forces as themselves having intelligence isn’t really relevant. Intelligence or no, they still have influence, and they serve purposes that don’t serve us.

I am not saying this to spook anyone. I have a point and it relates to today’s topic. We behave according to laws that predate us by an immeasurable length of time, and our bodies both arose and evolved according to an order that exists immanent in reality itself. This gave rise and still does inspire the insights that lead us to artists expression.

Laws as in instinct? Law as in physical law, but manifesting in the instincts of life as well as the tendencies of material behaviour. The Jungian archetypes have not a lesser reality than our current world model, they have a greater reality. The implicate order as we experience it in our subconscious minds and our conscious imaginations is very real, and if we gain no understanding of this, then we will control nothing ever. Collapse is permissible in the implicate order we live in, and a tree without roots does that very thing.

So it’s like a preprogrammed thing? It’s more like the essence of code, and it doesn’t care what you program. The code still follows its own logic.

I would think that could only be understood with an interdisciplinary view. I agree. The unification of the arts was the ultimate in interdisciplinary cooperation.

You can’t disobey any more than you can hold your breath until you die. You can disobey, in a sense, because you can choose to obey something else. It’s a very broad reality, and the return to clarity and sanity will be achieved by neither priests nor scientists. Both of their views are innately limited. They have to be to exist in the form they now do.

Art can bridge the gap? Can, yes, with the right artists and a holistic vision.

Your thoughts are welcome. Be well friends.

Travis Saunders
Dragon Intuitive
~science,mysticism,spirituality~

In these cultures, the creation of images was generally not shunned. In other cultures, the artists were the first heretics. As communities grew and prospered, some cultures saw it as necessary to discourage any activity not encouraged by their law. That way all that strength and energy could be “properly” funneled into sustaining the interests of the community as defined by their religion. The basis of the two disciplines are intermeshed, but when they clash… Well, we have seen the results repeatedly.

So art and religion ran parallel with each other for a very long time. When religion became empire than we see the split between the arts in general and those arts we consider crafts. Chapel building was okay and building those necessary things for survival was okay, but building much else was frowned upon in those cultures though it continued anyway.

That’s why the ornate old buildings have so much religious symbolism? Yes, as well as the belief that these had power, and well, even recent research confirms that they did and do have power of a sort.

The religions were nervous that the art would inspire people to possibly go against the doctrine? Yes, and there are a great many documents attesting to that.

Now with the split between art and religion, you see the surfacing of a perhaps very strange art following a parallel path to that originally taken by religion. Religion looked at the physical world and tried to intuit deeper meaning in the ways of the world in order to understand the territory, issues of dominion and power. Sort of like understanding animal behavior serves to allow humans to avoid being eaten by a wolf. They sought to avoid running afoul of whatever was in charge of the world, but also to share in the strength and authority of that presence or presences. With the rise of religion, these powers or beings become part of the community also.

The strange art I spoke of was also arrived at intuitively. Some understood physical experience on a smaller scale, and while artists sought to understand, describe and explore this experience, this strange art sought to influence it through the same channel that human beings themselves were influenced. They began to form a body of insights into the way these influences seemed to behave, and the things they seemed responsible for creating or causing to happen, and they practiced reproducing these insights. A simple one being the intuition that animals behave at least somewhat like people so they could be communicated with, and even have their behavior changed by changing the situation around them. This served as a craft that they explored and expanded as much as they could, and when the arts and religion grew apart, these also became heretics as their body of insights often showed them that the world around them only partially reflected the law taught by and supported by the priests.

Is there an example of that kind of art? Perhaps the making of dolls and animal toys? Indeed, it did lead to the creation of dolls and animal toys, and influenced the creation of tools. We now know the art as magic.

I expect the art of alchemy was a big one shunned by religion. Ah, indeed it was. The idea that something other than god could spare your life, in time was seriously discouraged.

Your thoughts are welcome. Be well friends.

Travis Saunders
Dragon Intuitive
~science,mysticism,spirituality~