Celtic · The Self
Symbol · The Ancient World
Triskelion
The Spiral of Life
Life as motion, not state — spiralling out and back, at the risk of losing the centre you turn on.
What it meansThree arms in rotation, all turning the same way, so the figure has no rest position — it reads as motion even when still. The reading is of life as process rather than state: always going round, and always around a centre that is itself empty.
Symbol · 4th century
Ogham
The Trees Came Later
Ireland's earliest script, and on almost every stone just a name; the tree alphabet came later.
What it meansIt is written along an edge — the corner of a standing stone is the line, and the strokes cross it. So the script requires a three-dimensional object and reads upward. Nearly every surviving stone says only a name, which is the use: to mark that someone was here.
The FindingThe ogham tree alphabet is on none of the c. 400 stones — it is a doctrine of the medieval manuscript schools, surviving earliest in the Book of Ballymote of about 1391 — and the thirteen-month tree calendar behind the ogham oracles sold today is Robert Graves's, from 1948.