God of the Week: Ogma

Following on from yesterday's post about Ogham, the early Irish tree alphabet, I have chosen Ogma as the Bad Witch's God of the Week - the deity said to have taught Ogham to humans. Ogma is also the Celtic God of Eloquence.

Mythology website Godchecker.com states:

"His name seems to be short for Ogmious, who invented a sort of Celtic shorthand called the Ogham Runes. These are mostly symbols for various trees, and apart from engravings on funeral stones and the like, remain somewhat mysterious.

"It seems the Ogham Runes were used by druidic types for divination and possibly solving early cross-word puzzles. So no-one in this day-and-age knows quite what he was trying to say. Probably blarney.

"His ears are chained to his tongue, which seems rather masochistic, but we are told it is to signify in some bizarre way that he is the God of Eloquence. Or maybe he is just tongue-tied. Or likes talking to himself.

"We consider that nowadays he must also be the God of Cell Phones and Blogging. He ought to be the mascot of all self-respecting Tweeters and Facebookers. Especially the Celtic ones."

How useful to have learnt the name of the God of Blogging. I think I might ask Ogma for help next time I'm stuck for words when writing A Bad Witch's Blog - if you see a post that's all in a strange shorthand of little lines, you'll know how the help arrived!

The photo shows my set of Ogham sticks

Links
http://www.godchecker.com/pantheon/celtic-mythology.php?deity=OGMA