Yareah Magazine

Our gardens are full of marvelous trees which have been venerated during centuries. In Yareah magazine/January, we started to know and see their poetic secrets by analyzing Robert Graves’ famous essay “The White Goddess

- A Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth” and what he calls “The alphabet of trees” in Celtic Druidic culture (letters were known by the name of a tree which started with its same initial. For example, “duir” -our oak- was also the letter “D” and “saille” –our willow- was the letter “S”). We explained that this alphabet had five vowels and thirteen consonants and the reasons why these last ones formed a magic seasonal calendar based on trees and “Mother Nature” which was secretly used by Druids for centuries, even after Christian irruption... they had to hidden their magic words and spells of their enemies to prevent their possible attacks, a belief shared by old Greek and Roman religions.

The number of January was dedicated to the first holly tree and consonant letter of that Neolithic calendar: to the birch, called “Beth” and which represented the letter “B”. Logically, in the number of February we studied the second tree and letter of the Celtic Druidic alphabet: the wild ash tree, “Luis”-letter “L” and in this number of March, we will focus in the third holly tree: the ASH, called “Nion”- letter “N”.
In Old Greece, the ash tree was consecrated to Poseidon, god of seas and sailors. Therefore, the ash represented the power which lived in the waters but, curiously, in Ancient Wales and Ireland, all of the oars were made of ash wood and the other name of the Scandinavian Odin was “Yggr” in relation with the word “hygra” (“sea” in Greek).
According to Hesiod, the “Meliai” or ash spirits were really intelligent because they were born of Cronus’ blood and three of the five Magical Trees cut down in Ireland, in the year 655, to symbolize the victory of the Christianity over the Paganism, were ash trees. A descendent of them was still in Killura in the 19th century and its wood was a talisman against drowns: Irish emigrants, who had to go to America when the Potatoes Crisis, carried a little bit of ash wood with them… The Druidic Magic Wand of Anglesey (1st century) was made of ash wood too.
This third holly tree dominated from the 18th of February to the 17th of March. It is the season of floods and nights are longer than days. Some Old Mediterranean people who had changed the White Goddess (Mother Nature) for a masculine God (Zeus) rejected this season as they considered than the Sun was dominated by the Moon, symbol of the feminine divinity for ever.

BIOGRAPHY Isabel del Río

http:// www.isabeldelrio. wordpress .com Isabel del Río was born in Madrid (Spain). She has studied in the University of Valladolid and she has a degree in Geography and History. She likes Arts and she has been painting for years. Now, she is teaching in a secondary school in Madrid and investigating about old lost female painters. She has published a novel called “Ariza” (Grupo Editorial Alcalá ISBN 978-84-96806-52-8).