John Michael Greer - The Coelbren Alphabet: The Forgotten Oracle of the Welsh Bards

Llewellyn Publications

Woodbury, Minnesota

Copyright Information

The Coelbren Alphabet: The Forgotten Oracle of the Welsh Bards 2017 by John Michael Greer.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any matter whatsoever, including Internet usage, without written permission from Llewellyn Publications, except in the form of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

As the purchaser of this e-book, you are granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. The text may not be otherwise reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, or recorded on any other storage device in any form or by any means.

Any unauthorized usage of the text without express written permission of the publisher is a violation of the authors copyright and is illegal and punishable by law.

First e-book edition 2017

E-book ISBN: 9780738752839

Book design by Bob Gaul

Cover design by Kevin R. Brown
Editing by Laura Graves
Interior art by Llewellyn Art Department

Llewellyn Publications is an imprint of Llewellyn Worldwide Ltd.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data (Pending)

ISBN: 978-0-7387-5088-0

Llewellyn Publications does not participate in, endorse, or have any authority or responsibility concerning private business arrangements between our authors and the public.

Any Internet references contained in this work are current at publication time, but the publisher cannot guarantee that a specific reference will continue or be maintained. Please refer to the publishers website for links to current author websites.

Llewellyn Publications

Llewellyn Worldwide Ltd.

2143 Wooddale Drive

Woodbury, MN 55125

www.llewellyn.com

Manufactured in the United States of America

Contents

: The Bard from Glamorgan

: The Coelbren of the Bards

: The Letters of the Coelbren

: Coelbren Divination

: Coelbren Meditation

: Summary of the Divinatory Coelbren

: The Coelbren and The Celtic Golden Dawn

Einigan the Giant beheld three pillars of light, having in them all demonstrable sciences that ever were, or ever will be. And he took three rods of the quicken tree, and placed on them the forms and signs of all sciences, so as to be remembered; and exhibited them. But those who saw them misunderstood, and falsely apprehended them, and taught illusive sciences, regarding the rods as a God, whereas they only bore His Name. When Einigan saw this he was greatly annoyed, and in the intensity of his grief he broke the three rods, nor were others found that contained accurate sciences. He was so distressed on this account that from the intensity he burst asunder, and with his parting breath he prayed God that there should be accurate sciences among men in the flesh, and there should be a correct understanding for the proper discernment thereof. And at the end of a year and a day after the decease of Einigan, Menw, son of the Three Shouts, beheld three rods growing out of the mouth of Einigan, which exhibited the sciences of the Ten Letters, and the mode in which the sciences of language and speech were arranged by them, and in language and speech all distinguishable sciences. He then took the rods, and taught from them Barddas

Introduction

This book owes its existence to a remarkable and unexpected discovery.

Like many others before me, I had long been interested in the curious, vaguely runic alphabet called the Coelbren of the Bards, which appears in the pages of Barddas (Bardism), the vast collection of Welsh Druid lore partly compiled and partly invented by Iolo Morganwg in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. According to the texts included in Barddas , the Coelbren had been passed down by a succession of Welsh bards and loremasters since the days of the ancient Druids, and formed the key to a body of hidden lore, Cyfrinach Beirdd Ynys Prydain , the Secret of the Bards of the Isle of Britain.

Practically all scholars today reject the claim that the Coelbren goes back to ancient times, and most believe that Iolo invented the alphabet himself. The Coelbrens roots in the Druid Revival of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, though, make the old bardic alphabet a fascinating phenomenon in its own right, and like the other traditions of Druid nature spirituality that emerged from that movement, it needs no older pedigree. Like so many others over the last three centuries or so, I found my own spiritual home in the heritage of the Druid Revival and Ive had the opportunity to contribute more than once to the process of recovering lost or neglected elements of the modern Druid tradition.

The Coelbren was a tempting candidate for a rescue mission of this sort. A great many spiritual traditions around the world have made use of writing systems as an important source of symbolism. The Hebrew alphabet plays an essential role, for example, in the Kabbalah, Judaisms mystical tradition, and kotodama a system of spiritual interpretations of the Japanese kana writing systemshas as large a place in Japanese esotericism. The Ogham alphabet of ancient Ireland and Scotland, and the Germanic, Norse, and Anglo-Saxon runes have a similar function in contemporary Celtic and Germanic Paganism.

What gives each of these writing systems the ability to function as potent symbols in divination, meditation, and ritual is that they represent concepts as well as sounds. For example, the Ogham few (letter) Beith, , represents the birch tree, and also beginnings, purification, and renewal, and the Old English rune Feoh, , represents cattle, and also wealth, creativity, and prosperity. The same is true of every other writing system that has been put to use in spiritual, religious, and magical traditions: knowing the meaning as well as the sound of the letters is the key to making the system work.

That was the difficulty with the Coelbren, though. The passages of Barddas that discuss the Coelbren have a great deal to say about its origins, history, and traditional uses, but they say nothing about letter meanings or even the names that were used for the individual letters. Lacking those pieces of the puzzle, the Coelbren remained silent. Some attempts had been made to assign meanings and symbolism to the letters in recent years, but those were arbitrary and worked poorly in practice.

In 2013, shortly after the publication of my book The Celtic Golden Dawn , I decided to tackle the riddle of the Coelbren and see if I could find some way to make it work as a symbolic alphabet for modern Druids. Over the months that followed, I read and reread the pages of Barddas and tried to find other resources on the subject, with very limited success. It was clear from certain passages in Barddas that the Coelbren letters once had a very important place in Welsh bardic symbolism and teaching. Small wooden sticks with notches were once used, according to one of these passsages, to communicate the mysteries of the bards. The Welsh word coelbren itself, literally omen stick, strongly suggested that Coelbren divination was once part of the bardic repertoirebut what the individual letters were named, what they meant, and how they were used for any purpose but writing poems and prose remained unknown.