I am a harpist, and the bulk of what I play on the harp is Irish trad.  Not only that, but the bulk of my ethnic heritage was imported in the last century from the fair green isle.  Today a quote from Giraldus Cambrensis' Topographica Hiberniae was brought to my attention concerning his impression of Irish music, an impression which is particularly telling, considering that, by all accounts, the man did not approve at all of the barbarous Irish attitude toward freedom and pursuit of leisure at the expense of the veneer of what was then considered "civilization."

It reminded me a great deal of those of us who Seek the Mysteries, as well as of the general gist of the Law of the Trapezoid:

I find among these people commendable diligence only on musical instruments, on which they are incomparably more skilled than any nation I have seen. Their style is not, as on the British instruments to which we are accustomed, deliberate and solem but quick and lively; nevertheless the sound is smooth and pleasant.

It is remarkable that, with such rapid fingerwork, the musical rhythm is maintained and that, by unfailingly disciplined art, the integrity of the tune is fully preserved throughout the ornate rhythms and the profusely intricate polyphony—and with such smooth rapidity, such 'unequal equality', such 'discordant concord'. Whether the strings strike together a fourth or a fifth, [the players] nevertheless always start from B flat and return to the same, so that everything is rounded off in a pleasant general sonority. They introduce and leave rhythmic motifs so subtly, they play the tinkling sounds on the thinner strings above the sustained sound of the thicker string so freely, they take such secret delight and caress [the strings] so sensuously, that the greatest part of their art seems to lie in veiling it, as if 'That which is concealed is bettered—art revealed is art shamed'.

Thus it happens that those things which bring private and ineffable delight to people of subtle appreciation and sharp discernment, burden rather than delight the ears of those who, in spite of looking do not see and in spite of hearing do not understand; to unwilling listeners, fastidious things appear tedious and have a confused and disordered sound.

Quert/Cert is the fifth fid of the second aicme, and thus constitutes the tenth letter of the Ogham alphabetic system dating from the time of Primitive Irish.  It is an interesting fid, particularly because it is one of the feda of which the interpretations of the various authors who have undertaken to write books on the subject of the Ogham have diverged somewhat, or at least at first blush may seem to do so.   The Thorsson/Kelly rendering in The Book of Ogham has it signifying Beauty, Eternity, and the Hidden God.  Ellison tersely associates it with the Otherworld and choice.  Laurie attributes to it an emphasis upon, in addition to the Otherworld, madness, and misfortune.

Years and years ago when I was first flailing about on the path to magic, I dallied a bit with the “Faery Wicca” books authored by Kisma Stepanich (Reidling), and one of the things she wrote about that spoke to me is the notion that human beings have a very difficult time with Eternity.  She opined that human beings needed to be reincarnated because the human mind simply cannot compass eternity from one fixed point, that it led to madness.  Meditating upon Quert recently, that thought surfaced when I surveyed the seemingly divergent opinions on the interpretations.  The Otherworld in the Irish myths has always conveyed a dual nature of beauty and madness, confounding the human mind’s attempts to cope.  Quert has indirect associations with the apple, and lo and behold, in the English-speaking world , with its hidden vestiges of Celtic heritage, when came into contact with the Judeo-Christian symbology, the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge was depicted as an apple.  “Good” and “evil” may appear to be more clear-cut in the present moment, but like so many products of human life and thinking, subject them to Eternity from the perspective of everyday, mundane thought, and they start looking a bit like the rags tied to clootie trees, blown about in the cosmic wind.

Looking over what Caitlin Matthews had to say about Quert in the little book that came with the mass-produced, store-bought Ogham set I bought years and years ago, I was reminded of the lack of the letter P in the Primitive Irish in which the first Ogham inscriptions were written.  When a loan word from Latin, for example, contained a P, the /kw/ sound, or “Q,” was substituted.  That reminded me of the idea of the Hidden God, the analog of the P sound being obscured by Q in Proto-Celtic and Primitive Irish.  If Q is the mystery, C by relation might offer clues to its method of being obscured, and if P is the Hidden God, then something of its unvoiced echo should be found in the voiced B consonant, in which the lips form the same shape, and perhaps in even in its next door labiodental neighbor, the F.

Through these recent ruminations, Quert/Cert is coming to be nuanced in my own conception as a Hidden, Eternal mystery of the Self that can be sensed in at least its rougher lineaments by the canny but cannot be seen directly, at least not at first; perhaps only perceived through a softening of the mind’s eye into a more receptive, slightly blurred focus, or seen only through reflections and the mind’s own version of peripheral vision.