The Hazel

The Hazel is the ninth tree of the Celtic year. In the Irish stories hazels grew around a well at the source of the great rivers, nine of them in the usual telling, and their nuts fell into the water and were eaten by the salmon, and whoever ate the salmon came to know everything worth knowing. That is a lot of weight for a small tree to carry, and the Hazel carries it lightly. It is the tree of learning, of knowing without being told, and of handing on what you have gathered to the people who need it.

Emma, born 6 August 1992, is a Hazel. The second day of the month and firmly inside it. The dates are fixed, so you need no calculator for this one.

The tree itself

Hazel is a modest plant. It grows as a big shrub or a small tree, several stems from the ground, nothing about it that stops you on a walk. Then in autumn it drops nuts that are dense with oil and protein, enough food in a handful to carry you a fair way. Its wood is flexible and was the wood of choice for divining rods and for the wands of teachers and magicians. Plain to look at, with concentrated nourishment inside. If you are a Hazel you may already see yourself in that.

Who you are

You are curious. Ideas, learning and understanding are what drive you, and the life of the mind is central. You seek out the books and the teachers and the traditions that stretch what you know, and you have been doing it since before anyone asked you to.

You are articulate. Your thoughts find words well. You can explain a hard thing to someone who did not understand it, and you can write it down so it stays explained. This habit of turning what you know inside into something another person can receive is one of your main gifts.

You also know things you cannot account for. Alongside the reading and the reasoning there is a direct knowing, a hunch that arrives whole, and in my experience the Hazel's hunches are right more often than chance allows. I would trust them. Keep a note of which ones landed and you will learn the feel of the good ones.

Strengths

The first gift is making wisdom reachable. Plenty of people know a great deal. Far fewer can pass it on in a form that actually arrives in the other person. You can, and the handing on is quiet work that changes lives without making a noise.

The second gift is the pairing of head and gut. You can analyse something properly and you can sense it directly, and the two together reach an understanding that reasoning alone never gets to. Most people have one or the other. You were given both and asked to use them together.

The third is patience with learning. You do not mind that understanding takes years. You are in it for the long gathering, and the nuts ripen in their own time.

Challenges

The shadow of the scholar is knowing about things without having lived them. A Hazel can read about love and grief and spiritual practice for twenty years and still be running on second hand wisdom, because the knowing came from a page, and a Tuesday afternoon that went badly teaches something a page cannot. The mature Hazel has put the book down often enough to have some scars of its own. Study and experience together make wisdom. Either one alone is only half of it.

The other shadow is pedantry. The love of knowledge can tip into the need to correct, to display what you know, to win the conversation with information. Wisdom given freely is a gift. Wisdom used to come out on top is a weight the room has to carry. Watch for the moment you start correcting someone who did not ask, and let it go.

In love and work

In love you bring conversation with something in it. A partner who can meet you in ideas will find a deep match, and a partner who cannot will slowly bore you, and you will both know it before either of you says so.

The risk is living in your head. Being in your body, feeling something while it is happening, the plain physical side of being with someone, these can slip to second place unless you tend them on purpose. The Hazel needs to come down out of the branches regularly and put its feet in the dirt.

In work you do best anywhere wisdom is gathered and passed on. Teaching, writing, counselling, research, publishing, translation. You are the one people come to when they need to understand something difficult, with or without a certificate on the wall. If you are a Hazel and nobody is learning from you, something is being wasted.

The Ogham letter

Coll is the Hazel's letter in the Ogham, the old Irish alphabet whose letters were notches cut along the edge of a stone or a stick, each named for a tree. The glosses link Coll with wisdom, with intuition and with the divining rod that finds what is hidden under the ground. The rod finds water that was already there. That is the Hazel's gift exactly: finding what was there all along and showing other people where to dig.

Across the traditions

The Hazel month runs from 5 August to 1 September, so it overlaps Leo and then Virgo in Western astrology, mostly Leo. The Leo page and the Virgo page in The Signs give you the warm performer and the careful analyst, and a Hazel usually has a foot in each. The sign boundary moves by a day either way depending on the year, so if you were born around 22 or 23 August, check your chart.

Your tree is one layer in a full portrait, which reads thirteen systems side by side. Chinese Astrology, Vedic Astrology and Mayan Astrology each have their own section in the library, and Find Your Numbers and Signs will give you your tree alongside the rest when it arrives.

What do you know that you have never once written down?

If you would like this read against your own chart, my readings are here.