The Celtic Omen Days

Foretell your destiny for the year ahead.

I first learned of this practice in 2020 from my teacher Asia Suler after the Omen days had already passed, so I embraced and applied it fully the following year.

This practice goes back to the time of our ancestors when they understood our interconnectedness within the web of life. Everything around us, especially in nature, is always communicating and speaking to us. This is also a very shamanic perspective of everything. When paired with intention, we can observe and gather signs and omens from the world around us to divine the year to come.

Christmas day, of course and reasonably so, stands alone as a holy day, so the counting of the 12 days of Christmas would have begun on the 26th of December and ended on the 6th of January.

These are known as the “Omen days” or the “days out of time”. Each of these twelve days is assigned to each of the months for the next calendar year.

DAY 1: December 26th - January
DAY 2: December 27th - February
DAY 3: December 28th - March
DAY 4: December 29th - April
DAY 5: December 30th - May
DAY 6: December 31st - June
DAY 7: January 1st - July
DAY 8: January 2nd - August
DAY 9: January 3rd - September
DAY 10: January 4th - October
DAY 11: January 5th - November
DAY 12: January 6th - December

The Omens (signs, symbols, words, songs, phrases, cards, whatever comes up!) gathered and experienced on each of the omen days are indicative of each month to come for the next year.

As Caitlin Matthews shares in her blog here, this tradition of divining from nature, or nature augury, has roots in Celtic lore. Nature is everywhere. This can be experienced through a daily walk, a happening in your day, a literal sign that appears in your surroundings... signs, symbols and omens are literally everywhere for us to discover and witness. Most often we simply have to set an intention to receive them.

This is perhaps the most important part of the practice, and of every spiritual practice in my perspective - intention. Without intention, we are walking blindly into everything. Set your intention at the start of every day to be open and receptive to receive your omen as well as give clarity to the powers that be to help you divine the year ahead.

Many people who practice the omen days will only seek to utilize nature for this practice. I like to encourage you to use the many spiritual and divinatory tools that are at your disposal like oracle cards, runes, crystals, music, people, books, dreams, films, divination kits, words from a friend... even social media sources can deliver to you your omen.

As always with spiritual practice comes the element of trust. Trust that you are getting the omen you need on each day. Trust your intuition when you feel that what you received IS your omen for that day. Trust in the divine to deliver your omen to you. Trust the web of life to reorder itself to provide - always.

I encourage you make a note in your phone or have a journal on hand to take with you for these days.

Then, at the start of each month in 2024 refer back to your omen from your omen days ritual. Here’s a fun snapshot of mine from last year from the month I got pregnant. It is very resonant for me and what I was feeling... I always said I would not feel safe bringing a baby into this world until we lived on our own in a safe home without any worries of family breaking boundaries. June was the first month I had felt safe in a long time and this is what I had written:

To create my omen days list I simply began each day holding in my heart the intention to divine the corresponding month for the next year.

Then I would go about my day, sometimes continuing the intention with a walk or a card pull, but allowing my awareness to be focused on what spoke to me as my sign. You can see from the picture above that many things would come up, so for that note I took what they all added up to mean through my own intuitive lens, which I wrote in the note as: A sacred new beginning after a difficult time.

Pretty fascinating, right?

So, now I'll give you some tips and advice on how to receive your omen for these days with one of my favourite practices to try in your omens days ritual. Watch the video below to learn!