Mallacht - Celtic Curses Go n-ithe an cat th is go n-ithe an diabhal an cat. Curse tablets found at Bath appeal to Sulis to punish the perpetrators of the crime. To take a few examples: in 1960 Mary Feehily knelt down on the road to use her widows curse, calling for God to smite her neighbour Patrick Watters, who had berated her during an argument about trespassing animals.140 After an inheritance dispute, Ellie Walsh of Carrick spent the five years between 1957 and 1962 solemnly and publicly cursing her neighbour Harry Walsh, going down on her knees, holding up a crucifix, and praying that the curse of God would come to wipe out Harrys family. Following decades of debate, the Corrupt and Illegal Practices Act of 1883 at last outlawed the using of undue spiritual influence during elections, meaning clerical curses.118 Priests still threw imprecations, and many people still credited them. Defeats in football, hurling and even stock market losses were occasionally blamed on old curses.159 More seriously, in the Irish Republic a few people still threw maledictions and credited them with dire powers. The sources of the curses are: National Folklore Collection at University College Dublin (hereafter NFC), MS 1838, 296. After lots of stunted answers, the interviewer started pushing and reassuring Michael: just tell us one instance: its all right. Joan Hoff and Marian Yeates, The Coopers Wife is Missing: The Trials of Bridget Cleary (New York, 2000); Andrew R. Holmes, The Shaping of Ulster Presbyterian Belief and Practice, 17701840 (Oxford, 2006), 89103; Richard Jenkins: Black Magic and Bogeymen: Fear, Rumour and Popular Belief in the North of Ireland, 19721974 (Cork, 2014); Angela Bourke, The Burning of Bridget Cleary: A True Story (London, 1999); Diarmuid Giollin, Celebrations and the Rituals of Life, in Eugenio F. Biagini and Mary E. Daly (eds. Chief amongst these useful maledictions, during the impoverished early nineteenth century, was the beggars curse. Cursing was demanding, sophisticated, formidable and imposing. of Ireland Maynooth Ph.D. thesis, 2002), pt 1, 25, 250, 261, 2767; Lisa M. Bitel, Tools and Scripts for Cursing in Medieval Ireland, Memoirs of the American Academy in Rome, li/lii (2006/2007); Luke McInerey, A Sixteenth Century Bardic Poem Composed for Sen Mac Conmara, Lord of West Clann Chuilin , Seanchas Ardmhacha, xxiii (2010); Katharine Simms, Guesting and Feasting in Gaelic Ireland, Journal of the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland, cviii (1978). Yet we should not ignore what was once the most widespread Irish magic of all: cursing. Hibernia's ancient lords and chieftains were notorious cursers, as were the saints who converted the Emerald Isle to Christianity, medieval Irish churchmen, and the Gaelic bards. A magical art like this deserves neither our condescension nor a staid and lifeless dissection, but our (perhaps begrudging) respect. Kevin Danaher, Irish Country People (Cork, 1976), 14. Humorously, he asked: where was the blackguard who canvassed for the Conservatives? Curse Tablets. Concepts like belief, ritual, tradition, symbolism, mentality and discourse undoubtedly illuminate key aspects of historic Irish maledictions. CC BY. It was terrifyingly brutal, mustering dark feelings that marked people who had seen or maybe just heard about the events in question. Curses were thrown at Protestant evangelists and their converts too, with notable victims being the Reverend Edward Nangle (180083) and his mission on the island of Achill.111 Their tongues would fall out, local Catholics were warned, if they failed to bellow abuse at the heretics.112. I. Nobody on the estate backed a winner yesterday, an informant later told the Belfast Telegraph. It all came out. John J. Marshall, The Dialect of Ulster (Continued), Ulster Journal of Archaeology, 2nd ser., xi (1905), 124; A. Hume, A Dialogue in the Ulster Dialect, Ulster Journal of Archaeology, 1st ser., vi (1858), 41; George Francis Savage-Armstrong, Ballads of Down (London, 1901), 334; James Orr, Poems, on Various Subjects (Belfast, 1804), 17, 91, 155; W. Clarke Robinson, Antrim Idylls and Other Poems (Belfast, 1907), 22. Hoppen, Elections, Politics, and Society in Ireland, 212. As well as publicly uttering maledictions, Irish women used modern means to advertise the dark forces they had unleashed. James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance (Yale, 1990), 423. In bilingual or largely English-speaking regions, and in towns and cities, tuneful maledictions were composed in English and sold as printed ballads. Borrow, Wild Wales (1862), iii, 417, 422, 434, 436. Fionnuala Carson Williams, A Fire of Stones Curse, Folk Life, xxxv (1996/1997); Fionnuala Carson Williams, A Fire of Stones Curse Rekindled, Folk Life, xlii (2003). 1862. John C. Messenger, Inis Beag: Isle of Ireland (Long Grove, Ill., 1983), 11317, 127. With the legal system generally trusted to provide fair outcomes, perhaps there was little need for a justice-based supernatural punishment. Locals became very annoyed with Peoples Democracy: they will get no support from us now, one said.154 Ian Paisley, the hard-line leader of Northern Irelands Democratic Unionist Party, had more success when he used the rhetoric of cursing to advertise his partys no surrender politics. The same is likely to be true, though perhaps to a lesser degree, of other magical techniques. It furthers the University's objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide, This PDF is available to Subscribers Only. Tutankhamun 2. A few tried to send the maledictions back. 465, 83. Christiansen, A Norwegian Fairytale in Ireland?, Baloideas, ii (1930), 238; Pdraig Tuathail, Folk-Tales from Carlow and West Wicklow, Baloideas, vii (1937), 67. Yet cursing did not always work that way. Folklorists interviewees, such as Patrick Feeney of Gurrane of Ballyhea in County Cork, said that the generations growing up from the 1960s knew little of maledictions.150. In Ulster, the north-eastern province, Presbyterians uttered curses in Scottish accents using the dialect of Ulster-Scots. 1967; Connaught Telegraph, 2 Mar. Celtic Curses - Bernard Thomas Mees - Google Books Curses sprung from bitter passions at trying times. It has been said that cursing priests belonged to the primitive, pre-famine era, before modernizing institutions like St Patricks College at Maynooth improved the quality of clerical training.113 This was not so. 119, 507. Curses in the Bible Sulis was a deity worshiped at the thermal spring of Bath. The widows curse was on them and their children. In nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Ireland, women usually wore headscarves when outdoors, to keep warm and as nods to strong patriarchal conventions of modesty and respectability. Since the late 1920s it had been involved in the Irish Free States censorship of immoral books, cinema and journalism. In multilingual Ireland, people cursed in many tongues. 640, 75. Not everyone in Ireland thought curses were legitimate. Nineteenth-century Irish folk possessed a deep oral literacy and a high capacity for verbal sparring. 573, 383; vol. Stemming from moral indignation, the virtuoso but also shocking technique required knowledge, composure, practice and wit. ), Cambridge Social History of Modern Ireland. Alexander Macbains An Etymological Dictionary of the Gaelic Language (Stirling, 1911) recorded five Scotch Gaelic words for a curse: ainchis, condrachd or contrachd, mallachd and trusdar. Ancient finds (among them long Gaulish curse texts, Celtic Latin Curse tablets found from the Alpine regions to Britain, and fragments . Devil take you. Everybody knew what a beggars curse was: it was a regular and familiar part of life, in pre-famine Ireland. Number III of Tracts Published by the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge and Practice in the Kingdom of Ireland (Dublin, 1787); T. C. Barnard, Reforming Irish Manners: The Religious Societies in Dublin during the 1690s, Historical Journal, xxxv (1992), 820. Rituals and a certain style were required to launch maledictions, to give them energy as the antiquary William Carleton put it.62. By the close of the nineteenth century the masses of Irish beggars who had once stunned travellers were gone, and the beggars curse began to be forgotten.96 A few stories were still told about it.97 Occasionally, people who had fallen on hard times threatened to use it, to elicit a bit of money or food. They, after all, were immersed in the Judeo-Christian cursing tradition, trained in practice of solemn ritual and public prayer, and possessed of sacred objects like chalices, church bibles and vestments. Ian Lynch, a researcher at University College Dublins National Folklore Collection, discovered something similar in 2011, when he sent out questionnaires asking about widows curses. Like many early twentieth-century anthropologists, Malinowski was nonetheless rather condescending about the topic. geasa) is an idiosyncratic taboo, whether of obligation or prohibition, similar to being under a vow or curse, yet the observance of which can also bring power and blessings.It is also used to mean specifically a spell prohibiting some action. In an era when we often see anger as dysfunctional, as something needing to be managed, and when many contemporary forms of indignation are indeed horribly crude (think of road rage or abusive outbursts on the Internet), surely it is worth considering the artful ways people expressed and used anger, historically.15 Thankfully, there is no lack of evidence. Margaret Dobbs, On Tin B Flidais, riu, viii (1916), 146; Salvador Ryan, Popular Religion in Gaelic Ireland: 14451645 (National Univ. But as hordes of desperately needy people left the Irish landscape, promises of beggars blessings and threats of beggars curses stopped being regular occurrences. yourself! Curses of Caesarea The Curse of the Knights Templar II. To badmouths, they might retort divil choke you. Some men interviewed by Irish Poor Law Commissioners in the early 1830s admitted this. The beggars curse was an old idea that resonated powerfully in early nineteenth-century Ireland.84 This was because rapid population growth, a lack of official poverty relief and a parlous economy based on inefficiently subdivided land had unleashed a tidal wave of begging.85 You could find begging in all major cities, of course, but its vast scale in Ireland staggered travellers from Britain, Europe and America. To illustrate: in a classic essay about anonymous threatening letters, sent to English farmers and grain-dealers in the late 1700s and 1800s, E. P. Thompson noticed that these letters were often rhymed in a spell-like style, as if to imply a bit of magical menace.60 Irish threatening letters, by contrast, were far more supernaturally explicit, teeming with the direst maledictions of the sort contained in a letter sent to a County Limerick landlord in 1886: may you wither up by the fire of hell soon and sudden, may the flesh rot off your bones, and fall away putrid before your eyes, and may the consolation of eternal flames come to be your consolation in your last illness, and the hearthstone of hell be your pillow for ever.61 That missive was pure literary cursing. See The Art of Magic and the Power of Faith, in Bronislaw Malinowski, Magic, Science and Religion and Other Essays (Boston, 1948) and Owen Davies, Magic: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford, 2012), 112. In this dangerous environment, it was best to be cautious. May the arm that is now sick, sling dead and powerless by her side before twelve months time. Curses figured in several of the Churchs ceremonies, including the most severe form of excommunication (the anathema) and some ordination liturgies for nuns and bishops. English newspapers portrayed them as slow, stupid drunks; yet Irelands workers possessed finely honed curses for every occasion, every fit of passion.58 Their lyrical formulas were designed to awaken God to injustice, alert the Devil to sin, and generally unsettle supernatural forces. It was used for both cursing and blessing. Lady Wilde, Ancient Cures, Charms, and Usages of Ireland: Contributions to Irish Lore (London, 1890), 224. Curses - The Mystica Why then was the righteous art of cursing so heavily cultivated in Ireland, in the commercial and increasingly sophisticated world of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries? Jeanne Cooper Foster, Ulster Folklore (Belfast, 1951), 1202; Ulster Folklore, in Proceedings and Report of the Belfast Natural History and Philosophical Society: Session 19431944, 2nd ser., ii (1945), 153; Lynch, Widows Curse, 2836. Formally, the Church forbade it. The time has come for redress. Publicly, respectable men insisted they did not. Common Brittonic - Wikipedia John ODonovan, Folk-Lore. This article looks at the ancient records of the northern nations of Scotland and England and features a selection of the most famous incantations from these magical Celtic Kingdoms where the spoken word and oral traditions were akin to community glue. Like the New Age movement internationally, in Ireland this revival was principally concerned with holistic wellness and spiritual exploration. Nor was it employed exclusively by the weak and powerless. On the Traditions of the County of Kilkenny, Transactions of the Kilkenny Archaeological Society, i (1851), 365. The first comprehensive study of early Celtic cursing, this work analyses both medieval and ancient expressions of Celtic imprecation: from the binding tablets . In this epic struggle, priests curses were potent forms of intimidation, which helped the notionally peaceful Catholic Association exercise great pressure on voters, whilst at the same time remaining just within the pale of the law. May you never die till you see your own funeral, for example an obscure allusion to a hanged man watching the spectators at his execution.54 May she and her friends who in any way caused this marriage, be forever without the grace or favour of God may their offspring unto their latest generation be unhealthy and attended with every misfortune that can befall mankind. Caesar ( 6.14) states that the druids taught "that souls do not become extinct, but pass after death from one body to another.". Cambridge Social History of Modern Ireland; Antain Mac Lochlainn, The Famine in Gaelic Tradition, Irish Review, xvii/xviii (1995). Celtic Curses. May the cold north blast of misery nip your body, while your heart burns like fire. 1890; 24 Mar. Inspiration for a fuller, more dynamic understanding of cursing, and perhaps other forms of magic too, can be derived from the way that magicians since classical times have imagined the ars magica the art of magic.18 Although pioneering anthropologists like Bronisaw Malinowski acknowledged the art of magic, this understanding of the controversial topic has been forgotten by many recent studies in which, as one not unsympathetic critic puts it: all too often a sense of magic is lost.19. Irish Independent, 11 Nov. 2000; Irish Independent, 8 Feb. 2002; Sunday Independent (Dublin), 26 July 1987. Every time misfortune struck they would mention your curse, whispering how you had never had any luck since that fateful day. Reflecting a remarkable continuity in the history of magic, blacksmiths were known as potent cursers. Quoted in John D. Brewer with Gareth I. Higgins, Anti-Catholicism in Northern Ireland, 16001998: The Mote and the Beam (Basingstoke, 1998), 111. In 1817, Mrs McCollum from Ballycastle in County Antrim reportedly became almost crazy after she was cursed by her local priest, shunned by her neighbours, and denied the rites of the Catholic Church.68 She may well have experienced something close to what physiologists call voodoo death, where a fearful magical attack inspires an extreme fight or flight response, an adrenaline surge so powerful that it causes real physical and mental damage.69 Beyond such pains, it was deeply humiliating to be publicly cursed, to have your misdeeds advertised and family openly threatened, especially by someone who was notionally your social inferior. Occasionally, priests fought back with maledictions, wishing Gods curse on Catholics who worked in or enrolled their children at Protestant schools.109 Any person or persons sending their children to this school henceforth, may they be struck blind and deaf may they be pained both sitting and standing [may] their crops and their goods be taken away by the devil.110 So pronounced a priest from County Clare in 1851, praying for curses to afflict patrons of the new Kiltrellig school. Folklorists in the newly independent Irish Free State began a nationalistic project dedicated to preserving the spirit of Ireland, the traditions of the historic Irish nation.12 Under the direction of figures like Sen Silleabhin, the government-funded Irish Folklore Commission (est. Ireland's Witchy History: 6 Unforgettable Irish Sorcerers Some of his respondents made an equivalence between curses and maleficent practices like leaving eggs and dead animals on neighbours farms.166 People no longer distinguished between different types of occult attack. Curses had many connotations and Irish people used them to joke, flirt, lament, insult, threaten and rage. Broken Mirror Curse 2. Like cursing African Americans in the early 1900s, Irish cursers revelled in luxuriant fantasies about their enemies being destroyed in specific, irremediable ways, with bones broken, flesh rotted, heads smashed, stomachs exploded, arms withered and eyes blinded.75 Curses expressed peoples deepest anger and most elaborate fantasies, making them a great relief of the heart, as one prolific Irish imprecator put it.76 If you could not stop an eviction, get a tolerable meal, recover your stolen possessions or ensure that your relatives behaved loyally, it was invigorating to imagine that, in time, an artful malediction would wreck the evildoers. Curse Dolls 4: Dido's Curse upon Troy IV. I would never have spoken of the occurrence at all only that the priest cursed those who knew about it off the altar for not exposing it, a witness admitted.120 Well into the twentieth century, priests threw imprecations at land-grabbers, who rented or purchased estates from whence the previous tenants had been evicted.121 A priests curse was useful in a boycott because it meant that neither the grabber nor his or her customers would prosper. May you leave without returning. Cursing continued to be rife during the period of the Enlightenment, throughout the 1800s, and until about the mid-twentieth century. Some of the more inventive could be used in our 21st-century livesjust swap out the Roman names and use your imagination to get dark magic to do your bidding. 2 and 5; Michael D. Bailey, The Disenchantment of Magic: Spells, Charms, and Superstition in Early European Witchcraft Literature, American Historical Review, cxi (2006). If potatoes, grain or a few pennies still were not forthcoming, they could begin hinting at more mysterious powers. The Curious Case of Irish Curses and the magical cursing stone Flower, Western Island or Great Blasket, 49. Murphy, Diocese of Killaloe in the Eighteenth Century, 258. The beggars curse did not decline because it was formally disproved. The Bjorketorp Runestone 3. Case studies can be revealing and exciting, as in Angela Bourkes exploration of the 1895 killing of a fairy-ridden Irishwoman, Bridget Cleary, or Ruth Harriss account of collective possession in an Alpine village the Mal de Morzine.16 But I think a broader perspective is more suitable here, because bringing together a wide range of evidence allows us to better appreciate cursings central quality. $76.60 - $78.80 4 Used from $78.80 14 New from $76.60. In court, hundreds of witnesses described how the local Catholic clergy and others had used various intimidating practices, from violence to threatening letters to sermons calling for the Conservatives to be ostracized. Geasa are common in Irish and Scottish folklore and mythology, as well as in modern English-language fantasy fiction. 95, 112. Carleton, An Essay on Irish Swearing, 349. Best Irish curses to hex your enemy - IrishCentral.com A 'Celtic Curse' Has Roots Stretching Back To The Bronze Age Amongst these strategies was cursing. However, it thrived in the modern world of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries because it functioned not only as a potent weapon but also as a gruesome therapy and misanthropic coping strategy in fraught times. Lady Wilde, Ancient Legends, Mystic Charms, and Superstitions of Ireland, i, 1325; NFC, Schools Collection: vol. Celtic curse in the blood - The Irish Times Geas - Wikipedia ), Crime, Violence, and the Irish in the Nineteenth Century (Liverpool, 2017). These campaigns achieved little. 78, 153; MS 42, 203; MS 538, 212. Catholic priests were still extraordinarily plentiful, with as many as 1 to every 660 members of the laity in 1950.127 People took their curses seriously; yet priests no longer used them. Full analysis of ancient and medieval expressions of Celtic cursing, using evidence ranging from magical charms to curse tablets. A kneeling woman, perhaps a widow, calls down a curse on the landlords evicting her family. Minutes of the Evidence Taken at the Trial of the Galway County Election, 211. In this respect, it was an art. In 1888, a shopkeeper from Mitchelstown who had purchased a house from the Countess of Kingstons estate was warned by notices posted around the town: let her be aware of the widows curse.134. Even so, cursing was not dead. Gearid hAllmhurin, Flowing Tides: History and Memory in an Irish Soundscape (Oxford, 2016), 67. Patricia Lysaght, Visible Death: Attitudes to the Dying in Ireland, Merveilles & contes, ix (1995), 34; Galway Mercury, 26 Apr. !.51 But workaday curses were not particularly suitable for proper cursing because they invited easy retorts. Catholic priests were well placed to excel at the theatrical art of cursing. Although not really an art, it seems to have nurtured determination and vengeance, amongst people experiencing terrible loss. Had he ever heard about them? Bad cess on you. Druidry in Contemporary Ireland, in Michael F. Strmiska (ed.) He talked volubly about dozens of topics, but when curses were broached, Michael went quiet. Like most tribal scopes of ancient times, the basic framework of the Celtic society was composed of extended families and clans who were based within their particular territories. ), Foclir Gaeilge agus Barla, 200, 687; Samuel Lover, Legends and Stories of Ireland (Dublin, 1832), 187. When Johanna Sullivan was convicted of being drunk outside Corks Theatre Royal, in 1863, she gave the magistrates a mouthful, but the local paper noted only that she uttered a fearful curse.56 Novelists were less inhibited, but as well as being melodramatic and stereotypical, they were unconcerned with literal accuracy. This had various causes: emigration, population decline, the near disappearance of the precarious peasant class, the increased availability of official poverty relief, and new laws criminalizing wandering begging. Cursing rapidly faded from the mid-twentieth century and, unlike other forms of occultism, was not revived by the post 1970s New Age movement. Celtic Curses by Bernard Mees | Goodreads Heroic Epic and Saga: An Introduction to the Worlds Great Folk Epics (Bloomington, Ia, 1978), 302. The first comprehensive study of early Celtic cursing, this work analyses both medieval and ancient expressions of Celtic imprecation: from the binding tablets of ancient Britain and Gaul to the saintly maledictions of the early medieval period, and other traces of . [Thomas Secker], Against Evil-Speaking, Lying, Rash Vows, Swearing, Cursing, and Perjury. Writers like W. B. Yeats communed with banshees and fairies, but did little with maledictions except for a few fleeting references and using The Curse of Cromwell as a poem title. Dr James Butlers Catechism, Irelands official statement of Catholic faith, explicitly prohibited cursing for being contrary to the Second Commandment.100 Within Roman Catholicism, however, this simple statement masked considerable ambiguity and inconsistency. Breandn Mac Suibhne and David Dickson (Dublin, 2000), 226. There are ancient stones, called bullaun stones, which were believed to lend power to a blessing or a curse - if the person saying the words was touching a bullaun stone at the time, their words were thought to come . To signify this, real cursing used scarier and more complicated wordplay. 5 Like in other loosely Celtic societies, in pre-modern Ireland cursing was regarded as a legitimate activity, a form of supernatural justice that only afflicted guilty More directly, mendicants insinuated mystic influences by asking for alms for the glory of God, as one Irish beggar did when she met the linguist George Borrow, in the summer of 1854.89 Anyone who agreed, who provided a little charity, would be rewarded with profuse blessings. Cursing was rife in nineteenth-century Ireland because many people valued it, not only poor peasants and beggars, but priests, parents, and others needful of influence and consolation. ), Magical Folk: British and Irish Fairies 500 ad to the Present (London, 2018); Andrew Sneddon and John Fulton, Witchcraft, the Press and Crime in Ireland, 18221922, Historical Journal, lxii (2019). Kuhling, New Age Movement in the Post-Celtic Tiger Context, 177. NFC, MS 538, 20813; Schools Collection: vol.
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