I did. 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. Hibernias 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.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 parties.6 The idea had important consequences. Finally, towards the end of the nineteenth century, Irelands priests stopped throwing political curses. Not until these fires burn, they prayed, will the newcomers do any good. Women were central to the struggle, organizing ostracisms and boycotts of land-grabbers, shouting and spitting at bailiffs, throwing stones at policemen, snatching notices and blocking roads to stop evictions (see Plate 2). The relationship is revealed in the timing. The most dangerous malediction, Irish commentators and ordinary people agreed, was a priests.98 I mind nothing but the priests curse, one of Lady Anne Dalys tenants told her in 1872, when describing how he could endure any intimidation from his neighbours except that.99. In multilingual Ireland, people cursed in many tongues. Cursing was stress busting and cathartic, for two reasons. Edward Nangle, The Origin, Progress, and Difficulties of the Achill Mission (Dublin, 1839), 534, 140. Exceptions include: Patrick C. Power, The Book of Irish Curses (Aurora, Ill., 1974); Eugene Hynes, Knock: The Virgins Apparition in Nineteenth-Century Ireland (Cork, 2008), 4347; Ian Lynch, The Widows Curse: Legend and Belief, Continuity and Change (Univ. 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. This psychologically powerful form of magic was deeply rooted in Irish cosmology, tradition and history. ), Albions Fatal Tree: Crime and Society in Eighteenth-Century England (New York, 1975), 303. In dangerous times, many peoples thinking amounted to a magical version of Pascals wager, where it was best to stay safe, to avoid curses if doing so was not too costly, just in case. Your soul go to the Devil might be nullified with my soul from the Devil.53. 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. 573, 383; vol. Henry Glassie, Passing the Time in Ballymenone: Culture and History of an Ulster Community (Philadelphia, 1982), 83. An inherited disorder that stems from a problem in the way the body handles iron in the blood has been called a "Celtic Curse" because of the condition's high prevalence among people with. Lindsey Earner-Byrne and Diane Urquhart, Gender Roles in Ireland since 1740, in Biagini and Daly (eds. Fairies, leprechauns, banshees, witches, holy wells and rural remedies. [Anon. But cursing songs were not a dying art, part of a vanishing Gaelic folk culture. From an emotional perspective, evicted tenants consoled themselves with the thought that dire supernatural punishments awaited the new occupants. So prayed a priest from County Mayo, in 1872, on a woman he accused of spreading tar on his churchs seats.119 He uttered that malediction while standing at the altar, pointing, and followed it up with stories about families who had wasted away and animals that had gone mad, after gaining the priests malediction. Mostly though, Irelands cursers were women. 12, 1718, 39. Quoted in John D. Brewer with Gareth I. Higgins, Anti-Catholicism in Northern Ireland, 16001998: The Mote and the Beam (Basingstoke, 1998), 111. Curse Dolls 4: Dido's Curse upon Troy IV. 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 Celtic . These clever formulas were the basis for the unnerving art of real cursing, a scary but widespread occult attack that Irish folk used in their struggles over vital areas of life, from land and food to politics, religion, gender and family disputes. It began with dress. Whatever the response, after scenes like these, the neighbours would talk, and not just about your crimes. Troubles or deaths befalling the earls of Egmont, to take a famous example, invariably prompted retellings of the tale of the solemn curse that had been laid on the family seat of Cowdray House, way back during the Dissolution of the Monasteries, in 1538.72 Even if you tried not to believe in it, being cursed made you seem weaker an impermanent and insecure presence, who was not long for this world. Parliamentary Elections (Corrupt And Illegal Practices) BillBill 7, Hansard, cclxxx, col. 84293 (18 June 1883). Hannes Magerstaedt/Getty Images In February. Although not really an art, it seems to have nurtured determination and vengeance, amongst people experiencing terrible loss. These tablets served to curse enemies and other undesirable people, asking the gods to intercede and affect the person in question. People who believed they were cursed occasionally wrote to newspaper agony aunts, describing themselves as being under an evil power, as if curses were identical with black witchcraft.164 Likewise, in the 1990s and early 2000s countryside, in places like County Limerick and County Tipperary and even rural Ulster, there were still farmers and veterinarians who had seen strange things and experienced weird agricultural misfortunes. The Irish were formidable cursers. Cursing continued to be rife during the period of the Enlightenment, throughout the 1800s, and until about the mid-twentieth century. Breandn Mac Suibhne and David Dickson (Dublin, 2000), 226. Stereotypically male though in reality mostly female, beggars included people as various as migratory farm labourers, temporarily workless families asking their neighbours for assistance, tinkers or travellers an increasingly distinct ethnic group, and professional itinerants known as boccoughs or bull-beggars.86. For victims, it was threatening, disturbing and humiliating. Every time misfortune struck they would mention your curse, whispering how you had never had any luck since that fateful day. Imprecations like: the curse of my orphans, and my falling-sickness [epilepsy], light upon you, which a woman from Athlone pronounced in court, on the people prosecuting her for theft.2 Or: the curse of God and the curse of the flock be upon any men who vote for Higgins, repeatedly bellowed by a priest from County Mayo, during a fractious election campaign.3 Or: may the curse of God alight on you and your family throughout their generations may the curse of Gods thunder and lightning fall heavily, prayed by a farmer from Limerick, on the landlord who had evicted him.4, Those maledictions were uttered between the 1830s and 1850s. (Dublin, 1834), i, 34950. In 1888 Thomas secretly disposed of the dead body of his little daughter, who he had conceived out of wedlock with his cousin and housekeeper. Female tenants joined the Land League (187981), the organization that fought for tenants rights, but were barred from leadership positions and from speaking at public meetings. 1845; Derry Journal, 15 Jan. 1839; W. G. Wood-Martin, Traces of the Elder Faiths of Ireland: A Folklore Sketch. By the 1960s American movies and television shows were popular even in remote Gaelic-speaking places like Inis Beag, a windy isle three miles off Irelands north-western coast. Murphy, Diocese of Killaloe in the Eighteenth Century, 27982; Conrad M. Arensberg, The Irish Countryman: An Anthropological Study (Gloucester, Mass., 1959), 1978. Roscommon and Leitrim Gazette, 4 Apr. Basic maledictions like hells cure to you, the divils luck to you, and high hanging to you were easy to remember and quick to say.50 Sometimes, for real cursing, they were piled on top of each other, as if to multiply their effect. Their money would melt in their pockets, apparently.122 During the bloody years of the Irish War of Independence (191921), murderous republicans also felt the force of clerical imprecations, if they killed well-liked local characters.123. The same is likely to be true, though perhaps to a lesser degree, of other magical techniques. St Brigids stone, Blacklion Co. Cavan. 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. I will light a candle that your family will die and you will suffer grief in the next 12 months, he said: when it happens, I will take pictures and send them to you and put them up for everyone to see. But as hordes of desperately needy people left the Irish landscape, promises of beggars blessings and threats of beggars curses stopped being regular occurrences. Curse . 1. 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 Southern Irelands independence in 1922, crime in the Irish Free State and Irish Republic fell precipitously, partly because huge numbers of deviants and dissenters were shunted off to asylums and church homes. K. Theodore Hoppen, Elections, Politics, and Society in Ireland, 18321885 (Oxford, 1984), 21213. The heaviest curse at the present, wrote a teacher from the same county in the same year, is Marbhadh Fisg ort the squeeze band of Death on you.145. Edward OReilly, An Irish-English Dictionary, new edn (Dublin, 1864): acais, airire, anfhocal, aoir, aor, easgaine, inneach, irire, mallachd, moiscaith, oighrir, oirbhir and trist. Their blessings and curses often seemed arbitrary and cruel, but they were still upheld as the primary force and source of . A Moonlight Curse, Dublin Daily Express, 20 Apr. 78, 153. A righteous occult attack, a dark prayer for terrible pains to blight evildoers, cursing was unnervingly common from ancient times until the mid-twentieth century. Quoted in: Ignatius Murphy, The Diocese of Killaloe in the Eighteenth Century (Dublin, 1991), 129. It did not always ensure peoples compliance, but it did have other grimly consoling uses, in assuring frustrated people that their pains would be avenged. Evening Herald, 12 Mar. Full analysis of ancient and medieval expressions of Celtic cursing, using evidence ranging from magical charms to curse tablets. 1862. May your bones be broken, for example, and a thousand placings of a rope round your neck.41 Irish people said these things during arguments, after accidents, or following near misses. Yet Irish societys patriarchal conventions hampered womens capacity to oppose. There is ample evidence to demonstrate that the ancient Celts, like many other people, believed that the soul did not die with the body. But even if the threat of a malediction did not shape someones behaviour in the way you had hoped, the evil prayer still had value. 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. ), Bob Norberry; or, Sketches from the Note Book of an Irish Reporter (Dublin, 1884), 228. Yet cursing did not always work that way. 1827). Ronald Hutton, Witch-Hunting in Celtic Societies, Past and Present, no. 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. Curses have been left out of accounts of Irish land conflict, but there is no doubt that they played an important role. Corinne A. Kratz, Genres of Power: A Comparative Analysis of Okiek Blessings, Curses and Oaths, Man, new ser., xxiv (1989). Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. For instance, in ancient Greece around the 5th century BC, artifacts called "Tablets of Curse" could be made. 1973. 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. Captain Prout [John Levy] (ed. Recognizing this challenges us to reconsider our wider ideas about the history of magic. To badmouths, they might retort divil choke you. Following Holy Communion, Father Loftus stood at the altar, holding a chalice. It is time we acknowledged the polish and power of the art of magic. 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. Cursing blended lyrical and ritualistic spell casting with something like prayers to God, Mary, Jesus, the saints (and occasionally the Devil), begging these awesome entities to smite guilty parties. Those nasty practices had an extensive Gaelic terminology of their own. The Bjorketorp Runestone 3. The Most Rev. Anthony McIntyre, (18531856), Public Record Office of Northern Ireland (hereafter PRONI), MS D1558/2/3, 120. Full analysis of ancient and medieval expressions of Celtic cursing, using evidence ranging from magical charms to curse tablets. Since the late 1920s it had been involved in the Irish Free States censorship of immoral books, cinema and journalism. Between the 1820s and 1860s, Protestant missionaries strove to persuade Irish Catholics to abandon Rome and embrace Reformed faiths. 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. 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. Teresa ODonnell, Skin the Goats Curse on James Carey: Narrating the Story of the Phoenix Park Murders through Contemporary Broadside Ballads, in Kyle Hughes and Donald M. MacRaild (eds. In this dangerous environment, it was best to be cautious. May his neck get stiff, they mumbled.44, More serious were musical curses, stinging ballads calling for uncanny retribution. Kerry Evening Post, 19 Sept. 1835; Niall R. Branach, Edward Nangle & the Achill Island Mission, History Ireland, viii (2000), 358. 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 . Roman Catholic Questions: Church of Rome in Ireland, British Critic, v (1829), 1867; Wexford Conservative, 28 Oct. 1835. In 1786, for example, Munsters Catholic bishops announced their determination to sanction clerics who habitually poured forth from the altar the most shocking curses and imprecations.23. farm in the townland of Coolnagarrane in County Cork. Even so, cursing was not dead. In oral stories, collected by folklorists like William and Lady Wilde (Oscars parents) during the nineteenth century, and by the Irish Folklore Commission from the 1930s, imprecators were usually female.128 Local yarns recounted the sufferings of cursing women, bereaved mothers who cried that the caor [lightning] may kill him, against men who betrayed their sons.129 One particularly gruesome tale described a mother enraged by her sons bridal choice, who willed his death by lighting candles round his bed as if a corpse lay there, going down on her knees, praying for his demise.130 Across Ireland, many people knew childish legends about mothers who gave their offspring the choice of a large cake and a curse or a small cake and a blessing.131 More seriously, the commonest malediction stories concerned the dreadful power of the widows curse.132, Like the beggars curse and the priests curse, the widows curse was an old idea that chimed with the conditions of Irish life during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Irish Independent, 11 Nov. 2000; Irish Independent, 8 Feb. 2002; Sunday Independent (Dublin), 26 July 1987. Nothing was more feared than a really venomous malediction, commentators on Irish manners claimed, without much exaggeration.10 Yet this intriguing form of modern magic remains almost entirely unstudied.11 Antiquarians and folklorists were only marginally interested in it, with the exception of a lively essay by William Carleton (17941869). Irish cursing persisted partly because of its value, use and functions. A few tried to send the maledictions back. yourself! Eviction Scene, Daniel MacDonald (c.1850). Soon after the Catholic Associations foundation, in 1823, Members of Parliament in Westminster began complaining about the outrageously intimidating Irish clerics, who were frightening electors with horrid stories about priests curses sending people blind, as if that might be their punishment if they were so unwise as to opt for the wrong candidate.103 Protestant periodicals also started carrying scattered reports about priests using maledictions and altar denunciations to make their parishioners pay the Catholic rent, a regular fee to support the Catholic Association.104 One might be tempted to dismiss these sectarian writings as fabricated propaganda. One of the more charmingly bitter traditions of ancient Greece and Rome were "curse tablets"spells written on lead, wax or stone that laid out the ways in which people had been wronged. 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. It is a form of Insular Celtic, descended from Proto-Celtic, a theorized parent tongue that, by the first half of the first millennium BC, was diverging into separate dialects or languages. It also reminds us that not all types of magic share the same chronology of rise and fall, growth and decline, enchantment and disenchantment. It must begin with deep history and the cursing traditions I noted earlier. Privately, amongst their families at home, the reality was different. Its adherents revisited and reinterpreted Irelands mystical traditions, particularly its country remedies, ancient myths, magical legends and pagan monuments.158 Needless to say, the historic art of cursing did not chime with this agenda. Southern Reporter and Cork Commercial Courier, 30 Apr. To use sociological parlance, there was a certain amount of path dependency, with Irish imprecators drawing on well-established conventions and precedents, just as people do in other cursing cultures, such as the Okiek of Kenya.79 Yet when Irish folk uttered maledictions, they recreated and renewed certain (not all) cursing techniques. May the Almightys curse rest on your children. Irish imprecations can be analysed using familiar academic categories such as belief, ritual, symbolism, tradition and discourse. Perhaps that was overstating it: some people still knew bloodcurdling tales. First Report from His Majestys Commissioners, 687. When Spells Worked Magic In ancient times, a curse could help you win in the stadium or in the courts, and a plea addressed to a demon could bring you the woman of your dreams. Druidry in Contemporary Ireland, in Michael F. Strmiska (ed.) The tablets were requests for intervention of the goddess Sulis Minerva in the return of stolen goods and to curse the perpetrators of the thefts. CC BY. 1890. May the cold north blast of misery nip your body, while your heart burns like fire. Overall though, cursing is best conceived of as an art because of the cultivation it required and the strength of the reactions it elicited. !.51 But workaday curses were not particularly suitable for proper cursing because they invited easy retorts. When the evicted tenant prayed the widows and orphans curse upon him , Mr Dowd suddenly reneged on his purchase, frankly telling the vendor: Ill have nothing to do with that place I so unwisely bid for. Beggars also needed stories about how they had fallen on hard times. On the Traditions of the County of Kilkenny, Transactions of the Kilkenny Archaeological Society, i (1851), 365. Hardcover. Metaphorical maledictions were certainly amusing, impressive and intimidating. If potatoes, grain or a few pennies still were not forthcoming, they could begin hinting at more mysterious powers. Against a Conservative supporter, Mrs Griffiths, Father Loftus pronounced a Gaelic curse translating as: the curse of the people on her may bad luck fall on everything she touches. Magic & Curses. Cuchulain in Battle" by Joseph Christian Leyendecker (1874 - 1951) shows the famous Irish warrior flanked by a crow, often thought to be a manifestation of the Morrgan or badh. On a symbolic level too, priests status within the Church enhanced their cursing abilities. They expressed fear, loathing, hate and yearning for pitiless vengeance, for punishments exceeding anything one could mete out physically. P. W. Joyce, The Origin and History of Irish Names and Places, 3rd edn (Dublin, 1871), 379; T. ORorke, The History of Sligo: Town and County, ii (Dublin, [1889]), 2578; amonn Tuathail, Mallachta Choluimcille/Coluimcilles Curses, Baloideas, ii (1930); John Begley, The Diocese of Limerick: Ancient and Medieval (Dublin, 1906), 55. Although they shunned Catholic-sounding imprecations that begged the saints to unleash their holy wrath, Presbyterians were not above letting a curse out, as it was known, using plainer maledictions like Gods curse upon his head and bad luck to her.27 Cursing occurred in English too, which became Irelands dominant language during the eighteenth century. These campaigns achieved little. Western People, 10 Oct. 1936; First Report from His Majestys Commissioners, 543; NFC, Schools Collection: vol. Cursed Irish Farmer Calls in The Druids Read Later Print A Cork farmer has employed the services of druids to end his decade of bad luck after a bull damaged an ancient standing stone on his land. Many thanks to the librarians and archivists who helped me locate sources for this article. 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. Maledictions were uttered across Ireland, North and South, Protestant and Catholic districts, even in towns and cities. That ye may never have a days luck! 640, 75. Cursing was probably too common and Catholic, and certainly too distasteful and subversive for these amateur scholars, who focused instead on recording what they regarded as rapidly disappearing pagan survivals. E. P. Thompson, The Crime of Anonymity, in Douglas Hay et al. Amongst their standard questions, the commissioners asked witnesses whether people bestowed charity because of beggars curses. 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 . Nobody on the estate backed a winner yesterday, an informant later told the Belfast Telegraph. 1901; Irish News and Belfast Morning News, 13 Mar. Dite agus loisceadh ort. Yet though their utterers may have been unconscious of it, non-literal curses were also vital preparation for the high art of real cursing. Keith Thomas, An Anthropology of Religion and Magic, II, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, vi (1975), 95. NFC, MS a102, 5862; O. Davies and D. Lowry-Corry, Killinagh Church and Crom Cruaich, Ulster Journal of Archaeology, 3rd ser., ii (1939), 103; Isabel R. Crozier and Lily C. Rea, Bullauns and Other Basin-Stones, Ulster Journal of Archaeology, 3rd ser., iii (1940), 106; NFC, MS a102, 5860; Sle N Chinnide, A Frenchmans Tour of Connacht in 1791, Journal of the Galway Archaeological and Historical Society, xxxvi (1977/1978); James McParlan, Statistical Survey of the County of Sligo, with Observations on the Means of Improvement (Dublin, 1802), 106. The consequences were catastrophic: the curse didnt fall on the people she give it too but it fell on herself. Some men interviewed by Irish Poor Law Commissioners in the early 1830s admitted this. In court, the officer explained how it made her feel very uncomfortable, though the defendants promised it was a load of nonsense.161 Even worse was the lurid curse an arrested driver threw at a Garda officer in Ennis in May 2018: I am putting a curse on you. Beggars could not curse lightly, because maledictions levied without just cause were ineffective.87 In a world of canny country folk and official discourses about the undeserving poor, mendicants had to appear genuinely needy to make their curses seem potent. R. F. Foster, Modern Ireland: 16001972 (1989), 338; K. Theodore Hoppen, The Mid-Victorian Generation: 18461886 (Oxford, 1998), 582. Statutes Passed in the Parliaments Held in Ireland. ], The Reign of Terror in Carlow, Comprising an Authentic Detail of the Proceedings of Mr. OConnell and His Followers, from the Period of His Invading that County Down to the First of September (London, 1841), 1718. David Nash, Analyzing the History of Religious Crime: Models of Passive and Active Blasphemy since the Medieval Period, Journal of Social History, xli (2007); Paul OHiggins, Blasphemy in Irish Law, Modern Law Review, xxiii (1960), 1556. George Borrow, Wild Wales: Its People, Language, and Scenery, 3 vols. . For example: Maureen Flynn, Blasphemy and the Play of Anger in Sixteenth-Century Spain, Past and Present, no. The piece is expected to sell for between 800-1,200 ($1,440). The beggars curse did not decline because it was formally disproved. Sulis - Mother Goddess, Goddess of Healing Springs.