For example: Mark C. Taylor, Critical Terms for Religious Studies (Chicago, 1998); Christine D. Worobec, Witchcraft Beliefs and Practices in Prerevolutionary Russian and Ukrainian Villages, Russian Review, liv (1995); Sarah Tarlow, Ritual, Belief and the Dead in Early Modern Britain and Ireland (Cambridge, 2011), chs. E. P. Thompson, The Crime of Anonymity, in Douglas Hay et al. 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 . Inevitably, it left traces on a wide range of literary material, from Gaelic dictionaries to local newspapers, government reports, travellers writings, letters, novels, legal documents, memoirs, diaries and religious tracts. 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. 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. May the flesh rot off your bones, and fall away putrid before your eyes. the Roman Catholic Bishop of Down and Connor, (12 May 1818), PRONI, MS D1375/3/35/15. For interpretations of witchcraft as discourse, see: Willem de Blcourt, Keep that woman out! Notions of Space in Twentieth-Century Flemish Witchcraft Discourse, History and Theory, lii (2013), esp. These Celtic literary maledictions thus appear closer in style to a third type of Greek and Roman imprecation - other than katadesmoi and conditional curses - one known only from ancient literary sources. They expressed fear, loathing, hate and yearning for pitiless vengeance, for punishments exceeding anything one could mete out physically. Mostly though, Irelands cursers were women. Kuhling, New Age Movement in the Post-Celtic Tiger Context, 177. The boundary between religion and magic is always porous.102 This distinction is especially problematic for Irish cursing, which was an unusually religious type of magic. The art of cursing, on the other hand, is little cultivated. Full analysis of ancient and medieval expressions of Celtic cursing, using evidence ranging from magical charms to curse tablets. 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. II. J. M. Synge, The Aran Islands (Dublin, 1907), 1434. Carleton, An Essay on Irish Swearing, 3489. Thomas Waters, Irish Cursing and the Art of Magic, 17502018, Past & Present, Volume 247, Issue 1, May 2020, Pages 113149, https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtz051. 212 (Aug. 2011); Ronald Hutton, The Witch: A History of Fear, from Ancient Times to the Present (Yale, 2018), 246. Then another witness, a cottager, chimed in: I know my wife always gives when she is big with child, and she says she must do it, or she would have a miscarriage.95 His remarks feel genuine. 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. 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. 461, 456; vol. First Report from His Majestys Commissioners for Inquiring into the Condition of the Poorer Classes in Ireland, with Appendix (A) and Supplement (hereafter First Report from His Majestys Commissioners) (House of Commons, 1835), 496. This article explores its neglected modern history, since the late 1700s, by carefully scrutinizing the Irish style of cursing, relating it to wider social and economic conditions, and making comparisons with maledictions elsewhere. Cursing continued to be rife during the period of the Enlightenment, throughout the 1800s, and until about the mid-twentieth century. Irish Times, 18 Feb. 1873; Cork Constitution, 21 Feb. 1873; Warder and Dublin Weekly Mail, 21 Feb. 1874. Irish Independent, 5 Dec. 1919; Freemans Journal, 4 Dec. 1919; Connacht Tribune, 17 Jan. 1920. This theme has been recorded far and wide, from Western Europe to East Africa, from ancient times to the present.80 In Ireland, stories about imprecating blacksmiths were still current during the 1930s, when the Irish Folklore Commission made the inspired decision to get schoolchildren to record their elders yarns.81 Threatening a curse was the only way some country blacksmiths could get paid, apparently.82 In real life, smiths genuinely mentioned curses during financial confrontations, albeit rarely. He would have got away with it, had not the local priest heard rumours and put his malediction on anyone who did not report what they knew to the police. Formally, the Church forbade it. May you fade into nothing, like snow in summer. Wood-Martin, Traces of the Elder Faiths of Ireland, ii, 58; Robert MacAdam, Six Hundred Gaelic Proverbs Collected in Ulster (Continued), Ulster Journal of Archaeology, 1st ser., vii (1859), 282. Beyond the stock villains of Irish popular culture, their targets included bankers, merchants and police informers.46 James Carey, whose testimony helped convict the men who murdered the government ministers Thomas Henry Burke (182982) and Lord Frederick Cavendish (183682) in Dublins Phoenix Park, was the object of venomous songs wishing that he be afflicted with everything from bedbugs to death.47 For wrongs past and present, the old adversary across the water was also a frequent target: Gods curse on you England, you cruel-hearted monsters.48, Jokey, angry and tuneful curses were mere horseplay, some said. I. Yet in Ireland, a proclivity for this dark kind of cursing goes back millennia. Partly this was because the church hierarchy was now firmly in control. 1886. Geneticists at Trinity College have sequenced the genomes of ancient Irish farmers, discovering that haemochromatosis (known as the 'Celtic curse') was inherited by people from the Pontic . Some of the dwindling number of monoglot Gaelic speakers wondered whether English might be especially suited for firing imprecations.28 Really though, the great cursing language was Irish Gaelic, still spoken by around 40 per cent of people in 1801, when Ireland was incorporated into the United Kingdom, though a century later the figure had fallen to under 15 per cent, with less than 1 per cent speaking Irish Gaelic only.29 Cursing formulas were very common in the Irish language, as the Victorian linguist George Borrow noted.30 Irish also had an abnormally large number of curse words, certainly more than English, and probably more than Scottish Gaelic too.31 Ten Irish Gaelic nouns for a curse were recorded in Bishop John OBriens 1768 dictionary, and thirteen in Edward OReilly and John ODonovans more definitive 1864 compilation, along with numerous verbs for the act of cursing and adjectives to describe accursed people.32 Mallacht was the main Irish term for a curse, but Gaelic speakers had many alternatives. 625, 258. 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). In 1960, for example, in the little town of Elphin in County Roscommon, Martin OConnor threatened a shopkeeper with the blacksmiths curse during a row about money.83 The blacksmiths curse persisted in Ireland, but at a low level. May his neck get stiff, they mumbled.44, More serious were musical curses, stinging ballads calling for uncanny retribution. That yeer eyes may fall out of yeer head!! That question has a multi-causal answer, which I will build up throughout the rest of this paper. Irish Independent, 11 Nov. 2000; Irish Independent, 8 Feb. 2002; Sunday Independent (Dublin), 26 July 1987. To boatmen who sailed over their nets, fisherman spat out all sorts of imprecations, both profuse Gaelic maledictions and simpler curses in English, the writer J. M. Synge observed while sailing between the Aran Islands in Galway Bay.42 Interfering clerics, who habitually visited paupers, sometimes found their souls cursed to the hottest and lowest regions of hell, as happened to the Reverend Anthony McIntyre of Belfast in 1854.43 Policemen, too, were damned in this way, like a constable who during the Great Famine of 184555 stopped a hungry Ulster crowd from taking shipwrecked grain. Virginia Crossman, Politics, Pauperism and Power in Late Nineteenth-Century Ireland (Manchester, 2006), 915, 119222; Caitrona Clear, Homelessness, Crime, Punishment and Poor Relief in Galway 18501914: An Introduction, Journal of the Galway Archaeological and Historical Society, l (1998). May Gods curse and my curse light down on her every day she rises, a mother from Ballybay cried in 1911, on the woman she blamed for spoiling her relationship with her adult son.74 Many maledictions, however, were horribly detailed and gory. Calamitous historical events were memorialized in maledictions, notably Oliver Cromwells brutal 1649 conquest of Ireland, which spawned the Curse of Cromwell, a fearsome imprecation supposed to bring death and destruction.8 In villages and towns nationwide, place names and oral stories told how ancient curses had created local lakes, rivers, mountains and hills.9. The widows curse was on them and their children. Lindsey Earner-Byrne and Diane Urquhart, Gender Roles in Ireland since 1740, in Biagini and Daly (eds. First Report from His Majestys Commissioners, 449, 550, 565, 577, 628, 648. Publicly, respectable men insisted they did not. archaeologists found a tablet in which a Roman named Silvianus told Nodens, the Celtic God of . Gearid Tuathaigh, Languages and Identities, in Biagini and Daly (eds.) 498, 307; vol. Sean OFallon, Irish Curses, Northern Junket, xi (n.d.), 28. For full access to this pdf, sign in to an existing account, or purchase an annual subscription. $76.48 4 Used from $78.80 14 New from $76.48. 1935) documented a vast sphere of life, from cooking to clothes, and cursing too.13 Even so, historians have largely followed the narrower agenda of the earlier generations of folklorists, by studying Irelands fairies, banshees, witchcraft, the evil eye, supernatural healing and calendar customs, along with newer oddities like the black magic rumours circulating in 1970s Northern Ireland.14 Irelands curses have been ignored despite the fact that there is a vast academic literature about cursing elsewhere, from ancient lead malediction tablets to imprecations in Anglo-Saxon legal documents to curses in contemporary societies. As well as publicly uttering maledictions, Irish women used modern means to advertise the dark forces they had unleashed. She was considered as a nourishing, life-giving mother goddess and as an effective agent of curses wished by her votaries. Nor was it employed exclusively by the weak and powerless. ), Foclir Gaeilge agus Barla (Dublin, 1904), 200. 1835. 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. May you leave without returning. To signify this, real cursing used scarier and more complicated wordplay. ], Focaloir Gaoidhilge-Sax-Bharla (Paris, 1768). 1827). I Think Im Cursed, Sunday Life, 21 May 1995, 30. 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. The Curse of the Knights Templar II. Although the union with Britain was still in place, many of the Catholic movements great causes had been won, from emancipation in 1829, to control over most state-funded schools, and the disestablishment of the Church of Ireland in 1869. Cara Delay, Uncharitable Tongues: Women and Abusive Language in Early Twentieth-Century Ireland, Feminist Studies, xxxix (2013). Whether or not the residents really credited the curse, it was politically counterproductive. 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. Corinne A. Kratz, Genres of Power: A Comparative Analysis of Okiek Blessings, Curses and Oaths, Man, new ser., xxiv (1989). Everybody knew what a beggars curse was: it was a regular and familiar part of life, in pre-famine Ireland. THE MORRGAN. Visions and Beliefs in the West of Ireland Collected and Arranged by Lady Gregory: With Two Essays and Notes by W. B. Yeats, 2nd ser. Cursing was demanding, sophisticated, formidable and imposing. A magical art like this deserves neither our condescension nor a staid and lifeless dissection, but our (perhaps begrudging) respect. May you be accursed in the sight of God, and hated by your fellow man. Cursing, once understood as a righteous supernatural assault, had been subsumed into the general category of evil magic. Maledictions were uttered across Ireland, North and South, Protestant and Catholic districts, even in towns and cities. Captain Prout [John Levy] (ed. Something obvious like bad luck to you invited the reply good luck to you, thin; but may neither of them ever happen. It was finally let in 1901 but the new occupant quickly gave it up after hundreds of local people protested and their leaders warned him that he would go before God with the widows curse.137 In that instance, it is hard to discern what part the curse played, but other cases show that maledictions genuinely did drive out some land-grabbers. Historic Cowdray, Dublin Daily Express, 22 Aug. 1910. Bathed in righteous power, steeped in the Holy Spirit, it was obvious that they should possess awesome imprecations. 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. At Tully in County Mayo, farmland owned by Miss Pringle remained unoccupied for at least fifteen years during the 1880s and 1890s, because the old tenant had been evicted. Celtic language. Curses sprung from bitter passions at trying times. Lady Wilde, Ancient Legends, Mystic Charms, and Superstitions of Ireland, i, 1325; NFC, Schools Collection: vol. 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. Santeria Curses 3. May the cold north blast of misery nip your body, while your heart burns like fire. 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. Their blessings and curses often seemed arbitrary and cruel, but they were still upheld as the primary force and source of . Kevin Danaher, Irish Country People (Cork, 1976), 14. The history of Irish cursing underlines how mystic forces and supernatural powers can resonate incredibly strongly in modern societies, if they chime with peoples struggles and are indulged by complacent authorities. Other cursers stood up high, on rocks above island shores for instance, as policemen and bailiffs sailed away. 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. But when they cursed, women literally let their hair down.67 It marked a new if temporary status, their unwillingness to be restrained by ordinary gender norms, and their intention to unleash hidden powers. Edward Hirsch, Coming Out into the Light: W. B. Yeatss The Celtic Twilight (1893, 1902), Journal of the Folklore Institute, xviii (1981); Roy Foster, Protestant Magic: W. B. Yeats and the Spell of Irish History, Proceedings of the British Academy, lxxv (1989). For the imprecators, cursing could be a means of coercion, a cathartic fantasy of their enemies destruction, or merely a way of showing off. NFC, Schools Collection: vol. Dublin Weekly Nation, 4 July 1857; Advocate, 17 Feb. 1858. The piece is expected to sell for between 800-1,200 ($1,440). It all came out. 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. Throughout the first half of the twentieth century, many people understood the righteous arts finer details. 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. Janet K. TeBrake, Irish Peasant Women in Revolt: The Land League Years, Irish Historical Studies, xxviii (1992). Not until these fires burn, they prayed, will the newcomers do any good. 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).