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. But this general point also needs qualifying. William Carleton, An Essay on Irish Swearing, in Traits and Stories of the Irish Peasantry, 2nd ser., 3 vols. Everybody knew what a beggars curse was: it was a regular and familiar part of life, in pre-famine Ireland. The distinction was important. Christiansen, A Norwegian Fairytale in Ireland?, Baloideas, ii (1930), 238; Pdraig Tuathail, Folk-Tales from Carlow and West Wicklow, Baloideas, vii (1937), 67. Hexing Cursing and Malediction in Irish Traditions ), Foclir Gaeilge agus Barla, 200, 687; Samuel Lover, Legends and Stories of Ireland (Dublin, 1832), 187. 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. Curses in the Bible 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. Witchcraft and piseogs were straightforward malicious magic, designed to visit harm or death on anybody, whether good or evil, innocent or guilty. Especially in the North, evictees still used the fire of stones curse.146 Before they were thrown out, tenants would build up piles of stones in every hearth in the house. The Ars Notoria - An Ancient Magical Book to Perfect Memory and Master Academia As part of a larger collection known as the Lesser Keys of Solomon , the Ars Notoria is a book that is said to allow followers a mastery of academia; giving them greater eloquence, a perfect memory, and wisdom. But as hordes of desperately needy people left the Irish landscape, promises of beggars blessings and threats of beggars curses stopped being regular occurrences. 1827). 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. 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. First Report from His Majestys Commissioners, 687. But we should not exaggerate the extent of its decline, or imagine that it disappeared. Hardcover. A Home Rule candidate John Philip Nolan trounced his unionist opponent, the Conservative William Le Poer Trench, before the result was overturned on appeal. Titim gan ir ort. Roman Catholic Questions: Church of Rome in Ireland, British Critic, v (1829), 1867; Wexford Conservative, 28 Oct. 1835. The Confessions of an Apostate, Meath People, 23 Oct. 1858. Many thanks to the librarians and archivists who helped me locate sources for this article. The Bath curse tablets are a collection of about 130 Roman era curse tablets (or defixiones in Latin) discovered in 1979/1980 in the English city of Bath. 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. Tutankhamun 2. Dr. James Butlers Catechism: Revised, Enlarged, Approved, and Recommended by the Four R.C. Curses - The Mystica May you leave without returning. Some female beggars wore their hair down, as if to imply that they were already in the cursing pose. 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. Instead, the tradition faded with the massive reduction in begging that followed the Great Famine. Bad cess on you. R. F. Foster, Modern Ireland: 16001972 (1989), 338; K. Theodore Hoppen, The Mid-Victorian Generation: 18461886 (Oxford, 1998), 582. Cursing, once understood as a righteous supernatural assault, had been subsumed into the general category of evil magic. If . 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. 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. 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. Their greatest impact was at places like Doughmakeon and Oughaval in County Mayo, where during the early nineteenth century galvanized clergymen cleared their parishes of ancient cursing stones, destroying or burying unusual rocks that had long been used to lay powerful maledictions.24 A good number of these sinister monuments remained, however, including the bed of St Columbkille, a hillside rock near Carrickmore village, which was still being used to lay curses during the 1880s, as well as cursing stones on the island of Inishmurray in Sligo Bay and St Brigids stones near Blacklion in County Cavan (see Plate 1).25 The anti-cursing laws were sporadically employed and supplemented by the Town Police Clauses Act of 1847 and the Towns Improvement Act of 1854, both of which forbade profane language.26 But cursing was too deeply embedded in everyday life for crackdowns based on vague legislation to be effective. Paulo Reis Mouro, Determinants of the Number of Catholic Priests to Catholics in Europe: An Economic Explanation, Review of Religious Research, lii (2011). Whereas metaphorical curses were daily occurrences, real cursing was deeply serious and comparatively rare. Irelands cursers were beggars, priests, blacksmiths, millers, orphans, people nearing death, parents, and all sorts of wronged souls. Cormac Grda, Ireland Before and After the Famine: Explorations in Economic History, 18001925 (Manchester, 1993), 17; Mel Cousins, The Irish Parliament and Relief of the Poor: The 1772 Legislation Establishing Houses of Industry, Eighteenth-Century Ireland, xxviii (2013). With outstretched arms and windswept hair, they roared maledictions using magnificent words and gestures that were totally uncharacteristic of their usually reticent temperament.66 Flowing hair, incidentally, was important. With these responsibilities, ecclesiastical leaders could no longer permit their priests to use such terrible language. 514, 19; vol. To signify this, real cursing used scarier and more complicated wordplay. 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). The Most Rev. The emigration and land consolidation following the Great Famine meant that female farmers (most of whom were widows) made up a growing proportion of tenants, from 4 per cent in 1841, to 15 per cent by 1911.133 Landlords were evicting unprofitable tenants but farmers fought back, particularly during the Land War of 187982, using non-compliance and intimidation. Researchers Reveal How a Celtic Curse Fell Upon the Ancient Irish 4000 Michael L. Doherty, The Folklore of Cattle Diseases: A Veterinary Perspective, Baloideas, lxix (2001), 556. 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 . It began with dress. Curses of Caesarea Patrick Kennedy, Legendary Fictions of the Irish Celts (London, 1866), 547; Reidar Th. Kiss my butt! 625, 258. Santeria Curses 3. 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 stipulation and binding only speculated on in earlier scholarship. Ruth Harris, Possession on the Borders: The Mal de Morzine in Nineteenth-Century France, Journal of Modern History, lxix (1997); Bourke, Burning of Bridget Cleary. 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. 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. Formally, the Church forbade it. Statutes Passed in the Parliaments Held in Ireland. Irish Independent, 11 Nov. 2000; Irish Independent, 8 Feb. 2002; Sunday Independent (Dublin), 26 July 1987. Who were the Celts? - missgien.net Hugh Dorian, The Outer Edge of Ulster: A Memoir of Social Life in Nineteenth-Century Donegal, ed. [Anon. Lady Wilde, Ancient Legends, Mystic Charms, and Superstitions of Ireland, i, 1325; NFC, Schools Collection: vol. In any case, there were fewer reasons for clerics to curse. Bath curse tablets - Wikipedia Michael knew a woman who threw the widows curse. That ye may never have a days luck! 119, 507. John ODonovan, Folk-Lore. Nineteenth-century Irish folk possessed a deep oral literacy and a high capacity for verbal sparring. May his neck get stiff, they mumbled.44, More serious were musical curses, stinging ballads calling for uncanny retribution. archaeologists found a tablet in which a Roman named Silvianus told Nodens, the Celtic God of . 9 Timeless Ancient Curses To Use Against Your Enemies - Ranker Those land-grabbers never had a bit of luck. Catholic priests were well placed to excel at the theatrical art of cursing. 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. "May you all go to hell and not have a drop of porter to quench your eternal thirst" For some Irish people, no porter is hell so the two are. Beggars also needed stories about how they had fallen on hard times. As well as publicly uttering maledictions, Irish women used modern means to advertise the dark forces they had unleashed. Yet we should not ignore what was once the most widespread Irish magic of all: cursing. 2 and 5; Michael D. Bailey, The Disenchantment of Magic: Spells, Charms, and Superstition in Early European Witchcraft Literature, American Historical Review, cxi (2006). A Handbook of Irish Pre-Christian Traditions, 2 vols. Celtic Curses by Bernard Mees, Hardcover | Barnes & Noble Murphy, Diocese of Killaloe in the Eighteenth Century, 258. The priests curse was rooted in ancient precedents, yet it gained a remarkable new relevance in the fractious but slowly liberalizing world of nineteenth-century Ireland. Celtic Curses: Mees, Bernard: 9781843834571: Amazon.com: Books 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. The words for curses and cursing did not really overlap with the vocabulary for witchcraft and piseogs, as evil spells were sometimes called. The misfortune intended by curses can range from illness, and harm, to even death. Its unusual history underlines three wider points: (i) magic can usefully thrive in modern societies, figuring in the most vital areas of life; (ii) different types of magic have distinct chronologies; (iii) the most psychologically powerful forms of magic are subtle arts that deserve our (begrudging) respect. Saxon (Bedlington, 1877), 10910. 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. Their blessings and curses often seemed arbitrary and cruel, but they were still upheld as the primary force and source of . 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. On a symbolic level too, priests status within the Church enhanced their cursing abilities. Curses are declared to be the most dreaded form of magic, often called black magic, and are believed to be universally used. 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. Edward Nangle, The Origin, Progress, and Difficulties of the Achill Mission (Dublin, 1839), 534, 140. The Celtic languages were a group of closely related languages sharing . Irish Times, 18 Feb. 1873; Cork Constitution, 21 Feb. 1873; Warder and Dublin Weekly Mail, 21 Feb. 1874. ), Bob Norberry; or, Sketches from the Note Book of an Irish Reporter (Dublin, 1884), 228. 6 Cursed Artifacts That Continue To Haunt Their Owners - TheCollector 1890; 24 Mar. Sulis - Mother Goddess, Goddess of Healing Springs. Source: Crawford Art Gallery, Cork. 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. 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 Cursing and the Art of Magic, 1750-2018 - OUP Academic The decline was partially compensated for by the increasing popularity of folklore books and pamphlets, where malediction stories were told and racy curses listed. 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. 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. May you be stretched out under the gravestone.45 In places like County Clare, on Irelands west coast, they sang in Irish and performed for family and neighbours. Geas - Wikipedia At Ballyloo in 1840, Father Tyrrell went with a hundred men to the house of Patrick Regan, where the priest gave Patrick his curse, saying he would soon see whether he would prosper.107 Their curses would raise storms, sink ships and bring the sickness, imprecating clergymen warned.108, During this conflicted moment, proselytizing also began to inspire clerical maledictions. It only worked on people who deserved it: evildoers, killers, cheats, betrayers and so on.34 When we do not deserve the curse we would not heed it; the curse of the wicked never availed, a farmer from County Mayo explained in 1834, when asked about the eerie topic.35 Unjust curses would not just miss their targets. The Letters of the Most Reverend John Mac Hale, D.D. 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. Diodorus Siculus ( 5.28) expands upon this idea, stating that the Celts . Mal de Ojo of Mexico 2. First Report from His Majestys Commissioners, 52530, 560, 585. 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. 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 every thing that could give comfort in affliction be a days march before you, whilst sorrow, multiplied sorrow, be your daily companion, the Irish writer John Levy made one of his characters, an old widow, pray on her landlord.57 Neither novelists nor journalists mentioned sexual maledictions. (Dublin, 1834), i, 34950. Carleton, An Essay on Irish Swearing, 348. Amongst their standard questions, the commissioners asked witnesses whether people bestowed charity because of beggars curses. Dublin Weekly Nation, 4 July 1857; Advocate, 17 Feb. 1858. It was discovered in 2022 by Paul Shepheard and his wife Joanne during a metal detector rally in Haconby, Lincolnshire. But the atmosphere darkened when the priest said anyone voting for Captain Trench would die bearing the mark of Cain, as would their children.117 Next Father Loftus pronounced a Gaelic malediction that Charles could not understand, but which affected the Irish-speaking majority so much that they instinctively touched their chests, in horror. A Day at Lough Patrick, Christian Examiner and Church of Ireland Magazine, xi (1831), 48. 1886. 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. Gearid hAllmhurin, Flowing Tides: History and Memory in an Irish Soundscape (Oxford, 2016), 67. However, by repurposing an older way of thinking about magic, I argue that historic Irish cursing is best understood as an art, because it required knowledge, practice, wit, skill and composure. In this respect, it was an art. Yet though their utterers may have been unconscious of it, non-literal curses were also vital preparation for the high art of real cursing. Finally, towards the end of the nineteenth century, Irelands priests stopped throwing political curses. 1967; Connaught Telegraph, 2 Mar. Yet in Ireland, a proclivity for this dark kind of cursing goes back millennia. 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. Broken Mirror Curse 2. Trasna ort fin. In November 1996, Ellen tried to stab the woman she held responsible for uttering it.160 In January 2010 a Donegal Garda had a gypsys curse put on her, by the occupants of an uninsured car. 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. To illustrate: Irish cursing was closely linked with certain characters, whose identity gave them heightened powers. May you be accursed in the sight of God, and hated by your fellow man. A kneeling woman, perhaps a widow, calls down a curse on the landlords evicting her family. Driver Jailed After Placing Lurid Widows Curse on Garda that Her Family Would Die, Irish Examiner, 8 Jan. 2019, . For Sale In Britain: A Small Ancient Man With A Colossal Penis Historic Ireland is famous for its superstitions, magic and alternative beliefs. 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. Celtic Curses - Mallachta - irishpage.com ), 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). The curse was known in Scotland too, and may have been brought to Ireland centuries ago by Presbyterian settlers (though the transmission could have been the other way).147 One of the most baleful curses known in Ulster, the folklorist Jeanne Cooper Foster was stunned to learn that, as late as the 1940s and 1950s, the fire of stones curse was still used.148 It was always levied in connection with evictions, she discovered, with cases occurring in Downpatrick, Bushmills, County Down, and even on Belfasts famously Protestant Shankill Road. A Moonlight Curse, Dublin Daily Express, 20 Apr. In practice, they amounted to things like ill-wishing, the evil eye, and leaving rotting meat or eggs on a neighbours land to bring bad luck.33 Cursing, by contrast, was a just form of supernatural violence. In 1972 the Reverend Paisley attacked what he called the curse that has blighted twentieth-century Protestantism, this curse of ecumenism.155 Infamously, in the late 1970s and 1980s he and other senior members of the DUP used similar rhetoric to attack another target: if homosexuality were legalized in Ulster, they said, it would bring Gods curse down upon our people.156 The scandalous claim has haunted the DUP ever since; whether it damaged or enhanced their electoral prospects is debatable. With the legal system generally trusted to provide fair outcomes, perhaps there was little need for a justice-based supernatural punishment. 1901. Cursing rapidly faded from the mid-twentieth century and, unlike other forms of occultism, was not revived by the post 1970s New Age movement. 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. Ancient Roman Curses 1. Mallacht - Celtic Curses Go n-ithe an cat th is go n-ithe an diabhal an cat. After the Great Famine, survivors wrote songs excoriating the landlords and agents who had evicted starving tenants. 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. 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. (eds. The same is likely to be true, though perhaps to a lesser degree, of other magical techniques. To explain this it is helpful to take an unfashionably functionalist approach, which shows how cursing most persisted when it was useful. First, it was an outlet for boiling anger, doubtless engaging what clinical psychologists call the neurological rage circuit even more powerfully than conventional swearing did.73 Second, and rather luridly, cursing articulated intricate revenge fantasies. 1, S816. 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. Also: First Report from His Majestys Commissioners, 525, 530, 537. Celtic curse or "hemochromatosis" is a genetic metabolic disorder that the Celtic Irish descendants have inherited where the blood has excess iron. Guardedly, they talked about piseogs, the evil eye (blinking), witchcraft and curses.165 However, those words now meant much the same thing. College Dublin M.Litt. Those nasty practices had an extensive Gaelic terminology of their own. 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.
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