Cursing continued to be rife during the period of the Enlightenment, throughout the 1800s, and until about the mid-twentieth century. Celtic curse or "hemochromatosis" is a genetic metabolic disorder that the Celtic Irish descendants have inherited where the blood has excess iron. 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. 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. Bad cess on you. Common Brittonic (Welsh: Brythoneg; Cornish: Brythonek; Breton: Predeneg), also known as British, Common Brythonic, or Proto-Brittonic, was a Celtic language spoken in Britain and Brittany.. 149 (Nov. 1995), 368. Rev. Captain Prout [John Levy] (ed. dissertation, 2012). The relationship is revealed in the timing. Ancient Roman Curses 1. Between the 1820s and 1860s, Protestant missionaries strove to persuade Irish Catholics to abandon Rome and embrace Reformed faiths. 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. Newry Telegraph, 9 Oct. 1851; Limerick Chronicle, 11 Oct. 1851. 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. 1967. 1886. After the Great Famine, survivors wrote songs excoriating the landlords and agents who had evicted starving tenants. 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. 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. No. William Carleton, An Essay on Irish Swearing, in Traits and Stories of the Irish Peasantry, 2nd ser., 3 vols. 1890. Source: Crawford Art Gallery, Cork. Murphy, Diocese of Killaloe in the Eighteenth Century, 3840. 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. Copy of the Minutes of the Evidence Taken at the Trial of the Galway County Election Petition (1872), pt 1 (House of Commons, 1872), 173. Tutankhamun 2. He found out and she gave birth to blind and crippled children after the angry cleric muttered Oh God keep her its like she knows how her own children will be yet.125 Elsewhere, people remembered priests pronouncing dreadful curses on smokers who lit up near chapel.126 The tales spoke to lingering anxieties about clerical supervision and supernatural powers. 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 . In bilingual or largely English-speaking regions, and in towns and cities, tuneful maledictions were composed in English and sold as printed ballads. Archbishops of Ireland, as a General Catechism for the Kingdom (Dublin, 1836), 42. [Anon. Full analysis of ancient and medieval expressions of Celtic cursing, using evidence ranging from magical charms to curse tablets. Carefully calibrated to absolutely ruin enemies, real cursing differed in many ways. There are many famous examples of spells and curses in folklore. In Ulster, the north-eastern province, Presbyterians uttered curses in Scottish accents using the dialect of Ulster-Scots. 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. James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance (Yale, 1990), 423. [Thomas Secker], Against Evil-Speaking, Lying, Rash Vows, Swearing, Cursing, and Perjury. That all belonging to ye may die with the hunger!! (London, 1920), 131. 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). Ronald Hutton, Pagan Britain (Yale, 2013), viiviii. But cursing songs were not a dying art, part of a vanishing Gaelic folk culture. Maybe, too, cursing was weakened by the decline of Catholicism and the idea of a supervisory God, with the weekly church-going rate in the Republic collapsing from 91 per cent in 1973 to 43 per cent in 2008.163 Whatever the case, Irish cursing had not just diminished but changed, losing its previously strong link with morality. These campaigns achieved little. Perhaps that was overstating it: some people still knew bloodcurdling tales. May his neck get stiff, they mumbled.44, More serious were musical curses, stinging ballads calling for uncanny retribution. 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. Yet cursing did not always work that way. Archaeologists Find Ancient Magic Curse Tablet in Jerusalem In a world where people firmly believed in the existence of gods and goddesses, it is possible that the curse tablets made potential criminals think twice before committing a crime. Keith Thomas, An Anthropology of Religion and Magic, II, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, vi (1975), 95. Hardcover. 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. 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. Ancient finds (among them long Gaulish curse texts, Celtic Latin Curse tablets found from the Alpine regions to Britain, and fragments . Nineteenth-century Irish folk possessed a deep oral literacy and a high capacity for verbal sparring. She died in torture, of kidney disease: it come back on herself, back on herself Im telling you she suffered for the curse she gave to other people.151 Michaels trembling words underscore the powerful emotions swirling around this topic. 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 . Scopas Poggo, The Origins and Culture of Blacksmiths in Kuku Society of the Sudan, 17971955, Journal of African Cultural Studies, xviii (2006), 170; Felix J. Oinas, The Balto-Finnic Epics, in Felix J. Oinas (ed.) John C. Messenger, Inis Beag: Isle of Ireland (Long Grove, Ill., 1983), 11317, 127. On the Traditions of the County of Kilkenny, Transactions of the Kilkenny Archaeological Society, i (1851), 365. 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. That question has a multi-causal answer, which I will build up throughout the rest of this paper. A geis or geas (pl. Whatever the response, after scenes like these, the neighbours would talk, and not just about your crimes. 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. The same is likely to be true, though perhaps to a lesser degree, of other magical techniques. Kevin Danaher, Irish Country People (Cork, 1976), 14. Irish imprecations can be analysed using familiar academic categories such as belief, ritual, symbolism, tradition and discourse. These collective groups, often categorized as Celtic tribes, were ruled by kings or high chieftains, with power sometimes shared by dual authorities. Not until these fires burn, they prayed, will the newcomers do any good. Adekunle G. Ahmed et al., Developing a Clinical Typology of Dysfunctional Anger, Journal of Affective Disorders, cxxxvi (2012); Amy Hyoeun Lee and Raymond DiGiuseppe, Anger and Aggression Treatments: A Review of Meta-Analyses, Current Opinion in Psychology, xix (2018); Jerry L. Deffenbacher et al., The Driving Anger Expression Inventory: A Measure of How People Express Their Anger on the Road, Behaviour Research and Therapy, xl (2002). 465, 83. Maledictions were uttered across Ireland, North and South, Protestant and Catholic districts, even in towns and cities. Imprecating servants, labourers, soldiers and sailors were to be fined a shilling, and everyone else two, with escalating fines for subsequent offences and non-payers pelted in the stocks or whipped.21 Beyond the legal crackdown, seventeenth- and eighteenth-century churchmen sermonized and wrote tracts attacking not just common swearing but also the very near akin yet much graver habit: the monstrous cuftom of cursing.22 Mostly it was Protestants who spoke out, during moments of evangelical revival, but not exclusively. 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. Lady Wilde, Ancient Legends, Mystic Charms, and Superstitions of Ireland, i, 1325; NFC, Schools Collection: vol. Modern Paganism in World Cultures: Comparative Perspectives (Santa Barbara Cal., 2005); Carmen Kuhling, The New Age Movement in the Post-Celtic Tiger Context: Secularisation, Enchantment and Crisis, tudes Irlandaises, xxxix (2014); Richard Jenkins, The Transformations of Biddy Early: From Local Reports of Magical Healing to Globalised New Age Fantasies, Folklore, cxviii (2007); Catherine Maignant, Alternative Pilgrimages: Postmodern Celtic Christianity and the Spatialisation of Time, Nordic Irish Studies, vi (2007); Jenny Butler, 21st Century Irish Paganism: Worldview, Ritual, Identity (Farnham, 2019). 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. From an emotional perspective, evicted tenants consoled themselves with the thought that dire supernatural punishments awaited the new occupants. Caesar ( 6.14) states that the druids taught "that souls do not become extinct, but pass after death from one body to another.". 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. Breandn Mac Suibhne and David Dickson (Dublin, 2000), 226. 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. 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. "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. Curses were part of many peoples begging strategies. The art of cursing, on the other hand, is little cultivated. Magic is a potent force in the world, not supernaturally but psychologically. W. B. Cannon, Voodoo Death, American Anthropologist, xliv (1942); Esther M. Sternberg, Walter B. Cannon and Voodoo Death: A Perspective from 60 Years On, American Journal of Public Health, xcii (2002); Martin A. Samuels, Voodoo Death Revisited: The Modern Lessons of Neurocardiology, Cleveland Clinic Journal of Medicine, lxxiv (2007), suppl. The devil go with you and sixpence, an thin youll want neither money nor company, was a mock malediction men used to tease women.38 Bad scran to you, meaning poor food, was a jokey curse suitable for needling either sex; and surely a poignant one, given that for much of the nineteenth century most peoples diet was restricted to potatoes, buttermilk, an occasional smattering of fish and maybe some wild greens.39 Bad luck to your own soul for the head-ache you gave me yesterday, with laughing at your old stories, and drinking your new wine, was the kind of cheeky curse friends uttered, with a wink, to their drinking buddies in Dublins alehouses.40, Beyond the jokes were half-serious maledictions, simple utterances for releasing quick bursts of anger. K. Theodore Hoppen, Elections, Politics, and Society in Ireland, 18321885 (Oxford, 1984), 21213. J. J. M. Vingerhoets, Lauren M. Bylsma and Cornelis de Vlam, Swearing: A Biopsychosocial Perspective, Psychological Topics, xxii (2013). 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. The decline was partially compensated for by the increasing popularity of folklore books and pamphlets, where malediction stories were told and racy curses listed. Some men interviewed by Irish Poor Law Commissioners in the early 1830s admitted this. Christiaan Corlett, Cursing Stones in Ireland, Journal of the Galway Archaeological and Historical Society, lxiv (2012). 461, 456; vol. 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. ), Cambridge Social History of Modern Ireland. (London, 1902), i, 310; Dublin Weekly Register, 11 May 1844; Dublin Daily Express, 20 Apr. !.51 But workaday curses were not particularly suitable for proper cursing because they invited easy retorts. Sulis - Mother Goddess, Goddess of Healing Springs. Statutes Passed in the Parliaments Held in Ireland. But we should not exaggerate the extent of its decline, or imagine that it disappeared. Everybody knew what a beggars curse was: it was a regular and familiar part of life, in pre-famine Ireland. The consequences were catastrophic: the curse didnt fall on the people she give it too but it fell on herself. 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. Edward OReilly, An Irish-English Dictionary, new edn (Dublin, 1864): acais, airire, anfhocal, aoir, aor, easgaine, inneach, irire, mallachd, moiscaith, oighrir, oirbhir and trist. Curses in Ireland come from the usual roots, folk magic and charms, mythology, and religion (the good versus evil model is simple and always popular) with famous examples of spell curses in folklore (eg the spell placed on Etain that turned her into various animals or the curse placed on the children of Lir.) Probably cursing was too vicious, humorous and Catholic for it to be translated into the dreamy and non-denominational realm of the Celtic Twilight.157 Cursing experienced none of the post 1970s esoteric revival, either. Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in Popular Beliefs in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century England ([1971] London, 1991), 599611. Broken Mirror Curse 2. Henry Glassie, Passing the Time in Ballymenone: Culture and History of an Ulster Community (Philadelphia, 1982), 83. Trasna ort fin. 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. They formed a sharp edge of the Catholic Association, a mass movement founded by the barrister Daniel OConnell to campaign against anti-Catholic discrimination and for the repeal of Irelands union with Britain. 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. Gearid hAllmhurin, Flowing Tides: History and Memory in an Irish Soundscape (Oxford, 2016), 67. On Sunday 14 January, at the midday Mass at Dunmore chapel, a local priest named Father Loftus imprecated Charles OLoughlin, the Catholic agent of the Conservative candidate, as he sat in his family pew. 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. 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. Source: Wellcome Collection. A Handbook of Irish Pre-Christian Traditions, 2 vols. The beggars curse did not decline because it was formally disproved. Not swearing, turning the air blue with four-letter words, but spoken maledictions for smiting evildoers. Irelands cursers were beggars, priests, blacksmiths, millers, orphans, people nearing death, parents, and all sorts of wronged souls. NFC, Schools Collection: vol. During the Troubles, Ulsters radical politicians invoked and even threw a few curses, with mixed results. Since the late 1920s it had been involved in the Irish Free States censorship of immoral books, cinema and journalism. Samus Duilearga, Introductory Note, in Sen Silleabhin, A Handbook of Irish Folklore (Detroit, 1970). NFC, MS 548, 242; Schools Collection: vol. Douglas Hyde, Beside the Fire: A Collection of Irish Gaelic Folk Stories (London, 1890), 187; P. W. Joyce, English as We Speak It in Ireland, 2nd edn (London, 1910), 38. La Llorona III. Widows were certainly plentiful and needful of power. Corinne A. Kratz, Genres of Power: A Comparative Analysis of Okiek Blessings, Curses and Oaths, Man, new ser., xxiv (1989). Cursing, with its traditional resonances, was a powerful tool for conventionally demure women to loudly and forcefully object.143, Cursing dwindled, in Ireland, as its major uses disappeared and the networks that transmitted knowledge about it atrophied. Irish Independent, 5 Dec. 1919; Freemans Journal, 4 Dec. 1919; Connacht Tribune, 17 Jan. 1920. Publicly, respectable men insisted they did not. 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. It also reminds us that not all types of magic share the same chronology of rise and fall, growth and decline, enchantment and disenchantment. Santeria Curses 3. Patrick S. Dinneen (ed. 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. 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). Recognizing this challenges us to reconsider our wider ideas about the history of magic. 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. For example: Maureen Flynn, Blasphemy and the Play of Anger in Sixteenth-Century Spain, Past and Present, no. Irish maledictions can be usefully analysed using familiar academic categories such as belief, ritual, symbolism, mentality, tradition, meaning and discourse.17 Cursing contained all those things: but it was also something fundamentally more lively, active and affecting. Other cursing traditions were more current because they chimed with the needs and conditions of large numbers of people. Curse Dolls 4: Dido's Curse upon Troy IV. Your soul go to the Devil might be nullified with my soul from the Devil.53. $76.60 - $78.80 4 Used from $78.80 14 New from $76.60. A Day at Lough Patrick, Christian Examiner and Church of Ireland Magazine, xi (1831), 48. Also: First Report from His Majestys Commissioners, 525, 530, 537. They would rebound on their casters, unless they quickly cancelled their maledictions with a blessing formula such as agus crosaim th in Gaelic or its English translation: I cross you.36 Proverbs in Gaelic and English reiterated the point: Curses, like chickens, come home to roost.37, Whether uttered in English, Irish or Ulster-Scots, not all maledictions were magical. First Report from His Majestys Commissioners, 687. 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. Nor was it employed exclusively by the weak and powerless. 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. NFC, MS 538, 20813; Schools Collection: vol. It provides the first full overview and analyses of the ancient Celtic use of binding curses (as attested in Old Celtic and Latin inscriptions) and examines their mooted influence in later medieval expressions. 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. St Brigids stone, Blacklion Co. Cavan. Some maledictions, it is true, were fairly general, calling for unspecified punishments. Bound over to keep the peace, Ellie remained unbowed saying: I cursed Walsh, and I will continue to curse him until I die.141 Less dramatically, in 1967 Mary McCormack of Cloonard in Castlerea put her widows curse on informants who told the police she was holding unlicensed public dances.142 The Republic of Ireland was a patriarchal and conservative place, where until the 1970s married women were largely kept at home and out of the workforce. Stemming from moral indignation, the virtuoso but also shocking technique required knowledge, composure, practice and wit. 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. George Lewis, The Bible, the Missal, and the Breviary: or, Ritualism Self-Illustrated in the Liturgical Books of Rome, i (Edinburgh, 1853), 232, 242, 2601.
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