Everybody knew what a beggars curse was: it was a regular and familiar part of life, in pre-famine Ireland. Find many great new & used options and get the best deals for 19thC Antico 63 Cromata Agata Ancient Celtic Viking Amuleto Contro Draghi at the best online prices at eBay! 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). 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. Also: First Report from His Majestys Commissioners, 525, 530, 537. Kiss my butt! The sources of the curses are: National Folklore Collection at University College Dublin (hereafter NFC), MS 1838, 296. However, the main reason priests stopped throwing political maledictions lay elsewhere. For full access to this pdf, sign in to an existing account, or purchase an annual subscription.
Celtic Curses: Mees, Bernard: 9781843834571: Amazon.com: Books Cursing was largely ignored during the late 1800s and early 1900s occult revival in Ireland. Throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, metaphorical curses peppered Irish peoples conversations, jokes, songs and angry outbursts. Roman Catholic Questions: Church of Rome in Ireland, British Critic, v (1829), 1867; Wexford Conservative, 28 Oct. 1835. Gearid Tuathaigh, Languages and Identities, in Biagini and Daly (eds.) Edward Nangle, The Origin, Progress, and Difficulties of the Achill Mission (Dublin, 1839), 534, 140. Following Holy Communion, Father Loftus stood at the altar, holding a chalice. 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. 2 and 5; Michael D. Bailey, The Disenchantment of Magic: Spells, Charms, and Superstition in Early European Witchcraft Literature, American Historical Review, cxi (2006). They received many different answers, but one thing was clear. 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. This article looks at the ancient records of the northern nations of Scotland and England and features a selection of the most famous incantations from these magical Celtic Kingdoms where the spoken word and oral traditions were akin to community glue. May you die without a priest. 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. Ronald Hutton, Witch-Hunting in Celtic Societies, Past and Present, no. A few tried to send the maledictions back. Ultimately though, cursing was no longer being embedded in youngsters minds. A Home Rule candidate John Philip Nolan trounced his unionist opponent, the Conservative William Le Poer Trench, before the result was overturned on appeal. John Gamble, Sketches of History, Politics, and Manners, in Dublin, and the North of Ireland, in 1810 (London, 1826), 201. ), Foclir Gaeilge agus Barla (Dublin, 1904), 200. (eds. If we want to appreciate how magic can move people in these ways, we need to better appreciate how accomplished, skilful and imposing it is. Murphy, Diocese of Killaloe in the Eighteenth Century, 3840. The Letters of the Most Reverend John Mac Hale, D.D. Curse Tablets. Hardcover. Pg mo thin. 95, 112. A kneeling woman, perhaps a widow, calls down a curse on the landlords evicting her family. 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). James C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (Yale, 1985), xvixvii. NFC, Schools Collection: vol. I. I did. This changed with the late nineteenth-century Gaelic revival and particularly after Irelands partition in 1922. Particular thanks to Dr Crostir Mac Crthaigh and Mr Jonny Dillon of the magnificent National Folklore Collection, University College Dublin. 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.
Devil take you. II: Containing from the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Years of Charles the Second, ad 1665, to the Eleventh Year of Anne, ad 1712, Inclusive (Dublin, 1794), 2578. 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. St Brigids stone, Blacklion Co. Cavan. II. In 1939, questioned about mallachta (curses) by a researcher from the Irish Folklore Commission, a farmer from County Mayo reeled off an impressive list of eleven Gaelic maledictions, evoking death and the Devil, failure and blood, as direly poetic as any curses from a hundred years earlier. Captain Prout [John Levy] (ed. Whereas metaphorical curses were daily occurrences, real cursing was deeply serious and comparatively rare. 95, 1467; vol. Imeacht gan teacht ort. Full analysis of ancient and medieval expressions of Celtic cursing, using evidence ranging from magical charms to curse tablets. Such was the nasty curse pronounced, in 1829, by a Catholic priest from Tarbert, County Kerry, on discovering that one of his flock was marrying a Protestant.55 Often though, it can be difficult to uncover the exact wording employed by Irelands greatest cursers, because journalists censored horrible maledictions. Cursing continued to be rife during the period of the Enlightenment, throughout the 1800s, and until about the mid-twentieth century. Catholic priests were well placed to excel at the theatrical art of cursing. Instead, the tradition faded with the massive reduction in begging that followed the Great Famine.
Celtic Curses - Kindle edition by Mees, Bernard. Literature & Fiction (Dublin, 1834), i, 34950. Sulis was a deity worshiped at the thermal spring of Bath. 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.) 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. John C. Messenger, Inis Beag: Isle of Ireland (Long Grove, Ill., 1983), 11317, 127. But we should not exaggerate the extent of its decline, or imagine that it disappeared. Parliamentary Elections (Corrupt And Illegal Practices) BillBill 7, Hansard, cclxxx, col. 84293 (18 June 1883). Ancient cultures used curses to invoke deities, to bring punishment upon enemies, and to express dissatisfaction with someone or something. By the close of the nineteenth century the masses of Irish beggars who had once stunned travellers were gone, and the beggars curse began to be forgotten.96 A few stories were still told about it.97 Occasionally, people who had fallen on hard times threatened to use it, to elicit a bit of money or food. 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. Andrew Sneddon, Witchcraft and Magic in Ireland (Basingstoke, 2015), 53. Curse tablets found at Bath appeal to Sulis to punish the perpetrators of the crime. Southern Reporter and Cork Commercial Courier, 30 Apr. The relationship is revealed in the timing. Dublin Daily Express, 20 Mar. 1901. In Northern Ireland, as sectarian violence flared during the dark days of the Troubles, curses were sporadically revived. In 1930s County Clare, an American anthropologist discovered that maledictions, if uttered for cause, were credited with the power to ruin prosperous families, break unbelievers necks, and send people blind.144 Stories about lingering curses, uttered on land-grabbers generations ago, were rehearsed when their descendants died in strange circumstances. 1827). 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 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. 1886.
Celtic Curses - Bernard Thomas Mees - Google Books 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. Here's our pick of some top ancient Irish curses: 1. 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. Women and children elicited more sympathy, so husbands generally waited out of view. For the imprecators, cursing could be a means of coercion, a cathartic fantasy of their enemies destruction, or merely a way of showing off. ), Albions Fatal Tree: Crime and Society in Eighteenth-Century England (New York, 1975), 303. NFC, Schools Collection: vol. !.51 But workaday curses were not particularly suitable for proper cursing because they invited easy retorts. In an era when we often see anger as dysfunctional, as something needing to be managed, and when many contemporary forms of indignation are indeed horribly crude (think of road rage or abusive outbursts on the Internet), surely it is worth considering the artful ways people expressed and used anger, historically.15 Thankfully, there is no lack of evidence. It was the scariest manifestation of a well-established but increasingly controversial tradition, of sharp-tongued females using fearful words to scold, defame and assert themselves.139 Irish popular culture had long paid special heed to womens voices, in moments of crisis, from the cry of the keening mourner to the wail of the banshee. 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. Intimidating, cathartic and virtuoso: cursing mingled gruesome yet poetic phrases with ostentatious rites, in the name of supernatural justice. 1901; Irish News and Belfast Morning News, 13 Mar. 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. To signify this, real cursing used scarier and more complicated wordplay. 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. Caesar ( 6.14) states that the druids taught "that souls do not become extinct, but pass after death from one body to another.". 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. 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. Kerry Evening Post, 19 Sept. 1835; Niall R. Branach, Edward Nangle & the Achill Island Mission, History Ireland, viii (2000), 358. Cess is from success. It is tempting to classify it as one of the weapons of the weak that have been most sensitively studied by the sociologist James C. Scott those everyday forms of resistance that subordinated individuals use to subtly check authority and limit powerful peoples claims upon food, rents, taxes and labour.167 To fit Irish cursing precisely into this schema would not, however, be entirely correct. They could take the initiative, however, by throwing curses at land-grabbers. Maria Trotter and Robert De Bruce Trotter, Galloway Gossip Sixty Years Ago: Being A Series of Articles Illustrative of the Manners, Customs, and Peculiarities of the Aboriginal Picts of Galloway, ed. In any case, there were fewer reasons for clerics to curse. Nineteenth-century Irish folk possessed a deep oral literacy and a high capacity for verbal sparring. 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. ], 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. Western People, 10 Oct. 1936; First Report from His Majestys Commissioners, 543; NFC, Schools Collection: vol. Curses were part of many peoples begging strategies. 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. 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). Amongst these strategies was cursing. 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. A solemn curse was uttered with poise and determination, with a hair-raising seriousness seldom found in everyday life.
Cosmology | Exploring Celtic Civilizations Celtic Curses - Boydell and Brewer Celtic Curses by Bernard Mees, Hardcover | Barnes & Noble 6 Cursed Artifacts That Continue To Haunt Their Owners - TheCollector As well as publicly uttering maledictions, Irish women used modern means to advertise the dark forces they had unleashed. Bad cess on you. Curses had many connotations and Irish people used them to joke, flirt, lament, insult, threaten and rage. Some Protestant claims about cursing priests undoubtedly were. 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. First Report from His Majestys Commissioners, 687. 514, 19; vol. Titim gan ir ort. 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. May the arm that is now sick, sling dead and powerless by her side before twelve months time.
Ireland's Witchy History: 6 Unforgettable Irish Sorcerers The distinction was important. 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. This may explain why, despite growing anxieties amongst Irish elites about the unruly conduct of verbally abusive females, Irish women continued to curse until the era of the Second World War and beyond. Love your enemy bless them that curse you, peacemakers counselled.152 But who could blame the bereaved families who wrote to newspapers, telling the world that they had prayed for Gods curse to fall on the murderers, or the clergymen who announced that paramilitary killers bore the curse of Cain?153 This was not the elaborate, artful cursing of generations past, using complex formulas and theatrical rituals to call down gruesome tortures. 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. 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. Writers like W. B. Yeats communed with banshees and fairies, but did little with maledictions except for a few fleeting references and using The Curse of Cromwell as a poem title. Irish cursing persisted partly because of its value, use and functions. OHiggins, Blasphemy in Irish Law, 156.
Celtic Curses by Bernard Mees | Goodreads This psychologically powerful form of magic was deeply rooted in Irish cosmology, tradition and history. For victims, it was threatening, disturbing and humiliating. Quoted in John D. Brewer with Gareth I. Higgins, Anti-Catholicism in Northern Ireland, 16001998: The Mote and the Beam (Basingstoke, 1998), 111. K. Theodore Hoppen, Elections, Politics, and Society in Ireland, 18321885 (Oxford, 1984), 21213.
Ancient Roman Curse Tablets Invoke Goddess Sulis Minerva to Kill and Patrick Kennedy, Legendary Fictions of the Irish Celts (London, 1866), 547; Reidar Th. Like many early twentieth-century anthropologists, Malinowski was nonetheless rather condescending about the topic. Witchcraft and piseogs were straightforward malicious magic, designed to visit harm or death on anybody, whether good or evil, innocent or guilty. Dinneen (ed. Widows were certainly plentiful and needful of power. Dublin Weekly Nation, 4 July 1857; Advocate, 17 Feb. 1858. Cursing rapidly faded from the mid-twentieth century and, unlike other forms of occultism, was not revived by the post 1970s New Age movement. 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. Beggars also needed stories about how they had fallen on hard times. The bayonet of the British soldier will protect him, admitted a speaker at a meeting of the Callan Tenant Protection Society in 1847, but the widows curse will meet him on the threshold and wither him.135 Literary stories about Irish life contained a trope about an abandoned cottage, left unoccupied since the previous occupant uttered her widows curse.136 In the real world, loosely similar events took place. We know this because of a remarkable ethnographic source: the First Report of the Irish Poor Law Commissioners (1835). Source: Crawford Art Gallery, Cork. My aim is to evoke and analyse a mostly intangible but nonetheless vital culture, which flourished between the late eighteenth and early twentieth centuries, and which still resonates somewhat today. The Celtic languages were a group of closely related languages sharing . Lady Wilde, Ancient Legends, Mystic Charms, and Superstitions of Ireland, i (Boston, 1887), 191. Most provided evasive or cynical replies, saying that only illiterates, fools, servants, children and women took beggars curses seriously.94 Occasionally though, witnesses gave a glimpse of an uncertain superstitious psychology beneath the hard-nosed faade of early nineteenth-century opinion. The beggars curse was an old idea that resonated powerfully in early nineteenth-century Ireland.84 This was because rapid population growth, a lack of official poverty relief and a parlous economy based on inefficiently subdivided land had unleashed a tidal wave of begging.85 You could find begging in all major cities, of course, but its vast scale in Ireland staggered travellers from Britain, Europe and America. Curses sprung from bitter passions at trying times. 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. If potatoes, grain or a few pennies still were not forthcoming, they could begin hinting at more mysterious powers. 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. Cursing was stress busting and cathartic, for two reasons. Irelands cursers were beggars, priests, blacksmiths, millers, orphans, people nearing death, parents, and all sorts of wronged souls. But as hordes of desperately needy people left the Irish landscape, promises of beggars blessings and threats of beggars curses stopped being regular occurrences. 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.
The Curious Case of Irish Curses and the magical cursing stone Noonans auction house will soon sell a small bronze statue featuring a man holding a large penis in his right hand, in Mayfair, London. 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. 1. La Llorona III. Why then was the righteous art of cursing so heavily cultivated in Ireland, in the commercial and increasingly sophisticated world of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries? 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. ), Crime, Violence, and the Irish in the Nineteenth Century (Liverpool, 2017). 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. 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 . Like rulers elsewhere, early modern Irelands politicians and senior churchmen repeatedly tried to quash the foul habit, as part of a general attack upon ungodly speech, which in turn fed into a wider civilizing mission that historians have termed the reformation of manners.20 The Oaths Act of 1635 was ineffective so more strenuous efforts were made in 1695, when Irelands parliament again outlawed both profane swearing and cursing those two detestable sins. Perhaps that was overstating it: some people still knew bloodcurdling tales. 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.