2 and 3. Stories about cursing priests were told in villages and towns across mid-twentieth-century Ireland, the Irish Folklore Commission discovered.124 In Virginia, County Cavan, locals spoke about a woman who had mocked a rheumatic priests cranky gait. 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. 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. 625, 258. The women of_Irish_ and Celtic mythology are equally loved and feared. Irish cursing was a potent art. Hibernias ancient lords and chieftains were notorious cursers, as were the saints who converted the Emerald Isle to Christianity, medieval Irish churchmen, and the Gaelic bards.5 Like in other loosely Celtic societies, in pre-modern Ireland cursing was regarded as a legitimate activity, a form of supernatural justice that only afflicted guilty parties.6 The idea had important consequences. Witchcraft and piseogs were straightforward malicious magic, designed to visit harm or death on anybody, whether good or evil, innocent or guilty. To badmouths, they might retort divil choke you. 465, 83. He that shall curse him, let him be cursed.101 The Bible also abounded in imprecations with hapless infidels and appalling sinners, smote by the inescapable curses of a wrathful God. 2 and 5; Michael D. Bailey, The Disenchantment of Magic: Spells, Charms, and Superstition in Early European Witchcraft Literature, American Historical Review, cxi (2006). Famous Ancient Curses 1. Cursing featured heavily in many Irish peoples speech and personal interactions, from day-to-day joshing to terrible pronouncements that were remembered locally for generations. 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 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. Saxon (Bedlington, 1877), 10910. 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! 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. 1890. Privately, amongst their families at home, the reality was different. Cursing, once understood as a righteous supernatural assault, had been subsumed into the general category of evil magic. 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. (London, 1902), i, 310; Dublin Weekly Register, 11 May 1844; Dublin Daily Express, 20 Apr. Lady Wilde, Ancient Legends, Mystic Charms, and Superstitions of Ireland, i (Boston, 1887), 191. 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). Sean OFallon, Irish Curses, Northern Junket, xi (n.d.), 28. Taking a broad approach like this, and enhancing it through comparisons with maledictions elsewhere, is obviously not the only way to undertake a history of magic. Dr. James Butlers Catechism: Revised, Enlarged, Approved, and Recommended by the Four R.C. Parliamentary Elections (Corrupt And Illegal Practices) BillBill 7, Hansard, cclxxx, col. 84293 (18 June 1883). This was how Catholic priests imprecated grievous sinners, from the altar, with an open Bible or chalice in hand, and candles flickering.63 Beggars shooed away from cottages empty-handed could curse just as ostentatiously. Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in Popular Beliefs in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century England ([1971] London, 1991), 599611. These collective groups, often categorized as Celtic tribes, were ruled by kings or high chieftains, with power sometimes shared by dual authorities. For victims, it was threatening, disturbing and humiliating. Also: Curse of Cain, Belfast Telegraph, 26 Nov. 1971, 5; 11 Sept. 1972, 3. Curses sprung from bitter passions at trying times. 126, 126; vol. To explain this it is helpful to take an unfashionably functionalist approach, which shows how cursing most persisted when it was useful. Cara Delay, Uncharitable Tongues: Women and Abusive Language in Early Twentieth-Century Ireland, Feminist Studies, xxxix (2013). K. Theodore Hoppen, Elections, Politics, and Society in Ireland, 18321885 (Oxford, 1984), 21213. It has been said that cursing priests belonged to the primitive, pre-famine era, before modernizing institutions like St Patricks College at Maynooth improved the quality of clerical training.113 This was not so. It also reminds us that not all types of magic share the same chronology of rise and fall, growth and decline, enchantment and disenchantment. 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. Yet we should not ignore what was once the most widespread Irish magic of all: cursing. 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. J. J. M. Vingerhoets, Lauren M. Bylsma and Cornelis de Vlam, Swearing: A Biopsychosocial Perspective, Psychological Topics, xxii (2013). 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. For example: Maureen Flynn, Blasphemy and the Play of Anger in Sixteenth-Century Spain, Past and Present, no. Diodorus Siculus ( 5.28) expands upon this idea, stating that the Celts . Mchel Briody, The Irish Folklore Commission 19351970: History, Ideology, Methodology (Helsinki, 2016), chs. 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. Curse . May the flesh rot off your bones, and fall away putrid before your eyes. Patricia Lysaght, Visible Death: Attitudes to the Dying in Ireland, Merveilles & contes, ix (1995), 34; Galway Mercury, 26 Apr. I did. 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. 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. Though not a witch in the most traditional sense, the Morrgan of Irish mythology's Ulster Cycle bears a name often translated to "Queen of the . Curses in the Bible dissertation, 2012). Jeanne Cooper Foster, Ulster Folklore (Belfast, 1951), 1202; Ulster Folklore, in Proceedings and Report of the Belfast Natural History and Philosophical Society: Session 19431944, 2nd ser., ii (1945), 153; Lynch, Widows Curse, 2836. Trasna ort fin. Your soul go to the Devil might be nullified with my soul from the Devil.53. Cursing was stress busting and cathartic, for two reasons. NFC, MS 548, 242; Schools Collection: vol. Thomas Waters, Cursed Britain: A History of Witchcraft and Black Magic in Modern Times (Yale, 2019), ch. A publican and farmer from Kilmanaheen, in County Clare, told the commissioners: a woman with child would certainly never refuse relief, meaning that a pregnant woman would not dare risk a beggars curse. ), The Cambridge Social History of Modern Ireland (Cambridge, 2017); Bettina N. Kimpton, Blow the House Down: Coding, the Banshee, and Womans Place, Proceedings of the Harvard Celtic Colloquium, xiii (1993); Sneddon, Witchcraft and Magic in Ireland; Jenny Butler, The Sdhe and Fairy Forts, in Simon Young and Ceri Houlbrook (eds. That question has a multi-causal answer, which I will build up throughout the rest of this paper. 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. 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. archaeologists found a tablet in which a Roman named Silvianus told Nodens, the Celtic God of . Corinne A. Kratz, Genres of Power: A Comparative Analysis of Okiek Blessings, Curses and Oaths, Man, new ser., xxiv (1989).
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