S. M. Hussey, The Reminiscences of an Irish Land Agent, ed. Some men interviewed by Irish Poor Law Commissioners in the early 1830s admitted this. In 1969 a member of the Trotskyist civil rights group Peoples Democracy put the curse of Cromwell on three hundred council tenants from Armagh, because they failed to join a protest demonstration outside Armagh City Hall, preferring to organize their own march instead. Irelands cursers were beggars, priests, blacksmiths, millers, orphans, people nearing death, parents, and all sorts of wronged souls. J. J. M. Vingerhoets, Lauren M. Bylsma and Cornelis de Vlam, Swearing: A Biopsychosocial Perspective, Psychological Topics, xxii (2013). Publicly, respectable men insisted they did not. 78, 153; MS 42, 203; MS 538, 212. Cosmology | Exploring Celtic Civilizations After lots of stunted answers, the interviewer started pushing and reassuring Michael: just tell us one instance: its all right. May the flesh rot off your bones, and fall away putrid before your eyes. But as hordes of desperately needy people left the Irish landscape, promises of beggars blessings and threats of beggars curses stopped being regular occurrences. The first drop of water to quench your thirst may it boil in your bowels. Southern Reporter and Cork Commercial Courier, 30 Apr. 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. 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.) 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. Dinneen (ed. Murphy, Diocese of Killaloe in the Eighteenth Century, 3840. 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. Amongst these strategies was cursing. 625, 258. 2 and 3. In this respect, it was an art. The Irish were formidable cursers. Kiss my butt! Some female beggars wore their hair down, as if to imply that they were already in the cursing pose. After that, the curse tablets were buried, placed into a well or a pool, or even hung on the wall of a temple. The emphasis on justice, on curses befalling evildoers, had waned. Many thanks to the librarians and archivists who helped me locate sources for this article. Fairies, leprechauns, banshees, witches, holy wells and rural remedies. Everybody knew what a beggars curse was: it was a regular and familiar part of life, in pre-famine Ireland. Finally, towards the end of the nineteenth century, Irelands priests stopped throwing political curses. Concepts like belief, ritual, tradition, symbolism, mentality and discourse undoubtedly illuminate key aspects of historic Irish maledictions. 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. 1973. 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. The widows curse was on them and their children. 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. To lay foundations for a locally funded but nationally organized system of poor relief, commissioners traversed Ireland, gathering evidence about poverty from rich and poor, Protestants and Catholics, men and (much less) women. Perhaps that was overstating it: some people still knew bloodcurdling tales. 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. Keith Thomas, An Anthropology of Religion and Magic, II, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, vi (1975), 95. Marian Duggan, Queering Conflict: Examining Lesbian and Gay Experiences of Homophobia in Northern Ireland, 1st edn (London, 2012), 53; Fintan OToole, Fire and Brimstone, Magill, ix, 13 Nov. 1985, (accessed March 2019). With the legal system generally trusted to provide fair outcomes, perhaps there was little need for a justice-based supernatural punishment. To signify this, real cursing used scarier and more complicated wordplay. For victims, it was threatening, disturbing and humiliating. Ultimately though, cursing was no longer being embedded in youngsters minds. A kneeling woman, perhaps a widow, calls down a curse on the landlords evicting her family. 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. Santeria Curses 3. She was considered as a nourishing, life-giving mother goddess and as an effective agent of curses wished by her votaries. 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 . Some of his respondents made an equivalence between curses and maleficent practices like leaving eggs and dead animals on neighbours farms.166 People no longer distinguished between different types of occult attack. They, after all, were immersed in the Judeo-Christian cursing tradition, trained in practice of solemn ritual and public prayer, and possessed of sacred objects like chalices, church bibles and vestments. These tablets served to curse enemies and other undesirable people, asking the gods to intercede and affect the person in question. Privately, amongst their families at home, the reality was different. Whatever the response, after scenes like these, the neighbours would talk, and not just about your crimes. J. M. Synge, The Aran Islands (Dublin, 1907), 1434. 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. NFC, Schools Collection: vol. This article explores its neglected modern history, since the late 1700s, by carefully scrutinizing the Irish style of cursing, relating it to wider social and economic conditions, and making comparisons with maledictions elsewhere. Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. Paulo Reis Mouro, Determinants of the Number of Catholic Priests to Catholics in Europe: An Economic Explanation, Review of Religious Research, lii (2011). 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. That ye may never have a days luck! 3. In court, the officer explained how it made her feel very uncomfortable, though the defendants promised it was a load of nonsense.161 Even worse was the lurid curse an arrested driver threw at a Garda officer in Ennis in May 2018: I am putting a curse on you. It mattered because curses were believed to be most powerful when their victims remained silent, as if dumbstruck by the lyrical ingenuity of the dreadful utterances.52 By contrast, people who instantly countered with clever replies could turn curses back on their authors. Minutes of the Evidence Taken at the Trial of the Galway County Election, 211. But cursing songs were not a dying art, part of a vanishing Gaelic folk culture. Instead, the tradition faded with the massive reduction in begging that followed the Great Famine. 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. Something obvious like bad luck to you invited the reply good luck to you, thin; but may neither of them ever happen. Kevin Danaher, Irish Country People (Cork, 1976), 14. 1827). Driver Jailed After Placing Lurid Widows Curse on Garda that Her Family Would Die, Irish Examiner, 8 Jan. 2019, . 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. Curses of Caesarea Edward OReilly, An Irish-English Dictionary, new edn (Dublin, 1864): acais, airire, anfhocal, aoir, aor, easgaine, inneach, irire, mallachd, moiscaith, oighrir, oirbhir and trist. Ronald Hutton, Pagan Britain (Yale, 2013), viiviii. E. P. Thompson, The Crime of Anonymity, in Douglas Hay et al. farm in the townland of Coolnagarrane in County Cork. 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. Then another witness, a cottager, chimed in: I know my wife always gives when she is big with child, and she says she must do it, or she would have a miscarriage.95 His remarks feel genuine. 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. 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. Some Protestant claims about cursing priests undoubtedly were. Flower, Western Island or Great Blasket, 49. 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. Samus Duilearga, Introductory Note, in Sen Silleabhin, A Handbook of Irish Folklore (Detroit, 1970). But evidence from other sources confirms not only that priests deployed their curses politically, but also that some Catholic bishops actively encouraged them. During the Troubles, Ulsters radical politicians invoked and even threw a few curses, with mixed results. Broken Mirror Curse 2. 640, 75. To badmouths, they might retort divil choke you. 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. Henry Glassie, Passing the Time in Ballymenone: Culture and History of an Ulster Community (Philadelphia, 1982), 83. Generally though, in Ireland, cursings power was derived from more than mystic phrases alone. No. Celtic curse or "hemochromatosis" is a genetic metabolic disorder that the Celtic Irish descendants have inherited where the blood has excess iron. Although not really an art, it seems to have nurtured determination and vengeance, amongst people experiencing terrible loss. The congregation laughed and even Charles himself chuckled. 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. 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. 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. The Letters of the Most Reverend John Mac Hale, D.D. However, they had little sense of cursing as a distinct type of moral magic.78. Curse tablets found at Bath appeal to Sulis to punish the perpetrators of the crime. King Tut's Curse (and Other 'Mummy's Curses') The burial mask of Egyptian Pharaoh Tutankhamun. Gamble, Sketches of History, Politics, and Manners, in Dublin, and the North of Ireland, 48. 11 of the Most Infamous Ancient Curses in History - Oldest.org 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). The sources of the curses are: National Folklore Collection at University College Dublin (hereafter NFC), MS 1838, 296. 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. 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. Patricia Lysaght, Visible Death: Attitudes to the Dying in Ireland, Merveilles & contes, ix (1995), 34; Galway Mercury, 26 Apr. It also reminds us that not all types of magic share the same chronology of rise and fall, growth and decline, enchantment and disenchantment. However, the main reason priests stopped throwing political maledictions lay elsewhere. The Lost Charms and Incantations That Molded Celtic Reality In Northern Ireland, as sectarian violence flared during the dark days of the Troubles, curses were sporadically revived. Thomas Waters, Cursed Britain: A History of Witchcraft and Black Magic in Modern Times (Yale, 2019), ch. Hardcover. Gearid hAllmhurin, Flowing Tides: History and Memory in an Irish Soundscape (Oxford, 2016), 67. 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. 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. CC BY. Rituals and a certain style were required to launch maledictions, to give them energy as the antiquary William Carleton put it.62. Even so, cursing was not dead. 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.
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