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. It would have been obvious what the Archbishop of Tuam meant when, in 1835, he wrote to his clergy, instructing them to kindle amongst voters the fear that the curse of the Lord will come on those who elect enemies of religion, meaning opponents of the Catholic Association.105 In the depressed and famine-struck years of the 1840s, reports mushroomed of clerics flaunting their mystic powers during elections. John Gamble, Sketches of History, Politics, and Manners, in Dublin, and the North of Ireland, in 1810 (London, 1826), 201. 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. Ellen Collins of Ballina, for instance, who thought a curse killed her mother, made her child disabled and gave her depression. A curse is one or many M agic spells which are placed upon people with the intention of harming them. Kerry Evening Post, 19 Sept. 1835; Niall R. Branach, Edward Nangle & the Achill Island Mission, History Ireland, viii (2000), 358. 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. 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. When they knelt in the street to curse, crying out to the Almighty and all who would listen, like a poor woman from County Kerry recalled in one early twentieth-century memoir, it would have been hard to know how to react.70 Some victims unconvincingly mocked their imprecators, saying they did not care about their curse any more than their blessing.71 Others walked off, shaking, or maintained what they imagined was a dignified silence. 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. [Anon. 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. ), Crime, Violence, and the Irish in the Nineteenth Century (Liverpool, 2017). Corinne A. Kratz, Genres of Power: A Comparative Analysis of Okiek Blessings, Curses and Oaths, Man, new ser., xxiv (1989). Hugh Dorian, The Outer Edge of Ulster: A Memoir of Social Life in Nineteenth-Century Donegal, ed. Did people fear beggars curses? 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. Thomas Waters, Irish Cursing and the Art of Magic, 17502018, Past & Present, Volume 247, Issue 1, May 2020, Pages 113149, https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtz051. Catholic Emancipation Petition of the Roman Catholic Bishops of Ireland, Hansard, xvi, col. 796 (2 Mar. Whether or not the residents really credited the curse, it was politically counterproductive. 149 (Nov. 1995), 368. Gearid Tuathaigh, Languages and Identities, in Biagini and Daly (eds.) Privately, amongst their families at home, the reality was different. S. M. Hussey, The Reminiscences of an Irish Land Agent, ed. There is ample evidence to demonstrate that the ancient Celts, like many other people, believed that the soul did not die with the body. Partly this was because the church hierarchy was now firmly in control. 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. 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. Concepts like belief, ritual, tradition, symbolism, mentality and discourse undoubtedly illuminate key aspects of historic Irish maledictions. 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. Not until these fires burn, they prayed, will the newcomers do any good. May you live a hundred years, may you pass unhurt through fire and water, may the gates of Paradise be ever open to receive you.90 But if there was still no luck, and they were desperate or frustrated enough, beggars might curse. 1846; Londonderry Sentinel, 26 Sept. 1835; Statesman and Dublin Christian Record, 31 Mar. Hardcover. Paulo Reis Mouro, Determinants of the Number of Catholic Priests to Catholics in Europe: An Economic Explanation, Review of Religious Research, lii (2011). ), Albions Fatal Tree: Crime and Society in Eighteenth-Century England (New York, 1975), 303. To explain this it is helpful to take an unfashionably functionalist approach, which shows how cursing most persisted when it was useful. Not everyone in Ireland thought curses were legitimate. It began with dress. Ancient finds (among them long Gaulish curse texts, Celtic Latin Curse tablets found from the Alpine regions to Britain, and fragments . Go. 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. For the imprecators themselves, cursing was a powerful form of coercion. (Dublin, 1834), i, 34950. 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. At Tully in County Mayo, farmland owned by Miss Pringle remained unoccupied for at least fifteen years during the 1880s and 1890s, because the old tenant had been evicted. Search for other works by this author on: The Past and Present Society, Oxford, 2020, This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs licence (, Astrology, plague, and prognostication in early modern England: A forgotten chapter in the history of public health, Machines in the Hands of Capitalists: Power and Profit in Late Eighteenth-Century Cornish Copper Mines, Doubt and the dislocation of magic: France, 17901940, Writing the Paris Commune in the Warsaw Ghetto, The Cave Mission of 1876 and Britains Imperial Information Strategies, https://magill.ie/archive/fire-and-brimstone, https://www.irishexaminer.com/breakingnews/ireland/driver-jailed-after-placing-lurid-widows-curse-on-garda-that-her-family-would-die-896320.html, http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/, Receive exclusive offers and updates from Oxford Academic, Copyright 2023 Past and Present Society. 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. Curses were written on tablets made of thin pieces of metal that were then folded or rolled. 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. The congregation laughed and even Charles himself chuckled. May you never prosper. ), 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). 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. Captain Prout [John Levy] (ed. Shivas Curse Upon Brahma 4. Intimidating, cathartic and virtuoso: cursing mingled gruesome yet poetic phrases with ostentatious rites, in the name of supernatural justice. Bad cess on you. A Scotsman named Patrick Dowd, for example, who in 1901 bought a distressed farm in Sligo. Henry Glassie, Passing the Time in Ballymenone: Culture and History of an Ulster Community (Philadelphia, 1982), 83. NFC, MS 548, 242; Schools Collection: vol. 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. 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.) La Llorona III. Historic Ireland is famous for its superstitions, magic and alternative beliefs. Cursing continued to be rife during the period of the Enlightenment, throughout the 1800s, and until about the mid-twentieth century. In this respect, it was an art. May the flesh rot off your bones, and fall away putrid before your eyes. The sources of the curses are: National Folklore Collection at University College Dublin (hereafter NFC), MS 1838, 296. 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. 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. Amongst their standard questions, the commissioners asked witnesses whether people bestowed charity because of beggars curses. On the Traditions of the County of Kilkenny, Transactions of the Kilkenny Archaeological Society, i (1851), 365. Alexander Macbains An Etymological Dictionary of the Gaelic Language (Stirling, 1911) recorded five Scotch Gaelic words for a curse: ainchis, condrachd or contrachd, mallachd and trusdar. With the legal system generally trusted to provide fair outcomes, perhaps there was little need for a justice-based supernatural punishment. 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. In multilingual Ireland, people cursed in many tongues. May you be accursed in the sight of God, and hated by your fellow man. 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. Another clerical curse victim was Thomas Mahon, a retired policeman and possible child killer from Carna in County Galway. Think. Ronald Hutton, Witch-Hunting in Celtic Societies, Past and Present, no. Between the 1820s and 1860s, Protestant missionaries strove to persuade Irish Catholics to abandon Rome and embrace Reformed faiths. Western People, 10 Oct. 1936; First Report from His Majestys Commissioners, 543; NFC, Schools Collection: vol. A geis or geas (pl. May your limbs wither and the stench of your rotten carcass be too horrible for hungry dogs. 461, 456; vol. 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. 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. 514, 19; vol. After that, the curse tablets were buried, placed into a well or a pool, or even hung on the wall of a temple. First Report from His Majestys Commissioners, 687. 1862. 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 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. Julian Adelman, Food in Ireland since 1740, in Biagini and Daly (eds. 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. Geneticists at Trinity College have sequenced the genomes of ancient Irish farmers, discovering that haemochromatosis (known as the 'Celtic curse') was inherited by people from the Pontic . The same is likely to be true, though perhaps to a lesser degree, of other magical techniques. In fact, there is good reason to think that the power of cursing clerics actually grew, in the wake of the famine.114 Their ratio was rapidly increasing, from roughly one priest per three thousand laity in 1840, to approximately 1 per 1,500 in 1870, and still growing.115 Priests could now realistically monitor their parishioners and, if they misbehaved, pronounce personalized imprecations.116 Good evidence of this powerful combination was generated by the disputed Galway by-election of 1872. Had he ever heard about them? 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. 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. Breandn Mac Suibhne and David Dickson (Dublin, 2000), 226. 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. Curses are declared to be the most dreaded form of magic, often called black magic, and are believed to be universally used. Visions and Beliefs in the West of Ireland Collected and Arranged by Lady Gregory: With Two Essays and Notes by W. B. Yeats, 2nd ser. They contained no real viciousness and Irish folk used them only to give force to their speech.49 This was not quite so. Sulis - Mother Goddess, Goddess of Healing Springs. The Curse of the Knights Templar II. Blessings and curses: Another Celtic tradition that survived long into Christian times was the belief in blessings and curses. 1846; Ballyshannon Herald, 17 July 1863. 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. 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. But evidence from other sources confirms not only that priests deployed their curses politically, but also that some Catholic bishops actively encouraged them. Some of the more inventive could be used in our 21st-century livesjust swap out the Roman names and use your imagination to get dark magic to do your bidding. To make a curse stick, it was best to say something dreadful, complex and difficult to rebut. During the modern era, the currency and style of magic words varied considerably, and over short distances. These collective groups, often categorized as Celtic tribes, were ruled by kings or high chieftains, with power sometimes shared by dual authorities. Locals became very annoyed with Peoples Democracy: they will get no support from us now, one said.154 Ian Paisley, the hard-line leader of Northern Irelands Democratic Unionist Party, had more success when he used the rhetoric of cursing to advertise his partys no surrender politics. 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.)
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