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. Intimidating, cathartic and virtuoso: cursing mingled gruesome yet poetic phrases with ostentatious rites, in the name of supernatural justice. But cursing songs were not a dying art, part of a vanishing Gaelic folk culture. With fearsome curses, needy Irish people did indeed demand food, land, and family and religious loyalty, with some success. Roscommon and Leitrim Gazette, 4 Apr. Kerry Evening Post, 19 Sept. 1835; 1 Apr. 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. Paulo Reis Mouro, Determinants of the Number of Catholic Priests to Catholics in Europe: An Economic Explanation, Review of Religious Research, lii (2011). The emphasis on justice, on curses befalling evildoers, had waned. Fairies, leprechauns, banshees, witches, holy wells and rural remedies. But this general point also needs qualifying. Rev. Amongst these strategies was cursing. 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. Other cursing traditions were more current because they chimed with the needs and conditions of large numbers of people. Parliamentary Elections (Corrupt And Illegal Practices) BillBill 7, Hansard, cclxxx, col. 84293 (18 June 1883). English newspapers portrayed them as slow, stupid drunks; yet Irelands workers possessed finely honed curses for every occasion, every fit of passion.58 Their lyrical formulas were designed to awaken God to injustice, alert the Devil to sin, and generally unsettle supernatural forces. May you fade into nothing, like snow in summer. [Thomas Secker], Against Evil-Speaking, Lying, Rash Vows, Swearing, Cursing, and Perjury. ), 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). 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. Full analysis of ancient and medieval expressions of Celtic cursing, using evidence ranging from magical charms to curse tablets. To illustrate: in a classic essay about anonymous threatening letters, sent to English farmers and grain-dealers in the late 1700s and 1800s, E. P. Thompson noticed that these letters were often rhymed in a spell-like style, as if to imply a bit of magical menace.60 Irish threatening letters, by contrast, were far more supernaturally explicit, teeming with the direst maledictions of the sort contained in a letter sent to a County Limerick landlord in 1886: may you wither up by the fire of hell soon and sudden, may the flesh rot off your bones, and fall away putrid before your eyes, and may the consolation of eternal flames come to be your consolation in your last illness, and the hearthstone of hell be your pillow for ever.61 That missive was pure literary cursing. Dinneen (ed. 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. Evening Herald, 12 Mar. 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. A curse is one or many M agic spells which are placed upon people with the intention of harming them. Hardcover. I. For the imprecators, cursing could be a means of coercion, a cathartic fantasy of their enemies destruction, or merely a way of showing off. E. P. Thompson, The Crime of Anonymity, in Douglas Hay et al. However, by repurposing an older way of thinking about magic, I argue that historic Irish cursing is best understood as an art, because it required knowledge, practice, wit, skill and composure. 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. 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. More directly, mendicants insinuated mystic influences by asking for alms for the glory of God, as one Irish beggar did when she met the linguist George Borrow, in the summer of 1854.89 Anyone who agreed, who provided a little charity, would be rewarded with profuse blessings. Cursing rapidly faded from the mid-twentieth century and, unlike other forms of occultism, was not revived by the post 1970s New Age movement. Dr. James Butlers Catechism: Revised, Enlarged, Approved, and Recommended by the Four R.C. Bathed in righteous power, steeped in the Holy Spirit, it was obvious that they should possess awesome imprecations. NFC, Schools Collection: vol. May you fall without rising. The Celtic languages were a group of closely related languages sharing . 1890; 24 Mar. 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. 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. Cursing was largely ignored during the late 1800s and early 1900s occult revival in Ireland. 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. Andrew Sneddon, Witchcraft and Magic in Ireland (Basingstoke, 2015), 53. That question has a multi-causal answer, which I will build up throughout the rest of this paper. Defeats in football, hurling and even stock market losses were occasionally blamed on old curses.159 More seriously, in the Irish Republic a few people still threw maledictions and credited them with dire powers. Curse Tablets. OBriens words for curse were aingeis, aoir and airier, ceasacht, cursachadh, easgaine, irre, malsachd, mioscaith and trist. After lots of stunted answers, the interviewer started pushing and reassuring Michael: just tell us one instance: its all right. NFC, MS 548, 242; Schools Collection: vol. 1846; Ballyshannon Herald, 17 July 1863. These campaigns achieved little. John ODonovan, Folk-Lore. May your bones be broken, for example, and a thousand placings of a rope round your neck.41 Irish people said these things during arguments, after accidents, or following near misses. Cursing was not only an intimidating magical weapon, but also a dark therapy. Breandn Mac Suibhne and David Dickson (Dublin, 2000), 226. ), Cambridge Social History of Modern Ireland. 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. 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. Driver Jailed After Placing Lurid Widows Curse on Garda that Her Family Would Die, Irish Examiner, 8 Jan. 2019,
