![]() ![]() 10 Yet this intriguing form of modern magic remains almost entirely unstudied. ‘Nothing was more feared’ than a really venomous malediction, commentators on Irish manners claimed, without much exaggeration. 9Ĭursing continued to be rife during the period of the Enlightenment, throughout the 1800s, and until about the mid-twentieth century. 8 In villages and towns nationwide, place names and oral stories told how ancient curses had created local lakes, rivers, mountains and hills. Calamitous historical events were memorialized in maledictions, notably Oliver Cromwell’s brutal 1649 conquest of Ireland, which spawned ‘the Curse of Cromwell’, a fearsome imprecation supposed to bring death and destruction. 7 Along with taking some stigma out of interpersonal supernatural conflict, cursing influenced how Irish people saw the world. It may help to explain why, during the early modern period, Ireland experienced no ‘witch craze’, with just a handful of trials, compared with almost four thousand across the water in Scotland (mostly involving people from lowland and non-Gaelic regions). 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. 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. Yet in Ireland, a proclivity for this dark kind of cursing goes back millennia. Those maledictions were uttered between the 1830s and 1850s. 3 Or: ‘may the curse of God alight on you and your family throughout their generations … may the curse of God’s thunder and lightning fall heavily’, prayed by a farmer from Limerick, on the landlord who had evicted him. 2 Or: ‘the curse of God and the curse of the flock be upon any men who vote for Higgins’, repeatedly bellowed by a priest from County Mayo, during a fractious election campaign. Imprecations like: ‘the curse of my orphans, and my falling-sickness, light upon you’, which a woman from Athlone pronounced in court, on the people prosecuting her for theft. Not swearing, turning the air blue with four-letter words, but spoken maledictions for smiting evildoers. This article is about historic Ireland’s penchant for cursing. May the Almighty’s curse rest on your children. May you be accursed in the sight of God, and hated by your fellow man. May you fade into nothing, like snow in summer. May your limbs wither and the stench of your rotten carcass be too horrible for hungry dogs. May the flesh rot off your bones, and fall away putrid before your eyes. The first drop of water to quench your thirst - may it boil in your bowels. Its unusual history underlines three wider points: (i) magic can usefully thrive in modern societies, figuring in the most vital areas of life (ii) different types of magic have distinct chronologies (iii) the most psychologically powerful forms of magic are subtle arts that deserve our (begrudging) respect.īad cess on you. Cursing rapidly faded from the mid-twentieth century and, unlike other forms of occultism, was not revived by the post 1970s ‘New Age’ movement. It had many applications but was particularly valuable to Ireland’s marginalized people, fighting over food, religion, politics, land and family loyalties. Intimidating, cathartic and virtuoso: cursing mingled gruesome yet poetic phrases with ostentatious rites, in the name of supernatural justice. 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. Irish imprecations can be analysed using familiar academic categories such as belief, ritual, symbolism, tradition and discourse. 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. A righteous occult attack, a dark prayer for terrible pains to blight evildoers, cursing was unnervingly common from ancient times until the mid-twentieth century. Yet we should not ignore what was once the most widespread Irish magic of all: cursing. Historic Ireland is famous for its superstitions, magic and ‘alternative beliefs’. Fairies, leprechauns, banshees, witches, holy wells and rural remedies. ![]()
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