Living Irish Witchcraft Ep 16: Does Like Pull Like?

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This episode opens up sympathetic magic, the backbone of Irish folk spellcraft, the idea that like affects like and that things once joined stay joined. Drawing on Lady Wilde’s Irish Cures, Mystic Charms and Superstitions, the wart and cure entries of the Schools’ Collection kept on Dúchas, and Andrew Sneddon’s Witchcraft and Magic in Ireland, it walks through the wart and cloth cures, the tradition behind the Irish rag tree, and the plain domestic thinking under so much of the folk record, with a clear word on why the rag tree is not a thing for tourists to imitate at a sacred site.

This Episode’s Practice: The Cloth Transference

Take one small piece of natural cloth, an old cotton rag or a strip torn off a worn out shirt, nothing bought special. Pick the one trouble you want shifted and keep it to the one, a physical ache that will not lift, a worry gone stale, a low mood that has outstayed its welcome. Hold the cloth against your skin where the trouble sits, or against your chest if it has no place, for a few slow breaths at least, and name out loud what you are putting into the cloth. Then tie it onto a thorn, a bramble or a whitethorn on your own ground or along your own road, and only ever your own ordinary thorn, never a rag tree or a well tree at a sacred site. Leave it to the weather, and as it frays and rots and comes apart in the wind and rain, the trouble tied into it comes apart with it. Walk away and leave it, and do not go back for it. Close with Beir Bua (pronounced: BARE BOO-ah). Keep this to your own troubles and your own cloth, and leave other people out of it.

Irish Terms in This Episode

draoi (pronounced: DREE): an Irish druid, a practitioner of the native magical and spiritual tradition; Lora’s own word for what she is.

piseoga (pronounced: PISH-oh-guh), singular piseog (PISH-ohg): the charms, spells, and folk workings of the tradition; the word covers both a helpful cure and a harmful working laid on someone.

Beir Bua (pronounced: BARE BOO-ah): ‘take victory’; the closing phrase of the practice.

Sources

• Lady Jane Wilde, Irish Cures, Mystic Charms and Superstitions (1888), the wart cure and the cloth cures.
• The Schools’ Collection, National Folklore Collection (Dúchas.ie), the wart rubbed with meat and discarded.
• Andrew Sneddon, Witchcraft and Magic in Ireland (2015), butter stealing and the sympathetic transfer of profit.
• Charms, Charmers and Charming in Ireland, ed. Ilona Tuomi, John Carey, Barbara Hillers and Ciarán Mac Murchaidh (2019), sympathetic magic in the Irish charm tradition.

Living Irish Witchcraft is hosted by Rev. Lora O’Brien, MA. Find more at irishpaganschool.ie