Living Irish Witchcraft: Does Like Pull Like?
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[00:00:00] There is a geranium on the office windowsill that started life as a single snipped stem off a much older plant, and I stuck it in a jar of water until it threw down a few roots. And it's a whole plant in its own right now. It's flowering away beside me here while I work. I do that all the time with cuttings, and that's obviously the way anyone with a bit of grá for the gardening does.
But I just wanted to stop a little bit to think about why a cutting works at all, because that one scrap of stem was never really a separate thing from the plant that it came off. It carries the whole of that plant inside it, and this is whether it's a cutting or a seed or anything. But it carries everything that the parent was, and it grows up true to it, the same flower and the same leaf.
One small piece of a plant can hold the whole thing, and a piece stays tied to whatever [00:01:00] it came from So those two things are facts, that a part can carry the whole, and that a part stays linked to its source. And that's the idea that's sitting at the root, forgive me, of a great deal of Irish folk magic.
So if you're new to me, I'm Lora O'Brien. I'm an Irish draoi. I've been in this practice the guts of 30 years, and I took my master's in Irish history, so what I hand to you during content like this or in any of our platforms comes out of the Irish record and my own working of it.
It's not off a spirituality shelf assembled a long way from Ireland. This is living Irish witchcraft, and I make it for the Irish Pagan School. So thinking about all that, those two [00:02:00] facts, the part can carry the whole, and that a part stays linked to its source. That has a name, or the scholars gave it a name anyway, which is sympathetic magic.
And it's really only those two same everyday facts put to work on purpose, honestly. So the first is that like affects like, right? A part can carry the whole, so it still can affect things that are like it because it's still a part of it. Like affects like. So if you make a small copy or an image of something, a part of it, whatever you do to the copy is worked on the real thing that it stands for.
And the second one is what the geranium shows you, is that things once joined stay joined. So a piece of a thing or an object that's been against your skin or taken your warmth [00:03:00] has been joined to you or any person. It keeps a link to you after it's left your hand. Now, as a gardener, I might lean on that link without thinking twice about it.
I will accept that this thing that has been joined to this whole plant will create a whole new plant, right? But the folk practitioner, the Irish witch, leans on the very same link and turns it to a different purpose, and it sits under a great deal of the Irish charm and cure work, the pisoga of the tradition.
Now, pisoga would often be a negative name, but it also goes for the charms and cures as well
And the tradition shows that where a trouble is moved out of a person, a part is taken out of it and into something else, like a plant, an animal, or a plain object, then that carries it off. From the resources folklorist Lady Wilde, that was Oscar's mammy, [00:04:00] set down one of the plainest form of it back in the 1880s, where she talked about a wart rubbed with a scrap of stolen meat that's then buried in the ground, so that as the meat rots away and the wart goes off with it.
Now, I think that the stolen meat is important there because it's not tied to you. It's something that is tied to somebody else.
And you're gonna find that same cure gathered again and again in the school's collection, Dúchas, the National Folklore Archive. Lady Wilde, though, records that the cloth cures alongside it. So a trouble tied up into a bit of a cloth that's been worn against the skin makes the ailment or the sickness go out of a person and stays behind with the thing.
That's the root of the Irish rag tree lore. In Scotland, it's called the clooties, and it's the real root of the lore, the rag tree is a [00:05:00] careful piece of folk work. It's not a thing for tourists to ape by knotting fucking sweetie wrappers and hair bobbins onto a sacred tree at a holy well, which does no good at all.
You have to understand where the tradition is coming from. And otherwise, you're just littering, right? But one of our historians, Andrew Sneddon, shows a kind of a darker turn of the same logic in the butter stealing cases that he documents, ~where a person was thought to draw off the profit of a neighbor's.~
~A person was thought to draw off the profit. ~Where a person was thought to draw off the profit of a neighbor's milk by working on a thing that stood in for it. So the mechanic under the whole lot is the one thing. It's practical and domestic. Far more kitchen than temple and ceremony, as the living Irish witchcraft tends to be.
And that ordinariness is the everyday Irishness of it. We don't just work on special occasions. It is the everyday magic is [00:06:00] what we're doing here. So here's a form of this transference that you can do for yourself, And it's built off those old cloth cures, the rag tree tradition.
And what you want is one small piece of natural cloth, like an old cotton rag or a strip torn off of a worn-out shirt or something. Nothing that's bought special, right? But pick the one trouble you want shifted, and keep it to just one. Do one at a time. Maybe it's a physical ache that won't lift.
Maybe it's a worry that's gone stale on you, causing you trouble. Maybe it's a low mood that's outstayed its welcome. You hold the cloth against your skin, or even wear it for twenty-four hours, where you would imagine that the trouble sits. So say it's an anxiety of the brain, right?
Just to try and put it into context. Say it's an anxiety that would be sitting in your brain usually. It could be in your heart, could be in your body. You could definitely wear [00:07:00] it somewhere on your person. But, you could wear it under a hat for a little while, right? Anyway, you want to put this piece of cloth somewhere where it can literally absorb the problem that you're trying to move or shift,
so hold the cloth against your skin, as I said, where the trouble sits, or just against your chest if it hasn't a place on you specifically. For a few slow breaths at the least of it but as long as you can, really. And name out loud what it is you're putting into the cloth. Then you take it, and you tie it onto a thorn, like a bramble or a white thorn or hawthorn on your own bit of ground or along your own road.
Just a very ordinary thorn tree. It doesn't have to be a rag tree or a well tree at a sacred site. You could bring it to one of those places if they are convenient to you. If there is a known rag [00:08:00] tree tradition in your area, then by all means. If there's a particular tree, a thorn tree, that sits by a particularly sacred piece of water, that is definitely a part of tradition.
So you can bring it there if you want to But tie it loosely so you're not harming the tree or the bramble or whatever it is. Tie it loosely around the branch and leave it there to the weather. And as it frays, this is why it has to be natural, don't be doing it on any kind of synthetic material that's gonna stay there for years and years.
But as it frays and rots and comes apart in the wind and the rain, the trouble that you tied onto it comes apart right along with it. And, you're supposed to walk away, leave it be, don't go back for it. If you want something shifted pretty quickly, you could also use a piece of paper We want a good quality paper, that's going to rot, decay a little bit more [00:09:00] quickly, right? That's not ideal, but it is what it is So I want you to keep this to your own troubles and your own cloth. The same logic can be turned onto another person against their will, of course.
All of this magic is double-ended, like the Dagda's club. And like the tradition holds plenty of that too, honestly, but it's a road that carries its own very heavy weight on it. So leave other people's names out of your mouth and other people's cloth well out of it. You don't want to be messing with that.
The one exception I would have here is if you had a sick child or a sick relative. With a relative, an adult, it would definitely have to be with their permission and consent if they're capable of doing so. With a child, with your own child, not just a random child, obviously. With your own child, you could be said to take responsibility for them.
So as long as it's healing practice, obviously it can [00:10:00] be used for that too. If you would like a grounded Irish practice sent to you, coming to you every month actually twice a month, with the source and the story behind it, that is exactly what my Simple Irish Spells newsletter is for.
It's over on the Irish Pagan School site, and when you sign up, you'll get my Magic for Social Change toolkit, which is a PDF with instructions, not an actual physical, spell kit that's going to be sent to you. But you get it for free. So there is a free tier and a paid tier to the newsletter, and whichever you choose, you are getting properly sourced Irish practice that you can actually do and reference for future.
There's back issues as well. So you'll find it at irishpagan.school/spells. So slán go fóill, and I will see you next time.
