Living Irish Witchcraft Ep 18: Can Words Do the Work?

August 31, 2026

Episode 18: Can Words Do the Work?

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This episode takes on the spoken spell in Irish tradition, the ortha and the bricht and the epaid, and asks what actually made a set of words a charm rather than a wish. It works through the two shapes the Irish charms take, the command spoken in the first person and the narrative charm that recites a cure which already happened and then binds the present trouble to it, using the manuscript charms R. I. Best printed in 1952, David Stifter's translation of the blood staunching charm from a Royal Irish Academy medical manuscript, the St Gall incantations, and the blood charm collected in County Longford for the Schools' Collection. It closes on the thing most often left out, that in the Irish record the words are only ever half the working and an act carries the other half.

This Episode's Practice: The Charm in the Ointment

You need a small amount of plain oil or butter, nothing has to be bought for this.

Pick the one trouble that has a place on you: an ache that won't shift, a stiff shoulder, a small cut that's healing slowly, or the spot where a worry sits in your body.

Put a little of the oil into your palm and warm it there for a minute.

Say the trouble out loud in plain words, naming what it is and where it is, the way the old dialogue charms open by asking what ails you and answering straight.

Speak your command over the oil in the first person, in the Irish shape, telling the trouble what you're doing to it rather than asking for it to be lifted off you. It runs along the lines of I hinder this, I stop it here, I put it out of me. Use your own words, keep them short, and keep them fixed, because from that moment on those are the words and they don't change.

Say them over the oil three times, the same each time, the way the manuscripts set three paters after the charm.

Rub the oil into the place you named, working from the outside of it inward until it has all gone in, and let that be the end of it for the day.

Close with Beir Bua (pronounced: BARE BOO-ah).

Keep the charm in its right place. In the folk record a charm for bleeding sat alongside the plantain leaf, the cobweb and the tight bandage rather than instead of them. Work your charm, take your medicine, go to the doctor, and never let a set of words stand in the way of a cure that would mend you. Keep it to your own troubles unless somebody has asked you for 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.
the Mórrígan (pronounced: MOR-ee-gan): a great goddess of Irish tradition, tied to sovereignty, war and fate; Lora has been her priest since 2004.
ortha (pronunciation to confirm): a charm or prayer said over a trouble; the ordinary folk word for a spoken cure, and the term Maebhe Ní Bhroin used for her index of over a thousand Irish healing charms from the National Folklore Collection.
bricht (pronunciation to confirm): a spell; one of the medieval Irish terms for supernatural work listed by Jacqueline Borsje.
epaid (pronunciation to confirm): a charm or cure; the word used when the man with marriage trouble comes to the saint asking for one in the Middle Irish Life of Brigit.
díchetal (pronunciation to confirm): the chanting of an incantation; another of the medieval Irish terms in Borsje's list.
rosc (pronunciation to confirm): the heightened chanted verse form used by the poets, which Ksenia Kudenko describes as obscure; Coirpre's satire against Bres is a rosc.

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

Sources

RI. Best, 'Some Irish Charms', Ériu, 16 (1952), 27 to 32. Nine charms copied into the margins and blank spaces of Trinity College MS H.3.17 (1336), including the horse sickness charm written into a script for the horse's forehead with three paters and three aves after it, and the Three Good Brothers charm read over oil and the wool of an unshorn wether and then laid around the wound.

David Stifter, 'A Charm for Staunching Blood', Celtica, 25 (2007), 251 to 254. Translation of the charm in Royal Irish Academy MS 24 B 3, p. 55, copied at the end of the fifteenth century and held by scholars to be considerably older: 'I hinder the blood, I slay the disease.'

The St Gall incantations, from the Irish charm texts held in the Irish Pagan School research library, the standard edition being Whitley Stokes and John Strachan, Thesaurus Palaeohibernicus. The thorn charm is put into butter which doesn't go into water, and the butter is smeared all around the thorn without touching the point of it.

Episode Transcript

Living Irish Witchcraft: Can Words Do the Work? 18
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[00:00:00] Whenever the grandbabies are here and I can get them to sit down for five minutes, we get a book on the go, because reading together is one of our things. Something I love, something I always did with my own children, and really, really want to carry on, especially in our newer digital age. But reading aloud to a small child will show you fairly quickly that the words of a story

aren't up for negotiation, especially when it's a book that they know and that they love. You just don't get to improvise. So if you skip a line to reach the end quicker, not that I've ever done that, of course, or accidentally swap one word for another that means the same thing, you will be stopped and corrected and sent back to say it the way that it's meant to be said.

The words have to be the words in the order that they belong in, and a child who can't yet read a page for herself will still know the difference. That instinct that a set of words has a right [00:01:00] form and loses something when the form is broken is sitting underneath the whole Irish charm tradition, not just me reading to my grandchildren.

So if you're new to me here, I'm Lora O'Brien. I'm an Irish draoi, and I've been a priest of The Morrigan since 2004, with about 30 years of practice behind me and a master's in Irish history. So what I hand to you in this podcast and through the Irish Pagan School comes off the Irish record and out of my own working of it, rather than off a shelf of general Celtic material

or academic research. This is Living Irish Witchcraft, and I make it for the Irish Pagan School. Now, Irish carries a whole set of words for the spoken working, which tells you straight away how ordinary a thing it was. There's urtha, the charm or prayer said over a trouble, and bríathra, a spell, [00:02:00] and epud, a charm or a cure, and dícheall, the chanting of an incantation.

Now, all these terms are in the notes below in the podcast,

So you can get the spellings of them there. But the poets had a form of their own for the heightened stuff, which was called the rosc. And that's a chanted verse obscure even to the scholars who work on it. And it's obscure to the magicians, the witches, the draoi, and even the Mórrígan priests who work on it as well.

It's still quite obscure. So don't worry if you don't understand it straight away. But all of that sits in the manuscripts beside the law tracts and the medical texts, and it's squeezed into the margins and the empty spaces where a scribe found room, which is exactly where another academic, R. I. Best, found the nine charms he printed in 1952 out of a Trinity College manuscript.

The Irish [00:03:00] charm lived in the working part of the library rather than off in some separate book of magic. And remember, this carried through into Christian times as well.

So when you look at what the charms actually do in the record that we have, you find two shapes basically. It can get very complicated, but we'll break it down pretty simply. The first is a command, and it's spoken in the first person, where the speaker does the work in the saying of it. For example, there's a blood-staunching charm in a Royal Irish Academy medical manuscript copied at the end of the 15th century, although the scholars reckon it's a good deal older than that, as is usual.

And David Stifter's translation of it runs, "I hinder the blood. I slay the disease." There's no petition to a god or an ancestor anywhere in it, and the speaker states the act as already done [00:04:00] Now, the second shape that we have within the charms record tells a story first. You give the account of a cure that happened once already to somebody with the standing to make it happen, and then you fasten your own trouble onto it, so it has to follow the same road.

For example, Peter, that would be Saint Peter, sits down at the River Jordan with a sore tooth, and Christ comes up to him and puts him right. And then the charm finishes by saying that the charm and the toothache won't be in the one head together. So obviously, if you bring the charm into your head, you're saying it with your own mouth, then the toothache won't be able to stay there.

There's another one. The three good brothers go up to the Mount of Olives looking for herbs to heal every wound, and they're sent back with oil and wood and the words to say over it. And then there's a version of the blood charm, which is collected in the school's collection, and we see it from County [00:05:00] Longford,

and it does both at once. So I'm gonna read the whole of it for you. Our Savior was born in Galilee. He came to the Jordan baptized to be. The water was clear, the water was good, and at his bidding, the water stood. By his power and in his name, I command this blood to do the same So there's four lines of story in that charm and then two of command.

And the command only bites because the story went in front of it. Now, either of those charm types can work separately, but again,

we do see them together as well. So the words in this tradition almost never travel on their own, and that's the thing most often left out when you go looking for Irish spells. In Best's collection that I mentioned earlier, the charm for a horse sickness goes into a script that's put on the horse's forehead with three Paters and three Aves after it.

That's Our Fathers and Ave [00:06:00] Marias, I presume. Another of them is read over oil and the wool of a wether that was never shorn, so that'd be a sheep that was never shorn. And that mixture is then laid around the wound. In another manuscript known as the St.

Gall incantations, the charm against a thorn goes into butter that hasn't gone near water, and the butter is smeared all around the thorn without touching the point of it.

Wherever you meet the words in the Irish record, you'll usually meet an act beside them. So here's a way to work that shape for yourself using a small amount of plain oil or butter.

Pick the one trouble that has a place on you right now. It could be an ache that won't shift, a stiff shoulder, a small cut that's healing slowly, or it could be the spot where a worry sits in your body, so not even something [00:07:00] physical, you'll likely carry that in the chest or the belly, or you'll know your own anyway

Put a little oil into your palm and warm it there for a minute. Then say the trouble out loud in plain words, don't have to do anything fancy, naming what it is and where it is, the way the old dialogue charms open by asking what ails you and answering straight. And after that, you speak your command over the oil

in the first person, like we do in the Irish charms, telling the trouble what you're doing to it rather than asking for it to be lifted off you, so that it runs along the lines of something like, "I hinder this, I stop it here, I put it out of me." I want you to use your own words, but keep them short, keep them fixed, keep them definite, because from this moment on, those are the words, and you don't change them.

This is a spell that gets more [00:08:00] powerful as you repeat it. So say them over the oil three times, the same each time, the way the manuscripts set three patters after the charm. Then rub the oil onto the place that you named, working from the outside of it inward until it's all gone in, and let that be the end of it for today.

Beir Bua. Now, if you'd like a grounded Irish practice like this one coming to you every month with the source and the story behind it, that's what our Simple Irish Spells newsletter is for. It's over on the Irish Pagan School site, and when you sign up, you'll also get my Magic for Social Change toolkit free as well.

It's a PDF that you can download and keep. There is a free tier to the newsletter, so you can sign up immediately, and there's a paid tier which won't cost you very much every month. But whichever you choose, you're gonna get properly sourced Irish practice that you can actually do. So you'll find it at irishpagan.school/spells.

Slán go fóill, and I will [00:09:00] see you next time

Living Irish Witchcraft Ep 18: Can Words Do the Work?

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