LIW Episode 20: What are the conditions on an Irish curse?
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[00:00:00] My sister and I are on the phone most days. You know yourself, we're either texting, calling, voice notes 'cause one of us is driving, or sometimes I'll even get to see her in person, which is amazing. But a good part of what we say to each other is the running account of who's been decent lately and who hasn't.
Now, every so often, one of us comes out of one of those conversations with a story about somebody being badly treated, and a feeling rises up out of that, which is that somebody ought to be made accountable for it. Somebody needs to answer for it. Anybody who's had a chat with their female friends might be familiar with this feeling, 'cause that feeling's ordinary enough, and the Irish historical record has a whole set of workings built around it, and every one of them comes with conditions attached.
Now, if you've not come across me before, I [00:01:00] am Lora O'Brien. I'm an Irish draoi and priest of The Morrigan since 2004. I've a master's in Irish history sitting behind about 30 years of my own spiritual and magical practice, so nothing goes out on this podcast without the source that it came out of
And my own experience backing it up. This is Living Irish Witchcraft, and I make it for the Irish Pagan School So the everyday end of all this working or cursing is still sitting in the language because when we might say bad cess to you, that's a curse that you'd still hear. And it's not that common anymore.
It definitely was more when I was a kid, but you'd still hear bad cess, bad cess, bad cess. Now, Diarmuid
Ă Muarthaigh in his Words We Use column in the Irish Times gives the plain sense of it as just bad luck. [00:02:00] And the word underneath that is cess itself, which is C-E-S-S. And the original meaning of it was a rate or a local tax. So he takes it back as far as Spencer in 1596, where cess is the billeting of soldiers and the provisioning of a governor's household.
So the ordinary Irish curse borrowed its word off the machinery of being taxed and having men quartered on you, which would cost you. And that tells you what a household reckoned was the worst thing that could land on it. Now, that would've been a well-to-do household, obviously. Not your average vernacular household of the ordinary people.
The formal end of the tradition is a different matter altogether, and it's where the conditions actually got written down. The word that you'll meet first in the old material is air, which means [00:03:00] satire. And it isn't the mild thing that word has turned into since. You know, having a satire, satirical cartoons, all that kind of stuff. One of the authors writing in the book Charms, Charmers, and Charming in Ireland pointed out that one of the old Irish verbs for satirizing comes from rinn, a sharp point. So satire was thought of as a wounding of a body with sharp words. There's even a word in the sources for the blotch that came up on a man's face after he'd been satirized.
Now lookit, the poets weren't out there heckling anyone. They were carrying out a sanction, and it was really well recognized within Irish culture and society. The whole thing was doing its job inside
the actual legal order of things. Now, that scholar Khudenko that I mentioned just there sets out a Middle Irish [00:04:00] tract that describes a fatal satire called the Glab Diacan, where the poet fasted first against the king whose behavior had provoked him, and fasting against a wrongdoer has its own name in Irish, a thruscath.
And for anybody who's familiar with Irish history, the idea of a fasting or a hunger strike is well attested. Please look up 1981 in the north of Ireland
But going back in time again, seven poets of different grades went up onto a hilltop once this fasting against a wrongdoer was being done. They went up to a place with a white thorn or a hawthorn growing on the top of it, and this would be a sign that there was an Otherworld connection going on there.
And each man or woman held a stone and a thorn in their hand, and each of them made a verse on the spot[00:05:00]
Now, what happened after that depended entirely on whether they were actually in the right, whether they were justified in the satire. So to quote, "Provided the satire was legitimate, the earth would swallow the king. If, however, the fili were in the wrong, the earth would swallow them." So there was a lot at stake here with this whole earth-swallowing thing.
So the fili were the poets, obviously. They weren't the judges of whether they're right. They just had to make sure that when they were doing a satire, when they were laying a curse effectively, that they believed that they were right, and you wouldn't be taking any risks with that because of that whole, earth-swallowing thing But they're really staking themselves on the answer, and if the case is a bad one, then the ground opens up under the ones who brought it.
So there's no getting away from that. Now, [00:06:00] Khudenko, in that essay, shows you as well that the kings who get cursed in these stories are kings who've broken fir flaithmon, the ruler's truth, or fir flatha, the sovereign's truth. And breaking it cost a king his right to rule. So you'll notice that the curse lands on conduct and on conduct that somebody has named out loud.
So accountability and the calling out of bad conduct was intrinsic within Irish society, Irish traditions. Now, you'll find the same condition much later and much closer to living memory. That same scholar, Khudenko, records that Saint Medach had a cursing stone, and turning it three times anti-clockwise against an oppressor brought a man's death inside the year Sitting here drumming my fingers on the desk wondering is there anybody who is
a little [00:07:00] bit overdue. Anybody in the world who might be worth having a justified satire or the turning of a stone against them? Anyway that's up to everybody to decide, and if you want to take matters into your own hands, then have at it. But be careful. It has to be justified, obviously.
Within the year, though we'll count it now from the time that this podcast goes out, right? Anyway, anti-clockwise there is Tuathail. That's the turning of the stone goes anti-clockwise. And that was taken as a marker of misfortune. It's the opposite of Deiseal or sunwise. Now, another scholar, Cecily Gilligan, in her book Cures of Ireland, writes about the Clocha Breaca out of Inishmurray
it's an island off Sligo, County Sligo, where there's about 50 smooth round stones covering an outdoor altar. Now, that's definitely not the only place [00:08:00] in Ireland that has that. It's actually, I wouldn't say common, but definitely there's quite a few places like this. And this is where somebody wanting vengeance on an enemy did the station in reverse.
The Stations of the Cross. This definitely went into this this blending of traditions between the old Pagan stuff and the more modern Catholicism that took over the island. And Protestantism, I suppose. Same thing. Christianity, let's call it. But they would do the Station of the Cross in reverse, walking against the sun instead of Deiseal or with it, and turning every stone over as they went Man called Patrick Herity, who was born on that island and wrote about its customs, told Gilligan that a curse laid unjustly would come back to haunt the person who made it.
There you go. So a thousand years apart, the poets and the islanders put the same condition [00:09:00] on the work, and there's your answer to the question in the title of this podcast. A curse is fair when the wrong is actual and you can name it, and when you're willing to carry it if you've called it wrong. Every piece of magic that you do in the Irish tradition, you have to take responsibility for because
ground opening up and swallowing you. It's a whole thing. I'll give you a working out of that now, a simple thing. And in the sources, these were lethal, and what I'm handing you is not lethal. We're not here for that. This names a thing and asks for it to be answered.
Now, you'll want to do it maybe on a bit of height, so a hill if there's one that you can get to, and if there isn't, then the highest ground you can reach without wrecking yourself getting there. For the fasting, maybe go without a meal beforehand, and that's your trusket.
If fasting isn't safe for you though, give up something else that you'd have that day instead. You want to be making an [00:10:00] offering in that way, that there's some kind of cost to you. It doesn't have to be food though, okay? Once you get there to the highest place that you can make lift a stone off the ground of that place, and one that's small enough to sit inside your closed hand.
Say out loud what was done and who did it in terms of behavior rather than insult. Just like gentle parenting, we are calling out the behavior, not the child, right? So not what the person is, but what the person did. Now, say it in the way that you'd give a statement, and then turn the stone three times in your hand against the sun, so to a bale.
And with each turn say that you're asking for the thing to be answered. Then say the test out loud in your own words, and it runs something like this. "If this case of mine isn't just or justified, let it come back on me and not on them." [00:11:00] Now, I want you to say that and mean it because the sources put that condition in the work every single time.
You're throwing a tantrum with props, basically. Then you put the stone back in the ground where you lifted it and you go home. Beir Bua. Now, the test isn't decoration and you don't get to leave it out. I really need you to be doing that, honestly, since that's the condition in the poet's ritual and on Inis Mor from both of the sources we've looked at like a thousand years apart.
This isn't just for somebody who's irritated you or disagreed with you because in the sources, the target is an oppressor and the trigger is an offense. So you need to have a genuine oppressor for this to actually be effective and to make sure it doesn't turn back on yourself. You need to get out and about and do the work and you need to make sure that [00:12:00] you Put that test in for yourself and the powers that be who may be listening to you.
If you can't state the wrong against you in one sentence that would stand up to another person hearing it, then you haven't got a case. Think of yourself standing up in court basically and trying to make your case or in front of the Gardai or something, right? And if you can't do that, you're better off leaving the stone where it lies and just going on about your day, honestly.
We are not trying to make any claims as part of this podcast, but we are just illustrating the tradition and examples of how we can go about working with it today. But it's on your own responsibility what happens thereafter.
We do a newsletter every single month called Simple Irish Spells. It's actually a couple of times a month that editions go out. [00:13:00] It's over on the Irish Pagan School website. There's a free tier and a paid tier, and you'll find it at irishpagan.school/spells. So slĂĄn go fĂłill, and I will see you in the next podcast
