LIW Episode 21: The Cure You're Handed
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[00:00:00] We talked about cursing a little bit last week, so definitely go back and catch that episode if you missed it. But this week, I thought I better balance it out with a bit of a cure. Now, the cure traditionally in Ireland moves along the lines of one particular person to another particular person, and it doesn't work at all unless somebody hands it over.
~And it's often in families, and it's often gender-related. And~
it's often in families, and it's often gender-related, and there's a whole tradition to it about who has the cure and who doesn't. So we're going to talk about that today. Now, for anyone landing here for the first time, I'm Lora O'Brien. I'm an Irish draoi, and I've been a priest of the Irish goddess MĂłrrĂgan since 2004.
I took my master's in Irish history, so the work and the source that carries it both come off the Irish historical record with me and out of the guts of 30 years of doing this myself, so my own [00:01:00] experience as well as what I've learnt. This is Living Irish Witchcraft, and I make the podcast for the Irish Pagan School.
Now, the Irish word for charm is earca, and the collections are full of earcaĂ named for the job that they do. Now, whenever you come across an Irish term in this podcast, make sure you check the show notes. ~Um, ~the same for the sources. Everything is down below, so you can always grab that. But one of our scholars, Barbara Hiller, is writing in Charms, Charmers, and Charming in Ireland, gives us earca na fola for the blood, earca na daoithe for the toothache, and earca na dĂłite for the burn.
Now, there's dozens more where they came from, and every one of them is tied up to one particular complaint, as you might tell from the names. But in Ireland, a cure isn't a thing that you learn. It's a thing that you're given. Another author, Cecily Gilligan, interviewed people with cures the length of the country for her [00:02:00] book, Cures of Ireland.
~And one of the 119 cures she looked into, and ~of the 119 cures she looked into, about three-quarters had been passed down, mostly inside families, as I said. ~Now, nearly a third of the ones that get passed on can't stay with one particular sex. So a woman would give it to a man, and a man gives it to a woman, and that's how it's passed on.~
~I said gender earlier. That's a whole different conversation, but~
~No, we're gonna go with gender. ~Now, nearly a third of the ones that get passed on can stay with one particular gender. So a woman gives it to a man, and he gives it then on to a woman, and it gets passed like that. Don't know what happens to us non-binary people, but there we are. The conditions on holding a cure are pretty strict, though.
Somebody with a cure isn't supposed to ask for it to be handed to them. They're expected to make it whenever they're asked to, once they have it, and they're not allowed to charge for it. So a man in his
50s in the Armagh countryside who holds the cure of Bell's palsy gave Gilligan the whole of it in one line. And I quote, "With my charm, I can't advertise it, I can't charge for it, and I can't refuse it." Now, you're gonna meet the money rule inside the charm texts themselves as [00:03:00] well.
Barbara Hiller's, as I mentioned earlier, talks about one from Galway where the instruction's sitting in the body of the charm, and it says, literally, do not ask for payment in return. Another folklorist, Lady Wilde, ~uh,~ in the 1800s, drew the line in the same place, and she's saying that a potion made up of herbs had to be paid for in silver, but the charms and the incantations were never paid for or they'd lose their power.
Though you could make a present afterwards as thanks. Now, that's closer to the old Banfhasa tradition. So it's not just that things weren't valued, it was that they weren't being sold. They weren't being bought and sold, the actual magic of it, right? But the work and the skill and the learning that went into the herbalism or the actual purchase of the herbs or the growing of the herbs, those could all be charged for.
~But not the actual magic part~
But [00:04:00] not the actual magic part. But if you were grateful, if things worked out, you could absolutely be given a gift for it, in gratitude for it. But your given the help wouldn't be dependent on money changing hands. So that's misunderstood in modern times a lot, where people are saying like, "Oh, you can never charge money for the craft." The banfasa in a community was always paid, but it just wasn't necessarily in gold or silver, except for her herbal skills, right?
Except for her herbal skills. So the actual craft of it, you could absolutely charge for. Now, within Gilligan's interviews, about a third of the [00:05:00] 93 people that she interviewed wouldn't take money at all. And one woman with a wart cure told her that if she takes money or touches money, it won't work. And, that's fair enough, right?
There's rules for the tradition being the way it is, but it's going to be up to everybody to make sure that they can still, pay their bills at the end of the day
There's nearly always an exchange all the same, some small gift, shells gathered off the beach, a bit of bread. A man with an eye cure was told by the woman who handed it to him that a cure isn't finished until something is passed between the two people. So it is important to understand that back in the day, there were things that could be bartered and could even be paid for in goods.
These days, the no money rule might be a little bit more lax if somebody couldn't be paid in, shells off the beach [00:06:00] or couldn't be paid in a bottle of whiskey because that's not gonna pay their rent or pay their electricity bill or, keep the lights on in the house kind of thing, or put fuel in their car.
So it is important to understand that there's the principle of the thing and the ethos of it ~that you're not supposed to be~
That you're not supposed to be fleecing people for it, right? ~Um, ~or withholding it from people who couldn't pay you. I think that is the crux of it
With all these cures, the words themselves are held close. ~Um, ~Gilligan again quotes fieldwork from the north of Ireland finding that most people with a cure won't tell it even to their own spouse except to pass it on. Cures do get lost when somebody dies with theirs untold. One man told her that you have to have the grá for it, the love for it, or there's no point in you holding it at all.
If you're not doing this with a [00:07:00] good heart, if you're not curing people with a good heart, if you're only in it for the money, for example, then there's no point in you even having it. ~If a cure is given under conditions like those, then I can't~
So with all that being said, if a cure is given under conditions like those, I can't hand you one down this microphone, and anybody telling you different is trying to sell you something and maybe is a grifter, right? So just be careful out there
What I can give you though is one that got written down with no gaes attached to it. Lady Wilde recorded a charm for a burn in her collections of Irish cures, and she gives the actions along with the words. Now, I don't know whether she was supposed to do that at the time, but she certainly sets no condition in the book on who may say it,
so we will take what we are given, and what I want you to do is if somebody does have a burn, take the ordinary care of the burn first. Please don't just rely on magic charms, magic spells. Please take proper medical action first because the [00:08:00] charm sits on top of the treatment and not in place of it. So your average, your normal cool running water over the place of it for a good 20 minutes, and if it's anything worse than a small scald off the kettle, then it goes to a doctor rather to a charm.
Now, please, please be sensible about these things, right? But once the medical treatment has been issued, whatever is appropriate for the actual burn that you have, then lay your right hand very softly over the burned place, barely touching it. Say these words three times over to yourself, and each time you say them, give one gentle blast of breath from your mouth onto the place that's burnt.
And say, "Old clod beneath the clay, burn away, burn away. In the name of God, be thou healed. Amen." Now, of course, if you're not Christian, you can swap a particular deity, or you can call on your [00:09:00] ancestral lines. In the name of my ancestors, be thou healed. Beir Bua. So that's three sayings and three breaths, and take your time over them rather than rattling through them.
I want you to be really mindful. Wilde says that the pain eases after it, and that a deep sleep falls on the person, and I'd say the sleep does as much good as the charm, so that's the wording exactly as Wilde recorded it. Do as you will with that. You haven't been handed this under the old conditions, work it on yourself or on somebody in your own house who's asked you for it, and leave it there.
Don't set yourself up as a charmer off the back of a podcast and my work going through the historical record and the archives, because the people who actually hold those cures got them from somebody under conditions, and the ones that Gilligan spoke to would tell you themselves that charging for it or any kind of misuse of it will break it.
If what you want is practice that you can stand over like this, [00:10:00] with the source sitting right there beside the working, that's what you get every month in Simple Irish Spells. It's my newsletter over on the Irish Pagan School site. There's a free tier and a paid tier. Goes out a couple of times a month, and you'll find it at irishpagan.school/spells.
And again, make sure and check the show notes in these podcasts for the sources underneath. Slán.
