LIW 23: Did Ireland Hunt Its Witches?
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[00:00:00] We're gonna open this episode with a line from a Jesuit, William Good, describing the witch people feared in Gaelic Ireland in the 1580s He said that they feared some old trot that would filch away their butter. His words, obviously. And this is describing when a hare was found among the cattle on May Day that was taken to be the witch and killed.
Now, I'm Lora O'Brien, and this is Living Irish Witchcraft from the Irish Pagan School. I've been an Irish draoi and priest of The Morrigan since 2004. I have written eight books, and I hold a master's degree in Irish history, so I know of what I speak. Now, you'll have met the story that Europe burned its witches by the million, and if you've been at this a while, you've likely read the historians who took that number apart.
Ireland's part in it is very, very small, and expert on Irish witchcraft, Andrew Sneddon, [00:01:00] set it out case by case in his book, Witchcraft and Magic in Ireland.
The Dame Alice Kyteler case is the oldest. You may have heard of her. She's from Kilkenny, and ~this was in nine-~ and this was in 1324 and 1325, when Dame Alice Kyteler's stepchildren accused her of using sorcery to murder their fathers. The Bishop of Ossory had really had it in for Dame Alice. His name was Richard de Ledrede, and he went further and charged her and about 10 others with heresy and sorcery.
Now, Alice Kyteler got away to England, but one of the accused, Petronella de Media, was flogged, gave evidence against Dame Alice, and then she was burnt alive. Ireland got our own witchcraft statute in the law in 1586, and it stayed on our books until 1821. ~Um, Sneddon...~ Until 1821, and Sneddon goes back through the older counts of Irish witch trials and kind of corrects them, [00:02:00] and he lands on four recorded trials for witchcraft in early modern Ireland with one execution.
So Florence Newton was tried at the Cork Assizes in 1661. She was accused of bewitching a young servant in Youghal, and the sources go quiet on how it ended. It's generally assumed that she was convicted and executed In 1711, eight women from around Island Magee in Antrim were convicted at Carrickfergus.
They were sentenced to a year in prison and four turns in the pillory on market day. That's where you get your head and your hands stuck in the big wooden stocks and people would ridicule you at best and often throw rotten fruit and vegetables at you. Certainly by the end of the day, if stuff hadn't sold, rather than carry it home, if it was a bit gone off or a bit dodge, the people who were trapped in the pillories would be the ones who got the brunt of the [00:03:00] rotten fruit and veg thrown at them.
But the witch that ordinary people feared was this butter thief that was referred to by this Jesuit good. And he had another test for finding her. People would look at a house through the shoulder blade bone of a sheep. If a spot or a shadow showed in the middle of it, the owner was taken for a witch who'd steal all their butter the next summer.
In the book Irish Folkways, E. Eston Evans puts the fear down to how chancy butter making was when a family had only one or two cows and fairies, witches and blinkers to contend with. So blinker is like an eye biter, like what we call the evil eye in other traditions. And they had a lot going against them, ~you know,~ and they needed the butter.
So he calls the protective charms around the churning absolutely legion, as in there were so, so many of them. And the ones he lists are [00:04:00] small and domestic. If you walked into an old style mountain kitchen while the churning was on, you might be asked to lend a hand or at least to leave your weight on the staff to show your intentions weren't evil.
So you're basically contributing to the churning of the butter to make sure that your part in it is good, ~you know.~
There were to be no bad words while the churning went on, and no quarrels, no singing, and no drinking. No singing. When the butter broke, a small ball of it was smeared on the wall or tossed up on top of the dresser to bring luck to the house. And among the other guards and protections that Evan lists for the butter, a ring of salt went onto the lid of the churn as well.
Now, if the butter still wouldn't come, if all of this was in place and the milk just wouldn't churn, there were ways of catching the thief because this is said to be somebody who has turned the butter against you, basically. And Evans [00:05:00] again gives one where a cake stuck with pins went into the churn with a bunch of yarrow, a plant, in case you're not familiar, and the thief came crying to the door in pain.
So it's almost like, ~uh, you know, this,~ this whole sticking pins into somebody, ~um,~ that we would see in other cultures. We had it in our culture as well, and it's just as old, to be honest, if not more old. ~It could--~ We have a very, very old one called the glove deacon, which used clay and blackthorn thorns.
~And,~
~um, so yeah,~ who's to say where it started? It could have started consecutively in various cultures because, ~you know,~ sticking sharp things into representations of people that you wanted to do harm to. Surely more than one group of humans could have come up with that. Anyway
For today's charm, what I'd love you to do is take the butter that you already have in the fridge. Now, please use real butter. Please don't be using margarine or something. So if you do have to go out and buy some, if you want to do this, please make sure that you're buying actual real dairy butter, not that whipped shit that you get [00:06:00] in America or some kind of oil plastic margarine nonsense, right?
~We're,~ we're looking for real butter here because you will just offend every ancestor and spirit. I'm not just saying it for the sake of, like, snobbiness about butter, although I do have snobbiness about butter, and I will be the first to admit that. Anyway, go and buy some real butter or take the butter that you have in the fridge.
Leave it out for about an hour so it's soft enough to work with. Then get a bowl, spoon, pinch of salt, and the usual dish that you keep your butter in. Now, the kitchen gets Evans' churning rule while you're at it, so no bad words, no rows. I'd avoid the singing personally and the drinking, ~you know,~ just for the sake of it, but have your own way about it, I suppose.
If there's an argument going on through the house, wait until the argument is over. Then put a lump of the butter in the bowl and work it with the spoon. Now, if you want to go churning your own butter, please do that too. ~There are actual,~ there are actually [00:07:00] guides online. You can do a YouTube search for how to churn butter and you will see.
So if you want to make your own butter for this, by all means. But, ~um,~ you can use the spoon and the butter that you have, and as you work it, you say what you're guarding. So I would say something like, "Butter for this house and luck for this house, and nobody takes from either." Something simple, right? Use your own words.
~Um, ~anybody who comes into the kitchen while you're at it, they rest a hand on the spoon for a moment. They might give it a little, ~um,~ a little work, as you say, like just push the spoon into the butter
And if you want to ask them in words that are close to the tradition, you tell them to leave their weight on the spoon, something like that. And it's the same way that a visitor would leave their weight on the butter when they were doing the churning. Now, if nobody comes in, you just work it through yourself, and you share with the house.
You just work it through yourself, and if you share the house with people who'd look sideways at [00:08:00] this, the words can go under your breath, and nobody knows any more than you're just messing around with the butter a bit ~if anybody happens to see you~
if anybody happens to see you. Now, when it's worked, you press the butter back into its dish, put the lid on, sprinkle a thin ring of salt around the dish, and this obviously is standing in for putting the salt on the lid of the churn, and say that the lid's on. So, the lid's on, and what's ours stays ours.
So that's why I would always make it a covered dish if possible. And then you can put a small knob of the butter on a saucer on the highest shelf in the kitchen for the look of the house, which is near as most of us get really to the top of the dresser, where the, ~um,~ the original folklore would have it tossed.
~I mean,~ it could go on top of your kitchen cabinets maybe if you don't have mice to worry about. Maybe put it in a jar rather than on a plate. And finish it off with Beir Bua, gain victory. ~And then Remove that,~ and then remove that offering, that little, ~uh,~ knob of butter that you [00:09:00] put in the morning. Sweep up the salt and use the butter the same as always.
Now, the cake full of pins stays in the teaching because that charm was built to hurt whoever was suspected, and we don't need to do that. What you're doing here guards your own and leaves everybody else alone. So go to irishpagan.school/witchcraft for more Irish witchcraft, funnily enough, that keeps its sources in view.
It's very important to me that you know exactly where all this stuff is coming from because it is part of our, both our historical record and our living traditions as I live and breathe them every single day. So it's coming to you directly from people who are living the tradition here, namely me, and you'll find the most recent of what we've made at that link, irishpagan.school/witchcraft.
And as I record this, ~there is something good in the works~
There is something good in the works, so I will see you next time. Slán.
