How can a gypsy put a curse on you

At Ballyloo in , Father Tyrrell went with a hundred men to the house of Patrick Regan, where the priest gave Patrick his curse, saying he would soon see whether he would prosper.

During this conflicted moment, proselytizing also began to inspire clerical maledictions. Between the s and s, Protestant missionaries strove to persuade Irish Catholics to abandon Rome and embrace Reformed faiths. Curses were thrown at Protestant evangelists and their converts too, with notable victims being the Reverend Edward Nangle —83 and his mission on the island of Achill. In fact, there is good reason to think that the power of cursing clerics actually grew, in the wake of the famine.

In court, hundreds of witnesses described how the local Catholic clergy and others had used various intimidating practices, from violence to threatening letters to sermons calling for the Conservatives to be ostracized. Amongst these strategies was cursing. Following Holy Communion, Father Loftus stood at the altar, holding a chalice. The congregation laughed and even Charles himself chuckled. But the atmosphere darkened when the priest said anyone voting for Captain Trench would die bearing the mark of Cain, as would their children.

Against a Conservative supporter, Mrs Griffiths, Father Loftus pronounced a Gaelic curse translating as: the curse of the people on her — may bad luck fall on everything she touches. However, the main reason priests stopped throwing political maledictions lay elsewhere. Now, though, the main targets were sinful, antisocial parishioners. Another clerical curse victim was Thomas Mahon, a retired policeman and possible child killer from Carna in County Galway.

In Thomas secretly disposed of the dead body of his little daughter, who he had conceived out of wedlock with his cousin and housekeeper. He would have got away with it, had not the local priest heard rumours and put his malediction on anyone who did not report what they knew to the police. Stories about cursing priests were told in villages and towns across mid-twentieth-century Ireland, the Irish Folklore Commission discovered. Catholic priests were still extraordinarily plentiful, with as many as 1 to every members of the laity in Partly this was because the church hierarchy was now firmly in control.

With these responsibilities, ecclesiastical leaders could no longer permit their priests to use such terrible language. In any case, there were fewer reasons for clerics to curse. Widows were certainly plentiful and needful of power. The emigration and land consolidation following the Great Famine meant that female farmers most of whom were widows made up a growing proportion of tenants, from 4 per cent in , to 15 per cent by As well as publicly uttering maledictions, Irish women used modern means to advertise the dark forces they had unleashed.

Eviction Scene , Daniel MacDonald c. A kneeling woman, perhaps a widow, calls down a curse on the landlords evicting her family. Source: Crawford Art Gallery, Cork.

Reproduced with permission. Curses have been left out of accounts of Irish land conflict, but there is no doubt that they played an important role.

From an emotional perspective, evicted tenants consoled themselves with the thought that dire supernatural punishments awaited the new occupants. At Tully in County Mayo, farmland owned by Miss Pringle remained unoccupied for at least fifteen years during the s and s, because the old tenant had been evicted. A Scotsman named Patrick Dowd, for example, who in bought a distressed farm in Sligo. With curses, Irish women complained, agitated, denounced, denigrated and fought back. This may explain why, despite growing anxieties amongst Irish elites about the unruly conduct of verbally abusive females, Irish women continued to curse until the era of the Second World War and beyond.

Cursing, with its traditional resonances, was a powerful tool for conventionally demure women to loudly and forcefully object. Cursing dwindled, in Ireland, as its major uses disappeared and the networks that transmitted knowledge about it atrophied. But we should not exaggerate the extent of its decline, or imagine that it disappeared. At the mid-twentieth century, cursing was not just the province of aged farmers in the Gaeltacht — western Ireland, where Gaelic was strongest.

Maledictions were uttered across Ireland, North and South, Protestant and Catholic districts, even in towns and cities. The curse was known in Scotland too, and may have been brought to Ireland centuries ago by Presbyterian settlers though the transmission could have been the other way. Cinema, radio and television all diminished popular knowledge of cursing. The decline was partially compensated for by the increasing popularity of folklore books and pamphlets, where malediction stories were told and racy curses listed.

Perhaps that was overstating it: some people still knew bloodcurdling tales. Michael Rooney of Blacklion, for instance, who was interviewed for the Irish Folklore Commission in He talked volubly about dozens of topics, but when curses were broached, Michael went quiet.

Had he ever heard about them? It all came out. Curses sprung from bitter passions at trying times. They expressed fear, loathing, hate and yearning for pitiless vengeance, for punishments exceeding anything one could mete out physically. It was terrifyingly brutal, mustering dark feelings that marked people who had seen or maybe just heard about the events in question.

In Northern Ireland, as sectarian violence flared during the dark days of the Troubles, curses were sporadically revived. It was simpler, informed more by biblical imagery than oral tradition, yet it did have elements of public performance. Although not really an art, it seems to have nurtured determination and vengeance, amongst people experiencing terrible loss.

Whether or not the residents really credited the curse, it was politically counterproductive. Cursing was largely ignored during the late s and early s occult revival in Ireland.

Writers like W. Even so, cursing was not dead. Defeats in football, hurling and even stock market losses were occasionally blamed on old curses. Ellen Collins of Ballina, for instance, who thought a curse killed her mother, made her child disabled and gave her depression. In November , Ellen tried to stab the woman she held responsible for uttering it. There was another difference, between turn of the twenty-first-century curses and the maledictions of the s.

The emphasis on justice, on curses befalling evildoers, had waned. With the legal system generally trusted to provide fair outcomes, perhaps there was little need for a justice-based supernatural punishment.

Maybe, too, cursing was weakened by the decline of Catholicism and the idea of a supervisory God, with the weekly church-going rate in the Republic collapsing from 91 per cent in to 43 per cent in Fairies, rural remedies, stone circles and holy wells have made a modest comeback, in early twenty-first-century Ireland.

The art of cursing, on the other hand, is little cultivated. This is striking because, up to about the s, cursing was probably the most valuable magic in a land where all sorts of mystic forces were treated with respect, from Marian apparitions to banshees. These clever formulas were the basis for the unnerving art of real cursing, a scary but widespread occult attack that Irish folk used in their struggles over vital areas of life, from land and food to politics, religion, gender and family disputes.

It also reminds us that not all types of magic share the same chronology of rise and fall, growth and decline, enchantment and disenchantment. Irish cursing persisted partly because of its value, use and functions. With fearsome curses, needy Irish people did indeed demand food, land, and family and religious loyalty, with some success.

Yet cursing did not always work that way. Cursing was not only an intimidating magical weapon, but also a dark therapy. Nor was it employed exclusively by the weak and powerless. Cursing was rife in nineteenth-century Ireland because many people valued it, not only poor peasants and beggars, but priests, parents, and others needful of influence and consolation. To be intimidating and cathartic, cursing required knowledge, practice, wit, skill and composure.

In this respect, it was an art. Recognizing this challenges us to reconsider our wider ideas about the history of magic. Concepts like belief, ritual, tradition, symbolism, mentality and discourse undoubtedly illuminate key aspects of historic Irish maledictions.

Overall though, cursing is best conceived of as an art because of the cultivation it required and the strength of the reactions it elicited. The same is likely to be true, though perhaps to a lesser degree, of other magical techniques.

Magic is a potent force in the world, not supernaturally but psychologically. Psychosomatically, it can heal, injure and even kill; intimidate, haunt and terrify; or invigorate, inspire and empower. If we want to appreciate how magic can move people in these ways, we need to better appreciate how accomplished, skilful and imposing it is. It is time we acknowledged the polish and power of the art of magic.

Many thanks to the librarians and archivists who helped me locate sources for this article. Exceptions include: Patrick C. College Dublin M. Biagini and Mary E. Daly eds. Adekunle G. Ahmed et al. Deffenbacher et al. For example: Mark C. Like many early twentieth-century anthropologists, Malinowski was nonetheless rather condescending about the topic. Davies and D. Is a curse just a superstition or is there more to it than that? One of the most prevalent beliefs about being cursed is that you should never refuse a gypsy or annoy a witch as they may put the heebies on you.

Fortune-telling Carly, 24, was visited at home by a woman claiming to be Romany and offering to read her fortune. All the time she was saying:?

It is said that a group of gypsies placed a curse on the ground when they were moved on from a site they considered to be their home. Modern witches also have an unfounded reputation for cursing. Many are vocal against their characterisation as compulsive cursers. Mavis Collingwood of Occult Art Company www. Most practising witches consider cursing unethical but there are some who will curse if they believe the other person deserves it.

Collingwood says she has seen some interesting examples of effective curses involving poppets dolls filled with hair and nail parings, then stuck with pins. Then in he was horrified by news accounts of an English Gypsy woman whose home was bulldozed while she was giving birth. That child and her three other children were killed in the demolition. Gypsies, who prefer to be called Roma, are believed to have migrated from India to Europe more than 1, years ago.

They number about 12 million throughout the world, about 1 million in the United States. Their language, Romani, is a Sanskrit dialect influenced by the languages of countries in which they have lived. He teaches about 30 undergraduates and a handful of graduate students each semester.

The courses cover Gypsy traditions such as reluctance to marry non-Gypsies and their rules for food preparation, similar to the Jewish kosher requirements. I thought they were a people who preferred not to work and had a carefree, fun-loving life. Hilton discovered firsthand the myths Hancock tries to debunk. When doing research for a paper, she interviewed Austin police detectives who told her they dealt with Gypsies involved in car-theft rings and fraud rackets.

Although he dropped out of school at 14, Hancock was enrolled at the University of London as part of an experimental program. He had caught the attention of a professor who was impressed by his independent studies on West African languages.