The Irish Ritual of Cursing
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That corpse you dread is living with you right now.
The Filidh or magical poets of ancient Ireland used the ritual known as the Glan Dicenn in the Irish language. It is a survival of Druidic custom. A ninth century Gaelic work refers to it in Irish as the Corrguineacht and describes it as consisting of “being on one foot, raised one arm and closed one eye making the Glan Dicenn.”
From this it appears that while uttering the verse or verses the poet stood on one foot, raised one arm and closed one eye. There are some ancient conditions attached to the Glan Dicenn, but the following style of ritual would have been followed: the poet started with a fasting. He went up onto the summit of a hill. He faced in the direction of the residence of the person he wished to cast the spell of the Glan Dicenn against, with the North Wind blowing at the time of the spell. This form of satire in ancient times seems to have had a most serious and formal manner of effectively cursing someone.
In fact the word ‘curse’ comes from the Irish language. It derives from the Irish word Cursacadh which meant abuse in ninth century Irish. It has since fallen into disuse in Irish but has found a permanence in English.
There is an ancient belief in Ireland that a curse developes a life of its own once pronounced.
Colonel Wood Martin in his book, “Traces of the Elder Faiths in Ireland, Volume 11″, notes that, ” a curse must fall on something; if it does not fall on the person on whom it is invoked, it will remain for seven years in the air ready to fall on the person who pronounced the malediction. “In Gaelic there is a saying that expresses this: faoi bhun crainn a thiteas an duillir – “under a tree falls its foliage”.
In the past the most helpless person was the widow, she usually had nothing. All she had left was her curse, and a widow’s curse was one of the most feared things in ireland. People were terrified of a Druid’s curse too although such curses are so few that they are relatively unknown, and with the advent of the new religion they came to fear the priest’s curse much more because the priests made full and frequent use of potent cursing.
If a person knows you have cursed him and he is an adept he can send your curse back at you to strike you three times harder under the ancient Threefold Law of Return. It may also be the case that the person you curse is under the protection of the Otherworld – if this is the case you are doomed. So be careful who you curse!
The writer and modern Druid Peter Beresford Ellis mentions the hereditary curse on a section of his family and says that he takes it very seriously. As the description suggests the hereditary curse fell upon a person and his descendants. The vicious injustice of this practice needs no comment from the fair-minded. The most famous hereditary curse in Ireland was on the family of the Marquis of Waterford. This family, named Beresford, took over the land and rank of the last Lord Power and Curraghmore after the Williamite War. One of the Beresfords hanged a widow’s only son in Seskin near Carrick-on-Suir for a trivial reason and the widow cursed him and his descendants for seven generations. All the owners of the beresford lands died violent deaths until the curse ran its course.
Cursing was often accompanied by certain rituals, not all of them coming from the ancient past. Cursing from a height is more effective, so we have the modern saying, “he cursed her from a height”. Some of the more interesting cursing ceremonies use stones called “cursing stones”. This practice probably comes from a time when miniatures of standing stones and stone circes were used, stones prised off the insides of tombs of eveil people as well.
A West Clare farmer was prosecuted in the last century for beating a beggar woman. In his defence in court he stated that she had threatened ” to turn the stone of Kilmoon against him.” The Kilmoon Stone was turned anti-clockwise by the curser whilst the words of doom were recited. The Kilmoon Stone could turn one’s mouth awry and make one look like a permanently deranged lunatic.
The famous Gaelic scholar John O’Donovan speaks of another cursing stone he saw on Caher island seven miles north of Renvyle Point in Galway. There is an ancient monastic site with some ruins on this island. The cursing stone is on the altar of the ruined church. If anybody felt wronged he went to the island, fasted and prayed. He turned the stone anti-clockwise as he cursed the wrong-doer. Then, if he was in the right a storm arose and the cursed person was destroyed.
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Source by Michael J Meehan McGrath