As I made my way across the courtyard, I banged my head smack into a post, probably not the most auspicious omen, but I tried to chalk it up to my clumsiness, rather than cosmic irony. On the other side of the ersatz karaoke bar was a small room that stank of ammonia from below the bamboo floor where the chickens hid from the sun, but otherwise the room was neat if Spartan, its only decoration a calendar from Japan.
From inside a dark room adjacent to the clinic wafted the sounds of the NBA playoffs, no more incongruous than the adjacent karaoke bar. The old woman, dressed rather stylishly in a purple blouse, her gray hair pulled back with a scrunchy into a ponytail, worked on a client, a woman suffering from asthma while I waited on a bamboo bench and watched her work. I was impressed.
There were no snakes, but it was still tactile and sensuous, and this is what you want when working with magic, to physicalize the mysterious and ineffable. A smooth stone lay at the bottom of the jar—the stone, she said, had been given to her by the Santo Nino.
The stone was cold and incredibly heavy, my guide said. He had touched it once. Her brand of magic was an amalgam of local animism and Catholicism; she crossed herself before she began her work.
Of all Western religions, Catholicism is perhaps best suited to mix and match with other ancient rituals and beliefs, its pantheon of saints, its incense, its holy water, all tactile and visible manifestations of the mysterious at work in the world.
Of all Western religions, none allow more for the intercession of the supernatural in the everyday lives of mortals. A friend of mine prays to Saint Jude, the patron Saint of Lost Causes to find parking spaces, and she claims he always comes through for her. The trick of crossing your fingers for good luck originated in the Middle Ages as a quick sign of the cross to ward off the devil and evil spirits. Certainly, even the most skeptical among us have crossed our fingers. As the woman blew on her straw, the water started growing cloudy and little specks of dirt floated in the jar.
She stopped blowing and examined the jar, withdrew a piece of something and showed it to her patient, then rinsed the jar clean and filled it with water again, repeating the process of blowing into the water until it clouded again. She started in on me, blowing bubbles along my shoulder, my chest, my groin.
My case was acute. I could have guessed as much. She used three jars of water on me, each one clouding up, big chunks of flotsam swirling in the water as she grunted and blew. I should have been at least a tad curious. I suppose I was letting him down in my complete lack of interest in how the clear water became dirty. He spent much of his professional career debunking psychics, but only because he wanted so desperately to believe in an afterlife so that he could communicate with his departed mother.
Psychics hated him and he was the object of many a curse. Who knows if they eventually worked? He did, after all, meet his end on Halloween. I suppose a skeptic would assume the junk in the jar originated in the straw or that she hid it in her cheeks.
At one point, she fished out a dark piece of something and said it looked like a scale of some sort. Before I could get too excited by the coincidence, I remembered that I had mentioned snakes when I was explaining the nature of my malady. She placed the dark thing on my finger and I studied it. Definitely not a scale but a soggy piece of wood. I passed it around the room, where some of my students were looking on.
A few touched it, but most refused. When the old woman had finished, she blew down my neck and said a prayer. I asked her if the curse was removed. Still, I bought a jar of special coconut oil from her, made with three hundred herbs, gathered during Holy Week and prepared on Black Saturday. She wanted to find someone who specialized in barang, not asthma.
Yes, there are such people, she was told, but they live high up in the mountains. They always do. You have to do some trekking. Unfortunately, we had limited time, so dispelling the spells of Evil Auntie Neneng would have to wait for another visit.
Of course, the question remains whether my curse was removed or not. I wondered in subsequent days whether an Indian curse could be removed by a Filipino healer who specializes in asthma. I even wondered whether I had indeed been cursed at all or if my woes, often indefinable, could be relegated to the nefarious and incurable human condition of daily life.
A couple of days later on the island of Bohol, while walking in my flip flops on a side street, I severely gashed my big toe on a rock. Later that day, my eye inexplicably swelled shut. And that evening, while walking home from a bar on the beach, I gashed my other big toe open on another rock, this time so badly that my flip flop was awash in blood and I left a rather ghastly trail all the way back to our hotel.
I fretted that my curse seemed stronger than ever. S ix weeks later, I traveled to Cuba—that summer found me careening wildly from one point of the globe to the other, mostly for reasons to do with my teaching and writing. In Cuba, I was scouting a workshop of undergraduates I would lead later in the year. Of West African origin and hybridized by Afro-Cuban slaves over several hundred years, Santeria is another manifestation of the dispossessed taking control of their lives in cosmic fashion, and another free mixing of Catholicism and animism.
As my guide led me to the church, we passed a smattering of women seated on the curbside, calling to us to have our fortunes told. Yunie pointed out the Santeras and Santeros, woman and men dressed all in white from head to toe—the religion had undergone a revival after originally being suppressed by the Communist Party. While most of us in the witch community want to believe every other witch and magical individual is loving and kind, particularly to our OWN kind, the truth is that not everyone is about the love and light.
The truth is — when jealousy or drama comes into play, a witch might be more prone to curse another witch than a non-witch. A common sign of a curse includes strange animal appearances, disappearances and illnesses. Is there an animal that seems to be sticking around, checking you out more than usual?
Have you found a dead or dying animal or more at your doorstep, recently? Or have your pets come down with illness or death? Unfortunately animals are subject to curses, too. Are you finding broken glass on your doorsteps or in your front yard seemingly out of nowhere?
This is one of those common signs of a curse or hex that dates back centuries. Broken glass may be a sign of a curse. This is a BIG one and one that you can always trust. Your guides will WARN you if you are under a spiritual attack of some kind. This is a sign of a curse that you can trust.
Signs will come in different forms — including random conversations, symbols in nature, on TV, etc. Make note that these thoughts are NOT your own. In addition to one or more of the above signs of a curse, sudden broken relationships could indicate spiritual attack. This could be any type of relationship: familial, romantic, platonic, etc. Curses seek to destroy lives and what better way to tear someone apart than to split them from their loved ones? Curses can truly only take root when the person being cursed fuels it with their own fear and negativity.
Keep this in mind. Someone once showed me a photograph of a pot of fecal matter — this is an obvious sign someone is throwing bad juju your way! Missing personal items is sometimes a sign of a curse.
Are you missing anything personal such as underwear, a hairbrush, jewelry, keys, etc.? These items carry your DNA and are often used by witches to curse individuals.
But seeing an omen in conjunction with other signs of a curse could confirm your suspicions. Depending upon the severity and power of the person cursing you, the weather over your house or property will be worse than elsewhere in town. Similar to how Eeyore always had a cloud over his head, except this will be over your home.
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. Crozier and Lily C.
John J. London, , iii, Patrick S. Dinneen ed. Dublin, , i, — MacRaild eds. Yeats , 2nd ser. London, , Captain Prout [John Levy] ed. Murphy, Diocese of Killaloe in the Eighteenth Century , 38— Western People , 10 Oct.
Home Gordon London, , Vingerhoets, Lauren M. James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance Yale, , 42—3. Corinne A. Oinas ed. Borrow, Wild Wales , iii, , , , The Most Rev. Dublin, , Kerry Evening Post , 19 Sept.
Newry Telegraph , 9 Oct. Hoppen, Elections, Politics, and Society in Ireland , Foster, Modern Ireland: — , ; K. Murphy, Diocese of Killaloe in the Eighteenth Century , Irish Times , 18 Feb. Irish Independent , 5 Dec. Janet K. Evening Herald , 12 Mar. Western People , 4 Mar. Saxon Bedlington, , — John C. Quoted in John D. Brewer with Gareth I. Strmiska ed. Irish Independent , 11 Nov. Michael L. Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University's objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide.
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Volume Article Contents Abstract. Thomas Waters Thomas Waters. Imperial College London. E-mail: thomasedwardwaters gmail. Oxford Academic. Google Scholar. Select Format Select format. Permissions Icon Permissions. Abstract Fairies, leprechauns, banshees, witches, holy wells and rural remedies. Open in new tab Download slide. Synge, The Aran Islands Dublin, , —4. For commercial re-use, please contactjournals.
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