Charms, Charmers and Charming in Ireland

From the Medieval to the Modern

John Carey, Ciarán Ó Gealbháin, Ilona Tuomi, Barbara Hillers, John Carey, Ciarán Ó Gealbháin, Ilona Tuomi, Barbara Hillers

• Publisher: University of Wales Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781786834942
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Critica letteraria del periodo medievale e dei primordi dell'età moderna

This is the first book to examine the full range of the evidence for Irish charms, from medieval to modern times. As Ireland has one of the oldest literatures in Europe, and also one of the most comprehensively recorded folklore traditions, it affords a uniquely rich body of evidence for such an investigation. The collection includes surveys of broad aspects of the subject (charm scholarship, charms in medieval tales, modern narrative charms, nineteenth-century charm documentation); dossiers of the evidence for specific charms (a headache charm, a nightmare charm, charms against bleeding); a study comparing the curses of saints with those of poets; and an account of a newly discovered manuscript of a toothache charm. The practices of a contemporary healer are described on the basis of recent fieldwork, and the connection between charms and storytelling is foregrounded in chapters on the textual amulet known as the Leabhar Eoin, on the belief that witches steal butter, and on the nature of the belief that effects supernatural cures.

1

EUROPEAN AND AMERICAN SCHOLARSHIP AND THE STUDY OF MEDIEVAL IRISH ‘MAGIC’ (1846–1960)

Jacqueline Borsje

Introduction

Two millennia ago, the Roman intellectual Gaius Plinius Secundus (23–79 CE), also known as Pliny the Elder, wrote about remedies and medicine.¹ He formulates an ‘important’ and ‘never-settled’ question in his famous Natural History: ‘Have words and formulated incantations any effect?’² He begins by stating that the wisest men reject this belief, while the general public believes it unconsciously. Then, however, he gives many examples in which words (and rituals) have been effective.

What Pliny refers to are – what I call – ‘words of power’: words with which people believe themselves to be able to influence reality in a supernatural way. I use the term ‘supernatural’ as a descriptive tool for the non-empirical dimension of life, which is crucial to religious belief cultures. This neutral term can be applied to notions found in any religion. There are various verbal-power genres: curses, blessings, prayers, satire, spells and so on. All over the world, people use such utterances/texts as religious/linguistic proactive/reactive strategic devices in order to enhance their lives. The doubts that Pliny expressed about their efficacy have multiplied in secularised cultures, but the use of powerful words has never been abandoned.

‘Magical texts’, such as spells, charms and incantations, form one genre among these words of power. Recent developments in international scholarship have shown an increased interest in this genre: many publications on various magical texts, objects and rituals have seen the light in the past decades.³ In 2000, however, John Carey noted the virtual absence of medieval Irish magical texts in these studies and a predominant focus on the twelfth century and later.⁴ Irish culture is a crucial hinge between late-antique and medieval culture.⁵ As is reflected in the present volume, for instance, several Celticists are now researching this important field. It is worthwhile investigating what kind of attention Celticists paid to magical texts in the early decades of the discipline. We need to study which theoretical, and especially religious, concepts influenced them. If we do not position them within the mentality history of Europe and beyond,⁶ if we do not grasp which time- and place-bound concepts are implicit in their descriptions, our thinking is influenced by the biases inherent in them without our being aware of it. We need to study which historical, cultural, intellectual and religious factors were influential in the lives and output of these scholars. This brief chapter is a modest initiative for studying the following question: What scholarship was devoted to medieval Irish ‘magical texts’ from roughly the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century?

This chapter will give an introduction to the first century of research into verbal power by Celticists, focusing on the so-called magical texts – a term that I shall use to include charms, spells and incantations.⁷ I subscribe to the view that magical texts are characterised by a claim, sometimes implicit, that the words possess intrinsic power. They may contain foreign words and mysterious language that makes use of obscure, cryptic and highly symbolic utterances. Because this chapter is based on the views of our scholarly predecessors, I have included texts that fall under my umbrella term ‘words of power’ but that need not be magical texts in the strict sense. I will note when such sister genres occur and treat them as examples of the wealth of Irish forms of verbal power, without giving a full bibliography. I have divided the material under three headings: survey studies, clustered collections and studies of individual texts.

Survey Studies

Pioneering work was done by Heinrich Friedrich Zimmer (1851–1910) from Germany. In 1895, he published an article on the term éle, which he translated as Zauberspruch, Zaubergesang (spell, incantation/charm).⁸ His etymology of the term was disputed by the Irish Whitley Stokes (1830–1909)⁹ and Danish Holger Pedersen (1867–1953).¹⁰ Despite the debatability of the etymology, Zimmer’s methodological approach of how to study such a text and textual genre can nevertheless be called exemplary. He discovered a spell in a ninth/tenth-century Old-English collection of medical reference books known as Bald’s Leechbook (London, British Library, Royal 12 D xvii).¹¹ The editor could not recognise the language of the spell,¹² despite the fact that the manuscript itself identifies it as Irish; Zimmer confirmed this identification. He interpreted the words helæ and hæle from the Leechbook spell as Old-Irish (h)éle – the self-referential term of the spell. He compared the language and structure of this éle-spell with other medieval Irish verbal-power texts (especially those in the eighth/ninth-century Stowe Missal and Sankt Gallen manuscript leaf; see below) and with texts in other genres. He made a survey of instances of the term éle as it is found in medieval Irish literature, and mentioned other spells called éle, of which one exists outside a narrative context (the éle from An Leabhar Breac, ‘The Speckled Book’; see below). This methodology is still valid today: Irish magical texts need to be studied not only within the context of verbal power but also in relation to all Irish literary genres; moreover, they need to be compared with spells in different languages. The often bi- or multi-lingual character of verbal power pleads for this approach.

The Dictionary of the Irish Language translates éle not only as ‘charm, incantation’, but also as ‘prayer’.¹³ The overlapping of the textual genres spell and prayer is highly problematic to certain dominant Christian discourse models, according to which the former is ‘unorthodox’ and the latter ‘orthodox’; yet verbal-power material displays such overlapping. Using the umbrella term ‘words of power’ may broaden our view beyond such dominant discourse/terminology so that we study differentiated religious belief cultures in an open, non-normative way. Various sorts of religious belief cultures may coexist with dominant models and may even be adhered to by a majority of the population in certain places and periods of time. Numerically, supposedly ‘heterodox’ culture may be in the majority, while within the dominant religious power structure, it is judged as heretical, foolish or wrong.

The (Anglo-)Irish scholar Eleanor Hull (1860–1935) showed her awareness of this overlapping of genres when she published a survey article that emphasised the link between hymns and charms.¹⁴ She first described protective hymns from the eleventh-century Liber Hymnorum that were accredited with supernatural power,¹⁵ and then devoted her article to another protective genre called lorica (literally: ‘breastplate’). She compared the medieval texts with modern ones from Ireland and Scotland, and rounded off by referring to the presence of charms in the Middle-Irish metrical tracts and in liturgical manuscripts and prayerbooks, such as the Sankt Gallen leaf, the Stowe Missal, the Book of Nunnaminster (eighth/ninth century) and the Book of Cerne (eighth/ninth century). She divided her material into two groups: first, the hymns that were formed upon a foreign ecclesiastical model – even though ‘composed as charms or believed by later reciters to contain definite charm-power’ – and second, the lorica genre together with the similar ‘native charms’.¹⁶ Hull’s article leaves the reader with an impression of the interconnectedness of the material in content, use/function and manuscript context, despite her use of a twofold classification loosely based on a foreign/native contrast.

Further important survey studies followed. The years 1911 and 1912 saw the appearance of ground-breaking work by the Breton Louis Gougaud (1877–1941); Gougaud catalogued loricae, followed by hymns and prayers comparable to the lorica.¹⁷ He described the literary-cultural background and international comparanda of the lorica, listed its structural elements, and explained its use. He dedicated a separate section to a comparison with magical texts, noting a deeply rooted popular belief in ‘the sovereign force of mysterious formulae, the efficacy of “powerful words”’.¹⁸ The American Fred Norris Robinson (1871–1966) described the importance of satire and its connection with spells or incantations in 1912.¹⁹ His article contains a useful survey of relevant terminology and portrays the Irish material (narratives and law texts) in an international context. Another American, John Revell Reinhard (1893–1974), published his monograph on geis (prohibition, injunction, ‘tabu’, spell/incantation) in 1933; material of relevance to the present study plays an important role in this book, especially in the final chapter on ‘magic, spells and transformations’.²⁰ Zimmer’s wish that a Celticist should look at the Anglo-Saxon manuscript in which he found the Irish éle/spell was more than fulfilled in 1945, when another American, Howard Maxwell Meroney (1905–91), made a survey of Irish words and phrases in Old-English charms.²¹ Finally, the Irish scholar James Carney (1914–89) edited several healing spells from various medical manuscripts; his wife Maura (Morrissey) Carney (1915–75) translated and commented on them.²²

The survey studies discussed above cover three important areas of verbal power: healing, harming and protection. A somewhat different, although related, area is divination or prophecy, the art of finding out about things hidden. There are some medieval Irish descriptions of rituals for acquiring this hidden knowledge. Although these rituals may involve magical texts, this area differs from other forms of verbal power, because the perceived direct influence of the words on reality is lacking or of a different nature. The area of mantics and prophecy is beyond the scope of this chapter and deserves a study on its own. For this reason, the description of this research area is brief. People observe signs and hear sounds that they interpret; these interpretations lead to the taking of decisions about actions or refraining therefrom. Misunderstood signs or utterances, the manipulation of signs and words, different possible interpretations – these themes have been creatively employed in the literature. Survey studies into well-known divinatory practices such as imbas forosnai were published by the American Robert Douglas Scott (born 1878) and the English Nora Kershaw Chadwick (1891–1972).²³

Clustered Collections

Magical texts are sometimes clustered together in medieval and later manuscripts. Among the most renowned are the healing spells from the Stowe Missal and the Sankt Gallen manuscript leaf.²⁴ The Sankt Gallen incantations have received considerable scholarly attention. The earliest editions are by the German Johann Kaspar Zeuss (1806–56), who added brief, mainly grammatical annotations in Latin; and by Zimmer who reflected on Zeuss’s work and translated the ritual prescription of the third incantation, Caput Christi, ‘Head of Christ’, into Latin.²⁵ The German Rudolf Thomas Siegfried (1830–63) edited a variant version of Caput Christi from Dublin, TCD H 3.17, a manuscript best known for its important legal material; Stokes published Siegfried’s papers posthumously, noting that this version ...