CC Ep 5 What Was Never Said In The House
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[00:00:00] We're going old school into the lore and legends today. So this bit comes out of the Journal of the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland for 1895, where a scholar called Herbert Hoare sets out to explain where the banshee came from.
~Where the Banshee came from.~ Quote, "Every great Irish house retained a nurse who had knowledge of herbs, who prepared decoctions and administered them, and who attended to and watched the sick and the dying." End quote. He goes on to say that she was used to being up at night, and that perhaps she went out now and again to gather herbs by moonlight, and that she was used to mourning and crying.
So when a patient in her care was past hope, she'd begin to lament in her own fashion. ~His next sentence runs on...~
His next sentence says, "The inhabitants of the house or castle ~in which the sufferer lay,~ in which the sufferer lay, would recognize in her cries a sure [00:01:00] sign that the sufferer was dying." So a decoction, if you're not familiar, is herbs boiled down in water until the goodness is out of them. It's actually the roots and stems.
~Um, ~an infusion would be the leaves and flowers. Just in case you needed that kind of level of nerdiness. So the woman that Hoare is describing is the household's healer, or Bean Feasa. She's the one with the knowledge, the one who's up at night, the one who can see what's coming before anyone else in the building can.
I'm Lora O'Brien, and I'm a native Irish educator and cultural steward with a master's degree in Irish history.
~With a master's degree in Irish history.~ Most of my working life has been spent in the folk record here in Ireland, reading what ordinary Irish people said and did at home, which is often a long way from what the people above them wrote down about them. Now, a good number of you are listening a long way from Ireland.
I get that. And very few [00:02:00] of us grew up in anything that could be called a great house. I certainly didn't. But the house in Hoare's article is an Irish one from centuries back, and the house that counts here is whichever one you were raised in, wherever it stood, whether it was on this island or not. The banshee that Hoare is trying to explain belongs to a family rather than to a place.
He describes her as a feminine spirit whose affection for the family she was attached to showed itself when one of them was about to die. And he says that these spirits were entirely hereditary in their sympathies, so she came down the line with the name. ~So he seems to be talking here about basically that these nurses or this role or this function~
Basically that these nurses or healers who were attached to the families became spirits, became ancestral spirits. ~Um, ~or it could be that the role and function that was attached to the household drew otherworldly spirits or ghosts who were attracted to that
So as he's [00:03:00] talking about this, the best authenticated account that he can find is from the memoirs of Lady Fanshawe, who heard one at Inchiquin House before the death of one of the O'Brien family. And I'll leave you to make what you like of my own surname here. ~I know of what I speak~
I know of what I speak. But Hoare adds that there's been no other equally plausible case since. Now, I would definitely disagree with that. So he hopes we won't see another, which is about as dry as a Victorian antiquarian gets. This guy really was trying to explain away this cultural phenomenon. He was trying to make sense of it.
He was trying to use logic to explain why everybody and their auntie in Ireland believes in the banshee. And honestly, to this day, it's one of the things that is still the most common belief, I would say the most common belief in Ireland still would be about the banshee. And even talking to my [00:04:00] own kids, who are all in their 20s now, they would have stories about their peers hearing the banshee.
So it's the one that has really stayed with us. So I don't know where Hoare is getting that from. ~It's wishful thinking maybe.~
Wishful thinking maybe. But his project in that article is really to take the banshee apart. He calls her a pretended spiritual phenomenon and says that his analysis will leave no specter and no phantom, only a visible human form. And he calls his own explanation conjectural. So he's not even given credence to the notion that maybe there would be a spirit or an Otherworld entity attached to this particular role and function, or somebody who had died within the family or within the household
But what I'd really like to look at is the house that he describes because that's the part that is worth a look and it's worth kind of keeping for [00:05:00] our work that we're doing here with the Cailleach community. So the way I read his account, the one piece of news that everybody in that house needed, that the person in the bed was dying, it came as a sound in the night.
And nobody stood at the foot of the bed to say it. And the household gave that sound to a spirit rather than to the actual woman whose work it was. But there's another detail that Hoare takes from an older source, Hamner the Chronicler, about how a sheep and a cow were shared out when they were killed in an Irish castle in the 16th century.
Each piece went to a named member of the household and the nurse had one of the best cuts of beef. So this is tied to much older traditions from the Brehon law, which is Ireland's native legal system, pre-colonization, which talked about, it's often called a champion's portion and that would be [00:06:00] from our mythological sources, but it was definitely into our actual legal and cultural sources.
So there was rules for who got the fairest part of anything that was being divided up within the household. So this nurse, this healer, this Bean Feasa, this wise woman who knew about the herbs, who knew about gathering herbs by moonlight, ~who possibly was a form of,~ who possibly practiced some form of divination so she knew what was coming, who was the lamenter, the keener in the house as well.
The household fed her well for her work and by the time this guy was writing about it, this would have been a native woman within probably an English household in the big house. So she was still kept on and ~she was still a skillful,~ she was still a skilled craftsperson ~within the colonized household.~
Within the colonized household who fed her well for her work, as I said, and still the thing that she knew ended up credited to the fairies as something that had happened in the house with the woman herself dropped out of it. [00:07:00] Now, whether she was crying or the fairies were crying, who can say? But to bring that home for your own house, which is smaller, ~um,~ the house that you grew up in probably was smaller.
Again, not many of us would have grown up in a big, grand house. Maybe you did, maybe you didn't. But by the time we were all born, there was nobody being paid to cry. There was a thing that everybody in it knew, ~um,~ it might have been drink or money or a marriage that everybody could see was in trouble, or a name that stopped being used at the table one year and never came back when somebody, ~you know,~ left the fold.
But everybody in that house, well, every adult in that house knew it, and nobody ever put it into a sentence. It remained unspoken. But the information moved anyway. It moved in who left the room and who went quiet when a certain car pulled up outside or somebody's name happened to [00:08:00] come up in conversation.
It moved in the jobs that suddenly became urgent the minute a child asked the wrong question in their own confusion. You could read all of that long before you could read words, and you probably got very good at it, especially those of us who were socialized female from birth, because we had to be good at it.
We had to be good at reading the room. We had to be good at reading the silences. But what that's left us is the thing that sits on your chest in the small hours. And the reason it has no name is that nobody in the house ever gave it one. These were the things that remained unsaid, unspoken. And there's a loyalty in keeping it as well.
Saying the sentence out loud, naming the problem, can feel like betraying the people who kept that secret, even if they're long dead or gone out of your life, even when what [00:09:00] they kept was hurting you or hurting them. So you end up keeping the secret too, and you call it privacy or respect or loyalty or just not making a fuss.
What's the point? Why, why would we bother talking about all that now? We don't want to dredge up the past But that silence didn't start with your own parents. They learned it in the house that they grew up in from the people who'd learned it in their houses. And like Hoare's banshee, it came down the line with the name.
Whatever your people were and wherever they came from, the rule about what could be said arrived in your house, and it was already old by the time it got to you. It's also why going near it is so hard. That's a lot of generations of secrecy. That's a lot of generations of not speaking about something. So you can be a capable woman who runs meetings and budgets and other people's crises and [00:10:00] still find that when you come close to that one sentence, that one knowledge, that one thing, everything in you says no.
And that no is a rule that's been kept for longer than you've been alive, ~and,~
and it's still doing the job that it was handed And in most families, somebody ends up as the nurse. That role, that tradition, that function is still being carried on in most households. She's the one who notices first and sits up with it. She's the one whose reaction gets treated as the problem instead of as the news.
Maybe that was your mother or an aunt or a grandmother. Maybe it was you. Maybe you're still doing it at every family table that you sit down at
And it follows you to work as well. You're very likely the woman who can tell a project is dying months before anybody else says so in a meeting. You see it coming. You know which director isn't speaking [00:11:00] to which, and you get called maybe too sensitive for noticing ~You learned,~ you learned that reading in a kitchen, and it's earned you a living, but it's cost you plenty.
And very few people who ever asked you, and very few people have ever asked you what it's like to carry it, what it's like to hold those secrets, to see something coming, to even maybe know how to fix it, but to feel stuck, to feel silent, to feel like you can't acknowledge it
But what's different now is who decides. The house that you grew up in decided what could be said and who said it. But the house that you run now, in that house,
The first person who hears that sentence or breaks that silence can be you
~So the practice today is,~ the practice today is one that happens at nighttime, once the house has gone quiet around you. [00:12:00] So wait until anyone that you live with, the others in your household, are asleep or out, or wait until the hour that you'd usually be lying awake anyway. Sit up somewhere with one lamp on, in a chair rather than in the bed, please.
We're gonna be doing this one conscientiously. And bring to mind the one thing that everybody in the house you grew up in knew and nobody said. And take the first one that arrives rather than the biggest one, whatever just comes up first for you when you think about that. And then say it out loud once, just in your ordinary voice, just to the quiet room.
Just say it. Now, if nothing arrives, switch off the lamp anyway and try again another night. Let yourself mull over it when you're going for your walk, when you're having your shower, when you're driving. Just let your brain work away on it. Let your heart and soul remember before your brain does, before it [00:13:00] arrives out your mouth
But while you're there on that other night, if two arrive at once, say the one that came first and leave the other one for another night, because the practice only ever takes one sentence
You got time. You can figure this out. You don't have to do it all at once And when you're done, switch off the lamp and go to bed. You don't have to write it down. Don't go looking for what it means tonight. ~Just say the thing that was never said~
Just say the thing that was never said in your house
Now keep that sentence to yourself. ~Um, ~you don't have to take it to a living relative or treat it as an accusation of anybody who lived in that house. If it turns out to be about harm that was done to you, it does deserve proper support from somebody trained to give it, and a great deal more than a few minutes by a lamp is ever going to be able to do for you.
So please take care of yourself if that's the case The grounding audio and the PDF that goes with it are free at [00:14:00] cailleach.community/past, that's P-A-S-T. If you'd like something to steady yourself around this, that's always a good start. I made it for the women who come to me with the waking anxiety and the inherited heaviness, just like you.
So I'll see you in the next episode. Slán.
