Holy Wells Research Articles

H17 Traditional medicine: a warts-and-all tale

Abstract A viral wart is a common benign lesion caused by infection with human papillomavirus. They typically present in children; however, they are also often seen in adults, particularly in immunosuppressed patients. Modern treatments for viral warts include cryotherapy, cantharone, cautery and curettage, and topical chemotherapeutic agents. However, historically, a variety of methods were employed to treat viral warts: animal-based, plant-based, mineral-based and magicoreligious. These can be further categorized based on the principles of chance and transference (Barron C, Soverino T. Snails, water in a stone, and Holy Wells: an examination of wart cures from the Irish Schools’ Folklore Collection, 1937–38. Folklore 2020; 131:386–412). One popular method that combined both the principles of chance and transference involved finding a snail by chance and then rubbing it on the warts, and skewering the snail to kill it. The concept behind this method was that the warts would be transferred to the snails and then the warts would subsequently decay with them. Another animal-based cure involved stealing a piece of meat, usually bacon, and rubbing the meat into the wart before burying the meat. In terms of mineral-based cures, there were many popular methods. The most commonly encountered treatments included holy water, forge water (often from a blacksmith), water from a stone or ‘wart rocks’. People would also attend ‘wart wells’ and make offerings of stones. The use of water was the most widespread mineral-based cure. Plant-based cures were also prevalent, with the milk of a dandelion, the juice of a potato, rushes and straw being just a few examples. Plant-based cures were often combined with aspects of religion. One cure involved cutting a potato in two, and rubbing the cut part to the wart in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. The potato was then put away in an old wall; when it shrivelled up, it was believed the wart would disappear. There were also ritualistic methods. Certain healers could perform prayers, and it was believed that when a funeral would pass, one should lift clay three times from under the right foot and rub it on the warts. They would then need to throw it away after the funeral. As the corpse wasted away, the warts would decay, too. While the natural trajectory was that these warts would have self-resolved irrespective of the cures used, our ancestors were proactive and employed many different methods to treat this common ailment.

Folk Liturgies and Narratives of Holy Wells among the Yoruba of Southwest Nigeria

Building on Celeste Ray’s extensive research on Ireland’s holy wells, I show how folk liturgies underlie meanings that are closely related to some of the practices that manifest around holy wells among the Yoruba in southwest Nigeria – meanings that are often neglected in the holy wells literature. I adapt some holy wells terms as they appear in existing studies for illustrative as well as for comparative purposes. Their interpretation and analysis will, however, focus on the liturgical narratives that best fit the article’s perception of what is local to holy wells among the Yoruba. With a focus on two holy wells, Olokun and Ori Aye, the article draws on the testimonies of local knowledge, close research encounters of ritual practices and performances and readings from extant literature to open the window through which holy wells and their various manifestations in the socio-cultural life among the Yoruba could be properly assessed and adequately understood.

Problematic Sources

Traditional Russian worldviews explained healing from water sources in terms both Protestants and Catholics would have used elsewhere in Europe: as the grace of God or as the intervention of saints through associated relics or wonder-working icons. Holy wells were freely venerated within parishes until the eighteenth century when Peter the Great and the Holy Synod (the Russian Orthodox Church’s highest governing body) forbade pilgrimage to holy wells in a reformist drive to eradicate religious “superstitions.” This essay employs primary sources to consider how nineteenth-century developments at Russian holy wells and mineral springs related to social class, economics and those eighteenth-century reforms that merged the church with government structures. While liturgical activities at holy wells and the designation of new holy wells was criminalized, mineral springs gained appeal for “scientific” cures and as resort enterprises for the upper classes

Sacred Trees, Mystic Caves, Holy Wells: Devotional Titles in Spanish Rural Sanctuaries

This paper explores how local, lived religion has creatively linked spiritual insights and popular devotions in ecologically valuable settings helping generate and preserve the rich Spanish biocultural heritage. Focusing on a selection of Sacred Natural Sites (SNS), mostly Marian sanctuaries, it shows that local “geopiety” and religious creativity have generated “devotional titles” related to vegetation types, geomorphological features, water, and celestial bodies. It also argues that, despite mass migration to urban centers, the questioning of “popular religion” after the Second Vatican Council, and the rapid secularization of Spanish society over the past fifty years, a set of distinctive rituals and public expressions of faith—some of them dating back to the Middle Ages—have remained alive or even thrived in certain rural sanctuaries. These vernacular devotions, however, do not necessarily announce the advent of the postsecular. Finally, it suggests that Protected Area (PA) managers, regional governments, custodians, anthropologists, tourism scholars, and theologians should work together in order to analyze, interpret, and help solve the management challenges highly popular SNS face.

An Unyielding Past: Holy Wells and Historical Narrative in The Faerie Queene 1–2

This article examines the wells found in 1.7, 1.11, and 2.1–2 of Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene and reads them alongside the long and syncretic history of holy well ritual practices in England. The essay borrows Jonathan Gil Harris's notion of "polychronic objects" to argue that holy wells, which were used by pagans, Catholics, and Protestants on the British Isles, are multivalent symbols that collate various moments in England's history. In the three episodes explored here, Spenser exploits this feature of holy wells in order to stage a conflict between the nation's Catholic and pagan past and its Protestant future. The episodes thus reveal the power of the polychronic landscape to recall the nation's past and complicate narratives about its future.

РЕЛИГИОЗНЫЕ ЧУДЕСА, ПРИУРОЧЕННЫЕ К ВОДНЫМ ИСТОЧНИКАМ

Religious psychoses and various forms of superstition are widespread, as a rule, in the days of severe upheavals and in the times of crisis in history. One of the most common phenomena of this kind in the 19th - first half of the 20th century was the discovery of holy wells or springs, in the waters of which numerous pilgrims observed visions with images of icons and faces of saints, as well as other paintings, most often on religious or historical themes. The purpose of the study is to analyze the distinctive features and the range of narratives about a certain group of events that are considered miraculous in the folk tradition - the appearance of saints and icons in the water. It is established that a place of pilgrimage is often a symbolic sacred center of a certain area (spring, well, krinitsa, bend of the river), or a certain narrow-local territory (hospitals, houses, churches). The most susceptible categories of the population - young girls and boys, elderly widows, etc...

Naming holy wells: A case study of names on sacred springs in Denmark

Naming holy wells: A case study of names on sacred springs in Denmark

Snails, Water in a Stone, and Holy Wells: An Examination of Wart Cures from the Irish Schools’ Folklore Collection, 1937–38

The Schools’ Scheme was a systematic national survey of folklore conducted in the Republic of Ireland in 1937–38 and is now part of the National Folklore Collection (NFC) at University College Dublin. Medical folklore and the curative powers of holy wells were prominent in the Schools’ Scheme, and in the ensuing Schools’ Collection (NFCS). A representative sample of cures from the NFCS was examined in this study, which included a total of 6,843 separate cures for various ailments. This article focuses specifically on wart cures—by far the most common ailment nationally for which a cure was collected. There are 749 separate wart cures, coming from every county in the Republic of Ireland.

24 Tirtha’s of Ramanatha Swamy Temple, Rameswaram

We know Ramayana and Ramesawaram, the memorable temple located at the tip of Indian Point in Tamil Nadu. It is the most important visit in the Hindu Religion and through the year tourist multitude the place to take a bath in the famous “Tirthams” of Rameswaram. Ramanathaswamy Temple is a Hindu temple enthusiastic to the god Shiva located on Rameswaram island in the state of Tamil Nadu, India. Rameswaram Temple Tirthas are the holy wells situated inside the Rameswaram Temple in Tamilnadu, India. There are sixty-four Tīrthas (holy water bodies) in and around the island of Rameswaram. According to Skanda Purana, 24 Tirthas in Rameswaram are important and taking snan (bathing) in them are considered equivalent to penance. Twenty-TwoThirth as are inside Ramanatha Swami Temple.

Touching the sacred: sensing spirituality at Irish holy wells

ABSTRACTThis paper explores the links between touch – as a physical sensation and as a metaphorical connection – and spiritual encounters at Irish holy wells. Building on embodied examinations of the sacred by cultural geographers, my emphasis on the haptic aspects of the micro-pilgrimages at these fluid locations presents new insight into spiritual experiences as practiced and felt processes. Touch serves both as an analytical lens and a sensed understanding to consider these ethereal spaces. An ethnographic exploration of two holy wells in the southwest of Ireland, including detailed field observations and participant interviews, illustrates how the sacred and material intertwine through ritualised tactile performances and numinous registers. The findings demonstrate how a focus on touch provides a fresh avenue to consider the creation of located spiritual experiences.

Paying the Rounds at Ireland’s Holy Wells

Paying the Rounds at Ireland’s Holy Wells

The Language of Gender, Power and Agency in Celtic Studies eds. by Amber Handy and Brian Ó Conchubhair (review)

Reviewed by: The Language of Gender, Power and Agency in Celtic Studies eds. by Amber Handy and Brian Ó Conchubhair Lisabeth C. Buchelt The Language of Gender, Power and Agency in Celtic Studies, edited by Amber Handy and Brian Ó Conchubhair, pp. 290. Dublin: Arlen House, 2014. $39.95 (paper). Since its establishment as an academic discipline in the late eighteenth century, Celtic Studies has been conceived of as the study of the six designated cultures’ pre-Christian to late medieval pasts. The discipline has always been interdisciplinary, encompassing philology, linguistics, archeology, art history, history, and literature, but for the most part has remained a highly specialized area of the more broadly conceived disciplines of ancient and medieval European culture. Part of this conception has been driven, most likely, in a European intellectual history that perceived the Celtic as only archaic. The Bretons, the Irish, the Welsh, the Scottish, the Manx, and the Cornish were anachronisms to the modernity of the French and the English. Even within medieval European studies, “Celtic” sometimes becomes a convenient classification for motifs that have no readily identifiable (Classical) sources—a sort of box marked “Other”—and Celticists, and what they study, are often seen as radically different from their other medievalist colleagues. It is as if modern medievalists feel that in the twelfth century those Celtic cultures were already existing behind a curtain of mist, in their own Otherworld and separated from the broader cultural developments happening in the Middle Ages. Within Irish Studies, scholars working in the Irish medieval time period—the Celticists—seem to have no place at the table, a point made clear when the [End Page 141] post for the Celtic Studies representative was recently abolished by the American Conference for Irish Studies. In the last decade or so, the Celtic Studies Association of North America, along with the MLA Celtic languages and literatures discussion group, has been working to rend the curtain, as it were, and has been doing so with success. The association’s 2010 conference held at the University of Notre Dame, “Saints, Sinners, and Scribes in the Celtic World,” from which this collection of essays is drawn, purposefully created an intellectual community that brought together scholars working in every possible area of Celtic Studies. The conference presentations, in the words of the editors, represented “literary, historical, and linguistic studies on topics from the seventh through twenty-first centuries.” In the introduction, Joseph Falaky Nagy asks the questions and concerns that link these essays covering over nineteen centuries’ worth of Irish texts: whose voice, and which languages deserve to be heard? What constitutes authorized speech? How does speech or language confer agency, or protect those in danger of exploitation? The essays that explore these questions are grouped into two broad categories: medieval and early modern, and modern and contemporary. In the first section, there are comparative essays, such as Theresa O’Byrne’s work on St Patrick’s Purgatory as it appears in Irish and late medieval Hungarian texts; Hannah Zdansky’s on the character of Dido in the medieval Irish vernacular translation of Virigl’s Aeneid; or Lawrence Eson’s examination of the motif of Merlin’s mixed-race heritage across several Arthurian texts. There are also textual interpretations in various theoretical frameworks, mostly based in cultural studies: Kristen Lee Over’s discussion of the notion of sovereignty in the Arthurian Welsh text Culhwch ac Olwen; or Marina Smyth’s continuing insightful work on the relationship between early medieval scientific thought and the Hiberno-Latin text De mirabilibus sacrae scripturae by a writer known as “the Irish Augustine.” Two of the best essays here examine relationships between texts and material culture. Catherine McKenna traces—through textual sources, archeological records, and maps—the proliferation of holy wells in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Ireland and suggests that many, if not most, of these sites had not been in existence since the “age of Tírechán [one of St. Patrick’s medieval biographers] and beyond into the pre-Christian era.” Rather, the radical altering of the landscape because of the new economics of land tenure led to a communal re-creation of sacred sites and their accompanying dinnseanchas, or stories...

Small health pilgrimages: Place and practice at the holy well

While established pilgrimage sites have extensive literatures, holy wells are less well documented, yet remain significant sites of pilgrimage with healing associations within more localised settings (Rattue 1995). Health geographers describe such settings as therapeutic landscapes where established reputations for healing are central to the production of place (Gesler 2003). Drawing from a sample of holy wells in Ireland, the operation of holy wells as markers of mind/body/spirit health is explored through a deep mapping of place. Taking account of material, symbolic and inhabited dimensions of wells, they are explored under three parallel themes. Retreat is identified as a core aspect of the well visits informed by phenomenological engagements and material spaces of the well where stillness forms the basis of a spiritual health practice (Conradson 2007). The histories of the wells also contain surprisingly liminal and carnivalesque recreational elements wherein the sacred mingled regularly with the profane. Finally, well pilgrimages connect to a range of scale issues around their position as between special-and-everyday spaces within which heterogeneous healing practices emerge. In the sustenance and revival of holy well visits, the notion of the small pilgrimage as a performance of health emerges to broaden our understanding of the wider pilgrimage process.

The sacred and the body politic at Ireland's holy wells

The sacred and the body politic at Ireland's holy wells

The Marriage Well at Teltown: holy well ritual at royal cult sites and the rite of temporary marriage

This article discusses Lag an Aonaigh, the ‘Marriage Well’ of Teltown, and the unusual temporary marriage ritual that once took place there during the annual Lughnasa festival. The relationship of Lag an Aonaigh to the modern and ancient fairs (aonach and óenach), and to the broader cult of holy wells is considered, which it is suggested largely represents the local adoption of the Mediterranean healing-spring cult. The article investigates the possibility that this marriage rite was informed by lore of a divine wedding at Teltown, and by the inaugurations carried out at many royal centres that entailed the matrimonial symbolism of the king marrying the Goddess of the land. The relationship of this site to the broader landscape of Teltown, especially to the nearby Knockans linear earthwork is explored. This relationship is then used to analyse the landscapes of the other main ‘royal’ sites, where linear earthworks similar to the Knockans that terminate near springs or ponds are also found. It is considered that all of these earthworks may have been used in ritual processions involving the springs, or even as devices to segregate young men and women at these assemblies, and lead them to the spring to start their own ‘Teltown weddings’.

Performing health in place: The holy well as a therapeutic assemblage

This paper examines the holy well as a representative therapeutic landscape with a particular focus on linking a traditional setting with contemporary theory associated with the ‘performative turn’. This is developed within the paper to suggest a new theoretical model of the ‘therapeutic assemblage’ containing material, metaphoric and inhabited dimensions. Drawing empirical evidence from Irish holy wells, complex holistic performances of health are identified within such settings. Deeper associations with more-than-representational theory suggest new directions in the study of therapeutic landscapes to uncover the importance of cultural practice and lay narratives of healing in the creation of healthy place.

Ireland's Holy Wells: Healing Waters and Contested Liturgies

Ireland's Holy Wells: Healing Waters and Contested Liturgies

Well, water, rock: holy wells, mass rocks and reconciling identity in the republic of ireland

ABSTRACTThis paper explores the significance of holy wells and mass stones in Southwest Ireland, as expressions of competing narratives of meaning, identity, faith and history. Drawing on ethnographic interviews and participant observation, this essay argues that these places and the ritual activities that regularly occur there reflect and reconstruct contemporary Irish identities. In an era of rapid cultural change, these places comprise a tangible and experiential connection to Irish heritage and tradition. As reflected in interviews, conversations and published documents, these places are viewed as simultaneously embodying indigenous pre-Christian spiritualities as well as being locations of a distinctively Catholic faith. At the same time, they are important as secluded locations where Irish Catholic parishioners held mass during the colonial era of English oppression and as locations of popular religion, in contradistinction to orthodox Roman Catholicism. As such, holy wells and mass rocks demonstrate the ability of sacred places to integrate and reconcile complex and heterogeneous identities.

Irish Pilgrimage: Holy Wells and Popular Catholic Devotion. By Michael P. Carroll (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999. pp. ix plus 226. $38.00)

Journal Article Irish Pilgrimage: Holy Wells and Popular Catholic Devotion. By Michael P. Carroll (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999. pp. ix plus 226. $38.00) Get access David W. Miller David W. Miller Carnegie Mellon University Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of Social History, Volume 35, Issue 2, Winter 2001, Pages 450–452, https://doi.org/10.1353/jsh.2001.0131 Published: 01 December 2001

Book Reviews

Books reviewed:Christian Smith, Christian America? What Evangelicals really wantNancy Eiesland, A Particular Place: Urban Restructuring and Religious Ecology in a Southern SuburbJanet Duitsman Cornelius, Slave Missions and The Black Church in the Antebellum SouthLinda Boynton Arthur, (ed) Religion, Dress and The BodyWilliam M. Newman and Peter L. Halvorson, Atlas of American Religion: The De‐nominational EraMichael P. Carroll, Irish Pilgrimage: Holy Wells and Pop‐ular Catholic DevotionPaul Eli Ivey, Prayers in Stone: Christian Science Architecture in The United States, 1894‐1930Andrew Greeley, The Catholic ImaginationR. Scott Appleby, The Ambivalence Of The Sacred: Re‐Ligion, Violence, And ReconciliationAna María Díaz‐Stevens and Anthony M. Stevens‐Arroyo, Recognizing The Latino Resurgence In U.S. ReligionWendy Griffin, (ed) Daughters Of The Goddess: Studies Of Healing, Identity, And EmpowermentCarole Bell Ford, The Girls: Jewish Women Of Brownsville, Brooklyn, 1940‐1995Thomas A. Idinopulos and Brian C. Wilson, (eds) What Is Religion? Origins, Definitions, And ExplanationsToby E. Huff and Wolfgang Schluchter, (eds) Max Weber And IslamWade Clark Roof, Spiritual Marketplace: Baby Boomers And The Remaking Of American ReligionJames A. Wellman, The Gold Coast Church And The Ghetto: Christ And Culture In Main‐Line ProtestantismMark Juergensmeyer, Terror In The Mind Of God