Strange Brew

It’s a long way to Tipperary, especially if you take the Limerick road southwest out of Dublin, then turn left at Portlaoise on the N8 for Cashel. If you don’t mind detours, you can take the L27 at Urlingford and drive through Killenaule to Clonmel on the river Suir. On the way, just before a village called Cloneen, you’ll pass by Ballyvadlea, which you will not notice. But that’s where the grim events chronicled by Joan Hoff and Marian Yeates took place a century-and-some-odd years ago in 1895.

Religion is the beliefs that bind those who hold them in common. Superstitions are the religions of others who speak a different language of belief. Hoff and Yeates’ “The Cooper’s Wife Is Missing” is about an encounter between the two. It is part murder mystery, part social history, tricked out with Irish fairy lore and superstition.

Ballyvadlea is not a village but what the French call a lieu-dit--a named place not fit to rank as a village. That’s where Michael Cleary, a cooper from Killenaule, married a local girl in 1887 and settled down in her parents’ cottage. Michael worked whenever he found work; Bridget, his high-spirited wife, raised hens whose eggs she sold in the district. Earning additional income as a seamstress, she owned a Singer sewing machine, which wasn’t bad for those days. He made barrels for the brewery at Clonmel and for the condensed milk factory there. “A united couple . . . in comfortable circumstances for persons of their station,” the Clearys were troubled only by Bridget’s barrenness and her obsession with the fairy faith of ancient (and not so ancient) Ireland. Bridget’s mother had had a penchant for the fairies. After her mother died in 1894, Bridget made more and more frequent treks to the two fairy forts on Kylnagranagh hill nearby, whether to glimpse her mother among the fairy folk or to meet a lover, we shall never know.

As she became increasingly “weird,” Michael became increasingly bothered by her flirtation with fairies, fearing they might abduct her, possess her or drive her out of her mind. One late afternoon in March 1895, when she returned home chilled, aching, feverish and trembling, it seemed pretty clear that Bridget had suffered a fairy stroke, perhaps had become possessed by a fairy spirit. Michael was scared. His wife had been taken by the fairies and replaced by a changeling, a fairy or witch in Bridget’s guise. In a desperate struggle to drive out the interloper and restore the true Bridget, the stricken woman was dosed with herbal remedies, doused with urine (a purifier), tortured, battered, finally burnt alive, her distorted corpse hidden in a thorn-filled dike.

Friends and family who participated in the deadly exorcism said that Bridget had disappeared, “gone with the fairies”; but the police after days of searching discovered her concealed body, back and lower belly “roasted clear to the bone, with the vital organs clearly visible.” The trial of the nine men and women present at Bridget’s brutal murder (or that of the changeling) attracted international attention and ended in sentences that some found harsh and some too lenient. Condemned to 20 years’ penal servitude, Cleary himself clamored his innocence: He never burned his wife; he’d only burned a fairy. Who can tell?

“The Cooper’s Wife Is Missing” makes a lurid yarn, especially because it’s true. The authors, who plumbed trial records, newspaper accounts and local testimony, recount it in meticulous detail copiously larded with mythology, folklore and political, social and ecclesiastical history. Unfortunately, as Thomas De Quincey complained while commenting on murder as one of the fine arts, there’s always something wrong with Irish slayings “near Tipperary or Balina-something,” because “tithes,” “politics” and other digressions “vitiate every Irish murder.” They do so here because Hoff and Yeates tend to depart from the rabid ritual murder in its local context, the better to decode its wider cultural and political role. The central story trickles off while the narrative tap leaks distracting information.

I’m ready to stipulate the political history of Ireland that Hoff and Yeates sketch more in anger than in sorrow because they don’t like the colonial occupation of the island, as one long oppression cratered by uprisings, rebellions, agitations and repressions. Their version of the trial trumpeted by the press as “The Tipperary Witchcraft Case” is more debatable because it hints at a sinister British plot to set Irish nationalists at loggerheads, divide “rational” politicals and “superstitious” Catholics, discredit both pagan Irishry and a Catholic Church accused of paganizing practices. How does the argument go?

Galled by the rising tide of Irish nationalism at the fin de siecle, the embattled British are supposed to have seized on the Ballyvadlea tragedy to tar Irish Catholicism with fairy lore, to reveal the Irish folk as superstitious boors unready for parliamentary liberties, to weaken and divide the nationalist camp. Michael Cleary had asked the local curate, Father Ryan, to say Mass in the Cleary home to banish the evil spirits. Reluctantly, the priest had celebrated the holy office and given Bridget the Eucharist. Whether the bedridden woman swallowed the Communion wafer or spit it out, Ryan had played a role in the fairy test (to see whether Bridget was Christian or a changeling): He had either accommodated his parishioners’ pagan practices or allowed himself to be used by them. The church was implicated in strange and murderous rituals. That was the impression the crown set out to give, and that is the conclusion the authors seem to share.

They do not explain what effect this had on the nationalist camp. Nor do they point out, as they easily could, that a connection between Christianity and magic is not sensational news. Christian worship incorporates pre-Christian beliefs and practices. Local divinities have been reincarnated as saints; rites and sprites associated with springs, rocks and other powerful places have been recycled into acceptable pieties; “pagan” rituals of fertility and protection have been assimilated, Christianized, “civilized.” Possession itself, as attributed to Bridget, is an equivocal experience illustrated by Pentecostalism (born 1901) which exhibits many features of fairy enchantment: convulsions, healing, speaking in tongues and exorcism.

In any case, when modern secularism marginalized “religious superstitions,” as Christianity once marginalized pagan ones or drove them underground, more acceptable or titillating superstitions took their place: spiritism, necromancy, table-turning. Along with Victor Hugo, French astronomer Camille Flammarion, British physicists Sir Oliver Lodge and Sir William Crookes and Arthur Balfour of the Balfour Declaration were spiritualists, actively interested in paranormal phenomena that some would describe as witchcraft. Arthur Conan Doyle’s father, Charles, believed in the reality of fairies. The son believed in the reality of spirits and experimented with spirit photography. Across the channel, Ernest Ferroul, holder of a medical degree from Montpellier, socialist deputy and mayor of Narbonne at the time when Bridget was “roasted like a rabbit,” was a spirite: spiritualist and medium. He died in 1921 full of years and honors, but then none of his nearest and dearest objected to fairy friends.

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Nor was belief in fairies, goblins and other manipulating or manipulable spirits limited to backward Irish alone or to the “rural peasants” that Hoff and Yeates tautologically refer to far too often. Nineteenth century France seethed with sorcerers and spell-casters who also, as they did in Ireland, functioned as healers, bone-setters, herbalists and combatants in the war against demoniac powers. In France as in Ireland, fire was often used to extort admissions of spellbinding or to force alleged witches to cure their victims. Into the early 20th century, those whom public belief designated as witches were liable to be shot or beaten, tortured, burned to death or left to die of their injuries, sometimes in front of their neighbors and even local authorities. Less murderously, in 1887 in a Pyrenean village, a more accommodating priest than Ryan rebaptized a girl fallen under a fairy spell.

With at least 200 women killed as witches in India every year, witchery is no more passe than paganism, which thrives in the United States as once it did among the lesser breeds without the Law. A more comparative approach would have placed Cleary’s beliefs, and Bridget’s too, in other than a folkloric perspective and Tipperary trial politics in a different light. In 1987, in or near Baton Rouge, La., a 27-year-old woman culminated an exorcism by plucking out the eye of 16-year-old Darnell Washington, who was possessed by demons. “If thine eye offend thee,” the gospel of Matthew directs, “pluck it out.” We don’t hear what happened to the demons. But it is still a long way to Tipperary--at least if you start from Baton Rouge.