Blinking or Ill-wishing. 73 



We have many charms against the blinker : — A stallion's shoe, 

 of the meaning of which there is much doubt. Iron is ever a 

 mystic metal, ghosts and fairies may not face it, some say because 

 they are of the Stone Age, but the insistence on the stallion seems 

 to point to more and we may not forget that some races have held 

 the horse sacred. A he-ass is a sure defence, as is a four-leaved 

 shamrock, a holed stone, or in some cases an arrow head of black 

 flint. It is well to milk a heifer at her first milking into a can 

 with a sixpence in it, and it is wise in shooting at a witch-hare to 

 use a silver bullet. Salt is a good counter-charm. 



Witchcraft is no new thing and was once in high honour, for in 

 " Irish Magic in the Days of Cormac," an article in the " Dublin 

 Penny Journal," we read that Cormac had invaded Munster and 

 " at last the Druids got new orders from Cormac, and they flung 

 a baleful Druidical breath on the horses, and asses, and cows, and 

 sheep, and goats of Leath Mocha, and their milk was stayed, and 

 nothing was heard through the land but the neighing, and lowing, 

 and braying, and bleating, and sneezing of the cattle." So that 

 blinking is no new thing, and our examination of present day 

 Ulster has thrown light on the Ulster of the distant past when the 

 blinker was a friend of Kings, before Christianity put him under 

 its ban as a servant of the old gods, later identified with the devil. 



Yet before we laugh at antiquity for its folly let us look to 

 ourselves. I have heard that one fashionable spiritualist in 

 England, firmly credited by my informant, requires all who would 

 know their future to hold a crystal long in their hands till it is 

 warm and some of their " life-fluid," as she says, has entered it 

 so enabling her to see the inquirer's future in it. Now this is 

 nothing but our old friend the fallacy that Association in Idea is 

 Connection, only that the old hag wears a Worth gown and charges 

 a guinea a seance, which makes a great difference to some people. 



