Evil is a two-part Would You Believe? special which concludes on RTÉ One on Sunday next, November 26. This week, reporter Mick Peelo continues to put evil under the microscope to work out if it’s human or supernatural.
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One of the guests on the show is archivist Jonny Dilllon from the National Folklore Centre who discusses the part played by folklore in defining what evil is and how we relate to it.
Here's a transcript of the full interview with Dillon from the show.
Q - What does folklore tell us about evil?
Dillon: I think before we talk about how evil is represented in folk tradition, it's worth taking time to get a perspective on folk tradition more broadly in a modern context. It's often viewed as a maladapted left over from a bygone age, silly stories, old wives tales, idiotic nonsense. But what you have in folklore tradition is a distillation of countless generations of wisdom and knowledge of our forebears and ancestors of their experience of being in the world. And within that you find their root concerns find expression but that's often done in a way that we, in a modern context , are not used to. It's not done with recourse to cold logic and reason. It's done with reference to symbolism, dramatic and imaginative mythology, like an emotional reasoning to being in the world.
For our forebears there was a sense that our lives are kind of guided by unseen forces that hinder and harm but also help and and can be of benefit as well. So there’s an attempt to try and understand in folk custom and folk tradition what are those forces how do they manifest and how can I steer them in the correct direction?
Q - How was evil expressed in folk tradition?
Dillon: You often find examples of evil expressed as a deceitful heart so it's something that relates specifically to the human sphere and something that relates to a distortion of the truth or a deceit. One of the things you find, often a particularly old idea not just in Ireland but all over Europe and further afield, is the idea of the evil eye. The evil eye would be cast on someone if you would engage in false praise. So you praise someone, but with a heart of enmity and bitterness say, and that would cause an affliction and have a negative impact on the individual. Often in Ireland, a way to counteract that was to invoke the blessing of God if you're praising the work that person was doing so it was know that you weren't casting the evil eye on them.
I think that evil transcends all of us and, even as an archetypal idea, I can't but believe in it
The more specific instance you find is the personification of evil. That generally finds expression in folk tradition in the figure of the devil taken from Christian tradition, his appearance often manifesting as a human or as animal or a natural phenomenon, something like that. This devil-like character engages with mortals, tries to trick them or offers a situation that appears quite beneficial or pleasant, but is actually the complete opposite.
Q - Do you have an example of this?
Dillon: One of the popular narratives in this regard told all over Ireland focussed on a priest out late at night as he travels to a house to offer last rites. While on the road he hears a beautiful song in the valley and stops and listens to the singing. He's totally captured by the most beautiful singing he's ever heard. It starts to get quieter so he walks towards the sound until it gets louder and this keeps happening, delaying him on his way.
Eventually he comes into a field where he sees a huge black dog singing the beautiful song. So, there's a horrible disconnect as he realises that it's the devil who's trying to distract him from his business so that the man will die without the last rites and the devil can take his soul.
The story gives the idea of the deceitful nature of evil as it manifests itself in a kind of desire in the individual to follow something that really isn't in their own interests.
In this particular story, the devil was singing a song called "The Lovely Milking Girl". This song has attached a particular taboo in Ireland and people were reluctant to sing it because of its association with the evil one.
Q - What do you think such stories tell us?
Dillon: The narratives relate largely to the bewildering nature of human experience and our constant interaction with the unknown, the infinite and the boundless. Folklore tries to give boundary and embody that which is without boundaries through narrative, personification and symbolic form that relates to chaos and order. There's a sense that we are surrounded in the natural world by unmediated chaos. Everything is in enormous disarray basically. I suppose it really points to the nature of suffering, that we are human by virtue of our suffering almost. It tries to give expression to the different modes and ways in which we can maybe stave off that suffering and maybe bring on good fortune.
I think that evil transcends all of us and, even as an archetypal idea, I can't but believe in it. My view is that in modernity we have kind of kicked out all of the fundamental reference points that used to orient and guide us. We've kind of thrown our memory and customs overboard like ballast to try and kind of race faster and faster towards nothingness basically. I think in Ireland and Europe and in the west more broadly, we are faced at the moment with that great emptiness. A void has manifest where there is no past, we have no memory, we have the dissolution of these kinds of forms of identity and they are replaced with shopping and playing football and so on.
It's done with reference to symbolism, dramatic and imaginative mythology, like an emotional reasoning to being in the world
Folk tradition tries to answer the why of being, but in this materialistic perspective, we just get the what of being. That there is no meaning to redeem yourself and you're just left with meaningless suffering. You don't have to do anything with it, you can just float around in an endless moment of now, not knowing anything of who you are or your traditional inclinations or what reference points your forebears used to steer themselves as stars in the night sky. We are sailing in a starless sky in that sense having jettisoned our memory overboard.
