I thought I heard the Banshee but it was a Fox with a cough

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Welcome to the Blind By Podcast.

It's raining ferociously here in Limerick.

After three weeks...

Three weeks of solid fucking sunshine and incredible weather.

The likes we haven't seen in years.

But finally the rain is back.

And I'm happy with that.

I prefer the rain.

You can trust the rain.

When the sun is out in Ireland you can't really enjoy it because it's so rare so when the sun does come out it puts you under pressure.

It's like am I enjoying this properly?

Should I go to the beach?

Should I be at a barbecue?

Should I dry on my clothes?

You feel guilty about being indoors.

Whereas

When the rain is there, you know where you stand with the rain.

The rain asks nothing of you.

And the summer rain is beautiful because

you have these thick clouds and everything is overcast.

But there's a wonderful brightness and a freshness in the air.

So bring on the fucking rain.

But last night...

Last night I was aware that the rain was going to come today.

So last night I went out for

a walk, a walk in

the last.

it's gonna rain now for a long time we're not gonna see sun I'd say for another maybe five weeks

I've got no meteorological basis for that claim I'm just it's just the mood the mode of what Ireland is

and we get punished we get punished for sunshine so it's gonna be raining for a long time So last night I got a nice walk in.

I got a lovely evening walk at sunset because I knew that tonight the rain was going to start.

So I began the walk mindfully.

My voice is still fucked, lads.

As you know, I've had pneumonia last week.

I'm not on the antibiotics anymore, but I do have a hoarse voice.

My lungs and larynx have been ravaged.

So I had a mindful walk.

And a mindful walk means I don't listen to music, I don't check my phone, I actively avoid daydreaming or worrying about shit, you know,

worrying about the future or being regretful about the past, I try and keep it to the present moment

by gently drawing my attention to all of my senses,

the feeling of my feet and the concrete as I walk, the quality of light,

the peachy orange,

evening sun, the slanty stuff,

and how it makes plants and leaves and trees

look so wonderfully golden and green.

And then I take in the smells.

The smell of flowers,

that bang of chlorophyll,

the smell of green.

Even the smell of petrol as a car goes past.

I notice it all and I take it all in.

And then finally I notice

the sounds.

The sounds of birds chirping and chatting in the evening time.

The optimism.

Fuck me.

The optimism of summer birds.

I don't know what the fuck they're talking about.

But when I listen to a cacophony of summer birds in the evening, I just get the impression that they're really excited about tomorrow.

That's what I reckon they're talking about.

I can't wait to get up tomorrow when the sun comes up and start roaring and shouting.

So I was doing this.

I was doing this walk.

And the rule I'd set for myself was, I'm going to walk until the sun sets.

And when it's actually dark, then I'm going to go home.

I'm going to walk back when I feel that it's dark.

When the Sun has actually fucked off, then I'm walking back.

And what I was waiting for was that lovely moment, the lovely moment when the Sun does fuck off and then the birds all go quiet.

So I did.

and I walked home and there was that wonderful stillness in the night

and then I heard a weird sound

like

wailing.

Not a woman wailing but it sounded like

a girl, like a child wailing and screaming.

And it was difficult to tell the direction of it.

And I stopped in my tracks to listen.

What the fuck is this?

Is this a person in trouble?

Is there a child somewhere trapped or in pain or something?

This is a really weird,

anxious

kind of scream.

And I couldn't hear the direction.

But one thing I could notice about the sound of it is that

it sounded metallic, it sounded like

galvanized steel almost.

So I knew wherever this sound is coming from

it's kind of indoorsy, indoorsy with something metal.

And I was up on top of like a hilly area and it was near a road and everything like it was civilization.

And then I looked down to the left

and there's a

an abandoned

Celtic tiger petrol station.

A petrol station that would have closed down probably 2007 and it's just abandoned.

And I think to myself,

that's the only place it could be coming from if it is indoors.

But I'm not fucking going down there, not at night time.

I'm not, I'd have to hop a fence, I'd have to walk through briars, it's really dark, I'm gonna have to use the light on my phone, I'm kind of freaked out, I don't want to, I wanna go home, to be honest.

I wanna go home, cause I've been out walking for about an hour and five minutes.

I want to go home and then I hear the noise again.

I hear the noise

and it's like a wailing, like a child wailing or crying,

but like not a child.

It's strange

and I walk on and I go, fuck it, bollocks.

What if, what if that is actually a child in trouble?

What if

and then i walk home and i'm thinking i can't even be sure if it's a person like

it could be some weird bird or something or

a noise that a heron makes at night time or something and then my mind went to a fairly dark place

i thought about

horrendous videos i've seen online over the years where

If a person falls from a great height or if they're shot and their lungs are damaged or even severely wounded,

the human voice sounds really fucking weird.

And I start thinking, what if that's what I heard?

What if it's someone who's had their lung punctured and they're seriously injured?

What if it's a child?

And then I hear it again, and I go, I can't be sure what that is.

Fuck.

I can't take that risk.

So

I climbed the fucking fence,

which I wasn't very good at doing.

I climbed the fence, and now I'm walking through

old concretey tarmac.

It's it's a field

but no one's gone near it since 2007 so it's it's a field but the ground is concrete and tarmac that's grown over for ages which is it's a very unnatural feeling when there's not a lot of light.

It feels a bit like do you know when you step on an escalator, you step on an escalator and the escalator isn't working and your body expects to move and it doesn't and it feels you feel off balance it felt like that because my feet are clearly touching grass so it feels like a field but underneath me it's solid it's fucking tarmac so it was a very strange feeling in the in the dark and and then there was other bits where the tarmac had worn away so it nearly fallen into little tiny fucking holes and not being sure of my feet And the farther I go, I'm getting away from the street lights from the road now and it's getting really dark.

So I take out my phone and I pull out the torch and that makes it a bit better, but makes it freakier.

Cause when you shine a torch in a dark field, you start seeing things in the shadows.

So my heart starts racing now.

And then I hear the noise again, louder,

and I'm like, yeah.

It sounds like someone hurting a child.

That's the noise and it's definitely in that petrol station because I'm getting close to it.

And the farther I go into the field,

the more I freak myself out, because then I start thinking, that's when you get it.

Doesn't matter how old I am, how rational I'm being.

I'm now into the depths of a fucking field in the middle of the night.

With nothing but the light on my phone and I start freaking myself out thinking it's the banshee

It's the Banshee, and someone I love is gonna die.

I'm hearing the Banshee wailing.

And I'm reading a lot of folklore recently.

I'm reading all about Banshees and fairies.

And every single story, every single story is a person walking by themselves at night time.

Then they see or hear something in a field and they make the crucial mistake of being curious and trying to find that that sound, and then they get disoriented and are never heard from again.

So, rationality out the window now, and this, these are the thoughts that I'm thinking.

And I start to really freak myself out because

a couple of weeks ago, as well, I watched the Blair Witch Project.

I just threw it on, I hadn't seen it in years.

I watched the Blair Witch Project,

and it didn't, it wasn't that scary when I watched it now.

But when I was a teenager and I saw that film, fuck me, that it frightened me.

So all of that now starts to come back

and I'm feeling really anxious now and I've got my hand up like I don't want to see what's in front of me.

I'm freaking myself out, really fucking freaking myself out.

But I can't turn back just in case a person is hurt.

I can't turn back.

And then I get about

I'd say 25 feet from the petrol station.

Now it was a very clear night as well, a very clear night, so the moon was out.

So it wasn't pitch dark.

But as I walk closer to

this abandoned fucking petrol station, abandoned 20 years.

So like horror film shit.

As I get closer to the petrol station, it's really dark there because the forecourt is still intact.

So that's completely dark.

So I just, there's no fucking way, camera phone or not, I'm not walking into the space of the petrol station.

So I stop and I hear the noise again and it's like, yeah, that's coming from inside the petrol station.

My ears aren't playing tricks on me.

There's something inside there wailing.

I'm freaking out about the fucking Banshee.

And I think,

what am I going to do?

So I wanted to shout.

I wanted to shout out, hello.

I wanted to shout.

Because if there was a person or anything inside in the petrol station, I'm like 20 feet away.

I'm not going into where it's dark, I'm 20 feet away.

I want to shout because if something's in there, maybe they might shout back.

But I got that feeling

that you get in a dream, you know, when you're in a fucking bad dream and you can't scream.

I kind of got that feeling

like I could shout, I could, but it just something was like, no.

It's like my body wouldn't let me do it

so I think what am I gonna do

and I look down on the ground and there's loads of pebbles there's loads of pebbles and rocks so I go okay

so I get a

decent sized rock and I think

what if I throw if I throw this rock up onto the roof of the petrol station of the forecourt which is made of metal if I throw this rock up there then it'll make a loud bang let's see what that'll do So I get a rock and I throw it into the air and I miss it.

And then I get pissed off at myself because I used to be brilliant at throwing rocks when I was younger.

Then I get a second rock and I don't throw it this time, I lob it.

I lob it into the air and it comes down and then tuds onto the roof of the forecourt and makes this giant fucking metallic thunderous tud.

Rock was about the size of a tennis ball, just goes boong

like that.

And then I hear a sudden noise like a scarper.

And just in the corner of my eye, running out of the area of the petrol station and into the taller grass, I see the brush of a fox's tail.

It's a fox's tail.

And I just get this lovely sense of relief.

I'm like, thank fuck.

It was a screaming fox.

That's what it was.

Just a fox.

Thank fuck.

It wasn't wasn't a little a little child in pain it wasn't the panshe it wasn't the ghost it was just a fox everything's okay

and then

i turn around to go back to the road back to civilization because i've walked a good bit into this field where the old petrol station was and I turn my back to the petrol station and start walking away from it towards the road and then when that happens even when the danger is gone everything's okay there's a rational explanation for everything

that act of walking away from the petrol station

just

do you remember when you were remember when you were a kid and you're walking home at night time when you're like 11 or 12 and you're walking home by yourself and it's night time

and you just start running you just start running and you're telling yourself come on you're 12 there's nothing to be scared of but like fuck that and you run as fast as you can just to get home.

That just took over me.

That feeling came back and took over me.

Cause I just turning my back, turning my back on and the blackness of that forecourt of the petrol station.

Turning my back on that just felt chilling.

And I ran.

I ran really fucking fast.

Which was ridiculous because who the fuck?

Who's gonna haunt a Celtic tiger petrol station that got abandoned during the last recession.

Some fucking

a ghost holding a breakfast roll dressed like Ronan Keating.

Getting haunted by a defaulted mortgage.

But it was...

it was an interesting experience, especially in the context of having done a mindful walk where I'm checking in with everything.

To have become so overcome with

childhood panic.

Knowing full well as well this is completely irrational.

Why are you running away from the petrol station?

What if someone saw you?

But I'm like, fuck that, fuck that.

I'm getting back up onto that road.

I'm getting back up there to where those street lights are.

But I'm not that.

It was definitely the fox.

It was without a doubt it was the fox.

Because it's because it was the metallic sound.

So it was the sound of the fox.

Who had been either in the forecourt and that was the sound of its voice Hitting off that metal roof or it was insiding the building itself.

But that's the noise that the fox was making.

A strange, lonely

yelp, a long.

I thought it was a little girl.

I thought it was a girl of about 11 or 12.

That's what it sounded like, who was in pain.

But if I hadn't investigated that noise and got to the source of it,

I'm fairly sure I'd have.

I don't know what the fuck I'd have thought about that but

I I'd have a Banshee story.

I'd have to say to you, I think I heard the banshee

because it fits it fits the template.

You're walking home alone by yourself

and you hear a ghostly wail in the distance that chills you and then you go to bed terrified that someone close to you has

And then

in the off chance that someone you do know does die, you can say, I heard the banshee, I heard the banshee, and they predicted that person's death.

So when I got in home after my walk,

I immediately went researching the banshee.

And what I went researching was,

here's the thing.

Most Irish people listening to this podcast now,

mostly are gonna have a Banshee story.

A lot of people have heard the Banshee, or said they heard the Banshee, or that their parents heard the Banshee, and they might follow it up with a story about, and then my grandmother died.

But it's very common, very, very common.

Now, do I believe in the Banshee?

Do I believe that there's a ghostly woman in the night who cries and foretells people's death?

No, I don't.

I believe that

it's a deep part of Irish culture and superstition and I believe that we will hear things in the night time and then wrap a story around it.

We will hear noises and make that the Banshee.

So I researched what do people hear?

What do Irish people hear when they think it's the banshee?

And the answers that I found were

it's usually a barn owl

sometimes a sheep or a lamb and a fox, a vixen.

Specifically, foxes when they have coughs, a hoarse fox wailing in the night time

is often what people hear and they attribute to the banshee.

So I went scouring the internet looking for audio clips of screaming foxes until I found something that sounded like what I heard, what I heard coming from that petro station.

And I found this recording.

It's a vixen with a cough calling in the night.

And if you're thinking, you know, I overreacted and I did, I overreacted and freaked myself out when I went down into that petro station.

But I'd ask you, if you heard this, if you're on your own and you heard this, and you definitely know it's coming from a fucking petro station in the dark, an abandoned petro station, if you heard this,

you'd shit your pants too.

So this is a recording of a female fox with a cough screaming in the nighttime.

So, I I

I I heard that.

I heard that.

Mine was a little bit more childlike.

I heard that in the night time

coming from a long abandoned, darkened petrol station.

And what made it more...

What made it more terrifying is like I said, I identified,

because I've got ears on me because I'm a music producer.

I identified...

that sound against galvanized metal and that made it terrifying because it made it real.

Because I could have just thought, oh, it's someone in their car and they're playing something really loud or someone's watching a scary film and their windows open and they have

big speakers.

What I heard was that sound

definitely against vibrating against metal in a small space, definitely from that abandoned petrol station over there in the dark.

So it was chilling, it was chilling, and

the realness of it was why I had to check it out just in case it was a human in pain, just in case I had to just go, fuck.

Imagine if that was an injured person or an injured child and I chickened out and then tomorrow I find out they're dead.

So I had to go and check it out.

And it was a fox.

It was a female fox, most likely with a cough.

Maybe she has a nest in the petrol station.

I don't think foxes have nests.

A den in the petrol station, and she has little pups.

Or maybe, you know, she's an urban fox.

So she's smart enough to know that petrol stations, the bins behind them have loads of food, but she's not smart enough to know that here, that one's been abandoned since 2007.

Fuck off.

Maybe that's what she was screaming.

Where's the sausage rolls?

Where are the hash browns?

You cunts.

But when Irish people hear the banshee,

what they're probably hearing is that

a vixen at night time

or I've never heard an owl, but apparently barn owls can do a screech that's quite chilling.

And certain lambs can make noises too.

And that's what people hear is the banshee.

And every family in Ireland has got their banshee stories.

Like you won't find

it's the banshee stories are interesting because they've survived you see No one talks about fairies anymore.

No one's scared of fairies anymore

But we're still

even as rational adults

We're all still a bit wary of the Banshee and it's because

When you hear a sound like that and you think it's the Banshee

what happens is you immediately think of the people you love.

When you hear that noise and you're entrenched in Irish culture and you grow up with these stories, when you hear that noise

you go you you think immediately about the people you love the most

and you think of the loss and you wonder fuck where are they?

Oh my god are they in a car crash?

Is my partner in a car crash?

Is my mother in a car crash?

Has something terrible happened to someone I love?

And I think that's why we still hang on to the banshee.

Because it triggers your fight or flight.

It triggers your fight or flight.

You hear the noise and now you're thinking about a person that you love dying and you can't confirm it.

Because they might be in a car crash.

That's completely possible.

So then we get flooded with the emotion of fear and anxiety.

And as soon as that happens, we will interpret our environment to confirm our fears.

So you're not thinking, maybe it's an owl, maybe it's a sheep, maybe it's a fox.

You're just immediately entertaining ghost.

Or for me, it was either

that's either the banshee or a child being injured.

I didn't think that's an animal, that's an animal.

This is fine.

There's most likely a rational explanation.

I wasn't going there.

I was going into catastrophe territory.

It's either a ghost or a child actively being murdered.

Two of the most unlikeliest outcomes.

What is it?

It's a fucking fox.

Of course it's a fox.

You're in the middle of a city.

There's loads of foxes.

Of course it's a fox.

Or it could have been a cat.

Could have been a screaming cat.

Of course it is.

Could have been a crow.

Of course it is.

The anxiety wouldn't let me go there because I'm already thinking about people who I love dying.

Every town and village has its own banshee story like the big one we have in Limerick is

there's a bridge, Thorman Bridge, very fucking old bridge.

Could be 80 900 years old.

It just comes out of King John's Castle but on this bridge

if you look over the the side At the far end of it.

If you look over the side you can clearly see there's five scratches looks like a hand scratches in the stone now they've been there for

years

these five scratches now someone probably put them there with a chisel two three hundred years ago we don't know what they are but the story is

that those scratches in the stone of the bridge

that there was a fella about 150 years ago called drunken teddy And he was into all sorts.

He lived in Thomangate.

And he was into all sorts.

Drinking, riding, gambling, the whole shebang.

He lived an absolute life of debauchery.

And one night, really late on his own, he walked across Thoman Bridge to get home and he met the bishop's lady.

And the bishop's lady was a banshee.

I believe at one point,

She'd been a woman, a woman that the bishop was having an affair with.

And then the bishop had her killed because people were going to find out that they were having an affair and because the bishop had her killed her soul didn't have any peace so then she existed forever on the bridge as an angry banshee as a woman who'd been terribly wronged in her life and now she's stuck on this bridge as an angry banshee

So anyway, this fella Tady, drunken Tady,

he's walking home one night

and there's no one else around and the bishop's lady appears on the bridge and she starts wailing and then

she tries to drag him into hell over the bridge

and he grabs onto the bridge as best he can and he grabs onto the bridge so hard that his fingernails scrape into the stone and he manages to get away and then he never drinks again he never gambles again And that story, that's part of Limerick fucking folklore.

Everybody knows that story.

It's just beside the treaty stone.

And when I was a kid, when I was like 12 or 13,

and I'd be hanging around near Thomengate with my friends, if there was a thick fog, you often get a thick fog around the Shannon River.

If there was a thick fog,

none of us would go near that bridge.

In case we saw the bishop's lady combing her hair.

Because that's what we were told and that's what someone's granny that's the story that they would have that when the fog comes out at night time on that bridge

just where those

nail marks are and you can see them today you can go to them today just where those nail marks are we were always told when the fog is out if you look at that spot where the nails are you'll see the bishop's lady She's green and she'll be combing her long hair and if she starts singing when you see her someone you love is gonna die.

And it's it's a wonderful story, it's a brilliant story, and obviously it's a lot of harsh shit.

And it's a brilliant story, but it had a grip on us.

It had a grip on us.

And grown men, grown men would run across the fucking bridge if they were drunk, terrified of meeting the bishop's lady.

And it was like this story 3-400 years old, could be longer.

But

men who drink too much, men who were out on the lash or out too late That story would keep them in check.

They'd run across Thoman Bridge terrified.

Okay, let's do an ocarina pause now because I want to get into this

Support for this podcast.

Wait, no, what do I do?

Ocarina pause first.

I'm gonna blow into a bottle.

I've no fucking I'm after losing all my ocarinas.

I've misplaced them all.

I'm gonna blow into the top of a bottle of water.

You're gonna hear an advert for something.

I'm just gonna drink the water because I need it.

I'm gonna drink, I'm gonna drink this water, and you're gonna hear an advert.

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I'd have to do it silently because I don't want any of you getting misophonia.

I'm shaking water, look.

I have a kazoo.

I can't play the kazoo with the remnants of a chest infection.

Look, that was a pause of some description where you would have heard fucking adverts, alright?

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Um,

where am I going?

Bristol, Cornwall, Sheffield, Manchester, Edinburgh, Glasgow, York, London, East Sussex, and fucking Norwich.

Alright?

Those gigs are nearly sold out.

Don't miss out on those gigs if you can come along.

They're going to be fantastic.

I've got cracking guests.

I cannot wait.

Where am I looking forward to most?

oh i've got my tongue hanging out for york i have to say because they've got a very good viking museum in york yarvik as it was known really looking forward to york then

september

derry lovely gig coming up in derry come to that and then vicar street dublin so every town and village and city has its its banshee stories and its local banshee

and the banshee

what it means is

ban is woman

and she

is the mound the the fairy mound so the banshee is the the woman of the fairy mound so she's of the fairy she's of the fairy people

she lives in the other world

again going back to that irish mythology pre-christian before eschatological end times christianity you have a belief system where linear time doesn't exist.

So what you do have is the parallel world,

the parallel dimension of the other world where the fairies live.

And

things can come out of the other world or you can enter the other world through certain points.

Either through the mist,

through sites of holy wells, sacred wells.

or through fairy forts and fairy mounds.

So the Ban Shi, she's the woman of the fairy mound.

She exists around this portal, this portal to the other world.

And she exists in a place where time doesn't exist, in the parallel reality.

And in the parallel reality of the other world, in Irish myth, all knowledge exists.

Infinite everything.

So she knows when people in this reality are going to die.

And what I find so beautiful about the story and the myth of the Banshee, it's the musicality of it.

The Banshee's wail

is a form of call and response song that transcends space and time.

And what I mean by this is the Banshee is actually, it's like two sides of a coin, but we've lost one side of that coin.

One side of that coin is gone and forgotten.

The Banshee had a counterpart.

in this world, in this mortal reality, and that counterpart was was was called a keener

there's a very specific type of traditional Irish singing called keening and it doesn't exist anymore it's it's more than just singing a keener

was a woman right a woman in Irish society

whose job was to mourn professionally at funerals.

Now this is an ancient tradition, pre-Christian, and this practice of keening

it died out

in the late 1800s.

It stopped being a thing.

So you had these women that were usually poorer women

and if somebody died in the community and the thing is it didn't matter whether this person was rich or poor.

If someone died in the community, this woman was hired

and she would turn up at the funeral

and she mightn't even know the person, she mightn't even know the person who's died.

She'd turn up at the funeral.

In this act of great performance, she'd be completely disheveled.

She would act out the extremity of human grief.

Anger, wailing, sadness, tears.

And her role appeared to to be like

almost a conductor of grief.

She would lead the way

for other people.

She'd set the tone for how to cry, how to wail, how to roar.

And she'd enter like an altered state, an altered state of grief.

And also, she'd be allowed

and she'd invite everyone who was bereaved to join in with her.

And that was a keener.

That's what a keener was but she would also sing

songs

keens

which were laments for the dead

but they were very different to other types of Irish song

we're talking about an art form that doesn't really exist anymore we're lucky enough to have a few recordings from the 1930s of what Keening songs were but also some of the women who were keeners by profession, they were reluctant to

they wouldn't perform these songs outside of a funeral.

They could only engage in this performance if a corpse was present.

And to sing a keening song outside of the context of a dead person being there would have been strange, it would have been really strange.

So they were reluctant to record it or to even pass these songs on.

So a lot of the

art form and the songs, we don't have them anymore.

We don't have them anymore.

Like, it's been said that

Dolores O'Reardon from the Cranberries, who was from Limerick, it's been said that her way of singing, she had a really breathy, a strange, breathy way of singing.

You'll hear it in the song Zombie.

And it's said that that comes from Keening.

I hear it too in a singer called Elizabeth Frazier.

She was in a band called Cocktail Twins and she has that same breathy way of singing that Dolores O'Rearden has and I often wonder if

she's coming from a keening tradition because they would have had it in Scotland too.

Well I know that Scotland had banshees

so if Scotland had banshees, which it definitely does, it probably also had the tradition of keening.

Only a few actual keening songs exist that you can listen to.

And again what makes it so strange and unique and different to other forms of Irish music is

melodically, it contains

almost what you'd call melismus.

It's a bending of notes.

It's almost North African.

And there is, there's there's the fringe theories, the fringe theories of Irish origin, where

some of the songs and artworks and craft works of the west coast of Ireland in particular share a lot of similarities

with songs and artworks from the likes of Algeria in North Africa.

And we don't know why we can't explain it.

And one theory is that Irish, we either come from North African people or we had a huge amount of contact with North African people via the ocean.

which is if you go from Algeria up, you're going to end up in Ireland.

But keening died out.

The practice of keening at funerals died out.

We don't have a lot of the songs, a lot of the music.

A lot of it is lost.

A huge amount because of the famine.

We lost half the population and with that you lose traditions and cultures.

Colonization too.

This is an indigenous tradition.

It would have been hugely looked down upon.

by the British.

It would have been seen as savage, particularly during the Victorian era.

You'd have to assume it was one of the things that was outlawed during the penal laws.

But I'm going to play for you now one of the few recordings that exist of

a Keening song in the Keening style of singing.

And

this was recorded in 1951 up in Donegal.

And it was a woman called Kitty Gadagher singing it.

And the song, I think it's called Lament for a Dead Child.

So this is this is a Keening song specifically for the funeral of a small child and it's sung in Irish and the lyrics are

My child infant what will I do?

You're gone from me.

I've been left alone after a year.

I'm alone

Augustal

So that there is

one of the few recordings we have of what caning was.

And when you listen to it, and the

shifting of the notes, you can hear what I'm saying.

Well, it sounds

Arabic, North African.

It doesn't, it's different to other Irish music, it's in it's in its own league because it was a very separate thing.

It was music with purpose that was only sung in the presence of death by a keener.

By somebody who

I don't even think we have words to describe what the fuck that was.

I'm using words like performance.

They perform grief.

They're a performer that's hired.

But it's more than that.

It's something

deeply spiritual that we don't really have language for anymore because we live in a different reality.

And when I say

Banshee and Keening, they're both...

They're two sides of the same kind.

And all we have left is the Banshee, but we don't have keening anymore.

What I mean by that is

so these women, these women who were often poor, whose main subsistence was keen at funerals, being professional grievance performers,

they were terrified

of becoming banshees when they died.

They were terrified that

they would end up somehow trapped in a perpetual keen in the other world and that superstition tells me that they they believed they were doing something magical like

poachine makers and I've explored this in my short stories and in podcasts putchine which is Irish moonshine

the putchine makers

believed that when they were making this

strong alcohol distilling it because they didn't understand the science they believed that they were stealing this spirit from the fairy world from the other world and by stealing this spirit that they would be targeted that the fairies would come and kill their children or replace them with changelings and because of this the putgine makers used to they'd dress their kids up in the clothes of different genders so if they had a little boy they dressed the little boy up as a girl

if they had a little girl they dressed the little boy up as little girl up as a boy to confuse the fucking fairies because putine makers thought that they were fucking with the fairy world and that there'd be retribution.

Well the keeners,

the women who sang at funerals, they obviously had a similar belief that something that they're doing, that they're in communication or taking some power from that parallel reality, the other world, and that the punishment might be that they would

live forever as a banshee that they'd be trapped in the other world on a fairy mound,

forever singing their lonely, lonely song.

And that's what I mean when I say

you're talking about call and response.

You have call and response in Irish music.

You've a lot of call and response in African music and African American music, the blues gospel.

But you can view the Banshee and the Keener as call and response.

The banshee exists in the other world

and she calls.

She calls into existence a person's death or she forewarns about a person's death.

The banshee, because also too, if you look through the folklore, the banshee doesn't just wail,

she also keens.

Now I'm not putting this stuff out of my arse, I'm using solid academic sources.

Specifically, I'm reading the work of Patricia Lyset, who is a legendary Irish folklorist, and she'd be the authority on Banshees.

So a lot of Banshees

who lived on a fairy mound or whatever and who you would hear in the nighttime, because remember I said every town, every village, every family had their own different Banshees.

A lot of Banshees were legendary keeners.

There could be a Banshee that you hear in the nighttime and she was a keener from 300 years ago.

who existed in this reality and then ended up in the other world with the fairies trapped as a keener to warn us.

So the Banshee begins the song.

The banshee begins the song and says, this person's gonna die.

This person's gonna die tonight.

If you can hear this, this person's gonna die.

And she calls out that song.

Then the person dies and then the keener is at the funeral.

and she's keening that person's lament.

She's responding.

So that there is call and response in music, except it transcends space and time because the call is coming from the other world.

And then, the keener herself,

she could turn into the banshee.

And just to give you, this is a folklore quote from this is an interview with a man, and I think his mother or grandmother was a professional keener, this was her job.

And he said, the good keeners were asked to go to the funerals.

and this fella says his mother she had to go

and sometimes she'd hate to go and do her job but you couldn't refuse it.

If you were a keener you could not refuse the funeral and the reason that she hated to go is that as she got older

she said

God help me if I'm turned into a banshee when I die.

So this woman who spent her life as a professional keener as she got older, her fear was

I'm gonna be turned into one of these banshees when I'm dead I'll be living in a prison on a fairy mound and I'll never be able to escape I'll have to cry into the night for eternity and then there's another report from Waterford

and they interviewed someone in Waterford who knew about keeners or who had met a keener in their time and this person said

that only the keeners who didn't carry out their duties ended up as banshees.

So once you became a keener and this was your job, if someone came to you and said,

my brother's dead, my dad's dead, my son is dead, will you keen?

If that keener was to refuse, then she would be turned into a banshee.

So it's almost like the women are locked into it.

And you'd have to assume too,

maybe they had some gift.

Like I'd love to know how would a woman become a keener?

How was she picked?

Because

that there sounds like a gift.

When the person can't refuse, that sounds like she has some type of gift that made her a keener and she's the only person that can be asked.

If you can't refuse, then what she's doing is spiritual or magical to her.

It's not of this world.

She's not performing.

She's not singing at a fucking funeral.

There's something deeply spiritual and magical and gifted going on here as far as the community are concerned.

So we don't have that anymore.

We've lost that but we still have the banshee.

We still have the banshee and it used to be two sides of the same coin.

The banshee in the other world and the keener in this world.

And they called and responded and in the middle someone died.

And we'd have lost it because of the famine.

literally entire communities disappearing and when the community disappears the knowledge disappears.

I mean we see this in real time with fucking

I've had David Keown on this podcast twice and he's bringing back the ancient tradition of Irish stone lifting.

So

he's finding a tradition that was once part of our culture but we lost it because of the famine.

Like entire villages died, people died and this thing got lost.

But he's able to look at folklore and literally dig up a stone.

He can dig up a stone, that's what makes that beautiful.

But with this, you can't.

Songs die.

If no one records them, songs just die.

So, sadly, we don't have a lot of this, and a huge amount of the stuff that's written about Keening is from colonisers.

It's from British people from a distance watching Irish funerals in a state of confusion.

This would have been greatly shamed by English colonizers, too, because

this thing started to emerge in England from about the 1700s onwards, and it really took hold in Victorian times.

It was called muscular Christianity.

And muscular Christianity was

a type of Christianity that focused less on compassion, forgiveness, asceticism, and instead focused on

masculinity.

and being big and strong and working hard and that these things became virtuous within Christianity and from muscular Christianity

I mentioned last week you know I was talking about modern concepts of masculinity coming from Darwinism

well that Darwinism led into this muscular Christianity so from muscular Christianity you get

What's considered to be good and virtuous and Christian are big strong men who don't show emotion and then by the Victorian period this is where you get your British, your stiff upper lip.

And then this stiff upper lip, it bleeds into British colonization.

So now British colonizers, they start to view

expressions of emotion, crying in particular, as the sign of a savage, of a lesser inferior race that needs to be conquered.

Even fucking like Charles Darwin himself, he wrote in 1872, he had a book called The Expressions of the Emotions in Man and Animals.

And he wrote, savages weep copiously from very slight causes.

A New Zealand chief, who'd be a Maori, a New Zealand chief cried like a child because the sailors spoilt his favourite cloak by powdering it with flour.

So British colonialism starts to...

To be a conqueror, to be Christian, to be close to God is to not show emotion.

To show no emotion is to control your emotions.

And to

grieve loudly, to cry, to weep, this is the behaviour of a savage.

You need to be civilized now.

So that that attitude impacted everywhere the British colonised, including Ireland.

It's where you get the

I mean British funerals still.

I don't know about working class people, but posh English funerals

very sanitized affairs.

I mean who fucking died there recently?

Was it the queen?

Like the fucking queen.

The English queen.

Like

there was no emotion at her funeral.

No one was to show emotion.

Pash English funerals they're they leave

like loads of time.

Isn't there like a week or something before the person dies and you have the funeral so that the bereaved have time to get the tears out of them so that you're not showing it at the funeral?

And what's considered good and virtuous is to go to the funeral of the person you love

and not show any emotion.

Like I remember Lizzie

getting praised because she didn't cry at Diana's funeral, you know what I mean?

So that's that British stiff upper lip.

The stiff upper lip, which bleeds into this the manosphere, the manosphere that I spoke about last week.

This idea of the alpha male, the alpha male expressing everything through anger and having no space for vulnerability or sitting comfortably with uncomfortable emotions.

You can trace that to the British stiff upper lip and colonialism and muscular Christianity.

which is a bizarre name but

in Victorian times they had a crisis of masculinity.

When cities started to become a thing, society worried that men were getting less manly, so this muscular Christianity stepped up, where Christianity stopped becoming about charity, kindness, goodness, asceticism, which is denying the body food, fasting.

And then it becomes to be Christian is to be a patriarchal man who

is full of muscles and doesn't show emotion.

That's muscular Christianity.

And it greatly informed English colonialism.

And they would have viewed they were canonizing Ireland.

They would have viewed Keening as utter savagery.

What the fuck is this?

There's a woman, you're hiring a woman to perform the entire spectrum of grief, to exaggerate grief, to wail, to rip her hair off, to rip her clothes off.

What the fuck are you doing, you savages?

So that would have definitely impacted that tradition.

And all we're left with is the banshee.

The fox with a cough.

Alright, that's all I've got time for this week.

I promised you a guest this week.

I do have a very, very special guest, a dream guest, but they had to cancel at the last minute, so we're hoping to reschedule for next week if we can.

In the meantime, rub a dog, blow a kiss at a swan, and misinterpret the wails of a fox with a cough.

Dog bless.

And we're back live during a flex alert.

Oh, we're pre-cooling before 4 p.m., folks.

And that's the end of the third.

Time to set it back to 78 from 4 to 9 p.m.

What a performance by Team California.

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