In keeping with the "room for extended discussion" topics, I thought I'd start this thread. I'm not going to do what Hobo did, and cross compare some religious views on cursing/hexing/malediction/illwishing/whatever-term-your-system-of-belief-uses-here. Quite frankly I'm not sure I could do justice to anything other than the Roman Catholic Church, which would involve a copy-pasta from the Catechism.
Irish speakers have a cursing culture. Where English has invective, "go ******** yourself", the Irish language has casual malediction. "Go bpléascacht do chác thú", meaning "may your s**t explode you", being my personal favourite. This is casual illwishing. I don't believe that the casual maledictor believes that any ill will come of the declaration, but the malediction is a declaration of violent thought. Admittedly, some of them have been shortened so that they are part of a shared language where the literal translation of something like "éirí ort" which is literally "you rise"*, but is short for "titim gan éirí ort" "may you fall without rising".
Satire (glam dichenn), on the other hand, was an art reputed to be able to raise boils or raze homes (c wut I did dar?). It is presented in our histories in an amoral light, being neither inherently evil nor shunned, but as something that was done even in Christian times. Whether this is down to cultural conditioning combined with a psychosomatic placebo effect or some power the file (pronounced, roughly, filla) held is kind of irrelevant. It was a done thing, like lawyers (let's face it, try explaining a laywer to someone with no concept of a court, and you get into "it must be magic" especially if the concept of "court" dissappears due to cultural warfare)
*Ok, it's not literally "you rise" because that's not how pronouns work in Irish. Irish has prepositional pronouns. So it's literally "rise on you".
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