There is a belief associated with the eve of the Feast of the Epiphany. At a specific moment during that night, all the water in the world is transformed into wine.
But the story warns that it is futile to try to take advantage of this. A man sits all night waiting for the magical instant. But he is distracted – or asleep – when it finally comes around. Unlike we customers of Irish Water, this protagonist is unable to control the power which transformed water to wine – or expensive water to cheap water, the minor miracle the Irish people recently succeeded in performing.
A similar and very lovely belief applied to Christmas Eve: at some moment during the night, animals can talk. How wonderful to be awake just at the minute you can have a proper conversation with your cat or dog or donkey or cow; to find out what they really feel, what they want.
But in the legends, nobody ever manages to be around at the right moment. Like the instant when Santa Claus finally climbs into the room, we may believe it happens but, no matter how hard we try, we’re not going to witness it.
The
Wishing Hour
Other traditional stories in folklore, or oral literature, deal with such magical moments, not always of an attractive nature. A story well-known in Irish tradition, “Uair na hAchainí” (The Wishing Hour) for instance, refers to an instant when wishes or curses will be granted.
The stories always demonstrate how the strategy misfires, as in this relatively light-hearted version from Connemara:
There was once an old woman who was always praying: “Dear Lord, make an earl of Dónal”. She’d heard if she wished for something constantly she’d get it in the end. But this day she was praying away: “Dear Lord, make an earl of Dónal”. The cat passed by. “May your tail fall off!” she said. The words were barely out of her mouth when the tail fell off the cat. It was the hour when wishes come true!
These stories are told sometimes as warnings against misbehaviour – against cursing, against saying evil things you don’t really mean. You will remember possibly the injunction against “making faces”: the wind will change and you’ll be stuck with than grimace forever. Don’t make an evil face, or an evil curse, is the moral, or you may regret it.
Not surprisingly, these legends about ill-judged cursing were extremely popular as illustrations for sermons, and many occur in the collections of exempla used by preachers from the Middle Ages on – such collections provide us with some of the earliest documentation of folktales.
The story of the transformation of water into wine expresses another feeling, however: both the wish for alchemy, the deep-seated human desire for a gift which simply appears by magic and does not need to be earned, and the acceptance that such gifts or moments of transformation cannot be planned for or controlled. You can buy a lottery ticket but chance dictates whether you win or not.
Attempts to control what is intrinsically a matter of chance lead to failure, and perhaps to humiliation.
As humans, we naturally try to – and need to – control many aspects of life. That is what homo sapiens can do, thanks to our ability to think, to remember, to plan, to foresee certain aspects of the future. Nevertheless, there are limits to our ability to design our lives. The key events and rites of passage resist planning.
We haven’t the faintest idea when we are going to be born; even the exact moment at which our children will be born is not known to us. We don’t know when we are going to fall in love. And, most poignantly, we don’t know when we will die.
Níl fhios ag éinne cá bhfuil fód a bháis (nobody knows where the sod of his death is) is another proverb which expresses our powerlessness in the face of the greatest rite of passage – the passage out of life. Death, like life, always takes us by surprise.
Controlling destiny
As we progress in our knowledge of how the universe and all that is in it works, our ability to control destiny becomes progressively greater. We are not as powerless as our ancestors were, even in the recent past. We can access some information about the future: we know that it is going to rain tomorrow, that the well will run dry in July, that our baby will be born in or around January 11th. Some people know that they are likely to die within six months, or a year.
But the actual moment, when the transformation from non-existence to existence, or the reverse, occurs, is still difficult or impossible to calculate.
The folk legends, appearing so simple, express some of the most profound truths about life and death, and about the nature of grace and happiness.
Éilís Ní Dhuibhne is a writer, teacher of creative writing and folklore scholar. Grateful acknowledgment to the National Folklore Collection, UCD, for source material.
Diarmaid Ferriter is on leave