Exploring Banshees: Femininity, Lamentation, and Death within Irish Culture
Appearance
Banshees are reported to have a myriad of varying facades. They can appear as astonishingly beautiful women, with pale skin and luscious red or silver locks. This form of Banshee is usually wearing a long white dress, and is often seen combing her tendrils with a silver comb. She may also be seen as an old and haunting witch, dressed in all black, with an illusive veil masking her gray hair and mysterious face. This veil represents the banshee’s practice of mourning rites, wherein they isolate themselves from external perception to maintain sacredness and separation (Gennep, 2004). She can take the form of a headless woman carrying a bowl of blood, or even a frightening creature with glowing red eyes. She may also assume the guise of a washer-woman, rinsing the blood-stained clothes of the dying. A banshee may be viewed as a member of one’s lineage, often a young virgin who died too soon, and embraced the otherworldly harbinger powers (Wilde & Robert, 1887).
.png)
.png)
.png)
Women in Irish Culture
Historically, in Irish culture, women struggled to navigate their role as a societal outsider, alongside their role as family guardian and caretaker. This resulted in an overarching ambiguity surrounding womanhood, which fostered accusations of witchcraft and narratives of female wildness and disorder. During that period, men were adamant on regulating women’s places. This mirrors the sentiments of the banshees, as she is limited to wallow in the outdoors, despite her connections to patriarchal lines and her role within the family. The banshee is seen as wild and threatening, but her screeching cries and eerie presence may instead be an echo of the historical silencing of Irish women. As such, the Banshee transforms the woman-directed stereotypes of repression, wildness, and ambiguity into a feminine entity synonymous with power (Kimpton, 1993).
The Ritual
A ritual is often a deeply symbolic action or activity that exemplifies core values and beliefs within a culture (Sims, 2011). For the Irish banshees, their screeching rituals are interpreted as a notorious death omen. It is generally understood that the cry of a banshee can only be heard by individuals within a certain lineage, which creates the frame of the ritual. The wails of Irish banshees are often referred to as keening or lamenting, a sound that is synonymous with the keening women integral to Irish funeral wakes. Within banshee folklore, this keening announces the impending death of a family member, and marks the beginning of the mourning process and ritualistic behavior. As such, the screams of a Banshee mirror the actual rhythmic mourning and wails performed by women in traditional Irish death rituals.
.jpeg)
.jpeg)
Lamentation within Irish Culture
Throughout Irish history, death rituals have often included the keen or lament – primarily by a female voice. Lamentation was a focal element of women’s culture, and keening women would be brought from all over the region to perform in the wake of family members, community members, and even strangers. Keening was vital in order to help the soul ascend from the living world to the spiritual world (Ó Madagáin.B, 2006). Irish women were highly valued in death rituals and traditions, and keeners were believed to traverse the realms and guide the soul using the power of their voice. Banshee’s cries are said to mirror those of traditional Irish keening women, wherein they both “shake the roof with their female crying and lamentation” (O suilleabháin,1969). Under this framework, banshees represent the transition between life and passing, the journey towards transcendence, and the femininity intertwined in death within Irish culture.