Ancient Customs : The Ritual of the Hunger Strike

The practice of hunger-striking has deep roots in Irish culture. The Celts would use self-inflicted starvation as a means of discrediting someone who had done them wrong, as would unpaid poets or tradespeople who would camp outside the home of an uncaring patron and begin a hunger striking ritual until their wrongs were righted or their debts paid.

The Irish words “troscad” and “cealacha” appear in some of the earliest written records during the medieval period in Ireland, even written into the legal civil code: the Feineachas (the laws of the Feine or Feini (fainyeh)), which are now called the Brehon Laws. Dlighthe Feine is another name for the laws, with the same meaning. The Anglo-Irish word “Brehon” is derived from the Gaelic word Bret hem (judge). Troscad and Cealacha roughly translated, they mean: “fasting on or against a person” and “achieving justice by starvation.” As far as can be understood, it consisted of fasting on the doorstep of the person or institution accused. The troscad was the means of compelling justice and establishing one’s rights, and it was open to all members of Celtic society. It is not unreasonable to suppose that when a woman performed the ritual hunger strike, that her action recalls a former age when women, as sorceresses, witches, and even in connection with the goddess-oriented pagan religion, were able to compel a redress of their grievances by ritual, religious, and magical means. If the hunger striker died, the accused would suffer societal ostracism and would have to pay compensation to the dead person’s family. The law said “he who does not give a pledge to fasting is an evader of all; he who disregards all things shall not be paid by God or man.” If a plaintiff having duly fasted did not receive within a certain time the satisfaction of his claim, he was entitled to distrain as in the case of an ordinary defendant, and to seize double the amount that would have satisfied him in the first instance.

In ancient times, the troscad was one of the most effective means of someone of lesser social position to compel justice from someone of higher social position. Thus Druids could fast against a King, or even a man or woman in one of the lower orders of society could fast against a Chieftain. To refuse to submit to fasting was considered indelibly disgraceful, and was one of the things which legally degraded a man by reducing or destroying his honor-price.

In the play The King’s Threshold, William Butler Yeats portrays the poet on political hunger strike against a king who takes away poets’ rights to sit on the king’s council. Yeats was a founding member of the Abbey Theatre.

Persuade him to eat or drink? –
While he is lying there, Perishing there, my good name in the world
Is perishing also. I cannot give way.
Because I am king; because if I give way,
My nobles would call me a weakling, and, it may be,
The very throne be shaken.

- William Butler Yeats, The King’s Threshold

Additionally, fasting and the Catholic credo of self-sacrifice, are also part of Irish culture and viewed as a means of self purification that added power to one’s prayers. Troscad is at the same time also aíne frithaire, Christian ascetic, penitential fasting aimed at influencing God. We can see here a subtle medieval blending of both the old pagan ways and the new Christian faith, a compelling of God’s aid to the devotee who fasts as well as a reliance on the older Brehon laws.

There was a spiritual penalty to be paid as well, for at this time there was great social and moral regard for hospitality among the Irish people, which extended even to strangers at one’s door. To allow someone to starve to death at one’s doorstep was a profound disgrace.

That it was an ancient ritual can be demonstrated by the fact that it bears almost complete resemblance to the ancient Hindu custom of dbarna. This custom is not only found in the Laws of Manu but as prayopavesana (‘waiting for death’) it occurs in ancient Vedic sources. Dr. Joyce saw the troscad as ‘Identical with the eastern custom, and no doubt it was believed in pagan times to be attended by similar supernatural effects’; that is, that if the one fasted against ignores the person fasting then they would suffer fearful supernatural penalties. — Ellis, P.B.

The troscad was never entered into lightly and always with full knowledge of the seriousness of the final intent. Even after Christianity displaced the pagan religion, the troscad continued in Irish society even up to recent times where it has been used by political prisoners trying to gain rights to such things as sanitary conditions in the prisons and humanitarian treatment of the prisoners.