As we began by stating, it is a popular superstition among the
learned that the belief in second sight has died out among the
Highlanders. Fifty years ago, Dr. McCulloch, in his Description of
the Western Islands, wrote thus: 'Second sight has undergone the
fate of witchcraft; ceasing to be believed, it has ceased to exist'.
{245} Now, as to whether second sight exists or not, we may think
as we please, but the belief in second sight is still vivacious in
the Highlands, and has not altered in a single feature. A well-
known Highland minister has been kind enough to answer a few
questions on the belief as it is in his parish He first met a
second-sighted man in his own beadle, 'a most respectable person of
entirely blameless life'. After citing a few examples of the
beadle's successful hits, our informant says: 'He told me that he
felt the thing coming on, and that it was always preceded by a sense
of discomfort and anxiety. . . . There was no epilepsy, and no
convulsion of any kind. He felt a sense of great relief when the
vision had passed away, and he assured me repeatedly that the gift
was an annoyance rather than a pleasure to him,' as the Lapp also
confessed to Scheffer. 'Others who had the same gift have told me
the same thing.' Out of seven or eight people liable to this
malady, or whatever we are to call it, only one, we learn, was other
than robust, healthy, and steady. In two instances the seers were
examined by a physician of experience, and got clean bills of mental
and bodily health. An instance is mentioned in which the beadle,
alone in a boat with a friend, on a salt-water loch, at night, saw a
vision of a man drowning in a certain pool of a certain river. A
shepherd's plaid lay on the bank. The beadle told his companion
what he saw, and set his foot on his friend's, who then shared his
experience. This proves the continuity of the belief that the
hallucination can be communicated by contact. {246} As a matter of
evidence, it would have been better if the beadle had not first told
his friend what he saw. Both men told our informant next day, and
the vision was fulfilled 'scarcely a week afterwards'. This vision,
granting the honesty of the seers, was a case of 'clairvoyance,' but
'symbolical hallucinations' frequently occur. In our informant's
experience the gift is not hereditary.
On the whole subject Dr. Stewart, of Nether Lochaber, wrote several
articles in the Inverness Courier, during the autumn of 1893. The
Highland clergy have, doubtless, some difficulty in dealing with the
belief among their parishioners. But, as the possession of the
accomplishment is no longer regarded as criminal, and as the old
theories of diabolical possession, or fairy inspiration, are not
entertained, at least by the educated, the seers are probably to be
regarded as merely harmless visionaries. At most we may say, with
the poet:--
Lo, the sublime telepathist is here.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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