Evil eye in the western HighlandsMaclagan, Robert Craig
Religion
Evil eye in the western Highlands
Maclagan, Robert Craig
Evil eye; Folklore; Superstition
Without any suspicion of the owner of a beast having the Evil Eye
himself, his desire to retain it is supposed to render it specially
liable to the evil influence of any one possessed of the power. A
Kinlochbervie man remembers well how very common, in his youth, was
belief in the Evil Eye, and vividly recalls the terror his mother had
when any unknown vagrant came the way, lest, being possessed of an Evil
Eye, he might leave a blight on the house or anything belonging to it.
She would give almost anything they might ask so as to get them away in
a good mood.
STRANGERS SPECIALLY LIABLE TO BE ACCUSED OF THE POSSESSION OF THE EVIL
EYE
Acquaintances might be divided into two classes. The Evil Eyes and the
Non-Evil Eyes. Precautions should be taken against the former, and with
them it was safe to class strangers. The daughter of a tradesman, a
clever, intelligent woman, a farmer’s wife, whose husband’s people and
her own mother are very superstitious, having moved from one district
to another, her new neighbours, not long after she had came to live
beside them, lost a number of geese. The owners made a great “ado,” and
the position they took up relative to our reciter, the suspected one,
was: “_Faicibh fein an droch shuil tha aice. Cha deachaidh na geoidh
air seachran riomh roimhe, ach ghabh iad fuath ‘nuair a’ dh’ amhairc
ise orra._” (“See for yourself the Evil Eye she had; the geese never
before wandered, but took fright when she looked at them.”)
The owners of these geese seem to have had a very lively faith in the
Evil Eye. The collector having mentioned the experience to another
neighbour, she said: “That’s not so bad as I got. I went to inquire for
a friend if they would sell a goose. They said they would not sell, and
there was no harm in that; but shortly after all the geese flew away,
and if I did not catch it. They were in a fearful rage, blaming me for
putting my Evil Eye in them. Another time their hens ceased laying, and
they blamed my eye for that also.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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