Evil eye in the western HighlandsMaclagan, Robert Craig
Religion
Evil eye in the western Highlands
Maclagan, Robert Craig
Evil eye; Folklore; Superstition
More rarely than of cows, we hear of stirks being affected. This is
rather an old story, and the authority for this is the reciter’s
father, who told it of his own father. He was at market in
Stratherrick, and refused to part, after considerable bargaining, with
a stirk he had to a would-be buyer. “Before the market-day closed, down
fell the stirk on the ground and nothing could make it get up.”
In a quite recent case, however, a stirk, said to be affected by the
Evil Eye, “was very ill; its horns were quite cold, and it could not
eat anything. The beast recovered.”
By far most commonly, evil from a “bad eye” comes to cows. A reciter
tells of an instance that occurred to himself, where in a farm
previously occupied, his mother had a particularly good cow. “One day
my sister was in a neighbour’s house, and she was telling the woman
about the lot of milk this cow had. The next day when my mother went
out at the usual hour to milk the cow, she had scarcely begun when this
woman passed close to where she was milking. Well, not a drop of milk
could my mother get from that cow. The cow became suddenly unwell and
fell to the ground. The skin came off her udder and not a bit of skin
was on it after that. There was not the least doubt but that it was the
other woman that had injured her.”
A native of Skye, in whose younger days the belief in the Evil Eye was
very common there, and who remembers seeing “a general turn up” in the
township in which she was brought up, caused by the alleged effect of
one person’s Evil Eye upon the cattle of the neighbours, tells how
her father had a fine Ayrshire cow. She was such a good milker that
it was necessary to milk her three times every day. “All of a sudden
her milk left her, and they never could account for it, except on the
supposition of the action of an Evil Eye, and in fact were quite sure
that this was the case.”
The reciter of the following says she remembers a Sutherlandshire
minister telling it to her mother. He said that one time his cows were
not giving the right milk. The milk was more like water than milk, and
as for butter, not a bit could he get, no matter how well it might be
churned. The minister here, on the advice of his housekeeper, resorted
to witchcraft for a cure.
Another reciter says: “When my sister and myself were lumps of lasses
we were down the road one day with a cow of my father’s. When we
brought her home the milk was running from her, and she lay down on the
floor and she wouldn’t rise. When they tried to put her up she would
make as if she would climb up the wall.”
In fact, as another reciter in Rothiemurchus said: “It used to be a
very common experience to have cows going off their milk, and sometimes
dying from the effects of a person possessed of an Evil Eye looking
upon them, and it is still believed that cases of this kind happen.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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