Second sight
Second sight was a gift associated particularly with the Scottish Highlands and Islands. Second sighted seers saw apparitions foreshadowing future events. Some visions were dramatic; it was common for seers to see approaching armies, foretelling oncoming battles. Others were more mundane: one seventeenth-century seer from Mull saw his neighbour trying to steal a creel-full of his cheese.1Story from Rev. John Beaton (c. 1640-c. 1708/15), quoted in Michael Hunter, introduction to his edited volume The Occult Laboratory: Magic, Science, and Second Sight in Late Seventeenth-Century Scotland (Woodbridge, 2001), p. 26. Love and death were common themes. The theologian James Garden recorded a case of a rich young woman who was sought in marriage by a wealthy but unpleasant knight. Her friends pressed her to accept him, and she became miserable. However, a ‘common fellow about the house’ eased her mind, telling her ‘I see a lord upon each shoulder of you’. He explained that she would marry the unlikeable man, but he would soon die, leaving her with a grand dowry by which she could procure a better husband. The woman promptly accepted the unfortunate knight, and the rest came to pass as predicted.2James Garden’s letters to John Aubrey in Michael Hunter (ed.), The Occult Laboratory: Magic, Science, and Second Sight in Late Seventeenth-Century Scotland (Woodbridge, 2001), p. 145; we have modernised spelling.
Second sight was usually considered to be hereditary. It could afflict anyone, though the minister Robert Kirk of Aberfoyle (1644-1692) wrote that it was most common among men.3Robert Kirk, ‘Robert Kirk’s The Secret Commonwealth and his “A Short Treatise of the Scotish-Irish Charms and Spells”’, in Michael Hunter (ed.), The Occult Laboratory: Magic, Science, and Second Sight in Late Seventeenth-Century Scotland (Woodbridge, 2001), p. 94. Educated elites were usually mistrustful of second sight, considering it either a foolish superstition, or a gift imparted by the Devil. However, amid the rapid philosophical developments of the late seventeenth century, some educated people began to view second sight more sympathetically, as a way of demonstrating the reality of an invisible world of spirits. Robert Kirk, who collected stories of second sight and suggested that the visions were imparted by fairies, considered his accounts a means to ‘suppress the impudent and growing atheism of this age’.4Robert Kirk, ‘Robert Kirk’s The Secret Commonwealth and his “A Short Treatise of the Scotish-Irish Charms and Spells”’, MS version, quoted in Michael Hunter (ed.), The Occult Laboratory: Magic, Science, and Second Sight in Late Seventeenth-Century Scotland (Woodbridge, 2001), p. 77, note b. In 1703, the Skye native Martin Martin published his A Description of the Western Islands of Scotland, which included a description of the phenomenon. Fashionable London circles derided Martin’s work, but stories of second sight lingered, and contributed to the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century romanticisation of the Highlands.
Head of a woman, sketched in the 1480s by Leonardo da Vinci.5Leonardo da Vinci, head of a young woman (study for the angel in The Virgin on the Rocks) (1483-5), Wikimedia Commons.
The story of Elspeth Reoch (d. 1616)6Miscellany of the Maitland Club, vol. 2 (Edinburgh, 1840), pp. 187-91.
Image references:
1) Louis Fabritius Dubourg (1693-1775), head of a girl looking downwards, National Galleries of Scotland.
2) Horatio McCulloch (1805-67), landscape with a loch and boats, National Galleries of Scotland.
3) James Drummond (1816-77), study of two men with bonnets, National Galleries of Scotland.
4) Joseph Noel Paton (1821-1901), an old man and a girl, National Galleries of Scotland.
5) Thomas Faed (1825 – 1900), study of a peasant girl with a jug in a landscape, National Galleries of Scotland.
6) [Egbert van Heemskerck (1634/5 – 1704)?], five seated men drinking, National Galleries of Scotland.
7) Joseph Noel Paton (1821-1901), a girl waiting. National Galleries of Scotland.
Elspeth Reoch was tried for witchcraft in Orkney in 1616. During her trial, it was stated that she had second sight. In her case the gift was not hereditary, but imparted by a spirit. She used it in the fashion of a cunning-person, to serve her neighbours. The information that follows is drawn from the confession she made at her trial - doubtless extracted under duress, but sufficiently unorthodox to be almost certainly her own story rather than one concocted by her interrogators. Her story is a sad one, including physical/sexual assault and execution of a minor. (Images are generic.)
Reoch was born in Caithness, and was the daughter of a piper. When she was around 12 she had apparently ‘wandered out of Caithness’ to Lochaber, where she stayed with an aunt. One day she was waiting for a boat at a loch-side when she was approached by two men, one wearing black and the other green tartan. The latter told her she was pretty, and offered to teach her how to ‘ken [know] and see anything she would desire’.
The other man protested that Reoch would not be able to keep a secret, but the green-clad man proceeded anyway. He told her to boil an egg and gather the condensation on three Sundays, then rub the condensation on her eyes with unwashed hands. Reoch demonstrated her new powers when she divined that an aunt’s granddaughter was secretly pregnant to another woman’s husband.
Within two years, Reoch had borne a child out of wedlock herself. After she had delivered her baby, the man dressed in black appeared to Reoch again. He explained that he was a fairy man, her ancestor, called John Stewart. He was neither dead nor living, but ‘would ever go betwixt the heaven and the earth’. He persuaded Reoch to have sex with him, and told her that the price for her clairvoyant abilities would henceforth be muteness.
Reoch’s brother was angry that she would not speak, and beat her, as well as taking her to church and praying for her. She remained mute, although still managed to travel around telling people ‘what they had done and what they should do’. She also plucked the herb melefour (yarrow) while reciting an incantation (perhaps her muteness was selective, or temporary?), which allowed her to answer any question.
In one vision, she saw a gathering of men drinking together. They included Robert Stewart, illegitimate son of the former earl of Orkney, and Patrick Triall, who had fathered a second illegitimate child on Reoch. The men had ropes around their necks. Stewart was later executed by guillotine for leading a rebellion.
Reoch’s interrogators considered the fairy kinsman to be the Devil. She was found guilty of witchcraft and strangled at a stake. Possibly her creation of the fairy man was a means of talking about sexual assaults; her muteness was perhaps a result of trauma. Her second sight may have afforded her some means of living, but also became a factor in her premature death.
Letter from James Garden to the antiquarian John Aubrey, 1694.7James Garden’s letters to John Aubrey in Michael Hunter (ed.), The Occult Laboratory: Magic, Science, and Second Sight in Late Seventeenth-Century Scotland (Woodbridge, 2001), p. 143; we have modernised spelling and punctuation.
…if a man’s fatal end be hanging, [the seer will] see a gibbet or a rope about his neck; if beheaded, they’ll see the man without a head; if drowned, they’ll see water up to his throat; if unexpected death, they’ll see a winding-sheet about his head … One instance I had from a gentleman here, of a Highland gentleman of the Macdonalds who having a brother that came to visit him, saw him coming in wanting a head; yet told not his brother he saw any such thing: but within 24 hours thereafter, his brother was taken, being a murderer; and his head cut off, and sent to Edinburgh.
Detail from studies of eyes by José de Ribera, c. 1622.8The British Museum.
