The Second Sight - Page 2

A shroud is observed around the living man who is doomed; boding animals, mostly black dogs, vex the seer; funerals are witnessed before they occur, and 'corpse-candles' (some sort of light) are watched flitting above the road whereby a burial procession is to take its way. {228} Though we most frequently hear the term 'second sight' applied as a phrase of Scotch superstition, the belief in this kind of ominous illusion is obviously universal. Theoclymenus, in the Odyssey, a prophet by descent, and of the same clan as the soothsayer Melampus, beholds the bodies and faces of the doomed wooers, 'shrouded in night'. The Pythia at Delphi announced a similar symbolic vision of blood-dripping walls to the Athenians, during the Persian War. Again, symbolic visions, especially of blood-dripping walls, are so common in the Icelandic sagas that the reader need only be referred to the prodigies before the burning of Njal, in the Saga of Burnt Njal. Second sight was as popular a belief among the Vikings as among the Highlanders who retain a large share of their blood. It may be argued by students who believe in the borrowing rather than in the independent evolution of ideas, that the Gaelic second sight is a direct inheritance from the Northmen, who have left so many Scandinavian local names in the isles and along the coasts.

However this may be, the Highland second sight is different, in many points, from the clairvoyance and magic of the Lapps, those famous sorcerers. On this matter the History of Lapland, by Scheffer, Professor of Law in Upsala, is generally cited (Oxford, 1674). 'When the devil takes a liking to any person in his infancy,' says Scheffer, 'he presently seizes on him by a disease, in which he haunts him with several apparitions.' This answers, in magical education, to Smalls, or Little Go.

Some Lapps advance to a kind of mystic Moderations, and the great sorcerers attain to Final Schools, and are Bachelors in Black Arts. 'They become so knowing that, without the drum they can see things at the greatest distances; and are so possessed by the devil that they see things even against their will.' The 'drum' is a piece of hollow wood covered with a skin, on which rude pictures are drawn. An index is laid on the skin, the drum is tapped, and omens are taken from the picture on which the index happens to rest. But this practice has nothing to do with clairvoyance. In Scheffer's account of Lapp seers we recognise the usual hysterical or epileptic lads, who, in various societies become saints, mediums, warlocks, or conjurers. But Scheffer shows that the Lapp experts try, voluntarily, to see sights, whereas, except when wrapped in a bull's hide of old, or cowering in a boiler at the present day, the Highland second-sighted man lets his visions come to him spontaneously and uninvoked. Scheffer wished to take a magical drum from a Lapp, who confessed with tears, that, drum or no drum, he would still see visions, as he proved by