Scottish second sight (an dà shealladh)

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Scottish second sight — in Gaelic an dà shealladh, “the two sights” — is the faculty, long attributed to certain men and women of the Highlands and Western Isles, of involuntary visions: apparitions showing events at a distance or still to come, most often deaths, funerals, and arrivals. The name counts ordinary vision as the first sight; the second is the unasked-for one. The phrasing carries a whole theory of perception in three words. The world of the senses is one sight, given to everyone; the world of the unseen is a second sight, given to few. A person who had it was called a taibhsear, a seer of taibhse — apparitions, from the Old Irish taidbsiu; the faculty itself was taibhsearachd. Martin Martin, writing in 1703, fixed an older Skye spelling in the English record by titling his chapter an account of the second sight, “in Irish called Taish,” and that older form survives in the variant taischatair for a seer. A premonitory spectre might also be a tannasg or tàsg; an omen, a manadh. The vocabulary is exact, and it belongs to a living Gaelic world, not to the later psychical taxonomies that would try to absorb it.

A faculty that comes unbidden

What set the sight apart from the divinatory arts proper was that nothing is asked. The vision comes unsummoned, often against the seer’s will, and the tradition held the gift to be a burden more than a power. The accounts are full of seers who would have been rid of it: who saw what they did not wish to see, foreknew deaths they could not prevent, and were marked among their neighbors by a knowledge no one had sought. This is the deep line dividing second sight from an operative art. The seer of taibhse sets up nothing, gazes into nothing, summons nothing. Where crystal-gazing is a discipline the scryer undertakes — a speculum, a posture, an act of will turned on a surface — the two sights fall on a person the way weather falls, and the folk understanding treated it accordingly: not a craft to be learned and practiced, but an affliction or an inheritance, closer to a condition of the body than to a skill. It was sharply distinguished, too, from witchcraft. A witch was held to have made a compact; a taibhsear had made none, and was as likely to be pitied as feared.

The visions followed stable conventions, and the stability is itself the most arresting feature of the record. A shroud — the winding-sheet of the dead — seen wrapped about a living person foretold that person’s death, and the higher the shroud had risen on the body, the nearer the end was reckoned: at the feet, a death still far off; risen to the head, a death close at hand. A phantom funeral crossed the ground a real procession would later take, with the bearers sometimes recognized. Corpse-lights moved along the route a coffin would travel. The co-walker — the double or wraith of a living person — appeared where its original was not, and the arrival of a stranger was foreseen in the stranger’s likeness, sometimes down to the clothes, before the man himself came over the hill. It was also held that a seer could pass the vision to a bystander by touch at the moment of seeing, so that two people might look on the one apparition. These are not vague intimations. They are a fixed grammar of signs, and a Highlander of 1700 and a Hebridean of 1900 described them in almost the same terms.

Second sight is not telepathy

A word of caution governs the whole subject, because the sight has been repeatedly mistranslated into vocabularies that came after it. It is a faculty of seeing — of foreknowing deaths and arrivals and the dead through apparition — and it is not, in any of its native forms, a transfer of thought between living minds. The term telepathy is a late coinage; Frederic Myers proposed it only in 1882, in the first volume of the Society for Psychical Research’s Proceedings, for impressions received at a distance without the recognized senses. When Victorian investigators and Theosophical writers reclassified the taibhsear’s shroud and phantom funeral as “telepathy” or “clairvoyance” or, later, “extra-sensory perception,” they were retrofitting a folk faculty into a taxonomy invented two centuries after the Highland accounts began. The retrofit flattens what is most distinctive about the tradition. Second sight is overwhelmingly concerned with death and the future, not with the contents of another mind; it is involuntary where telepathy was theorized as a channel; and it belongs, in the Gaelic world’s own reckoning, to the order of fairy and apparition lore and the dead, not to a science of mental communication. Its closer kin among the arts of foreknowledge is precognition and, broadly, prophecy — but even those are loose translations of a category that named itself.

The record thickens: the late-seventeenth-century inquiry

The written record swells in the late seventeenth century, when second sight briefly became a question of natural philosophy rather than of mere wonder. Restoration virtuosi — the experimental philosophers of the new Royal Society — treated the Highlands as a kind of laboratory of strange but accessible phenomena, a place where unusual testimony could be collected and weighed. The interest was not idle. A well-attested order of spirits could serve as empirical evidence against the fashionable materialism of the age: if apparitions could be documented like any other matter of fact, the world of spirit was defended on the new science’s own terms.

The documented starting point is precise. On 3 October 1678, Robert Boyle — chemist, founding fellow of the Royal Society — interviewed George Mackenzie, Lord Tarbat, at his house in London, and Tarbat afterward set down a written account of Highland second sight; the manuscript survives among Boyle’s papers. From there the queries spread: questionnaires circulated to Scottish ministers, answers came back, and the diarist Samuel Pepys solicited testimony of his own. The whole dossier of Restoration inquiry has been reconstructed by Michael Hunter in The Occult Laboratory: Magic, Science and Second Sight in Late Seventeenth-Century Scotland (Boydell, 2001), which gathers the Boyle, Tarbat, Kirk, Aubrey and Fraser texts into a single edition and argues that this was a chapter in the history of science, not of credulity.

The insider’s synthesis came from Robert Kirk, minister of Aberfoyle, a Gaelic scholar who had worked on a metrical Psalter. His The Secret Commonwealth of Elves, Fauns and Fairies, composed in 1691, reads the sight as perception of the fairy people and their order — the “subterranean inhabitants” of a middle nature between man and angel, and the co-walker as a double “every way like the man.” Kirk’s purpose was conciliatory: to show that the second sight, far from contradicting Christian faith, revealed a hidden but natural part of the created world. The text is famously misdated. Kirk did not publish it; he left it in manuscript at his death in 1692, and it stayed there for more than a century, reaching print only in 1815 — a run of about a hundred copies — at the instigation of Walter Scott, and again in 1893 in the folklorist Andrew Lang’s edition, which gave it the title now universally used. The Edinburgh University Collections record of the 1815 first edition preserves the bibliographic trail.

The fullest early account is Martin Martin’s. A Gaelic-speaking native of Skye, Martin gave second sight an extended treatment in A Description of the Western Islands of Scotland (1703), built case upon collected case — the shroud, the phantom funeral, the foreseen arrival, reported with an ethnographic attention to his own people that later scholars have praised. The chapter, with its catalog of instances, can be read in full at Undiscovered Scotland’s edition of Martin’s Account. Other strands ran alongside: John Aubrey gathered second-sight testimony in his Miscellanies (1696), framed under “hermetick philosophy”; George Sinclair set it within an explicitly demonological frame in Satan’s Invisible World Discovered (1685), writing that men and women in the Highlands could discern fatality approaching in others — by winding-sheets about them — while conceding that many seers were innocent and had the sight against their will; and the inquiry reached Scottish ministers including John Fraser, Dean of the Isles, who answered with his own treatise.

Johnson in the Hebrides, and the long folklore afterlife

The celebrated Enlightenment confrontation came with the 1773 Hebridean tour of Samuel Johnson and James Boswell, recorded in Johnson’s A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland (1775) and Boswell’s Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides (1785). Johnson did not treat the sight as an absurdity to dismiss. He examined the testimony, weighed the absence of corroboration, and withheld conviction without denying the possibility, coming away — in the phrase that has stood for the whole subject ever since — only willing to believe. His father had put Martin’s book in his hands when he was a boy; the question had been with him a long time, and he left the Hebrides with it unresolved on his own terms but taken seriously throughout.

The material then passed into the folklore archive. Walter Scott’s Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft (1830) served as the Romantic bridge, treating second sight, fairies and apparitions analytically. The Gaelic-speaking minister John Gregorson Campbell of Tiree gathered the most important collections, published posthumously as Superstitions of the Highlands & Islands of Scotland (1900) and Witchcraft and Second Sight in the Highlands & Islands of Scotland (1902); it was Campbell who glossed the faculty exactly as its name implies, the world of sense visible to all and the world of spirits to certain persons only. Alexander Carmichael’s Carmina Gadelica (first two volumes, 1900) preserved the charms and lore of the same world, though later scholarship established that Carmichael polished and reworked his materials, so that the collection is a literary rather than a literal record of what he heard. An anthology edited by Norman Macrae, Highland Second-Sight (1908), drew the older sources together.

The Coinneach Odhar material — the “prophecies of the Brahan Seer” — belongs to this afterlife in a particular way, as a largely nineteenth-century literary construction retrojected onto a half-remembered name, and is treated under the Brahan Seer prophetic legend. The fairy and apparition complex into which Kirk fitted the sight — the sìthean, the co-walker, the unseen neighbors — is the subject of Scottish fairy and apparition lore. What this account holds is the faculty itself: the involuntary vision and its documented record.

The psychical re-appropriation and a scandal

Late investigation fared worse than the seventeenth century’s. Andrew Lang, folklorist and a figure in the Society for Psychical Research, pulled second sight back toward the new psychical categories, devoting a chapter to it in Cock Lane and Common-Sense (1894). The Society then mounted a Highland “Second Sight Inquiry,” begun in 1892 with the financial backing of the third Marquess of Bute. It was entrusted in 1894, on Myers’s recommendation, to Ada Goodrich Freer, who published reports on the lore of the Outer Hebrides — and who was afterward shown to have drawn, heavily and without proper acknowledgment, on the unpublished field notebooks of Father Allan McDonald, the priest and folklorist of Eriskay. The exposure came in John Lorne Campbell and Trevor Hall’s Strange Things (1968), which documented both the appropriation and the collapse of her separate “haunted house” investigation; the Society repudiated her work, the inquiry was never completed, and McDonald’s own collection survives as nearly the only honest residue of the whole enterprise. It stands as a permanent caution in the literature: the record of the investigation is not the record of the phenomenon, and the two must be kept apart.

What the documentary record shows (and the scholarship)

The interest of second sight to scholarship lies less in adjudicating whether anyone ever saw a shroud than in the unusual shape of its documentation. Here is a folk faculty that was examined by questionnaire and sworn witness in the 1690s — circulated among the founders of experimental science, weighed by a chemist and a diarist and a Skye ethnographer — more than two centuries before psychical research had a name or a method. The conventions stayed remarkably fixed across that span, and the hereditary claim, that the gift ran in certain families, was being asserted in the seventeenth century and was still being tested in the twentieth: Shari Cohn’s questionnaire surveys of second sight in northern Scotland, conducted from Edinburgh in the 1990s, gathered family pedigrees and reported the belief that the faculty descends through bloodlines — the same claim Kirk and Martin had recorded, now put to the apparatus of survey statistics. The modern critical frame is set by Hunter’s Occult Laboratory (2001) for the seventeenth-century inquiry; by Lizanne Henderson and Edward Cowan’s Scottish Fairy Belief (2001) for the wider belief world; by Ronald Black’s annotated edition of Campbell, The Gaelic Otherworld (2005), for the vocabulary; and by Alex Sutherland’s The Brahan Seer: The Making of a Legend (2009) for the invented-tradition problem in the prophetic material.

Read against all of this, the two sights make an unusual object. Most folk faculties survive as scattered anecdote; this one was caught early in the act of being interrogated, its testimony solicited in writing while the seers were still alive to give it, its grammar of shrouds and funerals and doubles recorded with enough consistency that the late collectors found themselves copying out what the Restoration ministers had already set down. A death-omen seen against one’s will, reported soberly and in the same fixed forms by Gaelic speakers across two hundred years, and gathered by men who disagreed entirely about what it meant — that is the coherence the documents preserve, and it is the rarer thing about an dà shealladh: not that it was believed, but that it was so early, so carefully, and so consistently written down.

→ Related: Scottish Fairy And Apparition Lore · Brahan Seer Prophetic Legend Invented Tradition · Divination · Prophecy · Precognition · Royal Society · Telepathy · Crystal Gazing