The Scottish Gaelic is an dà shealladh (un DAH HYAL-ugh), the two sights.

Note what the phrase does not say. It does not say the second sight, or extra sight, or a gift. It says two sights: the ordinary one and the other one, held simultaneously by the same person, whether or not they want them.

That framing is the whole of the tradition and it is quite unlike anything in modern psychic practice.

What it was understood to be

A taibhsear (TAIV-shar), from taibhse (TAIV-shuh) meaning an apparition or wraith, is a person who has the two sights. The related noun is taibhsearachd (TAIV-shar-uchk). The classic manifestation is not a vision of anything abstract. It is seeing a specific thing that has not happened yet, in the ordinary world, as though it were happening now:

  • A funeral procession coming down a road, with recognisable people carrying the coffin, weeks or months before the death
  • A spirit light, a small moving flame, travelling the route a coffin will later take
  • A person seen in their shroud, the height of the shroud on the body indicating how soon
  • A person seen dripping wet, foretelling drowning
  • A double, a co-choisiche (koh CHOSH-i-chuh) or fetch, of somebody still alive
  • Empty chairs occupied, or a house seen full of people who are not there

The information is overwhelmingly about death. Occasionally arrivals, marriages, or the fortunes of a house, but mostly death.

The historical record

This is unusually well documented for a piece of Gaelic folk belief, because it fascinated outsiders.

  • Martin Martin, a Skye man and a Gaelic speaker, wrote A Description of the Western Islands of Scotland around 1695 and published it in 1703. His account is the foundational source. He treats it as a matter of fact, gathers cases, and describes the mechanics: the vision appears without warning, the seer's eyes stay open, the seer cannot look away, and afterwards they are often exhausted or distressed.
  • Samuel Johnson and James Boswell pursued the subject throughout their 1773 tour. Johnson, a considerable sceptic, took it more seriously than he expected to and wrote about it at some length in A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland.
  • Robert Kirk, minister of Aberfoyle, wrote The Secret Commonwealth of Elves, Fauns and Fairies in 1691, dealing with second sight alongside fairy belief from the position of a Gaelic-speaking clergyman who considered the whole business real and worth documenting.
  • John Gregorson Campbell collected extensively in the Highlands and Islands in the nineteenth century, and his Witchcraft and Second Sight in the Highlands and Islands of Scotland (1902) is the fullest Victorian treatment. Ronald Black's annotated edition, The Gaelic Otherworld, is the version to use.

So: a seventeenth century Gaelic-speaking islander, a seventeenth century Gaelic-speaking minister, an eighteenth century English sceptic, and a nineteenth century Highland folklorist. Four very different observers, all describing recognisably the same phenomenon in the same population.

That is a better evidential position than most things in this field, and it is why I take the tradition seriously as a tradition, whatever one concludes about the mechanism.

The things that distinguish it

  • It was not wanted. This is the point that most modern writing about second sight loses entirely. The two sights are consistently described as a burden. Seers did not advertise. They were often reluctant to say what they had seen, because saying it made it worse for the family and because there was frequently nothing to be done. Knowing a man will drown does not stop him drowning; in a great many recorded cases the seer watches the foreseen thing arrive exactly as shown. There is no tradition here of developing the gift, opening up, or offering readings. It was an affliction with a social cost.
  • It could be transmitted involuntarily. One recurring motif has the sight passing to somebody standing in contact with the seer, sometimes by the seer's foot on theirs, sometimes by looking under the seer's arm. In several accounts this happens by accident and is regretted immediately.
  • It ran in families and in places. Associated with particular kindreds and particular districts. The Brahan Seer, Coinneach Odhar, is the most famous figure attached to it, though the historical evidence for him is thin and much of the material was assembled in the nineteenth century by Alexander Mackenzie. Treat him as legend with a possible historical seed rather than as record.
  • It was not divination. Nobody sat down and did it. There was no method, no tool, no question asked. It arrived.

That last distinction is the sharpest one. Divination is a practice you undertake. Second sight is a thing that happens to you.

Where I would be careful

Two things.

  • First, do not confuse this with psychic development. The modern framework of latent abilities to be cultivated is a nineteenth and twentieth century construction with roots in Spiritualism and Theosophy. It has been laid over the Gaelic material retrospectively and it does not fit. Nothing in the tradition suggests you can acquire the two sights by wanting them, and quite a lot of it suggests you should hope you do not.
  • Second, be careful of yourself. The classic phenomenology of second sight overlaps considerably with experiences that also occur in grief, in exhaustion, in bereavement, in certain neurological conditions, and in some forms of mental illness. Hypnagogic imagery, seeing a person who has died, hearing a name called: these are common human experiences, particularly among the recently bereaved, and they are not in themselves signs of anything wrong or anything special.

I am not telling you what your experiences are. I am saying that a tradition which understood these things as omens of death is a tradition that could make a frightening period considerably more frightening, and that if you are having persistent visions that distress you, the first call is a doctor rather than a diviner. The tradition itself would not have disagreed with getting help; it simply had different help available.

What is actually usable

If you set aside the question of whether anybody can see the future, there are three things in this tradition worth carrying.

  • The two sights, not the second sight. The premise is that the ordinary world and the other are both fully present, at once, to the same pair of eyes. This is not journeying, where you go somewhere. It is not trance, where you leave. It is double vision in the here and now, and as a model of perception it is quietly radical.
  • Sight as something that arrives. Everything modern practice teaches about divination is active: shuffle, cast, ask, interpret. The Gaelic model is entirely passive. The seer receives. If you have ever had the experience of knowing something arrive uninvited and complete, that is the shape of this, and it does not fit the tarot spread at all.
  • Reluctance as a mark of seriousness. In the tradition, the people worth listening to were the ones who did not want to tell you. I find that a useful filter generally, and not only here.

The Scottish context

Second sight belongs to a specific place and a specific language, and it is worth saying that plainly on a site like this one.

It is Scottish Gaelic. The vocabulary is Gaelic, the transmission was Gaelic, the collectors who preserved it were working in Gaelic-speaking communities, and much of it was recorded during the exact period when those communities were being cleared, dispersed and forced into English.

Martin Martin was writing about a culture he belonged to. Johnson was writing about one he was visiting shortly after Culloden. The difference between those two positions is not subtle, and it is worth holding when you read either.

If you have Scottish Gaelic, or want it, this is another good reason.

Sources

  • Martin, M. (1703). A Description of the Western Islands of Scotland. The foundational account. Available via Internet Archive and Electric Scotland.
  • Kirk, R. (1691, pub. 1815). The Secret Commonwealth of Elves, Fauns and Fairies. Full text at the Internet Sacred Text Archive.
  • Johnson, S. (1775). A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland, and Boswell, J. (1785). The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides. Both on Project Gutenberg.
  • Campbell, J. G. (1902). Witchcraft and Second Sight in the Highlands and Islands of Scotland. Via Internet Archive.
  • Black, R. (ed.) (2005). The Gaelic Otherworld. Birlinn. The annotated Campbell, and the best route into this material.
  • Carmichael, A. (1900). Carmina Gadelica. Full text, for taibhse, taibhsear and related vocabulary in the glossary.
  • Henderson, L. & Cowan, E. J. (2001). Scottish Fairy Belief: A History. Tuckwell Press.
  • Hunter, M. (2001). The Occult Laboratory: Magic, Science and Second Sight in Late Seventeenth-Century Scotland. Boydell. On the Royal Society's investigations into second sight, which are genuinely strange and under-known.
  • Mackenzie, A. (1877). The Prophecies of the Brahan Seer. Read with heavy scepticism; this is where most of the Coinneach Odhar material was assembled.
  • Am Faclair Beag for the Gaelic terms.

If visions or voices are distressing you or affecting your daily life, speak to your GP. In Scotland, NHS 24 is available on 111, and Breathing Space on 0800 83 85 87.

Related: [How to Read an Esoteric Claim]; [The Cailleach]; [Naming and Speaking]