Evil eye in the western Highlands

by Robert Craig Maclagan

The following is from a woman of her own experience in the case of her own son. She told that his sister went out with him one day to a neighbour’s house. He was sitting in her lap, when the neighbour’s daughter called her mother’s attention to the white beauty of the child’s legs. The mother agreed, and something more was said praising the child, and he then got a drink of milk. Well, as soon as he took the milk, he began as if he were singing, “Do re do, do re do.” This he continued to do for a good while, and was very fretful. This child was cured by a magic thread which stopped the “humming.”

Cattle, in popular belief, are much more liable to damage from the Evil Eye than other animals, judging from the greater number of instances related of it in their case. “Two of M. McN.’s cattle died within a short time of each other, and all the old people of the place persisted in saying they were injured by some Evil Eye.” A reciter told of her mother, who had married the elder of two brothers occupying a farm in common, getting the credit of the Evil Eye because, shortly after her marriage, the cattle on the farm “began to die right away.”

In the following case motive is given, and if any overt act of a magical nature had been said to occur, it would certainly have to be classified as witchcraft, but seeing there is no such history, it is one of those cases in which the action of an Evil Eye was evidently not supposed to be involuntary. The heir to a tenant who had fallen into arrears, having paid what was owing, got possession from the superior. Meanwhile a woman had been living in the house. She was warned to leave, but paid no heed to the warning, and it became necessary to turn her out by force. She got shelter from a relative near by, while the new tenant went to live in the house from which she had been ejected. “But if he did, he soon suffered for it, for he was not long there until he had lost nine of his cattle by death, and he and every one else believed that they had been “air an cronachadh” by the woman from spite.

There are no symptoms recounted in these general losses.

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.”