Right or wrong, the theory here advanced accounts, satisfactorily, as far as the writer can judge, for the present-day widespread belief in Scotland of the power for evil of the glance of the human eye.
As will be seen afterwards, there are those who theorise on the bad heart influencing the eye, the ill effect of the Evil Eye only arising from the glance of the covetous; but this is probably the result of preconceived religious ideas, and of the moral teaching to which its believers have been accustomed. It is not to be wondered at; it would be impossible indeed, but that the teaching of Christianity should have affected and given a direction to this ancient superstition. Thus we find it Christianised to a marked degree, its origin is conceived of as a breaking of the commandment “Thou shalt not covet,” and its cures are mostly connected with a reference to the Deity, and to the Trinity of the Christian. The magic thread with the three knots on it, though heathen in its origin, has surely some connection with the rosary, the aspersion with water, with baptism, and the holy water of the Roman Church. But it is not a superstition introduced with Christianity, it is as native as the heather of our hills, or the sandstone rock of the Coronation Stone.
This statement might be safely enough advanced upon general principles, but we are not without satisfactory literary evidence of what we advance. In the Ossianic “Acallam na Senorach” (The Colloquy with the Ancient Men), the second longest prose composition of the mediæval Irish, a collection (probably made in the late twelfth or thirteenth century) of separate stories united together in one framework, we find the following as related in MSS. of the fifteenth century and later.
The Fiann are on a visit to the King of Munster. The son of the King of Ulster marries the daughter of the King of Munster.
“The damsel bore him a famous and beautiful son named Fer Oc (‘young man’), and in all Ireland there were scarcely one whose shape and vigour and spear-casting were as good as his.”
On a subsequent visit, the three battalions of the Fiann are lost in admiration of the activity and skill of a young man who turns out to be this Fer Oc. “Then was a hunt and a battue held by the three battalions of the Fiann. Howbeit, on that day, owing to Fer Oc (and his superior skill) to none of the Fiann it fell to get first blood of pig or deer. Now when they came home, after finishing the hunt, a sore lung-disease attacked Fer Oc, through the (evil) eyes of the multitude and the envy of the great host, and it killed him, soulless, at the end of nine days.” “He was buried on yonder green-grassed hill,” says Cailte, “and the shining stone that he held when he was at games and diversion is that yonder rising out of his head.”[1] The Gaelic here simply says “tre tsuilib na sochaide” (through the eyes of the multitude), and it will be seen that modern reciters sometimes speak in exactly the same way of the “eye” unqualified, but meaning the Evil Eye. But there is more than this in the story; it is a young man who suffers, and the young are most easily affected. It is a remarkable and handsome youth that suffers, and what attracts the eye, especially beauty, is peculiarly liable to injury, and the statement is made that it was the envious glance which affected the victim. Cormac’s Glossary (an Irish compilation begun in the tenth century, and added to throughout the Middle Ages), preserved in MSS. of the commencement of the fifteenth century, mentions the Evil Eye:—
Milled (spoiling, hurting, (b) i.e. mi shilledh, a mislook, i.e. an evil eye).
Millead i mi shillead i silled olc. [Or as in another MS.]
Milliud quasi mishilliud i drochshilliud.
To this O’Clery adds “no droch amharc,” while O’Donovan’s note at (b) is “the evil eye,” “the injury done by the evil eye.”[2]