viii: Foraging through Folklore
Taking tea with a Highland Seer Ella Leith Reading tea leaves seems an innocent enough game, but predicting the future has been ascribed very different values by different communities. Interpreting omens was explicitly linked to sorcery and banned in Leviticus (19:26) and Deuteronomy (18:10-12), which led to fortune-telling being proscribed under some secular laws (e.g., the Scottish Witchcraft Act of 1563). Yet divinatory practices can be found peppering our everyday lives, from idly counting out cherry stones (tinker, tailor, soldier, sailor…) to throwing apple peels over our shoulders and looking to see if an initial is formed. Anyone can perform these acts; others require a little more skill. Tasseography— the art of identifying and interpreting symbols in the dregs of a cup of loose-leaf tea —is one of these; for this to really work, many people believe, you need someone who is a little bit psychic. Despite sometimes being seen as uncomfortably close to witchcraft (Godbeer, 1992), clairvoyance is more often conceived of as a gift: a talent, but also, as Bennett (1995: 136) puts it, ‘an unsought handout’ that leaves the recipient ‘uncontaminated’ by it. They may even be revered for it. In a 1956 interview, Robert Lamb (1904-1972) tells that, in his native Banffshire,
any old caileach [woman] that ever I knew that was pointed out to hae the Second Sight, they were never put down, they were looked on with great respect. Stiùbhart (2020) describes the Second Sight as ‘a primal, hereditary phenomenon involving involuntary visions of future events’, and the hereditary element conferred particular families with the reputation for clairvoyance. Those with the surname MacGregor, says Robert Lamb, were “spoken of wi veneration, because often, by some strange means, they hed predictit the future.” One of the MacGregors “was supposed to be, as we would say, the Seer, the Highland Seer” and “a reader o cups”: Wan o the girls said wad he read her cup, and […] bein a favourite he wud read her cup. When he took it up, he looked at it and they said “whad’ye seein?” “I see the devil,” he says, “awalkin on the ground, and before we reach Torbain tonight there’ll be a sad disaster.” A disaster there was: later that night, another local man’s pony shied at some imaginary thing on the road and he was thrown out o the gig an’ his neck was broken. […] That gave
