CHAPTER VIII.AUGURY.68
Theanxiety of men to know the future, the issue of their labours, and the destinies awaiting them, makes them ready listeners to the suggestions of fancy, and an easy prey to deception. The mind eagerly lays hold on anything that professes to throw light on the subject of its anxiety, and men are willing victims to their own hopes and fears. Where all is dark and inscrutable, deception and delusion are easy, and hence augury of all kinds, omens, premonitions, divinations, have ever exercised a noticeable power over the human mind.
The ordinary manner which superstition takes to forecast the future is to look upon chance natural appearances under certain circumstances as indications of the character, favourable or unfavourable, of the event about which the mind is anxious. Any appearance in nature, animate or inanimate, can thus be made an omen of, and an inference be drawn from it of impendinggood or bad fortune. If it be gloomy, forbidding, awkward, or unpleasant, it is an unlucky omen, and the subsequent event, with which the mind associates it, will be unfavourable, but if pleasant, then it is a good omen, and prognosticates pleasant occurrences.
Omens which proceed upon a similarity of character between the prognostic and its fulfilment are easy of interpretation. There are other omens which have no connection, natural, possible, or conceivable, with the impending event, and of which consequently the meaning is occult, known only to people of skill instructed in their interpretation. These probably had their origin in one or two accidental coincidences. For instance, if the appearance of a fox is to be taken as an omen, it will naturally be taken as a bad sign, the stinking brute can indicate nothing favourable; but no amount of sagacity will teach a person that an itching in the point of his nose prognosticates the receipt of important news, or the cuckoo calling on the house-top the death of one of the inmates within the year. His utmost acuteness will fail to find in a shoulder-blade any indication of destiny, or any prophetic meaning in the sediment of a cup of tea. The meaning of these is a mystery to the uninitiated, and it is easy to see how they might be reduced to a system and lead to the wildest delusions of fortune-telling.
Everything a Highlander of the old school set about, from the most trifling to the most important, was underthe influence of omens. When he went to fish, to catch his horse in the hill, to sell or buy at the market, to ask a loan from his neighbour, or whatever else he left home to do, he looked about for a sign of the success of his undertaking, and, if the omen were unpropitious, returned home. He knew his journey would be of no avail. He consulted mystagogues as to his fate, and at the proper seasons looked anxiously for the signs of his luck. Like the rest of mankind, he was, by means of these, pleased or depressed in anticipation of events that were never to occur. Hence the saying, “Take a good omen as your omen, and you will be happy.”
Probably the Greekμαντεία, prediction by an oracle, is cognate to the Gaelicmanadh, a foretoken, anything from which a prediction can be drawn. Both among Greeks and Celts a great number of omens were taken from birds.
As already mentioned, it is a bad sign of a person’s luck during the day that he should rise from bed on his left hand, wash himself with water in which eggs have been boiled, or the cakes for his breakfast should frequently break in the baking, or fall backwards. The coming evil can be averted in the latter case by giving plenty of ‘butter without asking’ (Im gun iarraidh) with the cakes. Indeed, ‘butter unasked for’ is of sovereign value as an omen of luck. A cake spread with it, given to fishermen, secures a good day’s fishing. It is reckoned good in diseases, particularly measles,and a most excellent omen for people going on a journey. Its not being given to Hugh of the Little Head, on the morning of his last battle, was followed by his losing the battle and his life.