Seer

“ Like the wide, deep ocean, that pulsates into every bay and creek and blesses the distant isles with its dew and rain, so God's heart throbs and pulsates unto the uttermost parts of the universe, having a parent's sympathy for His children who suffer.
Indeed, the seer ranges through all nature searching out images for interpreting His all-comprehending gentleness. "Even the bruised reed he will not break." Lifting itself high in the air, a mere lead pencil for size, weighted with a heavy top, a very little injury shatters a reed. ”

“ The seer is simply an example of a variation biologically, such as occurs in all species of living things, both animal and vegetable. But the unusually large roses in our gardens, the swifter horses of the herd, and the cleverer wolf in the pack have no means of influencing their fellows as a result of their peculiar superiority. ”

“ Thus we have seen that the last chief of Seaforth was deaf and dumb; that he had four sons; that he survived them all; that the four great Highland lairds who were his contemporaries were all distinguished by the peculiar personal marks the seer predicted; that his estates were inherited by a white-coifed or white-hooded lassie from the East; that his great possessions passed into the hands of other races; and that his eldest daughter and heiress was so unfortunate as to be the innocent cause of her sister’s death. ”

“ The success of each depends upon the observance of that method which is agreeable to their respective temperaments.
In regard to the qualifications which should supplement and sustain the natural aptitude of the seer or seeress, the following remarks may be of general service.
Self-possession and confidence in one's own soul-faculties must be the firm rock upon which all revelations should rest. The purer the intention and motive of the seer, the more lucid will be the visions accorded. No reliable vision can be obtained by one whose nature is not inherently truthful. ”

“ One{33} who listens to the song of life knows nothing of age or change. So it is that the boy John never slipped away from Burroughs, the man. So it is that the Seer of Woodchuck Lodge is eighty years young.
Do you know what it means to be a seer? A seer is one who has seeing eyes which clearly note and comprehend what most people pass a hundred times nor care to see. He looks, too, through the outer shell or appearance of things, and learns to read something of their hidden meaning. ”

“ The so-called Seer can “enjoy” as harmlessly and as uselessly as a boy who idly swims in the lagoon, where he gains no knowledge and may end his sport in death. Even so is the one who swims, cuts capers, in the astral light, and becomes lost in something strange which surpasses all his comprehension. The difference between such a Seer and19 the ordinary sensualist, is, that the first indulges both his astral and physical senses to excess, while the latter his physical senses only. ”

“ These two types—of which there are many varieties—achieve their psychic development by quite opposite means. The positive seer works with effort, throwing out the soul-images by the power of his will, perceiving them with more or less accuracy, and thereafter turning them over in the mind, reasoning and questioning concerning their import and meaning. The passive seer, on the contrary, works not at all and makes no effort, the visions coming slowly, almost imperceptibly, and in most cases having a literal interpretation. ”

“ A seer finds the egg and sucks it. Then the warlock grows as weak as a child, “for all his strength had passed into the seer.”828 In a Serbian story a fabulous being called True Steel declares, “Far away from this place there is a very high mountain, in the mountain there is a fox, in the fox there is a heart, in the heart there is a bird, and in this bird is my strength.” The fox is caught and killed and its heart is taken out. ”

“ Some sixty years ago a seer in Ruaig, Tiree, the neighbouring village to the preceding, was one day employed in the harvest-field, tying sheaves after the reapers, a work assigned to old people. One of his sons was away in the Ross of Mull for a cargo of peats. ”

“ The Greenland seer is bound 'with his head between his legs.' [32]
Can it be possible, judging from Australia, Scotland, Egypt, that the binding, as of a corpse or mummy, is a symbolical way of putting the seer on a level with the dead, who will then communicate with him? In three remote points, we find seer-binding and corpse-binding; but we need to prove that corpses are, or have been, bound at the other points where the seer is tied up—in a reindeer skin among the Samoyeds, an elk skin in North America, a bull's hide in the Highlands.
Binding the seer is not a universal Red Indian custom ”

“ Those in the seventh and eighth lines have been most literally fulfilled, for there can be no doubt that “foolish pride without sense” has brought about what the Seer predicted, and secured, for the present at least, the seed of the goat where the seed of the deer used to rule. The deer, and the deer’s horns, as is well known, are the armorial bearings of the Mackenzies, while the goat is that of the Fletchers, who now rule in Rosehaugh, on the ruins of its once great and famous “Cabair-feidh”. ”

“ Always the seer is a sayer. Somehow his dream is told: somehow he publishes it with solemn joy: sometimes with pencil on canvas; sometimes with chisel on stone; sometimes in towers and aisles of granite, his soul’s worship is builded; sometimes in anthems of indefinite music; but clearest and most permanent, in words. ”

“ A special kind of divination, which has at times been evidenced in certain parts of Europe, and is not unknown to our North-western Indians, consists in the perception of contemporaneous or future events, during a brief trance. Generally the seer looks with painfully raised eyelids, fixedly into space, evidently utterly unconscious of all around him, and engaged in watching a distant occurrence. ”

“ A certain delicacy of organization, together with a tendency to hyperaesthesia, is most frequently noted in the passive or direct seer; but a more robust and forceful constitution may well be allied to the positive type of seership. ”

“ Oh! how many hopes for a lover are there in the vivacity of those convulsive movements, in the fire of those glances, in the strength of those limbs, beautiful even in contortion! It is then that a woman is carried away like an impetuous wind, darts forth like the flames of a conflagration, exhibits a movement like a billow which glides over the white pebbles. She is overcome with excess of love, she sees the future, she is the seer who prophesies, but above all, she sees the present moment and tramples on her husband, and impresses him with a sort of terror. ”

“ A great herd of seals live there, protected by the authorities for the pleasure of the travelers who flock here by the thousands. In the afternoon they look like a flock of sheep resting in the shadows of the rock; but in the morning they are playing in the waters. At one time they sound like a pack of hounds far in the distance; at another, like a herd of hungry cattle. This, with the roar of the ocean against the rocks, makes a sound one never can forget. ”

“ A seal comes to its rock there before the tide has sufficiently gone down to let it lie upon it. It plays about the rock, fawns upon it, caresses it, woos it, one might say, dives down and circumnavigates it, tries or pretends to try to lie upon it, even under the water, swims away and returns, and does the same thing several times; and as soon as the water is sufficiently shallow to allow of it, it reclines, sea-washed and gently heaving, till the receding tide leaves it high and dry. A pretty thing it is—very—to see a seal thus waiting for its chosen rock to appear. ”

“ An occasional seal, that put up its half-human head to peer at us, or a sparrow or butterfly, that hovered about us when we neared the shore, or now and then a flock of water-fowl, were the only living things we saw. ”

“ I well remember the first seal I shot. I had landed on the weather-side of a small island. A cautious reconnoitring discovered a good-sized seal ‘lying up’ on a detached rock. Then I commenced the stalking, closely followed by my dog. But ere I could approach within range, one of those seal-sentinels and provoking tormentors of the seal-hunter, a herring gull, set up his wild warning scream. The seal perfectly understood what it meant, at once took the alarm, plunged into the water, and disappeared. ”

“ It seems funny to be looking over a ledge, all day long, and to eat one's lunch whilst so doing. But I just look up to make my notes, and on looking down again, almost right under me, I see a seal hanging lazily in this quiet shore-pool of the sea; for to-day there is hardly a foam-line round the stacks and rocks. ”

“ But why, then, should the true seals—the phocidæ, which must once have been in the same sort of transition stage between ordinary walking and their own gait, that the otariidæ are now—why should they have passed forward into their present more fish-like condition, since both the advantage of walking has been thereby lost, and that of swift swimming seems to have been lessened? Of two creatures, each of whom has, from once being a land-animal, become a water-animal, why should the one whose structure has been least modified in relation to the change, be more active in the water than the other? ”

“ What seal he is, scientifically, I know not, but he is certainly not the common one, for besides the pronounced difference in the shape of the head and face, colour and appearance of the fur, etc., he is much larger, the great barrel of the body being, perhaps, twice the size. The figure, too, though less human, is more buoy-like, increasing more rapidly, though very smoothly, from behind the head and below the chin, and tapering more abruptly towards the tail. ”

“ At length, with a mighty yawn and stretch, he turns full upon his vasty stomach, and immediately, by virtue of the different appearance which his fur has when wet or dry, becomes a much smaller seal that « 326 » has climbed up upon a buoy—the lower, wet part of him looks like that; the upper, alone, is himself. Then gradually he soaks all over, till he is, again, huge and indivisible, a great, naked, blue, greasy, oiled bladder,—yet firm still, as though he grew to the rock. ”

“ A seal can sleep as comfortably on the water as on shore. To sleep it turns on its back, holds its nose and feet above the surface, and takes a profound nap, gently rocked by the waves.
“While the young seals are on shore the big seals defend them and take care of them so long as they keep at home. If they wander away, even though they do not go out of sight, they pay no attention to them. ”

“ The seal stretches his head above the waves, not comprehending what has disturbed the repose of his asylum, while the rapacious skua pursues the puffin and gull. High in the air the birds seem like bees clustering about the rocks, whilst lower they fly past so close that they might be knocked down with a stick. ”

“ How it has escaped them that we must have a common ancestor with the seal, I know not. And yet it is a well-ascertained fact that the brain of a seal in size and general appearance more nearly resembles that of man than does the brain of any other animal; and look at the position and appearance of a seal's head when he comes to the surface of the water: can anything more closely resemble the head of a man in like circumstances? ”

“ After sinking down—down—nobody knows how far, they at length reached a door, which, being open, led them into a range of apartments, filled with inhabitants—not people, but seals, who could nevertheless speak and feel like human folk; and how much was the seal-killer surprised to find that he himself had been unconsciously transformed into the like image! If it were not so, he would probably have died, from the want of breath. The nature of the poor fisher’s thoughts may be more easily conceived than described. ”

“ Their bed-times are not governed by the ebb and flow of the sea.
The larger seal which I spoke of yesterday is called here, locally, a bottle-nosed seal, or at least some so designate it. He is here again to-day, rising at intervals and staring at the sky, in the other of these two-in-one-contained bays, which seems to be more particularly his own. When he rises he remains for a full minute standing upright, as it were, in the water, with his muzzle about six inches above it and pointing straight into the sky. ”

“ If it catches sight of a seal upon a drifting floe, it will slide quietly into the sea, swim with only the tip of its nose above the water, and, diving under the floe, reach the very spot which the hapless seal has regarded as an oasis of safety. ”

“ They spin and shoot about, slap each other with their fins or tails, and, every now and again, one hears a curious burst of sound, like subaqueous thunder; whether caused by the swirl, as they go down, or being a growl, half-choked under the water, I do not know. Seals seem to lead a most happy life. I have mentioned one leaping out of the water, as it went along, in pure enjoyment—for what else could it have been? But how different is all this to the lonely sleep of that great thing yonder!—Falstaff—Proteus—Bottle-nose—but that last is a calumny on a very respectable feature. ”

“ I do not think a seal’s range of vision on land, or out of the water, is very great. I have frequently experimented with adult fur-seals, by allowing them to catch sight of my person, so as to distinguish it as of foreign character, three and four hundred paces off, taking the precaution of standing quietly to the leeward when the wind was blowing strong, and then walking unconcernedly up to them. ”