Ravens and Black Rain

Elizabeth Sutherland has done a great service to all of us who hail from Scottish Highland heritage. She has mapped out through exhaustive scholarship the cosmologies, traditions and lore surrounding the ways of the seer in Scottish ways. A compilation of oral traditions and stories, including first hand accounts, of engaged seership in ancient, Culloden-era as well as contemporary Scotland, Ravens and Black Rain is an exquisite introduction to An Da Shealladh (the Two Sights), with plenty of meaty material for seasoned scholars or practitioners to consider. My favorite aspect of the book is, perhaps, Ms. Sutherland's matter of fact way of speaking about the sight as simply an extension of the old Druidic traditions alive and well in the milieu of a contemporary Scotland.

This scholarly and thorough, but highly readable account, details historic and modern (up to the 1980s) instances of the Scottish Highland brand of precognition known as Second Sight. From St. Columba to modern-day Glaswegians, it covers the visions seen by seers that accurately foretold future events. This book should appeal to all lovers of Highland lore and the occult. It is both objective in tone and open-minded regarding its subject and is a refreshing source of information with enough spine-tingling details to keep the reader on the edge of his seat!