Scotland’s Nostradamus: A Quest for the Brahan Seer

This is the first comprehensive study of Coinneach Odhar Mackenzie, the celebrated Highland Seer, and is the result of years of first-hand research surrounding the author’s own family’s history. McKenzie argues that this figure was the product of a patchwork of oral storytelling traditions that thrived in the Highlands, but was initially based on Michael Scot, the Borders born mathematician and astrologer who moved to Sicily in the early 1200s and became scientific adviser to the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II. The Battle of Culloden, the Highland Clearances, mass-emigration and industrialisation - all those major changes that the Brahan Seer was purported to have predicted- had a huge impact in society in the same way that modern conspiracy theories have had around more recent disasters.

After studying History at Cambridge University, during which time he first addressed the Brahan Seer in his degree dissertation about the last Lord Seaforth, Andrew McKenzie has maintained a lifelong interest in his Highland family history, including in 2013 writing May we be Britons? A History of the Mackenzies. After Cambridge, McKenzie has worked at Bonhams, the London auction house, where he became Head of Old Master Paintings, continuing to indulge his passion for 16th, 17th and 18th century European history and culture. After a spell working at Phillips, between 1994 and 2000, he was invited back to Bonhams to head the Old Master Paintings Department, where he remains as a senior consultant.