Originally a Scottish word, a variation of 'gramarye' or 'glaumerie'. We find it in undoubted use first in the i8th century, in Ramsay's publication of The Gipsy Counties:

As soone as they saw her weel faur'd face

They cast their glamourie o'er her O!

It generally signified a mesmerism or enchantment cast over the senses, so that things were perceived or not perceived as the enchanter wished. Gipsies, witches and, above all, the fairies had this power, so that a midwife to the fairies, Called to a patient's home, would see it as a neat cottage or a stately home with a beautiful lady lying in a four-poster bed until she happened to touch her eyes while she anointed the baby, when she found herself in a poor cave, surrounded by a crowd of skinny imps, with her patient on a withered heap of rushes. The fairy ointment had virtue to break the power of glamour, as a fourleafed clover could do. Indeed it was said that the ointment itself was made of sprigs of four-leafed clover.

[Motifs: D2031; D2031.2]