After the introduction of Christianity, its first preachers wishing to defer to the prejudices of the inhabitants, yet not so as to interfere with the celebration of Easter at the vernal equinox, with an accommodating policy, retained the Baal-tinne ceremonial, only transferring it to the saints’ days; thus diverting their attention from their former devotion, and fixing it upon those who, in their zealous propagation of the gospel truths, may be considered as Christian stars;—conformably to that gracious character of “a burning and shining light,” which our Saviour Himself applied to His precursor, St. John.
In honour of this apostle, June 24th, the day of his nativity, was substituted, in the old ecclesiastical calendar, for the pagan solstice festival, and called solstitium vulgi, the vulgar solstice.
The intention of the transfer was, however, lost sight of by the illiterate; and when they would kindle their fires on the tops of mountains on those occasions, they used to blend with them the features of the pagan institution, by passing children and cattle between them for the purpose of purification.
The propriety, therefore, of thus subserving to deep-rooted prejudices, has by some been impugned; but “surely,” after all, to use the words of a very able writer, “they were much wiser and better who, in those early times, grafted the evangelical upon the druidical culture, than they who, in subsequent times, instituted a system of extirpation in order to regenerate.”
The other pagan solemnities were similarly metamorphosed, and partook of similar transmutations. The 1st of May alone retained the name and characteristics of its original appropriation, being still called “La Beuil-tinne,” that is, the day of Baal’s fire, as familiarly as the name Christmas is given to the 25th of December. On it, too, fires are kindled on “high places,” as before; and children and cattle purified by passing between them;—
————“Yet, oh! remember
Oft I have heard thee say, the secret heart
Is fair Devotion’s temple: there the saint
Even on that living altar lights the flame
Of purest sacrifice, which burns unseen,
Not unaccepted.”[223]
I next turn to Killmalloch, the ancient name of which, as given by Ptolemy, was Macollicon,—a metathesis for Mallochicon; and the final, icon, which is only a Greek termination, being taken away, leaves Malloch, that is, Moloch, the Apollo or great divinity of the ancient universe.
To divert the natives from this misplaced enthusiasm, one of the early converts to Christianity assumed to himself the name of Maloch; and then prefixing to it the adjunct Kill, made it the church of Maloch, instead of the city of Moloch.
Here is still to be seen, careering towards the skies, one of those “singular temples of round form,” of the existence of which Vitruvius was so ignorant, but whose dogmatic enunciation of “monopteres” and “peripteres,” sounds as feebly in my ears, as Montmorency’s assumption that the round towers were dungeons!—and the violence which this structure has latterly undergone—by the effort made to incorporate it with the Christian cathedral, built beside it in rivalship, after an interval of nearly three thousand years—is one of the most triumphant evidences which truth can produce in suppression of error. My soul burned with earnestness to visit this hallowed scene, upon which I had revolved so much, and which I associated in my fancy with the recorded glories of Apollo. I have, at last, seen it; and he must be indeed a slave to faction, or the dupe of prejudice, who will not subscribe to that evidence which the very stones proclaim.
Apollo’s Temple, or the Round Tower, stands at the corner of the cathedral, subsequently built half-around it: and, as you ascend the parapet of the latter, by an intermural staircase, having to pass, afterwards, from one side of this parapet to the other, just at the very corner by which the Tower is girt, the pass being very narrow, and almost terrific in dimensions, wholly defenceless besides, on the right hand which looks down into the body of the cathedral, the constructors of this latter edifice were obliged, in their desire to intermarry Christianity with paganism, to scoop off, or rather to file, about six inches of the ancient rotund structure, all along, on the left, to the height of the human figure, so as to allow more room; yet even thus mutilated, I could not but reverence and bow down before the Tower.