"Whether the saint, on his arrival in Scotland, found a pagan temple on this little island, or whether he himself first consecrated the spot, is a question of interest. Pennant says, 'I suspect the dike to have been originally Druidical, and that the ancient superstition of paganism was taken up by the saint as the readiest method of making a conquest over the minds of the inhabitants.' This opinion I am inclined to adopt. The people of the place speak often of the god Mourie, instead of St Mourie, which may have resulted from his having supplanted the old god. Tradition also points to it as a place of worship before the Christian epoch; and the curious record I have obtained of the sacrifice of bulls there, strongly confirms this belief, and furnishes fresh proof of the liberal engrafting upon Christianity of all forms of paganism in the early history of the Church."
Chapter XII.
Superstitions of Isle Maree—(continued).
The principal source of the knowledge we possess of the superstitious sacrifices of bulls and attempted cures of insanity at Isle Maree, are the minutes extracted from the records of the Presbytery of Dingwall, which will be found in [Appendix F].
Dr Mitchell has the following instructive remarks on these subjects in his paper written in 1860:—
"Fuller wittily observes that, as careful mothers and nurses on condition they can get their children to part with knives are contented to let them play with rattles, so the early Christian teachers permitted ignorant people to retain some of their former foolish customs, that they might remove from them the most dangerous. Fuller is here writing of protesting times; but if we go back to the first introduction of Christianity into our country, we shall find that many pagan ceremonies were connived at and engrafted on the new religion, which we now-a-days should feel inclined rather to class with edged tools than rattles. Instead of breaking the monuments of idolatry, our early teachers gave them a Christian baptism, by cutting on them the symbols of their own religion; and with the rites and ceremonies of paganism they dealt in like manner.
"The places of Druidical worship, which Maelrubha found on his arrival in Applecross, in all probability became afterwards places of Christian worship; and such of them as were believed to possess special virtues continued to enjoy their special reputation, with this difference, however, that what the god, or demon, or genius loci did before, the saint took upon himself, tolerating as much of the old ceremony as the elastic conscience of the age permitted. 'Une religion chargée de beaucoup de pratiques,' says Montesquieu, 'attache plus à elle qu'une autre, qui l'est moins;' and this principle was freely acted on,—the more freely, perhaps, that the early Christian teachers came among a people peculiarly given to ceremony, if we may trust the remark of Pliny, 'The Britons are so stupendly superstitious in their ceremonies, that they go even beyond the Persians.' I am inclined to think, with Pennant and the writer in the old Statistical Account, that Inch Maree was such a locality. The sacrifice of the bull, and the speaking of the saint as 'the god,' made this probable, while the belief expressed by some old writers that such was the fact, and existing oral traditions, render it still more so.
"I have no earlier allusion to the well on this island than 1656. It was then the resort of the lunatic, and, as I have said, it may possibly have been so from the date of Mourie's arrival, or even before that time. One shrine in Belgium is known to have had a special reputation of this kind for more than twelve hundred years. I refer to that of St Dympna in Gheel. Our own St Fillan's, too, has been resorted to for the 'blessed purpose of conferring health on the distressed' since the year 700. Further back still, Orpheus, who is said to have written the hymn to Mercury, speaks of Mercury's grot, where remedy was to be had for lunatics and lepers.
"The most interesting feature of these [presbytery] extracts, however, is the finding so complete and formal a sacrificial ceremony commonly practised in our country at so late a period as within two hundred years of our own day. The people point to Inverasdale as the last place where the sacrifice was offered. For the cure of the murrain in cattle, one of the herd is still sacrificed for the good of the whole. This is done by burying it alive. I am assured that within the last ten years such a barbarism occurred in the county of Moray. It is, however, happily, and beyond all doubt, very rare. The sacrifice of a cock, however, in the same fashion, for the cure of epilepsy, is still not unfrequently practised; but in neither of these cases is the sacrifice offered on the shrine of a saint, or to a named god, though, of course, in both there is the silent acknowledgment of some power thus to be propitiated.