Blair Collection > History of the Celtic language

264 HISTORY OF THE
oracular appellations, and as truly of Eastern origin
as was the Tau-gha.\Ym, or invocation of Tau,
performed not very long ago in the island of Mull.
The reader will excuse a description of this Pagan
ceremony, viz : —
" Taghairm, s.^ (//•. toghairm.) A sort of divination ;
an echo ; a petition ; a summons.
" The divination by the taghairm was once a noted super-
stition among the Gael, and in the northern parts of the
Lowlands of Scotland. When any important question con-
cerning futurity arose, and of which a solution was, by all
means, desirable, some shrewder person than his neighbours
was pitched upon, to perform the part of a prophet. This
person was wrapped in the warm smoking hide of a newly-
slain ox or cow, commonly an ox, and laid at full length in the
wildest recess of some lonely waterfall. The question was
then put to him, and the oracle was left in solitude to consider
it. Here he lay for some hours with his cloak of knowledge
around him, and over his head, no doubt, to see the better into
futurity ; deafened by the incessant roaring of the torrent; every
sense assailed ; his body steaming ; his fancy was in ferment;
and whatever notion had found its way into his mind from so
many sources of prophecy, it was firmly believed to have been
communicated by invisible beings who were supposed to haunt
such solitudes." — J)r Armstrong's Gaelic Biclionary.
This is sufficiently Pagan ; yet there was another
mode of dealing with this Tau^ To, or Tot, not
less so, of which the following from the ^''London
Literary Gazette" for March, 1824, is a fair
picture : viz.,
" The last time the Taughairm was performed in the
Highlands, was in the island of Mull, in the beginning of tlie