306 Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy. 
ting the passage from the Amra, and adding the following stanza, at- 
tributed to St. Evin :— 
My pure quatuor (Gospels) is strong, 
For law and for sanctuary ; 
We bestow, they are good icr your valour, 
My clar and my cuilefadh. 
His conclusion is that it is an unknown object. 
Such was the state of the question until the publication of the 
Glosses on the Soliloguia of St. Augustine by Professor Windisch in the 
‘‘ Trische Texte,’ brought out jomtly by Dr. Stokes and himself, and 
published in Berlin last year. In these glosses I found the word 
Habellum glossed culebath. Windisch’s note on this, gloss No. 86, is 
merely ‘‘ I have never met the word except in this place.’”? But it is 
clearly the word which gave so much trouble to the distinguished 
editor of Adamnan, and thus it appears that this sacred relic, reputed 
to have been St. Columba’s, and to have been in existence 4. pd. 1090, 
was a liturgical Fan. 
In Cardinal Bonas’s work on the Liturgy, quoted in Bingham’s 4n- 
tiquities of the Christian Church, we find the following passage :— 
‘They have, in conclusion, fans with which two deacons standing 
at either side of the altar drive away flies and other unclean insects 
which fly past, so that they may not touch the sacred things. The 
Greeks call them the ‘ holy puridia’, that is ‘ Holy Fans’. The use of 
these in the Greek Church is extremly ancient, and is expressly men- 
tioned in the Apostolic Constitutions (lib. vill., cap. 12), mm the 
Liturgies of Basil and Chrysostom, and in others of the Eastern 
Church. They have a rather long handle, to the end of which is at- 
tached the face of a cherub surrounded by six wings. By moving 
this the deacons fan the sacred gifts at certain times directed in the 
Liturgy.” 
Such a practice was obviously convenient under the burning 
Eastern sun, and in lands teeming with insect life, but from the 
East it passed to the Western Church, where, being certainly out of 
place, it gradually declined, and finally ceased about the fourteenth 
century. 
Fans are mentioned as existing in many places on the Continent and 
in England, but according to Mr. Warren! they are not mentioned in 
Irish literature, though represented in the illuminations of the Book of 
Kells. This statement I have now shown to be a mistake, but it is 
worthy of notice that they are only referred to in connexion with our 
earliest ecclesiastics. These are St. Patrick, if O’Curry is right in de- 
scribing that at Armagh as his, St. Columba, St. Evin, and St. Ceallach, 
all of whom flourished before the close of the sixth century.» From 
this we may infer that the usage ceased very early in Ireland, where 
it must soon have been found quite unnecessary. 
1 History and Ritual of the Celtic Chureh. 
* St. Columba, b. 521. St. Evin, fi. 504. St. Ceallach, b. 548. 
