never been informed, but Mr. Moore is probably right in the use of the capital d, as the sacrificer is, according to all accounts, a highly devout Christian.  One more instance:  an octogenarian woman, born in the parish of Bride, and now living at Kirk Andreas, saw, when she was a ‘lump of a girl’ of ten or fifteen years of age, a live sheep being burnt in a field in the parish of Andreas, on May-day, whereby she meant the first of May reckoned according to the Old Style.  She asserts very decidedly that it was son oural, ‘as a sacrifice,’ as she put it, and ‘for an object to the public’:  those were her words when she expressed herself in English.  Further, she made the statement that it was a custom to burn a sheep on old May-day for a sacrifice.  I was fully alive to the interest of this evidence, and cross-examined her so far as her age allows of it, and I find that she adheres to her statement with all firmness."[756]

[By burning a bewitched animal you compel the witch to appear.]

But Manxmen burn beasts when they are dead as well as when they are alive; and their reasons for burning the dead animals may help us to understand their reasons for burning the living animals.  On this subject I will again quote Sir John Rhys:  “When a beast dies on a farm, of course it dies, according to the old-fashioned view of things, as I understand it, from the influence of the evil eye or the interposition of a witch.  So if you want to know to whom you are indebted for the loss of the beast, you have simply to burn its carcase in the open air and watch who comes first to the spot or who first passes by; that is the criminal to be charged with the death of the animal, and he cannot help coming there—­such is the effect of the fire.  A Michael woman, who is now about thirty, related to me how she watched while the carcase of a bewitched colt was burning, how she saw the witch coming, and how she remembers her shrivelled face, with nose and chin in close proximity.  According to another native of Michael, a well-informed middle-aged man, the animal in question was oftenest a calf, and it was wont to be burnt whole, skin and all.  The object, according to him, is invariably to bring the bewitcher on the spot, and he always comes; but I am not clear what happens to him when he appears.  My informant added, however, that it was believed that, unless the bewitcher got possession of the heart of the burning beast, he lost all his power of bewitching."[757]

[Magic sympathy between the witch and the bewitched animal.]

These statements shew that in the Isle of Man the sympathetic relation between the witch and his or her animal victim is believed to be so close that by burning the animal you compel the witch to appear.  The original idea may have been that, by virtue of a magic sympathy which binds the two together, whatever harm you do to the animal is felt by the witch as if it were done to herself.  That notion would fully explain why Manx people used also to burn bewitched animals alive; in doing so they probably imagined that they were simultaneously burning the witch who had cast the spell on their cattle.