Excerpt from Religio Scotica: Its Nature as Traceable in Scotic Saintly Tradition
St Jerome, speaking of the Scots and Attacots, sarcastically suggested that Christian catechumens might have promiscuous wives and common children after the Scottish and Attacottish rite and after the republic of Plato. With this evidence before them, among all the suggestions as to the meaning of these two names no one has proposed that they were so called on account of their cultus. Christian is a word of Greek derivation and there is no inherent improbability in Scot defining a religion also. If it is of Greek origin the Scots were so called because their parents "had evidently not had connection for the sake of procreating children, but secretly and in darkness." The term Scotoi was in Crete at any rate applied to those boys who when at home lived in the women"s apartments up to the age of manhood.
That such a condition of things can and did exist is certain, and we have looked for evidences of the correctness of our view in Scottish story and tradition and have found it; and though it must always be possible for students to believe that what we have gleamed was but philological romance in its origin, it certainly demonstrates that the earliest Gaelic writers had the idea of connecting the Scot with "darkness."
The Gael are made to originate in Egypt, about the date of the Exodus, the second last plague of the seven connected therewith being a "darkness that could be felt," which lasted three days for the Egyptians but did not affect the Hebrews. The eponymous ancestress of the Gael was a daughter of Pharaoh, "Scota," evidently related in name with Hesychius Scotia, Venus, the Goddess of Night.
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