Sense Holiness and Unholiness in non-divine/infernal creatures

Kodlak has pointed out that there are two examples of magical creatures with the ability, Sense Holiness and Unholiness.
The first is the beast of virtue Cockeral of virtue in RoP: M p. 59, and the second is the race of magic humans, Maritimus in the Africa book p. 122.
The core rulebook itself says that the virtue cannot come from the magic or faerie realm.
Silveroak also mentions that it isn't as strong and unable to detect demons, but I'm not so sure of that considering that the Cockeral of virtue has invisible spirits as a specialty.
So, what's up with that?
Are the virtues divine aligned?
Are they magic virtues?

One option would just be to say that they're Divine aligned, and the Divine is overruling the usual prohibition on creatures of the Realms having virtues and flaws from a different Realm.

There's a somewhat similar example in which an Eider Duck of Virtue (Farne Islands chapter in Mythic Locations) has a lesser benediction that allows it to benefit from divine as well as magical auras. That one's the work of Saint Cuthbert.

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It is clear that the following three:

  1. The Cockerel and the Maritimus having Sense Holiness/Unholiness
  2. Sense Holiness/Unholiness being only Divine or Infernal
  3. Creatures of Might not being able to access Virtues/Flaws stemming entirely from another Realm.

are in conflict, in the sense that any two of them can hold, but not all three. So something has to give. It would be nice if Ars Magica still had someone adding official errata... but in the meantime:

I think that the three are in order of increasing "centrality" to Ars Magica canon and cosmology; changing 1 has far fewer consequences than changing 2, which in turn has far fewer than changing 3.

3 I'd definitely not touch -- it's all over the place. It's a central metaphysical tenet of Ars Magica 5th edition.
2 might be tampered with in two ways: either, as silveroak says, assume that the magical/faerie version is weaker, or just assume that it's the rare magical virtue that can detect the Infernal (which I strongly suspect is the fundamental reason why the corebook disallows it stemming from Faerie/Magic sources). The first option is dirtier but less far-reaching, the second is ... cleaner but threatens the ArM5 metaphysics at a deeper level.
1 would be my choice to change. Nothing really is affected other than those two creatures. The cockerel does not even need Sense Holiness for its concept -- it should have Second Sight instead, particularly given that its comb can be Enriched to give the wearer Second Sight. The maritimus ... is a tad trickier, because its legend says that it uses its four eyes to look towards Virtue and avoid Sin, but note that even Sense Holiness/Unholiness is not quite the right match for that. There are a number of ways the Maritimus can be changed to better reflect its legend without violating ArM5 cosmology; I'd probably simply change the Virtue into an Essential Trait :Virtuous :slight_smile:

Arguably something with an essential trait of virtuous should be divine instead of Magical, although that road can take us on a dark and winding trip down the question of virtuous pagans and their realm alignment ...
I do recall there being something in ROP:F...

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