Before a gradual transformation into St. Guerlichon, it was an old priapic statue that was worshiped by the surrounding people during the Roman occupation of Gaul.
The veneration in which it was held and the miracles with which it was accredited made it impolitic as well as impossible for the early missionaries and monks to remove it.
Sterile women flocked to the shrine, and pilgrimages and a set number of days of devotion to this saint were in order.
Similar shrines to this same saint were erected at other places, and monks were kept busy supplying the statues with new members, as the women scraped away so industriously, either to prepare a drink for themselves or for their husbands, that a phallus did not last long.
By this innovation the good monks stole a march on their brothers in like shrines in other localities, such as those of St. Gilles, in Brittany, or St. Rene, in Anjou, where the old-fashioned scraping and replacing still was in vogue.