[HN Gopher] Saint Michael Sword: Are the cathedrals really on a ...
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Saint Michael Sword: Are the cathedrals really on a straight line?
Author : gh_hammour
Score : 274 points
Date : 2024-06-06 09:48 UTC (13 hours ago)
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| 082349872349872 wrote:
| Considering the birthday paradox, I get 600! = 126557231622543074
| 25418678245150829297671403862274660768187828858528140823147351237
| 81780279561957107476520853259806022480324090378216476943079502557
| 80542719062833876438260884481246264883326236083761640812211711794
| 39885840257818732919037889603719186743943363062139593784473922231
| 85278254761977172388925247687118600017469793454911284566259618230
| 82803906151846919244462155525865237400849328072590562389621046897
| 31522587564412231618018774350801526839567367444928206231310973619
| 44035472371801286775301955613572137620795955886055993305285691415
| 71206229800571698919125959265404275968534412769850067248695582019
| 30657900240943007657817473684008944448183219124163017666607770667
| 58508216959823923027403551773864806560049270209573284349270885603
| 69202198833631115279881092773926965627768134466456512384193015861
| 57342867860646666350050113314787911320639668510871569846664873595
| 01751899567095847780641166750534646259047113686264734966624342624
| 26771752047323142810644179390418686537411874230649851895567426401
| 11598580035644021835576715752869397465453828584471291269955890393
| 29444831574650026870214970880805310040639848094269562358604940334
| 80849700646689002062515169684797275155764259623921362691690898846
| 09794271331061018895634421094082310408889752954265842691732460538
| 91178496000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000
| 00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000
| 00000000000000000000000000L so I'd expect for there to be more
| than a few seemingly unlikely coincidences among them.
| defrost wrote:
| Placement is an interesting problem, _assuming_ a plan to lay
| them out in a "line", either Geodesic (tricky) or on a common
| projection of the period prior to construction there remains a
| few questions:
|
| Given a preferred predetermined position, navigating to the
| desired latitude would have been easy enough for the time,
| getting to a spot with the correct longitude is a tricky feat
| prior to accurate clocks.
|
| Having found such a location there's no apriori guarantee that
| site is ideal for a large stone building which would lead to
| some fudging about to find a near althernative site along a
| corridor.
|
| There's some work to be done upon the _order_ in which these
| buildings went up and on the locations themselves; for example:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St_Michael's_Mount
|
| dates as a monastic site back to the 8th Century or so and has
| very little (almost none) play in position .. it's situated on
| a rocky outcrop in a strong tidal zone.
|
| All of which leaves questions such as _when_ a decision might
| first have been made to infill later buildings to match a line
| through which earlier buildings on which projection.
| voidUpdate wrote:
| > Did the builders knew the earth was round?
|
| Yes. This has been known since ancient greek times, and Aristotle
| calculated the size reasonably well. Maybe not every labourer
| knew or cared but the architects almost certainly did
| smeej wrote:
| Exactly. I think I'm more annoyed at this point with the myth
| of the ignorant Medievals than I am with the myth of the flat
| earth itself.
|
| Even knowing the earth is round, if I were going to put things
| in a "straight line" geographically, I'd do it with the
| reference most people would actually use and see: a 2D map.
| searedsteak wrote:
| I'd say the bigger question is whether or not the projection
| used at the time of design was one that would show the
| straight line. The Mercator projection was first invented in
| 1569 [1]
|
| [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercator_projection
| regularfry wrote:
| This has to be the core of it. If the underlying question
| is "was this alignment intentional" then you could start by
| asking whether there are extant maps with better cathedral
| alignment than Mercator.
|
| These places are _old_. Skellig Michael goes back past
| 823AD, Mont-Saint-Michel is about the same sort of age, and
| the Sanctuary of Monte Sant 'Angelo goes back to
| 490AD(ish). San Michele Arcangelo is on top of a pre-
| Christian pagan temple. Stella Maris is on an Old Testament
| Biblical site. None of them is less than a thousand years
| old.
|
| The bar for finding a map that happens to align, and then
| explaining how it was made, is not a low one.
|
| There is a projection that might fit, though: Plate Carree
| is definitely old enough, and a brief visual sanity check
| doesn't make it look totally off.
| smeej wrote:
| Why do we need to assume widespread maps for this? Or
| even maps of the entire globe? A regional map showing
| barely more than a rectangle with this as its diagonal
| would be sufficient to get the point across to the
| average layperson.
|
| Virtually everything in church design is meant to
| communicate truths of the faith to illiterate laypeople.
| That's part of why pictures feature so prominently.
| They're telling stories to people who can't read. The
| sense of space, and the drawing of the attention upward,
| they're also communicating to people on purpose.
|
| If the argument is that the sites were _not_
| intentionally built in a line, that it just happened this
| way, that there just happen to be seven prominent hills
| with churches built on them that refer to St. Michael (or
| 6 and Mt. Carmel, which is associated with him in another
| way), I guess that 's a different conversation, but I
| thought the idea here was that these were lined up
| somehow on purpose, at least for the latter built ones,
| and were intentionally built to be "in a line" by some
| meaning of the term.
| regularfry wrote:
| The line is long enough for the curvature of the earth,
| and the subsequent distortion in the map projection, to
| be relevant. Notice that they're closer to a straight
| line on Mercator than to the geodesic: that means if you
| were to use purely local referencing to align the sites,
| they wouldn't end up where they are. You _only_ get them
| to line up when you distort the natural geography with a
| projection of some sort, so if you want to make an
| argument that they were intentionally built on a line,
| you also have to account for the systematic deviation
| from the geodesic. And that prompts the question of
| whether that 's remotely feasible given what we know of
| the history of cartography.
|
| What I'd want to know is how old the story of St
| Michael's Sword actually is. Not the churches, but what's
| the earliest reference to them being in a line. My bet is
| that it's well after Mercator, and probably safely after
| the 18th century, when chunks of Europe got geodetic
| surveys done.
| Archelaos wrote:
| > most people would actually use and see: a 2D map
|
| The expert used spherical mathematics. This was quite
| widespread knowledge required to build proper sun dials and
| in the Late Medieval period for long distance navigation.
| Some were able to use analog computers, called "armillary
| spheres", for the calculations, which were known since
| Antiquity.[1]
|
| [1] See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armillary_sphere
| smeej wrote:
| Most people aren't experts. If I'm setting up a bunch of
| churches in a line to make a point, I'm doing it to make a
| point to the vast swath of common people in them, not the
| handful of experts.
| Archelaos wrote:
| Only the experts of that time could have found out that
| this churches are all lined up according to the Meracator
| projection, if they had any idea of that projection at
| all. It seems rather as if your top-secret St. Michael's
| conspiracy, which, without leaving any written traces,
| when carrying out its secrete plan over several centuries
| using advanced cartographic and geodetic knowledge to
| determine longitudes, was aimed at the mystery-
| susceptible people of our times.
| crabmusket wrote:
| That's not necessarily true. I recently read Barnabas
| Calder's _Architecture: From Prehistory to Climate
| Emergency_ which contains several mentions of the
| incredible detail architects put into their work- from
| ancient Greece through mediaeval cathedrals. Details and
| design which would not have been noticed by any eye but
| an expert 's.
|
| I'll try to look up an exact quote later. But the gist of
| several passages was that there _was_ an elite or expert
| community- obviously, or nobody would have been designing
| buildings like this!
|
| Let's assume for the sake of this discussion that the 7
| sites _are_ deliberately aligned by somebody. They would
| presumably be a powerful elite, and would be doing it to
| impress other powerful elites.
| Archelaos wrote:
| You may perhaps be interested in these two documentaries
| about the geometric principles that were fundamental to
| medieval town planning:
|
| "Die Entdeckung der mittelalterlichen Stadtplanung"
| (2004): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ZzEzhIGnwM
|
| "Mittelalterliche Baukunst - Schonheit ist planbar"
| (2009) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MQcKOkbagDc
|
| Both documentaries are in German, but are well worth
| watching, even if the automatic English subtitles are
| sometimes a little inaccurate.
| buildsjets wrote:
| You have made the assumption that the line-up was done
| for the sake of human people, whether common or expert.
| When choosing the site to build a religious facility,
| would not the sake of the deity(s) being worshiped be a
| primary consideration?
| smeej wrote:
| Honestly? No, not usually, or at least not when the deity
| has made it clear that He can be worshiped anywhere.
|
| Locations are chosen for the sake of the people who are
| expected to come to them.
| Almondsetat wrote:
| It seems strange to include such a question at the end of the
| article that can be answered with a 5 second non-AI search
| gruturo wrote:
| > Aristotle calculated the size reasonably well
|
| Eratosthenes.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth%27s_circumference#Eratos...
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eratosthenes#Measurement_of_Ea...
| voidUpdate wrote:
| Sure, Eratosthenes got it more accurately than Aristotle did,
| but Aristotle was only 5000 miles out, came before
| Eratosthenes (died about 50 years before Eratosthenes was
| born) and on the scale of a planet, with the technology he
| had available, I'd say thats reasonably good
| dhosek wrote:
| One of the incorrect things about Columbus that I was taught in
| second grade was that he had trouble getting support for his
| voyage because his would-not-be patrons thought the earth was
| flat. In fact, they refused to fund him because he thought the
| earth was much smaller than it was and they had the correct
| size of the earth.
| deepsun wrote:
| I wonder how many would-be Columbuses were before him and
| failed.
| buescher wrote:
| It's historically rooted in Protestant anti-Catholicism, and
| the most popular version in America of it comes from
| Washington Irving.
| jameshart wrote:
| Knowing the earth is round doesn't mean you automatically
| consider a geodesic the most logical kind of 'straight line'.
|
| Mercator exists because it's easy to navigate with. It's easy
| to navigate with because it preserves bearings. Lines of
| constant bearing are, when you're navigating on the ground,
| much more meaningfully 'straight' than geodesics.
|
| 'Keep heading North West' sounds like a pretty straight line.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| These took nearly 4K years to build in total. Beautiful to see
| how much thought went into the placement.
| maratc wrote:
| Seems reasonable to try to fit a line such that the sum of
| distances (or square distances) between the cathedrals and the
| line is minimal. Doesn't have to be a straight line.
| willis936 wrote:
| Cathedrals are the highest tier of vanity projects of one of the
| most powerful institutions in written history. It's little
| surprise that the makers knew the top three most import factors
| for real estate value: location, location, location.
|
| Are they pointing to anything though?
| masswerk wrote:
| Cathedrals were erected by the townships and were indeed a
| major economic investment. They generally payed off well,
| giving raise to tourism (then known as pilgrimage) and
| elevating the status of the city, both with considerable
| effects on commerce. If you were a major town or city, or
| aspired to become one, you definitively wanted to build a
| cathedral. (And, as already pointed out by several other
| comments, none of these locations were cathedrals.)
| SideburnsOfDoom wrote:
| > and elevating the status of the city
|
| Indeed, having a cathedral is a thing that can define a
| settlement as "a city".
|
| Source: https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/what-makes-a-
| city/
| ttepasse wrote:
| At its core a cathedral is just a church where the cathedra
| (the "throne" of a bishop) stands. Can be any size, take a look
| at Nin, Croatia:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_of_the_Holy_Cross,_Nin
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| Harvard has more wealth than the Vatican.
| willis936 wrote:
| Did they 1000 years ago?
| ImJamal wrote:
| Harvard didn't exist 1000 years ago so obviously not. You
| could also argue that the Vatican has only existed since
| 1929. Prior to 1929 the Vatican wasn't independent and
| prior to that it was part of the Papal States (aka its own
| country)
| tokai wrote:
| > Certainly 7 cathedrals are too many to be a coincidence
|
| With the number of cathedrals in Europe I don't really think this
| is supported.
| chippy wrote:
| They are all dedicated to the same saint, St. Michael.
| Broken_Hippo wrote:
| Which isn't really all that special. In England alone, there
| are 816 churches named after St Michael. He's pretty popular.
| It'd be a lot more spectacular if they were all named after
| someone much more obscure.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dedications_in_the_Church_of_E.
| ..
| willis936 wrote:
| Only ~30 are cathedrals, still more than a selection of 7.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cathedral_of_Saint_Michael
| SamBam wrote:
| Right, but none of the 7 are cathedrals.
| chippy wrote:
| That's right. I would actually expect there to be a few
| more than 7!
|
| And if we extend the search to all placenames dedicated to
| St Michael quite a bit more!
|
| It's not pure coincidence but it is a kind of observation
| error as highlighted in other comment. Increasing and
| decreasing the variables and measurements effects the odds.
|
| Basically you can get a line between many things on earth,
| but 1) the dimensions of that line cannot be chosen if you
| also want to choose the things that define it or 2) the
| dimensions can be chosen but the things that make it up
| cannot.
| nashashmi wrote:
| In that case he should plot which of them match the
| geodesic line curve
| 6510 wrote:
| If one finds all of those lines one might find something.
|
| Also compare star maps.
| mytailorisrich wrote:
| There are not all cathedrals, actually. They are seven sacred
| sites dedicated to St Michael (of which there are many all over
| Europe).
|
| If they really were cathedrals, a coincidence would have been
| extraordinary.
| masswerk wrote:
| If they were cathedrals, this may raise the question why
| those towns were perfectly aligned, in the first place.
|
| Traditionally, it had been mostly exposed locations that were
| dedicated to St Michael, e.g., locations that had been
| alleged entrances to the underworld in antiquity. 6 out 7 of
| these locations are in costal areas, with corresponding
| erosion features. So this shouldn't be of much surprise, as
| the line crosses several costal regions - of which there are
| plenty.
|
| (In other words, the line crosses 6 costal areas with a St
| Micheal nearby and 6 without. The second fact may be as
| remarkable as the first one.)
|
| Edit: Challenge, can we identify a "St Michael's Serpent",
| approximating a sine wave?
| HankB99 wrote:
| Agreed. I wonder if they could find better candidates.
| getoj wrote:
| For what it's worth (not much), the line can be extended with
| similar error bars to include:
|
| - St Michael's Church in Bengaluru, India
|
| - Gereja Katolik Santo Mikael in Surabaya, Indonesia
|
| - St Michael's Catholic Church in Kilcoy, Australia
|
| - St Michael's Church in Auckland, New Zealand
|
| Perhaps the real data challenge here is to find the straight
| line with the most St Michael'ses globally.
| randomtoast wrote:
| One might begin to calculate the odds of seven cathedrals
| aligning perfectly in a straight line purely as a result of
| chance.
| ot1138 wrote:
| Please do so! This would be a fascinating experiment and
| perhaps a famous one, given that similar answers are the knee
| jerk reaction of armchair skeptics the world over.
| randomtoast wrote:
| I asked GPT-4. It did the following calculation (summarized):
|
| Let's consider Europe as roughly a 10 million square km area.
| The probability of a single point falling within a 50 km wide
| band (assuming the band runs the full length of Europe) is
| about 0.01581 (1.581%). The probability of seven points
| aligning within a 50 km wide band across Europe is
| approximately: 10^-14
| robertlagrant wrote:
| Doesn't the first point have a probability of 1? It's the
| subsequent ones that become less and less likely.
| randomtoast wrote:
| Maybe my question was not right then. But my question was
| how likely is it that 7 randomly chosen points fall
| within a given 50 km band across europe. Because I want
| to test the hypotheses that the 7 cathedrals fall
| randomly in line that we see. And that one random point
| falls in that band is not 1.
| regularfry wrote:
| It's pretty easy to Monte Carlo, even if you can't get
| there analytically.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| Yes, but I suppose even if you have 7 that line up, they
| may not fall in _your_ band.
|
| To remove that constraint, so it's just _any_ band, I
| think it should be more like: given a cathedral is in a
| particular place, how likely is it that six other
| cathedrals fall in a 50km wide band aross Europe.
| randomtoast wrote:
| Okay, GPT4 said there a just 189 non-overlapping 50km
| bands (horizontal, vertical, and diagnoal) in Europe and
| then continued to calculate the chance to land those 7
| points in any of the 189 bands and gave a result in the
| order of 10^-12.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| But diagonal at what angle? :)
|
| I think if you set the probability of the first one at 1,
| then the rest works perfectly at any angle of band. I
| could be wrong, but intuitively that seems correct.
| jimktrains2 wrote:
| You could have two points in 2 of your non overlapping
| bands that are less than a band's width apart.
|
| Also, the probability of the first 2 points will always
| be 100% because they define the line.
|
| Also, it's not 7 random points, it's 7 of thousands of
| random points.
| randomtoast wrote:
| Alright, I suppose it's not as simple to formulate the
| question accurately and correctly.
| 082349872349872 wrote:
| search box tells me 600 choose 7 is 5e15, which implies
| (if google and GPT4 were correct) that there ought to be
| on the order of thousands of fat lines containing 7
| actual cathedrals
| hatthew wrote:
| This is an impressively irrelevant calculation, regardless
| of whether or not GPT did the arithmetic correctly. If you
| want to calculate something similar but actually useful,
| you could get a list of all "cathedrals" dedicated to st
| michael, find the line for each combination of 2
| cathedrals, and then calculate the probability that 5 more
| also fall on that line.
|
| But it turns out that we don't even have to go that far.
| The line found in TFA is about ~50km wide. Any given 50km
| wide line covers approximately 1% of europe's area. There
| are allegedly 800+ locations dedicated to st michael in the
| UK, so let's make a conservative estimate and say there are
| ~1000 in all of europe. This means that in any given 1% of
| europe's area, there are on average 10. Therefore literally
| _any_ 50km wide line that crosses a substantial portion of
| europe has a solid chance at having 7 or more st michael
| dedications in it.
|
| Edit: actually via a generalization of the pigeonhole
| principle, if we assume that europe is 3000km tall and
| contains 1000 sites dedicated to st michael, there must
| exist at least one 50km band that contains at least 17
| sites.
| 082349872349872 wrote:
| One might indeed begin; see
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40595595
|
| (600 was for rough number of cathedrals, but apparently these 7
| sites are not even all cathedrals? That would make that
| factorial much bigger, then...)
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| This would be an extremely difficult calculation to build
| consensus around, because so many assumptions would go into
| where exactly one could even consider building such sites.
|
| They would have to be near enough to water to maintain life, or
| have access to freshwater for the religious communities there,
| they would have to be near building materials, they would have
| to be near population centers, etc.
| logtempo wrote:
| Are they aligned because they are famous, or are they famous
| because they are aligned? Or are they aligned because if I pick 7
| famous monuments aligned I can draw a line, look over my shoulder
| and say "ho look, if we draw a line it match!"
|
| From wikipedia, the list of St Michael churches:
| St. Michael's Church (disambiguation) Parroquia de San
| Miguel Arcangel (es), San Miguel de Allende, Guanajuato Mexico
| World Heritage Site Sacra di San Michele (Saint Michael's
| Abbey), near Turin, Italy Pfarrei Brixen St. Michael with
| the White Tower, Brixen, Italy Cathedral of St. Michael
| and St. Gudula, in Brussels, Belgium Mont Saint-Michel,
| Normandy, France - a World Heritage Site St. Michael's
| Cathedral Basilica (Toronto), Canada St. Michael's
| Cathedral (Izhevsk), Russia St. Michael's Cathedral,
| Qingdao, China Chudov Monastery in the Moscow Kremlin
| Cathedral of the Archangel in the Moscow Kremlin - a World
| Heritage Site Sanctuary of Monte Sant'Angelo, Gargano,
| Italy - a World Heritage Site St Michael's Mount,
| Cornwall, UK St. Michael, Minnesota St. Michael's
| Basilica, Miramichi, Canada Skellig Michael, off the
| Irish west coast - a World Heritage Site St Michael's
| Cathedral, Coventry, UK St. Michael's Golden-Domed
| Monastery, Kyiv, Ukraine St. Michael's Church, Vienna in
| Vienna, Austria Tayabas Basilica, Tayabas, Quezon,
| Philippines St. Michael's Church, Berlin, Germany
| San Miguel Church (Manila), Philippines St. Michael's
| Jesuit church, Munich, Germany St. Michael's Cathedral,
| Belgrade in Belgrade, Serbia Cathedral of St. Michael the
| Archangel in Gamu, Isabela, Philippines Mission San
| Miguel Arcangel, San Miguel, California, United States, one of
| the California Missions St Michael at the North Gate,
| Oxford, UK St. Michael's Roman Catholic church, Cluj-
| Napoca, Romania St. Michael's Church, Mumbai, India
| Church of St. Michael, Stip, Republic of North Macedonia
| St Michael and All Angels Church, Polwatte St Michael's
| Church, Churchill, UK San Miguel Arcangel Church,
| Marilao, Bulacan, Philippines San Miguel Arcangel Church,
| San Miguel, Bulacan, Philippines St Michael the
| Archangel, Llanyblodwel, England
| Maken wrote:
| But only 7 of those are Cathedrals, and only those are aligned.
| tecleandor wrote:
| I think none of them are cathedrals. There's a couple
| islands, a mount, a shrine, a monastery, a temple...
| throw46365 wrote:
| The fact that St Michael's Mount is on this line is enough
| to show that it is nonsense. It's an unbelievably lovely
| place and it was a site for pilgrims, but its
| ecclesiastical connection to St Michael is relatively
| weedy; a brief period of time.
|
| It's far more interesting to me that Perkin Warbeck
| occupied it!
| rob74 wrote:
| Yup... actually the linked Wikipedia page doesn't use the
| word "cathedrals", but they are remarkable in other ways
| (long history, pilgrimage sites etc.). Ok, Skellig Michael
| is now remembered mainly for being Luke Skywalker's island
| in Star Wars VII/VIII, but still...
| jfengel wrote:
| It annoyed me as soon as it appeared at the tail end of
| TLJ. I've wanted to visit it for a long time, but it's a
| bit of a hassle to get to. I can only imagine that it's
| even harder now that it's a pilgrimage site for Star Wars
| fans, and not just rock-botherers like myself.
| nabla9 wrote:
| >.. are aligned.
|
| Only on Mercator projection that is younger than many of the
| sites on the line.
|
| Oder of things:
|
| 1. There were bunch of monasteries (not cathedrals), not
| aligned on any direct line.
|
| 2. Mercator invented a projection.
|
| 3. Someone looked at map using Mercator a projection and
| invented story about ley lines.
| Maken wrote:
| You are right, not all the temples in the "line" are
| cathedrals, which does make the entire story less credible.
| jfengel wrote:
| "Cathedral" is a very specific kind of church, but not
| necessarily all that significant. It's where they
| happened to have centered a local bishopric. (A
| _cathedra_ is a chair, specifically one that a bishop
| sits in.)
|
| So there are a lot of magnificent churches that aren't
| cathedrals (Sagrada Familia, Westminster Abbey, St.
| Peter's in the Vatican), and a lot of cathedrals that are
| actually rather dull architecturally.
| Maken wrote:
| Precisely cathedrals are rare enough that seven of them
| in a line dedicated to the same archangel could no be a
| coincidence. I bet you can make similar lines if you look
| for churchess and sanctuaries dedicated to another
| important saint or saintess.
| weberer wrote:
| I think too much weight in this discussion is given to the
| Mercator projection since that's the specific one we use
| today. People were making 2D maps for much longer than
| that. Flat maps existed in the medieval era.
| nabla9 wrote:
| All maps on paper are flat. There are multiple
| projections into 2d map.
|
| There is no reason to assume that the lines align in
| other projections.
| unholiness wrote:
| > Only on Mercator projection that is younger than many of
| the sites on the line.
|
| People have been specifying locations in terms of NS/EW
| coordinates since the greeks. Celestial navigation ensures
| we always have a clear idea where north is, and when two
| locations are at the same latitude. It's the most natural
| way we've understood and discussed far-away places.
|
| I don't think it's fair to say mercator invented this
| projection so much as he famously published maps which used
| it.
|
| (btw, I agree this line is a complete retrospective
| coincidence, just not with this particular argument)
| nabla9 wrote:
| Just like weberer you seem to think that there is only
| one projection of earth into 2d map.
|
| Mercator is special projection that was not used before
| him. Different projections give different distortions.
| jameshart wrote:
| The Mercator projection has the property that lines on it
| are of constant bearing. You don't need a map projection to
| follow a line of constant bearing - you just need to head
| towards the point where the same star rises every night
| (mostly. Over a short enough number of nights, it works,
| anyway).
| simonh wrote:
| There are apparently 816 churches dedicated to the saint in
| England alone.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dedications_in_the_Church_of_E...
| Archelaos wrote:
| This Wikipedia list has a lot more St. Michael's churches:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._Michael%27s_Church
|
| Around 150 in Europe alone.
|
| For the next hackaton: Write a programme to find all possible
| approximately straight lines between any 7 of these churches.
| acjohnson55 wrote:
| Also, allow the map projection to vary, to produce lines of
| different curvatures.
| mikhailfranco wrote:
| There really are many more. I know of 3 in a small area of
| Somerset not on the list, but 2 of them are ruined, and hence
| not currently dedicated:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_of_St_Michael_and_All_A.
| ..
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burrow_Mump
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glastonbury_Tor
|
| Churches were often dedicated to St. Michael when they were
| built over pagan sanctuaries, because St. Michael could fight
| the old heathen devil. Another example would be in Brent
| Knoll, next to the iron age hill fort:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St_Michael%27s_Church,_Brent_K.
| ..
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brent_Knoll_Camp
|
| That is undoubtedly the case for both St. Michael's Mount
| (Cornwall) and Mont Saint Michel (Normandy) in the list of 7.
| They are both perfect defensive sites, on islands close to
| the shore, but accessible by causeways at low tide, and hence
| certainly occupied from prehistoric times.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St_Michael%27s_Mount
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mont-Saint-Michel
| mikhailfranco wrote:
| P.S. I added these to Wikipedia, but note there is a whole
| separate page for Michael with All his Angels:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St_Michael_and_All_Angels_Chu
| r...
| AdmiralAsshat wrote:
| See: ley lines
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ley_line?wprov=sfla1
| mikehotel wrote:
| Also: Alignments of random points
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alignments_of_random_points
| abrenuntio wrote:
| Definitely not ordinary places. Perhaps Stella Maris, the end
| point, is the most fascinating of all because of its
| association with the prophet Elijah.
| aworks wrote:
| I don't particularly care if if these line up, but I find the
| list interesting:
|
| Multiple churches in the Philippines presumably due to Spanish
| Catholicism.
|
| I didn't grow up in California so I don't know the Spanish
| missions very well (standard elementary school fare). I had
| never heard of San Miguel.
|
| I've also never heard of Polwatte or Miramichi.
|
| Two churches in the "Moscow Kremlin?" What's that about? And
| what's the story about Qingdao?
|
| And why just the name of a state, Minnesota, instead of a more
| precise location?
|
| Then I go to
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._Michael%27s_Church and it
| disambiguates from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St_Michael_and
| _All_Angels_Chur.... Finally, yet another long list in
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cathedral_of_Saint_Michael
| arethuza wrote:
| When I was a kid (11/12 or so) I was fascinated by finding
| alignments between ancient things in the landscape (of which
| there are many here in Scotland!) - eventually I came to the
| realisation that given the scale of the maps I was looking at
| (1:25,000) that you can find loads of meaningless alignments if
| you look hard enough...
| Oarch wrote:
| The Great Glen Fault is beautifully straight line across
| Scotland. Once seen it can't really be unseen.
| arethuza wrote:
| My own favourite is the Highland Boundary Fault - the
| northern edge of the rift valley that is central Scotland:
|
| https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highland_Boundary_Fault
| Shrezzing wrote:
| I'm not sure if this is concrete fact, or just a theory, but
| you can continue the line up Norway's western coast too. Then
| in the other direction, the line was broken, but restarts &
| progresses from Nova Scotia down through the Appalachians in
| North America.
| kitd wrote:
| IIRC they were all part of the same Pangaian range, and
| include Greenland east coast and the Atlas mountains.
| jfengel wrote:
| I'm gonna be driving along most of Loch Ness early this
| autumn. Anything in particular I should look out for with
| respect to the Great Glen Fault? Any less-obvious geologic
| features?
| arethuza wrote:
| Not related to the Great Glen Fault but the Parallel Roads
| in Glen Roy are fairly close and worth a look:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glen_Roy#The_Parallel_Roads_o
| f...
|
| Edit: Also have a look at the Lochaber Geopark:
|
| https://lochabergeopark.org.uk/
| jfengel wrote:
| Thanks! I'll keep an eye out.
| spiderfarmer wrote:
| It's a type of apophenia.
| LudwigNagasena wrote:
| More like the garden of forking paths, the look-elsewhere
| effect and data dredging.
| Blahah wrote:
| As opposed to the forking of garden paths, the whereelse-
| look effect, and dreading dating
| gravescale wrote:
| The Ancient Aliens discovered the same laws of engineering:
|
| 5. (Miller's Law) Three points determine a curve.
|
| 6. (Mar's Law) Everything is linear if plotted log-log with a
| fat magic marker.
|
| https://spacecraft.ssl.umd.edu/akins_laws.html
| arethuza wrote:
| Speaking of Ancient Aliens - I did have also read a book by
| Erich von Daniken when I was younger (9 or so) although I had
| realised that was nonsense by my stage of hunting maps for
| alignments it probably influenced me to think about it.
| grahamlee wrote:
| I used to read his books as exercises in critical analysis
| --how does he get from the data to these conclusions, and
| what does he ignore that doesn't fit his conclusions? Then
| I discovered that, as stated by Carl Sagan, von Daniken
| also relies on factual errors in his arguments.
| theginger wrote:
| Assume pi is 1
| tutuca wrote:
| I yell Akin's laws to any new coworker like a drill sargent.
| wolframhempel wrote:
| I studied art history, and this always bothered me when
| learning about Christian symbolism. When reading about numbers
| related to cathedrals, such as the number of statues on a ledge
| or the number of archivolts (the bands around doors), so much
| emphasis was put on the meaning of these particular numbers by
| whoever authored the piece. Three related to the Holy Trinity,
| four represented the four Gospels, five alluded to the number
| of wounds Christ received, seven related to the days of
| creation, sins, or virtues - and don't even get me started on
| twelve.
|
| In fact, as an architect of a cathedral, you pretty much had to
| make 22 or more of anything to avoid having a meaning ascribed.
| dfxm12 wrote:
| One Christmas homily, the priest told a story about how the
| candy cane was invented by persecuted Christians as a symbol
| for each other. The cane looked like a shepherd's staff, red
| for Jesus' blood, etc. If you look into the actual history of
| the candy cane though, none of this is true.
|
| What I'm saying is that it didn't matter what the architect
| did. Someone, well after the fact, would have found a tenuous
| connection between their work and the Bible and claimed they
| were divinely inspired.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| Not the candy cane, but the fish: https://en.m.wikipedia.or
| g/wiki/Variations_of_the_ichthys_sy....
| 082349872349872 wrote:
| Might the fish have anything to do with precession of the
| equinoxes into Pisces?
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38761574
| mmcdermott wrote:
| The fish was derived from a Greek acronym. The wikipedia
| link above mentions this as well. Is there any evidence
| for an astrological significance?
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| Humans sacrificed animals when relations between abstract
| numbers and reality were discovered:
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pythagoreanism
|
| The practice of wonder surrounding numbers and their role in
| existence has been practiced by nearly every ancient
| civilization for many millennia.
|
| Definitely not unique to Christianity. Definitely as natural
| as religious practice itself.
| seanhunter wrote:
| Humans may have done that, but not the Pythagoreans, who
| were vegetarians. From that wiki page:
|
| > The Pythagoreans also thought that animals were sentient
| and minimally rational. The arguments advanced by
| Pythagoreans convinced numerous of their philosopher
| contemporaries to adopt a vegetarian diet. The Pythagorean
| sense of kinship with non-humans positioned them as a
| counterculture in the dominant meat-eating culture.
| noduerme wrote:
| Wasn't the whole point of building the thing to make physical
| all that symbolic stuff in the first place?
| calvinmorrison wrote:
| The temple _is_ God's physical dwelling place
| noduerme wrote:
| I had a similar obsession for awhile. Take any 2 really famous
| places in the old world and draw a great circle line between
| them on Google Earth... and it's astonishing what falls under
| that line. (Try Avignon and Jerusalem, for example).
| 0xRusty wrote:
| I feel a new Dan Brown novel coming on! Probably is a coincidence
| given these countries were basically at war the whole time so
| getting agreement to even start a project like this is unlikely.
| Very interesting nonetheless.
| OnACoffeeBreak wrote:
| Matt Parker ("Stand up Maths" channel on YouTube) gave a very
| informative and entertaining lecture in 2010 titled "Clutching at
| Random Straws" [0], which, among other things, covered something
| similar. From the subtitle of the video: "Did aliens help
| prehistoric Britons find the ancient Woolworths civilisation?"
| The answer is "no". Given enough data points, you can find all
| sorts of patterns.
|
| 0: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sf5OrthVRPA
| SilverBirch wrote:
| I've got to assume that this is partly a Birthday Problem -
| that the probability of something unlikely being true grows
| rapidly as the population grows. Probability of 3 random
| churches lining up? Small, probability of 3 churches lining up
| when there are 100,000 churches in Europe? Basically 100%
| Tachyooon wrote:
| That's one of the examples he goes into in his talk, at a
| high level anyway. I'd love to find a write-up of someone who
| has done the detailed calculations of how likely alignments
| and shape occurrences are.
|
| Another thing that would be interesting is to look at the
| effect of non-uniformly distributed birthdays. For example,
| the day that's nine months after valentine's day or christmas
| might (?) have a slightly higher number of births than an
| average day. Then you could look at what kind of an effect
| this would have on the probability of a common birthday as a
| function of group size.
| smusamashah wrote:
| Thanks for the link. Gist was that with enough data, lots of
| patterns are inevitable.
|
| He gave example from some text taken out of bible with spaces
| removed. That's lots of letters on one screen, and from those
| letters he was able find his name, date and topic of the talk,
| when joining letters at equal distance.
|
| Finding unbelievable patterns is not as amazing as we think.
| abrenuntio wrote:
| Check it :-) Other popular saints and devotions are "Mary",
| "Joseph", "Paul", "Sacred Heart", ... can you easily get seven
| sufficiently special ones on a line for those?
| SilverBirch wrote:
| There's a different way of going about this. So the author uses
| various projections and evaluates whether the churches are
| aligned. But this is backwards. The churchs were selected because
| they lined up. And they lined up on a mercator projection.
| There's simply no way that the churches _could_ line up on
| different projections (subject to certain conditions).
|
| So, let's just look at the churches as they line up on the
| Mercator projection. If you google the churches one by one, you
| start to notice a pattern. They all predate the invention of the
| Mercator projection. You also notice, as someone else pointed
| out, there's a hell of a lot of Churches called St Micheals.
| Zobat wrote:
| From the article it's quite obvious they're not on a line (as
| drawn on a spherical representation of earth), but i wonder if
| they're close to being on the same plane?
| reedf1 wrote:
| This is probably, given the sheer number of churches (of all
| saints) in Europe, the look-elsewhere effect.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Look-elsewhere_effect
| gorgoiler wrote:
| > _Certainly 7 cathedrals are too many to be a coincidence..._
|
| Aha, but two of them will always be on a straight line. It's only
| the other five that are the coincidences.
| paipa wrote:
| He managed to get my attention starting with the cathedrals'
| polygons and exact bell tower positions, only to pull a "50
| kilometers off, nevermind".
| smeej wrote:
| I didn't understand what the bell towers had to do with
| anything. If you're going to pick a piece of architecture that
| mattered to the architect in terms if "where the thing is," go
| with the altar.
| kedv wrote:
| How was this achieved?
| onion2k wrote:
| I'm not a civil engineer so I don't know for sure, but I'd guess
| you can't just throw a cathedral up just anywhere you want. The
| land has to be the right composition, you need to have good
| enough transport links to get the raw materials to where you're
| building it, you need local talent to actually build it, _it can
| 't be in the sea_.
|
| It'd be surprising if these buildings were _exactly_ aligned.
| Presumably people could easily say that the respective diocese(s)
| are aligned though.
| lloeki wrote:
| Tell that to the people that decided that Strasbourg should
| have a cathedral: the whole area is a freaking swamp (water
| table + sand and clay). Not to fret, they punched 15cm x 1.5m
| tree trunks into the ground, as if you were standing on a
| thousand toothpicks.
|
| Local myth has it that the second spire wasn't build because it
| would topple over.
|
| Probably many more examples like this one exist. "I don't care.
| Figure it out. You're the expert."
|
| https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=BKorP55Aqvg
| johncalvinyoung wrote:
| Salisbury Cathedral (highest medieval spire surviving in the
| UK, at 404 feet!) was built on a floodplain close to the river,
| with shallow foundations only four feet deep. But the prior
| cathedral had been on a hilltop with much strife over access to
| water, and at least that would not be a problem at the new
| cathedral.
|
| https://salisburycathedral.wordpress.com/the-spire/ is a
| glorious essay on the architecture of that spire.
| nonrandomstring wrote:
| Texas sharpshooter fallacy?
|
| 800 shots. Pick 7.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_sharpshooter_fallacy
| yergi wrote:
| Faulty math because the map that the points are being plotted on
| needs to match the type of calculation performed for the line
| placed upon it.
|
| Of course it's going to be off with any other method than that of
| the map itself.
| dougdimmadome wrote:
| Skellig Michael is not a Cathedral by any stretch of the
| imagination. It is a cluster of stone beehive huts on an island.
| It should be recognisable to most people these days as the place
| Luke Skywalker was hanging out in the new Star Wars sequels, as
| the movies used it as a filming location in 2015 and 2017.
|
| It's a UNESCO world heritage site and a huge tourist attraction
| long before Star Wars, but it is definitely not a Cathedral.
| dougdimmadome wrote:
| ...and, fun fact, the "porgs" only exist because the island is
| also a wildlife refuge and home to thousands of birds who
| happily walked across the set during takes, so they had to be
| CGI'ed out.
| jfengel wrote:
| Under ordinary circumstances they would have kept the birds
| out of the shoot. But Skellig Michael is extremely protected,
| and that includes not being allowed to touch the birds.
|
| CGI'ing over them is a genius solution that makes me absurdly
| happy.
| dougdimmadome wrote:
| me too =)
| lalaithion wrote:
| > Or did they followed some method that is today lost, possibly
| based on the position of a start or a constellation, resulting in
| an alignment on the Mercator projection?
|
| I would not say that the method is today lost; while not aligned
| on a geodesic, the cathedrals are aligned on a spiral starting at
| the North Pole and ending at the South Pole which always travels
| at a constant bearing. It's totally possible to recreate a line
| like this with a compass by walking such that the compass has a
| constant reading. Doing so over the Mediterranean, multiple
| mountain ranges, and bits of the Atlantic would be a bit
| difficult, though.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| I wonder if the answer is along these lines. Eg. a star path
| relative to the horizon from some reference point...
| bsza wrote:
| Even if they are not on a great circle, they could be on _a_
| circle (still unlikely as 4 of them would have to be aligned with
| the other 3).
| TillE wrote:
| More interesting to me here is the history of the "line". Is this
| a medieval idea or a modern one? Wikipedia is surprisingly
| unhelpful. "According to legend", yeah ok.
|
| Who first wrote about this? Who picked those seven sites? The
| earliest source mentioned is from 1969, and it's not even about
| this particular line.
|
| There's no shortage of writing about esoteric Christian topics
| throughout the centuries, but this one seems really thin and
| really modern.
| SamBam wrote:
| Right, that's the biggest thing. If medieval builders were
| deliberately placing these in a line, there would be
| documentation and discussion about it.
| karaterobot wrote:
| Are any of these actually cathedrals? I see some monasteries and
| sacred sites, I don't see any cathedrals in that list. The
| difference is that 7 cathedrals, all named after St. Michael,
| found in a basically straight line would certainly not be a
| coincidence. It would be like there being 7 Google complexes in a
| straight line spread around the world: something's going on here.
| But 7 random religious sites named after one of the most famous
| saints is more like there being 7 Burger Kings in a basically
| straight line: much easier to believe as a coincidence.
| grahamlee wrote:
| If you add every single other church or shrine that's dedicated
| to St. Michael to the map, what's the straight line you can
| draw that contains the most of those locations?
| margalabargala wrote:
| As this article found, the answer to that question depends
| heavily on the map projection you use.
| pdabbadabba wrote:
| Perhaps we have yet to discover the real St. Michael's
| sword, which would, of course, be aligned along a geodesic
| line.
| hef19898 wrote:
| Yeah, spherical geometry exists. But using various
| projections makes for better click bait.
| seanhunter wrote:
| In TFA he tries the geodesic line first before trying the
| various projections. It doesnt' really fit any of them
| because even with these extremely cherry-picked seven
| points, you can't retcon them into having been designed
| to be in a line when they weren't.
| hef19898 wrote:
| Take a small enough map or globe and a big enough sharpy
| anf everything is on a line.
|
| Agree so, there is no line besides the one people make
| up.
| seanhunter wrote:
| Well I'll give you one I know: St Michael's mount in Cornwall
| (second in his list) is definitely not a cathedral. There is a
| stately home and smallish castle on a small tidal island on the
| site of an old monastery but I'm pretty sure it has never been
| a cathedral. It's not in or near a city for starters.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St_Michael's_Mount
|
| p.s. It's a cool place to visit btw. You can walk over to the
| house at low tide and then the house is on a steep hill
| surrounded by a lovely garden which you are compelled to enjoy
| until the next low tide at which point you can walk back to the
| mainland. Nearby is a heliport where you can get a passenger
| helicopter to the Scilly Isles which are also worth a visit.
| seanhunter wrote:
| Oh and the last one "Stella Maris monastery" is not at all
| connected with St Michael, which the wikipedia article
| acknowledges. It's just somewhat near a mountain that is in a
| biblical story with St Michael. "Stella Maris" means "Star of
| the Sea" and actually refers to Mary.[1]
|
| [1] https://epicpew.com/hail-bright-star-ocean-ave-stella-
| maris/ (worth noting that this source is some sort of
| Catholic thing and is written in what the Wikipedia banners
| on some articles used to refer to as an "in-universe style")
| addaon wrote:
| > smallish castle
|
| This makes more sense, as castles tend to move in straight
| lines. As another comment mentions, if these were cathedrals
| that would mean a bishop in residence, and we all know
| bishops prefer to move diagonally.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| Not Howl's.
| greggsy wrote:
| The author cites this page, which refers to them as 'sites'. I
| suspect English isn't their first language, and they've missed
| some nuance.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_Michael's_line
| svieira wrote:
| The extra interesting wrinkle here is that each of the Burger
| Kings in the straight line are associated with an appearance of
| the Burger King himself explicitly asking for a shrine in the
| location, while the others are mostly random franchises stuck
| up by someone who decided they would like a fast food
| restaurant here and it might as well be a Burger King.
|
| (i. e. Mont Saint Michele the bishop who saw St. Michael
| originally refused to construct the shrine because he wasn't
| sure of the veracity of the vision. It was only after he was
| wounded by St. Michael's sword and the wound refused to heal
| that he went to establish the shrine. And only then did the
| wound closed up.)
|
| Make of that what you will.
| jvanderbot wrote:
| That's neat! However, if each burger king was so enshrined by
| king burger, then there would again be nothing interesting.
| So, were these the _only_ sites that were selected in that
| way?
|
| Second, is this a post-hoc story we told _about_ the shrines
| (perhaps to avoid destruction / re-purposing by a greedy
| local lord?)
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| Put another way, if there are 10,000 shrines to this one
| saint around Europe, the probability that 7 will randomly
| be in a straight line on the Mercator projection is a lot
| higher than if there are <10.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| 10^-8 compared to -16?
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| I don't think it's that low. The number of coincidences
| will rise exponentially with the number of churches. You
| also have to account for the fact that there are
| something like 1000 prominent Catholic saints, and 10's
| of usable map projections, etc.
| pyrale wrote:
| > are associated with an appearance of the Burger King
| himself explicitly asking for a shrine in the location
|
| ...According to the guy trying to sell you a big mac or
| whatever they are called there.
| PeterCorless wrote:
| Whoppers. And yes, they are trying to sell you a whopper of
| a tale.
| sonoffett wrote:
| Royal with cheese
| Ylpertnodi wrote:
| Another 'e' is required in this sentence.
| Ylpertnodi wrote:
| Another 'e' is required in this sentence.
| empath75 wrote:
| The level of credulity displayed here is pretty amusing.
|
| but just to back that up:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skellig_Michael#History
|
| Not a cathedral, No mention of an appearance of St Michael,
| and the monastery predates the dedication to him (it?) by
| several centuries.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St_Michael%27s_Mount
|
| Not a cathedral, site predates dedication to michael. No
| mention of an appearance of michael.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mont-Saint-Michel
|
| This one has a story of an appearance, still not a cathedral
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sacra_di_San_Michele
|
| Not a cathedral, does have a story about an appearance, but
| that site significantly predates that appearance.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Michele_Arcangelo,_Perugia
|
| Pre christian temple that was converted, not a cathedral
|
| Taxiarchi Michail
|
| Monastary, not a cathedral
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stella_Maris_Monastery
|
| Not even dedicated to michael.
| svieira wrote:
| 1. Shrines, not cathedrals.
|
| 2.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St_Michael%27s_Mount#Folklore
| - "There are popular claims of a tradition that the
| Archangel Michael appeared before local fishermen on the
| mount in the 5th century AD.[44] But in fact this is a
| modern myth. The earliest appearance of it is in a version
| by John Mirk, copying details of the medieval legend for
| Mont-Saint-Michel from the Golden Legend.[45] The folk-
| story was examined and found to be based on a 15th-century
| misunderstanding by Max Muller."
| verandaguy wrote:
| > an appearance of the Burger King himself explicitly asking
| for a shrine in the location
|
| Is this canonically BK lore?
| mrbonner wrote:
| A cathedral has nothing to do with size of the church. If a
| church has a bishop resides, it's a cathedral.
| pdabbadabba wrote:
| Sure. But is that inconsistent with anything GP said? If you
| look at the list[1], I think you'll see that the sites are
| obviously not all cathedrals by that definition. The
| Wikipedia article doesn't claim otherwise; it calls them
| "sacred sites dedicated to the Archangel Michael." In fact,
| two of them are just islands named after St. Michael. Another
| is a religious site, but one that is _not_ dedicated to St.
| Michael--rather it is located on Mt. Carmel which is
| associated with St. Michael.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_Michael%27s_line
| sigzero wrote:
| Correct!
|
| The word cathedral comes from a Latin word meaning "seat."
| The seat referred to is the seat of the bishop, who is the
| leader of a group of churches related to the cathedral. The
| bishop's seat is both a metaphor for the cathedral as the
| bishop's "seat of power" and his actual chair, the
| "cathedra," inside the cathedral.
| schoen wrote:
| Strictly, it's a Greek word meaning "seat" (kathedra),
| although it was borrowed into Latin with what I believe is
| a more restricted meaning. There is also a Latin word
| meaning "seat" (sedes) which is _also_ used to refer to the
| seat of a bishop (an episcopal see)!
| seanhunter wrote:
| Yes, but a bishop is not ever going to (and could not ever)
| reside at a monastery because it would be incompatible with
| their job as a bishop to do what monks do (retire to a life
| of prayer and contemplation). A bishop is the boss of all the
| diocesan priests, so needs to be a secular priest not a
| religious.
|
| Source: not religious at all but my brother is a dominican
| friar so has explained this stuff to me. Also confirmed by
| this for example https://catholicsay.com/differences-between-
| a-bishop-archbis...
| miniwark wrote:
| - Skellig Michael: monastery, circa 6th century
|
| - St Michael's Mount: monastery, 9th century
|
| - Mont Saint-Michel: monastery & sanctuary, 708
|
| - Sacra di San Michele: monastery, circa 983-987
|
| - San Michele Arcangelo: sanctuary, 490 (St. Michael,
| supposedly did appear here)
|
| - Taxiarchi Michail: monastery, 18th century (the younger one)
|
| - Stella Maris: monastery, 1185 for the latin monastery (but in
| fact 15th century BCE as part of Mount Carmel)
|
| So, none of them are a proper cathedrals but monasteries and
| sanctuaries. With San Michele Arcangelo & Mont Saint-Michel the
| only two important ones as pilgrimage destinations.
|
| For a partial map of St. Michael churches or alike see:
| https://www.reseausaintmichel.eu/carte-des-sites/
|
| The "line" could easily be "broken", if we add for example, the
| Castel Sant'Angelo in Roma (Mausoleum of Hadrian) or Saint-
| Michel de Cuxa. Both are far more prestigious than... Skellig
| Michael than nobody would know about if if was not on this
| "line".
| mandmandam wrote:
| Skellig Michael is plenty prestigious. It's a UNESCO heritage
| site and a Star Wars filming location.
| egypturnash wrote:
| This is an interesting point. Wikipedia's page on St. Michael's
| Sword describes it as "monasteries and other sacred sites" and
| also notes that they are also "almost all located on prominent
| hilltops". Only four of the seven locations show up on
| Wikipedia's list of "churches dedicated to Saint Michael" (http
| s://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_(archangel)#Churches_d...).
|
| Also worth noting: "[Michael's] churches were often located in
| elevated spots", says the page on San Michele Arcangelo,
| Perugia.
|
| The obvious next step here is gathering a database of every
| spot claimed to be sacred to Michael, plotting them on a map,
| and seeing if this particular set of seven places leaps out of
| the data. But that sure sounds like work.
|
| (Well, that's the obvious next _data scientist_ step, there 's
| also the obvious next step for the magician or priest, which is
| to go to or create a sacred space suitable for summoning
| archangels, call down Michael, and say "hey thanks for coming,
| so what's up with this line we call your sword?".)
| larsrc wrote:
| I would say the next logical step is figuring out the
| probability that with this many points, what is the
| likelihood of 7 of them being this close to being on a line?
| We can assume a uniform random distribution on the unit
| circle or square for simplicity.
| mminer237 wrote:
| Here's a partial map of churches in Europe dedicated to
| Michael: https://overpass-turbo.eu/s/1MyM
|
| If you filter to monasteries, it trims it down a lot
| https://overpass-turbo.eu/s/1MyP
| pantalaimon wrote:
| Stella maris isn't even named after St. Michael
| deepsun wrote:
| > Did the builders knew the earth was round?
|
| Long before St. Michael was born, yes.
| neaden wrote:
| St. Michael is an Angel, so either has existed since before the
| Earth was made or if you want the earliest literary reference
| from the Book of Enoch which dates to around 300 BCE but might
| have existed in an oral tradition before that. Earth being
| round dates to around 500 BCE so depending on how old the oral
| tradition of the angel Michael were around was probably earlier
| but maybe contemporary.
| 082349872349872 wrote:
| > " _Once upon a time, there were four little angels who went
| to the police academy and they were each assigned very
| hazardous duties. But I took them away from all that and now
| they work for me. My name is YHWH._ " --not Aaron Spelling
| rpz wrote:
| The article checks the Mercator projection but doesn't check the
| Equirectangular projection, which could have been known to the
| builders of each cathedral.
|
| I wonder if the line is bang on in that projection.
| Duanemclemore wrote:
| I wish I could link to a great portion of the Eco book Foucault's
| Pendulum here - it's quite relevant to how we go trying to find
| meaning in things. If you haven't definitely a novel worth a
| read.
|
| I'm surprised no one has mentioned From Hell here, which plays
| with the concept of drawing symbols using lines between
| landmarks. Alan Moore got a lot of his ideas for that from Iain
| Sinclair, whose books are well worth a read as well.
| Specifically, the material Moore references is from Lud Heat
| iirc.
| dark-star wrote:
| > Certainly 7 cathedrals are too many to be a coincidence
|
| A very far-fetched claim without any proof. Simple answer:
| selection bias
|
| > Did the builders knew the earth was round?
|
| If he had just googled that he would have gotten the answer,
| which is, of course, "yes"
| tantalor wrote:
| > though this distance would not be a "real" distance in any
| meaningful sense
|
| Huh?
| dave333 wrote:
| The location of the 3 northernmost sites is on existing
| geographic features that predate Christianity so there was no
| choice of location for those. However the church may have noticed
| these three were in a straight line and extrapolated from there.
| irrational wrote:
| > we know that the cathedrals are not aligned on the geodesic
|
| Maybe not exactly aligned, but looking at that image of the
| geodesic line and the location of the churches, they all seem
| close enough to make me think their locations are not random
| chance (especially since they were laid out in the days before
| satellites and airplanes). I presume these are all Catholic
| churches? Could the medieval Catholic Church have had a plan to
| do this?
| SamBam wrote:
| I also wondered about the strategy of joining the first and
| last church. The authors switched to a regression for their
| last test, but only on the Mercator projection.
|
| (I actually remember in 7th grade that our math teacher had to
| repeat time and again that a line of best fit does not
| necessarily need to join the first and last dot. For some
| reason it's a very instinctual thing to do.)
| m3kw9 wrote:
| Is there selection bias so a straight line is made by selecting
| the ones that fit?
| klaussilveira wrote:
| This is why I come to HN. Fascinating investigations, perfectly
| executed by genius fellow hackers. Thank you.
| denton-scratch wrote:
| How many other cathedrals/shrines are _not_ "on" this line? If
| the surrounding countryside is peppered with shrines to St.
| Michael, then any line you choose to draw would pass
| through/close to a number of them.
|
| That is: TFA seems to be ignoring the null hypothesis.
| pjs_ wrote:
| https://archive.org/details/b29827553
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