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Saint Michael Sword: Are the cathedrals really on a straight line?

karaterobot
48 replies
1d7h

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.

svieira
19 replies
1d7h

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.

pyrale
8 replies
1d4h

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.

sonoffett
4 replies
1d3h

Royal with cheese

Ylpertnodi
1 replies
23h16m

Another 'e' is required in this sentence.

throwaway211
0 replies
21h54m

Anothere 'e' is required in this sentence.

mcswell
0 replies
19h0m

Do you want fries with that?

Ylpertnodi
0 replies
23h16m

Another 'e' is required in this sentence.

PeterCorless
2 replies
1d3h

Whoppers. And yes, they are trying to sell you a whopper of a tale.

SargeDebian
0 replies
15h33m

Judging from the ingredients, the Big King is more comparable.

jvanderbot
4 replies
1d6h

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
3 replies
1d5h

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
2 replies
1d3h

10^-8 compared to -16?

pclmulqdq
1 replies
1d1h

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.

verandaguy
1 replies
1d

    > an appearance of the Burger King himself explicitly asking for a shrine in the location
Is this canonically BK lore?

thret
0 replies
12h51m

Not _yet_

empath75
1 replies
1d3h

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
0 replies
1d1h

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."

mock-possum
0 replies
17h9m

I mean… it’s fake, obviously. Seeing visions of dead saints and being wounded and unable to heal until a shrine was built is all made up. None of that is real, that’s medieval superstition.

mrbonner
6 replies
1d6h

A cathedral has nothing to do with size of the church. If a church has a bishop resides, it's a cathedral.

sigzero
2 replies
1d5h

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.

thaumasiotes
0 replies
20h53m

The word cathedral comes from a Latin word meaning “seat.”

It's not a possible word in Latin; it would have to be a loan from Greek.

schoen
0 replies
22h50m

Strictly, it's a Greek word meaning "seat" (καθέδρα), 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
1 replies
1d2h

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...

pdabbadabba
0 replies
1d6h

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

grahamlee
6 replies
1d7h

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
5 replies
1d7h

As this article found, the answer to that question depends heavily on the map projection you use.

pdabbadabba
4 replies
1d6h

Perhaps we have yet to discover the real St. Michael's sword, which would, of course, be aligned along a geodesic line.

hef19898
3 replies
1d4h

Yeah, spherical geometry exists. But using various projections makes for better click bait.

seanhunter
2 replies
1d2h

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
1 replies
1d

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.

lazide
0 replies
5h58m

I wonder what the width is in miles of a chisel tip sharpie on a beach ball sized globe. 100?

egypturnash
5 replies
1d5h

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" (https://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
1 replies
1d4h

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.

CoffeeOnWrite
0 replies
5h19m

Erm human population is pretty far from uniform, and is a certain population threshold is a pre-requisite for building one of these sites.

gopher_space
1 replies
17h4m

You can’t just rip off Tim Powers and Alan Moore like that.

egypturnash
0 replies
1h36m

Yes you can, you just have to be willing to accept that the answer might be "oh yeah it is literally where my sword scarred the earth when I sent the Devil back to Hell, and by hearing this directly from my mouth you are now eligible to be enlisted in the secret society that makes sure it never opens again; go to theswordofstmichaels.org and apply for an account if you want to know more about the perks, responsibilities, and dangers of joining."

seanhunter
3 replies
1d7h

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.

addaon
1 replies
1d6h

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
0 replies
1d1h

Not Howl's.

seanhunter
0 replies
1d7h

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")

miniwark
1 replies
1d5h

- 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 Cuxà. Both are far more prestigious than... Skellig Michael than nobody would know about if if was not on this "line".

mandmandam
0 replies
1d5h

Skellig Michael is plenty prestigious. It's a UNESCO heritage site and a Star Wars filming location.

pantalaimon
0 replies
1d4h

Stella maris isn't even named after St. Michael

arethuza
28 replies
1d9h

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...

wolframhempel
11 replies
1d8h

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
5 replies
1d7h

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.

baruz
1 replies
17h6m

No, “fish” in Greek is ιχθυς, which was used as an acrostic for Iesous Christos Theou Huios Soter, Jesus Christ, Son of God, savior. I vaguely recall seeing somewhere that during the persecutions, one Christian would draw one line of the two-line symbol as a shibboleth for another to complete to show that they too were Christian.

082349872349872
0 replies
14h48m

As far as I can tell from a cursory search, our evidence for ιχθυς dates from II and later, which would indeed put it firmly in a "fisher of men" or "loaves and fishes" interpretation and not an astrological one. Thanks!

mmcdermott
0 replies
22h56m

The fish was derived from a Greek acronym. The wikipedia link above mentions this as well. Is there any evidence for an astrological significance?

noduerme
2 replies
1d7h

Wasn't the whole point of building the thing to make physical all that symbolic stuff in the first place?

fwungy
0 replies
2h53m

The buildings are more than symbols, we have no clue how they were built, just theories, but remember there were no power tools before 1895. There were no cranes. Those massive Roman columns, were carved in perfect symmetry by hand tools?

The beings who built the cathedrals had methods and technologies of amazing power that we know virtually nothing about. They are artifacts of something that is now, presumably, gone.

calvinmorrison
0 replies
1d7h

The temple _is_ God's physical dwelling place

mensetmanusman
1 replies
1d7h

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
0 replies
1d2h

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.
Oarch
6 replies
1d9h

The Great Glen Fault is beautifully straight line across Scotland. Once seen it can't really be unseen.

jfengel
2 replies
1d7h

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?

jfengel
0 replies
1d4h

Thanks! I'll keep an eye out.

Shrezzing
1 replies
1d7h

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
0 replies
1d7h

IIRC they were all part of the same Pangaian range, and include Greenland east coast and the Atlas mountains.

gravescale
4 replies
1d9h

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
1 replies
1d7h

Speaking of Ancient Aliens - I did have also read a book by Erich von Däniken 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
0 replies
1d7h

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 Däniken also relies on factual errors in his arguments.

tutuca
0 replies
1d1h

I yell Akin's laws to any new coworker like a drill sargent.

theginger
0 replies
1d5h

Assume pi is 1

spiderfarmer
2 replies
1d9h

It's a type of apophenia.

LudwigNagasena
1 replies
1d8h

More like the garden of forking paths, the look-elsewhere effect and data dredging.

Blahah
0 replies
1d8h

As opposed to the forking of garden paths, the whereelse-look effect, and dreading dating

noduerme
0 replies
1d7h

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).

logtempo
24 replies
1d9h

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 Arcángel (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 Arcángel, 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, Štip, 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
14 replies
1d9h

But only 7 of those are Cathedrals, and only those are aligned.

nabla9
9 replies
1d8h

.. 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
2 replies
1d8h

You are right, not all the temples in the "line" are cathedrals, which does make the entire story less credible.

jfengel
1 replies
1d7h

"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
0 replies
1d6h

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
1 replies
1d8h

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
0 replies
1d7h

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
1 replies
1d5h

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
0 replies
1d5h

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
1 replies
1d5h

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).

nabla9
0 replies
11h20m

Nobody could have discovered that these points are in the line of constant bearing without maps.

(hiking in straight line and jumping into boat at the point where land ends is not how people travel)

tecleandor
3 replies
1d9h

I think none of them are cathedrals. There's a couple islands, a mount, a shrine, a monastery, a temple...

rob74
1 replies
1d9h

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
0 replies
1d7h

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.

throw46365
0 replies
1d9h

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!

Archelaos
3 replies
1d9h

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.

mikhailfranco
1 replies
1d4h

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

acjohnson55
0 replies
1d7h

Also, allow the map projection to vary, to produce lines of different curvatures.

aworks
0 replies
22h19m

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

abrenuntio
0 replies
1d7h

Definitely not ordinary places. Perhaps Stella Maris, the end point, is the most fascinating of all because of its association with the prophet Elijah.

voidUpdate
23 replies
1d10h

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
12 replies
1d10h

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.

Archelaos
7 replies
1d9h

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
6 replies
1d8h

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.

crabmusket
2 replies
1d7h

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
1 replies
1d5h

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 – Schönheit 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.

crabmusket
0 replies
17h2m

Interesting! I've added them to my queue, thanks :)

buildsjets
1 replies
1d4h

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
0 replies
1d

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.

Archelaos
0 replies
1d7h

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.

searedsteak
3 replies
1d10h

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
2 replies
1d8h

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 Carrée is definitely old enough, and a brief visual sanity check doesn't make it look totally off.

smeej
1 replies
1d8h

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
0 replies
1d4h

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.

dhosek
5 replies
1d8h

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.

buescher
3 replies
1d7h

It’s historically rooted in Protestant anti-Catholicism, and the most popular version in America of it comes from Washington Irving.

cryptonector
2 replies
21h47m

I was taught the same thing by Catholics in Buenos Aires.

buescher
1 replies
5h48m

Well, now you know where they got it from.

cryptonector
0 replies
1h41m

Maaaybe. I've not seen any strong evidence for that. It's also possible that multiple groups independently came to think that smearing Columbus' detractors was a useful thing for them to do.

deepsun
0 replies
1d7h

I wonder how many would-be Columbuses were before him and failed.

voidUpdate
0 replies
1d9h

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

jameshart
0 replies
1d4h

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.

Almondsetat
0 replies
1d10h

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

randomtoast
15 replies
1d9h

One might begin to calculate the odds of seven cathedrals aligning perfectly in a straight line purely as a result of chance.

ot1138
12 replies
1d9h

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
11 replies
1d9h

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
9 replies
1d9h

Doesn't the first point have a probability of 1? It's the subsequent ones that become less and less likely.

randomtoast
8 replies
1d9h

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.

robertlagrant
6 replies
1d8h

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
5 replies
1d8h

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.

jimktrains2
2 replies
1d7h

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.

robertlagrant
0 replies
11h29m

Also, it's not 7 random points, it's 7 of thousands of random points.

Ah - I missed this one.

randomtoast
0 replies
1d7h

Alright, I suppose it's not as simple to formulate the question accurately and correctly.

robertlagrant
0 replies
1d8h

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.

082349872349872
0 replies
1d2h

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

regularfry
0 replies
1d8h

It's pretty easy to Monte Carlo, even if you can't get there analytically.

hatthew
0 replies
22h55m

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.

mensetmanusman
0 replies
1d7h

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.

082349872349872
0 replies
1d9h

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...)

tokai
13 replies
1d10h

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
6 replies
1d9h

They are all dedicated to the same saint, St. Michael.

Broken_Hippo
5 replies
1d9h

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...

chippy
2 replies
1d8h

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
0 replies
1d8h

In that case he should plot which of them match the geodesic line curve

6510
0 replies
1d6h

If one finds all of those lines one might find something.

Also compare star maps.

SamBam
0 replies
1d5h

Right, but none of the 7 are cathedrals.

getoj
2 replies
22h11m

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.

lionkor
1 replies
15h1m

Sounds like the real challenge is to circle the world without getting too close to anything named after some Michael

hef19898
0 replies
13h12m

Those two things do depend on each other, don't they? Like Ying and Yang?

mytailorisrich
1 replies
1d9h

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
0 replies
1d9h

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
0 replies
23h3m

Agreed. I wonder if they could find better candidates.

santiagobasulto
11 replies
12h34m

I live very close to the one in Italy (close to Turin). It's SO impressive. The early cathedral was built around the year ~800AD. And it was not "built" in the sense that they placed bricks one over the other. Instead, what they did was "cut" the stone of the mountain to shape it as a cathedral.

The steps of the stairs are just cut and shaped stone, the walls are just stone. It can be summer and 90degrees in Turin, and inside the cathedral is 30 degrees and so chill.

If you ever find yourself close, go visit it, it's a very humbling experience.

sokoloff
10 replies
11h46m

It can be summer and 90degrees in Turin, and inside the cathedral is 30 degrees and so chill.

Which temperature scale are you using here?

pbmonster
6 replies
11h28m

Shitty life-hacks: you can ballpark converting from Celsius to Fahrenheit by multiplying by 2!

throw_pm23
5 replies
11h22m

This life-hack is significantly improved if you change it to:

C->F: multiply by 2, then add 30

F->C: subtract 30, then divide by 2.

thruway516
2 replies
10h21m

Ill say. If I follow GPs life-hack for 30C I get 60F, which is significantly different from 86F. Some life-hack.

dEnigma
0 replies
9h35m

That's why they called it a "shitty" life hack.

combray
0 replies
9h35m

30*2 + 30 = 90, which is pretty close to 86.

Going the other way

86-30 / 2 = 28 which is close to 30.

elviejo
0 replies
3h26m

This is the correct life hack. is approximate enough to give you an idea. and easy enough to do mentally

abofh
0 replies
4h25m

At room temperatures, the +32 is significant, at cooking temperatures, who's oven is even accurate to 16/32 degrees? It depends on if knowing the "right" answer is more important than knowing an answer that will get you to what you want e.g., tasty muffins rather than charcoal briquettes :)

throw_pm23
1 replies
11h20m

I suppose Celsius and 90 is a poetic exaggeration for 35+, while 30 being realistic for inside a stone-building mid-summer in Italy.

Alternatively, Fahrenheit, and 90 is realistic for outdoors mid-summer in Italy and 30 is a poetic exaggeration for ~80 inside a stone-building. If meant literally, the holy water would freeze inside the cathedral. Besides, nobody uses Fahrenheit in Europe, but poetic exaggeration is common.

tjoff
0 replies
10h17m

I've never heard of anyone proclaim 30 deg c as being "so chill". Also much hotter than what I would expect a cathedral to be.

But then again, I am sensitive to heat.

enedil
0 replies
11h31m

Probably not Kelvin.

willis936
6 replies
1d10h

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?

mensetmanusman
2 replies
1d8h

Harvard has more wealth than the Vatican.

willis936
1 replies
1d4h

Did they 1000 years ago?

ImJamal
0 replies
1d4h

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)

masswerk
1 replies
1d9h

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.)

SebastianoF
6 replies
11h23m

Hello! Being the author of the blog post commented here, I'm glad it became food for thoughts.

Here a few of the salient points:

They are not cathedrals!

True! As I learned after writing the blog post, a Cathedral is not simply a large church. As written in several comments there has to be a bishop.

Fallacy of using other projection than the Mercator one.

It was known that they are "visually" aligned on the Mercator projection. The question is: does it mean that they are aligned on the surface of the earth? That question was the crucial one underpinned the post.

Birthday paradox and Texas sharpshooter fallacy.

These are two really interesting take on the problem that I did not considered or knew about. Certainly worth exploring in a next blog post.

Also I have to inform you that the blog is temporarily suspended. This decision is after an unfortunate billing policy from the provider netlify. It has nothing to do with the comments received here. On the contrary the comments received here had encouraged me to write more (and to document myself better beforehand).

I hope to be able to bring it up back soon with a different provider, that would not add extra costs with no capping for going "viral" and exceeding the allowed free bandwidth.

loceng
0 replies
9h24m

Hi, I'm at least one person who emailed you to let you know this was on front page of HN.

I just wrote another comment that may interest you to some degree: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40607523

It's probably best to reply to each person's comment, letting them know first also know you're author of the article/project.

koolala
0 replies
7h58m

Hi the website was down. Thank you for sharing your ideas!

When you say "strait line" is it globe based curved path like the flight of a bird? Why was it called a sword?

Edit: found a working link! still extra extra curious!

fwungy
0 replies
4h45m

Would it be hard to try this on the Azimuthal Equidistant projection?

araes
0 replies
4h16m

Huh. I think St. Michael might be clever. The second line goes through areas where there are many Michael named locations. Often disproportionately.

Cyprus: https://www.google.com/maps/search/st.+michael/@34.8439762,3...

Rhodos: https://www.google.com/maps/search/st.+michael/@36.5898973,2...

Thessaloniki: https://www.google.com/maps/search/st.+michael/@40.9052893,2...

Croatia: https://www.google.com/maps/search/st.+michael/@44.8895084,1...

Switzerland: https://www.google.com/maps/search/st.+michael/@47.0545837,8...

France, almost right through Paris notably: https://www.google.com/maps/search/st.+michael/@48.823467,2....

England, Exeter area (bunch of Michael churches): https://www.google.com/maps/search/st.+michael/@50.7123109,-...

Many are actually kind of notable in that they bunch fairly near the geodesic like in Croatia. They might be the birthday paradox, definitely a possibility. Yet quite a bit of clustering along that route.

OnACoffeeBreak
5 replies
1d9h

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
1 replies
1d9h

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
0 replies
1d7h

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
0 replies
1d8h

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.

modderation
0 replies
11h43m

He also covered this in a more recent talk [1] which has some better audio and a direct feed of the slides. It also comes with an entirely different set of interesting stories for anyone inclined to listen :)

1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6JwEYamjXpA&t=2489s

abrenuntio
0 replies
1d7h

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?

dougdimmadome
3 replies
1d8h

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
2 replies
1d8h

...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
1 replies
1d7h

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
0 replies
1d7h

me too =)

aredox
3 replies
14h26m

Nobody to mention that the property of Mercator projection is that it preserves angles?

Meaning that the points are not on the shortest path, but are close to being at the same azimuth one to another?

hazn
1 replies
12h23m

the article mentions it

forgotpwd16
0 replies
6h34m

Read it twice but didn't see any mention of this.

forgotpwd16
0 replies
6h34m

Basically a straight line on a Mercator projection is a rhumb line (i.e. a path of constant true bearing). This enabled sailors/merchants to plot a straight-line course by maintaining a constant compass direction. Could explain the appearance of those sacred sites in such line.

TillE
3 replies
1d7h

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
1 replies
1d5h

Right, that's the biggest thing. If medieval builders were deliberately placing these in a line, there would be documentation and discussion about it.

loceng
0 replies
9h32m

This comment has helped me realize that most people likely don't have an understanding of the deeper or more evolved spiritual-religious communities.

For example, the Santo Daime church originating in Brazil - and who drink Ayahuasca at the beginning of and throughout what they call works [Ayahuasca is in Brazil's constitution as a right, and Canada also has it legalized for the church to import legally] - and then sing from hymns depending on the type of work and time of the year, their hymns containing the teachings, sung mostly in Portuguese; arguably those teachings will have been divinely transmitted to the people, mostly the founder to begin, while in the altered-connected state; the biologic pathway for part of this experience is the concept of ego death-dissolution, where your ego temporarily is out of the way to allow your senses to be more aligned with the more holistic - your senses not "calcified" away from feeling more than just your strongest stimuli of your own senses and the signals of your ego mind - both that can mask the more subtle - and can be repressed if disconnected from it at a young age due to various reasons.

Furthermore, if you read the book The Immortality Key, there is the belief circulating that wine - "the blood of Christ" - historically wasn't alcohol but wine was a mix, and arguably an entheogen-psychdelic that then connected people to an altered state to help open the mind and heart, and heal vs. alcohol which is a depressant and poison; where the knowledge that Jesus taught/shared was supposedly from 300 years prior from the Greece region, where millions of people would pilgrimage to annually arguably to partake in drinking the "wine."

Part of the misunderstanding is that it's believed that Christ has already resurrected but in energetic form, where he joined the divine celestial order, along with St. Michael and other energetic-conscious beings.

I've thought it's an interesting idea, whether it was oppressors who wanted to prevent this healing and weaken people's connection to God - which arguably gives people strength when they have a faith in something invisible [and unengaged most of the time], and/or if it was authoritarians incidentally working with or benefitting from industrial complexes - producers and merchants of alcohol who decided to claim their alcohol was the "wine" that "everyone was talking about and pilgrimaging for" - and in high demand, for the sake of profits; which would have also caused people to not ride the wave of word of mouth transmission toward drinking Ayahuasca et al; it makes me think partly of the more recent "war on drugs" that happened to suppress-control and prevent access to arguably highly effective non-patentable and relatively natural medicines, that are now coming to light again - Ayahuasca, mushrooms, ketamine, MDMA, etc.

In conclusion, St. Michael or anyone in the divine order - conscious energetic beings who can influence at least in so much as giving guidance - could have guided each builder or person picking the build site independently, potentially leading to such a phenomenon - whether the St. Michael's Sword line was simply coincidence or happenstance, or perhaps could simply be decided to be human-made and simply a recognition to honour St. Michael; to me it boils down to a fun-playful thought exercise, but where it could be dangerous in that an ideological mob could use it to demonize people who let's say are needing or desperate for hope or truth of the divine - and haven't yet reached a faith state.

onion2k
2 replies
1d8h

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
0 replies
1d8h

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
0 replies
22h49m

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.

jasonvorhe
2 replies
9h30m

Anyone else getting a Site Not Found?

macintux
0 replies
5h30m

Yep, same here (central U.S.).

comonoid
0 replies
8h50m

Me too (Barcelona, Spain).

deepsun
2 replies
1d7h

Did the builders knew the earth was round?

Long before St. Michael was born, yes.

neaden
1 replies
1d6h

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
0 replies
1d2h

"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
bowsamic
2 replies
15h28m

What’s with the use of “we” everywhere?

forgotpwd16
1 replies
5h47m

"Authorial we" is/was common in academic writing although its usage has declined nowadays. Shouldn't be mixed with "royal we". Rather it's meant to specify "the author and the reader", that is "I and you" (even if what you do is basically follow along an already done work).

bowsamic
0 replies
1h18m

Right but in this case we is being used to express quite personal opinions and so is not appropriate (my first instinct was, in fact, in total sincerity, that the author has a multiple personality disorder/DID)

paipa
1 replies
1d9h

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
0 replies
1d7h

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.

lalaithion
1 replies
1d7h

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
0 replies
1d3h

I wonder if the answer is along these lines. Eg. a star path relative to the horizon from some reference point…

irrational
1 replies
1d5h

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
0 replies
1d5h

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.)

0xRusty
1 replies
1d9h

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.

forgotpwd16
0 replies
6h23m

Definitely seems like something that could play a role in one of Langdon's adventures.

082349872349872
1 replies
1d10h

Considering the birthday paradox, I get 600! = 12655723162254307425418678245150829297671403862274660768187828858528140823147351237817802795619571074765208532598060224803240903782164769430795025578054271906283387643826088448124626488332623608376164081221171179439885840257818732919037889603719186743943363062139593784473922231852782547619771723889252476871186000174697934549112845662596182308280390615184691924446215552586523740084932807259056238962104689731522587564412231618018774350801526839567367444928206231310973619440354723718012867753019556135721376207959558860559933052856914157120622980057169891912595926540427596853441276985006724869558201930657900240943007657817473684008944448183219124163017666607770667585082169598239230274035517738648065600492702095732843492708856036920219883363111527988109277392696562776813446645651238419301586157342867860646666350050113314787911320639668510871569846664873595017518995670958477806411667505346462590471136862647349666243426242677175204732314281064417939041868653741187423064985189556742640111598580035644021835576715752869397465453828584471291269955890393294448315746500268702149708808053100406398480942695623586049403348084970064668900206251516968479727515576425962392136269169089884609794271331061018895634421094082310408889752954265842691732460538911784960000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000L so I'd expect for there to be more than a few seemingly unlikely coincidences among them.

defrost
0 replies
1d9h

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.

yergi
0 replies
1d8h

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.

tantalor
0 replies
1d6h

though this distance would not be a “real” distance in any meaningful sense

Huh?

rpz
0 replies
1d7h

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.

ouraf
0 replies
3h30m

Saint Michael wielded a Katana, it seems

mensetmanusman
0 replies
1d10h

These took nearly 4K years to build in total. Beautiful to see how much thought went into the placement.

mcswell
0 replies
18h57m

My name is Michael, and I approve of this article.

Wait, you want to know if I'm a Saint?

maratc
0 replies
1d10h

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.

m3kw9
0 replies
1d5h

Is there selection bias so a straight line is made by selecting the ones that fit?

klaussilveira
0 replies
1d5h

This is why I come to HN. Fascinating investigations, perfectly executed by genius fellow hackers. Thank you.

kedv
0 replies
1d8h

How was this achieved?

gorgoiler
0 replies
1d9h

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.

denton-scratch
0 replies
1d4h

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.

dave333
0 replies
1d6h

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.

dark-star
0 replies
1d6h

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"

d-z-m
0 replies
5h40m

Link appears to be broken.

cozzyd
0 replies
6h33m

Since the only geodesics that are closed on an ellipsoid are the meridian and equator, doesn't they mean that all points are (eventually) connected by a geodesics? Obviously this isn't what anybody means by a straight line though.

I'm surprised I can't find a "short" (no longer than the largest distance between points) geodesic fitter anywhere. Sounds like a fun hour-long project using GeographicLib.

classified
0 replies
14h41m

But was there Mercator projection at the time these sites were built?

bsza
0 replies
1d7h

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).

Zobat
0 replies
1d9h

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?

SilverBirch
0 replies
1d9h

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.

Duanemclemore
0 replies
1d7h

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.