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Comment by karaterobot | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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."

    > an appearance of the Burger King himself explicitly asking for a shrine in the location

Is this canonically BK lore?

Not _yet_

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?)

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.

10^-8 compared to -16?

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.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alignments_of_random_points for a thorough treatment of this topic, with citations to the published literature.

> 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.

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

Your information is out of date. EU recently reaffirmed the Irish ruling, so we can expect this to spread:

https://www.irishtimes.com/life-and-style/food-and-drink/lik...

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

Royal with cheese

Do you want fries with that?

Another 'e' is required in this sentence.

Anothere 'e' is required in this sentence.

Another 'e' is required in this sentence.

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.

- 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".

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

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?".)

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

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.

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

Looking at that map of sites in France alone, randomly distributed is a good first approximation for figuring out the probability.

Pondered the estimation a bit more. The first two points of a group of 7 define a line. The probability of the remaining five being close enough to the line is just the probability of each being close enough, to the power of five. We can roughly estimate that probability as the "close enough" distance divided by the total area. Let's just normalize. Let's assume distribution within a unit square Some of the lines would not cut in a way that most of the "close enough" area is inside the box, but that's a constant factor and not to big.

Given n points and the probability p7 that seven points lie close enough to a line, we take the number of different sets of seven points, N7 = (n choose 7). The likelihood of a match is (1-(1-p7)^N7).

This is a very rough estimation, of course, but it gives some idea of the likelihood.

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

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."

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

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

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...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Territorial_abbey

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.

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)!

> 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.

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.

> 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.

Not Howl's.

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")

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?

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

Stella maris isn't even named after St. Michael

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