Megalithic Saints (British History)

[Ishmael]

That was our key insight. It was the first thing I noticed and it led to the rest of it, plus Zebadiah Stones - which confirmed everything.

[Hatty]

The theme of twins or tanists competing or taking it in turns to rule, each being ritualistically killed at the solstice, occurs constantly in mythology whether Christian, Jewish or 'other'.

Castor and Pollux are just one more instance. The reoccurrence of pairs or twins chimes with the navigational aspect of aligning two fixed points.

[Ishmael]

[Mick Harper]

Megalithic Saints (Cont)

It is not possible to identify for certain whether any particular religious building (not just churches but chapels, oratories, hermitages and so on) is either Megalithic or Catholic but once you take the totality of structures with apparently Megalithic names and in apparently Megalithic places, it is possible to come to only one of two conclusions, either:
1. The Christians of the fifth, sixth and subsequent centuries had a weird desire to site many of their buildings in places of considerable inaccessibility and to come up with names closely associated with a culture that had ceased to exist at least five hundred years before and was wholly at odds with the fundamentals of the Christian faith or
2. That culture had not gone away (very far) and was now back, operating in a Christian milieu.

In the following pages you will be able to make up your own mind.

[Mick Harper]

Megalithic Saints (Cont)

For English Megalithia, the starting point must be St Michael. Michael is the leading archangel, angelos, meaning messenger in Greek. Since Hermes was the messenger god, known as Thoth to the Egyptians and Mercury to the Romans, it is reasonable to place the Archangel Michael as the Christian Hermes. Actually the strictly 'religious' identification is made specific because Thoth weighed souls against the feather of Ma'at in the Underworld, Hermes was in charge of escorting and judging souls and Michael judged souls on the Day of Judgement.

Michael is a Hebrew name meaning 'Who is like God?' but was originally a Chaldean deity. However the concept of angels does not seem to belong to any one particular religion, if indeed they can be called 'religious' at all since it is noticeable how uncomfortably they sit in the more austere monotheistic religions. In Christian iconography angels are depicted specifically with swans' wings; in northern European and Celtic mythology, swans are the vehicles for the soul's journey to the Otherworld just as Hermes, the messenger or angelos, accompanied souls to the Underworld.

[Mick Harper]

Megalithc Saints (Cont)

Swans are the most Megalithic of birds. It is from the flight of cranes that Thoth was said to have invented the alphabet in Egyptian myth, Hermes did the same with swans. Hermes, the god of roads, is why so many strategically-sited pubs are called The Swan (or, for that matter, The Angel), for instance the Swan Hotel by the Goring-Streatley bridge is where the Michael Line crosses the Thames.

In alchemy the three prime elements are mercury, salt and sulphur and the swan symbolised mercury. Apart from the Crown and the occasional monastery, only the dyers' and vintners' guilds may own swans. This singular privilege reflects alchemical interest in chemical dyes and the fortifying of wines.

[Mick Harper]

Megalithic Saints (cont)

Michael is also the chief dragon-slaying saint.* Dragons are as mysterious as they are ubiquitous in Megalithia--they seem to play a role in navigation, in mining and in metallurgy. The original pole star was named Draconis, the Dragon, and dragon 'beacon' hills crop up frequently on ancient routes; dragon, worm and orm seem to be essentially the same and relate to mining**; but dragons are also centrally involved with smelting processes, presumably accounting for their fiery attributes. The names of smiths in mythology tend to refer to fieriness, cf. Hephaestus 'the shining one', Vulcan i.e. volcano, and St. Brigit, the patron saint of blacksmiths, whose name is a synonym of 'bright'.

These themes are often combined in saint's tales: the fifth-century Welsh saint,. Cynog, defended the locals against 'ormests', described as giants ravaging the countryside, at the cost of losing a large piece of flesh from his thigh (an inescapable fate of heroes). He then dies fighting over access to the 'miracle spring' he owned, and it seems that mineral springs played a key part in the processes of metal hardening. Cyn in Welsh means chisel or wedge, an essential tool in mining, and this formidable hermit appears to have been a servant of Artemis, Cynthia being another name for Artemis.

* 'And there was war in heaven: Michael and his angels fought against the dragon' -- Book of Revelations 12:7.

** The Great Orme at Landudno was allegedly the largest copper mine in antiquity.

[Mick Harper]

Megalithic Saints (cont)

St George is another popular 'dragon-slayer', apparently a later and more obviously Christian version of Michael. In his pre-Christian incarnation he was a minor fertility god probably originating from Georgia in the Caucasus as his name suggests . George, or 'earth-worker', seems to be etymologically linked to gore--dirt, dried blood, the gouging horn-tip of a bull--which would place him as a metallurgical saint, but the other variant of his name to mean, a variation of gorge, or narrow valley, such as the Goring Gap which marks the half-way point between Avebury and Ivinghoe Beacon on the Ridgeway prompts navigational associations.

St. George's churches are often megalithically significant, especially those on a 'Roman road' beside a ford/weir/bridge,* but mostly his name is associated with pubs. A coaching inn called The George is probably commemorating the monarch but a 'George and Dragon' is always of megalithic interest. The patron saint of innkeepers is St Goar of Aquitaine, a sixth century monk famous for his hospitality after whom St Goar, a town in the Rhine gorge at the river's narrowest part, is named. He is represented as a hermit being given milk by a hind or a hermit with the devil at his feet, but also in a more intimate manner with a devil on his shoulder, reminiscent of Odin's ravens to whom pirates pay due homage by having a parrot on their shoulders .

* The main 'Via Iceniana' in Dorchester crosses the River Frome at Fordington, overlooked by a St. George's church on a beacon hill.

[Mick Harper]

Megalithic Saints (cont)

St. Margaret (Marina in the East) is a female 'dragon-saint'--she was swallowed by a dragon but the cross she was holding irritated it, it being really the Devil, and she was sicked up none the worse for the experience. Her name crops up right at the very end of the Michael Line where it reaches the sea, at Ormesby St. Margaret, opposite Ormesby St. Michael (orm also meaning dragon).

This kind of twinning as 'gate-keepers' is very characteristic of Megalithia, and Michael and Margaret themselves occasionally turn up as guardians of church doors. But pairs of villages with significant saints' names also 'guard' Megalithic routes e.g. Barford St. John and Barford St. Michael guarding the crossing at the River Swere and Ogbourne St. George and Ogbourne St. Andrew on either side of the Ridgeway.

As a virgin-saint and patron saint of childbirth, it can be assumed that Margaret was originally a moon goddess, whose key attributes are also chastity and childbirth. The association of childbirth with 'Megalithic saints' is a recurring theme but the reason for it is not at all clear, though doubtless it has to do with the rather different attitude to women that Megalithics held in contrast to the marked misogyny of the Roman Empire and the Pauline Church.

[Hatty]

[Hatty]

[Mick Harper]

Megalithic Saints (cont)

In British churches St Margaret was often 'twinned' with St Catherine, another 'moon goddess' saint, as perhaps the two most popular saints of the High Middle Ages. Both of them are pictured with books which is pretty much unique in medieval Christian iconography and seems to reflect the new more enlightened view of women's role in society.

The Neo-Megalithic Normans who seemed to have introduced the Catherine cult into Britain were similarly unusual in having no qualms about leaving their women in charge. Equally relaxed about gender were the contemporaneous Cathars, the heretical sect of southern France, and Catherine, from katharos meaning 'pure' in Greek, is the root of Cathar (perhaps of cathedral too). Another derivation of Catherine is the kithara, the Greek lyre, which takes us full circle back to Hermes, inventor of the lyre.

[Hatty]

Catherine was the patron saint of the University of Paris so she is more than a Norman protegee. Cathedrals were prototype universities.

[Hatty]

Catherine may be connected to the island of Kythira/Cythera in southern Greece, in one of the most dangerous straits of the Peloponnese. The island was traditionally associated with Aphrodite, she of the cockle-shell, when it was an ancient Greek colony.

[Mick Harper]

Megalithic Saints (cont)

Known to Catholics as St Catherine of Alexandria, she is actually the Christian version of the Egyptian Heqet, who in turn is Hecate, the Greco-Roman goddess of magic, witchcraft and crossroads, protector of shepherds and sailors, and guardian of the underworld. In other words Hecate is the female version of Hermes; she was tellingly referred to as 'the triple Hecat' , in the same way that Hermes is Thrice-Great Hermes, Hermes Trismegistus.

Catherine is the patron saint of philosophers and in particular of the University of Paris, and both Oxford and Cambridge have colleges named after her. She was seen as an all-purpose 'intellectual saint' and her familiar symbol, the 'Catherine wheel', would appear to be a modified cross-staff, a navigational device for measuring latitude.