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.
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:
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.
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
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.
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]
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.
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.
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.
> 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]
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.
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.
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.
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?
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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)
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.
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.
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?
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
(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...)
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.
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
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!
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...
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.
"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.
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.
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.
> 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)
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).
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:
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.
Definitely not ordinary places. Perhaps Stella Maris, the end point, is the most fascinating of all because of its association with the prophet Elijah.
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...
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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%
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.
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.
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?
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 :)
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.
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?
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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
...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.
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.
260 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 202 ms ] threadGiven 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.
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
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.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercator_projection
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
"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.
Locations are chosen for the sake of the people who are expected to come to them.
Eratosthenes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth%27s_circumference#Eratos... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eratosthenes#Measurement_of_Ea...
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.
Are they pointing to anything though?
Indeed, having a cathedral is a thing that can define a settlement as "a city".
Source: https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/what-makes-a-city/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_of_the_Holy_Cross,_Nin
With the number of cathedrals in Europe I don't really think this is supported.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dedications_in_the_Church_of_E...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cathedral_of_Saint_Michael
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.
Also compare star maps.
If they really were cathedrals, a coincidence would have been extraordinary.
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?
- 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.
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
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.
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.
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.
Ah - I missed this one.
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.
(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...)
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.
From wikipedia, the list of St Michael churches:
It's far more interesting to me that Perkin Warbeck occupied it!
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.
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.
There is no reason to assume that the lines align in other projections.
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)
Mercator is special projection that was not used before him. Different projections give different distortions.
(hiking in straight line and jumping into boat at the point where land ends is not how people travel)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dedications_in_the_Church_of_E...
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.
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
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St_Michael_and_All_Angels_Chur...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ley_line?wprov=sfla1
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
https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highland_Boundary_Fault
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glen_Roy#The_Parallel_Roads_of...
Edit: Also have a look at the Lochaber Geopark:
https://lochabergeopark.org.uk/
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
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
0: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sf5OrthVRPA
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.
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.
1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6JwEYamjXpA&t=2489s
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.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Look-elsewhere_effect
Aha, but two of them will always be on a straight line. It’s only the other five that are the coincidences.
It'd be surprising if these buildings were exactly aligned. Presumably people could easily say that the respective diocese(s) are aligned though.
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
https://salisburycathedral.wordpress.com/the-spire/ is a glorious essay on the architecture of that spire.
800 shots. Pick 7.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_sharpshooter_fallacy
Of course it's going to be off with any other method than that of the map itself.
It's a UNESCO world heritage site and a huge tourist attraction long before Star Wars, but it is definitely not a Cathedral.
CGI'ing over them is a genius solution that makes me absurdly happy.