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St Michael's Mount
St Michael's Mount is a small
island in Mount Bay that you can see and walk to across a cobbled
causeway from the small village of Marazion, when the tide is out.
 Ancient Roman historians said that the
mount was the island of Ictis, an important port for the Cornish tin
trade.
When the Normans found the island, after
1066 AD, they believed it was
 like their own Mont-St-Michel, and so they
gave the island to the Benedictine monks to erect an abbey, like their
own own in Normandy.
One of the traditional
patron saints of Cornwall is St. Michael, who is said to have appeared
here in 495 AD.
It is possible that until the 4th century
AD the Scilly Isles were one large island, which later submerged in
parts. These may have been the lost kingdom of
Lyonesse, as suggested by
Carew in his Survey of Cornwall in 1602.
Situated on either side of the English
Channel and precariously perched upon coastal rock outcroppings are the
famous medieval pilgrimage shrines of St. Michael's Mount and Mont-St.
Michel.
At both sites, visions of the archangel were seen during the
fifth century and the histories of the two shrines are intimately
connected with one another.
Guarding the entrance to the Land's End district of Cornwall, the
English Mount was known as a port and trading post (for tin and copper)
from as early as 350 BC. Following the defeat of the seafaring merchants
who controlled the mount by the Roman Julius Caeser in 56 BC, the small
island was abandoned to hermits and mystics. Legends tell of a visit by
St. Keyne and a spring that miraculously gushed forth when she set foot
upon the rock in 490 AD. The event that most clearly stimulated
Christian pilgrimages to the mount however, was an apparition of St.
Michael to a fisherman in 495 AD.
According to different versions of the
legend, St. Michael was observed either high upon a rocky ledge or
walking upon the waters of Mount Bay. Whatever the case, the mount
quickly became an important sacred site that would continue to draw
pilgrims from throughout England for 1500 years. During its long history
after the apparition, the Mount has been a church, a priory, a military
fortress, and a private castle of the St. Aubyn family. Today the castle
and shrine are maintained by the National Trust, an independent
organization devoted to the preservation of British antiquities. Both
tourists and religious pilgrims visit the site.
 In
studying St. Michael's Mount two interesting matters come to light. The
first regards the legendary accounts of apparitions of the archangel.
According to various reckonings, St. Michael was said to have
miraculously appeared in over 400 places throughout Britain and Europe
during the 4th and 5th centuries. At a large percentage of these sites
he is said to have slain dragons.
Throughout the world different cultures have memorialized the power
places and the enigmatic apparitions that occurred at them with myths
and legends, drawings and carvings of dragons, serpents and giant
snakes. These iconographic representations of the earth spirit and its
mystic powers are methods whereby peoples' experiences of the
unexplainable were symbolically communicated over long periods of time.
Snakes live beneath the surface of the ground and thus were universally
used to symbolically depict the mysterious forces of the underworld (it
is also true that various species of snakes live in trees and there is
much ancient iconography depicting serpents and dragons sinuously wound
round the great Earth Tree whose roots reach into the underworld).
Yet there is still more to this matter, and the Christian myth of the
dragon-slaying St. Michael may be further unravelled. Many pre-Christian
legends, in those areas of Europe with standing stones in the
countryside, have references to giants or normal persons who 'speared a
serpent' or 'captured the dragon forces' at a specific site by the
placement of a great stone into the body of the earth. Even more telling
is the fact that many Christian sacred sites were, prior to the arrival
of Christianity, known as dragon's dens and serpent's lairs. The
Christian story of St. Michael spearing a pagan serpent may thus be seen
as a usurpation of a far older pagan myth. It is truly one of the
sweetest ironies that while the Christian symbol of St. Michael was
intended to depict the so-called 'victory' of the new faith over the
old.
A second fascinating matter that presents itself to the researcher of St.
Michael shrines in Britain is the extraordinary linking of those shrines
by straight lines running for hundreds of miles across the countryside.
One example is the line, which originating at St. Michael's Mount in
Cornwall, goes on to pass through the pre-Druid or Druid sacred site of Cheesewring, through the St. Michael's churches at Brentor, upon the
Neolithic mound of Burrowbridge Mump, and upon
Glastonbury Tor, and thence
continues on to the stone rings of Avebury. These places listed here are
only the better known sites along this particular line; there are indeed
many other earth and stone structures along the line and all of them
predate the arrival of Christianity by thousands of years.
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