#skellig michael
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This is my senior thesis from all the way back in college! It's about a 12th century monk who is forced to travel from the Skellig Islands to Rome when his monastery is abandoned. I'd love to revisit it with everything I've learned since then.
#original work#skellig michael#comics#illustration#monasticism#monks#I DID THIS WITH DIP PEN AND LOOSE BRUSHES!!! insane#i was quite literally insane#Slimemanagement
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Ach-To and Irish Archaeology
The sequels were my entry into Star Wars and I never would have gone to see The Force Awakens if I wasn't an archaeology nerd.
During the production of Episode VII, a decent number of people with an interest in our archaeological heritage here in Ireland were quite worried about the impact of filming on one of our only two UNESCO World Heritage Sites, the island known as Skellig Michael down off the coast of Kerry.
I went to the film to see if any potential damage was worth it, or if they'd do something unspeakably stupid with it in-universe. I wanted to see if it was respected.
And holy hell I was NOT disappointed. I think I walked out of TFA sniffling to myself about how beautiful the Skellig looked and how it seemed like its use as a location was not just respectful but heavily inspired by its real history.
See, Skellig Michael was a monastic hermitage established at a point when Christianity was so new that the man who ordered its founding sometime in the first century CE was himself ordained by the Apostle Paul. The fellah from the Bible who harassed all and sundry with his letters, THAT Apostle Paul. This is how old a Christian site the Skellig is. It predates St. Patrick by at the very least two hundred years.
The steps we watch Rey climb were originally cut NEARLY TWO THOUSAND YEARS AGO. They have been reworked and repaired many many times since, of course. Still, the path the camera follows Daisy Ridley up is as much an ancient path built by the founders of a faith in real life as it is in the movies.
A hermitage was a place where monks went to live lives of solitude and asceticism so as better to achieve wisdom. The practice is common to many of the major world religions, including the myriad East Asian faiths which inspired the fictional Jedi.
It is said that the hermitage and monastery were originally built with the purpose of housing mystical texts belonging to the Essanes, one of the sects of Second Temple Judaism which influenced some of the doctrines of Christianity. They also, according to what I have read, characterised good and evil as 'light' and 'darkness' and were celibate.
As such, the use of the island in TFA and TLJ does not merely respect Skellig Michael's history, it honours it. It is framed as somewhere ancient and sacred, which it is. It is framed as a place where a mystic goes to live on his own surrounded by nature that is at once punishing and sublime, which of course it was. It shown to be a place established to protect texts written at the establishment of a faith, which it may well have been.
This level of genuine respect for my cultural heritage by Rian Johnson in particular is astonishing. I don't think anyone from outside the US ever really trusts Americans not to treat our built history like it's Disneyland. Much of the incorporation of the Skellig's real past into a fictional galactic history occurs in TLJ, which is why I'm giving Rian so much credit.
It's Luke's death scene which makes the honouring of Irish archaeological history most apparent though.
Johnson takes the archaeological iconography back a further three thousand years for his final tribute to my culture's beautiful historical temples. This time, he incorporates neolithic passage tomb imagery, specifically that of Newgrange, which is up the country from the Skellig.
I think if you understand what the image represents then it makes a deeply emotional scene even more resonant.
The scene I'm referring to is Luke's death.
As he looks to the horizon, to the suns, we view him from the interior of the First Jedi Temple. The sunset aligns with the passageway into the ancient sanctuary, illuminating it as he becomes one with the Force.
As for Newgrange, every year during the Winter Solstice it aligns with the sunrise. The coldest, darkest, wettest, most miserable time of the year on a North Atlantic island where it is often cold, wet, and miserable even in the summer. And the sun comes up even then, and on a cloudless morning a beam of sunlight travels down the corridor and illuminates the chamber inside the mound.
You guys can see this, right? The similarity of the images? The line of light on the floor?
Luke's death scene is beautiful but I think it's a thousand times more moving with this visual context. Luke's sequel arc isn't merely populated by a lore and iconography that honour the place where the end of his story was filmed, I think that incorporation of that history and mythology honours Luke.
We don't know for sure what the Neolithic people believed, religion-wise. We know next to nothing about their rituals. We know that there were ashes laid to rest at Newgrange. There is some speculation that the idea was that the sun coming into the place that kept those ashes brought the spirits of those deceased people over to the other side.
It's also almost impossible not to interpret the sunlight coming into Newgrange as an extraordinary expression of hope. If you know this climate, at this latitude, you know how horrible the winter is. We don't even have the benefit of crispy-snowwy sunlit days. It's grey and it's dark and it's often wet. And every single year the earth tilts back and the days get long again.
The cycle ends and begins again. Death and rebirth. And hope, like the sun, which though unseen will always return. And so we make it through the winter, and through the night.
As it transpired the worries about the impact of the Star Wars Sequels upon Skellig Michael were unfounded. There was no damage caused that visitors wouldn't have also caused. There also wasn't a large uptick in people wanting to visit because of its status as a SW location, in part I think because the sequels just aren't that beloved.
But they're beloved to me, in no small part because of the way they treated a built heritage very dear to my heart. I think they deserve respect for that at the least.
#star wars meta#ach-to#irish history#Irish Archaeology#first jedi temple#skellig michael#newgrange#luke skywalker#the last jedi#early christianity#neolithic#historical parallels in star wars#star wars and history#star wars and mythology#star wars and archaeology
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Shrines to St. Michael.
"Mountains figure prominently at the mighty ganglia of the story of Christianity... As Jesus prays atop the holy mountain, the other world intersects with ours as the divine comes down to the human, as the eternal touches the temporal and mortal. And that other world is the ultimate reality, not this one. No wonder that St Michael, ‘Quis ut Deus,’ has his shrines on lofty peaks; no wonder the Celts worshipped on hills and mountains...
The spirit of the Archangel Michael permeates discussion of the world of the Celts—shrines such as Skellig Michael on precipitous mountain-tops in the cold and wet Celtic desert; early connections with the ancient Eastern world; guardianship of Tuscany, Provence, Normandy, and Cornwall; safe-keeping of wanderers and hermits; motifs of spear, sword, and stone; waging of the war in Heaven and the downfall of Lucifer; the communion of the Grail."
St. Michael: Early Anglo-Saxon Tradition, Raymond JS Grant
(1) Mont St. Michel, Normandy, France; (2) St. Michael’s Mount, Cornwall, England; (3) Castel Sant’Angelo, Rome, Italy; (4) Saint-Michel d’Aiguilhe, Le Puy-en-Velay, France; (5) Abbey of San Galgano, Siena; (6) Skellig Michael, County Kerry, Ireland; (7) Sacra di San Michele, Mount Pirchiriano, Turin, Italy; (8) St. Michael’s Tower, Glastonbury Tor, England
#st michael#saint michael the archangel#mont saint michel#st michael's mount#castel sant'angelo#saint-michel d'aiguilhe#skellig michael#glastonbury#glastonbury tor#celtic christianity#celtic#celts
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What a lovely day to have a working eye
#OOC: travels#skellig michael#jane eyre#mr rochester of thornfield#ask mr rochester#star wars#the last jedi#Ireland
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Skellig Michael - Sceilg Mhichíl
#ireland#skellig island#irlande#skellig michael#skellig#irish island#seascape#landscape#architecture#view#Iveragh#archipel
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Skellig Michael, Skellig Rock Great, Ireland
mana5280
#Skellig Michael#Skellig Rock Great#Ireland#Atlantic Puffin#Puffin#Puffins#Birds#Bird#Wildlife#Europe#IrelandWildlife
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Monastery
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Me and my fear of heights vs Skellig Michael
#adventures with sokka#mini update of sorts#update#rambling#ireland#skellig michael#indulge my bullshit
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Photo
#tommy tiernan#the tommy tiernan show#skellig michael#ahch-to#the pope#luke skywalker#star wars sequels#star wars#ireland
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#skellig michael#this is just a note to say i didn't kill us on the steeply inclined curving cliff roads ✌️
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Le monastère de Skellig Michael, ermitage de Luke Skywalker
Nouvel article publié sur https://www.2tout2rien.fr/skellig-michael-ermitage-de-luke-skywalker/
Le monastère de Skellig Michael, ermitage de Luke Skywalker
#archipel#ermite#hutte#ile#Irlande#Luke Skywalker#moine#monastere#patrimoine#pierre#ruine#Skellig Michael#star wars#unesco#vidéo#architecture#cinema#imxok#voyage
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I'm trying to put together the itinerary for a trip to Ireland so long as it's not canceled by, you know, another plague like the last almost-trip to Ireland, or fucking nuclear war or something,
and I want to travel by train as much as possible because there's, you know, an actual rail system out there, but also it's buckwild to me that if I do rent a car, I can cross the width of an entire nation in less time than I usually spend driving to a different state
#it's small as hell out there!!#also we're going too early in the year for Skellig Michael alas#and as of right now schedule restrictions may prevent me from seeing Reenadinna but I'm gonna fight for that. LET ME SEE THE YEWS
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Skellig Michael, Skellig Rock Great, Ireland
mana5280
#Skellig Michael#Skellig Rock Great#Ireland#Puffin#Atlantic Puffin#Birds#Bird#Wildlife#IrelandWildlife#Europe
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marginalia, chapter 50 -- december - part two
“I say we just pick one,” says James, and at first Sirius is inclined to agree. “Skellig Michael, something a bit more remote. See what we can find.”
“What, like a massive fuck-off sign that says, Well done, you, here’s horcrux number one?” Sirius asks, lip quirking.
“If the shoe fits. Or isn’t our Moony a human dark detector these days?”
Remus rolls his eyes.
The problem, Sirius thinks, is that they’ve really only got one shot at this. He harbors no illusions that Figg and Moody won’t put the lot of them under house arrest the moment they get back to Phoenix Isle, hard evidence of horcruxes and the method to destroy them in hand or not. So they’ve got one shot at this, and they’ve got to make it count.
“Fair point,” says James, when he says as much. “I’ll go, then. They can’t ground me, not if they don’t know I’m gone.”
“Yeah, only you’re not a human dark detector, mate,” Sirius points out.
“True. Damn.”
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