Skellig Michael

"The West shall shake the East awake . . .   while ye have the night for morn . . ."

A mission from the West . . . . .

The island of Skellig Michael, also called Great Skellig, is the larger of the two Skellig Islands, 11.6 kilometres west of the Iveragh Peninsula in County Kerry, Ireland.

A Gaelic Christian monastery was founded on the island at some point between the 6th and 8th century and remained continuously occupied until it was abandoned in the late 12th century. The remains of the monastery, and most of the island, became a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1996, and was used recently as a location for the latest Star War movies.

The island featured in Kenneth Clark's first episode of his very personal account of the values inherent in the cultivation of a culture that he calls "Civilisation".

Civilisation: A Personal View by Kenneth Clark was a  groundbreaking television documentary series outlining the history of Western art, architecture and philosophy since the Dark Ages, and produced by the BBC and broadcast in 1969 on BBC2.

"The Skin of Our Teeth" is the title of the first episode where Clark tells his story of the Dark Ages, the six centuries following the collapse of the Roman Empire, and how in this far flung place, the threads of a European continuity and connection to the ideas and values of the classical world survived, and then reconnected to the wider world.
 
It is a widely held assumption that places out at the edges of the world, the margins, the peripheries, do not tend to influence the wider world in the way that centres do. Whilst centres are the product of history and geography, some places, that seem remote, have to an extent helped create that history.

Schottenklöster (German for "Scottish monasteries") is the name applied to the monastic foundations of Scottish and Irish missionaries in Continental Europe, particularly to the Scottish Benedictine monasteries in Germany, which in the beginning of the 13th century were combined into one congregation whose abbot-general was the Abbot of the Scots monastery at Regensburg shown in the image here. 

Ireland's sobriquet "Island of Saints and Scholars" derives from this period, when scholars and missionaries from Ireland exerted great influence on Continental Europe.

This was what is known as the Hiberno-Scottish mission, a series of missions and expeditions initiated by various Irish clerics and cleric-scholars who, for the most part, are not known to have acted in concert. There was no overall coordinated mission, but there were nevertheless sporadic missions initiated by Gaelic monks from Ireland and the western coast of modern-day Scotland, which contributed to the spread of Christianity and established monasteries in Britain and continental Europe during the Middle Ages. The earliest recorded Irish mission can be dated to 563 with the foundation of Iona by the Irish monk Saint Columba. Columba is said by Bede and Adamnán to have ministered to the Gaels of Dál Riada and converted the northern Pictish kingdoms. Over the next centuries more missions followed and spread through Anglo-Saxon England and the Frankish Empire. The early missions are often associated with the Christian practice known as Celtic Christianity, which was distinguished by its organizations around monasteries rather than dioceses and certain idiosyncratic traditions, but the desire to maintain a relationship with the Holy See saw their missions take on a more Roman character.

The Latin term Scotti refers to the Gaelic-speaking people of Ireland and the Irish who settled in western Scotland. In early medieval times Ireland was known not only as "Éire" but also as "Scotia", a name that the Romans used at times to refer to Ireland as well as Scotland. By the end of the 11th century it generally referred to Scotland, which had become Gaelicised by settlers from Ireland, and from where the name Scotland derives. The Romans also gave Ireland the name "Hibernia". Thus, the "Scots" missionaries who were so influential in the early Church history of Germany included men from both modern countries Ireland and Scotland.

But was it FAKE NEWS?

The transmission and communication of stories, belief systems, ways of explaining and understanding the realities of the world, even when mythological, is in some sense, all about the perceptions we have and are making about ourselves and our world.

In 2017 and in the context of globalisation and currently existing capitalism, there are thinkers like Samir Amin who, when addressing the question of Eurocentrism, points out that when it comes to actually changing the system, that change is more likely to occur at the peripheries of capitalism, where the contradictions, the injustices, the instabilities are so visible, so explicit, and the means to counter change less robust.

George Bernard Shaw writes about his visit to Skellig Michael whilst staying at the Parknasilla Hotel, Sneem, 18th September 1910.

My Dear Jackson,

We are both here — in the only place in the world that makes Tarn Moor a mere dust heap. Yesterday I left the Kerry coast in an open boat, 33 feet long, propelled by ten men on five oars. These men started on 49 strokes a minute, a rate which I did not believe they could keep up for five minutes. They kept it without slackening half a second for two hours, at the end of which they landed me on the most fantastic and impossible rock in the world: Skellig Michael, or the Great Skellig, where in south west gales the spray knocks stones out of the lighthouse keeper's house, 160 feet above calm sea level. There is a little Skellig covered with gannets — white with them (and their guano) — covered with screaming crowds of them. The Bass rock is a mere lump in comparison: both the Skelligs are pinnacled, crocketed, spired, arched, caverned, minaretted; and these gothic extravagances are not curiosities of the islands: they are the islands: there is nothing else.

The rest of the cathedral may be under the sea for all I know: there are 90 fathoms by the chart, out of which the Great Skellig rushes up 700 feet so suddenly that you have to go straight up stairs to the top — over 600 steps. And at the top amazing beehives of flat rubble stones, each overlapping the one below until the circle meets in a dome — cells, oratories, churches, and outside them cemeteries, wells, crosses, all clustering like shells on a prodigious rock pinnacle, with precipices sheer down on every hand, and lodged on the projecting stones overhanging the deep huge stone coffins made apparently by giants, and dropped there God knows how. An incredible, impossible, mad place, which still tempts devotees to make "stations" of every stair landing, and to creep through "Needle's eyes" at impossible altitudes, and kiss "stones of pain" jutting out 700 feet above the Atlantic.

Most incredible of all, the lighthouse keeper will not take a tip, but sits proud, melancholy and haunted in his kitchen after placing all his pantry at your disposal — will also accompany you down to the desperate little harbour to squeeze the last word out of you before you abandon him, and gives you letters to post like the Flying Dutchman — also his strange address to send newspapers and literature to; for these he will accept. I tell you the thing does not belong to any world that you and I have lived and worked in: it is part of our dream world.

And you talk of your Hindhead! Skellig Michael, sir, is the Forehead. Then back in the dark, without compass, and the moon invisible in the mist, 49 strokes to the minute striking patines of white fire from the Atlantic, spurting across threatening currents, and furious tideraces, pursued by terrors, ghosts from Michael, possibilities of the sea rising making every fresh breeze a fresh fright, impossibilities of being quite sure whither we were heading, two hours and a half before us at best, all the rowers wildly imaginative, superstitious, excitable, and apparently super-human in energy and endurance, two women sitting with the impenetrable dignity and quiet comeliness of Italian saints and Irish peasant women silent in their shawls with their hands on the quietest part of the oars (next to the gunwale) like spirit rappers, keeping the pride of the men at the utmost tension, so that every interval of dogged exhaustion and drooping into sleep (the stroke never slackening, though) would be broken by an explosion of "up-up-upkeep her up!"

"Up Kerry!"; and the captain of the stroke oar — a stranger imported by ourselves, and possessed by ten devils each with a formidable second wind, would respond with a spurt in which he would, with short yelps of "Double it — double it — double it" almost succeed in doubling it, and send the boat charging through the swell.

Three pound ten, my dear Jackson — six shillings a man — including interest on the price of the boat and wear and tear of ten oars, was what they demanded. They had thrown down their farming implements (they don't fish on Saturdays) to take to the sea for us at that figure.I hardly feel real again yet.Hindhead! Pooh! I repeat it in your teeth. POOH!Celt and Saxon — you and me — I mean me and you — or it is you and I? Meredith and Anatole France! Is Box Hill a beehive cell 700 feet up?

What does any Parisian know of Skellig Michael? Get out!