This alleged trans-European alignment of sacred sites, involving shrines associated with Apollo and St. Michael, was first reported by Lucien Richer in the May-June 1977 issue of the French Journal Atlantis, though it was first brought to my attention by John Michell, who asked if I could test its accuracy mathematically. The four folders here catalogue my investigations of the accuracy of the alignment.
1. Richer’s Alignment as a Great Circle on a Sphere – This part of the investigation turned out to be irrelevant in the end, once Richer had made it clear that his claimed alignment was a rhumb line rather than a great circle. To view, click here.
2. Richer’s Alignment as a Rhumb Line on a Sphere – Basically this is the simplest first approximation to analysing Richer’s alignment. To view, click here.
3. Richer’s Alignment as a Rhumb Line on a Spheroid – This is a messier, more complicated, but more accurate analysis of Richer’s alignment. (In fact, it shows that the first approximations of Folder 2 are surprisingly accurate.) To view, click here.
4. Richer’s Alignment and Adam’s Peak (Sri Lanka) – I’m not sure where this claim originated, but someone had made a suggestion that if Richer’s line was extended, as a rhumb line, it would pass through Adam’s Peak in Sri Lanka. This folder shows that it would in fact miss it by some 46 miles. Perhaps not surprisingly, then, this particular claim seems to have been quietly dropped. To view, click here.
The results of Folder 3 were incorporated by John Michell and Christine Rhone in their book Twelve-Tribe Nations and the Science of Enchanting the Landscape (1991), p.107, with the comment:
“Bearing in mind the distance from the west of Ireland to the Holy Land, some 2500 miles, and the fact that many of the sites are natural landmarks, sanctified by nature rather than by human choice, the straight path on which they all stand is indeed narrow.”
Personally, I thought some of the discrepancies were a bit too big, but the idea of the alignment clearly held such appeal for John and Christine, that they saw things otherwise, and just carried on regardless. Equally regardless were Hamish Miller and Paul Broadhurst, in their book The Dance of the Dragon (2000), p.13, which also quotes the results of Folder 3 and the same paragraph from John and Christine’s book which I have quoted above! Hamish and Paul’s book recounts their adventures in travelling from Skellig Michael to Mount Carmel, dowsing the energies of the alignment on the way! “The Apollo–St Michael Axis” illustration of the alignment, reproduced here, appears both on the back of the dust-wrapper and on the end-papers of the book.
Lucien Richer’s alignment arose out an investigation of an alignment of sites in Greece discovered by his brother Jean Richer, a translation of whose book by Christine Rhone, Sacred Geography of the Ancient Greeks (1994), is discussed in “Strange Shores III – The Numismatic Zodiac”, in the Numismatic section of this website. (To view, access via this link, under "Strange Shores".) Lucien Richer’s alignment is given a brief mention in Christine’s book, on p.5.