Clonmacnoise Monastery
There was a monastery in Ireland around the 7th century in Clonmacnoise
Clonmacnoise, Irish highlands
It’s located in about the center of Ireland, on the banks of the River Shannon - Irelands longest and most significant river.
The Clonmacnoise Monastery had monks living there.
These monks were terrified of vikings, but terrified of other things too.
They wrote these down in their annals.
There are written reports of the monks being plagued by “UFOs”.
These weren’t your standard modern UFO. All shiny and disk shaped.
What the Monks reported were much stranger.
They would see ships among the clouds.
Sailing ships.
And they would sometimes see men, jumping from the ships.
They would see them with fishing spears.
They wouldn’t fall down, they would be suspended.
Like they were swimming among the clouds.
They would also see the men drowning in mid air.
Dying, and floating back up.
Now to make sense of this, it’s important to understand the context of christian monks in 7th century Ireland.
Christianity is an eschatological religion, meaning it concerns itself with beliefs in the “end times”.
Christians believe not only that the world will end, but that it should, with the return of christ.
They believe that when Christianity has spread to every corner of the world, it will trigger the end, as said in the Gospel of Matthew:
“And this gospel of the kingdom will be preached in the whole world as a testimony to all nations, and then the end will come.”
Matthew 24:14
Try to empathize with these Clonmacnoise monks’ position at the time, situated in Ireland.
The Altlantic Ocean was the edge of the world.
Most believed there was nothing beyond.
Ireland was the western most point of the known world in the 7th century.
So christianity had spread to the far corners. they had reason to believe the end times were upon them (as they always seem to).
Christians also believe in the firmament.
This is a structure that God created to separate the heavens and the earth.
This is part of the creation myth, Genesis:
“And God said, ‘Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters.’ And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament.”
Genesis 1:6
This is directly saying that the waters of heaven rest atop the waters of the earth.
There are the “waters above” and the “waters below”.
The “waters above” make a notable appearance in the story of Noah, when God releases them to flood the earth.
Back to the Monks, there was a belief that if you sailed to far out into the ocean, you may actually end up on the waters above, up in the sky.
You could sail so far that you might end up above your own house.
But you wouldn’t know that. You would just be sailing on the ocean.
The Otherworld
This blurring of dimensions is common in Irish folklore, the other component of this story.
Irish myth has the Otherworld, which is a parallel dimension to ours that you can get lost in if you wander too far out into the mist. The Otherworld is where spiritual creatures like fairies live.
In our world, you don’t see their true form.
We would see a fairy or deity as something normal, like an animal.
It isn’t uncommon in Irish myth to have things crossover from the Otherworld.
A fairy may still reveal themselves to you if they choose.
For the men the monks saw drowning, they would be drowning in a normal ocean.
It’s just that the ocean was the waters above, and the monks could see them.
So It isn’t too unbelievable to have a blending of christian and Irish myth - with the firmament and the Otherworld.
Story time
There’s an old story that contextualizes this myth.
So theres a different group of monks that are sailing to Rome through the ocean, and a bad storm hits.
They decide to stop and put their anchor down to wait out the storm.
When it’s over, they want to continue but the anchor is stuck on something, and they can’t get it back up.
So they get one of the young monks to swim down and try and see what the anchor is stuck on.
When he swims down, he sees that the anchor is stuck in the bell tower of an underwater monastery, on the bottom of the ocean. Not only that, but there are other monks, down at the bottom, staring and pointing at him.
But they don’t seem like he is underwater.
They are standing and walking like they are on solid ground.
These are the monks of Clonmacnoise, and from their perspective they just saw an anchor come crashing through their bell tower from the sky, and a young monk drowning next to it.
So they rush up the bell tower and grab the drowning monk, and bring him into their world to save him.
Meanwhile, the other group of monks on the boat never see the young one come up again. They realize he’s drown and so they carry on, and go back to Rome.
And now, the young monk, having been rescued, is living with the other monks in Clonmacnoise, in this parallel reality under the sea. He spends a year learning everything about them. Their order, their beliefs, their art and roles.
A year later the monks are once again sailing right by the spot where the young monk drowned, and they see him swimming there on the surface.
After some shock, as they thought he was dead a year ago, he’s brought onboard. The young monk tells them whats he’s learned and gives them a small bell from the tower.
Bloodborne
I find this idea of a sea above the sky fascinating.
There is another appearance of this in modern storytelling in a video game: bloodborne.
warning: this is a major spoiler of the game.
To quickly summarize, at the very end of the game, after spending all of your time in a massive city, you arrive at a very unexpected location - a small fishing village.
You get there after going to the top of the tallest building in the city, the clocktower.
If you look off the shore, you begin to see vague outlines of buildings under the waves.
The realization is that the city was under this ocean.
The premise of this fishing village, and the end of the game’s story, is that it is the location where a group discovered the body of a god washed up on the shore. In their greed, they defiled it, searching for ways to achieve its immortality. This cursed the village, and created a nightmare world beneath the ocean, for humanity to be trapped in. This was the “original sin”.
This kind of checks out with the firmament be a support for the place where gods live.
Something you wouldn’t have noticed throughout the game, is at certain locations you can make out small ship masts and sails in the distance. These must be shipwrecks from above. There was a small clue you probably could not have pieced together until getting up there.