Article

Belief

Creed

Monsters

26 September 2024

5 min read

Which dragon does St Michael need to slay today?

Explore the cultural impact of the dragon killer.

James Cary

James is a writer of sit coms for TV and radio.

A patch depicting a angel in armour, wielding a sword, on camoflague uniform.

Thomas Tucker on Unsplash.

St Michael is everywhere. But only if you have eyes to see him. He’s probably somewhere in your town. He may even be hiding in your wardrobe in one of your jumpers. Retailer Marks and Spencer trademarked the ‘St Michael’ brand in 1928. It was inspired by their best-selling hosiery brand – St Margaret. The name Michael came from the founder of M& S, Michael Marks. But the logo they used, a winged angel holding aloft a sword, was a reference to the archangel St Michael mentioned in the Bible.

Even in the pages of that book, however, St Michael is a little elusive, being named only a handful of times. Perhaps that was his mystique. Less is more. But whatever St Michael was doing worked really well in the Middle Ages. A tradition arose around him, culminating in a feast day known as Michaelmas on 29th September. This feast day had extra significance as it become a ‘Quarter Day’.

In days gone by, the year was divided into four, bookended by quarter days. Michaelmas was one, at least in England. The next is Christmas Day, followed by Lady Day (March 25), and Midsummer (June 24). Rents were traditionally due on quarters days. Legal and financial contracts were to be settled. Michaelmas was particularly associated with the domestic servants moving around. You will hear it referred to Michaelmas along those lines in Chapter One of Pride and Prejudice.

Dragon sightings may have declined sharply since the seventeenth century, but they have come roaring back in the last few decades.

Many schools called their autumn term ‘Michaelmas’. Mine did, although no-one ever explained what it meant. As schools began to dominate British life, the calendar year ceased to be broken into four but three. Now our lives are regulated by school holidays, ‘back to school’ days and half term, when it is traditional to double the cost of your holiday rental. Christmas remains. Lady Day morphed into the end of the tax year. (I’m sure the Virgin Mary would be thrilled). And Midsummer Day has vanished almost completely.

St Michael had a good run. He had been a wildly popular figure from Anglo-Saxon times and Michaelmas a firm fixture in the calendar. Many churches founded in that period were named after him. Over 800 of those churches dedicated to St Michael remain in England, scattered across the counties. (I walked around one on Sunday afternoon in East Coker, Somerset where the ashes of TS Eliot have been interred.) Only the Virgin Mary, St Peter and All Saints are more popular in the church dedication charts.

In short, St Michael was a big deal. Why? Because he was a dragon killer.

In fact, Michael was not just ‘a killer of dragons’ but ‘the killer of the dragon’. That dragon is the silver-tongued serpent, Satan himself. The final reference to Michael in the Bible reads thus – and yes, it sounds better in the King James Version:

And there was war in heaven: Michael and his angels fought against the dragon; and the dragon fought and his angels, and prevailed not; neither was their place found any more in heaven. And the great dragon was cast out, that old serpent, called the Devil, and Satan, which deceiveth the whole world: he was cast out into the earth, and his angels were cast out with him.

St Michael is the defeater of evil itself. This is a comforting figure when boatloads of Vikings could appear in your shire at any minute in order to destroy, steal, rape and pillage. The fact that these longboats had a dragonhead on the prow served only to reinforce this image that the enemy were representatives of Satan himself.

Dragon-slaying was a staple of heroic tales. Beowulf naturally fights a dragon. Merlin is mixed up with a dragon called Kilgharrah. There are also dozens of accounts in which dragons are slain, often presented in a prosaic and serious way, like a report of pest control. Not far from me in the woods near Wells, the Bishop Jocelyn killed a dragon in 1320s. The latest account like this is in 1614 , reporting a “strange and monstrous serpent” living in St Leonard’s Forest near Horsham in Sussex “to the great annoyance and diverse slaughters both of men and cattle, by his strong and violent poison”.

Dragon sightings may have declined sharply since the seventeenth century, but they have come roaring back in the last few decades. Dragons are everywhere. Our TV screens are constantly invaded by insatiable fire-breathing serpents. Bookshops bulge with titles about dragons.

When you see those efficient, bloodthirsty killers jumping off their dragon-headed longboats, good and evil don’t seem like relative concepts.

Has the time come for St Michael to return? Surprisingly not.

St Michael has not been summoned because he is a dragon killer, and we don’t want to kill dragons. Not anymore. We want to tame them. We want to understand them. We want to harness their power.

That’s what happens in Game of Thrones. Daenerys Targaryen wishes to assert her claim to the throne of the Seven Kingdoms of Westeros using the dragons that she has hatched. But can she use those dragons to bring about justice or ‘the greater good’ without being consumed by them or becoming dragon-like herself? It is an eternal question, played out in the Cold War with nuclear weapons and in Middle Earth with a powerful ring.

We are seduced by the allure of the dragon all too easily. It’s there at the very beginning of Western Culture in the Bible: Eve is approached by a persuasive snake who tempts her to eat from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. She falls for it. But throughout the Bible, the one blamed for the sin is not Eve, but Adam.

But how is it Adam’s fault? Adam failed to give the serpent the Archangel Michael treatment. Adam should have killed the serpent or chased it out of the garden. He didn’t because, well, things were just starting to get interesting. And the rest is theology.

St Michael is the extinguisher of evil. But we don’t want to destroy evil. We just want to see it diminished. A bit. In fact, the talk of Good and Evil is rather embarrassing. We don’t do Good and Evil. We do ‘values’. We don’t condemn sins. We seek to re-educate those with ‘anti-social behaviours’.

We have the dubious luxury of speaking this way because we aren’t about to be attacked by Vikings any times soon. When you see those efficient, bloodthirsty killers jumping of their dragon-headed longboats, good and evil don’t seem like relative concepts. Evil is very real. That’s when you might need some clean pairs of Marks and Spencer’s famously excellent underwear.

Scroll the news and you will find that millions around the world live with the reality of Viking-like terror right now. For them the virtues of St Michael might be more apparent.

Article

Belief

Community

Culture

Music

15 July 2025

1 min read

Oasis: it's all gone a bit biblical at this summer’s musical moments

We’re reaching for some ancient vocab to describe our experiences together

Belle Tindall

Belle is the staff writer at Seen & Unseen and co-host of its Re-enchanting podcast.

A silhouette of a musician holding up shakers.

'Cast no shadow'.

x.com/oasis

A biblical narrative keeps whirring around my mind.

In the first century, Paul – planter of churches, writer of letters, spreader of the way of Jesus – finds himself in Athens, the Graeco-Roman city where meaning is made. He wanders around this city, soaking up its culture, noticing its priorities, watching its habits. But he doesn’t do so silently. Paul pulls out his usual party trick; yelling about Jesus here, there, and pretty much everywhere, eventually catching the attention of the local philosophers. They want to hear more, and Paul finds himself thrown in front of the Areopagus, the meaning-making council at the heart of the meaning-making city. The cultural epicentre of the Graeco-Roman world, one could argue.

Never one to miss an opportunity, Paul gets to his feet and unleashes a monologue for the ages, kicking off with this line: ‘People of Athens! I see that in every way you are very religious…’

Quite the opener, isn’t it?

It’s that opening line that my imagination seems to have gotten snagged on.

There is so much going on around me – right here and right now, in 2025 - that makes me want to find a place into which I can scream the exact same thing. There and then, here and now, I can see that in every way we are very bloomin’ religious.

What Paul and I don’t mean by such an assertion is that everyone our contexts are signed up – hook, line, and sinker - to an organised religion. Such an assertion would be silly, considering the data tells a different story. What I’m pretty sure Paul meant, and what I know I mean is this – in every kind of way, people are searching for that which is bigger, deeper, truer than ourselves. We are directing our attention, our energy, our worship in certain directions. We are seeking ritual and practice, wrapping ourselves in stories that give meaning to our day-in-day-out experiences, stories that tie our lived reality into something that transcends it. We’re grasping for a world that is more full of beauty, truth, and sense than we imagined; pledging allegiance to our inkling that there is something more. Yup. In every way, we, the good old human race, are very religious.

Paul said it with his chest then, I think he’d say it with his chest now.

There are a hundred different places that I could go in order to pluck some ripe evidence for my theory – but for now, my evidence of choice is the language being used to describe the long-awaited Oasis reunion.

‘Biblical’

That’s the word being used – in national headlines and personal Instagram captions alike, ‘biblical’ is the adjective of choice.

Isn’t that strange?

I don’t really know what people mean by it, to be honest. According to my research, they’re taking their cue from Liam Gallagher himself, who was the first to describe the band as such. Stay humble, Liam.

Is using ‘biblical’ as the descriptor of choice a reference to the reconciliation of warring brothers? That’s certainly a biblical motif, which I guess is being played out in real-time, witnessed by those who could afford the £400 ticket (no, I’m not bitter). Is it implying that this event is so monumental, it should be canonised somehow? Written about? Memorialised? Poured over for millennia to come? Or is it a reference to the fact that what we are witnessing is the fulfilment of rumours, prophecies, hopes and expectations?

Maybe it’s all of the above, maybe it’s none of the above. It doesn’t really matter. What matters, at least to me, is that people are wanting to express that these gigs are more than the sum of their parts; there’s something transcendent about them, something awe-inspiring, wonder-infusing. Something that feels, dare I say it, religious about them.

It gets even more interesting, because such sentiments aren’t reserved for the reunification of the Mancunian brothers.

I’m still stunned, curious to the point of distraction, about the fact that we – in a secular, materialist, rational culture – cannot help but stretch toward spiritual language.

In a podcast episode recorded in the days leading up to this year’s Glastonbury festival, the DJ and broadcaster, Annie Mac, described the event as ‘communion’, explaining that ‘when you don’t go to church, you need to get that somewhere.’ On the flip side, in the days following the festival, another DJ and broadcaster, Miquita Oliver, teased the endless Glastonbury posts that were filling up her social media feeds – she jokingly stated that ‘it all gets a little churchy after Glastonbury… like “it’s heaven on earth”… can we all relax?’

So, here we have it again – people reaching for religious language to describe significant musical events. Be it the Oasis reunion or Glastonbury – I’m fascinated by the fact that we’re not content with stating that these gigs are merely talented people doing what they do well, and in so doing, giving us an enjoyable time. Such language may be factually accurate, but it doesn’t feel true enough to us. Rather, we’re grappling with the feeling that these events feel like something we were made to experience somehow, they they’re tapping into the deepest parts of us, perhaps?

In the past, I’ve wondered whether this is down to the sense of profound togetherness that these events provide – how they have the ability to remind us that we’re bound to each other, only if for a night. They’re a direct afront to individualism, the biggest and sturdiest lie of our age. I’ve also reflected on the fact that they instil as sense of awe within us: raw awe. An elusive emotion that can be hard to come by, but that we were made to feel. I still think all of that comes into play.

I’ve pondered this a thousand times and yet I’m still stunned, curious to the point of distraction, about the fact that we – in a secular, materialist, rational culture – cannot help but stretch toward spiritual language. Nothing else quite hits the spot; nothing else feels quite deep enough, big enough, true enough. Religious references and language, we’re determined to keep them in our repertoire, aren’t we? Our reliance upon them betrays us. Indeed, I’ve come to see our unceasing usage of them as a crack in the façade of disenchantment.

Oh, people of 2025 and beyond, I can see that in every way you are very religious.

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