Equinoctial Holy Mountain
An encounter with St Michael and Skyrrid Fawr - April 2026 newsletter
Welcome to the April 2026 newsletter which follows a dream from the Spring to Autumn Equinox in an equinoctial synergy.
My thanks, as always, to those of you who continue to send me cups of tea via the Ko-fi site, which you can do by clicking on the cup below, and to those who are paid subscribers.
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Happenings
The Shamanic Sundays group is NOT running in April but will return on Sunday 3rd May as normal. Times (for May) are 10am to 12.30pm - you can find out more and book a place here . Why is this? Well it’s Easter Sunday on the first Sunday of the month in April and I have chosen to spend the day continuing the spirit/matter work I write about below.
Equinoctial Holy Mountain
In last months newsletter I wrote of how a sun beam ‘lit’ my way forward at the time of the Saturn Neptune conjunction in February. I had gone ‘up the top’, which is a short walk from where I live with panoramic views, to see if I could see the Skyrrid Fawr mountain and thought it was too low in the landscape to be visible from my viewpoint. It was the weather rather than the height of my viewpoint that restricted my view because last Friday I went to the same spot and as the weather was clearer the Skyrrid stood out like a great whale surfacing. In the photo below the central point is the volcano look-a-like Sugar Loaf Mountain which sits behind the darker and lower mountain to its left, Skyrrid Fawr.
I had become interested in Skyrrid Fawr after finding out that it is known as the Holy Mountain. Skyrrid, whose modern spelling is Skirrid, the Welsh is Ysgyryd, means 'split' or 'shattered'. There is also the addendum ‘Fawr’ which means ‘great’. So Skyrrid Fawr translates as the Great Split or Shattering. Indeed there is a great split or shattered piece of mountain on the west/north west side which, if you are a geologist, is the result of ice age landslips. If you are more inclined to mythology the shattered piece came away during the earth tremors at the time of the crucifixion of Jesus.
Here we have it, a question of spirit or matter in terms of interpretation. Yet what if there is something greater still, perhaps a synergy of ‘spirit’ and ‘matter’ when experienced in ‘time’? By separating geology and mythology we have either / or but by bringing them together we have what we see and what we believe, a melding which indicates movement or rhythm. When I couldn’t actually ‘see’ the Skyrrid I doubted my ‘literal’ viewpoint. Yet my spiritual viewpoint kept tugging at me . . . and then, as reported in the last newsletter, the sun beam showed me the ‘spiritual’ Skyrrid Fawr. There is a rhythm here . . . as my awareness shifted the element of time or movement had . . . and is . . . and will continue to fuse or coalesce (to use the last newsletter’s title). The either / or becomes fluid . . . as does spirit / matter.
Let’s jump forward - it is now the night before the Spring Equinox. I have a plan afoot, with a friend, to visit some churches near the Skyrrid the following day (to mark the Equinox) but I don’t have a plan to go up the Skyrrid as this is something I want to do on Easter Sunday, a sort of nod to the earthquake or shattering at the time of the crucifixion. I take a note of my dreams one of which includes a biodynamic farmer called Michael who makes goat’s cheese. In the morning I realise that one of the churches is probably called St Michael. We look for a ‘Michael’ Church near the Skyrrid and find one in a place called Llanvihangel Crucorney. So that is where we head. On the way we get some fabulous views of the Skyrrid and its landslip.
When we get to the church of St Michael and All Angels at Llanvihangel Crucorney we are dismayed to find it locked. As it is lunchtime we decide to repair to the pub - we are waiting for our lunch in the back garden and I see the shape of the Skyrrid above the church tower in the tree branches - they seem to match the shape of the church too. Is there a church in the mountain or is the mountain in the church? Perhaps they are both.
This reminds me that we can’t see the Holy Mountain in the back garden so we move to the front cobbled area, which is the busy thoroughfare of the village and where you have a view of the Skyrrid, and we find something that very much ‘unlocks’ everything . . . as you can see below.
A depiction of the Skyrrid at a time of calamity. That sort of hit the nail on the head and so . . . following a bit of lunch and some further churching nearby . . . we decided to make an ascent.
Up we went and along the spine of the Great Shattering. We were blessed with the warm rays of an early spring sun which had a halo and a sun dog at one point and an almost Turner-esque or Steiner-ish sky.
In the photo below you can see, right at the end of the spine, the tiny nugget of the trig point (you may need to squint if you’re on a small screen), but there are also the ruins of a chapel dedicated to St Michael which has ‘entrance’ stones and the remains of a wall or two. The mountain and the church are one and both.
The relevance of the chapel’s name did not escape me but on a deeper level there was also the apposite of the Spring Equinox - that being the Autumn Equinox which is marked by Michaelmas and the expression of St Michael at that time of the year representing the cosmic inward breath. (A note - I use the word ‘apposite’ rather than ‘opposite’ to indicate the ‘juncture’ or ‘intersection’ rather than separate poles of the equinoxes).
I have been reading a lot of Rudolf Steiner’s work of late and he speaks of the enormity of the events at Easter, in terms of our ‘supersensible’ awareness and how Michaelmas is its apposite. And to make Steiner’s philosophy in this matter as simple as possible, he says that at the Spring Equinox the earth’s soul begins to breath out into the cosmos to meet with the sun (which manifests literally in matter here on earth) and at the Autumn Equinox the earth’s soul begins to breath in, matter decays and spirit ascends. Our earth has a soul which breathes in and out as much as do our souls and the saints and deities in the Christian canon. In the past I would have attributed that breath to the solstices and, of course, that is a legitimate belief too, yet I can’t help but feel that I’m being drawn down a garden path that is somehow richer and more embellished with this equinoctial expression. There is certainly a great deal of synchronicity to what is unfolding for me at this time.
And because it was the Spring Equinox it seemed fitting to mark the occasion by witnessing the sun’s set and it was certainly an epic, mind - and eye - shattering event. We watched the sun sink to its half self, radiating its upper half as the light of spirit or the sky, as in Skyrrid, while its lower half was buried in matter - see the title photo but here’s another one with the Sugar Loaf mountain in for scale.
Afterword
Returning to the dream about the biodynamic farmer called Michael who made goat’s cheese . . . biodynamics is, of course, the system of agriculture that Rudolf Steiner developed. As for the goat’s cheese, well I am a Capricorn, by Sun and Ascendant, which has the symbol of a goat with a fishes tail and my sustenance (cheese) is to climb . . . which is what I had to do on the day . . . when you ascend Skyrrid Fawr the first half is steep, worthy of a goat.
Six months earlier, and recounted in the October 2025 newsletter entitled Fulcrum, I was by the sea in West Wales at the time of the Autumn Equinox. Of course this is the other half of a Capricorn - the fishes tail - immersed in the great sea of spirit. I am matter and spirit, yet it is the rhythm of soul that brings them (me) together.
Thank you for reading . . . Mandy