The Legend of Saint Galgano and His Vision of Archangel Michael

Michael the Archangel. These parents, having desired a child for a long time that they could not have, asked for help from the Archangel and, after probably undertaking a pilgrimage to the sanctuary of Saint Michael on Mount Gargano, saw their requests fulfilled. It is therefore hypothesized that Galgano's very name derives from the name of Mount Gargano, the place where one of the oldest and most interesting places of worship of the Archangel Michael is located. The mother would reiterate this dedication of her son to the Archangel at an undefined moment in his youth when he would have dreamed of being dressed by her with armor and weaponry to join the celestial chivalry. It is therefore important to note how Michael's role plays an important part from the beginning both in the conception and in the early life of Galgano.

Indeed, of Galgano's early life, apart from these few characteristic notes, it is largely unknown to us. Some documents speak of a "fierce and lascivious" knight from the Merse valley, thus insisting on the discontinuity brought about by his conversion. Others instead highlight the process as not immediate but progressive, requiring a time of 4 or 5 years of penance, a period in which, evidently, the vocation was not strong enough to push him to take the step of hermitic life and yet was pressing enough to push him to undertake a constant spiritual search. During this period he probably came into contact with the Templars, as well as with this Guglielmitan hermitic community and perhaps also became a Cistercian affiliate of Casamari Abbey which immediately after his death requested his place and remains.

The Legend of Galgano and the Vision of Michael the Archangel

Let us come instead to the actual Legend of Saint Galgano and to the first vision of Michael the Archangel, that is, to the first testimony of the path and spiritual events that occurred to Galgano. To contextualize the moment with respect to the Templar period, we are in 1180, the exact year in which Guy of Lusignan marries Sibylla and therefore at the most critical moment for the Knights of the Temple and which, if from a certain point it represents their culmination for heroic acts and battles, from another point of view marks precisely the turning point and the beginning of their decline.

Let us come however to Galgano's vision. The Legend tells that Galgano nurtures the desire to reach the celestial chivalry: So great is the desire that one day in a dream - that is, in a kind of vision - Saint Michael the Archangel appears to him who leads him along a road through a forest that subsequently transforms into a long, very long and very tiring bridge beneath which one sees a turbulent river and a mill that rotates and grinds and represents the advancing and flowing of time and the wheel of earthly existence.

"under which bridge, as the vision showed him, there was a mill which continuously rotated and turned, which signified earthly things which are in perpetual flux and movement and without any stability, entirely labile and transitory." Legend of Saint Galgano the confessor (Cardini)

Galgano's vision thus alludes to a moment of consciousness passage guided by the Archangel Michael and which passes from a symbolic forest, a dark and gloomy place full of dangers, transporting him through the limits of space, time and causality represented by the river and by the mill in "perpetual flux". Having crossed these boundaries, Galgano finds himself in a very beautiful and delightful meadow, which was full of flowers, from which came an immeasurable and gracious scent. The reference to the meadow full of flowers is a clear reference to paradise or the Garden of Eden and therefore the legend alludes to an experience that leads Galgano to find himself in a spiritual state similar to that preceding the Adamic fall.

At this point Galgano leaves the meadow where he finds himself and enters a kind of cave finding himself on a Mountain in which there are twelve apostles in a round house with an open book on a verse from Psalm 70.

"in which mountain he found twelve apostles in a round house, who were reading an open book, and that he should read it in which part of the book was written: 'My mouth will announce your justice, will always proclaim your salvation which I cannot measure'"

The bridge, the meadow and then the cave, all seem to refer to a process of progressive stripping of consciousness, the abandonment of all forms until arrival at the sanctuary. Here the round form of the sanctuary makes us understand that we refer to an archetypal spiritual sanctuary, immutable. It is round like the round table and therefore perfect immutable, beyond the flow of time, in it are found the 12 apostles who like 12 knights are the symbol and manifestation of the twelvefold virtue of Jesus Christ, the God-Man who indeed appears to Galgano on this occasion. In fact at that point Galgano raises his eyes to heaven and sees "that image is he who was and was, and who must come to judge the world, God and Man"

Experience of Montesiepi and Sword in the Rock

This vision therefore resolves in the practical act in a desire on Galgano's part to find the place that was shown to him by the Archangel Michael. Something that however is not possible for him because of his mother who seems to obstruct him in this process. However, a few days later, after praying to God to make actual the promise he had manifested in the vision, Galgano, while going to Polissena, the girl from Civitella, is diverted by his own horse which leads him to Monte Siepi, a place that Galgano recognizes as being the place of the vision. Galgano dismounts and not finding a cross plants his own sword in the rock and there begins to venerate the cross formed by the hilt of his own sword. His clothing changes and from knight's clothing becomes monk's clothing. When he then wants to leave...