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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Dr. Strangemonkey" data-source="post: 401921" data-attributes="member: 6533">Meep and MonksSt. Leibowitz and the Mad Horsewoman, the sequel to Canticle of Leibowitz, contains some interesting descriptions of how monastarics deal with unusual people.The basic reaction in the book was, "Your vision sounds like something you will have to contemplate, now do your duty and continue to illuminate the manuscripts!"Which seems fair from my own knowledge of monks dealing with mystics in the Middle Ages.  They were seen as special and often miraculous, but they were still members of the community and had to do their jobs.  If the community saw the unusualness as potentially helpful to the life of contemplation they were rewarded with time alone to work on it or positions of authority in the community.  If the community saw the specialness as potentially disruptive, mostly a result of the specific weirdness rather than doing this to everyone weird, than they were invited to consider a hermits lifestyle or to attach themselves to some other community, like the local parish. Be careful of thinking of Saints as simply people who got the local pagan traditions transferred to them.  Ala, St. George.  While that is something that regularly happens, there are a lot of saints and there is a lot of variety.Sometimes the local people would hear about someone holy, conclude that that person was a saint, and begin praying to them.  That's why the Buddha is an 8th century Southern Italian saint.Sometimes the local people would hear a really neat story, not understand it was fictional, and begin treating one of the characters as a Saint.  This was why later research made the church very wary about the wildly popular St. Christopher.Sometimes people would misinterpret historical tales or ancient images.  Thus the woman martyr everyone thought was a patron of bakers because she was holding bread was later discovered to be holding her own severed breasts.And mistakes go the other way, too.  St. Bridget and St. Scholastica may be purely mythical, male saints often have less documented female counterparts, but they generally don't have the pagan connatations later scholars see them as possessing.But the most common, and cool, method is for someone special to come along and just start motivating or inspiring people.  Very often these guys are far wierder and more interesting than myth normally deals with.Any of these 'methods' to Sainthood illustrate a very interesting route for magic from the Flowering to become inculcated in the local culture.Sainthood was mostly a local thing until late in the middle ages and the primary methods of proof were that people believed, that miracles had been performed, and the Devil's Advocate couldn't come up with proof that the person had been bad or a non-believer.On the other hand, the locality means that someone who is holy in one place is a heretic in another, and all of this while everyone belongs to the same church.</blockquote>

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