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Colin Wilson - Mysteries

When Saint Augustine landed in England in 597 AD, he found an island covered with pagan ternples dedicated to the sun god and the earth mother. We know that many churches are built on pagan sites.
What names, the historian Lethbridge wondered, would the Christians choose in re-dedicating these sites? A tenable assumption is that Magog-or Matrona -would be replaced by Mary, the Mother of God, and Lucifer by his legendary adversary, the Archangel Michael. By way of checking this hypothesis, Lethbridge looked through Crockford's clerical directory, and picked out all churches dedicated to the Virgin and to St Michael in the south-west, and marked them on an ordnance survey map.

The result was as he had expected.

Where there were old Iron-Age forts, there were plenty of Michaels and Marys; where there were no Iron-Age forts, Michaels and Marys became infrequent. He also observed a high percentage of St Andrews in these areas, which seemed to confirm another of his theories-that St Andrew had ousted the Welsh sun god Mabon.