The Pilgrims' Scallop Shells and the Methodist Church

September 04, 2017

The Pilgrims' Scallop Shells and the Methodist Church

Makasi Scallop Shells

Ever wondered what the the shell symbol on the Methodist Church logo came from?

To me, the question was first sparked when I read Paulo Coelho's "The Pilgrimage" and tried to make a connection between 'Camino de Santiago' route symbol and the MCSA emblem.

Just as the Muslim tradition requires that all members of the faith, at least once in their life, make the same pilgrimage that Muhammad made from Mecca to Medina, so Christians in the first millennium considered three routes to be sacred.
Each of them offered a series of blessings and indulgences to those who traveled its length.

The first led to the tomb of Saint Peter in Rome; its travelers, who were called wanderers, took the cross as their symbol.

The second led to the Holy Sepulcher (a grave room) of Christ in Jerusalem; those who took this road were called Palmists, since they had as their symbol the palm branches with which Jesus was greeted
when he entered that city.

There was a third road, which led to the mortal remains of the apostle, San Tiago – Saint James in English, Jacques in French, Giacomo in Italian, Jacob in Latin.
James, son of Zebedee and Salome was one of the Twelve Apostles of Jesus, and traditionally considered the first apostle to be martyred, in 44A.D.

The site where St. James was buried came to be known as Compostela – the star field – and there a city had arisen that drew travelers fromevery part of the Christian world.
These travelers visiting the shrine of St James in Santiago in Spain were called pilgrims, and their symbol was the scallop shell. At the height of its fame, during the fourteenth century, the Milky Way – another name for the third road, since at night the pilgrims plotted their course using this galaxy – was traveled each year by more than a million people from every corner of Europe. Even today, mystics, devotees, and researchers traverse on foot the seven hundred kilometers that separate the French city of Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port from the cathedral of Santiago de Compostela in Spain.
The shells adopted as a symbol by pilgrims to the tomb of the apostle; they served as a means of identification for the pilgrims when they met.

Over the centuries the scallop shell has taken on mythical, metaphorical and practical meanings.
The grooves in the shell, which meet at a single point, represent the various routes pilgrims traveled,
eventually arriving at a single destination: the tomb of James in Santiago de Compostela.
The shell is also a metaphor for the pilgrim: As the waves of the ocean wash scallop shells up onto the shores of Galicia, God's hand also guides the pilgrims to Santiago.

According to the Methodist Church of South Africa's records:
In 1778 the portrait painter William Hamilton RA painted the portrait of John Wesley which now hangs in the National Portrait Gallery in London.
Later that same year, an engraving of this portrait was published by James Fittler.
Beneath the portrait, Fittler added his own conception of the Coat of Arms of the Wesley family – a shield with an outlined cross, containing three scallop shells in each quarter and a wyvern as the crest, with the words, “God is love” as the motto underneath.
It is not known whether he prepared this drawing with Wesley's permission, but the motto added an authentic touch, for Wesley did use the words, “God is love” on one of his seals.
It seems that there are as many as 15 different Coat of Arms used by various branches of the Wesley family, but the one under John Wesley's portrait has become a fairly well-known Methodist motif, even though it cannot strictly live up to its title of being “John Wesley's Coat of Arms”.
The Wesleys were apparently reticent about their aristocratic ancestors – the Wellesleys and Annersleys – yet when John Wesley saw the incorrect drawing of the Coat of Arms beneath his engraved portrait, he was surely reminded by the scallop shell that some remote ancestor of his had been a crusader and a pilgrim to the Holy Land.