A Universal History: History through the Symbolic Lens | with Richard Rohlin

so hello everybody i'm here with richard roland for those who are involved in the symbolic world you have seen him around you've heard him he's written articles for uh the symbolic world blog he's involved in the community in different ways he's also the co-host of the ammon soul podcast now is involved with father andrew in different projects i would say he's involved in this really he's completely aligned with what we're trying to do which is try to help people understand uh traditional thinking in a modern way help them understand how we can re-embody relive these stories um and one of the exciting things that i found is that i've had this like secret dream for many years which is to restore what we call the uh universal history uh the idea that the ancient peoples had a common history that they shared that they kind of had different perspectives on um and that like in the middle ages everybody was just part of this massive story um and i've always had this dream of kind of helping people understand why it's important and why it matters and i've discovered in richard really like a like a partner we were both texting away at each other amazed at you know how we're excited about the same seemingly obscure things but that are not at all obscure because they really can help ground us in a common narrative so so richard is a philologist he studied ancient languages he's also very smart works in data science but i'm looking really forward to to our discussion today so maybe richard you can tell us a little bit about the things you've done around us and then we can dive right into the subject [Music] this is jonathan pageau welcome to the symbolic world yeah so i have um as you mentioned i've written a couple of articles for symbolic world i have a couple more that are in the pipe uh but i just keep not you know finishing them but uh uh but i've written some things there specifically on hagiography which is a subject that's really important to me um as it's it's actually the main genre of of literature in the middle ages like far and away there's more ideography than literally anything else and uh but it's not you know not a lot of attention is paid to it yeah um as you mentioned i'm a philologist um basically that means i study old words and and old texts and old stories and the languages that they're all written in and um i'm i'm a data scientist which as i i mentioned earlier is sort of a modern day soothsayer um and so uh but uh my my main deal is is kind of looking at at medieval stories um two things one is looking at medieval stories and uh seeing meaning there um and then the other one is sort of i have a i have now developed a kind of sideline in reminding other academics that the middle ages was a christian period which you would think people would know this but i mean i once had a i want to have a conversation uh with a uh a fairly well-known medievalist about the holy grail and i was talking to this person and you know making an argument for kind of a liturgical reading of christian's uh grail story which one of these days we're going to do a video on um and uh and you know he said to me something like well you know aren't you reading a lot into that i said well i mean there is a host in it and he looked at me no lie looked at me and said what's a host [Laughter] so uh so my my uh my basic sideline and i'm kind of in connection with this there was i was going through a recent translation of the pearl poem which i write about in in a midweeping there is joy which is a book that we had that just came out we'll talk about that later but uh uh i was i was reading the a recent translation of the pearl poem and the uh the scholar who again is a very well-known medievalist she translated the word mass as feast just sort of like generically feast so like completely took the mass out of the poem amazing which which the poem is all about the mass so things like that so basically my my uh my new thing is just reminding people of the middle ages was a uh was a was a christian period and that there was a sort of a narrative and original context for all of that and um that that should actually affect the way we read these stories exactly and i think that what we want to do now is part of helping people understand you know one of the things that i the middle ages act as a kind of mythological substructure to the modern world whether people want to or not you know there is there even though people are trying to kind of move away from it so much of our so much of our dark like even the idea of that it's kind of went into the dark place where we have these dark stories and these fairy tales and these strange misunderstood uh stories you know because the fairy tale even if it's not medieval has its medieval in its structure and it's medieval in its uh illusions let's say right so all of that shows us that the middle ages are acting as this kind of just like for the greeks of the times of athens you know the trojan war and uh and and the uh the odyssey where like this mythological backdrop to what who they were the middle ages are the mythological backdrop to who we are who we are and so we need to diving back into it and having a clear vision of what it can tell us and how it can structure our more consciously structure our reality can can be one of the solutions to the disenchantment that we're facing it's it's funny because um somebody asked a question and i'd this might have been on an episode i think this is on an episode of the m school podcast somebody somebody wrote in with a question of basically like well why is all fantasy or like the vast majority of fantasy why is it set in a medieval setting and it's it's for exactly the reason you just described this is what i was trying to explain it's that that's where we look back to right that's where our meaning comes from even even that's where our monsters come from uh that we're dealing with right now like it's all it's all sort of contained in there uh because the you know there's this big medieval synthesis where basically it's the only time in human history when we we've really had everything sort of come together and mesh together and fit together that's amazing because you say that and everybody so many people who are listening will think what the dark ages had a synthesis where everything came together and it just shows how ignorant we are of what the middle ages had well and that's really you know you know we're going to be talking about universal history today that's really what universal history is about it's about it's about showing how the the christianity of the middle ages um chesterton in in his poem the battle of the white horse he said it's only christian men who was it it's only christian men who protect even pagan things in other words you know only christianity you know has has the let's say the catholicity the universality right to to actually take in the entire pagan world and integrate it find a place for everything and that's what you see basically happening in in universal history it's a way of fitting our story right the story of my people whoever my people are into kind of a master story a master narrative yeah and this is something which was already was already there let's say before christianity that is we have to understand that the ancient pagans had a intuition about other peoples which is that when they would encounter other peoples they would they would always be trying to to pinpoint for example like okay so they have these strange gods uh let's recognize the strange gods right so okay so when they talk about this god they're referring to zeus so they're referring to ares but they're referring to different the different the same gods we have they just have different names and some of them and it wasn't like a perfect system sometimes it was like well their god seems to be like adjoining of these two gods that we are that we're worshiping let's say but there was a sense in which it's not like the like this this strange modern idea that somehow uh things are so arbitrary that they just pop up and you people can have all these traditions that are arbitrary but rather that there is a common human experience whether we're connected historically or just in terms of our nature that will that will bring about similar stories that will bring about similar uh principalities that will notice different principalities in the world and we end up worshiping uh the same gods and so even it was there before christianity but then when christianity arrived there is almost this idea that all of this now culminates into into christ and all the good elements of these ancient traditions can be kind of pulled into this one story yeah um in the discarded image lewis says i think it's in the preface or like the introduction to the book he says that there was of course of course and he he actually divides it into right and left um obviously you'll understand and your your listeners have been paying attention for a long time will understand the symbolism of the left hand really is to sort of push something away right so he says there's a christian left that was always trying to get rid of these things yeah but then there was always a christian right who would say along with you know saint justin martyr or justin the philosopher whatever true things have been said by men at any time belong to us christians of course you could look at that now and say oh that's just appropriation appropriationism or something like that and first of all technically yes right there is you know this uh university in california that has this proposed you know uh class that they wanna they wanna start teaching that that actually christianity is guilty of what they call theocide which again yes sort of our deal right but also but also uh what what people don't always understand there is that when these things die that they have a capacity to be resurrected in a way that allows them to participate within the larger story of the christian world so you do see the seeds of this happening and i mean for instance herodotus when he encounters egyptian society spends a whole lot of time trying to figure out how do the gods that the egyptians worship match up to the map to the gods that we worship right but then what christianity does is it it integrates it in a more complete way right so that you so that you don't have competing principalities so that everything is able to to kind of lay itself out in a hierarchy that lets you figure out where your story fits into this larger narrative yeah exactly um and the idea that the idea that we're appropriating it's so hilarious it's as if it's it's like you think that we were that these were copyrights or that the purpose of of the world is to be original and to like come up with the new thing that hasn't been done before every time someone says that christianity has elements of things that are there before them i'm thinking like are you are you are you patenting these things like what reality what reality do you actually live in like that's how it works we we take the things that are given to us and then we we try to fit them in a way that will be more that way more real and that will be more um conducive to to uh like a universal history like the one that christianity finally ended up coming towards you know that this was actually a process a historical process that wasn't done by one person that was kind of we don't even know who was doing it sometimes it just is this organic thing that that happens and pops up in legends and pops up in different different texts um but it's just a funny thing like to think that somehow like somehow these stories that again once again that somehow reality is so arbitrary that that we could that we could be like stealing ideas from other like like companies steal tech ideas from each other you know yeah um one way to think about the development of narrative in the middle ages is that it's not until a very very late stage basically until dante right dante is kind of the first self-conscious author right in the sense that that he's really the first person i mean obviously there's a lot of there are a lot of works which will begin with you know oh pray for the poor rat sinner whose name i'm not even going to give you because i'm so unworthy because i'm going to not relate to you these great things or something like that um but dante's really the first the first sort of like uh in one sense kind of you know he's standing right there on the cusp of the the medieval and the modern because he's the first person who sort of writes himself into the story but before before that uh the writing in the middle ages is characterized by two things one is a deep respect for authority and authority really at the end of the day means anything else written down right because writing is very expensive people don't write stuff unless it's important um so a deep respect for the authority of the earlier text and then also secondly basically no concept of the idea of authorship like our ideas today of authorship plagiarism things like this would not would not even make sense back then that's why when people get a little hung up on things like well you know who's who's the real author of this pseudo-a pigger full text like only only a modern person can ask that question and it'd be meaningful right um you know uh so i wrote an article on the on the symbolism of saint dionysius theriopogite right and uh and his his story basically just takes all of everything i'm saying right now and just kind of combined it right so there's this this whole body of text and the question is you know most scholars today say it it was actually authored by somebody that they're going to call pseudo-dianese dionysius you know so so in other words not dionysius but somebody else writing under his name right well that's that's essentially just a modern hang-up um yeah and also the idea it's also because it's the idea that texts uh exist in a vacuum because the the person who wrote that pseudo diagnesius or whatever who knows who who wrote it didn't write it out of his just out of his own mind he didn't just sit down and think up something new to write he was writing it based on things that had been handed down to him and and even if we don't know exactly how these things were handed down they reveal themselves as being as as they're received by the church and integrated into the church as appropriately transmitting certain things which were already there in the in the in the tradition right yes all right so let's go let's go let's go into the to the to the history so when we talk about universal history uh the biggest thing that happens is the joining of the hellenistic tradition and the the the christian or the jewish history or the hebrew history that seems to be like the biggest thing that happens and it happens in troy in alexander and and then ultimately joining all of this together with like the genealogy genealogies of scripture and how these different uh these different groups relate to each other so if you can tell us a little bit about how what that looks like let's say so i think kind of the first moment where this happens is actually probably in the book of daniel um so in the book of daniel you have these prophecies and of course whether or not you think their prophecies will depend on whether or not you believe such a thing as prophecy is possible you know can people write about events before they happen um but in the book of daniel you have these prophecies some of which concern alexander the great and so there's this legend that goes back into the time of antiquity that alexander the great shows up to jerusalem with an army and the the the people of jerusalem come out and they uh you know they're you know you know please spare us don't destroy the city et cetera et cetera and um and so they bring out the the high priest brings out the book of daniel and he reads to alexander the uh the prophecy concerning the rise of the macedonian empire in in the book of daniel and alexander is so profoundly impacted by this that he spares the city you know so this is this is the tradition and of course we know historically that alexander whenever he went to a city he would always figure out what does he need to do to join that city's pantheon how does he become adopted as a son of the principality of that city right and so we can so i think i think you know you can you can see that same pattern manifesting itself here and in this case it's not that alexander it's not that alexander can uh you know sort of ritually become you know the the heir of david or something like that but there's a there's a joining at that point between what's happening in the hellenic world uh which is not a it's not a secular thing right alexander's rise is not a secular thing right he's he's identifying himself as a divine figure as actually multiple divine figures you know the whole alexander story is deeply religious you know to the point that uh even long into the middle ages right alexander is sort of seen as this pre-christian uh manifestation of the virtues like sort of as like the highest the highest human development that you know the highest you could get without actually being a christian um and and uh i mean you've talked about you know the ascent of alexander and sort of he ascends and then sort of hits his limit he can't go any higher than that right so and there's there are some traditions about alexander which have him actually recognize the god of israel and recognize the one god so he's so impressed by the priests that come to greet him he's so impressed by what he sees in terms of worship that he that he he declares the unity of god and that and this is important people understand because that legend that's why alexander is in the quran like alexander is in the quran because there was a tradition which was there within the christian world that alexander had recognized the unity of god and and therefore was acting like a predecessor to what christianity would be which is the pagans recognizing the god of of the hebrews as being this one this one god and there's something about that what's important is like there's something about that which is legendary but there's something about the fact that alexander was aristotle's student and there's a whole tradition of alexander exchanging letters with aristotle and these are all apocryphal or whatever but that the fact that he was aristotle's student that aristotle had that notion of a single that that divinity was one and that there was an unmovable mover makes the these legends that went around it not completely insane not completely unfathomable right rather talking in narrative form about a reality which is slowly developing in the west which is this capacity to see the unity of the divine and and to start to formulate it in a way that would ultimately culminate in in christianity uh and so there is this sense in justin martyr and in and in some of the early fathers that this seed was there in the the the in the greek in the greek philosophers that there was a seed of what of what christianity would bring was already there so these legends of alexander are talking about that in narrative form and they end up creating something as powerful as having having alexander in a sacred text in the islamic sacred text so another another text tradition that is closely that is closely related to this um is in the is the is the sibling oracles which i've been reading through recently i'm about maybe halfway through um and those are we thank you for reading those because they're they can be tedious sometimes but there's some real nuggets in there um so just to say uh you know usually we associate maybe if you're a student of like mythology and folklore you might associate the sibyl with rome which is not incorrect but actually in the ancient world they were like a bunch of different sybils we tell people what a sybil is because a lot of people will not know it a civil a sybil is a it's a female oracle basically it's a female prophet a seer somebody who's been uh given access by the divine to to sort of know the know the future to see the pattern manifesting itself in reality and so actually um your your video on the apocalypse uh the beast of the apocalypse came at a really good time because it came out just as i was getting into the sibling oracles and something that's that's uh really key in there is of course uh you know scholars have gone through there and they said well this verse sounds like paganism so this this verse was written by a pagan but then this verse is clearly you know supposed to mention you know refers to to christ and so this this verse had to have been written by a christian and then they come across a verse that says well this verse references vaguely judeo-christian moral values but it doesn't explicitly mention christ so that one must have been written by a jew and they they dissect it like this you know man you know why i hate scholars so much i know i know i i apologize on behalf of my tribe i really do but uh but i mean like it can be a little maddening to kind of to kind of like try to trace that down but if you if you just take all of that source criticism and you just set it to one side and you read the whole thing it is actually especially if you're familiar with any other ancient medieval literature deeply cohesive um and one of the things that's interesting in there you said in in your your video on the beast of revelation that uh prophecies the way prophecies work you know they don't they don't just refer to the one event at a certain point in time otherwise once that event was passed nobody would read them anymore right but rather it's almost because there's this fractal fractal uh structure to reality that prophecies you can see you know they deal with the patterns and even if the the accidents change the patterns manifest themselves over and over again and you see that in the sibling oracle so for instance when they're dealing with judgment against a certain people they'll pick two historical events that we would know like in a chronological sense happened 500 years apart but they both happened to the same greek city where they both happened to roam right and so the sibling oracles uh which you know probably do come together as sort of you know probably a hodgepodge of different sources because you know even if you if you believe what the ancients believed there are many different sybils and they're writing at different times and at some point somebody could you know collected these prophecies together and of course the first and the most important sybil you'll like this is noah's daughter-in-law interesting yeah so it all goes back to or it all goes back to noah and in fact in the first it's either the first or the second sibling oracle there is this passage where it drops out of prophecy because it's describing the flood um it drops out of prophecy and it just starts describing here's what happened in the flood and it's this deeply realistic firsthand account of of noah opening the door of the ark and what or the window of the ark and looking out on the sea and what he saw and how he felt and the color his face turned and you know just the you know like all this stuff like it's it's this deeply actually i mean it felt like something tolkien could have written about the downfall of numenor in fact some of the language was so close that it made me like kind of raise an eyebrow but then you get to the end of that oracle and the the the prophetess reveals herself in a riddle and if you work out the riddle it's she's the daughter-in-law of noah you know since she was on the ark so you could even the existence of these symbols and the existence of the the the kind of strange what you could call mixture of of the the some pay more pagan symbols some more christian some more jewish and how they're kind of brought together right on the one hand you could say that this is syncretic and it is but out of that syncretism can be pulled a notion that whoever it is that pulled these these uh legends together thought that these were could exist together like that they were living in the same world that somehow the hellenistic world and the jewish world uh had a way to talk you know had ways to talk to each other um that's the thing whenever somebody starts to say such an incessant credit i'm always like why is that an objection to you like have you met people you know like how else do we do things yeah yeah it's and it's also about me it's about meaning it's like understanding that what makes what makes syncretism problematic is when it goes against the the the truth right when it moves against the truth but when sometimes it points towards the truth and so that's why some of the the ancient myths have a little seed of understanding what christ will ultimately reveal and in those seeds we can see something valuable um and for example like we all know that every single culture in the world has a flood narrative so we could say something like oh those stupid cultures they just copied the jewish story and and it's all the jewish story copy the you know don't look at that it's it's horrible or like you said or that it's just the jewish or you could see no there's a definitely a common ba the common experience on which this is based whether it's a common experience in terms of of history or if it's an actual almost like uh genetic or like human nature thing that we have in us that is that is that bubbles up no matter what you do that it's a it's almost like an imprinted memory on the on human nature it doesn't matter how you look at it that means that you can get nuggets from these other stories as well and you can get a sense like when you read gilgamesh there are some things about about the ancient uh flood that actually shine brighter when you read the gilgamesh story because you're like oh they're doing it this way and so you say oh so it's pointing to something that i had noticed in the other text yeah and maybe it's also worth kind of pointing out here um so the simply oracles are they're they're sort of part prophecy part history but there's the two things are so interwoven that you can't actually uh separate them yeah and part of part of being able to understand the idea of a universal history is being able to also understand it in terms of apocalypse and these two things always go together i mean we've talked a lot about this particular volume from the dumbarton oaks medieval library which i have a lot of on the shelf over here um and uh so this this connects two works one is the apocalypse of pseudomethodius and the other one is an alexandrian world chronicle so the apocalypse of pseudomethodius is basically like um dealing with the whole idea of after the after the roman empire was dealing with really it's really sort of like dealing with the story of the rise of islam right so after the after the roman empire has has come has christianized has established peace why then are bad things happening you know didn't didn't we didn't we like you know to put it in in arthurian terms like didn't we find the grail like shouldn't things be good now like what's going on um and then the alexandrian world chronicle is uh is under their work from roughly the same period that is basically just a very straightforward blow-by-blow universal history of the world in fact if you want an easy introduction to a to a universal history you could you could do a whole lot worse than than the alexandrian world chronicle but uh the fact that these two things were just included in the same volume is a wonderful sort of symbolism happens moment because the two texts are not you know related in that they're from the same author but they are of a piece right um that ancient peoples understand you have to understand history to understand apocalypse and vice versa right because the the history is here's the way that the pattern manifested itself before us you know this is where we're from this is how we fit into the story but then the apocalypse is that same thing looking forward yeah right and even uh okay so i grew up in basically the same kind of culture that you did right fundamentalists baptist evangelical right um and so you'll know that there's a deep obsession in that culture with the end times the book of revelation etc and of course one of the things now this may not have been an issue for you because you're from you're from the land of canadia i think um i think that's how you guys say it canadia the orlando i'm actually not i'm from the land of quebec yeah because tobacco oh you don't identify with those okay yeah um but in america uh in american evangelical culture there's a deep obsession with trying to find the nation of america in the book of revelation it's really important um that americans and like i've got bad news for you if it's there it's the [Laughter] he's like okay i don't i don't disagree with you but it's but it's like uh so so actually so a good example of this would be uh there's there's this moment when uh the the the virgin who bears the child you know uh is it tur the church or is it mary i mean it's both it's not hard people it's both yeah but anyway um she's born up on the wings of an eagle to a safe place and so they will say the wings of the eagle is the united states air force oh my goodness i have sat in stop like i had a i was a i was a i mean part of my story too is i was a baptist pastor before i was became orthodox and uh so i've sat in theology classes teaching where they were teaching eschatology and that's what they said in the class that the wings of the eagle are the united states air force carrying the chosen of people chosen people of god to safety so see there it is america is part of the story now that's and you wonder why there's so many atheists like you just wonder so it's okay but it's wacky yes but it's actually also a pretty normal impulse yeah to try and find where is what's your place in the pattern like what you know in the story that's being told and the pattern that's manifesting like where do my people fit in yeah um and that's that's kind of what you a universal history is about and and part of the the loss that we've had as a result of the the loss of the medieval model the part of the loss that we felt has been uh not having a universal story that we can plug ourselves into and so that's actually been been replaced we think we're so cosmic cosmopolitan but it's actually been replaced by much more parochial narratives yeah um like like the the sort of uh you know evangelical american conservative narrative you know as america is the new israel or or lika even even things like the 1619 project i don't know yeah yeah yeah their desire a desire to read [Music] those are ways of doing mythology but they're not universal they don't actually you know they're actually ironically deeply non-inclusive yeah and so the the way that i kind of see it and i think that you're pointing to the apocalypse and to the let's say legendary history um there's something about so if it just exp in terms of experience so you can imagine you we have your moment like the moment in which you live and that moment is you what you you have access to a certain granularity to that moment if you want to right you can kind of access the the the details of this moment okay but the more you go forward and the further you go back in both directions yes the more you move towards pattern right and that just will happen normally because in order for you to remember things from a very long time ago they have to synthesize into patterns and in order for you to talk about something that hasn't happened yet but that is following that pattern then you also have to use images that are universal enough you know for them to then find body in the future uh and it's like if i said something like i'm gonna die right i'm gonna meet death one day it's like i'm talking in patterns i don't know how i don't know but i i know because i understand the pattern of life that this is going to happen and so i'm predicting it but i'm not saying i'm not saying that i'm going to get this disease or that i'm going to be this age or you know so as you move towards the future you talk you move in patterns and so that can help us understand why the legendary history both this the story in genesis why it's so patterned and why it looks like the end of revelation with the with the heavenly jerusalem and and why the prophecies of ezekiel are talk about paradise and the mountain of precious stones and all this type of imagery because it's it's it's both like there is this extreme in the in the the past and the future of how you can actually see the pattern uh more easily when you look at at things that are very far away in in both directions let's say um and so in the universal universal history that's something that happened and so uh one of the elements of the universal history is trying to trace all people's back to noah right and the way that they would do it was almost like through ontology you know through the characteristics of the people to a certain extent so there would be like their place in the world geographically but there would also be like an understanding of the characteristics of the people so a good example that i like to use which is which seems arbitrary is that the hungarians see themselves as descendants of nimrod and you think like how could you ever prove that you can't prove anything like that like this is obviously not but there's something about their you can imagine when the hungarians converted then they tried to they looked at the they tried to unite themselves with the biblical story of the christian story right and then in their characteristics they're like oh we're we're nomads we're hunters we we live you know this is how our ancestors lived and therefore connecting it to nimrod who was this giant also because the hungarians are are kind of are kind of ogre like you know like even in their own the way that they that's why the ogres are are actually hungarians you know like i think some people think that the word ogre comes from from like at same root as hungarian oh interesting yeah exactly and so and so and so this idea that they have giant ancestors and that they were these hunters and everything um and so this is not even like people saying it about them right which is which because there's a negative aspect to that like being a descendant of nimrod is not like necessarily all positive um but it's like recognizing yourself and your place in the story and then understanding that that aspect can also be converted and participate in the you know in the universal salvation yes um so yeah you have to connect yourself back to noah um this is even sort of there uh in in uh even in scandinavian folklore mythology you know as as those people christianized they look back they look back at their ancestors and one of the things that they try to figure out was where do we fit in and actually this sort of thing has been going on ever since the gospel according to saint luke when luke writes his gospel so there's the genealogy in matthew's gospel which goes back to goes back to abraham right the genealogy in luke's gospel goes all the way back to adam and the point of this is that christ has come not as the savior just of the jewish people but as the as the universal savior right so that there's a place you can go you can trace your lineage back right this is what luke is basically encouraging his gentile his his primary you know primarily hellenic readers to do is to figure out where their story joins the line of atom which you know theoretic that should be everyone right so figure out where their story joins the line of adam because christ is the new adam so he's going to actually assume or sort of recapitulate all of that stuff back into himself and that's really that's really where this begins in the christian story um and then of course it goes on uh to to manifest itself in some really dramatic ways with uh one of my favorite historical figures uh which who we'll talk about in a minute so yeah um i thought it would be go ahead well uh i mean i want to get to uh basically again so we grew up in the same kind of subculture right so so i don't know if people blamed everything on constantine oh yeah so we're moving towards constantine that's right yeah we're moving towards constantine yeah but before we get to content we need yes yes okay two sources the two sources are really noah yes and then troy and so tell us more about why is it that everybody's connecting themselves to troy and even just tell us how they are because it's pretty amazing so let me talk about the scandinavian peoples because this will get both noah and troy in there right so the scandinavian peoples have this culture hero um uh he's called shield uh shield or um uh sheave or sometimes like those are you know some sources those are two different people and then in like the beowulf poem they're combined into one's shield shaving which is basically shield son of sheaf you know so it's the same same character right so the the idea is that uh and and what the these christian monks you know writing in the frozen north actually it wasn't that frozen there was a there was a warming period so they were growing grapevines in england at that time but anyway these these uh these christian monks writing in the northern europe uh would actually tie this time back and say you know sheave or uh was was a son of noah who was actually conceived and born on the ark uh there's actually a bunch of really wild medieval legends about a a a fourth son of noah who was born on the ark and actually there's there's there's some in here uh so please buy this book people this is a super cool book there's some in here and sometimes like it's a pretty monstrous thing yeah um but actually that monstrousness right that's part of that's part of the story of the scandinavian peoples especially as they first interact with the roman world so they sort of tied themselves back to noah via this the sort of fourth son who was maybe born on the ark and then others you say it was through the the line of japheth who actually if you look at the if you look at those div the the divisions so a lot of people tried to take the the t what's called the table of nations in genesis right so these 70 nations that descend from noah's three sons who are divided up after the tower of babel and what they would do is they would try to map those onto the nations that live in the world today and the crazy thing is that they mostly get it right yeah um they get it more right than they get it wrong uh because what they basically end up doing is mapping the three sons of of of noah to the three major linguistic groups of the ancient world um it's it's almost perfect actually so what what you end up getting is most of the people who they believe to be descended from japheth are speakers of indo-european languages um so it's it's from a philological standpoint it's actually pretty interesting um and so so they see themselves as maybe born out of this monstrous fourth child may be born out of this monstrous fourth child who is born on the ark so he's i mean you can think about the symbolism of like he's not born on solid ground right you know um he's born in between worlds like he's born in between figures right yeah and even in even in beowulf he's a liminal figure because he shows up he just washes a short during this interregnum period that the danes have so the previous king was bad and he's gone and they don't have a king now and so they've lost their culture they've lost technology right and then she comes to them and uh brings about this renewal of the danish people and kind of founds this mythical danish court which is basically the danish equivalent the scandinavian equivalent of the arthurian story so so he's this he's this and actually arthur's got that same sort of half monstrous uh element in history so does alexander alexander has that too and the legend at least because he's the son of a of an egyptian priest posing as an egyptian god yeah he's like he's a bastard figure a lot of these a lot of these founders because they're intermediary like they bridge two world they you know they're represented mythologically as half human half snake sometimes they have different in you know in every culture you always have the the first king of all often is a giant or a monster or some kind of a hybrid figure because he's in kind of in between worlds really yeah so then the other part of this is is troy so troy is i would say a full half of the master story of medieval civilization east and west right um and the story of troy i mean it's deeply important uh it's it's one of the stories that if you don't if you haven't read homer and then then you you kind of i mean it's hard to even know where to begin and the fun thing is that actually a lot of people in the middle ages hadn't read homer but they you know especially in the west they didn't have homer until pretty late but they had virgil yeah yeah they they had the indeed so in the aeneid what we see happening is is the uh the origin story of the roman people and specifically of the julian family right where julius caesar comes from and and and literally every caesar after him because even if you're not born into the julian family to become caesar you have to be adopted by the previous caesar um you know obviously the racoos and things like that but that was the normative way that things happened so you could say every every caesar was in in a sense part of the family of julius caesar right caesar's a family name before it's a like a title yeah so uh so and this was this is not a news story that that virgil is writing down um this is already the self understanding of the julian family and some of the other major families of rome was that they were descended from the mythical basically the exiles the people who lost the trojan war they're the descendants of the losers right but the trojan war is not a how do i say this it's not a if you read homer there's no right side yeah yeah it's a truly epic story in the sense that it shows all the the sides and you can you can actually see the story from the different sides yeah it's it's it's a deeply complex work it's a deeply complex work and so uh and so the so they even though they were the losing side they were still seen as as belonging to this older more beautiful world yeah and so to tie back to that is a way of tying back to the uh you know you could cynically say it's a form of political legitimacy but it's more than that it's it's they're already trying to tie themselves back into the older story of their culture right and so um what you have happening by the middle ages is that almost every culture um and i'll give father andrew a little shout out here because he he recently discovered that actually the lithuanians and and uh uh father andrew's been been sort of recently reconnecting with his lithuanian heritage the lithuanians also have this story that that their civilization was founded by refugees from troy um so what you have by this time of the middle ages is every major culture um has somewhere in their story somewhere in their founding story this idea that they that they go back to troy they'll have you know um and and usually they'll not always but usually this this will be somehow tied into the into aeneas family um because then what that does is it connects you with both the old world and by the old world i mean like the really old like the hellenic persian world but then it also connects you to rome yeah and all of the things that rome brings with it you know there's something about the india too that people need to understand is that the aeneid was seen in many medieval strains as have being somewhat prophetic because the prophecies about let's say the the pronouncement that that uh virgil makes about uh augustus caesar were interpreted by the the medieval scholars as ultimately talking about christ it's like almost as if virgil didn't know but the things he was saying were really ultimately uh referring to to christ you know because because augustus was seen as this kind of son of god figure it's like the then the the medieval people said the real son of god that he was talking about without even knowing was was christ and the interesting thing is it's not even so much augustus as it is augustus's son who uh who dies in in childhood right so so the prophecy uh this is book six of the indeed it's never realized in the roman story until christ yeah yeah yeah yeah um so it's it's this really powerful thing and it was so powerful that many people in the middle ages uh believed that you know maybe virgil was a secret christian and they sort of rejected that idea but but they still wanted virgil to be uh to be part of the christian story and of course dante does this in a really beautiful way yeah but even much later on uh charles williams has this uh who's he's one of the inklings and he's my least favorite inkling because he's into some not great stuff a lot of the times but he does have this he does have this uh he's really into the occult and and and kind of went went down some bad roads by the end of his life but um but he does have this one poem in his uh he has a a cycle of arthurian poetry called taliesin through logos and in that he actually has this this idea that the the welsh bard taliesin who is a christian um somehow by participation sort of like goes into hell or back in time it's a little ambiguous and actually like is able to save virgil as he's as he's falling into the abyss right so there's this so so it's people thought and and not just in that uh not just in in in uh in the init but some of virgil's other poetry they saw all of these you know sort of foreshadowings of christ yeah and i wanted to like take a little pause as we before we go further to help people understand why this matters and what is going on because we a lot of people might have have known a little bit about this or heard it in their different history classes but it's usually presented as as a as a kind of cheap trick as a either as a way uh you know from a protestant point of view as uh as the syncretism you know and as this kind of return to idolatry and then from the kind of modern scholar point of view as a as a cheap trick that doesn't count that you don't that you should ignore and and that you should just look at the at the either the more pagan uh source versions of those stories um like a good example will be in the etas where even though in the eddas is specifically told from a christian point of view the scholars today will say just ignore that ignore that yeah just look at just just go beyond that and what's really important is that this is talking about the ancient gods but the process of trying to integrate the past into the new story is something which has so much power and so much meaning and is something that christ can also do which is just as christ baptized romans just as christ baptized rome into into the church he can do the same for all the ancient stories as well can do the same for it doesn't mean that everything gets in it doesn't right some things get in some things don't but there is this process by which it has to narratively be connected so it's not just that we continue to think that these stories exist independently but we give them a christian meaning they actually get connected to the christian story in the story itself so it really sort of all hinges on how real you believe the incarnation is like how much of how much of humanity did christ actually assume in himself was it all of it does it go all the way back to adam well if if if it does then then all of this like anything that's good in any of this stuff like it's sort of like it's uh it's a it's you know it's the deep magic that it works in both directions you know and so if you if you believe i mean i've got this i i think i said the sun the areopagus podcast but i've got this this this this theory that um uh you you'll know a society is like really christianized when it has a specific icon of the mother of god that's specific to that culture you know like the poles have the black madonna and the the russians have the theotokos vladimir and so on but the reason for that is because she's so deeply connected with the incarnation um and so the more fully christ becomes incarnate in that culture right and obviously he became from a historical perspective incarnate in one particular place and time but it's that particularity that the that the universality we could say the catholicity of the faith actually depends on yeah it becomes like a fulcrum like an access around everything else sort of a slowly sort of like a cross shape i don't know i don't know i don't know where we get that idea i don't know all right so now so i think that that that we kind of got them so the idea is that when we say that everybody comes from troy so like that we'll go through fast so people can get a sense like the germans the uh the scandinavians end up seeing the gods as being a rescue rescue from troy yeah so in snorri's stories etta uh uh which is basically this it's actually a manual for poets that he writes it's not it's not intended to be like here's systematic theology for norse pagans that's yeah which is how people use it which is crazy it's not insane uh but um but he actually begins it with a story called gill forgetting which is this uh well what scholar city would call a eu hemorrhage which is a nice way of saying oh these pagan gods were actually human beings a long time ago and then people started worshiping them and by the way if you think that story is is uh let's say in conflict with the idea that the gods of the nations are demons you're not understanding the story because those things are not opposed uh but any but that's a different story for another time so uh but in guilford beginning what we see is is we get the the real story right the real story of the of the old norse gods and the story of the norse gods and by the way the the aesir the the what we normally think of we think of the norse gods odin and thor and all those guys right they're not scandinavian originally they're not we know that they're not we know that those gods were imported from somewhere else and they took over and so that story is explained as saying these were trojan kings and you know people from from trojan lands the lands around troy who after they were defeated by the greeks they migrated north and they took over so okay yeah so that doesn't contradict at all the idea that the principalities would that all of this would be happening at different levels at the same time right that all of this is going on it's going on at the same time um so it's mostly to help people understand that the that even the neopagans like all of your new pagans that are watching like the ones the people who wrote hello there the people who wrote those stories were trying to connect this to the universal story even though you'd think that that that there's no relationship between scandinavians and the romans there was this desire to to join together and to have this universal story um so can we maybe in the time that's left to us can we do my favorite one let's go because this is this is the key it's like the relationship between king arthur and byzantium like that's how deep this connection is yeah so um let me let me talk and we won't actually get into arthur today but we'll no no no but like it's still it's the source of all that yeah so we'll set up a teaser and then we'll get into that so this is all from uh this is all from the the history of the kings of britain by uh jeffrey of monmouth and which is discounted by scholars completely completely right yeah completely discounted by scholars right so uh the way that it starts out is that the island of britain and this is for all my lord of spirits friends out there okay so the island of britain is believed was believed uh to have been inhabited by a giant clan uh the giant clan of albion or so albie is an ancient name for the island of britain so alby and his sons were descended from essentially this greek princess now keep in mind that she's greek so she's from as at least in relation to britain she's from the east this greek princess who um she's betrayed by her sisters who want to kill their husbands so that they can rule over their kingdoms without being subservient to men that's going to be important later when we talk about arthur and so the princes in question didn't want to comply with the plot so she and her her ladies uh they get set adrift and they land on the island of britain and there are no men there for them to marry and so they end up interbreeding with evil spirits incubi right and they beget a race of giants now of course if you're listening been listening to the lord of spirits podcast you will know that this is how you get giants and i just want to point out that this version of the story survives all the way into a 14th century text so it's not like the idea not you know that like the nephilim ritual or the idea of where giants come from it was never totally lost especially out here on what we could call like sort of the edges of roman civilization where contact with paganism were contacts with paganism were sort of ongoing so these giants albion and his sons they rule over the island of britain until the coming of the trojan exile brutus and brutus is kind of depending on the version of the story he's either the grandson or the great grandson of aeneas and therefore he's related to the roman royal family he's part of the roman story so brutus has a journey uh which actually kind of recapitulates the journey of odysseus and aeneas he has a stopover in africa he's a bunch of battles he has an encounter with the sirens he actually founds the city of uh forgive me if i say this wrong tours in france um and uh and he passes by a bunch of other legendary locations until he eventually reaches the island of albion which is totally unpeopled except for the remainders of this giant clan and uh basically the last uh the the the ruler of the giants there's only about 20 giants left but the ruler of them is a giant known as gog magog as in gog and magog right and uh gog magog attacks brutus's camp and he's eventually the giants are defeated and gog magog is killed in a wrestling match with uh one of brutus's men quirinius who goes on to found the kingdom of cornwall which is actually also a really important uh element in the arthurian story and i'll just again point out there uh put this out there that the way that quirinius kills gog magog is that he heaves him up onto his shoulders and throws him off a cliff and into the sea so gog and magog are slash the giant the nephilim whatever you want to call them they're they're removed from the kingdom by being banished to the abyss which is actually the same way that christ gets rid of you know the demons put some sends them into the pigs like we read that we read the gospel like three times a year liturgically in the orthodox church like it's like a disproportionately read story but the reason is because it's it's this powerful story of of the defeat of the defeat of these demonic powers of these of these these giants yeah we need to remind people that in the the alexander legend gog and magog are uh are not a giant per se but they're they're like a race of monsters a race of kind of cannibalistic insane uh creatures and they get shut out of civilization by being you know there's these these gates that are that are built and they get thrown behind those gates and they're there they're supposed to stay there until the end of the world when they right let loose and yeah onto the world yeah yes so with the giants banished brutus establishes the kingdom of britain right and so the legendary history that jeffrey of monmouth lays out traces this line of trojan british rulers um in all of the ways and times that it intersects with the roman empire because we'll remember that you know julius caesar invaded uh the island of britain said to claudius uh claudius nero um so uh it uh so we see these trojans inter-intersecting and fighting with the roman empire who we must remember the romans are also trojans yeah so it's a it's a very complicated narrative that he lays out it's multiple chapters and i won't try to summarize it here but essentially to say it's it's this conflicting is this complicated narrative of conflicting principalities and ultimately the way that the principle that the conflict is resolved is by a marriage alliance between a british king and a roman princess and this line ultimately produces among other people the roman emperor constantine the great and that's something that people always have to remember that constantine comes from britain like this is not this is not like now we're not in not in the legendary history anymore this is like everybody knows constantine comes from britain this is really this is part of how this is part of the universal story of christianity here yeah so even if he wasn't born in britain st constantine is is indeed he's very british according to just your boring old history books right he's first acclaimed emperor by the roman legions in in brick yeah and i just have to point out here though that his mother helen uh she was claimed to be uh depending on this the medieval source either a native of anatolia which is where troy was or uh and she was and and therefore and a greek or uh britain in antiquity in the middle ages and it should be clear enough by now if you've been paying attention that these two origins origins for st helen they're not mutually exclusive they're actually polyvalent to say that she's from troy and by the way her name is helen okay yeah so like you can't make this stuff up like to say that she's she's uh a greek from the area of troy which helen helen you know was was greek and then taken detroit right so to say that she's a greek from the area of troy or to say that she's uh part of this you know part of this trojan remnant in the british isles that's that's those things are really close and so you know they're they're polyvalent you know they're not totally the same but they they have overlapping senses of meaning and so then what we see is that in the same way uh that that she you know helen is instead of a divider like helen of troy was or helen sparta um instead of being a divider um helen uh st helen is she's a uniter right and so what she's able to do is she's able to uh and she's a very important feminine figure in christianity especially in oh yeah in in the orthodox church right very she heals the helen yeah like she's actually she exactly exactly like and and and what she does is and of course then like saint olga right in baptism her baptismal name was helen right so it's it's almost like it's almost like if you're gonna have a woman to fill this role she has to be named helen just just like just like so you so maybe the way to think about it is this you know we have this idea of the the virgin mary is the new eve right but within christianity there's also the idea of saint helen and and then saint olga as the new helen of trump yeah and you can say and it's it's it's a beautiful parallel right because completely and does like you could say the trojan war is like the first hard divide between sort of east and west right and then what helen what st helen does is she actually heals that those things she brings them together so she's either an eastern person or she's a trojan but either way she's the one who is able to communicate christianity to her son and then what constantine does i mean this is crazy if you think about this so constantine goes to found his famous city constantinople within just a few miles of the ruins of troy where does he found his city it's amazing yeah within within a few miles of the of the ruins of the city of troy so you've got constantinople which is also called new rome and if you read jeffrey of monmouth he'll tell you that the original name of london in the in the universal history the original name of london is new troy so you've got you've got movement from from east to west troy to new troy and then movement from west to east rome which is troy to new rome which is at the location of old troy so there's this crash and of course obviously the story of the the the the cross is obviously super important to constantine's story yeah but it's so it's so important that it's actually embedded in the basic shape of his narrative there's this x-shaped cross-shaped movement in the development of roman history and western civilization you have exiles from troy move west to found a new troy which is either alba longa you know which eventually becomes rome or it's london new troy uh either way that's the same story and then you have a king from new troy constantine is a roman emperor but he's also from britain uh moving east to the ruins of old troy to found the new rome which is constantinople which becomes the first christian city there are no pagan temples in constantinople right and but in doing that he takes this this thing that started back with alexander right this this this this merging together of the hellenic and the hebrew narratives uh which was not always it didn't always go smoothly there's this whole thing called the maccabees you know if you read about that but it didn't always go smoothly but but then what constantine does but it didn't go smoothly because christ had not yet entered the picture you know he was hidden you know and hidden down in sort of the the roots of history but he hadn't yet emerged right the the stump i mean i mean this is literally the language of the bible the stump of jesse had been cut down and it had not yet sprung up again yeah and so when it springs up that creates the the potential right that creates the potential for the hellenic and the judaic stories or the roma you know roman greco-roman ninja and the and the jewish stories to actually merge um and so when the people that we grew up around or you know people out there on the internet say oh constantine introduced all this paganism into the church right they're not right but they're also right in a way that they don't realize they're right they don't understand yeah they just they just don't understand that actually constantine's merging of these things was first of all it's the only way it could have gone right it's the fulfillment of you know it's the cross yeah right um and also the few things to understand is that britain what's suggested in the story of britain and even the reality of written is that it was considered the end of the world consider the edge of the world which is why the romans were constantly trying to build walls out there to stop these insane like crazy naked barbarians from like flooding into the into the world so just like alexander built a wall you know at the caspian sea then the emperors built there were two walls the there were two imaginal lines that that that the uh that the the hadrian's wall and uh what's the name of the other wall and to end antonine wall so there's there are two walls that the romans built out there in britain to like stop these these insane barbarians from propping in so it was understood as the western edge of civilization and troy was the beginning of this whole story right so constantine joins them together right through rome itself and so it's like you have the the middle the edge and the other edge like the beginning this middle part and then the other edge all kind of brought together into one into one story so which is going that goes back to and by the way i know you're a francophone because you said maginot lion which is like that it would never occur to it to to an anglo well we would just we would just say like a wall like okay you know like we don't go to the maginot line as oh yeah that that's a that's a good way to explain this but anyway i i just love that that's that's that's so and then constantine so constantine's actual like even the history of constantine which is still preserved by modern historian right still has so much mythical in it yeah and so the fact that constantine wins his battle on a bridge it's all about that right it's all about this and and if you read the descriptions of the the the battle of melvian bridge you get the sense that he's like he's like the new moses he's he's crossing the red sea he's crossing the flood all this imagery of like a transition between two worlds uh as this kind of and also as kind of bringing together these opposites like this this new world that will join all of this together is there like right in his own story and that's the same we a few minutes ago we were talking about the joining of history and apocalypse right the beginning of a thing and the end of the thing right that's that's what constantine is doing right he's joining the the beginning and the end and what has he joined them with he joins them with the cross yeah and so i think we're getting fixed everything i just have to say that on the internet so it's recorded keep saying the constantine constantine fixed everything well they just say christ fixed everything yes and then constantine constantine participated in like the the fruits of that and manifested like the hidden fruits that that were there from the from the cross um and so i think so we'll stop there but just to get it give people a hint of where this goes is that you now you have to remember that arthur is not the idea that author arthur is like this this like celtic pagan figure is absolute nonsense like arthur is the descendant of these people he's a descendant of these trojans that are that are in in britain and so all of this is going to help you understand how this universal story then continues and how britain itself plays such an important part because of this because of how it is the edge of the world because of how it was the place out of which constantine came to bridge everything together um and how this is really really is a mythical story laying itself out um and so i hope you guys are like i i struggle to think you could be as excited about than as us as about this story but what we hope is we want to start to bring this into the four of your consciousness uh so that you can see that these connections are not arbitrary and that we even though we don't have to give up completely a more critical historical approach we don't have to give that up but but we need to be able to see these connections as extremely meaningful and based on meaning and on identities of these people and how they saw themselves right and so sometimes it's not necessarily even positive like the fact that the example that i gave with the hungarians or that or the scandinavians who saw themselves as a monstrous son of noah it's not just about boasting and about making your your people to be the best and there it is really is about a piercing into the mystery of the light and dark sides of your own people and seeing how this all connects together into this this giant puzzle so yeah so i'm hoping you guys are excited about this because i i really want us to kind of move on to both east and west we'll talk about arthur we'll talk about the the the byzantine prophecies and the byzantine notion of the the uh the coming emperor like the hidden and coming emperor that is similar to arthur and we got to talk about ethiopia as well you know definitely we need to definitely need to talk about ethiopia yeah very important all right everybody so thank you for your time i hope you you enjoyed this little trip that we brought you on go for it oh yeah let's talk about yeah let me just talk about a couple of of cool projects which you go for this sort of thing you would want to check out so as i mentioned earlier i'm the co-host of the amateur podcast on ancient faith radio if you just want to come hear me talk about tolkien which is actually what i do to sound sane to people i know that's crazy the stuff i'm talking about today like this is the the stuff i get really excited about but like i have to normally keep a lid on it but uh but uh so i talk about tolkien um and we have this book out now uh it's it's kind of like a who's who of people who've been on the edmonton podcast um yep it's called amid weeping there is joy orthodox perspectives on tolkien's fantastic realm and it is officially endorsed by me even so if you look at the back of the book it's got an official endorsement on the back endorsed by jonathan pageau and and um also uh great forward by father under stephen damick there's an essay in here by me on rude screens and ritual space in in tolkien and the pearl poem which is amazing by the way you people would i think it's very good it's really was written for all the people listening to my podcast it really was when i read it it's like i was like this is for uh this is for us but there's also an article about nicholas kotar that people around here know and it is i think like the first fruits of getting a sense not the first truth but one of the first fruits of giving a sense of how we're moving towards something which is really going to resemble like an intellectual movement a culture movement a social movement uh all these people who see the possibility of re-enchantment and uh and richard has really been playing a great role in that so tell us a few of the other things you're involved in um uh may 7th and 8th um we are father andrew steven damack and i will be hosting an online conference on tolkien and orthodox christianity it's going to be called dachshund online that will be giants so please show up to that um it's only 30 bucks you can sign up for it at store.ancientfaith.com forward slash docsimoot d-o-x-a-m-o-o-t um and there's still plenty of spots open so please join us for that there's a couple of things you really don't want to miss one is uh is father andrew talking about enchanting orcs and about the idea of sort of like demonic incarnation and the way that tolkien plays with that in his mythology the other though is that i'm going to be giving a talk on the recovery of actually what for a few years i've been calling in in talk in in talks i've given in articles what i've been calling the sacramental imagination what father andrew's been referring to is re-enchantment and really what is basically jonathan's whole deal here on the symbolic world and uh basically it's going to be my premise to give a little teaser that uh it's a real problem that it's easier to talk about the inklings than it is to write good stories and saying that as somebody who's like contributed more than my fair share of ink and air time to talking about the inklings right we need good storytellers you know christian storytellers who understand the stuff deep in their bones and the fact that we don't have very many people doing that with a couple of exceptions uh the fact that we don't have very many people doing that right now tells me that there's something that the inklings had that we've lost so i'm gonna try to take a stab at answering that question but then that's also gonna kick off a new book so the talk that i'm giving is called fighting the golden key which is a nice little george mcdonald reference that some of our symbolic world readers will understand it's called finding the golden key recovering this the sacramental imagination and next year in the fall of 2022 there's going to be a book of the same title coming out that's going to be a collection of essays edited and curated by myself um i'm going to be soliciting uh essays from several symbolic world people i've already i've already talked to jonathan about yes he's gotta he's gotta submit something um but i also actually i'm gonna be opening it up to the community so if you're if you're interested in this sort of thing and you'd like to contribute an essay um there will be uh we'll have a website up by the time of doc submits so the so that you can go there and actually uh submit uh like a a summary of of what you'd like to pitch so that's going to be published by the eighth day institute and we're actually going to have a big book launch party for it in wichita kansas which is the actual center of the world you thought it was jerusalem it's actually wichita um because here's because wichita has the greatest bookstore in the universe um but we're gonna uh so we're gonna be launching it there next fall um and uh maybe you know we'll see what travel conditions are like this you know fall of 2022 but maybe we can get some of these people all together in one place which would be i mean amazing convergence yeah that would be great like to have an actual meeting together with people yeah yeah so please sign up and come to dachshund uh you won't regret it even if you're not orthodox or you're like i don't know about all this tolkien stuff come anyway because there will be something for you that's great so it really i think it's it's just exciting time it's a it's a dark time but it's also an exciting time because we we are starting to kind of see who who it is that's working together towards this re-enchantment and who who is trying to plant the seeds for this for this kind of these future fruits so so richard thanks for all the work you do on symbolic world all the things you do which you also have a job which i can't imagine that you do all these things so and you also have four kids which is astounding so all of that thank you for for putting your heart into this and we'll definitely talk very soon thanks jonathan thanks for having me oh it's great

Channel: Jonathan Pageau

Views: 87,879

Keywords: symbolism, myths, religion

Id: _N5s4n_lwB8

Length: 76min 14sec (4574 seconds)

Published: Tue May 04 2021