Universal History: Beyond the Horizon: The Symbolism of the Far East | pt.1 | with Richard Rohlin

people saying things like well okay everything you're saying is nice for like a eurocentric world everything you're saying is nice for like an american-centric world but what about people in the far east or what about people in australia right so this is one of the one of the critiques i saw on our uh groundhog day video oh all the stuff you're saying about there being more light in the world you know you know on the vernal equinox for instance other stuff you're saying about there being more light in the world uh that doesn't apply if you live in australia so checkmate jonathan pedro [Laughter] to this i just have to say australia is upside down world people like people are walking around upside down in australia there are yeah it's the antiquities there are insane hybrid animals this is jonathan pedro welcome to the symbolic world [Applause] so hello everybody we are back uh for universal history with richard rowland i am super excited about the next few episodes because we are going to be talking about the far east about mongols about president john about all what people consider to be all these crazy medieval legends but we're really going to dive in and we're going to make sense of it and and see how it can help us understand something about how the world works and so richard take us just take go for it let's do this so as jonathan and i we're just discussing there's too much stuff like there's so many details and there's so much information uh that this is gonna be a slow build so everyone buckle in this my plan for this episode uh that we just and our plan that we just discussed is that we're gonna lay a foundation uh looking at somebody basically you could say like the or texts for how the christian world and how the roman world thought about the far east and engaged with it although sometimes also the other way around uh and then we're gonna go from there we're gonna build from there um and just very lightly tease the presser john stuff which is the really fun juicy stuff um and that's going to be uh next this is your next episode so today who knows how many of these are going to take but yeah we're going to we're going to do this it's going to be a lot of fun yeah this is really cool stuff so i thought that we would start by addressing i was i actually i do read the comments on our youtube videos i know that you're not supposed to do that but i i do it you know and uh one of the common uh things that i've seen the last couple of videos um is is people saying things like well okay everything you're saying is nice for like a eurocentric world everything you're saying is nice for like an american-centric world but what about people in the far east or what about people in australia right so this is one of the one of the critiques i saw on our uh groundhog day video which has like been weirdly popular um i mean it's not weird it was a lot of fun to do but one of the critiques on there i saw is oh all the stuff you're saying about there being more light in the world you know you know on the vernal equinox for instance other stuff you're saying about there being more light in the world that doesn't apply if you live in australia so checkmate jonathan pedro um to this i just have to say uh australia is upside down world people like people are walking around upside down in australia there are yes the antiquities it's the activities there are insane hybrid animals and people like i i was thinking about this because recently i got to hang out with a friend uh a friend of a friend who was passing through dallas from australia um and and he lives in australia and and he's a a pretty interesting dude and so we were just we we had a meet-up and i just had all kinds of questions for him about living in australia and what's that like and things and the thing that i came away with was man that's the other side of the world like australia is a weird place uh sounds like an awesome place we'd love to visit this is nothing against australia i know we have some australian listeners but australia is the other side of the world um and most importantly it's the other side of the world from jerusalem so this is the thing that i want to kind of start out by pointing out is that the christian uh grammar right um i i joked to somebody the other day that this supposed to be a universal history series but like low-key it's actually a universal grammar series where grammar meaning the old in the old sentence means something like the way everything connects and relates um to each other and what the proper names for things are things like this i want to say a little thing about australia because yeah it's important to understand let's say people will think what you said is weird but when you understand the idea the ancient idea that people you know on the south south pole or in the southern part of the world we're upside down of course we we think of it in a very simplistic way but we can understand it in a in a little more subtle way which is they are upside down in the in the heavenly patterns they're upside down they encounter the the pattern of the lights in the heaven and they are also like you said they have all these creatures i mean if they were ever dog-headed men kangaroos are like good candidates for that because look just think of what they look like and so and and there's a way in which when the europeans will encounter australia the way it will happen will be related to the upside down when we say that australia was a colony of criminals you know that there's this whole fringe aspect of australia which is which can it can help you understand why the world lays itself out this way if you think about it and the way we're trying to help you understand it yeah and if you think about i mean it's easy to read some of these things uh that we'll be quoting from today um there's a there's a great anglo-saxon text that i'm not going to read from today but it's worth your time to look it up and read it it's called the wonders of the east and it's basically just a catalog of here are all the weird hybrid creatures that you're going to encounter when you go out to be on the edge of civilization and like some of those things sound uh oh well clearly he's describing a rhinoceros or something like that here but some of those things are just like super weird you know but also like if if you know the history of european colonization exploration of australia they when they would send animals back they'd shoot an animal and and kill it and ship it back to england and they'd get it at the you know they'd get it at the the academy in england and they open it up and dissect it and start looking for the seams on the duckbill platypus because obviously this is a hoax this animal couldn't possibly exist in real life right so australia is actually a great example of what we're talking about it's not a it's not it doesn't disprove the categories that we're using here it actually kind of demonstrates australia is a really real way in which uh in which hybridity and the culture of the edge and the upside-down world all that stuff manifests itself and none of that means australia is bad and also none of it none of it implies the fact that there isn't an inner experience of let's say right aboriginals like these things are but we cannot we can only formulate the world from the perspective in which we live and so the idea that we are formulating this universal perspective but the universal perspective from the point of view of our own story of our own interactions doesn't invalidate the existence the or the inner possibility of aboriginals to have their own story and their own way to fit into the universal history but we don't have access to that we have access to our story and and the best way to encounter even something which to us would be as strange as let's say australian aboriginals is to be able to to fully embody our own story and to counter them in the proper way right so the um that is a super underrated point that you just made there like i feel like we almost need to spend some time talking about that later or something like that that's the thing like if if you want to most honestly interact with someone else another culture another world you have to honestly and legitimately and authentically embody the world and the story that you actually belong in so because one of the a simple example that is biological is that when you encounter the strange there is a danger of infection and you can't you can't pretend that that doesn't exist because because europeans weren't careful about the way that they encountered the strange massive populations were wiped out because of of not understanding that you were encountering things that don't fit with your identity and if you're not careful those there can really be a a destruction which is not which of course there was the war and and and all that kind of stuff but even just in terms of disease right it actually could create that that type of interaction so think about how we talk about extraterrestrials for example and people who are all excited about supposedly encountering extraterrestrial life but they don't un if they don't think about it properly in terms of a medieval way of thinking then that encounter if it could ever happen could completely annihilate us even without the ill or goodwill of of either parties right yeah so the the medieval account of the world is jerusalem-centric um and this is how i want to kind of frame the way we talk about this going forward i'm not saying in in all of the series you shouldn't be coming away from this and hearing oh richard and jonathan are just a couple of white guys with their american-centric point of view about the world and things like this like i i acknowledge i live on the edge i live in the land of the barbarians right i live in the extreme west right all the things that that means and that it embodies right for good and for evil that's the world that i live in but the medieval account of the world is jerusalem-centric so they would put um they would put jerusalem at the center of the map um i have a funny story about this uh there's a there was an american seminary that i walked into evangelical seminary once and um this particular seminary very you know had a really big focus on overseas missions and things like this so in the lobby of their building their main building there's a massive uh like mosaic on the floor uh it's a map of the world and all the different places that this denomination has sent missionaries to and things like this but the headquarters of the denomination where you were was the center of the of that map of the world like laid out in terms of the floors like we're the center we're sending things out and i remember remarking to a friend at the time it's like you know if this was the middle ages jerusalem would be in the center we'd be way over here on the edge right and that's the account of the world that we're trying to to help people understand and so when we talk about engagement with the the far east we're really talking about the way that the middle east engage with the far east which then colors the understanding of all of the sort of jerusalem's children right the the christian and the roman world during the christian era so um that's where we're going to be doing and what i want to do in this video is just basically lay down a little groundwork for vocabulary and perception and then we can get into the really fun juicy bits in the in the next video so the or text for kind of unders or the ur texts rather for understanding middle eastern and therefore european engagement with the far east is the legends of alexander the great and i'm going to say legends broadly because there are a lot of first-hand accounts from alexander and his generals and then there are other accounts that proliferated well on into the middle ages for example probably about the 6th or 7th century a letter began to circulate called the letter of alexander to aristotle and uh there's a greek original which is lost but it was definitely written in greek originally that that version was lost but there's a latin version that that survived and that latin version was translated other times and for instance there's an anglo-saxon like an old english translation of the latin which is actually this is a case of the translation is better than the original um because the anglo-saxon version has a much more satisfying ending um that's really dwelling on alexander's mortality in kind of this melancholy way that the aimless accent is really good at um so that's worth reading um and it's really actually that whole thing becomes quite important to the legends of prestor john which we'll talk about later right so for people who don't know most people will know this but for people who don't know aristotle was alexander's teacher so there is a relationship between aristotle and alexander the great and there has been speculation all through the history to re to understand what to what extent aristotle's metaphysics and aristotle's vision had an influence on alexander's imperialism and you know how it is it that they continue to communicate and so these letters pop out as kind of legendary manners in which to explore that question yeah and so plutarch for example in plutarch uh in his lives he has uh the life of alexander the great and um one of the most important things that comes up about in the life of alexander the great as he makes it to india which of course he did do historically um is uh that he encounters what a greek are called the gymnosofas uh in other words the uh or gymnos the naked philosophers that he encounters on the banks of the indus river and you can go and read about this if people are curious there are literally dozens of real you know historical groups in in india that are identified as the gymnosofas because the basic idea of a naked ascetic is like happens all over the world right certainly happens all over the east um and there's a story about uh how alexander captures 10 10 of these uh naked philosophers because they've been stirring up trouble for him and he says i'll let you guys go if you can answer some riddles which is this isn't plutarch's lives uh and this is great um and uh i'll give you just a couple of examples of the riddles uh first one he asks uh he says who is more numerous the living or the dead you know like are there more dead people or more alive people and uh the falafel philosopher says that the living are more numerous because the death no longer exists right which is like a nice and that that itself is a nice uh kind of riff on or play on the kind of the contrasting um contrasting ideas in the ancient world between like the greek world the semitic world about death and existence and things like this um the second being asked whether the earth or the sea produced larger animals said that the earth did because the sea is but a part of the earth so like all these all these riddles you know are like a little clever you know and um and in the end he he lets them all go with with presents with gifts and um and so this is one of the but it's it's kind of the first recorded encounter of the of western civilization with eastern philosophy and uh it's it's a pretty neat little encounter and ancient and medieval encounters with the far east other than the the career of alexander ancient and medieval encounters with the far east are geographically usually limited to trade routes which for the roman empire usually means the trade routes of what at the time was called the at the time of crisis was called the erythrian sea and the era 3 and c was the name for the what what nowadays we would call the red sea plus the persian gulf plus the indian ocean and that was all understood as like a single maritime trade area um and so silk from china for instance would have to pass over a really long overland trade route and then it would take a turn towards the south uh it would go to india and then it would sail across this era three and see until it comes to ethiopia and by the way this is why we talked about back under like our very first videos on ethiopia ancient sources often conflate or combine ethiopia and india right even though ethiopia is sort of the extreme south and india is the extreme east because anything coming into the roman empire from india would have to pass through ethiopia at least that was the case for a very long time uh but there are other examples uh for instance uh flores who's a roman historian he records chinese and indian ambassadors actually coming to bring gifts to caesar augustus like this so this is at the time of christ and i want to read a little bit of what he says because it is um it's quite lovely actually he says thus even scythians and sarmatians sent envoys to seek the friendship of rome nay the series that's the chinese came likewise and the indians who dwelt beneath the vertical sun bringing presence of precious stones and pearls and elephants but thinking all of less moment than the vastness of the journey which they had undertaken and which they said had occupied four years in truth it needed but to look at their complexion to see that they were people of another world than ours now this is not a it's not like a racist thing or something like that but it's just to say the romans when they in cave encounter with these ambassadors of the far east who'd come to bring them these gifts they noticed the difference they you guys are from another place yeah yeah and so in in all of this literature we basically see the far east presented to us as a land of extremes right so it's a world of naked aesthetics on the one hand but then also like you could say like unbound potential in the form of luxury goods um and i don't know uh it might be useful sometime jonathan if you're just out of video ideas uh to do uh to do something like on the symbolism of luxury goods and like the symbolism of decadence right yeah um uh because it's it always seems like the the failure to properly orient luxury goods towards you know a hierarchy say like a crown or a throne an altar at church um that results in decadence um and the way that the romans experienced this is that the wealth of the east and even the kind of near-east so in the case of like persian emperors this was experienced by romans as being extremely decadent so one of the things diocletian does for instance is that he basically there's there's there are ways in which diocletian is the first true emperor of rome right in in the sense that diocletian is the guy who basically says sorry you can't approach me directly right and he surrounds himself in kind of the mystery and the hierarchy and the distance um nowadays when we use the word byzantine to describe bureaucracy in like a negative sense right diocletian is the one who invents that and he does it in kind of imitation of the great persian kings of kings yeah and that that whole structure uh was very effective for running the empire at that particular point in time and of course it gets carried into the byzantine era but at the early stage when the romans encountered that when they saw their own people start to do it they saw that as ways that the east was the decadence of the east you could say was like corrupting you know you know homespun roman virtue yeah but you can see it you can understand it as the east itself that is the sense in which light comes from the east but there's also a sense in which there's something like uh un un unchecked glory is a way to understand that and that is what accounts for the decadence of hierarchy because that's one of the things that hierarchy offers it offers a kind of pride and and that kind of danger right so you can understand why both of those the idea of the naked aesthetics of these rigorous spiritual beings that exist you know in the east but then also this other extreme which is something like the dark the dark side of light not the dark side of light but like the the dangerous side of of light and of hierarchy i mean it's just i mean you can just think about sunlight right if i stand in the sun you know too long without protection especially at certain parts of the world right i'm going to get burned you can't get burned right that's it that's it's that easy right yeah um so there are a number of kind of important texts in the christian tradition uh which helped bring this symbolic experience of the far east into the four obviously there are a lot of biblical texts um and the biblical attack uh texts that are really important to our purposes are a lot of the ones that discuss ethiopia as being an example of the extreme the edge and i'm not going to cover those again because crp cr previous works yeah um but there are also these texts that talk about gog and magog um and and uh the the enemy like coming down out of the north yeah um and we're gonna talk a whole lot more about that in the next video so i'm going to maybe just bracket that for the moment but it's important to understand that people ancient maps are oriented yeah it's super important to understand that so you have the sentence where jerusalem is at the center we are facing east towards the sunrise and then on our left is the north and on our right is the south and so these these relationships are so important in terms of also how we experience light you go on the left hand we have the dark place you know we have the light coming from the east and so all of these things will be important in understanding the way in which for example we understand the barbarian hordes coming down and this idea of this dark power that comes from the north is important we have to understand it that way yeah and there's something to be said for um the way that uh cultural memory can sort of bear a scar um to give to give like an opposite example sort of um would be um in uh for the scandinavian peoples who were themselves some of those barbarians coming down out of the north and you know wrecking rome and all this other stuff right but for the scandinavian people is the invasion of the huns in the sixth and seventh century there's the invasion of the huns that that basically just like burns a deep scar in their cultural memory right and so for a scandinav for scandinavian and like western european storytelling the bad guys come out of the east right the invader comes out of the east and actually this is going on this is still going on in tolkien right where tolkien is like here's like a germanic mythical pre-history that's what tolkien kind of starts setting up to do and so for tolkien you know sauron is in the east the the hordes the barbarian hordes things like that they're in the east and it's it's the civilization is just like these tiny little outposts on the western coast of the world right which is very much how the northern european people saw themselves where they had the huns coming in out of the east and uh wrecking them really badly and they're just kind of like holding out over here not just the huns obviously the mongols also come out of the east and actually wreck up a good bit of eastern europe um and actually the kind of thing that keeps the huns and moguls from like coming all the way west is probably just the weather at some point uh uh the composite bows made by step nomads uh start to fall apart in really humid weather yeah and so um so it's probably probably the humidity of like western north northwestern europe that that kind of saved them but anyway uh in a in the same kind of a way here um if you're living in the levant uh there are dangers to the they're drained dangers directly to the east um usually in the form of the parthians the persians who were never seen as the same kind of barbarian their the parthians the persians were like uh an equally developed civilization right but but also rome's main rivals in that area but to the north and kind of the northwest that's where you have the scythians are coming from there that's where you have the you know all these what are essentially celtic tribes that are invading and then later a few centuries later it's the germanic tribes that are invading from the north right um gog and magog um which which uh we'll talk about more um in the next video all that stuff is to the north and of course the north is where alexander goes and builds his gates right to keep gog and magog out yeah so um some other texts that are really important for understanding the symbolism of the far east um herodotus's histories which is probably we could eventually if we wanted to do like a whole video on the histories or maybe somebody should do like a video series on the histories that would be maybe a fun symbolic world discussion group to do actually i'll think about that um because herodotus is histories is the first example of kind of a universal history it was like an attempt to take here's everything we know about the world and put it together in one place and so it's really important to this project that we're doing now um and uh by the time at the time that herodotus writes the histories the greeks slash persians are not really aware of the geography of india or of asia in general east of the indus basin and so herodotus says that india is the end of the habitable world he says as far as india asia is inhabited land but thereafter all of the east is desolation nor can anyone say what kind of land is there um but uh but he he also talks about he also talks about indians living far away from the persians southwest he's talking about the indian subcontinent uh and we're no who are no subjects of king darius um and in uh some of some of his books for instance in book three of the history herodotus gives an account of some of the peoples of india who'd been encountered by greek traders and by the persians and he talks about them as being very diverse makes reference to their eating habits some of them eat raw fish others eat raw meat others practice vegetarianism and talks about all this different gives really elaborate descriptions of them not just descriptions of them but of the animals that live in that part of the world for instance there is uh in this part of india that's that that the sandy desert lies here in this desert they live amid the sand great ants in size somewhat less than dogs but bigger than foxes i don't know what he's talking about but this vision of like the giant ants out in the desert um is in almost every medieval description of the east after this so that that that image like of giant ants stuck in somebody's mind for sure at first it shows up in that anglo-saxon text i was talking about the the symbols of the uh the wonders of the east where you have the great ants out in the desert digging up gold you know and and talking about how the the men like scare the ants off and come collect the gold and things like this um herodotus mentions uh he mentions um um the indian tribe of the khalitiyai for instance who the reason they get a mention is because they have the practice of what is sometimes called funerary cannibalism uh great name for a metal band funerary cannibalism or or sometimes it's called endocannibalism basically it's the idea of of eating your deceased ancestors yeah um which is something that was horrifying to the greeks and herodotus actually has like this weirdly almost like anachronistic moment of like cultural relativity or something like that he's like well we think this is terrible but they think it's terrible that we burn our ancestors so you know um yeah so uh there's there's a bunch more stuff about the far east and herodotus is histories um but then the the texts that are really really important to us for this series um we're going to come back to this text that we've talked about before on the show the apocalypse of pseudomethodius this is a it's essentially a uh syrian work of universal history that is written at a really important time a moment in time which is when the the arab caliphates were really wrecking christianity in the near east and um and so he's trying to kind of address that and kind of answer some questions about why is that happening and how are the how are they going to be judged for what they've done to the people of god and uh which is very common theme in apocalyptic literature and in this we very at the very beginning we get this this idea this idea that the far east is populated by philosopher kings who are descended from a fourth son of noah and so i'll just read this it says in the 620th year of the life of noah in the 20th year of the third millennium after noah left the ark the sons of noah established a new settlement in the outer earth so kind of out on the edge towards the east and name that place famine uh which is syriac word for eight after the name of the number of the eight souls who left the ark in the hundredth year of the third millennium a son was born to noah in his likeness and he named him yonatos or like uh gyunton in and syrian in the 300th year of the third millennium noah gave gifts to yonatos his son and sent him into the land of the dawn so he sent him farther east the tower of babel happens and it says then that the onus was the son of noah went to the east as far as the sea and the place called the country of the sun where the rising of the sun takes place and he settled there this yonatos received from god the gift of wisdom and he was the first to discover the practice of astronomy nimrod the giant came down to him and was instructed and took from him the council by which he ruled this nimrod was of the heroes of the children of shem and he was the first to rule as a king on the earth and in the 799th year of the third millennium in the third year of the reign of nimrod he pontipos the king of the sons of ham sent strong and able men from the sons of japheth wise in regard to all aspects of craftsmanship and architecture and they went down to the land of the dawn to jonathos the son of noah and built a city for him and called it yonatos after his name and i read all that because it's to understand the idea of universal history in general especially from the syrian point of view it's really important to understand that each of the sons of noah have kind of their own unique symbolism associated with them right so you've got the sons of shem who are the basically the mesopotamians right the fertile crescent the mesopotamians these are your city builders this is civilization and you could say it's the closest to being something like the center right um then you've got the sons of japheth who are basically europeans right and these are craftsmen and they kind of in this account they kind of represent something like techni yeah in the service of civilization right and then you have the sons of ham and the sons of ham are in this particular story they are uh africans specifically in in this passage they're specifically egyptians yeah right but it's uh but but as africans slash egyptians as traitors and all that kind of the symbolism of the edge that we talked about in our ethiopia videos so that's kind of like the three canonical sons of noah if you want to say that but then here in the syrian account we have this idea of the fourth son yonatos or yonton who symbolizes the far east and he lives in the land of the dawn and and the interesting thing is that he has you could say the most access to light he lives in the land where the sun rises he is able um to learn astronomy like real astronomy the gift of wisdom all these things but he's not able to build a city for himself yeah right so he's not able to like embody himself in the world so it takes the involvement of these other sons of noah and this story is probably uh you could say in this the apocalypse of pseudomethodius this is a reference to another work called the cave of treasures a very very important syriac work that it was historically attributed to saint from the syrian um and it's one of the main sources uh basically the whole thing is you could say it's like an extended midrash on genesis so if you want to know like early syrian christian understandings of things like the watchers and the descendants of seth still living on the slopes of the mountain the lower slopes of the mountain of paradise whereas the descendants of canaan live down in the valley and then cain's lineage they're taught by demons and they invent musical instrumentation so they can make this noise and make these sounds and actually attract and seduce the sons of seth down yeah it's a whole i mean it's the whole thing um uh pretty pretty important to to like you know doubt you know that understanding of the world we've talked about this but that understanding of the world and i think specifically the syrian expression of it is down at the roots of pretty much all attempts to to write universal history in the middle ages yeah i think it's a really important word so if you think about it in terms of yonatos and the idea of the east i mean it can help us understand the east in its in its symbolism as the source of light and so that's why yonatos in this case in the positive sense is the place of wisdom the place of you know he he has this secret knowledge this knowledge of the patterns that's what astronomy is he kind of understands the pattern but like you said he needs support from the west to give him body basically so you have a basic image of the kind of the spiritual influence coming from the east and then the west capable of producing body so but it's important for people to understand that because when you when you read it it might sound a little silly it might sound a little ridiculous but you have to understand that most people still think that way now most people even non-christian there's a weird perversion of that which is you know go to india find a guru go to go find some buddhist master go so like this wisdom from the east that comes you know and we are these like horrible technical people that are that that make machines but have lost their spiritual connection so the manner in which this is presented in these very ancient texts finds a corollary in the way some new ager will think about the world today yeah so the danger here um is actually also in this story uh because in this version of the story in the cave of treasures there is this guy a priest named uh edisheer or artist here and uh he sees that nimrod goes to the east and all the stuff and he sees that yonatos has this wisdom this true wisdom of astronomy that he's gotten from god right and uh but it says the artist here is a priest who ministers to the fire that ascends from the earth so you know this the idea there's another source of light but the source of light is is uh it's like an artificial sunrise you could say like as this fire that comes up out of the earth and there is a devil that appears to him in connection with the fire and so in this story um he asked that devil to teach him the wisdom that jonah's host has and so the devil that appears in connection with the fire that comes out of the earth and obviously this is a reference to uh i mean this guy is the the guy who found the magi so he this is a reference it's talking about zoroastrianism um basically says okay well if you want to do that there are these carnal rituals you have like these incestuous rituals that you have to partake in and if you do that then i'll give you the wisdom that you want so this idea of participating in these carnal rituals you get the wisdom that you're looking for but the wisdom that he gets isn't the true knowledge uh like the true astrology or the truest astronomy that yonatos has and the idea by the way is that that that true astrology or that true astronomy that's how the magi knew that christ was being born right because because they had access maybe you know in the middle ages people believe that that the magi had access through daniel to like the real the real wisdom but that this guy is the founder of the zoroastrian magi and he gets this knowledge from a devil from a demon um and that's the that's the introduction of divination magic which is the main kind of magic for instance in the bible when it's talking like all these things about witches and wizards and things like this it's not talking about people who are like uh playing the environment and they cast fireball right you know that's it's talking about it's usually talking specifically about divination magic and also like curses things like that um lord spirits just did a great episode about cursing and how that works and stuff like that but um so there's this idea that there is a uh there's a real pattern but then there's a danger like a false you know a false riff or a false rendition of that pattern and the danger would be going east and uh finding um not actually the true wisdom that is from above but this this false wisdom that actually comes from below yeah and it's kind of instrumental and used and you can see that right in the basic narrative of the book of enoch you get a similar image of it or it's more spiritualized we have the sense that enoch there are these secret patterns and there are these all these secret patterns of reality and that the angels are the watchers over these patterns but if they are let's say like the children of seth and the the children of uh of cain if they come together in seduction and a desire for power or desire to to make yourself more powerful then they become a counterfeit version of those patterns yeah so you could say the in the in the syrian literature which is really foundational to the whole idea of a of a universal history the far east is a place from which a genuine knowledge of that which is higher can come right but uh and even to the point of pointing you to the coming of the messiah into the world but that there is you could say like an intermediate power um in this case zoroastrianism but uh you could you could substitute anything else in that particular part of the world right one of the things that we're going to see that comes up constantly is like there's something in the in the far east and then there's suffering at jerusalem and then whatever is in the middle is always a problem right that's going to be one of the general patterns so eventually it's going to be in the far east you have presser john uh but in the middle you have the muslim caliphates and then you have jerusalem right here and the crusaders and all that yeah and there's a cosmic like again there's a cosmic version of that which is really exactly this idea the powers of the air of the right exactly beings you know the yeah skins or whatever all these kind of intermediary intermit this intermediary space is a space which is important which has a function and to kind of embody these higher things into things we can deal with but that's where all the danger is because that's where pride is that's where desire kind of finds its it's it's glimmer yeah and there's another important idea that i think also comes to the fore here especially in uh the the apocalypse of pseudomethodius is this idea of someone going from rome in other words japheth you know europe um uh medieval writers believe that japheth was that the word jove like the name jove jupiter was like a corruption of japheth interesting um uh you can agree with that or disagree with that but that's what that's what when people were writing medieval history they they they saw jupiter as being this you know like a real historical figure one of the sons of noah the founder of europe who is then sort of remembered and worshipped as a deity and then maybe some demon comes in and starts appropriating that worship at some point but that that's how they saw that so you see uh you see rome or japheth going to the far east to to to yonatos as a craftsman in order to build a city or to give body to this pure logos of the east and this turns out to be the premise of a really important early christian slash gnostic work called the acts of thomas and it is a gnostic text i don't so i'm not recommending people go out and read it um there's a bunch of weird stuff in there about you know how married people shouldn't procreate even for the purposes of procreation and stuff like this um that's certainly not what the church teaches but this is a really early work um and there are versions of it that became very popular in the middle ages and uh but for our purposes purposes the ver the part of that story which is important is that it has thomas going to india to evangelize but the way that he evangelizes you know he's talking to christ and christ is like and christ is like go into the east um and in this story um uh there's a there's a legend that you probably know that uh thomas was like christ's doppelganger yeah it was his twin yeah and and in fact this is even kind of like maybe hinted at in the gospels right thomas isn't hiding because he's afraid people are going to mistake him for jesus and and kill him you know um uh so this story is that that is kind of in this story but um basically he's talking to christ in christ like i want you to india and convert them and he says well how am i going to get there you know and so jesus says it's quite simple and so jesus takes him down to the docks and sells him into slavery and he sells him as thomas like like christ thomas is a carpenter he's a skilled workman and so christ sells him into slavery to this indian traitor and that's how he gets to uh that's how he gets to the far east is as a as a as a carpenter and this brings him to the far east and then we get this idea of like going into the east and building a city for the king of the east this this story actually gets inverted a little bit because what happens this is the story of the conversion of king gandafaris who is uh a historical figure um who converted to christianity and the story of his conversion is that thomas shows up and thomas is a very skilled carpenter and so the king puts him in charge of building him a new palace he gives him a whole bunch of money goes away and every so often uh he writes thomas and says hey thomas how's the palace going going and thomas says oh it's going great you know uh the walls are up i just need more money to finish the roof so he sends more money oh the roof's on i just need more money to finish off the trim work all this stuff so the king keeps sending more money more money more money finally the king comes back and there's no palace and he goes to his guys and he's like what is going on where's the palace that tom is supposed to be building and they're all like yeah that thomas guy he's just been walking around giving all your money away for that's right and uh so he's very upset and you know he's going to punish thomas for this but then the king's brother um gad dies and goes to paradise and the angels are showing him around and they show him and he sees this amazing palace and he says i'd like to live there and they say oh well that that should be just fine uh thomas has been building that for your brother i'm sure your brother wouldn't mind and so gad comes back to life after the prayers of saint thomas and tells gandalfari's what he's seen and gandafaris and god they both are baptized they become christians and so on um and of course there's a whole lineage of ancient apostolic christianity still in the indian subcontinent today which was founded by the apostle thomas um there's a bunch of different groups and it's kind of loosely usually called saint thomas christianity um so you i just point that out to say uh the acts of thomas very important work in in in the roman and christian world understanding the far east but also a very uh and and like the whole idea of the naked philosopher and all that stuff is in there too yeah but it actually takes this ancient sort of syrian idea of going to the east to build the city for the king of the east but it it makes it a heavenly city yeah but then really i wanted to point out one story from the legends of alexander show about what the east could mean in terms of it's it's also like a weird inversion of that which is one of the stories is that alexander comes and meets the the philosophers and they're naked they have nothing they have no possession right then so alexander wants to give them something so he gives them this like precious oil or whatever and of course the naked philosopher just pours it out as a libation because they can't own anything they are they represent this lack of absence of body right they're almost like these crazy stories we hear of the naked of the naked ascetics up on mount athos right now that we're hearing from father stephen and father andrew you know that there that there are these are patterns of uh these are patterns that kind of reproduce themselves and yeah help us understand what what is the relationship between let's say the higher aspect is this and and how body interacts with it anyway so that's something for all of you to think about that we we still have a tradition of naked aesthetics on marathons right yeah um yeah so all of this is like a nice setup um for the thing that we really want to talk about next um because there's this you could say this idea of the king in the east right um that this becomes one of the most important ideas about understanding the east when we get into the middle ages um uh the so there are all these early stories of of these righteous pre-christian and christian kings in the far east um the acts of thomas being a really good example that are the fountainhead for what eventually becomes the medieval legend of prester john right professor john meaning john the priest presser means priest the idea presser john is that he's a priest king he's uh he's he's a king of the east who is also a christian priest and is able to offer the eucharist he's a man he's a melchizedek figure yeah a melchizedek kind of a figure and um and this idea i mean when this this idea that arises in the 12th century 13th century that uh this there would be a christian king out of these who would actually uh attack the arab caliphate liberate jerusalem and uh sort of save the christian people in the in in the middle east from their oppressors and um so those are kind of uh let's say that's the groundwork those are the big patterns and that's what starts to manifest in the legends of professor john all right and so we have so i think we've got the basic structure we understand that for the medieval christians jerusalem is at the middle it's like the heart of the world and then you have the east which has two aspects of it two extremes which could be something like the two aspects some of the aspects of what uh hierarchy offers you know this order this light which comes from above but then also the possibility of a kind of excess uh of this idea of luxury and of excess of degeneracy which also is represented as coming from the east there is the relation there's also the notion that there's this intermediary space which appears in our cosmic vision of the world itself which is that we have the highest point of light above and then we have all these intermediary beings in between and those intermediary beings are possibly ambiguous they could go they said they're good ones and they're bad ones so you have that sense as well in this so you can understand how the way in which the medievals understood the map itself and their the way they embodied space was something which was based on their own kind of cosmic vision yeah and will strangely manifest itself that way as well as we continue on the story maybe a nice coda to leave people on if people want to go do a little homework for next video um go google something called the voyages of [Music] bar salma s-a-u-m-a the voyages of rabon salma do you know about this no so this is this uh i mentioned this earlier to you we were planning but oh this is the this is the punk yeah so there's a monk from peking in china so this is all the way in northeastern china almost you know like uh almost in korea at this point okay it's how far east this guy is he is a we're going to be talking a lot next time about what is sometimes called the nestorian church or the church of the east um so he's a monk and a bishop in this church and he is asked by his bishop at the time to undertake a journey to jerusalem to the holy land to undertake a pilgrimage and so he begins this journey all the way from uh peaking in in uh or what we now call beijing sorry i know that's uh all my old books sometimes get in the way yeah you guys know what i'm talking about so it goes all the way from beijing in china uh makes it to baghdad makes it to constantinople he makes it to rome he makes it to paris he meets uh he makes it all the way to uh gascony what is now called bordeaux france where he meets edward the first the king of england and also part of france at the time and uh actually serves liturgy and communes edward the first at the liturgy um before heading back um he he stops in rome we're going to talk more about this next video but he stops in rome he has arguments with the roman cardinals about the filioque um which which he all he writes about in his own first in his own words um and then eventually makes it back to baghdad where he dies in 1294 um so the great thing about this travel account is that it's sort of it's roughly contemporary with marco polo a little bit earlier i think but he is uh it's it's a first-hand eyewitness account not of the strange experience of going west to east but rather the experience of going east to west and the thing is if you take a look at his account what you will see is that even though he's from beijing even though he's traveling the complete opposite direction as most of the travel logs that we think about when we think about this his world is also centered on jerusalem and what you will read is even though it seems like he should belong to a different world with a different perspective because he also has this jerusalem-centric point of view as he travels his his his account is a christian account of the world when he goes to constantinople when he goes to rome when he goes to all these different places what does he want to do he wants to go see the churches and he has this beautiful description for instance of aguero sophia and the relics that he was able to venerate while he was there he wants to see the churches and he wants to see the relics that they keep in those churches and these these are the most important things to him so um i think that uh this account really goes a long way and unfortunately it's not well known and i encourage people to go out and read it uh you can find the whole thing online uh in in translation for free but this account is uh a very important witness to the things that we're talking about not just being eurocentric not just being like an american idea or something like this but as being truly universal right they're universal because they are first specific right um and the unit it's it's a universal way of understanding the world because it's a way of understanding the world that is oriented towards jerusalem yeah all right everybody so uh next next episode a lot of crazy stuff muggles spread through john we're gonna get into the real juicy stuff oh it's gonna it's gonna be really fun gonna get bloody also also very bloody it's gonna be very bloody right yeah all right everybody thanks for your attention and uh we'll talk to you very soon bye this episode is part of a series of discussions i've had with richard roland on universal history you can find a list of all these episodes on my youtube channel where you can find them also in my podcast stream from the symbolic world on your different podcast platforms make sure to check out richard's second podcast which he hosts in collaboration with father andrew damick called ammunsuol which looks at the relationship between tolkien and orthodoxy this podcast has also inspired me some ideas for creating some images whether it be the king under the mountain whether it be the grail or beautiful ethiopian traditions i've created some products which you can find on my store the symbolicworld.store and there will probably be more of those to come very soon so stay tuned this conversation is ongoing and there is still very much to explore in the universal history

Channel: Jonathan Pageau

Views: 24,395

Keywords: symbolism, myths, religion

Id: OoKxq9QFx2c

Length: 53min 18sec (3198 seconds)

Published: Fri May 27 2022