https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=eyz7hMTRHKA
Elisa asked, what is the symbolism of tails? Is it significant that human beings don’t have tails? It is very significant that human beings don’t have tails. And so, yeah. Mathieu, man, I wish Mathieu could tell you about his analysis of the symbolism of tails. He has a really, really good vision of that. And it has to do with, you could say that human beings are one above and are two below. And so, it’s like a pyramid. And that that is very important. But animals have a residue, you could say, of that structure. And that residue is a tail. And so, you could imagine that the tail is like a unity from behind, but it’s flexible. It’s shifty. So, it’s like a snake, kind of. And so, that’s what the tail has to do with. So, Gideon Yu says, hi, Jonathan. So, my question is, what is the symbolism of snakes or serpents as we see them shedding their skin all at once, whereas basically every other animal sheds its outer layer of death much more gradually? And so, I think the way to understand that is it’s related to the idea that the snake represents something, well, two things, something like change, and then something like the remainder. And so, interestingly enough, if you watch that movie, Noah, by Aronofsky, which is kind of half, it’s kind of 50-50, a lot of it is weird, and some of it is interesting. But anyways, in that movie, the garments of skin that Adam and Eve get, and they get kind of transmitted down, interestingly enough, very similar to our comic book. We had written it before Aronofsky’s Noah came out, but they had the same idea of having this notion that the garments of skin are kind of transmitted down the generations, but in their case, it’s a snake skin, which is the garments of skin that they kind of received, it seems, from God. So, that’s super interesting. And so, that’s why the snake is the thing in the garden, which is, you could say, that’s inside, but is not completely of the inside, that comes from the outside, or is related to the outside of the garden, but is inside. And that is that it is the variable which brings about change. That’s how you experience it in life in general. Something comes from the outside, something unexpected, something not part of the system manifests itself. And then you have to deal with it, and the way you deal with it will manifest a change. Hello, Jonathan. I don’t know if you’ve answered this before, but why is it important for the hair of Medusa to be made of snakes? It seems to me like it’s such an intuitive thing, like it’s such an intuitive thing, in the sense that hair is the covering, hair is also death, hair is the dead things, it’s like a dead covering that you have on yourself. And so, doesn’t it make sense to you that the snake would be like the hair, in the sense that even if you just would like to mix Christianity and Hellenic myth, that snake brings about death, brings about the cycle of death, right? He changes his skins, he loses his skin, and he changes all the time. And so, like this change, also the change, like Medusa changes people to stone, and so she’s an agent of transformation in a dark sense, and so that’s what snakes are, they change. I hope that makes sense, you know? And it’s like, so how do you stop the Medusa? You give her an identity, like if she sees herself, then she’s done. It’s like, so, you know, makes a lot of sense. You freeze her. The way you stop the snakes and the dead snake hair, is you freeze her. Michael Erickson asks, I’m currently reading through Exodus, and I’m wondering about the symbolism of the staff that Aaron uses in Exodus 7-10. Can you see as an example of how God flips things around so that the bad becomes a symbol for good, et cetera? And is it connected to the snake in the garden? Or am I reading too much in it? No, it’s definitely, I mean, if you read that story and you don’t see that the staff turning into a snake is not related to the snake in the garden, I mean, that would be crazy. It is obviously related to the snake in the garden. And so, you have to understand this idea. So imagine it like this. Now, I’ve talked about the right hand, the left hand. I’m not gonna go into it too much, but if you haven’t seen my video, my recent video on, what is it called? Iconography as the pattern of reality, where I talk about the left and the right hand. Also, this recent patron-only video, I talked about this as well. So there’s the idea of solidity and, and let’s say falling apart or breaking down. So solidity, when you hold onto something, so let’s say you grab something, you make it real, grabbing onto something or pointing at something, you gather it together. You can even think about it in terms of just ideas. Like, it’s like I grasp that idea, right? I grasp it. So when you grasp something, it comes together. It solidifies, it becomes something solid. It acts vertically, right? And then when you let go of something, then it fragments and it breaks down. When you abandon, when you give up, when you, all of this other type of imagery, that’s what gives the snake, right? That’s what gives the lack of solidity, the shifting, the shifting left and right, okay? Moving from one side to the other without any direct path. And so imagine, like you have a straight path, a crooked path, you have all this imagery. And so that’s what it’s referring to. It’s, you know, in the garden, that’s what happens. You know, the Adam and Eve at the top of the garden, they give in to opposites. And as they give into the opposites, then they break down, you know, with the snake down into the thorns. But that’s just the pattern of reality. It’s not good or bad. It can also be used, it can be used for good. Sometimes you let go and then the snake can be used as a, you know, as a monster to come and eat your enemy. So it just depends, it just depends. In that story, it shows the two possibilities of grasping and solidifying, letting go and having things become, let’s say, chaotic potential, something like that. So hopefully that wasn’t too abstract. But I think for those of you that have watched several of my videos, you will understand that. All right, so Joshua Anderson for 499 says, do you think it’s possible that Eve was tempted by the serpent in the garden in Genesis on a sexual level? And so I don’t think so. I think that that’s really… Okay, so the problem with this, the problem with this is that it’s also because it’s like, it’s also because people don’t understand all the symbolism of what the sexuality is. And so if you want to understand it this way, you could say that Eve does join herself to the serpent in the sense that the serpent tells her something, and then she believes him and acts in coordination with the belief in the word of the serpent. And so the serpent is, so she believes the serpent rather than believe God. And so she joins herself with the serpent and then becomes a body for his will, for his being, right? And so in that sense, you could say that she joined herself with the serpent, but you definitely do not have to think of it in terms of a physical union between the beast and or something that is like explicit in the way that people want to think about that. But you could understand it analogically as the fact that Eve does join herself with the serpent. And so there is a, how can I say this? There is something analogous to sexual symbolism in what’s going on, but it’s not directly, right? Just in the same way when if you read the story of Christ and the Samaritan, there’s sexual symbolism going on during the whole discussion between Christ and the Samaritan where he talks about the fountain of pure water and the well, which is referencing Proverbs where it talks about joining yourself with the foreign woman which is what he’s doing in that story. But it doesn’t mean that he had sex with her. It doesn’t have to mean that, right? It just means that the symbolism because it’s fractal and it works at different levels, that it scales at different levels. It doesn’t have to become, just like the fact that we are the bride of Christ doesn’t mean that Jesus has sex with us in like a physical sense. Why am I saying this? Like, why do I have to say this? Don’t have to say this. So Anders Roustadt, hi Jonathan, I’m curious about the difference between the snake around the tree, center heart and the snake around the garden, outside the garden, rubros. There are many snake images in the Bible, staff of Moses, snake on full dragons. How could you know which is related to which symbolism? They’re all very much related to be honest in the sense that, so, right? The rubros is like a, is a circle. And then you see the serpent eating its own tail. But the best way to understand it is rather to understand that it’s never fully the snake eating its own tail. Although there’s usefulness in that symbolism at that moment when the beginning and the end come together that there’s a kind of chaos. There’s an inversion or there’s a confusion in causality in the moment where the end of the beginning appear. Like when the system breaks down and a new thing is on the verge of starting. But the best, another way to understand it is as cycles that go like this, it kind of go up or go down, however you wanna think of it, depending on the system. So it’s like cycles that go like this. And so the serpent wrapped around the tree is similar to the serpent wrapped around the world. It’s just at a lower, at a more inside level. So one is more microcosmic and the other is more macrocosmic. And the different snakes that are on the different poles all have pretty much the same symbolism. Um. Um.