https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=xsBHL8nyyXM
I’m curious, like I actually really like the story of Moana. And I think that that’s a story that has, well, we’ve been talking about kind of how the replacement of masculine hero with feminine heroes, it’s not, it doesn’t make sense the way that it’s being done. It just- You think in Moana, I didn’t think, I thought in Moana it didn’t make sense either. I think Moana was one of the first like, the first crackling of that. Yeah, that’s what’s interesting, because I watched your video on Moana and I actually think that you’re right too. Yeah. Right, like I think that the points you make are really interesting in that video, but there was something really profound about that story for me. And it got to something that is, I think one of my big hesitations in say embracing Christianity, which is that it is the relationship with the feminine doesn’t seem to be fully represented or well-balanced in the Christianity that I’ve seen. And even in the idea of the Trinity, the idea of a father, son and a Holy ghost, it’s like, well, to me, the ghost sounds like the ghost of the feminine, it’s not there. And you know, you can, there’s a, within the kind of historiography of Semitic religion, there’s this idea of Yahweh used to have a consort. It was evidence that that is a thing that showed up in the old temples of the Israelites. It’s controversial, but it’s an interesting idea to me. And you know, when I first encountered Peterson, he had this idea that, you know, there’s the divine masculine, the divine feminine, and they have it, they both have a tyrannical and a beneficent aspect. Feminine is nature or chaos, the masculine is culture and order. And then there’s the individual who mediates between them. And that’s the hero and the adversary. And then he said, Christianity is the most archetypically complete religion. And I was like, well, okay, but where’s the divine feminine represented there? And it seems to me, I had this sense at the time that we live in a time when it’s more important than ever to have a really good articulation of the divine feminine for two reasons. Which are sort of weirdly paradoxical. One is that if we think of the feminine as nature, and we think of the masculine as culture, there’s never been a time in which culture had so much power over nature and so much potential to damage it. A hundred years, like even 200 years ago, like we were vastly more threatened by nature than nature was threatened by culture in many ways. But now it’s like we could let off a bunch of nuclear bombs and we’re in such that we couldn’t survive in that world. And so there’s something about that that’s important to me. And then the other aspect of it is that due to the pill, due to the change of what work is, due to female sanitary products, due to public bathrooms, women have been able to step into roles of power in our society in a way that they weren’t for the last 10,000 years. So I think that’s kind of the point of articulating how the feminine goes bad. If you don’t… But we do, we have plenty of ways. Like it’s just people don’t know them. Like they don’t know the stories, but… Yeah. But in terms of the feminine, it’s… Christianity has the mother of God. If you want to understand it, it’s like I think maybe you were exposed to more kind of evangelical or Protestant Christianity, traditional Christianity has the notion that Mary is the mother of God in the sense that she is the place, she is the throne, she is the container, she is the potential out of which the manifestation of God appeared in the world. And there is also a deeper aspect to that, which is that there’s an eschatological reality, that is that there’s a reality in the totality in the end, you could say, where all of nature, you could say, or all of creation is meant to be deified. So there isn’t a sense in which there’s… So you don’t have at all the sense in which there’s like, that’s a Godfather, Godmother, right? Like you see, for example, in many native mythological structures and things like that, you don’t have that. So you have God, and God is usually represented mostly as masculine, although we… No Christian believe that God is masculine. Like we believe that God transcends categories, but in the way in which he presents himself to us is as father, but that’s important because that’s what presentation is. That’s what statement is, statement, order, manifestation, categorization, all of these are the masculine things. We can’t pretend like we’re standing, we always have to stop pretending we’re standing outside of this, we’re inside. And so when it’s like in the Christian world, when the divine manifests himself, it’s masculine, it’s father, that’s the image. And then it’s father moving in a loving relationship with creation so that in the end, to imagine it like as a story which extends into totality, there’s a joining, there’s a sexual union between heaven and earth, which is fully realized. And that is the totality in which all things are called into God and are called to become God through participation. So this is something which is really, at least in the Orthodox tradition, this is the way that it’s perceived and presented, and this is the way that it’s seen. And there’s even, there are movements in the Orthodox church called sociology, which are movements to explicitly, let’s say, formulate the divine feminine, you could call it that way. But those have been prescribed by the church. And I think for good reason, because that’s the problem with pretending you’re not in language, is that you can’t formulate, you can’t formulate it, you can’t put it into a formula. If it’s supposed to be potential, once you formulate it, it’s no longer what it is. And so there are places, there are mysteries, like you read in the Church Fathers, they talk about the womb of God, right? They have these expressions, but they’re never dogmatic, they’re never something you have to say, this is the structure, because what are you doing then? Yeah. You’re perverting the very nature of the thing you’re trying to formulate. Yeah. First I have to go back. I probably brought you in a space that you never thought existed all of a sudden. I’m like, what is this Christianity Jonathan is talking about? I wanna go back to Moana, because I think this captures why Moana was valuable to me, and I want to, I’m curious to get your response. So when I first encountered Peterson, he’s talking about the heroic archetype and the dragon slayer. And then he says that the reciprocal for women is the beauty and the beast myth. And so I was telling everyone the dragon slayer story then at the end of my seminars, and saying like, this is ultimately what we’re doing in movement practice. We’re just going out and doing this. And parkour is 90% male. So it’s like, is this a more masculine thing to choose this type of path? Like, is there, how does this interact with feminine? But I had female students the whole time, and I learned profound things from them, and they were always really, it was really an amazing thing to work with women. So I had a big seminar in three days. It’s all beautiful, it’s going great. And then I tried to tell the beast story after the dragon story. And it just went over like a lead balloon, and these women were really not happy about it. A lot of them were really proactively feminist, and maybe it was not, it just didn’t work. So I went back and I was like laying in my bed, and I was up till like 2 a.m. that night thinking, and I thought about the idea of the story of St. George and the dragon, and that there’s a portrayal of a masculine and feminine aspect of the heroic, and that ultimately both George and the princess confront the dragon. She doesn’t leave when he engages in the confrontation. She assists him in the confrontation. And ultimately it’s actually her girdle wrapping itself around the dragon that resolves the situation. So I had this idea that there’s these two aspects to the confrontation with chaos. One is that the destruction of the chaotic and the assertion, the penetration of the lance. But the other is the holding of the space in which the chaotic comes into order. And I thought about that in relationship to like children. Children are little chaos things, and you don’t go put a lance in them, right? You hold a space that has enough strength, enough boundary, enough discipline, but that is nurturing. And that’s how they come into order. Yeah, it’s a home. Like it’s the symbol of a home. And I thought- It’s all there. Like, if you want to understand what you just said, you’ll realize, when now you look back at the stories, you’ll see that it’s all there, but it’s there often in a way in which also, let me tell you, like, you know the story of, I forget which sword, one of Arthur’s sword. I think it’s Excalibur. So, right, so when Arthur receives Excalibur, he receives the sword and he receives the sheath. And the sword, with that sword, right, he can strike all the enemies or whatever. And then with the sheath, he’s protected from all harm. And the question is, which is more valuable, the sword or the sheath? And that’s actually one of the, some of the questions that appear in the romances. Arthur loses the sheath, you know? But it’s like, there’s a suggestion, which is that the sheath is in some ways, secretly more powerful than the sword. Yeah, that’s, well, here was the interesting thing that I sat there and I realized. So I realized that there’s something like, there’s like a heroic power of assertion and a heroic power of surrender. And I had this really strange realization as I was laying there, which was that, when I did the things in my practice that were most heroic, let’s say, most dangerous, right, where if I failed, my life was literally on the line. I had to call on both of these. And it was the assertion that got me to choose to do the thing and to stand in front of the jump. But I never felt safe until I waited for a sense that the jump was already going to happen and that I was surrendering into it. The experience of doing the jumps when I could die is not an experience of pushing with will, it’s an experience of acceptance, of surrender. And so there was this weird place where I would, I consider myself a pretty masculine guy and I’m doing a very masculine thing that’s 90% male. And yet somehow I’m relying on this deeply feminine power in the most emblematic expression of this. So I went back and I’ve shared that story over and over again, and it really resonates with people. And so I talk about this idea of the feminine aspect of the heroic and the masculine aspect of the heroic. But there’s a weird thing, which is the version of the story that I understand is that once the dragon is tamed, they take it back to the village and the villagers throw stones and George kills the dragon. Yeah, well, there are many versions of the story. Yeah, I know there’s- That is definitely one version where he brings, he tames a dragon, brings it and then kills it later. Yeah, and the way that I interpret that was like, it’s a gift of the divine feminine that’s not seen, it’s too threatening. And so when I saw Moana, like what I saw was, you have a feminine hero, but she’s not just a masculine hero inverted, she actually is feminine. And ultimately, what she does is recognize the power of love to redeem a dragon and bring it into beneficent order. She flips the polarity of the divine feminine from the monster, the dragon, to the queen of nature. And she does that through acceptance and love. Yeah, there is like that pattern that you’re talking about. I think you hit the nail on an inkling of something which is positive. And you see it in the Wonder Woman story too, like in the Wonder Woman story for all the things I criticized about it, right? It actually ends with reconciliation, right? Which is not something that you necessarily see in the more kind of classic heroic study. Usually it ends with victory, right? So you think of the story where, invasion stories or whatever, it ends with victory. But the Wonder Woman story ends with her reconciling even with the Nazi soldiers. Like she has an effect on them where they like cry and regret what they’ve done and all this stuff. And there’s this like moment of reconciliation. I think she even mentions love or something. And so you’re right, that that’s something that’s interesting. That’s an interesting possibility for storytelling. And there is a little bit of that in Moana and there’s definitely a little bit of that in other stories. So yeah, it’s not completely, you’ve hit on something which is not completely corrupt, which has some hope for it. I mean, I think it’s, I also see your point about how everything that the masculine hero does is given to him. That he only, his only success is in being forgiven, right? And that ultimately that the meeting of heaven and earth isn’t represented in that story. But to me, there was something powerful about the recognition in the story of the value of the feminine aspect of the heroic and also of getting the relationship between the potential destructiveness of father culture towards mother nature, right. There’s a reconciliation of the natural world culture in that story, which is represented in the journey of that feminine hero. That’s why I- Ultimately what you would want is a story where you could do that without having to subjugate, humiliate, denigrate the masculine character. It’s like, wouldn’t that be awesome if we could have that? Yeah, absolutely. It’s like, we watched, my son and I, we watched the Black Widow movie and it’s the same, right? It ends in the same way where there’s actually like a reconciliation with like the daughter of the guy. And like, there’s like a reconciliation, but the whole movie, I remember my son was asking me like, why is this father figure there? Like, why is he even in the story, this Black Widow story? And as he said that, there’s a scene where he’s like, fighting the bad guy. And completely getting beaten up. And then for that scene to end, the feminine character has to come and basically solve the problem for him. And I was like, I didn’t even say it. And I was like, that’s why he’s there. That’s the only reason why he’s there. And it’s so annoying and it’s so counterproductive. Like you could have both at the same time and you could tell amazing stories if you did that. Yeah, absolutely. I think that that’s what we need, right? We need those stories that represent those things both powerfully. So we need the return of the king and the queen. How about that? Let’s do it that way. Well, that’s the cool thing. I think it’s so funny. Like the critique of Tolkien is so interesting to me because it’s like, oh, he doesn’t have any strong feminine characters. I’m like, wait, gladrile, Eowyn, like look at where the world that he’s inhabiting. But also these characters are, they represent like real aspects of feminine heroicness that show up in history too, right? And then the other aspect that I was thinking about in reference to this is the idea that Tolkien is ultimately a black and white story. And I was- There’s another part which is harder for people to get and I hate to bring it back, but this is the problem of making things explicit. And so this is the, like I was going to say, it’s gonna annoy a whole lot of people, right? I’m sorry. Even that feminine character, right? Which is like the, which is the, let’s say the heroic feminine character, there’s a manner in which it has to remain somewhat hidden for it to play the role it’s supposed to play. If you put a shine of light on it too much, you’re inevitably going to make it masculine. And that’s why it’s like, and that’s why probably the way it’s happening in our culture now is that it’s like the nature of the womb, the nature of the, of feminine characteristics is to be the hidden frame, this hidden house, this hidden healer, this like private sphere that we have. And so it’s like, if the private sphere is the private sphere, it’s the hidden place, it’s the secret in the bedroom. It’s the king who goes away from the meeting and in the evening. And then for some reason, when he comes back in the morning, he’s changed his mind and nobody knows why, right? It’s that transformation, which don’t denigrate it. It’s a real and powerful reality of the world, which is the manner in which things happen in secret and transformation happens in dark places. And so it’s like, if you shine too much light on that, you’re gonna change its nature. And that’s one of the problems of the situation we have now. It’s interesting, because as I’ve been thinking a lot about this, I’ve been like, well, what are the stories that sort of aren’t just well told and don’t just get into these issues, but actually point out something new, something that moves forward? And the author that I think is doing that best in fantasy fiction is Daniel Abraham. And he really represents this, but it’s made much more explicit, right? But I think it works. I’d be very interested to see your take on his work. But I think he writes incredibly powerful, agentic, feminine female characters that really change the world. But they don’t just play out masculine archetypes. They do it in the ways that traditionally women in a lot of these societies had to do that. They don’t get a medal. And it’s like, I understand everybody wants a medal, but the medal is, there’s something of the medal, which is a masculine, like a masculine fantasy, and even like a masculine vanity. It’s not even like, it’s not getting the medal is not, has no value ontologically. It has no value cosmically. It’s just like, it’s actually a temptation even, even for men, but like the idea that the transformations that are operated by the feminine, not just even like female characters, but just the types of transformations which are operated by the feminine, like, these are extreme. You know that movie, the, I don’t know if you’ve seen the movie, the big fat Greek wedding. I use this example all the time, right? There’s a scene, there’s a scene. So this girl wants to marry this guy who’s not Greek and her father doesn’t want it. And there, and like the father says, no, you can’t marry the guy. And the girl is crying and her mother’s with her. And she’s like, that is the head of the household. You know, he, whatever he says goes, he puts his foot down, that’s it. And the mother looks at her and she says, yes, the father is the head of the household, but the mother is the neck. And wherever the neck turns, that’s where the head looks. And it’s like, right. And so, but that’s already saying too much. Like that, that scene is already scandalous because you don’t, if you tell the man, I’m the neck, it’s not gonna work. You have to be in secret. I’m sorry to, like, I’m really like ruining all of this, but like, you have to be in secret, the agent of transformation for it to be real. But she’s telling her daughter she’s the neck, but she would never tell her husband that. If she told her husband she’s the neck, then it would just be a fight. Well, if the neck claims to be the neck, then it becomes the head. Exactly. And so that’s the, that’s the, that’s the, that’s the reality of the secret and the reality of these secret patterns that kind of, and it’s the same thing with the problem of the divine feminine. And the problem of the way it’s presented to Christianity is that as soon as you say it, it becomes a lie. As soon as you say it, it becomes denatured. And so you don’t say it. Again, I find this really interesting ring with the beginning of the Dao book, with Daoism, right? The way that can be named is not the eternal way. The nameless is the mother of all things. So the divine is represented as feminine first in the Dao. And then, but it’s also represented as undefinable. The only thing you can say about it is that it can’t be named. Yeah. And that’s something which I told you is hinted at. Like Sanf from the Syrian uses, he says the divine womb and then says, shut up. He says, and I’m not gonna talk about this. Yeah. Okay. So. It’s interesting to think about it. I think about how, let’s say, kind of new age type spirituality is. Like the nameless stuff is all they wanna ever talk about. It’s all they care about. That’s all they talk about. That’s all they want to put into light. And it’s like, that doesn’t work. You can’t, it doesn’t, if it’s nameless, it’s nameless. Like hint at it and shut up. Don’t stop talking about it. Stop trying to destroy the world with it. And that’s what happened when people talk about it too much is that they’re actually trying to destroy the world with this non-dual infinite unnameable thing. It’s like you’re destroying the world, people. I think, well, I think it’s really funny because I feel like I said in our last conversation, it feels like most people who have been moved by Taoism in the West, just ignore the passage about how the name gives rise to the 10,000 things. They get obsessed with the idea that namelessness is first. Don’t notice that you don’t get anywhere until you bring in the name. So that fits with what you’re saying.