https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=Z_PnN2I8fOI
So another text tradition that is closely related to this is the Sibylene Oracles, which I’ve been reading through recently. I’m about maybe halfway through. We thank you for reading those because they’re really long and there’s a lot of them. They can be tedious sometimes, but there’s some real nuggets in there. So just to say, usually we associate maybe if you’re a student of mythology and folklore, you might associate the Sibyl with Rome, which is not incorrect, but actually in the ancient world there were a bunch of different Sibyls. Well, you tell people what a Sibyl is because a lot of people will not know what that is. A Sibyl is a female oracle. Basically, it’s a female prophet, a seer, somebody who’s been given access by the divine to sort of know the future, to see the pattern manifesting itself in reality. And so actually your video on the Apocalypse, the Beast of the Apocalypse, came at a really good time because it came out just as I was getting into the Sibylene Oracles. And something that’s really key in there is, of course, scholars have gone through there and they said, well, this verse sounds like paganism. So this verse was written by a pagan, but then this verse is clearly, you know, supposed to mention, you know, refers to Christ. And so 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 dissect it like this, you know. Man, you know what? I hate scholars so much. I know, I know. I apologize on behalf of my tribe. I really do. But I mean, like, it can be a little maddening to kind of like try to trace that down. But 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. And one of the things that’s interesting in there, you said in your video on the Beast of Revelation that prophecies, the way prophecies work, you know, 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 structure to reality that prophecies, you can see, you know, they deal with the patterns. And even if the accidents change, the patterns manifest themselves over and over again. And you see that in the Sibling oracles. 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 Rome. Right. And so the Sibling oracles, which, you know, probably do come together as sort of, you know, probably a hodgepodge of different sources because, you know, even if you believe what the ancients believed, there are many different Sibyls 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 Sibyl, you’ll like this, is Noah’s daughter-in-law. Interesting. Yeah. So 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. 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 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 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 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, again, like you said. Even the existence of these Sibyls and the existence of the kind of strange, what you could call mixture of the some pay more pagan Sibyls, 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 legends together thought that these were could exist it together like that they were living in the same world that somehow the Hellenistic world and the Jewish world had a way to talk, you know, had ways to talk to each other. That’s the thing. Whenever somebody starts to say such and such is syncretic, 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. And it’s also about it’s about meaning. It’s like understanding that what makes what makes syncretism problematic is when it goes against the truth. Right. Right. When it when it moves against the truth, but when sometimes it points towards the truth. And so that’s why some of the ancient myths have a little seed of understanding what Christ will ultimately reveal. And in those seeds, we can see something valuable. 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 culture they just copied the Jewish story and, and it’s all the Jewish story copied the, you know, whatever. Don’t look at that. It’s horrible. Or like you said, or that it’s just the Jews. Or you could see, no, there’s a definitely a common back, the common experience on which this is based, whether it’s a common experience in terms of history or if it’s an actual almost like 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 almost like an imprinted memory on the on human nature. So 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 flood that actually shine brighter when you read the Gilgamesh story, because you like, oh, they’re doing it this way. And so you say, oh, so it’s pointing to something that I hadn’t noticed in the other text. Yeah, and maybe it’s also worth kind of pointing out here. The two things that are so interwoven that you can’t actually 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. 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. And so this this connects two works. What is the apocalypse of pseudo methodius? And the other one is an Alexandrian world Chronicle. So the apocalypse of pseudo methodius is basically like dealing with the whole idea of. After the after the Roman Empire was dealing with it really is 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 our theory in terms like, didn’t we find the grail? Like, shouldn’t things be good now? Like, what’s going on? And then the Alexandrian world Chronicle is another 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 the Alexandrian world Chronicle. But 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 related in that they were from the same author. But they are of a piece right 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. The way that I kind of see it and I think that you pointing to the apocalypse and to the legendary history. There’s something about so if it just experience in terms of experience. So you can imagine you have your moment like the moment in which you live and that moment is you would you have you have access to a certain granularity to that moment if you want to write, you can kind of access the details of this moment. 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. And it’s just like if I said something like, I’m going to die. Right. I’m going to meet death one day. It’s like I’m talking in patterns. I don’t know how I don’t know but 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 the story in Genesis, why it’s so patterned and why it looks like the end of Revelation with the heavenly Jerusalem, and why the prophecies of Ezekiel are talk about paradise and the mountain of precious stones and all of this type of imagery because it’s both. Like there is this extreme in the in the past and the future of how you can actually see the pattern more easily when you look at things that are very far away in both directions, I’d say. And so in the universal when universal history, that’s something that happened. And so one of the elements of the universal history is trying to trace all people’s back to Noah. Right. 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 is seems arbitrary 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, so 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. Then in their characteristics, you’re like, oh, we’re, we’re nomads, we’re hunters, we live, you know, this is how our ancestors lived. And therefore connecting it to Nimrod, who was this giant, as well as the Hungarians 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 actually Hungarians, you know. I think some people think that the word ogre comes from, from like, the 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. And so this is not even like people saying it about them. Right. Because there’s a negative aspect to that, like being a descendant of Nimrod is not like necessarily all positive, 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.