https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=l-A59wHL9ug
I’d love to hear Jonathan’s take on the association between dragons and lying. So, thoughts on that? Yeah, it’s funny because the way that the question is phrased is perfect to understand the relationship between dragons and lying. The symbolism of the dragon, a lot of it is really connected to the symbolism of the serpent or the symbolism of the snake. And you see it in scripture, there’s a relationship, of course, between the word for serpent in some cases, tannin, and the notion of the sea monsters. The idea of the leviathan is also connected to the notion of the great sea serpent. And so, it’s really a, it’s a very intuitive thing to understand that the snake is the twisty. The snake is exactly that bending. That’s one of the reasons why the snake is the one that lies to us because there’s, imagine the tree, which is a straight, and then imagine the snake, which is bendy and turns. And that’s the turning of untruth, let’s say. You can imagine truth as an arrow hitting a target, and then you can imagine the serpent as the one that takes, that moves from left to right and takes twisty ways in order to get what it wants. And so, there’s an, and we even use this notion also, and it’s also about the one and the many. It’s not just a forked tongue, this idea of speaking two things at the same time or having two sides at the same time. And that’s also the snake because the snake can be in two places at the same time in his own body. And so, there’s a very intuitive connection to the way that snakes present themselves to us and the relationship of that to lying and to manipulating. And of course, there is a difference between, and it has to do with purpose. And this is why also, when you talk about the idea of, let’s say, of slightly framing facts in a certain manner in order to reach a good goal, let’s say, or in order to attain a mighty purpose. You even see saints in ascetic writings of fathers who confess sins that they haven’t done in order to get the other person to confess a sin that they really have. You see this kind of behavior where it’s really towards the health of the person, truth as a purpose, as a goal. And then if the purpose is to twist and bend, then that is mostly what the lie is. It’s mostly a twisted purpose in the end. Yeah. And I’ll add that demons, of course, are closely associated. There is the demon that is the serpent in the garden. And demons are closely associated with lying. That’s what they do is they deceive, right? Because they’re trying to lead mankind into rebellion against God. And I once asked, I’m going to try not to bring him up three times because if you bring up Father Stephen DeYoung three times in a podcast episode, then he appears. But yeah, but I was having this conversation with him about demons and names for demons that are given in scripture and in some of the literature that surrounds scripture and informs scripture. And I said, so this one is another name for Satan and this one is another name for the devil and Satan and the devil are not necessarily the same person. And he said, look, it doesn’t work out. You can’t, there’s not a system. There’s not a system. That’s a good way. That’s really helpful to say that there’s not a system. There’s not a system. You can’t say that just because, for instance, in the book of Jubilees, there’s this demon named Mastema who seems to be kind of chief of demons who might be Satan, who might be the devil. And again, those are not necessarily the same person, although in some sources they seem to be the same person. And I said, I said, well, how do you, like, is there some key to all of this? Some, you know, that I can figure it out? He said, these are lying, deceitful spirits. Why would you think that there’s going to be some easy way to sort them out? You know, this is their actual reality. So of course, the way that mankind has encountered them over the centuries and the millennia is not going to be consistent. It’s not going to be in any way that we can make sense of. You know, and so, you know, dragons, it’s interesting how dragons are often depicted in almost any literature is one of the things that’s really characteristic of them is age typically, that they’re usually depicted as ancient beings. Right. Isn’t that the way that mankind has encountered demons? I mean, demons are compared to us, bodyless, and so therefore they don’t get old and die. The same demons have been afflicting mankind for how we don’t know how long, you know, thousands of years. And over that time, they’ve appeared in many ways and done lots of different kinds of things. I mean, they’re very experienced and they’re expert liars. And it seems in our day that the primary lie is, I don’t exist. The thoughts that you’re having are just you. That seems to be the main lie that they tell these days. You know, and, you know, in the past or work that I’ve done, I’ve often had to say to people, just because you have a thought doesn’t mean it comes from you. Yeah. There’s, you know, it’s not a flaw that you have that you keep having this thought. It’s that in many cases that the demons know that you’re susceptible to this thought. So they’re going to keep saying it until you accept it. You know, and the key is not to accept it. And if you accept it in the past, you don’t have to accept it. And I think that’s one of the things that you can see, for instance, in with Tolkien’s dragons, we’re going to talk about them, you know, individually. But is that there is this rejection that has to happen that the way that a dragon, at least the ones that tend to when people encounter them one on one, right. I’m not talking about when the dragon comes and just destroys your town, although that happens too. But, you know, when you encounter them one on one, there has to be this personal rejection that has to happen in order to kind of not fall under their spell. Right. And I think that that’s part of the lie, you know, that we accept what the dragon says on some level. We believe it or want to believe it or think that we have no choice but to believe it. Yeah. You know, and therefore he overpowers us. There’s also something important to understand in terms of the age of the dragon, the idea of the ancient dragon. It’s also related just like in the mythologies of giants and the mythology of the Titans, for example, in Greek mythology and in different cultures have this idea of these ancient beings that are there before our time. And the before our time is really important to understand what these creatures are to us, you know, because they like I talked about how they are chaos. And there’s a sense in which everything that is before our time is somewhat chaotic, because it’s not connected to you. It’s not part of your story. It’s some weird story from some other time, from time before you, some time very far away. And so because of that, it has that monstrous quality to it. And it also has that kind of it has that power of the dragon because it because it doesn’t it’s not part of the story you’re in. It can have a destabilizing function, right? It can devour your world if you’re not careful with it. You know, and you see that you see it, you see saw it happen very, very explicitly in the kind of Egyptology madness, you know, where people became obsessed with Egyptian mythology. And it wasn’t our story. And people didn’t understand those stories. They’re not connected to your story. And then the these weird Egyptian myths started to like devour our stories. And not long after you had people somehow claiming that Christianity is an Egyptian religion or all this kind of nonsense that you you hear all over the place because it’s these ancient, ancient stories which are before us. And you have to keep them at a certain distance from you. Just like even like when we you know, I study Greek myths and I study ancient mythology, I find them interesting. But I have to be careful because they’re not my story. They’re there. We can look at them from afar and be be find them interesting and see some connections. But you have to be careful not to jump into it because it’s a dangerous beast to play with. Right. And, you know, it’s notable that in the Exodus that God says that he has judged the gods of Egypt. You know, so on the one hand, he’s defeating actual demonic beings and calling his people out. But he’s calling his people out. You know, they’re not part of that Egyptian story anymore. They have to come out. They’re now Israel.