https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=NW_WlIurGtA
So hello everybody I am here with Father Andrew Dhammick and Father Stephen DeYoung. Both of them are working with Ancient Faith Radio and started a new podcast called the Lord of Spirits and the people around me, the people that watch my videos, everybody has been really excited about this podcast. I listened to the first episode and it’s very very fascinating. It’s a very, it’s an exploration of the world of angels, of spirits, of demons, basically trying to help people understand that as Christians, as believers, we don’t believe that it’s just us and God, although we do believe that God, the God we worship is transcendent, is beyond time, beyond space, beyond everything, is uncreated, but that between us and God, let’s say in the hierarchy of beings, there is a whole bunch of stuff going on. That’s how the ancients understood it, that’s how the fathers understood it, and so they are trying to dive back into that understanding and present it to us today in a manner that we can understand and that can also help us transform our lives in relation to all of this. Now I’m going to have some questions, some tough questions too, I hope they’re ready, in terms of what this means and what the consequences of going into this might be, because as you’ve seen in my videos, I’ve been tempted by talking about this more and more, and so yeah, so I think we’re going to have a lot of fun. This is Jonathan Peugeot, welcome to the symbolic world. So I don’t know who is going to speak first, but I would like you to maybe tell us a little bit about your vision for this podcast, you know, what you’re trying to accomplish, and then we’ll just dive in. I think we’ll probably have to cut it short because there’s so many things we could probably talk about, and so we’ll see. Yeah, well I’ll go first. I usually go first on the topic of the topic of the topic of the topic of the topic of the topic of the topic of the topic of the Well, I’ll go first. I usually go first on the actual show because I’m the one who’s looking at all the blinky lights in the studio, but yeah, so you know Father Stephen and I have come bring very different things to the table, and my desire to do this show was number one, in some ways to to give a wider audience to some of the work that Father Stephen has been doing in terms of talking about the the Bible especially and the Orthodox tradition in its full sense, and especially in the sense that is maybe hidden from us as people who tend to function as materialists, right, and so the reason why I’ve been fascinated by that stuff is because, you know, serving for a number of years as a pastor and still doing pastoral work in another different kind of way now, I think one of the biggest problems that we have in our age is that we tend to function as materialists. We tend to function, even if we’re believing Christians, we tend to function in a way that suggests that the 3D world is all that there is, and occasionally we maybe add in some God here and there, and then, you know, if we’re then we occasionally maybe add in some saints and angels, if we feel like really desperate, you know, God please do this for me, and oh by the way, you saints and angels please help, you know, and the truth is that’s a very anemic way of understanding the spiritual life, and so I’m also fascinated by narrative, and I think narrative is really the way that we understand and organize reality, the way that we actually able to approach it, and so much of what we’re talking about in this program is about reclaiming narratives that are in Orthodox tradition, they’re in the scriptures, they’re in the church fathers, they’re in the liturgical services, but have become opaque to us because of our modern culture and its, you know, secular humanistic materialism, so that’s kind of the nutshell of what it is that I’m interested in, particularly for this particular program. Father Stephen, maybe tell us about your research and, you know, the way you’ve been presenting it to people. I know in a blog for a while, but now in this podcast, tell us a bit about the angle and what you’re trying to accomplish with what you’re doing. Yeah, I’m the Bible nerd of our duo. I actually went and got a PhD in it, and I’ve spent a lot of my life studying ancient dead languages, but I think a big part of what has motivated me is I don’t think that as Orthodox Christians living in the West, for the most part, we sort of fully appropriated our tradition. It’s all there. It’s all in the tradition. It’s in our liturgics. It’s in the fathers. It’s in the scriptures themselves, but we’ve tended to, in part, I think because we’re doing this work in English, so we start out adopting traditional English language theological terms, sort of our interpretive grid for theology and understanding God and understanding the scriptures has been dictated by sort of modern assumptions, mostly modern Protestant assumptions, especially in terms of the Bible. And so, you know, we try to figure out, well, what’s the Orthodox view of justification? What’s the Orthodox view of predestination? We take these Western categories and just try to plug in the Orthodox stance, and you don’t end up with the Orthodox faith that way. You end up with sort of an Orthodox-ish form of Western Christianity. And so, I’ve been trying mainly to try to pull out some of this stuff that’s there in the scriptures, there in our tradition, especially the very early fathers, there in the Jewish traditions of the Second Temple period that formed the background for the New Testament that people just don’t know about and sort of show that, hey, this is what’s there, that there’s a whole other way of understanding all of these things that’s more original, that is the basis of the Orthodox faith, and that we’re just unaware of. That’s already with one episode in the bag, the most common comment we get, either from a critical side or a non-critical side is, why haven’t I heard this before? Well, one of the things that we’ve been, that has been a disservice to us, let’s say in the West, is our translations have been a desire to demythologize the scripture. And so, when I tell people that in the creation narrative, it says that God created sea monsters and people, they’ve never seen it, but it’s right there in front of you. They just use words to kind of make you think that, to avoid the problems or to avoid all the strange characters, the dragons, the demons, the strange gods that are named or these strange mythological creatures, there has been this attempt to kind of shield this from us in order to protect Christianity in the modern world. But now, in the past few decades, what we’ve had is, we’ve had kind of secular atheist type biblical scholars come at us with arrows and knives and say, all of this stuff is there and try to bring it back. And Christians have no idea. And so, one of the things I’m excited about what you’re doing is saying, we’re going to do this, but we’re going to do it in a way to show that it’s completely coherent with our Christian tradition. It’s not in opposition to it. It’s not there to undermine what we believe. Yeah. Yeah. We don’t have to be embarrassed by the appearance of monsters and spirits and so forth in the Bible. They are there. There’s this idea that we need to sort of make Christianity respectable. We need to make sure that it’s something we can talk about in polite company at cocktail parties with educated people. So, if we start talking about demons or we start talking about sea monsters or we start talking about giants, they’re going to laugh at us. So, we need to figure out some way to paper over that, some other way to understand that so that we can all be modern, intellectual, respectable folk. My big question, this is like, I’m going to go straight to the toughest question, I would say, is one of the reasons that I have been going very slowly at this or kind of bringing people slowly onto this point of view, which is this notion of these principalities of these beings, is I’m afraid of the Marvel Comics spirituality. I’m afraid of the Marvel Comics version of mythology, which is that everything is on the same level. So, you have these beings, but they’re all basically like us. They’re all basically on a kind of material sphere, I would say. And so, Thor’s on another planet and these gods are kind of floating in space or the recent version we’ve heard are things like they’re in other dimensions. This type of speaking, which is trying to use scientific speak to explain these beings, but always trying to explain them on the same level. And so, this is the thing that I’m a little worried about because to me, what it ends up creating is a kind of science fiction version of the Bible. And so, I don’t know if that’s something you’ve thought about. Yeah, like one thing you notice, for instance, in the recent Marvel films, I think it was the last Avengers movie. Thor gets a beer belly. So, this is the reification of Thor, that he’s real. He’s so real, he can become a deadbeat and get drunk and have a beer belly and be out of shape. Whereas, no one who ever worshiped Thor and the Christians who encountered Thor worshipers would have ever seen him that way. Those who worshiped him would have regarded him as a god and those who encountered those worshipers were regarded him as a demon, which are both biblical terms for the same kinds of beings. And he was not just a human with kind of superpowers who lives on another planet, but actually this spiritual being who through sacrifices and through sin, frankly, is in communion with this group of people and affecting them and they’ve made him part of their community and he’s super dangerous. So, the powers that he wields are by virtue of the kind of being that he is. And he’s not just like us. He doesn’t get bummed out like us. He doesn’t fall in love like us. He doesn’t get a beer belly like us. That’s just not what Thor is, just as an example. But yeah, I’ve long loved comic books and Father Steven is a comic book lover as well. But that’s not the real Thor. Well, there are analogies that say, I mean, I like comic books too, for sure. And I think that there are analogies to help us understand sometimes. You can use analogies of physical power to help you understand spiritual power. There are ways to use those tropes. And let’s say the manner in which even in the stories of the gods that they’re told, they’re told that way, right? That the gods are described in ways that have massive, let’s say, physical power and that they manifest this power. There’s a mapping on of the two worlds. Let’s say there’s a mapping on of the higher world with the lower world and we use words from the lower world to talk about it. But angels don’t, right, angels don’t have physical bodies or they have something like subtle bodies or you could call them that. I don’t know. Am I wrong in my understanding? Father Steven, what is your vision of this? Well, I think to begin with your original question, I think really getting into the reality of this does the exact opposite. I think the whole spiritual world and God himself has been sort of domesticated by sort of modern theology, especially Protestant theology. You’ve got Calvinism, which basically has a God who’s within time and sometime in the ancient past sat down and wrote out everything that was going to happen. And if he didn’t do that, then he’s not sovereign and he’s not in control. And then you have people who respond to that and go the other way with open theism who say that God doesn’t know the future. So we’ve got these wizards who humanize God. So I think when we come and say, well, if you look at the scriptures, the angels are these vast cosmic intelligences that help God in his governing of the spiritual and the material world. I think that’s a much less sort of marvelous, that’s less Justice League. And I think the word intelligence is probably the, I mean, it’s a traditional word to talk about these beings. And it’s probably a good way to speak about them in a manner that people can maybe understand what we’re dealing with here. Because one of the things you said, I think it was in the first episode, or maybe I read it on your blog, where you talk about the notion that the spiritual world in for the ancients, even though it’s seen as these intelligences that are above us and that are kind of managing the world, they nonetheless map on to the physical world, right? There’s a correlation. And so you have places in the world that are like, you know, the gates of hell or the mountain of the gods, or you have all these physical spaces in the world that kind of let’s say concentrate these spiritual powers. But it doesn’t mean that, let’s say, that if you went up the Mount Olympus, you would find God, you’d find Zeus sitting there kind of, you know, fiddling away at his lightning bolts, you know. But it’s difficult because people are so materialistic that I’m always afraid sometimes that, like, do you understand what I’m talking about? Because sometimes I’m a little worried when I talk to people about this stuff. We have the ancients saw these things as sort of overlapping, like to use a modern term, it’s like you have a transparency over a photo, you know. And so the Aterusian Lake, for example, was a lake in Hades, in Giole, in the underworld. And it was the place of, for Plato, it was the place of forgetting where the souls sort of lose their memories before they get reincarnated. In general Greco-Roman paganism, it was just forgetting their former lives completely and sort of starting to dwindle away to nothingness. Christians adopt that. And in a lot of the early Christian apocryphal works like the Life of Adam and Eve, they have repentant people in Hades at the coming of Christ being baptized in that lake and being cleansed of their sins and then able to enter into paradise. But that lake, you know, we could talk about how that functions in the stories of these, but that was also a lake in Italy. You could go there. It’s an actual physical lake. And they didn’t think it represented this spiritual reality. They thought those two things were the same. They overlapped. It’s more like a manif- I always use the word manifesting in the sense that it’s not an arbitrary representation, but it’s a condensation of something which is beyond what it’s condensating. Like it’s actually manifesting this principle, but the principle or the intelligent part of it is beyond what is being shown to you, let’s say. You know, just like a church really does, the physical building of the church really does become the place where Christ descend, manifest themselves in the cup, really, really. But you cannot limit that just to the blood and bread that’s in the cup because there’s something else going on. It’s pointing us, bringing us into something higher than what’s there. Yeah. And also that human participation makes a big difference in terms of what people actually experience. Right? So like early on, one of the memes that I think Father Stephen shared on our podcast Facebook page had these two pictures on it. And on the top, you see this very plain, very primitive looking sort of village with huts, you know. And then on the bottom, you see this idyllic countryside where you see mythological beings cavorting with human beings. And they’re labeled separately. I’m doing this from memory, so I forgive him for getting this wrong. But the top one with the sort of primitive bare, you know, set of huts, it says something like, what a video camera would have seen. And then at the bottom, it says what ancient people’s experienced. Yeah. And so, you know, what is the difference between those two? Like if I go to those huts, I’m probably going to just see huts. Because I don’t know how to participate in the same way that those people did. Right? And so, you know, and I think that that’s one of the key things, right, is this sense of ritual participation, but also just having the imagination. And by that, I don’t mean that they’re coming up with ideas in their heads, and then they’re seeing things. But I’m saying, having the ability to recognize something as being there and having that ability, then you actually do see more, right? So, you know, like, for instance, you talked about that lake in Italy. Just because you go to that place in Italy and stick your toe in doesn’t necessarily mean you’re going to forget everything you ever knew. Right? There’s something else going on there at the same time, right? There’s certain conditions that kind of have to be met in order to have that specific experience. You know, and like, I’m still kind of grappling to get a handle on a lot of this stuff. Father Steve has been working with it for a lot longer. But one of the things that I’ve found that’s really fascinating to me is that so much of it is I have this internal feeling of like, I’ve always wanted this to be real. I was one of this to be true. And now actually, now I have a coherent way of understanding how it is in fact, true. Right? So these sort of human intuitions that we have about the presence of spirits, for instance, there is a vocabulary, there is a tradition to understand and access and approach in the right way, these realities, because like, there are other ways to access them that are not the right way. You know, you can engage in the occult, you can engage in, like we were talking about offline psychedelic drug usage, you can engage in this stuff, and get in contact with the spiritual world. But you’re lost. That’s the difficulty is that a lot of the, there’s a hierarchy of beings. And there’s also a hierarchy in the good sense, in the sense that, that which is connected to which is above, but there’s also a hierarchy in the sense that there is a bunch of stuff that’s disconnected, or that’s wild and not that, you know, that is beings that are on their own and doing their own thing. And people have no way of discerning how what or how what they’re encountering when they they go on these trips. At least that’s my perception, you know, people, I remember one time a guy, who I respect very much, but he was telling me about psychedelics, and he was, you know, he was trying to get me to do psychedelics. A lot of people are trying to get me to do psychedelics. And so I was asking questions, and I’m like, okay, well, tell me about your thing, you know, explain it to me. And he’s saying, and then he says, well, you take psychedelics and everything, and if you ever see a monster, he said, you know, just relax, just relax, and like, ask it what it has to teach you. And I’m like, you know what, let’s let’s move on to something else. Because if I see a monster, I’m not going to ask it what it has to teach me, because that would probably not be good for my soul. You know, it’s funny. And I want to write, don’t talk to the monsters. But you know, it’s funny, like, so within 24 hours of our first episode, we must have received, I don’t know, five or six messages from people that essentially kind of went like this. My house is haunted. What am I supposed to do about this? You know, and I mean, like, we’re gonna, we’re gonna talk about this at some point. But yeah, I mean, Father, Steven, you could probably comment on that. Like, like, I don’t know, it’s so funny, we’re just kind of, there’s this explosion of interest that we’ve experienced. And so there’s an unending list of topics, you know. Well, yeah, and there’s, you know, I frequently brought up when I’m talking about this, and you’ve heard me do it, like at speaking engagements, I bring up the fact that for example, St. John Chrysostom in one of his homilies instructs his people on what to do when they encounter the spirit of a dead loved one. So apparently, this happened frequently enough to people that he had to give them directions on what they should do, right? And how they should handle it. And what did he say? I need to know. What did he say? He said, assume it’s a demon. Right. That’s he’ll prove it otherwise. Assume it’s a demon trying to trick you. But I say that, and people kind of chuckle, they’re like, wow, that’s weird. But then, when everyone’s everyone else leaves the room, I have people start coming up to me and say, hey, when my mom died, when my dad died, when my aunt died, when my grandma died, I kind of did, you know, they tell me they’ve had that experience. And I think these experiences are well, because this is reality, because spiritual reality is reality. People have these experiences, they try to write them off or re explain them or man, I must say something weird, or, or, or whatever, or they just don’t admit that they’ve had them because everybody again, they won’t be respectable, everybody will look at them like they’re crazy. You know, so so this reality intrudes on people’s lives. And so part of what I think is valuable about what we’re trying to do, hopefully for people is that we’ll give them a content, an orthodox context in which to talk about and understand that, you know, and what what do you do with your houses on? Well, I’ve done an exorcism on a house. And I ended up doing it because it wasn’t an orthodox person. It was a person from a Nazarene church. But he went to his pastor and said, Hey, this weird stuff is happening. This thing grabbed me and left like, burnt finger marks on my body. What do I do? And his Nazarene pastor was like, I don’t know, you need to go find a priest. Don’t you watch movies? Find a priest? What do you got here? I got this is it in my wheelhouse, right? This is I don’t have the toolbox for this, right? So I mean, these things happen to people and, and they’re normal in the sense that they’re part of the whole world. We’ve just done everything we can to blind ourselves to the whole spiritual element of the world around us. Yeah. Well, one of the things that’s being opened up, I would say right now is there are certain scientists and certain thinkers. There’s someone his name is Don Hoffman, who’s kind of attracting a lot of attention. And he’s, he’s positing that consciousness is basically a fundamental part of, of the world, like it’s a fundamental particle of the universe, and that it scales down the human, it scales down from our experience all the way down to the subatomic level, and it scales up as well, beyond persons. And then this this phenomena of consciousness scales up. And, and so, you know, and he’s really kind of muddling around, you can tell that he doesn’t have any traditional metaphysics, he hasn’t studied philosophy, he’s really doing it as a scientist, but he’s, he’s trying to account for consciousness, which is the last thing that scientists are unable to really account for. They can’t explain it, they don’t understand it, despite the fact that it’s through consciousness that they’re saying everything they’re saying, that they’re, everything they’re doing is basically through the lens of consciousness, but they can’t account for that phenomena. They think it’s just a phenomena, it’s not a phenomena, right? It’s the, it’s the place, the place meeting of heaven and earth, we could say. But what happens is that it opens up the possibility, even for materialists, are kind of scientifically minded, the possibility that the world actually organizes itself, not just in material categories, but in consciousnesses, you know, and if you join that with a kind of traditional metaphysics, if you imagine, let’s say, the platonic metaphysics of ideas, that the notion that there’s a hierarchy of concepts, you could say, or ideas, whereas the real traditional way of understanding it is that no, there’s a hierarchy of beings. The world manifests itself through beings and that even things in the world, that say sectors of reality are, have principalities that are beings that are managing those things. And it’s hard for people to kind of grasp that, but if you, in our human endeavor, that’s how it works, right? We have a mayor, we have a president, we have a general, we have these characters that are acting as principalities on larger constituents, you could say. Yeah, I’m totally fascinated by panpsychism, which is what you’re talking about. Yeah. Yeah. In large part, because it accords with, you mentioned, you know, the platonic metaphysics, but I mean, back when I was studying philosophy, I did a thesis on in Aristotle’s physics, Aristotle has everything having a will, anything that has a nature has a will, because will is a function of nature, which is also part of our orthodox theology that separates us from the West in a lot of ways. But that’s sort of treated as some kind of weird, crude, of course, by modern people reading Aristotle, they’re like, oh, this is some weird crude, he’s, you know, humanizing natural elements and the world soul and all of this, but this was basic to the ancient view is that there are these consciousnesses associated with everything in the material world. And as you say, that the idea that they scale based on the complexity of the system that they represent, but and then the question was, like when you read Philo, responding to Plato in a Jewish context, he’s saying, these consciousnesses aren’t gods to be worshiped in their own right. Right? They’re gods, we would put it with a small G, but they’re those beings created by and appointed by the God to administer his creation and through whom he administers his creation. And then the idea of demonic rebellion is that some of these powers have rebelled and were being worshiped as gods by the various nations treated as ends in themselves, rather than as part of this hierarchy that leads toward the God. Yeah, that’s it. One of the questions is probably this is a question that I’ve had for very, very long time. So I’m going to ask Father Stephen because I want an answer to this. So one of the things that I would say, people are going to call me a heretic now, but one of the things that I’ve appreciated, let’s say in the Islamic cosmology is the possibility of the jinn. Okay. That is, it seems to me, this is, and I might be wrong because maybe I do come from a Protestant background, but it seems to me that in the Christian cosmology of which I’m aware of, there’s this idea that there are, let’s say, angelic beings that are connected in the hierarchy to God and then there are demonic beings that are rebelling and therefore, let’s say, fallen or scattered, full of pride and pulling the world apart, let’s say, diabolos. But we don’t seem to have the possibility of beings that are neutral or that are ambiguous in between and we don’t have that, but then they reappear nonetheless as like fairies and gnomes and all these, let’s say, kind of folk beings that are there for the Christians even though they’re not part of their official Christian cosmology, let’s say. So to me, that’s like something that I’ve always wondered about. Are there traces in the Fathers or in, let’s say, in the traditional text or the extra biblical stories where we talk there, there is this idea of neutral or ambiguous beings? I think there are two answers to that. First is that that’s sort of where humans are because humans are both immaterial and material, right, but by being a soul-body unity, humans are the bridge between the unseen and the seen world and so we are sort of in between in that regard or able to move in either direction, would probably be a better description. The other place where you see that kind of thing is with the idea of the giants where you have this kind of, and we could talk about how to see that, but this quote-unquote hybridization idea of something fallen and something human, right, and there are some outlier traditions, but there are some outlier traditions that have people who would be categorized as giants but who are nonetheless righteous or repentant. And I think Father Andrew’s favorite one that I pointed out to him is that there is actually a tradition that Noah had some kind of Nephilim connection himself. Yeah, and they represent in different ways. Yeah, he’s made a nama with his children or he himself is kind of a, because he’s an artisan. Even in the regular story, you can see that he has something of Cain’s descendants because he builds a boat and that all is in Cain’s lineage. There are a lot of stories of his miraculous birth and there are a whole series of stories where after his sort of miraculous weird birth, his father Lamek is kind of like, hey, is this mine? Did an angelic being get involved here because he seems to be, right, and he has to sort of be reassured. And the dynamics of a lot of those stories actually get inverted, but they get reused by Saint Matthew in his gospel in terms of Saint Joseph’s questioning when the Theotokos becomes with child. Now they get inverted because he’s told the opposite answer. Lamek sort of reassured, like no, it’s not yours. Whereas Joseph, it’s like, yeah, no, it’s not, you know, humans. But the same kind of dynamics in the story get played out. So there is, those would be the two places I think where you would see something like that. Even then, I don’t think there’s ever really neutrality, but there’s the capability for certain beings to move in either direction. They’re not sort of locked in place. Yeah, because C.S. Lewis seems to want to try to recast that idea. And so, you know, he takes the different kind of little gods or the woodland creatures and the woodland spirits, and he recasts them in his Narnia series as being somehow something which I think are akin to the Djinn, like are these characters that you don’t really know, like they’re kind of neutral, you’re not sure. Some of them are with Athlon, some of them aren’t, and some of them can flip. Anyway, so I just thought I just was wondering about that because I see that someone like C.S. Lewis seems to have tried to create something akin to that in his series. Yeah, and you know, I mean, so you know, you and I have talked about Tolkien in the past a little bit, and Tolkien tries to deal with this on some level too, right? So on the one hand, you know, we were talking earlier about the idea of spiritual beings who are engaged at kind of every level of creation kind of helping to make it go. Like one of the best fictional depictions of that is in the Silmarillion by J.R.R. Tolkien when he was in the Silmarillion, J.R.R. Tolkien, when you have the one god who creates this, you know, the angelic beings, and they’re engaged in all this and so forth. And then some of them rebel, right? Justice happened in the real world. And at the same time, then there’s various kinds of creatures that exist in his world, like, you know, that seem to not necessarily always be entirely aligned in one direction or another. Although if you really had to sort them out, I think you could probably do it. But like the one of the ways that he attempts to kind of solve this problem is you have men and elves. But he essentially says that elves are essentially a kind of version of man, you know, that they’re two different types of peoples of the same one species. Yeah, right. Like a cat, like a caste system of some kind. Sort of. Yeah, sort of. But of course, you know, elves can be evil too, even though like when you encounter them in the Lord of the Rings, they’re generally, you know, almost divinized, right? But yeah, so it’s interesting how there’s various people that are attempting to kind of work out how to deal with these problems of, you know, how do you represent spiritual forces in the world? And also, what do you do with the fact that mankind has always kind of seen, up until relatively recently, has kind of seen fairies and sprites and gnomes around every tree? I think one of the problems that makes it difficult for us to understand that is that, especially since the Victorian era, a lot of those creatures have been kind of domesticated. So like Tolkien hated, for instance, one of the things he hated about Shakespeare, now he’s pre-Victorian. But the one of things he had about Shakespeare is that Shakespeare’s fairies are kind of too small. They’re too weak, right? They’re too cute. And that really becomes extreme in the Victorian era. Up to Peter Pan, yeah. Yeah, right. And now you get, you know, images of, you get Tinkerbell. Tinkerbell is the ultimate in cute fairies. Although it’s interesting how Tinkerbell is then presented in Peter Pan as being ultimately dangerous, right? Tinkerbell attempts to kill Wendy, you know. So even then you still have this idea that they’re dangerous, but they’ve been made much, much smaller, right? Whereas Tolkien’s elves and fairies and so forth are dangerous people to run into and generally not a good idea. So one of the things that I don’t bring up often, but I think in this case, it’s probably a good idea to bring up, the author, René Guénon, who was like an early century traditionalist, and he came out of the occult. Some of the stuff he wrote is very, is off. Some of the stuff he wrote is quite good. But one of his theories that he has was that materialism was like a wall that the civilization had built around itself to protect itself or to isolate itself from the spiritual world, let’s say. And he said it was actually, you know, a certain way successful. Like there, it’s true, there are less miracles, there are less manifestations, you know, and say from the Enlightenment on, there are less and less connection with what you would call the spiritual world. And so the materialism, philosophical materialism, and then had actually created this wall around the world. But his theory was that at the end, one, because that can’t hold, at some point it’s going to start to crack. And he called it the great fissures in the wall. But he said, when the wall cracks, it’s going to crack at the bottom, it’s going to crack below. And it’s the stuff from beneath that are going to come up. But people are still going to be more isolated from the higher beings. And we’ve seen, like he wrote that maybe in 1920. And we’ve seen it, you know, with all the new age insanity and all the craziness, we’ve seen it kind of happen, manifest itself. And so this brings me then to the question of the, you know, kind of what you’re trying to bring back, which is, you know, the book of Enoch and the Enochian traditions, we could call them, have been controversial, like to a certain extent in Christianity. But nonetheless, it seems like they do offer us a way to deal with this in the world. As we see these beings kind of creep back into reality, you know, it offers us a, I’d say a map or a guide to help us understand what exactly is going on. I don’t know if you’ve thought about that. Well, I think building off what you said, I think the rule of Christ gave us the luxury of materialism for a while. Right, because the Western world Christendom, right, as such, right, the fact that there weren’t practicing pagans. And so sort of idolatry and the religious aspects of sexual immorality had been kind of ruled out. It kind of created this space where there weren’t a lot of demonic manifestations and people getting possessed, which were commonplace in the ancient world and are still commonplace in some parts of the world. But within Christendom, they became relatively rare, and that allowed everyone to become materialists. Right, but the problem is that materialism then turned on Christ himself. For a while in the 18th and 19th centuries, they kind of put brackets around God and Christ and said, well, we’ll get rid of all the rest of this stuff, but we’ll keep those. But once you deny those, you lose that sort of protection. And that’s why you get sort of the return of demonic powers of chaos sort of welling up from the bottom, like you described. And in terms of the anarchic literature in particular, it was actually less controversial in the ancient church than it is now. I think, frankly, Sola Scriptura has poisoned the well in the West, where we, even most Orthodox people have this very binary view of like something is canonical, and therefore 100% true and literal. Or it’s non-canonical, and therefore it’s full of lies, and it’s garbage, and you shouldn’t read it, and it’s bad. Yeah. So why do you think the anarchic literature was lost? Because to a certain extent, I think the only copies of those texts were kept in Ethiopia, and most of the whole world had lost those traditions. They kind of had faded away in some way. In the West, in the West they had. We know they were still in circulation. In the eighth and ninth centuries, you have Byzantine historians drawing on that when they write their chronicles and write the history of the world, they’re pulling directly from First Enoch for all of their early history of the world. Interesting. And George Sinkelos in the eighth century basically said, this is the Byzantine word on First Enoch, he said it was an apostolic apocryphal. What he meant by that was in the original meaning of apocrypha, something hidden. So he was saying this is a text that has this information that’s part of the apostolic tradition, part of the apostolic preaching. Saint Irenaeus is on the apostolic preaching, basically cites straight from First Enoch. The scripture cites quotes from Enoch. But it’s hidden in that it’s not read publicly in the churches. Because that’s what canonical means, means we read it in liturgy. It’s not read in liturgy, so it’s hidden in that way. But it is this apostolic tradition. Even Saint Augustine, and I hate bashing Saint Augustine because he gets picked on way too much. But Saint Augustine is really the first one to really reject. And that’s why it sort of fell into disfavor in the West because the West became all about Saint Augustine. But even he, when he talked about the Book of Enoch itself, said that, well, yes, Enoch wrote something. He says, Saint Jude quotes it as being from Enoch. He says, but this text is so old. That would mean, right? That means it’s antediluvian. It’s from before the flood. He says, it’s so old, we have no way to verify that what we now have is the original Book of Enoch. That’s why you shouldn’t trust it. That was his argument. It wasn’t to just say this is spurious. So even he, who was the first one to really be against it, had this sort of marginal acceptance. And Saint Jerome at the same time, his contemporary, went into a protracted argument about how, well, Noah must have had a copy on the ark. Like, to explain how the book survived the flood. Who’s going all out with that? My goodness. Like, how could this have survived the flood? Well, Noah must have had a copy that he got from his great grandfather and brought with him. You know, like he had this whole elaborate thing. So it was much more accepted in the early church because they didn’t have, they really had three categories. They had canonical that’s read in liturgy. They had books to be read in the home, and then they had books not to be read, they were heretical. And the books to be read in the home, so you still find people the fifth and sixth century quoting the shepherd of Hermes, authoritatively, for example. But they wouldn’t have said it was canonical. They wouldn’t have read from it in liturgy. But they’re still quoting from it. The same thing with first Enoch, all the way into the eighth and ninth century, with examples we still have. Yeah, well, I’m happy to hear that because I have been trying to, let’s say, slowly reintroduce the ideas from first Enoch, mostly because it seems like it offers us a map of what’s happening around us right now. Because one of the stories of first Enoch is, of course, the increasing of technicity, which is connected with magic. We tend to want to separate those, but they’re really very similar in the sense that there’s an accelerated modification of nature, which is brought about by connection with these demonic beings. And these demonic beings teach all the different crafts and the different, also ornamentation, which is important. I think it’s Azazel who teaches both metallurgy and ornamentation, which is such a great connection between the two. Weapon making and seduction making. So it seems like we’re going through the same situation that was happening for Enoch, this acceleration of technicity, the loss of virtue, the loss of morality, the falling into sexual immorality to an extreme degree. All of this is kind of happening at the same time. As we’re talking about the notion of creating an AI, for example, that would be this artificial intelligence. I always tell people, if you want to know what a fallen angel is, just imagine what AI is going to be. That’s probably going to be the closest thing you’re going to come into contact with an AI. So anyways, maybe tell me a little bit about your perception of that trope that I’m trying to bring up here. Yeah, I think you’re right. One of our problems in looking at material from the ancient world is we tend to assume materialism as being what’s actually true. And so when we see stuff from the ancient world, we tend to think, like if we’re trying to give them a break, we’ll say, oh, well, they saw lightning and thunder and they didn’t understand it. And so therefore they had to come up with Thor or Perun or Procunus or Zeus. And then that was their explanation. And so then they wrote stories, they were probably initially metaphors, and eventually people took them as being real, and then they thought that Zeus was a real being as an example. But the problem is that, number one, doesn’t take seriously what these people are saying about their own actual experiences. And that they’re actually encountering divine beings and they’re engaging with them. That’s what they say about themselves. Now we can simply say they’re all lying. But if we accept that idea, then we’re basically saying that almost every single text from the ancient world is a lie, that people are lying about their actual lives across the world consistently. And interestingly, they’re lying in very similar ways throughout the whole world, the whole globe. I’ll give an example that blew my mind when Father Stephen first told me about it. He said, almost every ancient culture, when they depict spiritual beings that they encounter, depicts them as being about 15 feet tall. Everywhere, Africa, Asia, Indo-European cultures, South America, Egyptians, everyone is depicting their gods as being about 15 feet tall. Like, what is that about? I mean, you could explain. I don’t know. Maybe you could explain it to me. Right. So like, you could, for instance, do the historical critical thing and say, okay, well, maybe someone at some ancient Indo-European point depicted a 15-foot tall god. And so then therefore, all of these Indo-European cultures got the 15-foot tall god from that and it kind of spread out from there, right? You know, essentially kind of explain it linguistically. But the problem is, you know, but the problem is, is you have cultures that are not connected to those cultures at all, that are depicting the same things. So you could either say like, wow, that’s an interesting, massive, enormous coincidence all over the world, everywhere. Or you could say, well, maybe they’re all having a similar experience. And so they’re all therefore all depicting the same experience that they’re all having. You know, and so like, that’s one example of these things that are kind of right in front of us, but that we just sort of just disbelieve them from the outset, right? But I think you’re right that we are now experiencing this kind of increase in, for lack of a better term, spiritual activity, right? And it’s funny, like, one of the jokes that Father Stephen and I have sometimes made about the way that we’re already interacting with people about the Lord of Spirits podcast is, you know, at some point, we’re going to have to say, look, we’re not Ghostbusters. You know, we are, we are number one, we are ready to believe you. We are ready to believe you. You know, but that’s like, that’s not what we’re talking about. But it’s interesting that what happens in the Ghostbusters films, right, is a sense of this increase in spiritual activity. You know, they’re talking about that. So that’s, that’s interesting. In Ghostbusters, it’s all materialist. It’s all ectoplasm and like, capturing the ghosts in these machines. It really is like the worst of 19th century, kind of materialist magnetism, all that kind of, I’m sorry to say crap that came up in the 19th century to kind of, to make the spiritual world into material categories. Yeah. People had seances and then they would gather this goo, which was like elective. Yeah. Yeah. I think the dynamic, your point, which obviously is front and center in the book of the Watchers in the book of Enoch about the connection between the increase of kind of demonic activity and the increase in technology has to do with the way, even if we just stick with the Old Testament, the way in the Old Testament that the spiritual powers of chaos and evil attack, right, that their goal is the destruction of God’s creation in general and humans in particular, right? And the way they do that consistently is by trying to give to humans ideas, thoughts, wisdom, knowledge that they’re not prepared for, that they aren’t in a spiritual state to receive yet, because they know that will cause self-destruction. That starts with the serpent with Eve, you know, take the knowledge, right? Yeah. That you’re not prepared for yet. It’s not that the tree was evil. It’s that they weren’t prepared. Yeah. And all the way through, and that’s the same thing in the Watchers story, right? Where I’m going to give them weapons technology. They’re not prepared to use it responsibly, right? And so they’re going to use it to kill each other. I’m going to give them these means, the women, these means of seduction, right? Because they’re not prepared for it and they’re going to fall into sexual immorality. All this destruction and chaos comes. Yeah. And it’s knowledge that fills your desire. It’s knowledge to fulfill your desire for power, for domination, for seduction, all of these things that it’s basically how to act upon the world to get what you want is what they’re giving the people. Yeah. And that’s that experience again, like Father Andrew was saying is universal. That’s why you read about Prometheus. That’s why it’s all of that understanding that there are these spiritual powers who gave to man knowledge he wasn’t ready for that’s been destructive and they were punished for it is universal around the world. And you see it, it’s funny because you, even today, I don’t know, because I’ve mentioned this before, I’ve been sadly, I’ve been strangely been connected with all these people doing psychedelics. And so, you know, they talk about these mechanical elves that they meet, whatever they call them, cock elves or whatever. Machine elves. Yeah. Machine elves, I don’t know. And I read a story, a comic book story about Santa Claus, which is written by a weird pagan guy, Grant Morrison wrote a Santa Claus story. And he has Santa Claus meeting these machine elves, right? He takes some mushrooms or whatever, then he sees these elves and then he makes toys better. But then he also like ends up making a sleigh into like a super sleigh or whatever. But what I was thinking is that, wow, they’re actually encountering the demons from first Enoch. Like they’re actually encountering these beings that are giving them like mechanical formula or giving them, showing them technological feats that they then kind of encounter. And so it’s just very strange because we already have this story from, the story is from thousands and thousands of years ago, but we seem to be going through similar process right now. Yeah. And ayahuasca isn’t a new thing, right? Like it’s been around. To give you an idea of how long it’s been around, the Greek word that’s usually, when you read sorcery in your English Bible, the Greek word that’s usually behind that is pharmacaia. Yeah. Because they were using pharmaceutical, right? Even the oracle of Delphi was inhaling fumes coming out of a crack in the ground to produce an ultra state of consciousness in order to be possessed by the spirit of Apollo and give these oracles. So yeah, it’s not a new thing. That experience has just continued into the modern world. And one of the things I think that makes so much of the stuff very urgent is that, like we were just talking about drug use, for instance, right? For a lot of people, they might ask, why is it immoral for me to do psychedelic drugs? Right? And I mean, if you’d listened to everything we just said, then it becomes clear why it’s a super bad idea, why it’s a rebellion against God, because you’re entering into communion with these other spirits. It’s mostly dangerous. It’s like going on down a dark road without anybody to guide you. And you encounter beings and you think they’re there to help you. What are you doing? This is really not safe. Yeah. And what’s interesting, if you understand Christian morality, not just in terms of a list of things you’re supposed to do and not supposed to do, but rather actually like, this is the right way to interact with the spiritual world as it actually exists. Then all the other elements, for instance, of Christian morality, such as sexual morality, and even things like the right way to worship God, like this all makes much more sense if we understand it as not just being instead of arbitrary tastes or preferences or even just desires, but this is actually, you’re interacting with reality, and there are things that result from that interaction. Right? So that’s why, for instance, over and over again in scripture, you’ve got idolatry and sexual immorality are just paired together as always going together, as an example. And I think it’s frustrating on the one hand to see the modern world just diving headlong into immorality, not because it’s like we’re standing here and saying, look how moral we are. How dare they? But the problem is a lot of people, that’s how they see what Christianity is. That’s what they think Christianity is a sort of moralism. But really, it’s like that immorality is immoral, not because it violates a law somewhere, in the sense of a legal code, but rather that it’s like telling your children not to stick their hand on a hot stove. That’s reality. It’s not just right and wrong, don’t tell me what to do, Dad. No, it’s like, no, you are going to be burned. If you engage in immorality, you are entering into communion with demons. You are. That’s just objective truth. And you can watch people, I saw this as a pastor, watch people who get into it a little bit and then get into it a little bit more and get into it a little bit more. And then they would not even recognize where they had gone when they got it, where they are at the beginning of that process. Yeah. To me, I could just say that I’m very excited to see where this is going to go. I’m really happy that you’re taking this trip. And in a way, I’m happy that you’re doing it, that I’m not doing it because first of all, I don’t have the knowledge to do it, of course, but also because I know this road is going to be fraught with all kinds of strangeness that is going to manifest itself to you in terms of demonic things attacking you, but also people coming to you like Father Andrew already said, coming for help, trying to get them to deal with these experiences that they’ve had that they don’t understand in a modern world where all of this has been, although it’s everywhere in our fiction, it’s everywhere in our stories, in the real world, people try to avoid it or try not to talk about it or put it to the side. But nonetheless, if you look at all the card readers and all the new age stuff, people are trying to understand this. And so I’m happy to see that I’ve got Orthodox priests trying to guide people along the road so they don’t get lost. I think that, and I say this not in a kind of to draw attention to us kind of way, but I think the fact that we are priests, it’s not just a question of authority, right, in the sense of like- Although it is, we’re talking about principalities, right? So that’s the kind of authority. Yeah, right. That’s the authority that I mean is, and it’s interesting, for instance, I had the experience one time, just, and this happened years ago, where my wife was somewhere, and I mean, I wasn’t even present, but my wife was somewhere and this woman approached her in public and essentially kind of offered her, I don’t know if it was a seance or a fortune telling or something like that. Like, you know, and my wife told me that she looked at the woman straight in the eye and said, my husband is an Orthodox priest. That was the one thing she said. And she said that the woman like, drew back in sort of shock and fear. Right, right. So it’s not that I’m some holy person, I’m not. I’m not. But as priests, our task is to stand at the altar and to facilitate people communing directly with God and being engaged with the angels and the saints. And so, you know, there are many times you see in scripture where priests engage in this kind of spiritual warfare, not again, not because they have some special holiness on their own, but because this is the way that God has chosen to work. Right, you know, that offering incense, that offering up the Eucharist, these things are spiritually powerful, and not just in an individual way that makes somebody have a spiritual experience. But like, you know, for instance, that offering up like, you know, for instance, that offering up incense, fumigates the space from dark powers. Like, that’s literally what is happening when incense is being, it’s clearing them out. You know, and you see it happening in the Bible, right? It happens. You know, Father Stephen, what was that? What’s that passage where you see, isn’t it Aaron and a couple of other ones, like there’s some kind of plague that has happened with the people of Israel until they offer up incense to dry this out. After the rebellion of Korah, Aaron takes his censor and his sons take their censors and sort of stand between, the language is that they stand between the living and the dead, offering incense. And as they stand there, sort of the plague stops at that line. Like that forms the sort of barrier between life and death. And yeah, that’s, this is another one of those things that ancient people just understood. You see people offering incense and incense is offered as a sacrifice. There are altars of incense, right? But it says is offered all over, all over the world in every culture. And it’s so ingrained that the Greek word for purification, right? Catharsia, right? Is derived from the Akkadian word for incense. Kataru. That’s where it comes from. And there’s something, I think the materialists who are watching this, who are listening to this, that they really struggle to understand this stuff. And I always want to try to point them back to the notion of intelligence and the notion of consciousness that we brought up at the beginning, which is that if the world is constituted by consciousnesses or by intelligences, that if these intelligent patterns are the way in which the world lays itself out, then it’s not strange to think that ritual behavior or that acting in a way that is meaningful will be part of it, will alleviate these problems. That doing certain things that have meaning and that have a coherent kind of symbolic ritual meaning will affect the world because that’s how the world lays itself out as meaning and as intelligences. And of course, if people can’t even concede that or understand that, then it all looks like superstition and bunk and just whatever. But we do it all the time. We use meaning to affect the world all the time. And the most recent one is, one of them, the most recent one is this mask wearing thing. So much of the mask wearing thing is a ritual behavior. I even saw someone posted recently a post from the New England Journal of Medicine saying that the main aspect of mask wearing is a talisman function, where as people wear the mask, they feel safe and they are willing to act out in the world because they have this kind of protective garment that is shielding them from their perceived danger. And so that’s a ritual behavior. Yeah, I mean, it’s, I think, again, just basic that ritual, well, ritual does something, right? Too often people look at ritual, obviously, 99.999% of people in the world have never studied ritual theory. But we look at ritual, we tend to look at it in this sort of diagnostic way where even if we’re talking about the liturgy or the parts of the liturgy, right? Well, this represents this. And this represents that and this stands for that. But ritual does something. And so yes, the person who participates in ritual is going to be shaped by that. The community that participates in ritual is going to be shaped by that they’re going to be brought together as a community, that community is going to be formed in certain ways. And the example I use with people who are just raw materialists is I talked to them about sports. Maybe this only works in the US. I don’t know. Maybe it works with football other places, like non-American football. But that, right, it does not matter what socks you wear, in terms of whether your team will win or not. It doesn’t matter whether you watch the game, like on a materialist level. It doesn’t matter what you do. It’s not going to affect the outcome of the game. But you cannot tell a sports fan that what they do and their rituals and those kinds of things, you know, dressing up like a team member. As far as they’re concerned, that’s part of the game. That’s part of their team winning is their support from their house miles and miles away. You know, so that we understand it at some base level, even if we won’t let ourselves fully sort of appropriate it. The example I always use is shaking hands. Because, you know, you could say shaking hand represents showing your hands that you don’t have a weapon, that shaking hands represents, you know, a movement towards the other, blah, blah, blah. But it doesn’t just represent it. You’re actually doing the thing. You’re encountering someone and the gesture is creating the bond between you and that person. It’s not just a represent, although you can find all the meaning and it’s there. You can show it. You can show how all of this is very, very meaningful, but it’s also acting in the world and transforming the world in the way that ritual does. Yeah. Well, this has been good. We’ve been going for way longer than I usually go. I knew this was going to happen. But I am really excited, like I said, and I first of all appreciate you coming on here. And I want to tell all the people listening to Nan, it’ll probably be a lot to think about, a lot to discuss, a lot to debate about. I’m certain you’re going to create all kinds of controversy with this podcast, which is going to be good controversy that will help us understand a lot of the spiritual malaise that is in the modern world today. So thank you for your time and thank you for all your efforts. But it’s really hard because it’s so huge. I mean, you can talk about that. You’ll be able to talk about this for seasons of this podcast. Years, I think. I think there’s years worth of podcasts in here. We started out with monotheism is bunk. So it can only stir the pot more for me. I totally agree. I made a video like was it two years ago called The Problem with Monotheism. Especially for the modern atheist, it’s such a great thing to understand. You’ve seen it probably online where they say, you’re an atheist too, I just believe in one less god than you do. You know what? You’ve got the wrong guy because I believe in all the gods. That’s right. Yeah. Oh yeah. We only brushed on it in the first podcast, but you go and take any Old Testament course at a university in the United States. I’m sure this is doubly true in Canada and Europe. They’re going to tell you that Israel started out polytheist like everyone else. Then they evolved into monolatry and then they evolved into Unitarian monotheism sometime around the time of Christ. Around the time of Christ is when they go that far really. Yeah. They have it all laid out and they’ve just adopted wholesale this 19th century German thing. Because then what they want to do is they want to say, okay so polytheism is the thesis, monotheism is the antithesis, and the trinity is the synthesis. They want to do that whole Hegelian move. Look at rabbinical Judaism. They have all the weird stuff. They have way more weird stuff than we do. Oh yeah. There are some key books that I recommend to people all the time by Orthodox Jewish scholars talking about second temple Judaism and the fact that they were not Unitarian monotheists. That they were at least binitarian, sometimes more. In fact, Benjamin Sommer who’s a professor at Jewish Theological Seminary in the US who wrote one of those books in a talk said that Trinitarianism is tame compared to a lot of forms of Judaism. He was talking about different forms of Kabbalah that have like a hundred persons of the Godhead. Even the famous Sephirotic tree, they have 10 manifestations of God and it’s all like the whole tree is God. So it’s like what’s your problem with the trinity already? Yeah. He just comes out and says, you know, this is… I like sending people to the Jewish sources on it because then they can’t say I’m trying to pull something. I’m like, no, these are Orthodox Jews. They don’t have a dog in the fight. It was great to talk to both of you. I’ll send you a link as soon as this is posted. I may even try to post it today or maybe tomorrow morning. Thank you, Jonathan. We appreciate it. Yes. Thank you for having us. And so, and maybe in a few months once you’ve given us a full demonology and angiology, I’ll have you back on the show and we can talk about it again. That’s good. Absolutely. Bye-bye. Hope you enjoyed my discussion with Father Andrew and Father Stephen. Make sure you check out the Lord of Spirits podcast on ancient faith. I’ll be of course putting links to that in the show description. Also, make sure you check out Father Andrew’s other podcast called the Amin Sul podcast, one of his many podcasts actually. I was on there just a few weeks ago talking about dragons. That was also a lot of fun. And don’t forget that The Symbolic World also has a clips channel where Lisa Parrott is putting together clips of all my videos, organizing them in subject. And so if you’ve ever wanted to know what I think of this or that, it is probably the best place to check that out. And don’t forget, of course, with all the strange YouTube changes that are going on, don’t forget to make sure you’re subscribed to the channel if you want to get notifications for the next video. And of course, everything I’m doing is done thanks to your help and your support. So go check out thesymbolicworld.com support if you want to help out the podcast. So thanks everybody and I’ll talk to you very soon.