https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=EhqAdco3zFU

All right. Well, maybe the best way to start would be, since I’m sure many people watching this won’t know who you are, if not most of them, just kind of introduce yourself to give everyone an idea of who you are and what you do. So my name is Jonathan Pajot, and I am mostly an artist. I’m an icon carver, which means that I make images based in the tradition of the church for churches, for individuals, following really kind of the canons, we would call it, the standards of iconography and respecting the way that saints or that Christ or that stories have been represented in the past and trying to see in that a wisdom that’s been passed down. And so one of the things that I’m doing as an icon carver is I also study traditional symbolism and try to see, you know, try to understand it, try to see what it means for us today and also try to apply it to the to the world today so that we can we can understand these stories as being as giving us patterns which explain reality and explain our interactions with the world rather than just these arbitrary kind of strange fanciful stories that are from the past. Right. And that’s it’s really kind of great that with, you know, looking at pre-modern theology literature, particularly, but especially things involving saints and these other kind of mythological characters to kind of be able to approach it from that kind of symbolic and artistic standpoint so that it doesn’t just gloss over and say, oh, that’s really weird. I understand what’s going on, but actually try to work out what’s happening and like what’s, you know, because literally these stories have meaning beyond just, you know, people believe really weird things back. Yeah, the most important thing to understand is that there are innumerable ways of describing reality. We somehow still have this idea that a kind of matter of fact, very, let’s say kind of forensic way of describing reality, let’s say the way that you would describe reality to a police officer, an officer if there is a crime, we have this idea that this is the standard of how to describe reality. But that is absolutely not the case. Most of the time you’d never, you don’t describe reality as if you’re describing a crime to police officer. We use all kinds of imagery, all kinds of shortcuts, all kinds of compressions in order to compress large amounts of time into very short stories. And so this is something which the ancients understood very well. And so the idea that you would have strange stories that somehow sometimes have strange elements to them, it’s better not to understand them just as literary tropes or literary metaphors, but rather methods of compression and methods of telling stories which encompass things that are difficult to describe in forensic terms and contain more information. It’s like if I describe a, let’s say describe a boxing match, and I say that guy whooped this guy’s ass, like that’s way more descriptive than if I spend an hour describing every punch and at what centimeter from what muscle and what damage it did to how many blood vessels. Like one of them is more forensic, but the other is more real because it connects to all the emotional, all the meaning and all the deeper aspects of why you would watch a boxing match in the first place. Right, yeah. And you get that interesting thing where I think often modern people find things like saints lives really hard to kind of process, especially and not popular at all. Like usually it’s like, oh that’s you know these weird religious stories, who would ever want to read those? It’s like these were the super popular literature of the day in the middle ages and beyond. And they straddle that line and so far as you’ll have some which do seem to kind of they fit with our modern understanding of that kind of historical reports. There’ll be some that have no particularly fantastic elements in them and they’re seem to be fairly sober and then you get other ones where you know the saints being swallowed by a drake. That’s right. And especially the earlier, it’s like the further you go in the past and also the more the story tends to go down into the popular sphere, the more it will have fantastical elements in it because those fantastical elements actually point to some deeper patterns in us that tend to manifest in ways that even though they look idiosyncratic are actually the best way to represent certain realities. Right, I mean the story of the hero and the dragon right is so kind of universal or even broader than that just the hero and the monster or whatever it happens to be is just in every form of storytelling in some fashion. So it’s not like it’s some kind of arbitrary creation. Yeah and even the fantastical virgins that we have now like there’s a reason why things like Lord of the Rings or Harry Potter or fantastical novels are so popular not just because they’re flights of fancy but because the storytelling tropes that they use connect to some very very deep patterns that we have inside us and that kind of frame our reality. Right, I think one of the things that I think is useful about looking at literature like Saint’s Lies, these kind of pre-modern ones is that it kind of removes hopefully a little bit of that gap between oh yeah there’s these things we watch for entertainment like Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter that we like and we like fantasy right and then there’s real life and which is you know not like that at all. Yeah it was just boring and not colorful at all it’s just like that’s such a such a modern understanding like a pre-modern culture just would not understand what you’re talking about if you put it in those terms. Exactly yeah and the story of Saint Margaret is obviously a shining example of a story that has some very wild elements in it and that it’s important to kind of look at to and to help us understand you know what it says about her and what it says about why it was so popular like why people cared about the story. Right and I think one of the things that is interesting is to kind of understand how in pre-Christian culture you had what we might expect as that kind of heroic stories that were popular I mean obviously Homer and Virgil right you have the story of you know gods and demigods and these you know very martial masculine heroes and then you have this interesting flip that happens with Christian culture where it’s not that those things don’t still exist and they exist in Christianized forms but that you also have explicitly kind of Christian stories which could not have existed before that period of people who die incredibly you know shameful in the eyes of the world right deaths of slaves and also it may very well have been slaves themselves and that but they’re raised up in this as a kind of laudable or admirable you know example of right action so I know basically as a as a hero and it’s very much often framed in terms of overcoming right some kind of foe even though that overcoming results and usually people are killed it’s such a it’s such an interesting kind of reversal in a way it’s kind it’s partially reversal but it’s partially participating in that same pattern of overcoming the foe it’s just the method of the overcoming has shifted is different and so in the story of St. Margaret there are a lot of things in her story which really point to the things you’re talking about within the story itself you know in the the version at least that I read I don’t know if this is in every version yeah St. Margaret is actually born of pagan parents who expose her to die and so there this was a practice which was in Rome and Greece you know in different pagan cultures which is that especially if a girl was born because a girl was seen as trouble then the girl would be left out to die like you know when the father would see that it’s a girl and he would just leave her out to die or if it was someone who was slightly deformed or just in a in a in a wrong time or there was you know it just wasn’t the time for a child then there was no moral they didn’t see a moral problem in killing the child or exposing the child for it to die and so in the story what you have is Margaret is saved by a Christian person who raises her up in the faith to become you know a person who’s very strong in the Christian faith and is willing to stand up and to speak out against the evils of the pagan world it’s already interestingly enough you find you find a contradiction in the simplistic way people first of all view Christianity and the way that they view you know ancient civilization in general where one of the aspects that Christianity brought to the world was a value like a giving value to the feminine and a giving value to the lower aspects of reality the slaves the you know it gave a way for people who were marginalized in society before to now to have a way to to have a kind of power a kind of power which was a spiritual power and so in her very story you actually see what Christianity did to the pagan empire which is to to take that which was thrown out by the pagan empire take also women who were viewed as simply property in the pagan empire and bring it into Christianity where although people for some reason don’t can’t see that this was what happened that they they became fully human and they were also for example like you couldn’t in the pagan world you could marry a woman by just taking her whereas in the Christian world consent became the rule for Christianity is that a woman had to give consent in order to be married and so the story of Saint Margaret has her being raised by a Christian and being very beautiful very attractive and so she attracts the interest of a a kind of pagan king or some kind of pagan authority and the pagan authority wants to have her and the deal is he wants to have her and he wants her to submit to his god and so those two things seem to function together which is he wants her to submit to his authority and to the authority of his world the authority which he represents which is this ancient pagan world so Saint Margaret refuses and for that she is tortured she’s imprisoned all these things happen to her and so he’s torturing her in order to convince her to let go of her pride to give in to him to to finally you know just just give up this futile fight that she’s that she’s putting up and to marry him and so this is where the story gets very particular because when Margaret is put in prison then she encounters this dragon and the dragon comes to eat her and so in the virgin that I read the virgin that that that margay me she doesn’t get eaten by the dragon but the more ancient version she does she gets eaten by the dragon and then in the dragon she pierces out of the dragon with a cross that she has with her and so the kind of uses this cross to kind of break out of the dragon and to be freed from the dragon and this is kind of it’s like it’s connected with her fight to resist the temptation of giving into this guy right giving into this guy and giving into his god giving into his authority structure and then ultimately then because she after she she frees frees herself from the dragon then the man comes back and then the torture continues until she is finally killed and there’s a strange element too like this is harder to understand like I struggle to understand it there’s a the element of this this character this christian soldier which worked for the king yeah and then it’s a very strange element they’d be worth thinking about more because there is a there is a christian who works for the king and he’s the one who’s actually told to kill Margaret and and and at first he doesn’t want to do it and then she says you should you have to do this this is this is just how it’s going to be and so finally uh he kills her and then he kills himself he like he falls in his side and then they both die in uh in that moment and so that’s like a really intense intense I think I can kind of see what it’s trying to bring about in terms of storytelling uh maybe we can get into it after but first we need to talk about the the dragon that’s the most that’s the most interesting thing um and so the dragon in uh usually the dragon is a manifestation of chaos you would say or a manifestation of these lower aspects which kind of rise up you know and uh and try to devour the world and so usually the way it’s represented of course st george is the ultimate version of this and not just st george but also the image of st michael killing the dragon or st george killing the dragon is usually the idea that through through uh light through word through meaning then the dragon is pierced and is and is fixed right so imagine like a slithering chaos of of things that you don’t understand that don’t make sense it could be your desires it can be it could be a foreign a foreign uh army that’s on the border that’s going to attack you there’s all these different versions of what that dragon is manifesting which is just this kind of chaos which is pressing in and is going to it’s going to going to devour you from underneath you know imagine you have all these bills that you haven’t paid or all these problems all these things that come up from below and then through a through will through truth through light all these things from above then the the demon the chaos is pressed back down and you know order is reestablished and so that’s usually the way that it manifests itself but a kind of more interesting oh not this story of saint margaret shows us another aspect of the dragon which is the dragon is really mostly the notion of extremes you would say of extreme something so here’s the opposite it’s like the dragon is something like a tyrannical hierarchy like a corrupt tyrannical hierarchy and so instead of it coming from below let’s say it ends up actually devouring her and it becoming like a prison so you can imagine that for for for someone who is a marginal person who is on the edge or or doesn’t have power then this this order becomes like a prison that’s what that and that’s what she’s in she’s in a prison she has this king who wants her to give into his authority to give into his god right to give into the thing which manages his world and she refuses so the dragon the prison this call from the authority is all the same image right right the the dragon is just one version of the prison in which she is and the idea of course is that through her through her dedication to christ to something higher to something more true then she’s freed from that prison she ends up being freed from the from the prison and so that’s exactly what’s going on so you can see it at all these different levels and you can see it as a personal level too because for example the dragon of of st george is often represented to people as the passions right so this all these desires that contradict each other that rise up you know you can have all these these contradictory desires in you that are ripping you apart that are devouring you imagine the drug addict or a sex addict or anything that that you could be kind of addicted to and and so usually that’s what it that’s that’s the thing that it represents but here it’s kind of like the the opposite of of those desires it’s more this corrupt oppression that comes from above that is holding her in and that is imprisoning her that she has to free herself from and so it’s fascinating to see how the dragon is almost used in an opposite way but inside her it’s also the desire to give in like her own personal desire to give in to this man who is pressuring her and is saying you would just if you just gave into my authority to this corrupt false authority then all your problems would go away right and so she has this temptation which is different because it’s not like she’s attracted to him right it’s not like like like a like the image rather of a seductress who would come toward someone and then the you know the man has to resist this temptation her temptation is just the temptation to give in and to give into the authority in order to stop the suffering that she’s going through so it’s a different temptation but it’s a temptation nonetheless right and there’s this interesting aspect too in that we have this victory in so far as she overcomes the dragon either by bursting out of it with the cross or like in the 12th century middle english prose version where she just kind of makes a sign of the cross and he disintegrates into dust but she’s still in the prison and she’s not i mean she only gets that when she’s led out to execution and dies but that’s that’s the thing is that it ultimately ends up being a form of self-sacrifice which is what saves her and of course in in the christian vision that this is also the idea in general the idea of self-sacrifice ends up being the way you solve a lot of the problems right in the in the sense in this sense as well which is that the the the capacity to accept to suffer you know and so to not give into something you know which is false and to not give into something which you know which is a lie you know and this is this is something which you see happen in the image of gandhi or of of different characters who or even like nelson mandela for example who accepted to suffer you know so to not give into a corrupt authority and not you know amandela is maybe not the best example but but rather like the the the person who just who doesn’t submit but then doesn’t necessarily fight back but just becomes a an image of someone who is strong and is holding in holding on and doesn’t want to submit and then that has a transformational aspect for them but then also for the world as well ultimately it’s the whole image of peaceful protest like that’s what peaceful protest believes is that you you can transform reality through not giving in but not also rebelling at the same time right and there’s an interesting i think idea of the kind of i don’t know passive hero if you want to put it in that way of like someone like say thomas moore which is narrative narraturized in a man for all seasons by robert polt it was turned into a movie in the 60s of this idea of all he does in that story is keep silent and then they imprison them and they kill him like that’s the story and he’s held up even you know even in kind of contemporary secular 20th century west as this kind of figure too as a heroic figure even though he really did the whole point is in fact that he doesn’t do anything in that he’s just refusing to sign a document and staying in prison but he’s still there’s a kind of there’s an activeness to that possibility though yeah and it’s also you could call it something like the secret of inaction like the secret of the pillar right the secret of the axis of a wheel that and it’s something about the cross which is also showing this mystery of the cross which is this idea that at the center of something is the sacrifice like at the center of things this is something that ancient people understood very much right it’s something that people understood that’s why they sacrificed animals that’s why they sacrifice people because they understood that at the center of of a world is sacrificed and this is something that for example in a in just a basic way it sounds all weird when you say it that way but if i say something like in order for your family to strive as a parent you understand that the that the core of that is self-sacrifice like if you sacrifice yourself for your children then your then your family will will thrive and you will thrive right through that self-sacrifice but rather if you don’t if you act in just based on your own will and your own passions and your own desires then then you won’t be surprised that after your second divorce and your kids moving from one house to the other that your kids are going to start to not like you and are not going to are going to go in all kinds of weird directions and i mean it’s like don’t be surprised because you didn’t self-sacrifice in order for your the cohesion of your group or your the people that are with you to to stay together right there seems to be kind of separation i think it seems like in pre-modern societies whether that’s kind of hunter-gatherer societies or even agricultural societies because those kinds of cultures the sacrifice is really present you know you need to sacrifice in order to you know work the land you know you need to sacrifice obviously in terms of hunting to a degree and so there’s there’s a kind of experience where you’re you’re living it you’re kind of living that pattern of sacrifice whereas if you’re living in a modern industrial society where you can just kind of you know go to the store and get your pre-baked food and kind of you know you you become detached from this idea that like something had to be sacrificed at some point along the way in order for that to actually yeah exactly but for us at least it’s easier to see it psychologically because maybe that’s the that’s the crux of our existence because our our physical needs are so uh you know you know are so taken care of that it’s easier to see the need for a psychological for self-sacrifice in a in a psychological manner or in a personal manner and understand that you know that’s the same for any relationship like you can’t if you go into a relationship just trying to get what you can get from it it’s not going to be a fruitful relationship you also there is a there is this kind of a mutual self-sacrifice which needs to happen for any relationship to be fruitful so i think that that’s what that’s what you are seeing in in uh in the idea of the martyr is that the martyr becomes a mythical image of what christianity is at a lower level and so it’s sometimes it’s hard to understand why these people would admire these martyrs because you know like what is going on like what is this why is it so impressive to them it’s because it’s like an extreme version of something which they experience at a lower more common level and so that’s why it was like their shining examples were these people who who were willing to suffer torture and all these insane things uh in order to stay true to something higher were willing to sacrifice themselves for a higher ideal um and they would experience it at a lower level right it would be just like okay so you know instead of when i get my money instead of buying you know uh some beer i’m gonna buy food for my kids right um and so it’s like that’s the that’s the level of self-sacrifice that most people would have had to deal with right i think this is a really important point because i i feel like already on the level of dealing with martyr stories right the moderate reader can really easily just be like i never do like who would ever do that like who would suffer these horrible tortures just to not say like these words like what what are why would you even do that and if you go the next step up and and go to visualizing it and being swallowed or almost swallowed by a dragon then it’s just like well all connection to reality has been lost it seems and right it’s like what is this i can’t interpret this at all um but when you put it in those terms you realize like oh one yes like maybe you’re not murdering yourself i mean murder means witness right in that case it’s a kind of you know yeah in the christian context is witnessing for the faith but there but it is even this kind of pattern like you said of of you know you you’re maybe like a witness for your family or something like that um right and then you did the dragon in this case as a kind of tyrannical authority but that dragons are usually symbolic of you know all manner of kind of like you said chaos and passions and these kind of lower things and when you put it in those terms in a story like this doesn’t just become detached from something that’s you know more historical seemingly but is actually it’s doing the same thing it’s just yeah like you mentioned doing it in terms which we’re not familiar with usually yeah well in terms of authority there are some interesting examples uh that that that can help you to understand what this could mean like i’ll give you an example i i forget the name of the saint horribly it’s a russian saint in the orthodox church where this it was an aristocrat who in her city the the the priest was known to to have affairs with women and had prostitutes and whatever in his home and she and she knew about it right um and so this yeah so you have a problem which is you have this authority which is corrupt and so on the one hand it’s like you don’t you don’t want to rebel against the authority to kind of destabilize society but at the other hand the recognition of this corrupt authority and so you’d also don’t want to give in to the corruption that this authority represents so the story has her going into the room with the priest and the woman while they’re actually doing it and and taking the woman out of the bed throwing her out of the room then turning to the priest getting down on her knees and saying father i need to confess my sins oh wow and so there are other versions of that like uh you know we talked about saint francis of asisi there are images of him doing similar things where someone says what about this priest who’s living with a woman openly and he says he goes down and he says i’m not even worthy to kiss this man’s feet and so he’s like shoveling ash he’s shoveling like you know burning coals on this where all of a sudden it’s like if he doesn’t change his ways he’s going to hate himself and burn inside for the rest of his life you know so these these images of of how to deal with corrupt authority that can then show this how self-sacrifice can actually transform reality right it’s interesting because in the story she’s she has lots of invective against all these guys she’s you know saying you know you know you’re all gonna you know go to hell because like yeah your gals are false and whatever but she had no point is trying to like i don’t know incite a rebellion and we see that coming back to that weird thing with the her christian executioner at the end she says basically they do your duty and kill me and even he i mean there’s again there’s a weird suicide at the end but the whole point is that it wouldn’t have fit with the pattern of the story for either her to lead a rebellion certainly not but even for him to have kind of yeah and i and i think that the reason if maybe this is why i think that she was killed by this christian soldier is because the whole story is about not giving in to the the corrupt authority and so about a way to resist the corrupt authority and so obviously the the the the image of the sword obviously has does have some sexual connotation you can’t avoid those connotations when you read uh kind of chivalrous uh stories and this and the idea even that there there is this relationship and so in being killed by the christian soldier it’s as if even in her death she never gives in to the to the corrupt pagan authority even though she has to die it you know the story leads to a point where she actually never submits to this this pagan authority who’s trying to dominate her uh in a in a corrupt way right and i think that’s probably why they have the christian the christian killing her right and her telling him to do it so she accepts it it’s not yeah and she accepts that this is her fate and this is how the story has to has to go you know right well it’s it’s interesting because see so in a lot of ways she seems to be a really good example of the feminine hero right is the the way that that kind of character approaches the battle with the dragon in a way that someone like saint george or you know in a more secular context bae will for what have you is not going to do um but at the same time there are these kind of interesting markers of uh of a still that’s still active sense like there’s a part where she takes it’s not so she’s visited by multiple demons the first one that looks like the dragon then another one shows up and she throws him to the ground and puts her foot on his on his neck like pins in there which is so that’s you know kind of violent and active but i but i think even that is participating ultimately instill a kind of symbolism of the feminine even though it’s a little bit more no you’re right and there is but it’s not just that there is a sense in which sometimes these these stories when it’s like when when it’s relating to the also to the kind of foreign king let’s say there is there is a place for a a interesting active element of the feminine you know when it is like the idea of rejecting the foreign suitor or rejecting the the foreign authority so like that image of her pressing down her neck on the demon is in the bible there’s a version of that which is the story of jail and so jail is this prophetess and this foreign king who’s trying to invade israel comes to her comes to her tent and she receives him in her tent and then she acts like a kind of a mother lover to him she she gives him a blanket and she like gives him milk to drink and so she has him she puts him in this like comfortable situation and when the king is asleep she nails his head down on the ground with a spike have you seen this story before yes well that’s why i actually forgotten about it because i was thinking about judith and the holy furnace where it’s kind of similar she seems like she’s gonna you know yeah and she gets his head off i had forgotten that it has this almost the same pattern in that one too with this but with the space to the temple that’s right yeah and so there is something about the idea of the rejecting the foreign suitor in the sense of the the the one that isn’t your husband or that isn’t isn’t your authority or isn’t your husband or whatever that all of a sudden there’s this activation that happens and it’s like you know anything goes and there’s even like a reversal where she’s acting in a like she’s penetrating the the character she’s penetrating the the foreign king uh in a very violent and disturbing way but i guess getting to come back to what you’re saying before is like before you have the societal shift in terms of you know the the relationship between masculine and feminine being based in kind of consent of in a lot of pre-christian cultures the woman had to fight off the suitor right otherwise he’s his wife so there’s that kind of like you said this activation of you know if if he comes to take you by force you have to violently fight him off that’s kind of the way that you express your you know your proper nature i guess yeah and it’s possibly like one of the reasons why they have it uh because it would have probably it the one of the reasons why it’s the dragon that she that she ends up physically fighting off is also to to solve the problem of like you know the problem of the the let’s say the christian martyr facing his or her uh you know persecutor how it isn’t proper for them to turn around and and and be violent towards the persecutor so there’s all of that kind of going on in the story which definitely makes it a very fascinating a very fascinating story right well and it’s funny because like you said yeah she can’t she can fight against the dragon she can fight against the demons but she can’t physically fight against the actual physical foes and yet you know centuries later you have you know probably the most famous uh uh you know female saint for a lot of people in the kind of the secular world um uh hearing voices from various female saints one of which is saint margaret but there you have a very different kind of manifestation where you have i mean she’s dressing as a man she’s leading armies she’s physically fighting against the english yeah but but then when it comes to her own version of her own uh martyrdom then she seems to kind of take a closer to you know kind of saint margaret role where she’s not yeah because she she’s doing it also the the idea of of jonah vark is that she’s also doing it completely in submission to her king like everything she’s doing is in order to save the king and this is also the the power of jonah vark is that she saves the king despite how he basically you know ends up uh selling her selling her away to to the english and and the reason one of the reason why she dies in the hands of the english is because the french king never bothered to to lift a hand to save her and so there’s a tragedy in that in that story um but definitely like there’s there is there’s like i said there’s room for these feminine exceptions that you see in the in the stories like the story of jonah vark is definitely one of them uh where it kind of she she joins these extremes together in a way that she’s also a virgin it’s important that she’s a virgin in the story it’s like she’s this virgin warrior you know she’s almost she’s almost an amazon like in terms of the symbolism like she really is close to an amazon but if she like a holy amazon something like that right well it’s interesting because usually if you’re looking at uh you know things that are trying to find the kind of pre-modern uh manifestation of the the heroic feminine usually the amazons is where you turn but if you read you know if you look at how they actually appear in the greek sources they’re really nothing heroic about them they’re monsters they’re monsters the amazons are monsters yeah that’s right so you can see jonah vark as a saving of that monstrosity like a healing of the just like christianity always ends up including all the strange elements of paganism back into itself but transforming it in a way uh that is that makes it also different at the same time right so would you kind of conceive of then if we’re trying to think of okay what is the feminine hero or what is the kind of feminine manifestation of the heroic would it really kind of be something that while it’s participating in some of the same patterns as the masculine version in so far as it’s some kind of overcoming and it couldn’t involve a physical aspect that there’s still an interiority maybe to it that’s kind of more emphasized i think it just i think there are different versions of the feminine hero and i think that the version that we get in saint margaret is the let’s say the people resisting a corrupt authority right and so that which and and so you could see it in all kinds of guises you know and the you know the woman resisting a corrupt authority without um without herself let’s say betraying herself or becoming the monster that she’s resisting you know so that’s always the problem of resisting authority and you see it in any revolution which is the revolutionary becomes the monster they were trying to fight against so how how does the christianity deal with that problem and stories like the story of saint margaret help us to see a christian answer to that problem um and so that’s one version of the of the female of the feminine hero the other version of the feminine hero is of course the secret influence like the secret influence is one of the most powerful versions of the christian hero of the the feminine hero in christianity which is the one who moves things outside of the story in a secret manner and so if you look at how every single nation converted to christianity every early christian nation there’s always a woman behind that conversion and you know whether it’s the constantine’s mother whether it’s vladimir of kiev’s mother whether it’s uh you know the the the wife of different of the northern kings in in western europe it’s there’s always a woman who converts first and then you don’t hear about the discussions you don’t hear about them but then her son her husband you know augustine the capadocian saint basel and saint gregory it was their sister and so it’s just like it’s a universal christian story of this this kind of secret hero uh that that is actually turning the world without you know in a in a in a kind of silent way by creating i always say it’s like by creating a space by opening up a space for then then her male counterpart to act in something like that right it’s interesting because even in the dramatic tradition you have this sense of often queens or princesses being considered uh they use the term peace weavers the idea is that they weave peace so it’s so uh because behind the scenes you know whether it’s through council through marriages or what have you that that they’re actually bringing kind of warring sides together but you you don’t they don’t talk about it in a kind of explicit way yeah but it’s also it’s important because it’s an important aspect of reality and it’s an aspect of reality which because we are so we have valued the masculine so much that we can’t see it right we have destroyed the private sphere we’ve made everything public everything is like this you know there is we’re reducing the the private to the the minimum and so that was also in tradition that was also the the space of transformation that happened in the in a feminine let’s say in a feminine guise you could say you know the the type of transformation that happens the forming of the world that happens in the womb was something which manifests itself also at different levels of reality this kind of secret change that happens um and so by over valuing the masculine now we think that that’s the only thing that matters like we think that that’s the only thing that counts that in order for for example a woman to have value then she needs to act like a man she needs to to to to do all these masculine things and the other aspect this powerful aspect of reality is discounted as being stupid and irrelevant and it’s not it’s super important without it the world doesn’t work right yeah well that’s and that’s kind of why i really wanted to kind of look at st margaret because i thought well you could look at st junevarg and that’s also a really interesting as we’ve already touched on but it could be easy to just look at examples of the feminine hero that are very close to the masculine as opposed to looking at one that isn’t following that i mean it is a little bit again we have the overcoming of the monster but uh but again like if from if you’re looking at it from a material historical point of view it’s like well she resisted the advances of this guy and then was executed yeah it’s not it’s not like you know going out and leading an army and overcoming the villain and you know it’s not like that at all um and because i do think it does seem that we we don’t it almost seems like society doesn’t consider that heroic in the same way um or like of the same value as the masculine traits of going out in the world and kind of doing something actively as opposed to kind of privately resisting something um and even to the point of of death in the end yeah because most of the time in terms of dealing with corrupt authority if that’s a problem most of us will have way more than conquering some other like something it’s like we’re all of us in terms of in terms of the people we have a feminine role and you know compared to our authorities compared to the police compared to to uh you know to to the hierarchy that that’s above us like most of the people you’ll meet in your life all have a kind of relatively feminine role to play in the social sphere so we need to understand how transformation can happen in different ways besides conquest and all these kind of more uh let’s say the images of these more masculine actions so it’s it’s useful to understand this or else or else you know then we will just be bitter and we won’t be able to function in reality right well it’s interesting at this at this time period you know kind of moving from the you know the 1100s into the 1200s and kind of the late middle ages of how there starts to be a little bit of a reframing about how these kinds of traditional stories often originally oral stories um are received in terms of their kind of utility for the you know with the polis or the other kind of the community at large insofar as like there’s a time when these kinds of stories are massively popular in in england and particularly say margaret i mean amongst the lady so clearly they realize this has like they’re not just reading it for entertainment although you know maybe that’s an aspect but they clearly can feel like they can get something out of it but then as the uh more kind of intellectual elite type uh you know literate society starts feeling like these kinds of stories don’t actually reflect reality um right because there’s not dragons in reality and they don’t burst into you know dust and you make the sound of the cross of them they start taking them out uh to the point where in this this already in this 1100 story is like well the demon looks looks like a dragon but it’s not really a dragon and he doesn’t swallow her he just wants to swallow her and then she makes the sound of the cross and it goes away and eventually they just start telling stop telling her story all together um and to the point where she’s you know kind of forgotten yeah but i think that it’s a this move towards it’s kind of like the beginning of the pendulum swing you could say of uh of modernity already in the 12th century you see it starting you know how this this kind of this kind of move from hyper rationalism to irrationality that maybe finds its highest its highest easiest way easiest virgin to see in something like classicism and romanticism you know in the in the modern age these two these two extremes will start to manifest themselves because the problem is that this is why these stories are so important because they actually are a space of participation in which the more irrational fantastical elements of our psyche are integrated with the story in which you can participate in right because st margaret was seen as a person that existed that you could look up to that you could follow um whereas now we have these weird extremes which is like i said the on the one hand the kind of critical historical forensic version of of factuality and then harry potter and so then we have harry potter and this and and we have these two things that completely have nothing in relationship with each other and the same person that loves harry potter will make fun of a story like say margaret you know uh and so it’s like in the ancient world these there were spaces in which these two extremes of of of participation were joined together in these more legendary stories you could say right i think it’s a really important point because even though you can read a story like say margaret as literature and you could read it like you would read a harry potter novel at least in theory um there’s a difference in terms of what it was meant for and what it was used for for the certainly for the whole period of its popularity throughout the middle ages is that you’re it’s not just a story that you read for entertainment right not only because you can get something out of it of kind of greater value than simply being entertained but also like you said this is considered to be a person who lived and this is considered to be yeah there’s a reality to the story even if we don’t see it that way that is participative that you’re actually you can enter kind of into her story and she would agree she would have had a feast and people would have celebrated and there would have been churches name after her and cities name after her and so it’s like there there would have been a way to participate in her story and to celebrate her story that wasn’t like the kind of weird uh the weird geeky cosplay stuff that you see like that that wasn’t something that is kind of so weird and removed from reality that it’s it’s just like it it doesn’t participate in life whereas celebrating Saint Margaret and and you know and celebrating her feast and maybe having a procession or whatever it is that people would have done for her feast to to celebrate her was something that which was integrated into their into their let’s say yearly yearly cycle right there’s there is a sense where a story like this what it produces is something like you know an icon that you might carve that’s going to have a different function than a story of a dragon like you know smog and bilbo or something from the hobbit right that might produce art uh but it’s not it’s not the same because it’s connection to reality is at a different level yeah like i did carve an icon of Saint Margaret and uh and that icon it was for someone whose daughter is named Margaret and uh and that is going you know and it’s going to go into a room and she’ll be told the story and uh you know it’s her patron saint maybe you know that she’ll she’ll uh she’ll have a special prayer to Saint Margaret in you know in her daily life and so that’s a participative thing and so it becomes a model for her it becomes a you know like it’s not like you said it’s not just something you buy uh toys for and like that that that is just this kind of fictional world that you can’t really live in right and that’s actually that idea of naming i think it’s kind of interesting i would assume that this this story of Saint Margaret is one of the i think she’s really probably the main source of most you know people naming their children Margaret is probably generally would be after her yeah historically speaking um and just how that’s that is a different process than the kind of thing now where it’s becoming more popular to name children after characters from fictional things you know like oh i’m gonna name my child yeah first time i met an anakin i was like what are you doing what are you doing you watch the movies yeah exactly this doesn’t end well this oh boy yeah but indeed there is like this is some one of the points that i’ve been making for a few years is that there’s a strange moment now um in history where on the one hand churches are trying to be as close to entertainment as possible right and have taken up the concert model and using advertising tropes and you know popular music and all that but on this in the same at the same time entertainment is trying to be more participative and so you have people who like i said dress up as their characters have cosplay events there’s something called the church of harry i think it’s called the harry potter and the sacred text which is like an organization they meet every week and they have liturgical readings of harry potter books together they meditate on the meaning of harry potter so it’s like a harry potter church you know but you can’t live in the world of harry potter like you can pretend and you can you can have uh you can wear little hats and you can you know but but in the end it’s it’s it’s uh there’s it’s factitious and it’s schizophrenic to try to live in a world like that right well there’s plenty that you mentioned that because one of the things i think that is really hard to often get across especially if you’re trying to kind of introduce people the concept of kind of literary study is try and make it clear that literature is not the same thing as entertainment there’s crossover for sure it’s not like they’re completely separate spheres but the idea that we have there’s a reason why historically we have a distinction between literature as a kind of manifestation of culture in a kind of higher sense and entertainment as just that that thing that we go to kind of you know have fun and yeah to get off and to rest it’s like it’s not necessarily uh it’s not necessarily the idea of resting which most entertainment seems to to be part of yeah right yeah so um i think that’s i think it’s really really helpful to kind of put put the story in in all of these various contexts we’ve kind of gone through a lot of a lot of stuff uh but i think i think all of it is you know hopefully kind of illuminating of of why why a story like this isn’t just you know a relic of kind of the past that you can kind of you know forget it’s just silly or you know not relevant or you know it doesn’t have any kind of you know we don’t tell stories like that today so how does it how does it relate to uh uh kind of you know the modern conception of heroism or what happens to be but i think if you take all of these things into account then it really does form a pattern throughout uh i mean it’s really explicit in the west i think in the western literary canon but even beyond that um of this this is a kind of a structure of a story and how it how it lays itself out and these symbols reappear and that if we understand how these symbols work then we can hopefully apply it to other things that if you then go on and read Beowulf totally different kind of hero totally different kind of story but the dragon is going to be somewhat similar in terms of what he means yeah exactly it’s going to be it’s going to be similar and it’s also going to be something which can help you when you meet your dragon see the thing about the thing about the dragon is that it’s it’s if you give a specific thing like if you give a specific thing which appears to you as it manifests itself as a dragon it doesn’t when you retell the story it doesn’t have the same power right because it’s not universal and so a lot of times what happens in these ancient stories is that is that categories tend to contract right and so they contract to a point where they become understandable for a very long time and so if if you give something which is too detailed or too particular then it it has a limited lifespan right it it so but if you give something that has that is a contracted category then it has a much longer lifespan because it can it can kind of cross through the the ages and so you know there are certain images like a dragon is of course the one of the ultimate images that is a contraction of all kinds of categories of experience into this very powerful image but you can encounter a dragon it can happen to you and then when you tell the story you know you can give the the details of it but sometimes it’s probably better to to use a mythical image because it’s the one that reflects your experience of it the most right right it is it is going to make you wonder how many of the stories that you know have currency or popularity now like how many of those are going to last if they’re not participating in those kinds of patterns as opposed to these more ancient stories which last for millennia yeah like so that’s one of the reasons why movies might not last very long because movies are so type like they’re so the type of the movie is so set like if if you have a story about drug dealers and all these different things and and and you know in a few hundred years from now they they those just might not be even understandable to anybody no one would even know what it is that the movie is referring to whereas the stories which embody more universal patterns and are using tropes which can span through time then those will just naturally survive in the long run because because they’re not so idiosyncratic right i guess that’s kind of what the the purpose of the canon used to be in so far as like the texts which didn’t have that got weeded out over time because they weren’t copied down and then the ones that were copied down are the ones that lasted are the ones that had some kind of significance that transcended so like homer is you know relevant in all ages not just in ancient greece whereas now we have this weird thing because we preserve everything um and you know and and also a lot of these hierarchies are broken down so the idea is like well you teach something as relevant in this political and is you know it’s going to speak to some kind of current issue but like is that going to is that is that it’s not going to last forever because one of the problems we’re having now and it’s a it’s a unit it’s a big problem everybody’s seen it it’s the the problem of the hierarchy of information is that we’ve created a world where information is a near infinite but attention is not infinite and so there is a natural way in which the information will lay itself out in a hierarchy to you and that hierarchy will end up looking in look like a mythical structure you know it can be especially now like with the social networks and google and search engines it can be manipulated and it can be manipulated politically which is happening but nonetheless the problem of a hierarchy of attention is something that you can’t avoid and it’ll make it that you know the the the you know the third series of some random sitcom that no one ever cared about like the third season is just it’s just not going to be easily in your attention span because it’s so far there’s so much to attend to that it’s just going to vanish even though it might exist physically on some server somewhere it’s still not going to it’s still going to be on the on the fringe of people’s attention right right exactly and I guess it’s kind of interesting that something like this you know like the state morgan has been in the fringe probably a lot of places for a long time now but through you know forums like this I guess I don’t know bringing it back into people’s attention I guess well it’s it’s relevant it’s it’s relevant today and also the reason why it was it was eliminated was maybe not the right reason and so I think that as I think that as post-modernism has its way and kind of modernistic thinking has its way it’s going to have a surprising effect which is going to be restoring some of these old stories that people discounted as silly you know just just a few decades ago because a lot of the level of that story is no different than the level of the stories in the bible it’s like if you’re bothered by the story of saint margaret you know why aren’t you bothered by the story of tobit and why aren’t you bothered by by you know the story the leviathan described in job or the behemoth or all these monsters and the fact that god says in the first in the first chapters of genesis that he created sea monsters it’s like you’re gonna have to deal with that stuff you can’t just you can’t just toss it off to the side it’s coming back yeah exactly oh and it’s so much easier too like when you know so you can look at the north stuff and you see the the midgard serpent circling the world and instead of that being like oh that’s just like a cool viking thing it’s like no that’s like it’s in the bible too it’s it’s pretty universal my friend it’s pretty universal exactly it’s all over the place we have our own we have our own serpent inserting the world don’t worry it’s out there somewhere it’s great all right well i think this was a really good conversation i have to say well i hope it’s useful and uh yeah and to uh and i hope it will also be useful to your students