https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=-V_vSwv9YDw
So as this is the first video of 2020, I wanna start by wishing everybody a happy new year. Last year, just before the end of the year, in November, in the beginning of December, I went on this strange binge of creating different products. People had complained that my, that the t-shirts and products that I put were of bad quality and so, I don’t know, I just went on this, I just fell in this zone of creating different images to kind of put out there. And one of the images that I put out was a drawing of Alexander the Great. And he’s sitting in a chariot and he’s being carried by two griffins up into the sky. He’s holding these two sticks and at the end of the sticks are bait. And as the griffins try to eat the bait that’s above them, they kind of go up into the sky carrying Alexander with them. And quite a few people liked the image, but wondered what does this have to do with anything? What does this have to do with symbolism? And so I thought that as we begin the new year, I would take this time to explore this story. I’ve been wanting to talk about Alexander for quite a while. I’ve mentioned him in passing, how his legends are extremely important in the story, in storytelling, because his legends span from Mongolia through all of Islam and Christianity and Judaism. In India, there are versions of his stories. And so in, when you look at those stories, you can really get this traditional pattern of storytelling that kind of crosses the different cultures. And so I guess this will be an opportunity to look at one of these stories, this ascent of Alexander into the sky. [“Pomp and Circumstance”] This is Jonathan Peugeot. Welcome to the symbolic world. [“Pomp and Circumstance”] So quickly after the death of Alexander the Great, there started to accumulate around him a bunch of legends. And it happened almost right away. Even right after his funeral, already these stories started to circulate about Alexander the Great. And the modern historical approach and the modern historian will want to try to dismiss these legends. That’s possibly one of the reasons why they seem to have been forgotten in the West and in modern culture. But me, the question that I want to ask is, what is it about a figure that makes legends accumulate around them? What is it about a character that does that? And when those legends accumulate around these figures, these legends really do tend to take on this pattern of storytelling. They really do tend to take on very archetypal language and very archetypal structures. And so the legend of Alexander the Great particularly has this. In the Middle Ages, it was recognized as, it was called the Romance of All Chivalry. That is almost like as if Alexander’s romance, which precedes even Christianity, is the basis for the chivalric code and chivalric thinking and the chivalric attitude. And I think there is much to say about that. How there is this relationship with the way that Alexander conducted himself and his campaigns with how knights saw themselves. And especially as Alexander’s legends took shape in different cultures, they also came to be modified to fit into those different cultures. And so the Christian Alexander is very particular and can help us understand also the manner in which not only what the ancient world can look like in the eyes of Christianity, but also how stories can be flipped and be changed in order to serve another purpose while having the same patterns and even in a certain extent maybe refining those patterns to make them fit even better than what they did before. And so the story of the ascent of Alexander the Great is based on older, old, very, very old stories. There are stories even in the time of Gilgamesh and in these ancient Babylonian stories of a figure that gathers for eagles or for birds or for creatures and uses those four creatures to ascend up into the sky and see the world. In the version of Alexander, like I said, he builds this chariot or this throne and he assembles these four griffins to carry him up into the sky. When he goes up into the sky, he sees the different heavens and he sees all of this. When he looks back down upon the earth, he sees the earth as this island and he sees the ocean as this coiled snake around the ocean. So already you can start to understand what this could mean for us, which is that Alexander was able to rise up above phenomena and was able to perceive the pattern of the world, was able to get to a state where he was capable of seeing the structure of the world. Now we can understand it, of course, in a very common way, almost like a scientist would do it, but we can also understand it more symbolically, especially considering that he saw this snake around the world and he saw these patterns of the heavens from close up. Now, what is dangerous about the story is that on the one hand, the story could seem like a tale of hubris. That is, here is, like Nimrod built this tower of Babel, like the modern scientists thinks that they can figure everything out. Alexander also takes the meat, takes this flesh, puts it up and uses these monsters to kind of raise him up into the sky to be able to master the entire world. And so what’s interesting in the story is that in the Christian version, and I think probably in the Muslim and Jewish version, though I haven’t read them, so I’m not sure, something happens as he ascends. And so he ascends to a certain level, and then as he reaches, as he’s approaching the highest heavens, he hears a voice which tells him that he has to stop there, that he can’t ascend any higher and that he now has to come back down to the world. And so by having that little change in the story, what it does is it also, on the one hand, creates, tells you the story of how we do have access to the patterns of reality. We do by our own reason, by our own mind, by our own God-given capacities, we have the capacity to raise up and to see the patterns of the world, but we also have to be careful because there is a limit that we cannot go beyond, that we cannot by that means, by this kind of forceful reason, means of by the means of reason or the means of our own efforts, we cannot reach the highest patterns. We cannot reach that which is beyond all patterns. Another thing which makes this pattern very powerful, this image very powerful, is that there seems to be an analogy. We could kind of understand it as an analogy at a lower level between this image of the chariot with the four griffins and even the divine chariot, which has four cherubim. Some people have suggested that even the word griffin and the word cherubim are actually cognates, that they have some long distant source, which is the same. And you can see it in the image, which is the cherub as this kind of hybrid figure that has different heads of different animals or different body parts of different animals, depending on the description, we find in scripture that this description of the cherub is similar to a sphinx or to a griffin and that the griffin can be seen as analogous to that. So for example, in churches, some Byzantine churches would have griffins on the outside of churches, and then you could still see cherubs on the inside of the church, let’s say on the veil or on different aspects of the church, either on the different church cloths or the different icons. So you can kind of see it as different levels, that you can imagine the griffin as being this guardian, but on the outside, something like a guardian in the sense of a king or of an army, and then the inner guardian, who is the guardian of the secrets of the mysteries, the spiritual guardian, which is on the inside, and which is guarding the mysteries from profanation. And so there’s an analogy, and in the analogy, of course, there’s also, like I said, also the separation, which is that although we can see the analogy between Alexander going up into the sky and seeing the patterns, this is obviously at a lower level than the actual divine chariot, which took Elijah and brought him up all the way into the highest heavens. One is through the effort of man to raise himself up, and one is, let’s say, a movement from above to bring Elijah up into the highest heavens. But there is still an analogy between the two. And so what it does is it gives, what I like about that story is that it gives value to human capacity, it gives value to human effort, but in the context of the Christian Virgin, it also shows the limit of human value and of human capacity. And this legend of Alexander became very famous in the Middle Ages. You can see it all over the place, from Byzantine ornaments, you can see it on buildings, you see it in Venice on St. Mark’s Cathedral, you also see it in churches all the way to England, and you can see it in ornaments all the way in Persia. And so you can see it as this celebration of human capacity and also the value of the city, the value of the Roman Empire, or the vision of the human capacity to raise itself up and to become something which is coherent, but it also gives you the limit. It also shows you that if you go too high, then you risk what happened at the Tower of Babel is that you risk the breakdown. And if we look at the modern world today, what we can see as we notice the fragmentation in the edges, as we see our own, as we see Western culture start to be brittle and start to break apart, what we can surmise from that is of course the very fact that modern thinking and that the modern approach thought that it could gather everything into itself, and thought that it could reach the highest, that it could either see it as reaching God or getting rid of God so that it could encapsulate the entire world. Well in the story of Alexander, we see how we don’t have to go into extremes, we can both celebrate the capacity that humans have to participate in the patterns and to see the patterns, but we also have to know that there is a limit to which we can access them. But even for myself, it acts as a warning not to fall into hubris and not to think that my own mind is going to be able to master everything, that I’m going to be able to understand everything, because obviously that is sometimes a secret temptation that we have that we think, all right, I’ve reached it, like I figured it out. But an image like that, for me at least, is both a celebration and the warning that I need in order to kind of advance into this world of understanding symbolism. And so because the tale of Alexander also has in it an aspect of hubris, at the same time, it also has a, let’s say, something which precedes what Christianity would become. It has a kind of glimmer of what the possibility of Christianity could be. There’s also something in the story of Alexander that is a warning. And so you have different commentators in the story of Christianity, which will warn us that the figure of Antichrist is related to the figure of Alexander. And we see this in the figure of Julian the Apostate, for example. And Julian the Apostate is a Christian emperor who during his life at some point switched. He was raised as a Christian, and then he switched. This is at the early stages of the Christian development, the Christian church. He switched and reverted back to paganism. And his form of paganism was a kind of, a strange fake paganism, a kind of pluralism where he was saying that he wanted to, you know, open it up for all different faiths. He also said that he wanted to rebuild the temple in Jerusalem. He did all these moves of kind of opening up culture to all kinds of things, but secretly it was driven, it seems, by an animosity towards his own Christian upbringing and his own Christian way of seeing. And he saw, Julian, he saw himself as a new Alexander. And so we have to be able to hold the figure of Alexander in these two, on these two sides. We need to not be afraid of it because it has very powerful storytelling in it, but we also have to see it as a warning in different ways in the story itself as a warning not to go up too high in the Christian versions of the legend, but the figure himself as a warning of the danger of a kind of all-encompassing empire that would encompass the entire world and would want to, would want to destroy the particular story by giving access to all these different stories at the same time. So it’s something that hopefully the image of Alexander going up on his griffins is something that will be a source of meditation for you. And I hope to get back to the story of Alexander to go into other versions, other aspects of it, maybe in the comments, tell me if that’s something that interests you. If you know some of the story of Alexander, maybe tell me which aspect of his story you would like me to interpret because it’s such a big tapestry of storytelling. And so thanks everybody and I will see you soon. So hope you enjoyed this discussion on Alexander the Great. If you announcement next week, I will be in Saskatoon giving a carving workshop, which is already full, but if you are in the area, you can come to see a talk that I will be giving. It’s a Saturday, January 18th at 7 p.m. at Our Lady of Lourdes Catholic Church in Saskatoon. So check that out. I will also be in Boston on February the 15th. I will be giving a talk at the Greek Cathedral, the Greek Orthodox Cathedral there. It’s gonna be two talks plus question period and also a tour of the cathedral. All of that for $15, which includes lunch. So that’ll be February the 15th. I will put links to those events, to the Facebook events and also to the Eventbrite site where you need to go to get the tickets of the Boston event. I’ll put all of that in the description for those who wish to come. And of course, I hope to meet some of you there.