https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=N53qP7N5ECE
So hello everybody, I am sitting here with Christopher Rocchio. Christopher is a science fiction author and also an editor. He has written a series, he’s working on a series called The Sun Eater in science fiction. I’ve not read his work but I’ve seen him around. He’s been talking with people that, with Nicholas Cotar and he’s written a few emails. And he brought up a subject which I find very fascinating. He wrote me an email about a few months ago about the possibility of heavy metal being an apotropaic practice which is that heavy metal could actually be something which would be the kind of practices people would use to kind of frighten the devil or to push away evil things. And so I got really fascinated by that because it had crossed my mind a while ago. So I was hoping to see if he could make the case for it. And so we’ll see if he could do that. This is Jonathan Peugeot. Welcome to the symbolic world. Alright so Christopher maybe you can start just by telling us a bit about yourself, a little bit about the kind of projects you’re working on and we can ease into our conversation. Yeah sure. So I’ve been writing since I was I think in second grade. I was one of those kids who never developed social skills or the ability to play football. And so I’ve been working on some version of the story that eventually became The Sun Eater. Since then I went to school for classics and for English rhetoric at NC State here in North Carolina. And I sold my book series like two weeks after graduation and I’ve been working on that ever since. Really fortunate with the timing. And I also I work as a assistant editor at Bane Books. They’re a science fiction fantasy publisher, the largest independent science fiction publisher I think in the English speaking world. I were not owned by Simon and Schuster or one of the big ones. And I’m also a metal music fan which is why I was watching the 666 video. And I think you were talking about 666 not as a dark symbol but as a light one and that being something that metal community gets wrong. I was like okay all right. And then you described Ozzy Osbourne as a satanic figure and I was like well hold on. And I sent you an email that I was really embarrassed about because I usually don’t do that sort of thing. I was saying before the before we started recording. So this is just something that gets said a lot about metal music and it just and it’s something that gets said too even about my work because there’s a real tendency to confuse symbols with their context. And my main character is the book series is set in the distant future about 20,000 years out and his family’s symbol is a devil which had been kind of a metal music joke when I chose it. And there is a real question in the story about whether or not he’s good or evil. And there’s a lot of play there because it is I guess I should talk about the books briefly. Sure yeah. I was a big Star Wars fan growing up as part of the reason I never developed social skills. I’m kidding. And it’s that sort of space opera only instead of a galaxy far far away long ago. It’s our distant future. And he I like to say he’s like Anakin Skywalker if his becoming Darth Vader were his best possible option. He tells you page one that he is the person who ended this war between humanity and these aliens and that he killed all of them and the story is why and how it’s written as a memoir. And so there’s a lot of stuff that people don’t know and a lot of propaganda that he’s trying to unpack and he may be inserting his own twist on the story as well and he might not. So yeah it’s a bit about who I am and how all of this gets tied together and why I’m here. All right so now here comes the here comes the the case that you’ve got to make for me which is look I’m serious that I have thought about this before because I you know when I started to think symbolically I started to realize that a lot of things it’s just the place that they have. It’s usually that’s the problem with things and so I was trying to ask myself a question like what what would be the place of different things and then when I thought about Heavy Metal I had this vision of like John the Baptist right of John the Baptist like standing in the desert and like screaming telling people like repent the end is near all that stuff you know he’s he’s he’s got this like he’s got the natty hair and he’s eating locusts and so he’s kind of like this mar this crazy marginal figure who don’t know you don’t know if he’s insane or not and he’s uh and he’s yelling and he’s like telling people he’s like telling people they’re sinners and he’s accusing and he’s doing all that stuff and so I thought okay well that seems like in the best of worlds that that’s what Heavy Metal could be like every Heavy Metal could do that right so anyway so so now you have to make your case and tell me why you think it serves that function well I do think I do think that it does and so I guess before I can say anything about Heavy Metal I should just acknowledge that there are affirmatively satanic bands okay and there are neo-pagan ones there are generally occult ones and that does represent a large sort of vector of the community but it didn’t start that way um it’s hard to pinpoint where Heavy Metal exactly comes from as a genre um some people will say that it was Black Sabbath some people will go uh earlier than that um some people even point to like just the way that Jimi Hendrix played the guitar it’s a little bit heavier than than others I like the Black Sabbath choice just because it so clearly gets uh most of the features of metal music in in one band right and for them um they also sort of uh steal credit or not steal credit but take credit um in no small part just because of the the themes they were dealing um their Black Sabbath along with Led Zeppelin and Deep Purple were usually sometimes called the unholy trinity of metal music but there’s nothing really there’s nothing really unholy about a lot of their work Sabbath’s the only one that really deals with occult symbolism in any great detail the others will touch on it from time to time but you know Led Zeppelin’s much more like traditional rock and roll they’ve got some fantasy themes going on um with a lot of Tolkien references and whatnot and and Viking’s immigrant song obviously being about Valhalla and about Viking but it doesn’t really start to take the satanic turn until a bit later Sabbath named themselves after a horror movie of course Karloff film I think from 63 or 64 um and that’s what they wanted to be they wanted to do horror films but as rock songs and they wanted to recreate that feeling of dread and horror is a very moral genre right and he did all the monster videos right and and so horror films are very rarely well some modern ones are but they’re very rarely on the side of the monster yeah and a lot of those songs aren’t either there’s a song uh Lord of the World on I think uh Master Reality their third album that’s sung from Satan’s point of view but it’s about the cost of selling one’s soul right and so Ozzy plays this demonic character on the stage and the band sort of backs up that demonic feel to it but the the message of the song is just don’t do this right uh you turn to me and all your worldly greed and pride but will you turn to me when it’s your time to die and the answer is no most people don’t they uh they you know as they die they call out usually for God stereotypically right and um you made me master of the world this world where you exist you know which is uh I mean Lord of the World is one of Satan’s monikers right and but it doesn’t take that attitude towards it they actually um were so tired to be called a satanic band the second song on uh on that same album after forever is affirmatively Christian it’s uh reminding people to watch out for their souls um they were just sick of seeing it in the press all the time um now you know that doesn’t mean uh again that doesn’t mean that these bands don’t exist but it’s interesting to note things like that because um another great example is the the horns gesture right that everyone sees uh was there’s some dispute as to who started it gene simmons uh claims that it was him you know the basis for kiss but apparently he claims to have invented everything uh he owns the patent on on oj the the abbreviation uh so he people use that he just he he claims a lot of things interesting guy but it belongs I think really to Ronnie James Dio who was with Rainbow he was he was with Black Sabbath I replaced Ozzy actually um and he was uh from an old Italian family and his grandmother used to do that you know to wear the evil eye off or to put the evil eye onto someone and so what’s so interesting to me is the way that metal misuses so many symbols or in the community right people use that thinking oh yeah you know we’re demons but Dio in interviews would be very forthright in saying that this was a symbol um to ward off evil he uses it in weird times when he’s performing usually winning mentions the devil like he’s trying to to both portray him and keep him away like he’s a gargoyle in that moment right um and a lot of his songs too aren’t about um you know they aren’t affirmatively satanic so much as as warning people about uh different things very often social ills right like uh there is a famous song called Don’t Talk to Strangers and it’s about that simple you know just don’t do it because they’re dangerous um but he in that moment is sort of playing the role of the the fox from Pinocchio right um threatening threatening the audience right so it’s kind of so they are inhabiting these dark forces but in a way they’re doing it to kind of scare people off yeah at least the genre begins yeah um again that’s not to say there aren’t bands like i think you cited cannibal corpse in one of your videos and those guys are insane i i don’t i think they have a song called my house is full of skulls and it turned out that actually one of them had a whole bunch of actual human bones in his house um yeah i do not claim to be a fan of that band i understand that some people are i don’t uh don’t get it yeah well it seems like the thing when i when when i listen to you speak uh i think that there’s something to understand at least there’s something to understand in terms of apotropaic symbolism and so so apotropaic symbolism i have anybody who’s watched my videos you’ve you’ve you’ve seen it i’ve talked about gargoyles i’ve talked about the monster on the edge the monster on the edge who’s there who’s one of his functions is to protect you from the bigger monster and so you know you you have a you have a let’s say serbrous between the world of the living and the world of the dead he’s the scary three-headed monster but his purpose is to guard that that transition so that bigger monsters from hades don’t come up and devour the world you know and so the the the thing about this type of symbolism is exactly the the problem that you seem to be talking about which is it it’s um it’s it works like it’s a symbolism that works but it’s also can be a symbolism that’s dangerous because of that problem and the example that i give is an example which has nothing to which is maybe more political and people can understand it better is that you can imagine let’s say an empire roman empire they’re being attacked by nomadic tribes and these nomadic tribes they have all these fighting techniques and they have all these arm these weapons and this way of being that the romans don’t know how to deal with so they’re the ultimate stranger they’re they’re being strange and the romans can’t tame them so they’re coming in they’re destroying roman cities they’re doing all that so the romans decide well okay so what do we what should we do and obviously the only solution is hire these people or hire some of these people to then fight the the fight off the other nomads and so you do that so you hire the barbarian to fight the barbarian and it works but then there’s always a dangerous line that you cross which is that if you bring the barbarian in too much you never know when the barbarian is going to turn back on you and then devour you and so you get the barbarians to fight off the other barbarians but by the you know by the fifth century sixth century rome is barbarian and and all has been taken over by the very people they tried to use to fight off the other barbarians right and i think there’s a real danger with that in the genre just um i mean that’s part of how it has shifted culturally right especially in a pagan direction i think that’s really metal’s sort of more organizing principle in this tent because there’s so much of it’s produced in scandinavia and the scandinavian countries are turning towards you know some form of neo-veganism although you know it’s not really any continuity with the old the old tradition in any way i was i was so glad when you said that because i make that joke uh all the time i i was talking to a friend’s mother at a wedding and she was talking about being a greek pagan and worshiping uh dianysus and i asked her if she’d sacrificed a bull uh equinox and put on a play and she did not know what i was talking about um and what is it called in the in the play where they rip the animals apart with their bare hands you know in uh something something like that yeah i don’t know but i wonder if the dianysian people do that i if they don’t they’re faking it i know so but there is there is a tendency i think just because people are around those symbols i think they’re attractive in in in certain ways and that pulls people in weird directions because there there are bands who don’t get right that that even they don’t they don’t get when the older bands or certain bands are doing um or employing these symbols apotropaically they may uh they they may just go all in because it’s loud and it’s noisy and it upsets their parents yeah i actually don’t know if ozzy osborne knows that a lot of those earlier songs are apotropaic yeah well one of the things too is that these people like i i’m sorry to say this but a lot of the people aren’t the smartest like they’re not the smartest people so i don’t think and they’re not the most aware people so i don’t think that even someone like ozzy osborne necessarily understood the things he was doing when he was doing them you know if it’s true yeah so so if some of the things he was doing was playing this apotropaic uh function i’m not sure he was totally aware i’m not also sure it was to the benefit of his own soul if you know what i mean i i think that’s true i um i will say though he didn’t really write those songs um he gets a disproportionate amount of credit for writing the early black Sabbath songs because his wife was their manager’s daughter and she’s worked very hard to sort of uh twist the history of that band in particular if you go on black Sabbath’s twitter account to this day you will see no sign of the other five singers they had um they’re never mentioned um including Dio who was the the next one and um geezer butler who was the bassist wrote most of the lyrics to those older songs he wrote Iron Man he wrote Warp Pigs he wrote uh Paranoid and N.I.B and all those earlier songs that get up mostly they get replayed the most yeah and he was uh from an Irish Catholic family and uh Tony Iommi who’s the guitarist who really is black Sabbath um it was from an Italian Catholic family i don’t know the degree to which they’re practicing but it’s clearly an influence on their writing in a way that i just don’t think that Ozzy is aware of um and they’ll they’re the ones who’ll tell you in interviews right that you know this isn’t you know we’re not a satanic band right like we’re trying to tell horror stories and to scare people now they may not be aware of apotropaic you know magic for practices generally but they at least know that they’re not a satanic band right enough to enough to write a Christian song on their third record just to what was i don’t know i don’t i’m not a fan of any metal but what was that song about like what you said it was a Christian song it was um it’s called After Forever and it’s about um it’s it’s reminding the audience to um maybe think about religion it’s have you ever thought about your soul can it be saved or do you think when you go away you’ll just go in the grave um and it’s reminding them these things are actually real and maybe you should uh you should actually spend some time thinking about it there’s a point in it where they ask like what your what are your feelings about papism right are you you know an Anglican or not or um um and and a lot of more specific questions like that but it basically comes down on you should be paying attention to these parts of reality and and whatnot um and they’re not alone in this either i’m picking on black Sabbath a lot because it’s the one that we mentioned but there are bands like striper who um are very explicitly Christian them that’s all they write about they’ve got i can’t remember which i have a verse from Isaiah is all stamped on every one of their uh their yeah their records um the one about stripes right um i can’t remember i i wouldn’t know but i just remember the image i have the glam the glam band it was in the glam band moment when they had all the long hair and the makeup and yeah okay like uniforms with stripes on them man i could just never i even when i was like 13 14 there was really a lot of people were into that stuff and i was just like i just can’t they look ridiculous but they’re they they can play i tell you um but they did uh their last album there was a song on it called Yahweh that was like a a power metal epic about about god directly directly it wasn’t there wasn’t any layer of metaphor because usually in popular culture if you’re going to be Christian to any degree and get away with it it seems like you have to put it under layers of uh of protective clothing as it were in order to make it palatable to people and there are some heavy metal guys like i know i think who was it that converted actually that became like an evangelical um well alice cooper alice cooper right yeah he um he teaches bible study um which is amazing right because he’s alice cooper but like all the stories about him uh you know selling his soul for talent right he tells these things because he’s a performance right there’s a story about him killing a chicken on the stage i was just telling my co-worker about this yesterday um where um they said that he beheaded one on stage but what happened is when it wandered in it was like an outdoor performance some fair or something and he tried to shoo it off the stage and it flapped away and fell into this stands and people crushed it and so the newspaper said the next day you know this you know terrible satanist performer beheaded a chicken on stage and frank zappa apparently called him and asked if he really did that and he’s like of course i didn’t do that why would i kill a chicken he’s like well if anyone asks say you did right you know it’s your business and so he you know he just played that straight but he um i think he had a problem with alcoholism and uh turned around sometime in like the 70s and he’s been uh devoutly religious ever since i think he was i think he was a preacher’s kid actually when he was growing i think he’s a baptister or something but he’s not alone either um blackie wallace who’s uh the lead singer for wasp which was a like a real big you know party you know shock rock band throwing raw meat into the yeah because there’s also like a degenerate line in the heavy metal like the motley crew and all them like where it was all about being completely degenerate like it wasn’t the violent like the violent imagery of black sabbath or metallica or all those bands it was more like just the being a completely degenerate wasp is archetypically one of those yeah um they used to pretend to torture women on stage and it just it just to sort of out you know as as performance art and he even when he was in the middle of that he seemed weirdly sane to me in interviews as i’ll watch old interviews and i’ll be like well it’s just you know the violence that we’re seeing the world and i’m trying to reflect it to say something about you so i think there is this this thread of social critique that’s still there even when it’s like way too far for you know for my sensibilities right and his last album was a concept piece about the crucifixion and it’s played in the same musical style but he’s completely swung around i think 9-eleven really did a number on him if i remember his story right okay just psychologically he couldn’t believe that this was the world he was living in because he was a new yorker and well there’s something about that like when you said because if if you think about it there’s you know like the the passion of christ the passion of the christ by mel gibson is like a heavy metal movie oh yeah like that whole aesthetic like the whole brutality of it uh you know i you know when i was i remember watching it and thinking something similar it’s like this is something about this which is about kind of scaring you and disgusting you and you know shocking you into understanding how how serious this is yeah what i think part of that is is that the world we inhabit now is so sanitized right that getting any of it however over the top and fake and maybe the over the topness is a necessary feature of this because it really has to like wake people up i think it speaks to a a capacity maybe that some people just don’t experience in their daily lives anymore and so they go looking it’s like uh it’s like thrill seeking right it’s like uh people who go skydiving or something helps maybe uh experience the world in a in a more full sense although maybe maybe they’re going about it in the wrong way in some in some place yeah yeah i think i mean i think you’re right like the way to i think the way to understand it’s the same for for horror movies uh you know it’s like i don’t i don’t think people should watch horror movies i really think it’s it’s it’s bad for you but it’s for someone who’s lost and can’t feel or doesn’t understand you know the the imminence of death you know i can understand why they would want to to see that in order to shock themselves into to kind of just feeling that or to understanding that this is a imminent reality of this is an imminent part of our reality um and to see it’s like a kind of extreme version most of horror movies seem to be just extreme morality plays like extreme versions of of sin and punishment you know yeah kind of try to deconstruct that in the more recent movies but that seems to be it yeah well there’s something about that in like the way that greek tragedies work too right is that the characters are punished for their violation of some uh essential moral law right like in uh in the oristia right uh uh kaita nestra punishes agamemnon for killing ifigenia but then that creates this whole cycle that has to go back and forth until finally um with athena they’re able to synthesize some sort of new law to break them that cycle but the characters are serially punished for their transgression yeah um and it’s something shakespeare does too um you know to choose another another more classic example all the characters in shakespeare that have sex outside of marriage die um usually terribly um and it’s because there’s a violation of that moral law there and horror movies do that in a really sort of maximal way and i think that the visual language and the sound of heavy metal tries to catch in on some of that i think and i think very consciously because i think that’s what um especially the earlier bands are trying to do i think some of them have lost the plot like we’re talking about and have gone further down uh various avenues trying to cash in on uh that shock factor because that’s what you know brings people in um but i do think it’s it’s to try and uh i think it’s important to try and make people feel something and there’s something about when you said about the greek tragedy i find i find that you’re you seem to be right on in the sense that my in my perception of this is also to as we watch christianity kind of um erode in society we’re seeing the ancient tropes come back you know because the let’s say the whatever a horror movie can give you traditionally in a christian church you would get that during holy week like that’s what holy one of the things holy goes for was to bring you right up against that insanity right to bring you right up against that insanity understand that you are the one doing it to christ understand that christ is calling you to be the victim at the same time it was kind of like synthesizing the whole question of the the you know the the murderer and the victim and the the the sinful but sinless it was like this crazy capacity to bring all those threads together into one moment which is the crucifixion and we participated in it every year and so it seems like as we and you know and that also replaced even the you know the the the gladiatorial fights the people killing themselves in the arena for our pleasure all of that kind of went away as we had the crucifixion as the ultimate version of all these violent threads kind of coming into this one moment but as we watch christianity erode we’re seeing all of it come back like we’re seeing uh you know the cage fighting and all this stuff watching people beat each other and also the the extremity of the greek this kind of greek drama of of a of people getting ripped apart all the stuff that we saw in greek tragedy we’re seeing it again in these horror movies and in these things and so um in the best in the best world like in the best way they can still be they can still be a little thread towards christ like they can still have a little thread where you can still use those moments use those extremes and try to help people see you know all of this thing that you’re dealing with all of these feelings all of these uh situations that you’re attracted to they all culminate in the crucifixion like that’s there you can’t beat that story in terms of bringing it all together into one into one story totally i think i think you’re right on because i think a lot of uh a lot of the symbolic power in in the music for instance uh comes from the fact that a lot of these symbols are appropriated from especially the catholic church the amount of catholic symbolism in the metal scene however twisted around or placed out of context is is enormous is an extremely popular band called ghost um and the the lead singer dresses as a catholic bishop um but he paints a skull on his face and all of his crosses are upside down and don’t get started on the upside down cross thing um talking about symbols being misused that one kills me in every horror movie and every metal performance um but he dresses he dresses as a bishop right and all of their stage backdrops are stained glass windows that have you know the album covers and it actually was at an iron maiden show um last summer and all of their backdrops on stage were stained glass windows right and and um and so it’s interesting how much liturgical symbolism is is appropriated and misused and i think it’s because there is this i mean you hear this all the time right the west has no culture right um christianity is no culture well these things get repeated all the time but it obviously does and i think it’s just that it’s you know moved so much out of people’s vision for whatever reason i think possibly because uh a lot of protestants especially in america have an icon problem they just they won’t look at them they won’t their churches are you know old hotels yeah um but there’s so much of that’s been stripped away that i think the music by using these symbols catches a lot of young people and and is like actually this stuff does exist and we’re going to use it to be cool and edgy and they use it badly right and they use it you know i think to different ends right yeah well it’s an upside down it’s an apotropaic thing it’s an upside down it’s a carnival it’s all the symbolism that when i talk about the upside down world the clown world all of it that’s what it is you know like you said the upside down cross you know it’s like there is a positive version of the upside down cross which is the cross of saint peter but there’s also you know you’re you’re not super smart i mean and use like well i have this thing i want to that i that i i love hate this love hate relationship i have with this thing and so i’m gonna use all the imagery but i’m gonna just turn this thing upside down it’s like a really simple gesture to just say like i’m making and putting it upside down right and and and here i am putting everything upside down uh you know the key the key for us at least now in this moment in culture is to to now to to play the the last trick on them which is to flip that back up like to to take the upside down as it really is presented and flip it back i think that that’s the that’s the that’s the last trick i kind of joke about that with saint christopher too it’s the last it’s the last trick it’s the last inversion it’s the the inversion of the inversion or whatever um and so all these especially now with like all these people who love metal for example who actually christianity is so eroded that they have all these metal symbols they don’t even know what they refer to in terms of their own culture they just have the upside down version yeah so i have a funny story about this because there’s a meme that goes around on like imager and red from time to time about a band called malact which i’m probably mispronouncing their swedish uh black metal band who started researching uh catholic theology in order to better blaspheme and they researched so much that they converted to catholicism uh and they have written it’s we can’t blaspheme anymore because we don’t even know what we’re doing we gotta learn what we’re doing in order to blaspheme and then just like that’s hilarious they still write black metal but it’s it’s uh it’s catholic now catholic black metal they’re very they’re fairly obscure and i think the only time they ever get mentioned is in the context of this new story about them trying to blaspheme better and then converting um i’ve never really seen people talk about them that much but they do exist and that that final flip did happen locally in their case um but they yeah i was reading an interview with them a couple days ago where they were as i was trying to get ready right and i was about to talk to you and i wanted to mention this because it’s so funny um but they were talking about how you know they’re talking about the divine darkness and how uh that is you know uh it’s pretty metal right and then it might turn to light you know once you you know are where you know you come into the fullness of christ right but it’s dark outside of it which is you know where perhaps many of our listeners are so i think there’s a lot so black metal is still very appropriate for what we’re doing right um now i will say that’s not my preferred genre of metal uh it’s you know uh it’s not very hospitable uh to someone with my worldview but it is so fascinating to me that that happened that is that i mean that’s exactly what you would think like that’s exactly it’s almost like uh it’s a story that you would read in a in a short story almost it seems so perfect you know yeah that’s hilarious so now so now you let tell us a little bit about your your journey because you’ve been on been on quite a journey i guess in the past few years related to this and to your own writing and your own life and spiritual journey yeah so i’m one of those people that jordan peterson talks about um you know helping um i uh i was born catholic i raised catholic and i uh my grandparents all died in the same year um through unrelated circumstances when i was about 13 well um and it was it was just really hard um it was it was a really big you know personal tragedy for anyone to go through and that really sort of shook my uh shook my religious convictions and i combine that with going to high school right and i moved from a catholic school to a public one and there’s just a lot of things going on and so i i ended up with like the secular student alliance when i was in college and i had dinner with richard dawkins whoa i’m not not a very personal one it was like a big you know club banquet yeah i might have had 10 words with him yeah well that’s you know the sort of place i was in and for whatever reason um i found jordan peterson stuff right before the c16 stuff really hit um so i was i was in on the ground floor on that and i i watched everything uh because it was just i’ve always liked the psychology stuff i was going to be a psychologist uh i changed my mind right when i got to college because i realized there was not much money in it unless i wanted to be an academic or an actual psychiatrist at school so i thought i’d rather write stories which is what i was doing yeah because you make a lot of money doing that usually most people usually so much money yeah um yeah i was a kid uh i will say in my defense it’s worked out okay yeah there you go um so that’s that’s good but i um his bible series in particular really did uh did a number on me and so thank you for your part in that i i wouldn’t necessarily know where to put myself i said before the call right i’m maybe in the narthex still um i do know that i don’t really like the anti-theist crowd that much anymore i didn’t really like them when i was with them that was a uh seemed to me seemed to me to be very unhappy i know i was uh i don’t mean to speak for everybody but it was not a very like friendly there was a lot of political tension there too um that i just didn’t i didn’t find comfortable they were so interested in activism which i always felt was a weird choice but uh when i started i was writing all the way through this and what’s really strange to me uh about the book in particular is that when i wrote the first draft i was still pretty much in the richard dawkins camp and then as i revised it as i was revising it i was going through all these personal changes and so the book’s written as a memoir by a character who’s about 1500 years old because it’s science fiction and his 19 year old self thinks a lot like me pre-revision and the narrator who is narratizing the uh the whole story tends to think like post uh post-traumomy uh you know post i won’t say conversion because it’s more a journey home than anything but um and so there’s some weird dialogue between the two versions of the character that i think has a lot to do with my my personal evolution um the plot’s the same uh you know the but it’s it’s funny because i’ll get some readers who will be like wow this book is really anti-religious and there are other readers like i have a friend i have a couple of friends who are catholic priests who’ve read it and they’re like no it’s not uh and so people come away with different ideas about i think that’s one of the things interesting about stories in the same way that you know a painting or an icon might say more uh than a description of it i think stories can do more than one thing at once yeah wow that’s interesting so now so you’re you said you’re now you’re you feel like you’re kind of on you’re on a journey home i guess or you’re kind of in the in the narthex in between yeah i i’m really struggling i’d still i think i’m stuck in the same place that or one of the same places that peterson seems to be said where i don’t know what believe means um because i i don’t i don’t this is a really tricky conversation to have right and i don’t know what people mean when they say that and i don’t know what they mean when they say they feel the presence of of divinity or any of these things i do know that i the people who are religious seem happier to me the ones that i know at least what was really interesting to me is my fiance i’m getting married on saturday congratulations by the way thank you uh was a baptist but she’d sort of slipped from any sort of practice in college as as many millennials do and she was having a pretty rough time of it and i um i mentioned not really wanting to send my kids to public school because public schools made me nervous having been to one um and that i you know if we had any maybe catholic school would be worth doing and she told me she went home to miami she was um she was in school there at the time she told me she’d just gone to rcaa an rcaa meeting and she was going to convert and i had not put that into her head in any way that i know of but she went through um she went through and got confirmed and uh at first communion and all that and that seems to have been because of my influence in some way um i don’t know how but that’s also kind of telling because also you know in in in a lot of the biblical stories women seem to catch these things first so i’m just sort of trying to feel out what what what i what i feel what i believe and what that means and i’m trying to figure it out um are you being married by a priest i am yeah same priest who married my parents i you know so it’s it’s an interesting thing i don’t really know what to make of it um and and so i i i again this is a difficult conversation to have i’m just yeah i’m just sort of waiting to see what happens um hopefully not too long because there’s that overtold story about the three boats in the flooding house and i i don’t want to drown um but i i don’t quite know where i am and i’m worried that if i rush into something that i’ll have a reaction like i did when i was a kid because i have some whatever reason i just seem to be contrary yeah wherever i am i i push back when i was uh you know a kid and i was religious i had all these questions i quit confirmation class midway through yeah um and yeah do you want me to give you a uh i’ll give you an idea maybe or a little a little tip or something that i think that the i think that when you’re in the position that you are and you don’t know what it means to believe and you don’t know exactly what it means to um believe in god i would say that the best way to deal with that is to um is to be grateful is to thank god and it more than to see it because jordan one of the problems with jordan is that he says i act as if god exists and for him that means i try to live a moral life and i try to do what’s right but that’s not the first thing that’s the first thing is to to to see the goodness in your life to see the goodness in your relationship with your fiance to see the love that she has for you and to see the the you know the the moments where people are manifesting something more to you you know uh some generosity some love some affection and to thank god for that and then i think that if you do that and you’re going to start to see maybe what it means to to believe in god because believing god is more of a is more of a positioning yourself in life it’s more of a direction in which you’re facing more than a mental game that you play with your you know with your thoughts or whatever that you believe in this you know like what does it even mean to i’m not even sure what it means to to totally just say like i don’t believe me it’s the opposite like i don’t know what it means when someone says i don’t believe in god i’m like what are you talking about you don’t believe in god like okay you don’t believe in a god maybe you like what god do you not believe in i’d like to know because i’m talking about the infinite source of all being i’m talking about that which is both being and non-being that is both beyond existence you know i was reading sam maximus just now in uh in the ecclesiastical mystagogy and he basically says he’s like oh on the one hand we can say god does not exist on the other hand we can say god exists because god is not a being in this in the sense of of of like you or he is beyond all existence so when someone says i don’t believe in god or even when they say i believe in god i’m like well what do you mean even when you say you believe in god like what level at what level are you talking about here um so i would say that that’s probably not the most important thing like it it’s it’s mostly about i think gratitude and then looking at the story of christ and seeing how that story can be transformative in in your life because it’s the it’s the ultimate story well i haven’t been thinking about that last one a fair bit just because stories are what i do and the degree to which you know the christ story uh relates to things like campbell’s hero’s journey and it is the best version of that right and and so i i thank you um i guess i guess we’ll see we’ll talk in a few years and see how how how’s it going how it’s going yeah so so it’s just been a really interesting couple of years for me in that regard um and so gosh i really don’t know what to say about that sort of thing yeah um it is it’s it’s a very difficult personal conversation um yeah well i really do appreciate all that oh it’s thanks for sharing that with us as well and and i mean i it’s like just one step at a time you know just you just move slowly you’re getting married that’s the biggest thing you’ve got and so you know hopefully you’ll also see the presence of god in your in your relationship you know and that’s something that you can see as well i think if i’m going to see it anywhere maybe there there you go gratitude definitely be a theme for the last week and for the rest of this one i should think awesome oh yeah and so now you’re working on this series so how many books do you are you supposed to be making it so i turned the third one in a couple weeks ago i’ve got two more this is going to be five and then uh and then we’ll see where i go from there i might want to do a young adult series after that or some standalone novels um but it’s uh they’re they’re not small they take about a year to do they’re about a quarter million words a piece um and so yeah this has just been an ongoing project i try to do about one a year but i also edit a bunch of short story anthologies i work with all kinds of writers um you know actually there’s something i meant to say during all the heavy metal stuff is that there is a weird relationship right between heavy metal music and the whole literature of the imagination fantasy science fiction play um in no small part right they’re talking about sabbat being inspired by horror films but uh lindsay plin’s got this complex with Tolkien um and i remember you talked to nicholas about Tolkien so uh and he’s hugely influential in my own work um as well even though i’m writing a different genre or at least superficially a different genre i think science fiction is all fantasy um you’re right in some form or other you know um is the genre just the arguments about genre distinctions uh between science fiction and fantasy and all the little sub genres are as annoying and obscure as the distinctions between metal genres i don’t understand them it’s such a popular panel item at conventions they’re always like what’s urban fantasy and i’m like it’s not uh it doesn’t matter um but uh lindsay plin writes all these songs that touch on on middle earth and stuff and what’s so interesting about that is uh that they ended up making water the rings really popular with hippies in the 60s there was this huge boom in no small part because my publisher’s father donald wallheim published an unauthorized edition as a paperback there was some loophole in the way copyright law worked and he was able to bootleg them basically because Tolkien didn’t want to publish them as a paperback and so this cheap edition got published and got picked up by a bunch of science fiction and fantasy fans who were uh or who are a lot of them hippies and punks um and so on and so Tolkien caught on with the least likely people imagine it’s so funny which is another kind of inversion here right um because the tokyan world basically got it like it has a cast system in it basically it looks like it looks like medieval india or something sometimes yeah you know but he is he’s so explicitly catholic too right in the way that that’s written and he’s in oxford don right he he’s the last person any of these people would read and he becomes the underpinning for uh the entire genre really because yeah things really uh revolutionized the way we told epic fantasy stories to the point where people complain about it now you’ve got all these um you know activist writers who are talking about trying to get away from Tolkien’s you know shadow and his uh and his worldview and his world building and they just they just can’t seem to shake it anyway there was a story that went around about orcs um a couple i think like half a year ago or so where this guy was talking about how the orcs were all this uh this horrific racist stereotype um you know and i actually know that guy um he was a guest lecturer at nc state uh the guy who told that particular story but he um they just they can’t get away can’t get away from Tolkien they keep trying to divorce fantasy from him so did he try to write a story where the orcs win or something like where the orcs a short story uh where he conflated bilbo baggins with senator bilbo who was an american senator who was a segregationist um and uh it it was it was a strange like uh satire piece i i read it a while ago so i’m a little fuzzy on the details of the story itself but it’s it’s it’s really emblematic of this way that people keep trying to chip Tolkien out of the uh the canon if you will because so many people are aware of the fact that Tolkien is this religious you know sort of conservative figure it was i was talking to a writer in the last connection i was at and i just i described Tolkien as conservative and it like blew his mind what’s not like what he’s the return of the king like what are you talking about dude he didn’t get it and it’s so bizarre to me because the people who are fantasy fans and who are metal fans to an extent who are our rock music fans or these sort of marginal figures right if you’ve ever been to a science fiction convention you’ll i’m always and i don’t mean to sound this is going to sound bad but i’m always surprised that like i don’t see these people anywhere else right i i go there and i’m like where are you guys on tuesday they um they are these these you know marginal uh people and i was one of them right i was this kid who didn’t uh really fit in in school i was in a class of like 20 kids all the way through eighth grade and by about third grade they mostly decided who their friends were and i was not most of their friends and i think that’s sort of the archetypal like fan person right um they might be you know marginalized for different reasons i was marginalized for being weird as opposed to um you know the the canonical reasons people were marginalized in the 21st century right uh race sex behavior you know these sorts of things um but i but that’s the sort of person who is attracted to things like fantasy and to end like metal music too um there’s something in lord of the rings the the thing that saves now i’m kind of like i’m going over the top when i’m saying that his world is like it’s like medieval india he there’s something about the the great thing about tokiin which saves it and also makes it christian is that his main character is the littlest of these like he doesn’t he talks about the loftiness of the elves and the and you know and all these other characters but the one who saved the day ends up being the smallest one and so because of that he fills his world like he doesn’t just he doesn’t just say you know it’s like high good down bad like there’s also this idea that that even at the lowest even the smallest one can play a part and participate in the grand story and so right and final redemption’s in the hands of golem too right this really twisted marginal figure right so i want to make sure that i apologize to my fellow marginal nerd friends you know we are all golem to a certain extent and and that’s that is the way that the world is right there’s a part of us that is that sort of you know that that that wretched marginal you know character um and that’s i think part of what attracts everyone to tokiin right especially you know the fan community right it is that there is still that that space there’s a little bit left you know not tied off from the fringe right um is even golem right it is the the pity of bilbo that rules the fate of many right he spares this this this wretched thing um so yeah it’s it’s but it’s it is it’s it’s strange to me that the the margins of society right centered this very uh christian you know fantasy story rock and roll helped do that um and it brought all these people because i know people who don’t like i was at a party once and someone uh said that they had to stop seeing their kid because he dabbled in christianity um it was it was the most upside down sentence i ever heard um it was it was so bizarre but they were all um they were all wiccans yeah it’s like he’s hiding a bible under his under his pillow you know and apparently he was um and um but they also were talking about how they really liked tokiin about 20 minutes earlier right and i didn’t bother to point this out because it was late and i didn’t want to be in a party with all these witches anymore yes with witches it was conventions are like this uh there are an inordinate number of of witches who are involved in science fiction and fantasy writing i don’t take them seriously i someone tells me that they’re a practicing which i think oh right and i play dungeon dragons sometimes too um it’s all made up anyway it’s it’s all weird modern invention it the very earliest mid 19th century you know yeah gosh it’s so silly uh but they there are so many of them and it’s this weird reactionary goofy thing um but they are also attracted to the same stories and so they run in circles yeah you know i it’s funny because i’m i’m working i’ve been working on a story um like an origin story of santa claus for a few years and um i i bought i saw that um more grant morrison had published a a graphic novel called cloths um and so i got it and i knew kind of knew what i was gonna get what i was gonna get you know but it was just so hilarious to see this desire to make santa claus into like a pagan figure into like a completely pagan non-christian figure you know i think christmas isn’t mentioned once they always say yuletide or whatever and and it was like it was just so i mean i knew i should i knew that’s what it was going to be but it was just still shocking to like read the entire graphic novel and to realize you know he’s like taking psychedelics and he’s seeing uh he’s seeing um what are they called machine elves or whatever and like all this stuff and his clockwork elves and i’m like oh my goodness this is nuts this guy’s crazy it’s so strange this is the same thing though with like misappropriating these symbols right is i don’t know if they’re afraid to play the thing straight or if they don’t like the the original version of the myth because they have an antipathy for the faith and whatever but there’s a there’s a strange current that they can’t quite not use those stories right um like look at um like look at how many king arthur adaptations come out right without the church like every single every single every single medieval movie you know never has christianity in it which is just bizarre which is like unless it’s an evil catholic exactly and i do like lady hawk that is a good movie but um actually they do mention god frequently in that one never mind that movie gets a pass and that’s why all the king arthur movies suck they just stink to high heaven because they don’t have the grail they don’t have everything that makes king arthur king arthur you know and the and and then when you have the grail and you have you know the feast of pentacost and all these things then merlin as a shady kind of ambiguous figure makes sense but if you’re in a medieval world where there’s no christianity then it’s like okay well merlin just a wizard because we’ve seen wizards in harry potter and we’ve seen wizards everywhere they don’t they don’t matter because they all wear pointy hats and we all know what they are but it’s like in a christian world then you would have then merlin could actually play an interesting role and as this kind of strange ambiguous character this kind of marginal figure that is we don’t know which side he’s on we’re not sure what his intentions are it’s like there you’ve got interesting stuff but without that it’s just nonsense yeah but there’s this weird tendency to just denature everything right there’s not even a margin anymore so nobody can get any these stories are so sanitized especially the hollywood level they don’t really know what to do with any of it all right well it’s our job now then it’s our job to tell the good stories that’s it yeah that’s the truth i hope uh i hope someone you know i hope they’re i hope we’re not alone in that well we’re you know i think we’re with it’s growing i think we’re gonna see more and more and uh hopefully yeah hopefully we can just encourage people to to to learn the good stories and to tell the good stories um that’s one of that’s one of the things i’m trying to do that’s for sure to try to get you know like even connect people like you with nicolas and start to connect with people that are trying to to tell the stories in the in a good way you know even in the weird stuff you can have the weird stuff just have it in the right place and it’s fine like it’s yeah i will say that’s what i hope i’m doing right in to go back to the saint christopher story that is my name right which is what freaked me out about the story when you when you told it in the video i hope that my works in some way because they’re not explicitly christian books even to the degree of the lord of the rings when i was writing them i thought i was just writing science fiction stories and i don’t know exactly what it is i am writing but i hope that some people will come to that and then come through them maybe to something more meaningful um and i hope that i entertain people telling stories yeah all right christopher it was really great to talk to you and i’ll have to think more about heavy metal not too much i can send you a couple suggestions if you want at least send you after forever i think that one’s pretty safe that’s the song that’s that song by black Sabbath the christian one all right i’ll listen i mean i’ve listened to heavy metal before like i’ve heard it i’m not just never been a fan it’s not like i’m not saying that to be like uh to look virtuous i i was a punk rock i was a punk rock guy you know that’s what i was listening to so it’s not it’s not a not a ritu signal just not it’s just the thing about the the there’s the metal crowd they just also have this like hermetic thing where the metal fans they kind of they know each i don’t know they like know they can tell each other or they kind of have this weird thing where they know each other it’s the sub genre thing they’re mutually estranged from one another uh there’s a weird tower of bamboo thing that’s gone on where like black metal people don’t talk to power metal people and they only agree on the old stuff and even then not all the time it’s it’s strange anyway all right so it’s great to talk to you and hopefully i’m hoping that if i have time to to read your novels we can have another conversation after that i would love to i could send you a copy if you want sure yeah great and i wish you all the best on your your new wedding and hopefully uh yeah a new life starting that sounds like an adventure on its own thank you very much all right and thanks for having me yeah my pleasure hope you enjoyed this discussion with christopher rockio please check out his books i’m going to put links to his writing in the description so you can see that there are a lot of things coming up very soon i’m going to be in seattle in the month of may first week of may so the weekend of may 2nd i will be speaking at the shared inheritance conference there details are coming but mark that on your schedule i’m also going to be giving a week-long carving workshop from the fourth to the ninth in seattle so if you’re interested in that spending a whole week we carve we talk we have a lot of fun discussing all kinds of subjects stay tuned to that because details for how to uh to sign up for that will be coming very soon i will also be in hartford connecticut in the month of june which will be the first week of june from the 31st of may to the 6th of june and usually the same thing there a whole week of carving and hanging out and talking so stay tuned to that also for details how to sign up for that and uh yeah so a new video coming up very soon guys thanks for your support and uh talk to you very soon