https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=VqjUNiU6TBA
And the reason why I care so much about this is that if we talk about the notion that there are principalities or there are agencies which are above the human consciousness or that gather human consciousnesses together and gather phenomena together, let’s say, then the idea that it’s only either from heaven or hell, that it’s only good or bad, is not the one we experience. We experience agency on us that doesn’t necessarily have those two polarities. And so the problem is if we experience that, then how do we account for it in our own symbolic structure? How can we talk about it? This is Jonathan Pageot. Welcome to the Symbolic World. So hello, everybody. This is the return of Richard Roland. We haven’t done this in a while. Universal history. Richard has been super busy. You’ve been traveling a little bit too. I’ve been busy too. We’ve all been pretty busy. But it’s all for exciting things. And we’re going to see some… We were just talking about The Golden Key, which is a book that Richard has been bringing up once in a while that he’s working on now. I wrote a piece for and we’re going to move forward with bringing that out. You know, Richard is right now publishing all his fantasy stuff. He started posting that. And so we’ll put a link to that in the description. There’s just so many amazing things going on. So, Richard, thanks for despite everything coming along. Well, I’m very glad to be here. And the extra like the backstory that people out there don’t know is this is like the third time that we’ve actually tried to get together and record this episode. And one time we just ended up needing to work on some other stuff. And another time I scheduled it on American Thanksgiving, not realizing that it was American Thanksgiving. And so I was at church and you messaged me and you’re like, hey, are we talking today? Wait, it’s Thanksgiving. I was realizing it in like real time. Yeah, I mean, they’re in the zoom. Yeah, but we’re here now and I’m very excited because I get to talk about stuff that I actually know things about, which is always fun. So we’re going to talk about the Anglo-Saxons today. And as many people know, I’m a Germanic philologist. That’s really you could say that that was like my door into medieval studies. You know, I’ve always been interested in the Middle Ages, but even as a kid, but my real door into medieval studies as a scholar was through Germanic philology and specifically Anglo-Saxon and Old Norse literature and languages. And so we’re going to start by talking about, it’d probably be the first of a couple of conversations about the Old North and universal history and the way that the Christians of the late Germanic Iron Age, which is this Germanic Iron Age is a period. Some people, well, there are different dates assigned to it, but I think most people have it from about 500 BC, maybe a little bit later up to 800 AD. So the late Germanic Iron Age, this is the period in which the this and beyond is the period in which the various northern Germanic peoples begin to convert to Christianity. And it’s the basically it’s the period immediately before the Viking Age, so we will get into some Viking Age stuff as well. So probably not today, but in the future. So what I wanted to talk about was actually, let’s just pick up again with the the the Chronicle or the Apocalypse of Pseudomathodius. It seems like this is a text that we just come back to constantly over and over again. And it really is a central text to the way that these cultures understood universal history. And one of the important things to note about this text and something we’ve brought up a couple of times before is that in the Apocalypse of Pseudomathodius, we find a witness of this tradition that there was a fourth son of Noah. Now, I think that in the Apocalypse of Pseudomathodius, he’s named something like Yonatos or I think that’s right. And he would be born after the flood. Is that the idea? Yonaton or Yonaton or Yonatos. OK, so that’s I mean, that’s the question. That’s actually the big spicy question about him. And this goes back to the Apocalypse of Pseudomathodius is relying for this on a much earlier Syriac work called the Cave of Treasures. And I think Sebastian Brock did a pretty good translation of that. So you can go read that. It’s got just like a bunch of the early Christian, late Jewish traditions that were preserved in Syria concerning like Adam and Eve, the Garden of Eden and all this stuff. If you wanted to if you wanted to get like a better framework for reading Seda from the Syrian, that’s a pretty good. It’s a pretty good place to start. But yeah, so this is the question. Where when was he born? Where was he born? Some ancient authors and medieval authors have him being born on the ark. Others have him being born after the ark because the Genesis text is actually fairly explicit about who exited the ark. Right. And so this is so then it’s like, well, but, you know, maybe he’s a little baby. So just just in case people don’t know, there is a strong tradition that in a lot of ancient texts, especially in Syria, that when so Noah has these three sons. And then when God tells him that he’s going to destroy the earth with a flood, Noah lives as celibate until the flood. Oh, really? Yeah, this is this is a pretty well attested tradition. Okay. So the idea is that he lives as celibate until the flood. And then on the ark with his wife, he conceives this fourth son. And he’s either born on the ark or he’s born after they disembark. Kind of depending. I mean, the sort of like the math. If he’s born, if he’s conceived on the ark, the math doesn’t really work for him to have been born on there necessarily. But, you know, these are this is long ago and far off time. So, you know, mathematical considerations, not the most important thing. And also people live 900 years. So, yeah, who knows how long it took for a child. Right. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. So, so, yeah. And you could think about the symbolism of that in itself, the idea that Noah lived as celibate when he was building the ark. Yeah. But then he conceives a son while he’s on the ark and while the floodwaters are covering the earth. Yeah. And also, I mean, especially if you understand the ark as the seed for the new world, then it all kind of makes sense. And if you understand the ark as an image almost like of a of the holy place, you know, in chaos, you know, there’s all these there’s different types. The ark has all kinds of associations, but that is those associations are definitely there. You see some medieval representations of the ark as a seed. If you’ve ever seen it, it looks like it’s like kind of like not sort of almond shaped like an almond shaped. So, yeah. So, I mean, and I mean, there’s some weird stuff, too, about this, trying to decide how weird we want to go for for our return to universal history. So, I mean, the world is competing with you for weirdness right now. There’s nothing. You know what? It’s a very you’re right. That’s a very good point. So there’s this very ancient association between flooding and menstruation. Yeah. Which, you know, if you’ve read Matthew’s book, it’s very easy to understand to make sense. But there are also like certain taboos about reproduction during menstruation. The point of all of this is the fact that this fourth sun may have been conceived on the ark. Yeah, but it’s important to understand, like, I know this is we’re getting into really weird territory here. But it’s OK. But we also let’s say new beginnings are born out of exceptional things. And yeah, that’s that’s what I’m trying to get to. And you can even like see this in the way like the sitting the raven out, sitting the dove out to see the branch, all that stuff. Right. It’s new life being born out of this like really exceptional kind of a space. And and so this fourth son of Noah, who in Greek and Syrian text is usually like Yon ton or Yoni ton or Yoni to us in I think in Latin. Although I think there’s also a Georgian version that’s like Bonito or something like that. But anyway, this character, this figure of the fourth son, the point is that he’s born out of this kind of weird liminal marginal space. Right. You know, and he he functions in that way in more than one way, for instance. First of all, he, you know, isn’t actually in the canonical text of scripture. Right. This is a I wouldn’t say it’s a minority tradition. It’s an obscure tradition today, but everyone in the Middle Ages knew about this. But but it’s definitely it’s definitely an apocryphal tradition. Right. In the sense of, you know, apocryphal being something that’s hidden. Right. And and if people don’t remember in the apocalypse of pseudo methodius, the role that he has. Is that he goes off far to the east, which seems like the wrong direction for the stuff we’re going to be talking about today. But he goes off far to the east to the land to the land of the rising sun is actually what it says. And there he is taught sort of esoteric wisdom from God. And eventually, like Nimrod goes off and travels and he’s he’s the one that Nimrod learns like divination and astronomy and things like this from Nimrod learns this from Yon ton. Yeah. In the in the in the like the Cave of Wonders, like in the Syrian text. Yeah. And and of course, this is problematic because Nimrod also introduces the the worship of fire. Right. He finds this fire ascending from the earth. Like so the light coming from below is a post of light coming from above. And he goes down to where the light is coming from. And he a voice speaks to him out of the fire and he worships it. And this is like a sort of like a Syrian, you know, there’s a bit of like a polemic against their Persian neighbors here. Right. The Zoroastrianism, the worship of fire. But anyway, so eventually Yon ton tells him, you know, don’t come back, you know, teaches him some some stuff. But then he kind of sees the direction Nimrod is heading and he tells him, don’t come back. So anyway, he’s this interesting figure and he’s really associated, you know, back when we were talking about India and the Far East, he’s associated ultimately with the idea of like the Eastern of Eastern wisdom, the Eastern philosopher, the gymnasophist. All that stuff goes back to goes back to this this fourth son of Noah. So the weird thing is that there is actually there are a large number of connections which we are really just coming to understand. When I say we, I mean, like the scholarly community at large, people who study old English culture, Germanic studies, et cetera, there are a large number of connections between what you could call the Old Testament pseudo epigrapha, like the legit apocrypha. When I say apocrypha, I don’t mean like Tobit or Maccabees or Judith or something like that. That’s just the director’s cut of the Bible. But when I so when I say apocrypha, I mean like really apocryphal stuff like, you know, the Book of Enoch would the Book of Enoch is a good example. Yeah, or the life unless you’re Ethiopian, obviously, but the Book of Enoch, the life of Adam and Eve, stuff like that. So there is a huge connection between this apocryphal literature, the Syrian tradition, which was probably the the means of conveyance for a lot of these things and Anglo-Saxon Christianity, which is, again, a very surprising kind of a thing. And I think that’s part of why it’s taken us so long to notice, because in the past, traditionally, academia has been very siloed. So if you were somebody studying Syriac or Ethiopian, you were probably not all somebody who was also studying, you know, Beowulf. Yeah. Yeah. But the Nestorians appear in the Middle Ages in the kind of weird tales as these. Yeah, as these kind of mystical. Yeah. So this is similar to the way the gymnosophists appear. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But this is even before that. This connection goes back even before that. And in this case, we actually have a name, a face, a date that we can probably peg the connection to. So it comes through a couple of routes. One is that there was a huge treasury of these pseudo-apocryphal texts, usually translated first into Latin and then into Old Irish, that were kept in these Irish monasteries. And so people who know the story of the conversion of the Anglo-Saxons, it really happened from two directions. There was a Roman push for conversion kind of from the south. And then at the same time, there was an Irish push for conversion from the north. And eventually the two sort of met in the middle and they had some synods. And, you know, it’s a whole it’s a whole thing. But these Irish monasteries, unfortunately, most of the manuscripts they had were destroyed by Vikings during the Viking age. But these Irish monasteries had extensive collections of these pseudo-apocryphal texts. For instance, there is an Old Irish, it’s called the Salter Narain. I probably said that wrong because it’s Old Irish. But and my brain does not do Gaelic languages. So anyway, all the Gaelic, like the old Irish speakers out there, you have to just forgive me. It’s your Anglo-Saxon, you know, manifesto. Can’t do it. Yeah. But the Salter Narain, which literally just means like the Salter of the Quatrain, is a collection of about 100. I think it’s exactly no, it’s 150 because it’s a Salter. So it’s got 150 poems in it. It’s a collection of 150 Psalms or, you know, Quatrain, you know, these poems that have like these the basic stanza is four lines. Right. And basically, it’s the entire Old Irish universal history of the world, starting with Adam and Eve and the creation of the world and going forward through time. And if you go read the Salter Narain, what they basically do is they take all of this, all of the pseudepigraphal stuff and they take the early chapters of Genesis and they take, you know, the rest of the historical books of the scriptures and the Gospels and all these things. And they just weave it together into a cohesive account. And I just want to emphasize this was a book that was made for lay people. It’s not written in Latin. It was written in Old Irish because the point of it was that it would be easy way to sort of teach people the. I don’t want to say teach people their Bible, but teach people the tradition, like teach people like pass on pass on. What do we as Christians believe about where we came from, the origins of humanity, where did demons and angels and fairies and all the stuff? And so you can go look at this. And I don’t think the whole thing has been translated into English, but good bits of it have. There might be there might be a whole translation into English that’s like really archaic, I think maybe back in the 1800s. But they do give the origin of fairies in there. I mean, yes, I mean, where fairies are, you’re going to get me off on a thing here. Sorry. Yeah, no, it’s OK. I mean, just so interesting. Yeah. Well, actually, I was at I was at Doxicon in October, November, and there were some symbolic world folks there, which is great. We’ve got a picture together and it’s great to see all. But at Doxicon, somebody gave this beautiful talk and it was just on, you know, 19th century firsthand accounts of people who met fairies and the fairies were asking, well, can we be saved? Right. That was the question. And the the the general consensus in all of these stories seems to sort of be that’s a question that cannot be known until the day of judgment. But anyway, yeah, like you start getting to the fairy thing is really interesting. But basically in the Middle Ages, there are two or three main theories of where what fairies are and where they come from. And the you know, the first one of those and this is also found in rabbinic literature is that they are the unwashed children of Eve. You know, this idea that God or the Archangel Michael, depending on the story, comes to bless Eve and her children. This is after the fall and Eve puts her. But but but it’s like it’s like washing day and not all the kids are clean. Right. And so she puts the dirty ones behind her back and they don’t get the blessing. And so the ones that are blessed are the ones from which humanity is descended to the ones that didn’t get the blessing. They’re the ones that fairies are descended from. So they’re sort of like kind of like, well, fairies and gin and like, you know, all the all these different intermediary ambiguous kind of spirits. So that’s one theory. Another theory. And I think this is the one that you find in the Salter and Arraign is that fairies are the descendants of angels who took a neutral stance during the war in heaven. So during the war. Oh, really? Oh, you didn’t know this. So this is what I’ve been wondering about. If that exists. If there was a kind of gin tradition in Christianity, neutral, neutral space or ambiguous space. Yeah. So so this is is probably in the Middle Ages is probably the most common theory for where fairies come from. So the basic idea is that they were angels who took took a neutral position in the war in heaven and they didn’t fight against Lucifer, but they also didn’t fight on the side of God. So they are they’re cast out, but they’re not cast all the way down. So whereas Lucifer, the devil and his angels, they’re cast down to hell. These guys are cast sort of halfway down to earth and they become these sort of like very earthy spirits. And they are like these spirits of their these in between spirits of the air like they’re right there. These in between spirits of the air. And so then this is why there’s this big question in like sort of Irish folklore of can they be saved because they weren’t like totally damned. Right. So then now this is almost very similar to the gin tradition. It’s more or less exactly the same. And I think that I think that that ties back to a much older kind of source for both of those traditions. Yeah. By the way, I’ll just put it like a little plug. You won’t actually get it in this book, but you’ll find it in the next one that’s going to come out this next year in my own sort of fantasy legendarium. This is the origin that I use for they’re not called fairies in this story, but essentially the fairies that the main culture, the Amborean culture in my fantasy story, they’re descended from. But one of the things that I try to sort of suss out in my own reworking of that myth is, well, why did they take this neutral position and try to answer that question? So if you want my personal take on that, you can read till sometime next year and when it comes out. Yeah, that book will come out. But anyway, so then the third the third theory of kind of where fairies come from is essentially that they’re the Nephilim. Oh, directly now. Yeah. And so with the Nephilim understood as as either the descendants of Cain or the descendants of the sons of God, daughters of men, it just depends on like how do you read that sons of God, daughters of men thing, even in the Syriac sources. Like, for instance, the Nephilim is a very early witness to like that sort of sethite hypothesis. And whereas there are other other very early texts, such as the Book of Enoch, which have it as this coupling of angels and humans. And we’ve talked before about why these are not really in the Middle Ages, especially by the authors of things like the Beowulf poem. These are not necessarily viewed as mutually exclusive positions because, well, for one thing, either way, either way that you read it, there’s there’s this unholy pairing at these, you know, movement down the mountain at these levels of the ontological hierarchy. And the line of Cain is always involved somehow. Either the line of Cain or… And with Father Stephen the Young’s kind of exposition, the ritual aspect of it, then those two actually can completely coexist and there’s no issue at all. Right. So for me, it’s not people are like, oh, but doesn’t this person say this and doesn’t this person say this? And, you know, it’s since we’re just doing tangents today. So there’s a little bit for for for some other studies that I’ve been doing. I’ve been reading a lot of St. Cyril of Alexandria lately, and he has a he has this wonderful, wonderful sort of polemic piece called Against Julian. Right. So this is a piece that he writes against Julian the Apostate. And one of the things that he does is he excerpts significant portions of Julian the Apostate against the Galileans, which is his his sort of tirade against Christianity. And and it’s really the I think it’s the only extant place that we actually have that now is excerpted within St. Cyril. But in in Julian’s writings, he’s giving all of these arguments against the Virgin Birth, which he finds. I mean, Julian is I don’t I don’t know how to say this nicely. You don’t have to say anything nice about Julian the Apostate. Well, no, it’s not. Here’s the thing. Julian has like a bunch of very Protestant objections to Christianity. And again, I’m not trying to like at my Protestant friends or family or whatever. But like Julian the Apostate, if you if you read his actual complaints against Christianity, he can’t stand the fact that we’re kissing relics. He can’t stand the fact that we think the Eucharist is the body and blood of Christ. He can’t stand the fact that we call Mary the Theotokos. This is literally this is one of his main arguments against Christianity is he says it’s insane to call a human woman the mother of God. You can’t do that. Right. So he’s actually like an early witness to a couple of things. One is that at this very early stage, Theotokos was a title everybody had already been using for a long time. But one of the arguments he makes against calling Mary the Theotokos is he says, OK, OK, OK. If you really believe it went down this way, then that makes Jesus one of the Nephilim. Right. Right. Which is wrong and not the point, just to be clear. But it’s also an early witness to the fact that Julian, who we have to remember, basically went to seminary with the Cappadocian fathers or he went to the Academy in Athens with St. Basil the Great and Gregory the theologian. Right. And this was his understanding. In other words, this is how he’d been taught the scriptures was that this is how to read Genesis chapter chapter. Right. Yeah. Yeah. All that to say, I don’t really see these things as being sort of mutually exclusive, at least on a symbolic level. Right. You have kind of the same thing happening either way. And what’s really important is that you have this lineage of monsters to say, that’s right. Cane. Right. So yeah, in either version of the story, the line of Cane is the daughters of men in that equation. And the result of that unholy pairing is this race of monsters. Yeah. And so that this so this is the third version that you find in the Middle Ages of sort of like the origins for like, where do fairies come from? And by fairies, I mean, giants, monsters, etc. So and this is this is, for instance, the the version that you find in Beowulf, which we’ll talk about a little more in a minute. So but in this case, so to kind of rewind all the way back, there’s this there’s this very strong witness to the Old Testament pseudo epigraph in the Syrian tradition within Anglo-Saxon literature. And it’s only just now starting to be better understood. But most of this probably goes back to a guy named Saint Theodore of Tarsus. Do you know about Saint Theodore Tarsus? He’s one of the earliest archbishops of Canterbury. He was archbishop starting in 668. So this is very shortly after the Anglo-Saxon conversion. And he was born in Tarsus. He grew up in Constantinople. He visited Addessa. He spoke and read Syrian fluently and by sort of a series of historical accidents, whatever you want to call it. He first goes west to Rome, where he lives at an eastern monastery in Rome. And at this time, he this is when he learns Latin. And then after the Synod of Whitby is held in 664, he is sent to Canterbury because they need a new archbishop. And so they sent him there and he goes there. And there are sort of stories of his erecting what is either the first rude screen or just an iconostasis in a church there in England and all this stuff. So he’s a really interesting figure. And if you look at him, I mean, he was totally steeped in the Byzantine theological tradition, completely steeped in the Syrian theological tradition, kind of somebody who went to every great center of Christianity in the East, except for maybe Northern Africa, and was able to acquire the learning, acquire the languages. And so he brings with him and at Canterbury, he founds a school called the School of Canterbury. And there’s lots of evidence to suggest if you kind of look at the Chronicles and also the list of books. So sometimes we don’t have surviving books, but we have surviving book lists from the School of Canterbury. We see that things like the the Apocalypse of Pseudomethodius are listed among books that they had access to. So they were definitely aware of these traditions. There’s a really great book, which I have just over there, but the spine is facing away from me, so I can’t see the name of it right now. But it’s something like the Apocrypha in the Anglo-Saxon homiletic tradition, something like that. And basically, it does a great job of looking at sermons, books of homilies. So in the Middle Ages, people were not typically expected, especially when you had varying levels of learning. And sometimes your village priest wasn’t, you know, maybe the most articulate guy. That’s fine. We just need him to do the liturgy. Right. Because you had these varying levels of learning in the Middle Ages, it was not necessarily expected that your priest would always just be able to give like a banger of a homily, you know, off the top of his head every Sunday morning or something like this. And so it’s very common to have books of homilies. These are called homilaries. And these homilies would be arranged based on the liturgical year and the the lectionary readings and things like this. So they’re really they were copied a lot, which means they’re more likely to survive. And also they are really important witnesses so we can look at them to figure out things like, well, we know that the absolute latest date that this feast started being celebrated in this region was, you know, in this century. It could have been before that, but it certainly, you know, certainly was after that. Yeah. Yeah. And so, or absolute earliest day anyway. All that to say, so they’re really important, really important witnesses for lots of different things. And I’m really interested in them, a for the actual content, which is, which is usually pretty awesome, you know, and then B because they are a good gauge of what is being taught to lay people. Right. And so it’s like one thing to say that this this stuff is present in a, you know, it’s it’s in a library. It’s somewhere where monks have access to it, etc. Okay. But what what did the average Anglo-Saxon peasant common or whatever? What did they think about the world? And if you go look at my homilies, you can just see here are the things that are being taught. And so if you if you start looking through the Anglo-Saxon homiletic tradition, you find all kinds of wonderful things. And one of the things that you find is that they were taking the Old Testament pseudo epigrapha, for instance, the life of Adam and Eve, the visual poly the vision of St. Paul, or the apocalypse of St. Paul, as it’s sometimes called the life of Peter and Paul, like all these other important kind of apocryphal or pseudo epigraphal works. And they were actually incorporating them into their homilies to lay people to help them understand things about the afterlife. I mean, the visual poly is one of the earliest. But this way, there’s no Dante’s Inferno without the visual poly. Right. It’s one of the earliest descriptions that we have. Although it probably relies on like the the Ezra literature, like the, you know, second and third Esdras and things like that. But it’s one of the earliest witnesses we have to kind of this tradition of like the torments of hell and this idea, let the punishment fit the crime, stuff like that. One of my favorite things in there, and I think this is in Third Esdras as well, is the idea that Herod is forever imprisoned in hell, sitting on a burning throne. And so it’s one because he misused his kingship, but there’s also kind of a subtext there that sort of suggests a connection between that and childbirth because of all the children that he killed. And so, you know, things like this. Anyway, it’s all pretty grim stuff, but very interesting reading. It’s also important for Anglo-Saxon studies because it’s actually quoted and in some places and paraphrased and others in the Beowulf poem when they tried to describe the marsh where Grendel’s mother lives. This is this very, I mean, it’s it’s literally it’s hell. Right. This place where these monsters live, this kind of haunted swamp or mirror. They go back and they use a bunch of this stuff from these homilies that are normally descriptions of the torments of hell and they use it to describe this location. And so there’s there’s other stuff in there. Deliberate connections throughout Beowulf between Sigurd, right, the slayer of the. I want to say is it Sigurd or Sigmund now? I think it’s Sigmund because when the Beowulf poet wrote his poem, Sigmund was the famous dragon slayer. And then later on, it’s his son Sigurd. I might have that. I think that’s right. But basically, they take the most famous Germanic dragon slayer and then use language from his story. And then they take language from the story of Saint Michael casting Satan out of heaven and language from his story. And they incorporate both of that into the story of Beowulf killing monsters. And so it’s like, let’s tie our hero, who is a hero set in pre-Christian times, but it’s a story being put together by a Christian. And so let’s take the most famous pagan dragon slayer and the most famous Christian dragon slayer, you could say, and incorporate them both into our hero. So this is to me, this is what makes the Beowulf poem so interesting is the way that it’s certainly compiled by or written by a Christian, probably a monk, probably in the early seven hundreds. At some point, we’ll talk more about Beowulf. But what that monk is, he’s taking these older stories, not just from like Germanic paganism, but also from the sort of biblical apocrypha, like the apocrypha tradition. He’s taking both of those stories and integrated them. So in the Beowulf poem, for instance, you get this idea of sheaf or sheaf or sheafa, depending on how you want to say his name and where you’re from back then. And this character, although this gets a little complicated because the Beowulf poet, who is our earliest witness, like earliest written witness to this character, he actually combines him with an old pagan character. So we’ve got this tradition of a fourth son of Noah. There’s also this tradition of a guy named Sjild, which literally just means shield, who is the mythical progenitor of the Danish kings. He’s the Danish equivalent of like King Arthur. And the Beowulf poet takes those two characters and he combines them into a single character called shield shaving. Right. Sjild son of sheaf is what that literally means. But the sheaf myth or the sheaf legend is about this young boy who washes up on the shores of Western Europe. Back far, far away, long ago in the mists of time, washes up on the shores of Northern Europe. And he’s shining. He’s beautiful. He is his skin is literally glowing, which is, by the way, how Noah is described when he’s born in like third Enoch. And he’s there’s nobody with him. He just washes up on shore and he’s lying in the boat. And he’s got his head resting on a sheaf of wheat, which is why he’s called sheaf. And the people take him and they take him back up to the hall and their king has recently died and they don’t have a new king. And so they take this boy and they make him king. And he basically brings he’s a culture hero. He brings what is 19th century scholars refer to this kind of figure as a corn king. Right. Somebody who brings the secrets of agriculture and how to how to grow crops and things like that. He brings them to the Scandinavian people. So he’s this weird legendary figure that’s on a certain level like well attested, but at the same time not where we don’t really know much about him. And what seems to be happening specifically during the time of Alfred the Great is that they take sheaf, which is probably this preexisting sort of Germanic legend. Which nobody really knows when it started or where it started or how to explain it. They take sheave and you’ll find this, for instance, in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, which is written during Alfred’s life. Alfred, for people who don’t know Alfred the Great, in addition to making the Danes behave themselves, Alfred the Great oversaw a tremendous program of, you could say, like literary renewal and revival in England. In Anglo-Saxon England, and he’s responsible for just a tremendous amount of of most of the best Anglo-Saxon literature comes from. What was at least preserved, written down, preserved, collected, etc. by scholars working for him. He also did quite a bit of translation himself. He translated St. Gregory the Great’s Pastoral Care. And then he also translated the Boethius’ The Consolation of Philosophy. Although when I say he translated it, he translated it the way people translated things in the Middle Ages, which is as you’re translating, if you think of a way to improve this, we’ll just go right ahead. And actually, I kind of like Alfred’s better. No offense to Boethius. Well, OK, so here’s the thing about Alfred’s Boethius is that a lot of people say, oh, well, Alfred was like because he’s this Christian and he’s anti paganism, all this thing that he actually he actually removes all of the pagan remarks and and and all the pagan references and things like that. And when people say this, I just I always assume they have not actually read it because Alfred does not remove the references to paganism, although he changes them sometimes to make them make more sense to his audience. But he actually significantly enlarges them. So for instance, there’s a very brief reference and this is actually all connected. I swear there’s a brief reference in Boethius, you know, with what is talking about, you know, hubris and people who thought they were doing great. And then and then turned out, you know, things change for them. Right. Which is one of the main focus of the consolation. Right. So he as example, he lists the the Titans of old. Right. Well, Alfred says now some people here might refer an example to the Titans of myth. But you and I know perfectly well that the Titans of myth are actually the giants of Genesis. And he goes into this whole long thing about Nimrod and how Nimrod was a giant and all this stuff. So like he he keeps the reference, but he he he’s not Christianizing it in the sense of like sanitizing it. He’s just saying, but if you really knew about Genesis and the Anglo-Saxons were obsessed with Genesis and Exodus specifically, if you really knew about Genesis and you knew about this other literature, these other stories, you would know that the Titans of myth are actually the giants of Genesis, Chapter six. Yeah, he’s doing universal history. He’s doing universal history. He’s connecting things together. Exactly. So one of the things they do is they take this Germanic figure of sheaf and they connect him to this tradition of the fourth son of Noah. And then the question sort of becomes, was he born on the ark? Was he born after he got off the ark? The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle actually says he was born on the ark. And they do this because it allows them to connect their lineage. So one of the earliest places that we see this being done in writing is in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. There is a genealogy of Alfred’s father and in the genealogy of Alfred’s father, which I have, I have right here. So his father, Athel Wolf, great name, by the way. Anybody out there looking to name a son, Athel Wolf, very strong name. I always threaten to do something like that every time we we have a kid. Yeah, I used to do that to my wife and he would just drive it crazy. See, my wife, my wife would call my bluff on this. So I have to be careful. But I like to do this to like, like just like get my parents to worry a little bit. But yeah, so so they trace his genealogy all the way back and they get to these characters. And if you look at the early lineage that you find in the the prologue to Beowulf, you find a very similar lineage. It’s not exactly the same, but is same names. Beowulf, the son of Sheldwa, Sheldwa of Heromod, Heromod of Itermon, Itermon of Hadra, Hadra of Hvala, Hvala of Bedwig, Bedwig of Sheaf. That is the son of Noah, who was born on Noah’s ark. And then it traces Noah’s lineage back to Christ. So basically, Alfred sets himself up as a descendant. Right. So this is really, this is really important because the kings of Wessex already knew that. That and we’ll talk later about how eventually these two threads come together. But the descendants of the kings of Wessex already knew that they were descended from Ovin. Wotan, as they would call them. Right. Everybody knew this. So Alfred’s project, a big part of Alfred’s project. And of course, you have to think, you know, he’s got a bunch of pagan Danes right over there. And they’re doing their own things. And of course, he did kind of make them convert to Christianity, but it took a little while for that to take, let’s say. Yeah. Two centuries, let’s say. Yeah. Yeah. A couple of centuries. But you’ve got a bunch of Danes right over there. And so like Germanic paganism is present. Right. And so Alfred’s lineage that you find here, let’s say it’s a little quieter on the Odin parts. Yeah. You know, but the thing that he’s looking to do is really traces. Traces lineage back to Noah and of course, ultimately back to Christ or back to Adam. And says, well, and Christ, because he says, you know, who’s born on Noah’s ark, the son of Lasnek, the son of Methuselah, the son of Enoch, the son of Jared, the son of Malachil, the son of Canaan, the son of Enos, the son of Seth, the son of Adam, the first man and our father, that is Christ. Amen. So and this is I mean, that’s a deliberate reference back to the gospel according to St. Luke. Right. So you’ve got that genealogy in the gospel according to St. Luke and it goes all the way back to the son of Adam, who was the son of God. Right. And the point of the genealogy in St. Luke’s gospel, you could say, compared to the genealogy that we have in Matthew. Right. Matthew is sometimes too big a deal is made about this, but essentially Matthew’s, you know, Matthew is showing Christ revealing Christ as the Jewish messiah. But Luke, who’s writing a gospel sort of for the Greeks, maybe, or at least for, you know, the Hellenic Jews, Hellenic believers, he traces Christ lineage all the way back to Adam. Because the point is to show that Christ didn’t just come to save the Jews. He came to save everyone and that he sort of by that, you know, by this recapitulation, he becomes the new Adam. He becomes the new head and then everyone is gathered back under him again. This genealogy is deliberately echoing that race, deliberately echoing this to show where do the Anglo-Saxons fit in sort of the vast scheme of everything? And ultimately, where do they fit in the story of redemption? Where do they fit in Christian household? And what’s really weird is that they go this route because literally everyone else, if you look at Welsh Chronicles, if you look at French Chronicles, Chronicles, if you look at German Chronicles on the continent, literally everyone else just traces themselves back to Japheth, which is what any European would do in the Middle Ages. But the Anglo-Saxons and then ultimately following them, the Scandinavians, once they convert, they’re not converted. They haven’t converted at this point, but they they convert. And when they convert, they basically learn Christianity from the Anglo-Saxons. So everyone else at this time just traces their lineage back to Japheth. But for the Anglo-Saxons, it’s really important to trace themselves back to this fourth son of Noah. Very self-consciously so. And they do it without. I mean, they change his name. Like you can’t get from, you know, Jonton to Sheaf. Like you can’t do it. It doesn’t work. They change his name. They they ignore basically all of the the things that you’d find in like Eastern traditions about him. You know, as far as you know, there’s no association with Nimrod here. Alfred actually really how do I say this? The northern Germanic people, they had their own memory, right? They had their own memory of the war of God with the giants. This is one of the major background pieces of the Beowulf poem. Right. Is this is one of the major things that everybody kind of remembers happened. And of course, it’s because they had it in their own myths and legends. And then Christianity came along. Christianity had it, too. So here’s where I will say something really cool and then we’ll just save it for next time to explain. There is every reason to believe that the Beowulf poet had access to the Book of Enoch. He’s had access to strong Enochian traditions. In fact, I’ll just I’ll just like to say this wildly and like befuddle everyone, including my fellow English access. There is a very strong case to be made that Grendel’s name actually comes at least part of Grendel’s name comes from the Book of Enoch. So I’ll just throw that one out there and let people like percolate on it. Actually, if you’re not an Anglo-Saxonist, that may not be a very big deal to you. But if I am, you’re going to if you are, you’re going to be like, what the heck did he just say? So I’ll defend that Anglo-Saxonist. And I definitely want to hear. Yeah. This I would definitely want to hear how this connects together because I can kind of see it. You can kind of see it. But I don’t. I think I think that next time what we will have to do is actually just spend the entire video on on the Beowulf poem. I think that’s great because I think that’s the thing we’ve got to do. I’ve had an intuition for years because I was always presented Beowulf as a pagan story with a Christian veneer. And when I read it, I thought anybody who knows kind of the deep mythological stories that are part of the Christian tradition would not be able to say anything like that. No, no, no, no. There’s definitely paganism in there. But it’s it’s such a perfect weaving together of things that it’s almost impossible to disentangle it. But I really honestly, I believe that if you want to, there are certain there are certain texts, certain stories that are that are like the Rosetta Stone, you know, where you come across something that’s untranslatable. But then here’s here. Here’s the same text in a language you do know. Right. Beowulf is the Rosetta Stone for all of this stuff. It’s where especially in the old north, all of the stuff comes together in the Beowulf poem. And if you dig around very closely, I’ll just throw out kind of one little example. Right. When she’ll shaving, you know, he comes he’s shown washing up on the shore of the Danish coast and the Danes take him and they make him king. After after he dies, they hold a big funeral for him. There are three funerals in Beowulf, one at the beginning, one in the middle, one at the end. Very important to the story. But they hold this big funeral for bail for shield shaving. And when they do, they give him a ship burial. But it’s not like the one in the movie where they push the ship out and like shoot the arrow or whatever. They put him back in the ship. They laid they put a bunch of treasure on the ship with him and then they push the ship out into the sea. And what it says is they sent him back to those who had sent him. Not an earlier on, they keep saying that God sent him to the Danish people. God sent him to the Danish people is because they were they’d had a bad king before. And then now they don’t have a king at all. And so God sent him, God sent him, God sent him. But when they push the ship out, it says sent him back to those plural who had sent him. So the question is, who sent shield shaving to the Danish people in the Beowulf poem? If you’ve if you’ve got this kind of weird 19th century German version of Christianity, right? Where it’s so rigidly monotheistic that you don’t even have room to think about like the saints, the divine council, angelic orders, these different things, then that just it doesn’t make any sense. And you’d have to. And so they would look at that and they would say, aha, Christianity doesn’t have them. Yeah. And so that’s got to be the piece of paganism. That’s got to be like like the poet was just incautious. But actually, the Beowulf poet is, I think, one of the most cautious writers who’s ever lived in terms of I mean, he’s very artistic. And the idea that he would just make a mistake like that is, I think, utter nonsense. Much it’s a much better case to say that, well, actually, this probably eight century monk, there’s a little bit of there’s a lot of debate actually about the dating of the Beowulf poem. The manuscript that we have isn’t the original. It’s a copy. It’s from much later than when it was composed. So there’s kind of this argument about when was it composed? And why say there’s an argument? There’s a very there was a very famous conference held in Toronto, the University of Toronto called the Dating of Beowulf and an actual fistfight. I’ve talked to people who were there. An actual fistfight broke out at the conference over this stuff. My goodness. So it’s it’s it’s it’s hotly controversial. But academia like scholarship is so originally there was like an early date, maybe like, say, age of bead ascribed to it. And then then everybody’s like, no, it’s a later date. And now academia is actually coming back around based on based on our better understanding of like certain metrical laws in Anglo-Saxon literature and things like this. The consensus is kind of swinging back towards that earlier date again. Anyway, I’m an early date of Beowulf guy. If you’re not, I don’t care. But anyway, all right. All this to say all this to say, you can come you can come fight me. You know, it’s fine. You know, I’m not. Yeah, I think with your Jiu-Jitsu, we’re going to avoid we’re not going to fight you. But no, but in all seriousness, so this this monk, you know, probably probably. So anyway, I think Beowulf is most likely written by an eighth century monk living in England. Yeah. But you have you have given me like such a gift in this discussion. I’ll be honest with you. I hope I’ve been looking like I’ve been rambling. No, I’ve been looking for years to find some hook at the intuition that I have about this notion of intermediary beings and that in some ways, you know, the fact that we could see fairies appear in in Great Britain and, you know, that there was this whole structure there. And I thought, how do they account for that? Because it does look like the notion of the jinn or these these neutral or ambiguous figures, that can sometimes be tricky because they can go either way. Like, it’s not that they they can be neutral or they can go either way. And so this is great that they actually have this actual tradition. And I think that, I mean, this people will wonder why does Jonathan care so much about this? And the reason why I care so much about this is that if we talk about the notion that there are principalities or there there are like there are agencies which are above the human consciousness or that gather human consciousnesses together and gather phenomena together, let’s say, then the idea that it’s only either from heaven or hell, that it’s only good or bad is not the one we experience. We experience agency on us that doesn’t necessarily have those two polarities. And so the problem is if we experience that, then how do we account for it in in in our own symbolic structure? How can we talk about it? Both in technical terms, that’s easier. But to talk about it with a more mythological language, I found harder to do because it’s tricky. And I see like I saw C.S. Lewis obviously playing around with this. You see you see you see people playing around with this notion, but not not explicating it in a way that I found like gratifying. St. Isaac the Syrian explains all of it. So there you go. He explains he explains what exactly about exactly what you’re saying. Yeah, this stuff is in St. Isaac the Syrian. He talks about talks about like the old gods. And obviously he doesn’t use the word fairies, but one of his homilies, he talks about this idea, this and this idea that for him, it’s there’s like a. There is a limit that is placed on how much certain principalities and powers are allowed to lie, something like that. And so so yeah, so he’s he’s he’s got some really interesting stuff on this. I will see if I can dig that homily up and send you. I would love to see that. I have to go back and see which one it is. But but yeah, so so this is this stuff. Maybe to kind of wrap it up here because I think we’re getting close to the time that we we like to do these. But so to kind of sum all this up, the Anglo Anglo-Saxon Christians. Made very free use of the biblical pseudo epigrapha and of the or you know what what you know you could call the Apocrypha as well as Syrian traditions, right? They had access to these very important early works of universal history. And so when they attempt to write their own works of universal history, which is, by the way, that’s what the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle is. People only study it now for like, you know, you know, wars and things like this. But, you know, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle starts at, you know, starts with creation. Yeah, right. It’s you know, it starts with or at least it starts it starts back at it doesn’t start with creation. It starts with the birth of Christ. Right. But it’s I mean, think about that decision alone to say we’re the we’re the English people, not not British. We’re the English people. And we’re going to start our history. This is our Chronicle. And the history of the English people starts with. Before the incarnation of Christ, 60 years, Geist Julius, the emperor, the first of the Romans, sought the land of Britain and crushed the Britons in battle and overcame them. Nevertheless, he was unable to gain any empire there. And then Octavius reigned 56 winners. And in the 42nd year of his reign, Christ was born. That’s the opening kind of the opening entry, more or less, in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. So there so it’s a work of universal history because what they’re saying is our history actually begins with the birth of Christ and it begins with Rome. So what I’d like to talk about next time is why don’t we just zoom in on Beowulf? Oh, yeah, let’s do that. That would be great. And I’m looking forward to that. Sure. I actually have some. Well, we’ll do an episode on Beowulf. I have some other crazy ideas that I came up with today regarding Beowulf and the symbolic world. So we’ll talk about that later and maybe maybe see what you think about that and see what everybody else thinks about it. But and then after that, what I’d like to do is kind of pick up again after Beowulf and look at. So there are three things. So we said before in universal history that the universal history project is really you have to tie yourself back to Noah. Right. Or the Old Testament, you have to tie yourself back to the Christian story. And then you also tie yourself back to the Roman story. Right. Well, the North Germanic pagans, as they convert, they are going to do a third thing. Right. Which is try to tie themselves back to Noah, right, themselves back to Rome and then tie themselves back to all of their own like God’s heroes, ancestors and try to figure out where do they fit in the story. So, yeah, because their traditions were in some ways so strong and their memory of their own story was so strong, you know, that the Britons, the Gaelic people had lost a lot of their spiritual leadership anyways when by the time like Julius Caesar brags about how many druids he slaughtered, like by the time that they convert to Christianity, I don’t know how much was left even of their own tradition, whereas the northern people had this very strong memory of their own chronicles. And a big part of it was just the fact that they converted so late. Yeah. Yeah. So. All right. Well, I’m looking forward to talking about that. I think that’ll be the next couple of videos is we’ll just really dive deep into the stuff because it’s great. I can talk about it for hours, but also like there’s so much. It’s very difficult to kind of know where to start. So I hope this wasn’t too scattered for people, but maybe there’s at least enough here to get people excited. So if you want to know, is Grendel in the Book of Enoch come back next time? All right. All right, Richard. So thanks everybody. I think we’re going to try to get back on track and have these regularly again. And Richard showed you his book. Look up all the projects. The links will be in the description. There is a lot of interesting things coming in the future, you know, in all our collaboration. So thanks, Richard, for everything you do. Thanks, Jonathan.