https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=AkXcay54e6Q
So hello everybody, I am back here with Richard Roland. Everybody has been really excited about our last discussion on Ethiopia. I’ve been surprised to see how fast it’s been growing on the channel. It seems like it’s such a, it’s kind of an obscure subject but it actually seems to be touching on a lot of aspects of this re-enchantment and mystery, you know, and a different way of seeing peoples of the world which I find very exciting. And so I’m really looking forward to seeing what Richard has in store for us. And I have a few things in my, up my sleeve as well. I just have to say, I’ve gotten more, I mean, I don’t do nearly as much stuff on the internet as you do, but I’ve gotten more positive feedback on that Ethiopia video than I’ve ever gotten on, I think anything I’ve ever done. I’ve gotten emails from people who are like, oh, let me put you in touch with this person. You guys should have a conversation. But I’ve also gotten like, you know, just like a bunch of shout outs from like random Rasta guys. And yeah, so it’s been, you know, a lot of love from some of my Ethiopian and Eritrean friends over the video. So I’m really, really pleased about that. Like I said, I told you this a minute ago, but like I was pretty sure this is the video that was gonna get me canceled. So I’ve been really encouraged to see so much support for it, so. Yeah, but I think it was transparent for a lot of people to see just the enthusiasm we have about Ethiopian culture. And, you know, also this kind of surprise that we have that nobody knows about it, and this desire to help people see the kind of pearl that’s hidden there in Northern Africa. For most of us, you know, we don’t, a lot of people don’t know about it, but it definitely is a pearl. Well, so this actually, I mean, this’ll be a good segue into kind of everything we’re talking about today. Because I’ve watched a couple of response videos, you probably have as well, to the Universal History series that people have made on YouTube. And one of the really interesting criticisms about it was, well, let’s say twofold. First of all, that, oh, well, this idea of like a medieval European universal history, it doesn’t have room for the Chinese. It doesn’t have room for Africans. It doesn’t have room for, you know, this, whatever group that you wanna pick that you sort of like see as being sort of outside the traditional European Christian story. So one of the things that hopefully this Ethiopia video helps people sort of get is that the story of Christ, and really here, you know, I’m talking specifically traditional Christianity, really is all encompassing. It does have room to integrate all of these things, but it’s also, it’s a story that hasn’t ended, right? And so this is the other, somebody made the remark, I think this is when we were talking in our second video that we did together about Christ and Antichrist, talking about liturgy and this idea that the liturgy was sort of like interrupted in Constantinople and that one day it’s gonna be finished and things like this. And somebody said, well, you know, if liturgy was gonna save us, it would have already worked, like it would have already saved us. And I was just, I kind of squinted a little bit at my computer screen and I was like, you know, that’s like saying, well, if Jesus was gonna save us, he already would have, like, why are there bad things in the world? You know, why do bad things happen to good people, right? It’s kind of a silly argument. But here’s the thing that I’m gonna kind of point to and sort of show today is that the story’s not over, right? I think this would be true for both of us is that we still see ourselves as part of this story. It’s a story that’s ongoing. And that in some way, you know, one of the key parts of postmodernism, which I think it was actually really useful, was this ability to conceive of oneself as being part of a narrative. Even Tolkien is engaging with this when he says in the Lord of the Rings, there’s that moment at the stare of Ciaranthongol when Sam is looking up at the sky and he sees the star Arendo, which is connected to the light and the Silmarils and the file of light that Frodo’s carrying with him right now. And he starts to realize, hey, all these things are actually connected. There’s a larger pattern here that we’re actually manifesting. And he says, you know, we’re in the same story after all, right? And so I think maybe one of the more helpful things that postmodernism has done is it’s given us a way to kind of recapture the ability to conceive of ourselves as being part of this larger narrative, which is exactly what universal history is. This is the way that in the Middle Ages, they saw themselves as being part of this larger narrative. And it’s really important to point out to people that when we say universal history, we don’t mean it at all in a kind of enlightenment, scientific vision of kind of pulling yourselves out of the world and now looking at all of history as one big thing. No, it’s a universal history, but it’s a universal history that’s embodied and lived in the particular histories. And so it’s normal that you will also see, let’s say fractally, you’ll see those histories that are further away from you as being further away from you. And so there’s less room in the universal history for the Chinese, although there is, and we will get to it at some point. Especially when we talk about Mongols and stuff and we get to that kind of stuff, we’ll talk about that. But there is less room in the sense that it’s just further away. And so this is also, it’s important to understand that that’s how it works. It works as this idea of these centers that have their perspective, but these perspectives also fit together in a kind of puzzle. But it’s not a God’s eye view puzzle, but it’s an embodied puzzle that you encounter from the piece that you are in that puzzle. Let’s say it that way. Right, every society, when it encounters Christianity for the first time is on the margin, just sort of by default, right? But then of course, as it expands, right? These things sort of change and they shift a little bit. And it takes, this is not a rigorously, a lot of times when we’re, especially let’s say, dudes of a certain age who are like, trying to grapple with their world, what they really want is this hyper rigorous internal system where everything has a one-to-one mapping and things like that. And it’s a little more of an art than that. And this actually kind of ties into, this is not a question I wanna answer today, though I think there is an answer, but the question that I’ve been asked the most since we started doing the series, and this is, it’s the most American question to possibly ask is, well, where does America fit into this story? That’s what we’re really concerned about is like, okay, but where do I fit it? And this is nothing, I mean, in a certain sense, there’s nothing wrong with that, but we are, of course, we are a little self-involved, a little self-interested here in America. And so this is actually something I’ve been pondering a lot in the OCA, we had the, this last Sunday was the Sunday of All Saints of North America, and it was just a really good, which actually is wonderful serendipity landed on July 4th, which is Independence Day in the United States. I don’t know if you’ve heard of this, but we just blow stuff up for about three days straight. It’s a good time. But so I’ve had, but it just gave me a lot of occasion to kind of ponder, where does America fit into this symbolic story? And so I think that if people pay attention to this video, these next few videos, they’re gonna start, there are gonna be clues. And by the time we actually get to talking about America, I think that it’ll help make sense. I really want to, once we kind of finished going down this particular trail that we’re on, I kind of wanna like shift gears a little bit and look at Celtic Christianity, look at Ireland and Wales, which are also out there on the edge of the world. We touched on that a little bit with the Arthur stuff, but I think there’s a lot more there that’s gonna help us understand the symbolism of the edge actually in another way. And so anyway, it’s just a teaser. I’m really bad about these teasers, but. Yes, there’s a lot to talk about. There’s a lot to talk about. What I thought we’d do for this video is now that we’ve constantly teased it, we keep referring back to this Apocalypse of Pseudomethodius, which is in this wonderful volume by Dumbarton Oaks, because it’s, and it’s not the only work like this. There’s actually a really rich Byzantine apocalyptic tradition that kind of is in and around this, builds off of it, predates it, et cetera. But I like the Apocalypse of Pseudomethodius for a few reasons. One is there’s a really handy, easily accessible English translation of the work. It’s easy to find. People can pull it up and read it, and it’s not on a sketchy website. Some of this old stuff is, I don’t know how legit this is. I need a little more textual certainty or something like that. But basically all of the things that we’re talking about, we see, we find in the Apocalypse of Pseudomethodius in a Byzantine kind of a focus. So it’s not a particular, let’s say, Western focus in the sense that, although really the notion that Greek civilization is not Western, I just constantly find that ludicrous. But it’s not a particularly, let’s say, a Latin or Western or a Protestant colonialist, et cetera, all these things that are so easily problematized. This list has kind of cut through some of that noise and look at how does this pattern work? How does this idea of universal history work out? The other thing though is that the Apocalypse of Pseudomethodius is aimed specifically at answering one of the main criticisms which we’ve received, and I’ve heard this from two or three different people, which is, well, okay, but Constantinople fell. So there, your argument’s invalid. Obviously if Christianity was legit, if Orthodoxy is legit, if universal history is legit, then why did Constantinople fall? So one of the things that the Apocalypse of Pseudomethodius is actually set to grapple with is the rise of Islam and the Arab conquest. And that’s actually, I mean, it’s not an illegitimate question. If you’re pretty sure you’re on God’s side, and then that doesn’t end up looking like military might, then it’s a pretty normal thing to ask, as many people have over history, it’s a pretty normal thing to ask, well, why are we losing? And is this thing that I’m a part of? And I really actually like Dr. Mario, in his video that he did with you earlier in the series, he talks about the fact that one of the things that Byzantium is doing, that Constantinople is doing, is it’s really giving its life to the church, right? It really gives up this high level of cultural development, all of these things, and puts them into the deep treasury of the Orthodox Church, so that even when Constantinople falls, the Orthodox Church has continued, oftentimes under truly crushing opposition. And that’s not just here to show for orthodoxy, obviously, I’m Orthodox, I love it, I would like everyone to be, but the point of this is that one of the questions that has to be answered is this idea, well, can my faith outlast my government? What would it mean to have a Christian country that then falls to conquest from a non-Christian group? And that’s actually one of the questions that the apocalypse of Pseudo-Mathodius, that is, it’s attributed to this early church father, he’s like a third or fourth century church father named Mathodius, scholars because they hate fun, will say that this is probably written more like the sixth or the seventh centuries, actually maybe around the same time as the iconoclast controversy in the East. So, okay, all that to say, from the very beginning, the apocalypse sets up this tension between the center and the edge, but also it’s a work that is deeply concerned with giants. And in fact, I didn’t tell you- Look at you pause when you said giants. I didn’t tell you that I was gonna talk about this, but one of the things that I’m really interested in is the idea. So this is what it says about the birth of Seth. Says in the 230th year of the first millennium, that is also the first age, Seth was born a gigantic man in the likeness of Adam. In the 500th year in the same first millennium, the sons of Cain abused the wives of their own brothers in excessive fornications. So this is a… It’s an interesting work because basically this work takes both the approach that there are fallen angels involved, but also that it’s sort of like line of Cain, line of Seth. Like it’s kind of a hybrid of those two different hypotheses. But one of the really interesting things here is that Seth is put out as a giant. And as we keep reading, we find that there are actually kind of like two groups of giants, two groups of… And I think we can understand this as being like, these are large, these are powerful. Like a giant is a very… The way Dante uses giants in the Divine Comedy is to basically be like, they’re too fleshy. They’ve got too much body, right? So they’re large, they’re powerful. They’re in other words, like there’s this massive amount of potential. And what ends up happening is that Seth and his children go up and living and raising the line of Seth, raising their family on the slopes of the mountain of paradise, right? And that Cain and his people are down in the valley. And that’s- This is in the Pseudomethodius text. Yeah, this is all in the apocalypse. Yeah, yeah. Basically, it’s like a snapshot of this kind of cosmology, I think. Yeah, kind of St. Ephraim’s… The cosmology we find in St. Ephraim’s hymns of paradise. Yes. And so what happens then, what ends up happening is that these devils, these fallen angels, they come to the line of Cain and they specifically pollute and corrupt the line of Cain by teaching them the composition of every kind of music, is what it says. Your brother, Matthew, in his book has some really great things to say about music and its relationship to ornamentation, to variability, even to things like menstruation. And so you can sort of see, you’ve got the mountain of paradise right here. You’ve got Seth and his people living on the slopes of the mountain. They’re not quite in paradise, but they’re kind of as close as they can get. And then out here on the margin, that’s where the line of Cain is. And there’s basically ideas that what’s happening in the people of Cain is that there’s all kinds of mixture. So there’s every kind of music. And this is a real problem in the ancient world is figuring out how to… I mean, this is one of Plato’s main things that he’s concerned with in many of his writings, is the idea that there’s certain music that would be appropriate for a certain time and for a certain place. And that there are actually some kinds of music, let’s say some tones, some modes, that Plato actually believed it would be wrong to even let common people hear. Like he shouldn’t even play those in public. And of course, this is one of the things that in the Orthodox Church, especially in the Byzantine tradition, it gets resolved. I mean, this happened in the West too, up to a certain point, but this gets to result in the tonal system, right? The eight-tone system in the East, but also like in Grigori and chant, things like this in the West, where it was basically saying, okay, there really is like a hierarchy of music. And as strange as this might sound to lots of people living in America, there really is music that’s okay to listen to at your house that you shouldn’t play in church. Of course. Right. Yeah, and you can understand it very simply as a hierarchy of patterns and that there are different types of patterns and those patterns have a place in the world. And that, like you said, like they just have their place and some of them maybe don’t have their place like in public life, let’s say, because they can bring about, no, I mean, you can understand. It’s like the music that plays in a club, like is music that plays in a club? And there’s a reason why the things that happen in a club happen in a club and the type of relationships and the type of kind of decadence that you see, which is related to consumption, to fornication, to all that, there is, the music itself is, it’s not just the music, but the music is part of the pattern that is bringing about these kinds of things. And so if you listen to like a folk dance, you can’t do the same things that you would do in a club while you’re listening to a folk dance. It just doesn’t allow it in its pattern. Right. Right. Yeah, so what’s really interesting is that it’s called the camp of Cain, right? So at this point, at this point, in this particular narrative, there isn’t really a sense of like a city so much as it is the camp. And the idea is actually sort of the idea of a club floor. It’s like there’s all kinds of music. There’s a vast amount of mixture happening out here around the, in the valley, at the sort of the foot of paradise, at the mountain of paradise. So we’re told- If you’ve seen the movie, the second Matrix movie, that whole rave scene in the cave, that’s what’s happening. There you go. It’s the sense of Cain. Or the rave sort of slash, well, the last video I talked about the 10 commandments. Yeah, the rave at the bottom of the mountain with the golden calf. The rave at the bottom of the mountain is actually really, really well done. And if you, just as a little side note, because I love this movie a lot, if you kind of look into like some of the making of the movie, it took them two or three weeks, I believe, to shoot that scene. And it was just incredibly grueling on the people who had to shoot it. But anyway- Because there’s so many people and such mayhem. There’s so many people. And yeah, just like very physically exhausting to shoot. So we’re told that they’re around the base of the mountain of paradise, that in the Campo Cain, they’re more, even more inflamed in their abominable fornication. They become worse than the previous generation. They mount each other in the manner of animals. And there’s some explicit stuff in here, but it’s all kinds of debauchery, all kinds of fornication, anything you can imagine. That’s all happening here. Then it says, in the 700th year of the life of Jared, that is in the second millennium, the spiteful and troublesome devil applied himself to bring the war fornication to the sons of Seth, so that they should desire the daughters of Cain. And he pushed them on. There appeared giants in the earth, the sons of Seth who fell into the pit of sin and became altogether dreadful. So there’s actually, there’s like this devil. So you have fallen angels plus Cain plus Seth. So it’s like, again, it’s like a hybrid. It’s like a kind of a hybrid approach to that whole question. So they actually have the idea that fallen angels had relationships with women, but then also the tradition of Seth having relationships with Cain, let’s say. Yes, yes. And that- I always thought that those two were just the same at different levels of reality. I’ve always said that. Yeah, well, and that’s the thing. A lot of people are like, oh, well, this church father says it was this way. So, you know, like Lord of Spirits podcast is wrong or something like this. But you have to realize that most people in the Middle Ages, especially in the East, did not see these things as mutually exclusive. And a way to actually understand this is like, once you start, you know, the things that they’ve talked about, you know, especially in the land of giants episode of Lord of Spirits, about the Nethilene ritual and things like this, you can understand how you could have two humans from differing, who in this story are actually at different like ontological levels, right? Cause you have the, you know, the line of Seth is kind of up here and then Cain is down here. So you could actually have two humans coupling, but also there’s a demon involved in that somehow, right? Yes, and then two levels at a different level, like let’s say a priest and a prostitute, let’s say. Right. Pretty simple. Like it can just happen, it happens fractally at the material level, but it’s representing a higher reality, which is also happening simultaneously. Right, so all of this happens, of course, then you have, and I promise we’re getting to Ethiopia. So all of this happens, this is actually all set up for the Ethiopia thing. There’s like, I think seven or eight chapters that are basically, it’s like, it’s just an expanded narrative of the Genesis history, right? And explains we have the, we have the, you know, all the things that we’ve talked about a lot and that you’ve talked about a lot on this channel, you know, the center and the margin, the mixture resulting in the creation of something monstrous, all these different things, those patterns just recapitulate themselves over and over again. And what it eventually results in is in the line of Ham, which is, you know, this is gonna be relevant to, relevant to when we’re talking about Ethiopia. We’re told that, well, first of all, we’re told that Noah has an extra son and that the idea of the extra son of Noah, this guy’s name is Eunitus, this is a pretty popular medieval tradition that there was like this one extra son. And he actually goes to the land of the rising sun is what we’re told, the country of the sun, where the rising of the sun takes place and he lives there. And it says that Eunitus received from God the gift of wisdom, not only this alone, but he also became the inventor of every division of astronomy. And so that Nimrod actually came down and learned from him and received from him the counsel by which he might begin his rule. So you have Nimrod, all these things, but so you have this fourth son of Noah who goes to the very Eastern edge of the world. Now remember that Ethiopians in the Greek conception, so it come from one of two places. They either come from the extreme West, which is weird to think of Ethiopia being the extreme West, but if you live in ancient Greece, it’s less weird, right? Yeah. Because Africa is in the West. So you have Ethiopians in the extreme West where the sun comes down, and then you also have them in the extreme East where the sun comes up. So this is actually setting up this whole way of sort of thinking about, and of course, people in Byzantium at this time, or this might’ve actually been written in Syria, but people in that part of the world this time, they definitely knew there were these huge civilizations to the East, right? And so they had a very high level of learning, which had achieved a very high level of learning. Sometimes people point this out, I was listening to something last night where somebody is pointing out that, oh, well, medieval Christians didn’t know that China and India and all these, they had these high levels of civilization and they just thought they were the best thing on earth and all this stuff, and it’s not at all the case. It’s not at all true. They had a mythical way of representing it, all through the time. Yeah, so this is basically the explanation for that. Where did those guys come from? They actually, they are descended from like a fourth son of Noah, who goes to the land of the rising sun and is actually taught by God all of this lore, all of this wisdom, which is then sort of there preserved there on the edge of the world after the flood. Okay, so this is all kind of related to how Ethiopia comes into the story. And there’s a war between, I don’t wanna get into too much of this, but people should go read this because there’s a really interesting thing that happens. There’s a war between the descendants of Japheth, who would be like what we would call Europeans today, and between the descendants of Shem. This fourth son of Noah actually tries to intervene in this. And the reason he says that you need to, he tries to intervene in this is to say that there are some descendants of Ham, this is gonna be Arabia, who’s actually works gonna rise up and take you both out if you don’t sort of like band together, right? So here’s the idea. It’s like you’d have these European people and you have these Semitic people and they’re set up a very real tension that existed even in the ancient world between those people groups. But then also there’s this intuition that there’s something vital about the preservation of Christianity has to come from a union between those two people. And that this union, the source of this union is gonna come from outside. And so the narrative continues on and it gets us all the way to the time of Alexander. And what we’re told is that Philip, the father of Alexander, so this is now in chapter eight of the apocalypse, that Philip the father of Alexander, he’s a Macedonian king and that he marries, now I know that in a lot of myths and legends, especially medieval myths and legends, he marries an Egyptian princess, right? But in the apocalypse, she’s Ethiopian. Her name is Chuseth and she’s the daughter of King Fol of Ethiopia. And all of their lineage has been very carefully laid out from beforehand. So you see how she’s from, the Ethiopians are descended from Kush, who’s from the light of Ham and all this stuff. And so you have Philip, he marries Chuseth, this Ethiopian queen and from her is born Alexander. And we get the story of Alexander and all of his conquest and everything else. And this culminates in his encountering the descendants of, so he goes east towards the country of the sun, right? In other words, he’s going east towards India. And that’s when he encounters these descendants of the son of Japheth, who are Europeans, but who have gone the way of Cain, right? And so they’re out sort of here on the edge of things and they’ve participated in this mixture. They’ve become cannibals. They all eat in the semblance of the beetle, it says. And so they’re like bugs in the air. Yeah, I mean, this is like, so in other words, like a beetle just like rummages around in filth, in dying things, in decay things, and things that are broken down and mixed beyond the level of coherence, let’s say. And so it says they eat every polluted and filthy things, dogs, mice, snakes, carrion, abortions, miscarriages. Yeah, there you go. And those which in the womb, I mean, this is, I’m not even gonna read that whole bit because it gets really intense, but basically it’s like, it’s awful, right? So they’re- Sorry, I shouldn’t laugh, but I’m sorry. Yeah, here’s like the kind of Gog and Magog imagery here. Right, so they’re called, they’re not initially called Gog and Magog, but that phrase is used later on. And so what he does is of course he drives them north because what he’s trying to do is prevent them from getting to the Holy Land, right? So he drives them north to this place in the Caucasus and there’s still, I mean, it’s a real place, right? Alexander’s, it’s still called Alexander’s Gates. It’s also called the Paps of the North, which is a great band name for somebody out there if you wanna- It’s not good, it’s not do that. Don’t do that? Okay, sorry, nevermind. And he builds these gates and he builds the gates out of this special metal, which basically can’t be, they’re made out of something that can’t be touched by demons specifically. So the idea is that these, it says these filthy and misshapen or vile nations employed in unclean fashion all of the evils of magical arts, right? And so he has to make gates that are gonna sort of stand against- Magic gates. Magic gates, they’re magic gates. They’re magic gates. And so what we’re told then, getting into this prophecy, so in our last video, I read some stuff from the prophecy of Ezekiel, which talks about all these nations and the idea that Ethiopia and the land of the rivers, beyond the rivers of Ethiopia, beyond the rivers of Kush is being sort of like one extreme end of the world, right? And I think we should say at this point that when we talk about the symbolism of the edge, although somewhere like Ireland and somewhere like Ethiopia are both kind of on the edge and so they share certain similarities, they’re also different because the direction that you’re going in also has a lot of importance in this sort of symbolic- Yeah, which edge of the world. Which edge are we talking about, right? So this particular edge, which is like the Northern edge, it’s different from beyond the land of Ethiopia, right? These are the peoples which are later identified with groups like the Goths, group like these, basically the whole barbarian invasion period of European history. So it says in the end times, according to what- Yeah, but also the Huns too. Also the Huns, yeah. So the Huns are really interesting in this because they’re precisely one of these groups that is like sort of like maybe they’re Asian, but maybe they’re like European, but it’s not totally clear. Even- Even the Mongolians, like they’re weird legends of Genghis Khan with green eyes and stuff, so even the Mongols, like that, it’s not clear. They weren’t, it’s not clear that the image of Mongols we have now is what people encountered at that time. So Atilla the Hun’s name, right, isn’t, it’s not an Asian name. His name is Otli, which is Gothic, which is a European language. It’s a Scandinavian language. His name is, or Germanic anyway, his name is Otli and Otli basically means something like little daddy. So it was like an affectionate name that his soldiers have for him, probably wasn’t his real name. Yeah. You know, he probably had some other name, but Otli is what everyone called him, you know. This is, I mean, this is a really interesting, there are actually a couple of Roman emperors who have like a really similar nickname because they used to follow the troops around, like as, you know, like as a boy, they went with their dad on campaigns and like, you know, stumped around the camp in their dad’s boots or whatever. And so the impression seems to be something similar happened with Atilla. So even the Huns are not, they’re not, they’re exactly this kind of a group, that there’s an idea that some kind of mixture has taken place here. And we’re not really sure what it is, right? But that’s exactly what this legend is trying to deal with. So it says in the end times, according to what the prophecy of Ezekiel says, in the last day of the consummation of the world will come into the land of Israel, Gog and Magog, and that these are the nations and the kings that Alexander hid in the ends of the North. So Gog and Magog, and it just goes on, it lists all these nations. Among these nations, by the way, it mentions the Agra-Martians and the Anophagians. Anophagians probably means something like buttlicker in Latin. If you can think about the way that dogs greet each other. It’s the Anophagians. And the reason is because the Anophagians are also called the Sinosephalians. In other words, they’re dog-headed men, right? Yeah, so it’s all in there. Can help you understand what the dog-headed men also, another way of understanding what it meant. Right, right. So when you come into the legends of St. Christopher and things like this, that’s what’s going on, right? And so it says these are the 22 kings that are shut up within the gates that Alexander fixed. So this is like one chapter in the apocalypse. And the point of this chapter is basically just to refer to the story that everyone knows, right? Because this is a universal history. So it’s to refer to the story everyone knows. Everyone knows Alexander did this, right? This is just part of what everyone sort of believed in at this particular time in history. And so it’s a way of explaining actually a future disaster, a future apocalypse. Like this hasn’t, you know, from the perspective of when this is being written, this hasn’t happened yet. Right? So with that kind of out of the way, and it’s not unimportant for the rest of the story, but like with that kind of said, it were turned to this question of Alexander’s lineage. So Alexander is half Macedonian, but he’s half in this story, he’s half Ethiopian, right? So you can think that’s actually a really interesting image of something that comes from the edge and actually comes as a result of mixture from the edge is then the source of purity, right? That’s what drives these monstrous things kind of away in the opposite direction too, right? Not south, but north. So it drives the monstrous things away. So at this point, it returns to the story of Alexander. And basically what happened is after Alexander’s death, his empire is split among his four servants as pretty much I think everyone knows. And when this happens, his mother, Chuseth, returns to Ethiopia. Okay. All right, so now we’re getting into the stuff that I kind of teased in the last video. Bezos, who’s the founder of Byzantium, he sends the chief of his army over the sea to the king of Ethiopia. He wants to make a marriage alliance with Ethiopia. And he writes to him concerning Chuseth, the mother of Alexander, because he wants to take her as wife himself and make her his queen. Okay. So Bezos, the founder of Byzantium, right? And he’s a, let’s say, from a modern perspective, he’s a semi-historical person, right? Byzantium was named Byzantium because it was named after somebody who founded it, right? Obviously later on, Constantine will come, level the place and rebuild it, right? But it was already, it wasn’t a large place at the time, but it was already, it was kind of an important place. It’s founded by like most things, it’s founded by like a refugee from Troy and all this different stuff. So Bezos sends off off to Ethiopia and he asks for the Ethiopian princess, who’s the mother of Alexander, to wife. And so this all goes well. The king of Ethiopia sends his daughter back and she marries Bezos. And the place where the marriage is affected is at the city of Chalcedon. Yeah. Yeah. So this is where, this is where we have to sort of like turn to ecclesiastical history for a moment, right? Obviously we alluded to this in the last video. There is currently, you know, you and I are the Eastern Orthodox Church. There’s currently a schism that’s been going on for like 1500 years now between the Chalcedonian Orthodox Church and the group that is sometimes called Oriental Orthodox. And that’s actually kind of a newer name that’s been given to them, mainly by like Anglican scholars. And it really cracks me up because Orient is the same word as East. So like, eh, you know, but that was just, you know. To avoid the whole monophysite, metaphysite problems. Yeah, it’s like, do we, it’s self-named or is it the name that we use to talk about them? Yeah, and here I have to say, you know, with all love to my Ethiopian, my Eritrean friends, I, you know, I’m not one of these people who believes like it was all just a linguistic misunderstanding. And the reason I don’t believe that is because my main policy for operating in life is to not assume that our ancestors were idiots, right? Like to say, oh, it was just a big linguistic misunderstanding but now, you know, a fact, you know, 1500 years removed from when these languages were spoken as living languages, we can see through it and they couldn’t. I’m, I’m, I’m skeptical, let’s say. I’m a little dubious about that. So, so there is this schism between us. It’s a real schism and that doesn’t mean there’s not a lot of love going both ways because there is, you know, but there is, there is a, there is a real schism between us and the person who is writing this, you know, apocalypse is probably writing it. He’s, he’s probably in Syria, we think, which is, which is strongly affected by that schism, right? So he’s probably Syrian and he’s living probably only, let’s say maybe a hundred years after it happened. Okay. So this is a, this is a very real reality to him. The fact that this happened at Chalcedon is a very strong, you know, present reality to him. So in his story, the marriage alliance between Byzantium and Ethiopia, right? Which are on two sides of this question is affected at the same place the schism happened. The schism, yeah. It’s affected at Chalcedon. King Bezos marries Chuseth and they have a daughter named Byzantia and they marry Byzantia off to a guy who’s referred to in the text as Romulus, the king of Rome. So you have this, this marriage alliance between Byzantium and Ethiopia. And then that results in something that joins Byzantium, Ethiopia and Rome. Yeah. And of course, Rome in the West played a huge role in that particular schism, right? It’s the, it’s the, it’s the Tome of Leo, right? Read at the fourth council that really- Cinched it, they’d say. Cinched it, right? And causes this rift. So what the author is doing here is he’s very carefully building this idea that from this marriage alliance, that there’s something in this, in the history of the ancient world that goes all the way back to Alexander, right? What is Alexander’s role? Alexander’s role is to push the barbarians away, is to seal the gate against, you know, the, you know, the barbarians are literally at the gate when we’re talking about Alexander, right? So his goal, his role is really to play this role of, of unity and purity, right? But it’s not a, it’s not a monolithic purity. Alexander is himself half Ethiopian in the story, right? But it’s a way of, it’s a way of, this goes back to this very strange idea that I haven’t actually encountered anywhere else earlier in the apocalypse that Seth was a giant, right? So there’s some kind of idea here. Maybe you could speak to this a little bit because I’ve talked a lot. Yeah, well, there’s a, there’s a, there’s a difference between, there’s a, how can I say this? There is a moment or there’s a possibility for something like a hybridity to become synthetic, to become an actual new being. So were you mentioning this, was this in one of your last videos or was this in the Q&A? It’s in the Q&A that I talked about that. So this, this was really important. So maybe you could say a little bit about this again, because I think this is, this is probably the best part about whole Q&A. Yeah, well, there is, especially right now, it’s really important to see that because they’re the, one of the biggest problems that we have right now is we are struggling to tell the difference between confusion and unity. That is the unity of multiplicity into a new identity and the union of multiplicity, which is actually not a union, which is just a confusion of different identities that can’t sort themselves out. And it’s hard for people, it’s hard because it’s a really existential experience. It’s hard to, it’s hard to define the difference between, you know, something, when you look at it, you know it. Like you look at something and you say, well, that’s like, that’s like two things. It’s not one thing. You can’t tell that it’s one thing. It doesn’t come together into one. And so you can see that, for example, the example I gave is exactly Britain, for example. There’s a moment in which Britain was just a bunch of different groups fighting amongst each other. And you could say Britain, but it wasn’t. It was just this mixture of people. And then something happened, you know, something sacred, something high up on the scale of being, which was able to join them together so that now they recognize each other as having a true unity. And it doesn’t deny their multiplicity. It doesn’t annul it, but it makes the multiplicity participate in a unity. And so this is really the difference. So right now we talk about things like, like the whole idea of intersectionality, right? Intersectionality is really, is this worship of diversity for itself. And it’s like the opposite of unity. It’s like, like the one who can accumulate the most idiosyncrasy wins, rather than seeing how those idiosyncrasies can be joined together with our different idiosyncrasies to actually express unity. And so it’s sometimes you can confuse us because it almost looks like each other, but it is like a mirror reflection of one of the other. So this is maybe just a good place. Well, let me give an example. Yes, please, please, please. One example I’ve given recently in the Q&A is the difference between Christ and Baphomet. It’s a pretty clear example, which goes in kind of this kind of occult tradition, they have this sense of the union of heaven and earth. They talk about, you know, as above, so below, but the image that they come up with in the 19th century is a hybrid creature, is a hybrid hermaphroditic creature with like the head of a goat and the breasts of a woman and still seeming to be a man, you know? And so it’s like they confuse synthesis and hermaphroditism, like the idea of having two sexes at the same time, that’s not unity. And so you could say it’s like the difference between someone that is an angel that is beyond sex and a confused being that is a mixture of all these different identities. And so that’s the difference. So Christ is both man and God, completely no mixture, it’s really important for the definition of Christ, that there’s no mixture between the two natures, but completely united in one person so that they also can’t be separated, let’s say. And so that is the image of synthesis, whereas something like baphomet, it really is the image of confusion. Yeah, there has to be, I mean, so you just mentioned the hypostatic union, which is like the technical term for that idea that Christ says, and this is actually what that schism is over that we were just talking about between the Chalcedonian and non-Chalcedonian churches, is over this question, right? And so the church is teaching on this is that Christ has two natures, divine and human, perfectly joined in his hypostasis, his person, right? The second person of the Trinity that these two natures are joined, but not mingled, not confused. And I’ll give a weird example because people keep asking about the symbolism of America, and I’m just gonna, I’ll just tease this. I’ll just tease this, okay? So you might’ve heard, we had a civil war a couple hundred years ago here in the United States, it was kind of a thing. So in our name, right, there’s a plurality in the name, the United States, right? What is a state? A state is not a province. A state is like the traditional definition of a state is that a state is like a standalone self-governing principality of some kind, right? So we are the United States. And so the idea is that you had all of these standalone principalities who would come together to cooperate on certain levels, right? And that was the, let’s say that was one vision of what America might be, right? And it’s not what came out of the civil war. And the reason it didn’t come out of the civil war is because there was no higher principality, right? There was no sacred direction toward which each of those individual things could orient themselves, right? And so what ends up happening is, of course, you have some band together against others and you have a band together and you have a war. So the way that this, I’m gonna just say on a symbolic level, the way that the unity of the United States manifest in the post-civil war area is actually in the person of Abraham Lincoln. And the reason that I believe this is the case is because if we go to Washington, DC, we have a temple to Abraham Lincoln in Washington, DC. And it really is a temple. Like it says it’s a temple on the temple, right? There’s engraving behind this. So it’s modeled on an ancient temple of Zeus. I forget which one, but it’s modeled on an ancient temple of Zeus and then sitting in the center, in the throne, instead of Zeus, it’s Abraham Lincoln. And there’s an inscription behind him. That sculpture, man, it’s got a lot of that double nature to it because they actually, in the sculpture itself, they have one side of Abraham Lincoln, which is kind of ordered, and the other side of Abraham Lincoln, which is kind of disordered. It’s a little like what’s going on that Pentacor. In the icon of the Pentacor. Yeah, it’s really interesting. And so behind his head in an inscription that says, in this temple, as in the hearts of those for whom he saved the union, Abraham Lincoln will be forever enshrined, something like that. And like listening to the language there, the idea is that Abraham Lincoln has come into your heart and he has saved you. I mean, that’s deliberately, like that’s in the language of the Lincoln Memorial. But at the roof of the Lincoln Memorial, and I think it’s very interesting that it’s the roof and not say the floor, but at the roof of the Lincoln Memorial, you have the engraved names of all the states that were in the union at the time the Memorial was built. Right? And so there’s this idea then that it’s almost like an idea of like the council of the gods, right? But it’s the idea that we’re able to sort of like, we have a sacred place, we have a sacred building towards which the states are able to orient themselves. Right? And so like they’re sort of joined in the person of Lincoln. And one of the interesting things that’s happened is that as we start to fracture again as a society, you have people, originally it was the right who like maybe 10 or 15 years ago got really down on Lincoln because they felt like he’d obliterated the whole idea of like states rights or whatever. But now it’s the left and they’re down, like Lincoln is sort of getting canceled, right? So it’s like Lincoln was like the one thing everyone could agree on it. That was the principality, if you will, that was sort of holding this idea of the American vision, the American dream together. And as we began to fragment, we’re losing our trust in that particular principality. Okay, so I apologize. We didn’t mean to talk about this, but- It was the 4th of July, not very long. Yeah, it was the 4th of July. You’re allowed. It’s been on my mind a lot. All right, so let’s get back to this. So this period. So this marriage, right? So the idea is that the way that you join opposites, the way that you join two opposite things, which again, I can’t stress enough, this is what the whole schism is about. And what the writer of this is saying is that the way that you join two opposite things, Byzantium and Ethiopia, East and West, North and South, the way that you join two opposite things is in a person. So you join them in the person of this princess that he sends off to Rome. She has three children, one of whom is named Claudius, and Claudius rules in Alexandria. And then eventually the line of the Romans comes from him. But at the end of all of this, it says this, “‘Therefore the seed of Chuseth, the daughter of Fol, the king of Ethiopia, gained mastery over the Macedonians and the Romans.‘” So remember that the Ethiopian is the image of like the queen of Shiva or Moses’s first wife, right? It’s this idea that the Ethiopian is the one who is captured and then in her turn captures, right? So she somehow gains mastery over the Romans, because over the, sorry, over the Macedonians, because her son is Alexander who conquers everything, right? She gains mastery over the people of the Romans by this idea that East and West, the rulers and the principalities on both sides are now coming from her womb, right? And so, and I think this is a kind of image. This is a way of understanding, this is a way of understanding mastery that I don’t think is possible in a pre-Christian world, right, because pre-Christian, it’s not biology, but like pre-Christian biology is concerned with the seed of the man. The idea is the woman is basically just like a container. She’s basically just like, you know, potential, but she doesn’t contribute anything to that process. And then Christianity comes along and we get the Virgin Mary, right? And the Virgin Mary, right, you know, because Christ is without a biological father, this opens up a space to sort of think about women as actually participating in the birthing process. But not just that, that the idea that embodiment is part of the story. Right, yes, that’s what I’m trying to say. The power of embodiment is there in the story of Christ, but then in the story of the church and the whole way in which, let’s say, the light manifests itself into the world. One of the revelations that appears in the Christian story is the manner in which the feminine principle plays a role in revealing the body as it kind of comes down the cosmic mountain, I would say. It’s like filling up the mountain with the sea, but there’s a sense in which there’s a participation. There’s this call back and forth between the masculine and the feminine in the kind of song of songs manner in which the world reveals itself. And this is how we can both talk about the Virgin Mary as being sort of like the secret interior place, you know, like the holy place, right? But then also our champion leader, right? This is how we’re able to talk about her in a conquering way, right? So it says that the seed of Chuseth, and again, women don’t have seed, so it’s the seed of the woman, which is a phrase that goes all the way back to Genesis. The seed of Chuseth, the daughter of Foal, the king of Ethiopia, gained mastery over the Macedonians and the Ethiopians from the seed of the Ethiopians. This one, and it quotes that prophecy from the Psalms, this one shall stretch out her hands unto God at the last day, according to the word of the prophet. The blessed David looked ahead with the eyes of the spirit and foreknew that Chuseth, the daughter of Foal, the king of Ethiopia, would begin to rouse the kingdom of the Romans. And he prophesied saying, Ethiopia shall stretch out her hands unto God. And so, and then it goes on to say, since in fact, the great and venerable and honored wood of the life-given cross has been set up by the kingdom established from the seed of the Ethiopian lady, this is talking about Rome now, which wood is fixed in the midst of the earth, which is Jerusalem, which is why, perhaps as is fitting, the ancient father David himself made the statement, thus saying, Ethiopia shall stretch out her hands unto God, the idea of stretching out your hands is compared to the shape of the cross. Right? For there is no nation or kingdom under heaven which is able to prevail and overcome the kingdom of the Christians. For as we have already said above, because the life-given cross has been fixed and made firm in the midst of the earth, and it just goes on to talk about, you know, the result of this is that the ends of the earth are then described according to be fixed, according to breadth and length and height and depth. So the idea is that the cross becomes the measure of the world, right? It feels like a measure of the world. This is why it’s Ethiopia too, because it’s as if it’s the filling up. It’s the idea that there’s a notion in which there’s a joining between the center and the periphery, and that this joining is what Christianity is. And it’s actually, the cross is already what that is. And so the idea of opening up, putting your hands to the ends of the world, like spanning the horizontal, right? Spanning the entire breadth of reality. You can imagine that as being like the width of the mountain itself is the breadth of the cross is the width of the mountain. And so this is the idea of how the relationship between the emperor, you know, the king, and the Ethiopian queen, how this is an image of Christianity itself, because it spans everything. And already Solomon and the Queen of Sheba is already that image, that his wisdom kind of covers everything. And so this is where I think that in the story of Ethiopia, as it’s played out here in the Byzantine apocalypse tradition, you see the symbolism of Ethiopia, sort of the rectification of the story of Cain, right? That’s why I let off, I’m sure there are people who are gonna watch this video and be like, okay, he’s just talking about like Cain and giants and like, where’s this going? What does this have to do with Ethiopia? But there’s a reason that every time someone tells this story in the ancient world, every single time they start with Genesis and they start with Seth and Cain in the table of nations. And nobody tells the story of Ethiopia without starting there, right? Because it’s something to do. I mean, you were talking about like, let’s say, different kinds of multiplicity and like confusion versus synthesis, right? Which is really like Babel versus Pentecost. Yeah, exactly. And Pentecost really is this image of the rectification of the going down the mountain. That is, it’s like, you can imagine Cain, and the curse in general, going down the mountain and that the surprise of that phenomena is Pentecost, because it’s like, you don’t expect it, but then something happens where the Christ going down into death manifests itself cosmically as the ends of the earth being filled with the spirit of God, right? The land of Ethiopia stretching out its hand, all flesh being covered by the spirit. You see these images and we were hearing these images at Pentecost as well. Another one at Pentecost that we read is, this passage from Isaiah says, the knowledge of God will cover the earth as the waters cover the sea, which is a really symbolically interesting phrase, because of course, like the sea has all these resonances of chaos and death and division and multiplicity and all these different things. And then, so the idea is that, the sea is sort of the thing that’s without bounds, right? And whenever God wants to assert his power, he says, I’m the one that set the line that said, to the sea, you will not cross, right? So then for the knowledge of God to cover the earth in that way, it’s like the knowledge of God now is the thing without bounds. The knowledge of God is now the thing that’s like all encompassing, right? Yeah, there’s an image that I love to bring about, which I think is one of the most beautiful images that St. Ephraim in his hymns on paradise comes about, is he talks about how the saints, he talks about the rivers of paradise going down into the world. He talks about them becoming mitigated as they get further and further from the center, right? They become more confused, more mitigated, more polluted, you could say, whatever word you wanna use. Then he says, the saints go down the mountain and then they come to the sea and they walk on the waters. And so it’s like, that’s not a problem. It’s actually, if you’re looking in the right direction, all of that actually becomes glory. Even the bitterness of the waters in the end will vanish and it’ll become something like glory. Right, so it’s like there’s no sea, but there’s a crystal sea, right? Exactly, exactly. The same kind of a thing, yeah. So what follows from this point in the apocalypse is this long description. Actually, he immediately goes into a pretty long chapter after this talking about, now I just said that the kingdom of the Christians will never be overcome. But obviously the Jews were the people of God and they get conquered like every other day in the Bible. So like, what’s going on there? Like, what do I mean when I say that? And so you get this really kind of a long explanation for why does God allow suffering? Why does God allow kingdoms that are ostensibly Christian kingdoms to be conquered and overcome and things like this? And it’s a good explanation. There’s nothing in it that I think that would really surprise anyone. But his point is to sort of say, my kingdom is not of this world, but also sometimes it’s of this world, right? And there’s like this, I mean, that’s one of the big tensions, right? Is that Christianity is other worldly, but also it has this very unique ability to enculturate itself in all these different cultures and kingdoms, not in a way that makes them essential, like Byzantium can fall, Rome can fall, and Christianity not lose what it is, right? And in fact, there’s some interesting ways that that changed, things like some of the prayers that we used to direct towards the emperor, we direct towards our bishop now, but some of them we also direct towards the people. You know, that line in the liturgy where we say, oh God, save the pious and hear us, right? That’s directed to the faithful now, but originally that line was said to the emperor, and that was the point when the emperor came into the church and we prayed, oh God, save the pious and hear him, right? And so there’s some really interesting things that have kind of happened there. So it’s like, you know, on the one hand, we can be comfortable with the process of acculturation, and we can also be comfortable with where we came from, right? On the other hand, we don’t have to fear, right? Because this kingdom or that kingdom falls, right? So he’s working through all that stuff, and then it gets to the end, and this is kind of his view of the eschaton. And his view of the eschaton is that there’s gonna be this invasion in the seventh millennium of the world, there’s gonna be this invasion of the sons of Ishmael that it’s gonna wipe out the Roman empire. And that this is gonna bring in, this is then gonna open up a space for the invasion of these unclean nations that Alexander imprisoned long ago. They’re gonna flood across the world, and they’re actually going to overrun the servants of Ishmael, the sons of Ishmael, right? And then at the end of all of this, the last king of the Romans will manifest himself. And this is where Ethiopia comes back into the story. So there’s this idea that the seed of the Roman people, the seed of the last king of the Romans has been somehow preserved during all of this stuff, this constant overrunning over and over again. And that the last king of the Romans is going to manifest himself, and he will drive out these unclean peoples that Alexander imprisoned. So he’s like coming from Ethiopia, just like Alexander did, to kind of do the same thing that Alexander did. So he’s hidden in Ethiopia, like the seed appears in Ethiopia. It’s the Ethiopia shall stretch out her hands unto God is the, that’s the prophecy that they keep coming back to over and over again. So things are said really bad. It says, honor is gonna be taken away from the priests and the ministry of God will be ended. Every sacrifice will cease from the churches. It will stop offering the liturgy, it will stop offering the Eucharist, right? Which is actually tell a lot of the mystics in our tradition have said, that’s when the world ends. That’s when there’s no longer someone to serve the liturgy. Maybe liturgy is saving you and you just don’t know it. I don’t know. But it’s just talking about how bad things are. And it says, a man will offer for sale all of this necessary equipment and his iron tools and even his burial sheets, which is a symbolic image I’d like to return to at some point in the future. And that in the middle of all of this, this is when the last king of the Romans will manifest. And it says, trying to find the exact quote here. So this man will march out and proceed against them from the sea of Ethiopia. So he’s coming from the direction of Ethiopia and send his sword and distillation into Yathri, which is their homeland and will take after their wives and their sons. The sons of the king will descend upon those living in the promised land, the sword and cut them off from the land. This is the unclean peoples who have- And says from the sea of Ethiopia. From the sea of Ethiopia. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It’s almost like you haven’t been making this stuff up all along. Yeah, exactly. So yeah, it says all of a sudden trouble and affliction will come upon them. That is the people that Alexander imprisoned. And the king of the Greeks, that is of the Romans, will spring upon them in great anger and will be aroused like a man from a drunken sleep. And this is that image, that language that we find in the Psalms of the Lord rousing himself from sleep, rousing himself like a drunk man, which is a weird way to talk about God, but it’s in the Bible, so I don’t know what to say. And this idea that he’s suddenly awakened to fierce wrath. Well, that language here is applied to the last king of the Romans. Men reckoned him to be dead and good for nothing, and this man will march out and proceed against them from the sea of Ethiopia. So it’s like the last king of the Romans has somehow been hid down in Ethiopia while all this stuff has been going on. And everyone accounts him as dead, as good for nothing, as lost, that the Roman Empire is gone, the Greeks are gone, the empire is destroyed, all this stuff. And then in the last day, there’s gonna be this awakening from sleep. And he’s gonna proceed, he’s gonna march out from the sea of Ethiopia, and he’s gonna drive out the enemies. And he’s going to yoke them, it says, with a yoke sevenfold of what their yoke was on the earth. Great distress will come upon them, et cetera, et cetera. And all of this happens, and there’s a brief respite, there’s this brief period of rest that comes to the earth. There’s a peace right before the eschaton. And when the eschaton comes, this is when the Antichrist is unleashed upon the earth. And so there’s this brief repose, basically the idea is the last king of the Romans, he’ll revive things one last time, and then the Antichrist will be revealed. And when the Antichrist is revealed, he gets these guys that Alexander imprisoned, and he leaves them on one final slaughter across the earth. And when this happens, it says, when the son of Perdition shows himself, the king of the Romans will go up to Golgotha, which is where, at this particular time, this is where the true cross was. And we still have churches there and whatnot. He’ll go up to Golgotha where the wood of the holy cross was fixed at the place in which the Lord underwent death for our sakes, and he will take the crown from his head, and he will place it on the cross. And then he will spread out his hands to heaven and deliver the kingdom of the Christians to God, even the father. And at this point, the cross will be taken up into heaven along with the king’s crown, because the cross on which our Lord Jesus Christ was hanged for the sake of the common salvation of all, the cross itself will commence to appear before him and his coming as a refutation of the treachery of the unbelievers. And the prophecy of David will be fulfilled, in which he says in the last days, shall stretch out her hands unto God, because from the seed of the sons of Chuseth, the daughter of the foe, the king of Ethiopia, these last, in other words, the last Roman emperor, will stretch out their hands unto God. So the cross is taken up into heaven. The last king of the Romans, who was also the last king of the Ethiopians, surrenders his spirit, he dies, the antichrist takes over, and then Jesus comes back. That’s the way the apocalypse ends. There’s so much in this. There’s so much in this. One thing I wanna point out is, again, scholars think this might’ve been originally written in Syria. There’s a Syrian tradition, I think you find this in Ethiopia as well, this idea that at the moment of the crucifixion, when Christ’s side is pierced, that’s the moment that the veil opens, St. Ephraim talks about this. But when the veil opens, the holy place is shown to be empty. And there’s a Syrian tradition that says, at that moment, the Shekinah, if it was present in the temple, which other traditions say wasn’t even present, but there’s a Syrian tradition that says, that at that moment, the Shekinah glory, the presence of God in the temple, left the temple, it left the holy place, and it took up residence in the cross, not just in the cross, but in every cross. So then there’s this idea of the cross being taken up into heaven at this last moment as an act of judgment, it’s like God withdrawing his presence from the people. Yeah, so just before the end, let’s say. Yeah, yeah. So this is heavy stuff, and there’s a lot of really wonderful- Definitely, and also the idea of the crown being taken up, like let’s say, there’s almost a sense of something like the ascent of Enoch and the ascent of Elijah. I’ve talked about this before, where there seems to be a pattern, even the ascent of Moses, there seems to be a pattern that before a massive change, before the end of a world, there seems to be this, the best is taken up, but it kind of makes sense, and that’s also what kind of causes the end of the world. Well, that’s the story of Melchizedek, right? Is that, this is in one of the Enochian books, I think it’s second Enoch. That’s the story of Melchizedek, is right. Melchizedek is sort of like the last priest of Yahweh, and he’s taken up into paradise so that he’ll be preserved from the flood. Exactly, but it’s almost like to be preserved from the flood, but it’s also like the cause of the flood at the same time, because you’re taking the seed out of the world, you’re taking the meaning, you’re taking the thing that joins things together, and therefore, then the world breaks down, because you’ve removed its common principle, or the thing that makes it coalesce. Yeah, and so the holy people, when we hear this idea that saints hold up the world through prayer, it’s something like that. It’s like if the saints are actually functioning as fulcrums to preserve reality, and if the saints are taken up, then the world just falls apart, actually. So it seems like that’s what’s going on in the story of Enoch and the story of Elijah, but it also seems to be something like that that’s happening here. Like you said, it’s the shekinah leaving the temple, but if the shekinah leaves the temple, that’s actually the presence of God, but now it’s not just the presence of God, but it’s actually, let’s say, the fractally, the human authority itself, or the good human authority, that which is an image of the reign of God in the world is also kind of all taken up into heaven, and so the phrase here that the last king of the Romans gives up his spirit is the same phrase that’s used of Christ on the cross. Yeah, so the spirit ascends, and then darkness appears. The spirit of Christ ascends, and then darkness appears in the world, the same, and the shekinah goes up. Like you said, that tradition of the idea that when Christ dies and gives up his spirit, the shekinah leaves the temple, it’s a beautiful image to help us understand what is going on and what that means for reality in general, and how in the story of the apocalypse of Pseudomethodes, it makes sense that as the presence of God and human kingship in that presence leaves the world, then Gog and Magog and the Antichrist take over because there’s nothing left to hold it together. This is even in the scriptures, in the wisdom of Solomon, there’s this long passage about why do good people die young sometimes? And we actually, I think we read this in the church on like the eve at Vigil, on the eve of feast of like certain martyrs and monastic saints and things like this, but the explanation that’s given there in the scriptures is this idea that one of the reasons that sometimes good people die young is that it’s a mercy toward them and it’s a judgment to the world, right? Because the saints do uphold the world. I mean, as far as I’m concerned, the only reason that the world continues to exist and be upheld right now is because there are people on Athos and there are people elsewhere in the world, holy people, people we don’t know about, right? And that they’re the real hidden cause, they’re the real hidden life of the world. And that if that stops, you know. And you can understand it bottom up and top down at the same time. It’s almost like if the saint is taken up, then the world is destroyed. But the reason why the saint is being taken up is because the world doesn’t hold together anymore. It’s like those two things are kind of like happening at the same time. People don’t realize this, but this is what’s going on in that dialogue between God and Abraham over whether or not Sodom is going to be destroyed. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. That’s not just like Abraham is like, you know, trying to bargain God down, right? Things like this. Like they’re having a conversation in which God is actually showing the way that cities, nations, the entire cosmos is actually upheld, right? And it’s by the righteous, it’s by the prayers of the saints. So that even 10 righteous, right? Even the prayers of 10 people who are really holy, really seeking after God would be enough to preserve the most wicked city that has ever existed from judgment. And you almost have a sense in which the bet that Abraham seems to be making in that story is that his intercession will be enough to hold it together. Like his asking of God to hold the world together will be enough for it to hold together. And it seems it wasn’t in that case. Right. It was at least enough to remove his family from the city. But even then, like you have the best being taken out so that judgment can fall upon the city. It’s maybe from our standpoint, like pretty sorry that Lot is the best, but I mean. But I mean, look at your own life. Not you specifically, John. This is like us in general, like look at our own lives and all the things that are in our hearts, right? So yeah, I think this is just a really powerful story. And I think that once you kind of go here, then there are a lot of things about even the modern history of Ethiopia that make you start to wonder a little bit. Right. Certainly if nothing else, you could kind of take away from this. This text in all probability is written at a time when this Christian, the author of this text has seen the fracturing of the church in the Roman Empire and the breaking off of the non-Casadonian churches followed almost immediately by the rise of Islam and the Arab conquest. So he’s seeing these things happen and he’s trying to make sense of them. And what I think that he’s managed to do is actually to intuit and to understand a very important symbolic pattern about how the world works and what the symbolism of these different peoples and countries is to the point that I think he’s able to intuit some role that I do believe it seems Ethiopia might have to play. But it’s not just intuit, there’s a relationship between intuition and causality in the sense that the writer of this text would probably also have known that after Chalcedon, that’s when the nine saints went to Ethiopia from Syria probably, or from Egypt, from Egypt or Syria for one of those places, I think it was from Egypt, they go to Ethiopia and they see Ethiopia as the place to now build monasteries and to kind of create this bastion to hold the Christian civilization, at least in their perception. So you can understand that as, let’s say with the advent of Islam, that memory or that understanding, all of that would be part of the story. Like he also knew that these nine saints went there and probably brought a lot of the texts that were preserved, like there was probably a lot of that was going on with this kind of renewal of Ethiopian monastic tradition. And so there’s a relationship between intuition and causality, all of this is all kind of happening at the same time. So what I really want to do, if people will let us, I mean, like if you’ll let me get away with, and I mean, I’ve been pretty all over the place today, but if people will let us get away with another Ethiopia video, which I think they will, I’d like to actually look at those nine saints specifically look at their lives. Yeah, it’d be good to also look at how Ethiopian Christianity functions, the relationship, because the Ark is fractally present in all the churches. I’ve had a lot of people in the last two weeks. So there was a consecration at our cathedral. So we have a new bishop, which is great. But I got to see a lot of people that normally I only know on the internet. And I’ve had so many people come up to me in the last two weeks with like, so did you know that they actually have a little model of the Ark in every Ethiopian church? Yes. Yes, I know. There’s a limit of things we can talk about. Yeah, so I think that now that we’ve kind of like, I feel like all our previous videos were just laying the groundwork to where we could talk about this text. And now that we’ve done that, I think maybe looking at Ethiopian Christianity a little deeper for our next video would be. Yeah, I think that’s a great idea. And to talk a little bit about the different traditions and also these kind of underground cities, this underground city has this microcosm of Jerusalem. And this whole idea of a kind of a microcosm and a crossing of places, because if you go to these churches, some of the things you see are astounding. Like their crusader crosses carved into these buildings. And there’s this, you can see that so much has happened in these places that they really was seen as all through the middle ages, this memory was preserved and was participated in the grand story. And so definitely that, I think that will be a great thing to look at in our next discussion. Sounds good. All right, everybody. So yeah, I know that, but I know you can’t get enough of Ethiopia. So we will definitely be talking about that in our next discussion. And so I’ll also be interviewing Dean Arnold, who has written a book on Ethiopia. Dean is an Orthodox Christian that I met, I think a few times. And he’s written a book about Ethiopia, especially modern Ethiopia and how it connects to this universal story, but really focusing on the modern history and how he sees Ethiopia’s role, let’s say as the Ark itself in the way that we’ve talked about. And so because I know very little about kind of modern Ethiopian history, it’ll be interesting to also dive into that with him. So there’ll be more on Ethiopia coming your way. So Richard, thanks again for your time. I really love these discussions so we can just keep going because they’re a lot of fun. I’m down, let’s do it. All right, so thanks everybody. And don’t forget to check out all of what Richard is doing in terms of Alan Sewell, and the books that he’s participated in. We’ll put all the links again in the description if you want to kind of follow his thread, because he’s also been on a lot of podcasts. So maybe we can put a few of those links below that you can follow. You were on, why are we talking about rabbits recently as well? Really great conversation. Actually, I think just one of the most beautiful conversations I’ve had recently. It was just really lovely. And John is a great host, a very easy person to talk to, as you know. He has a lot of insight, definitely has a lot of insight. So we’ll put links to that in the description. Thanks everybody, and we’ll talk to you very soon.