https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=TyLFK7Lo0Zw
So hello everybody, I’m really excited to be back here with Richard Roland to continue the universal history. If you have not seen our first video, it has really taken off and also just sparked so much discussion. He’s now flooded with emails, he tells me of all these people who want to ask about everything from universal history to psychedelics. And I’m really happy that that’s happening because Richard is a very interesting person and I’m looking forward to kind of continuing this conversation as we move forward. So Richard, what is it that you wanted us to talk about today? So now that we’ve laid out the idea of universal history and tried to establish the idea that the way that they thought about history in the ancient and the medieval mind, that that way of thinking about history and of reading history still has value and meaning to us. What I thought that we could do would be to take a closer look at one of the main patterns that I see within Western history, within the whole medieval project. And by Western I mean the whole medieval Christian world, so including Byzantium and that. And so what I thought we could do is take a closer look at this one of the main patterns that manifests itself kind of over and over again and that really helps us to navigate the moment that we’re in right now. And that’s the pattern of Christ and Antichrist. So this actually starts, I want to start with kind of a deep hole here that maybe a lot of our listeners won’t be familiar with. And that is a guy named Mithridates VI of Pontus. So Mithridates is a super interesting guy. He ruled over the kingdom of Pontus and over much of Anatolia. Again, so this is a guy, he’s from the east, he’s specifically from Anatolia, which seems to keep coming up for some reason. And he’s actually a descendant of both Alexander the Great and also of Cyrus. Oh, interesting. So he basically understood himself. His self-understanding was that he was the inheritor of both east and west, of both Greece and Persia. So he’s living, you know, Anatolia is the space that’s sort of like on the border between these two worlds. And so he understood himself as having inherited both of these things. And he has a lot of, let’s say, messianic features about his life. There was a comet in the sky that was seen when he was born and all this other stuff. So he’s a really interesting figure. And when he’s quite young, I think about 10 years old or so, his mother actually tries to kill him along with his father and kills his father, but Mithridates escapes. And he spent the next 10 or 15 years kind of on the run in hiding. And he’s traveling around to all these different tribes and these different kind of wild groups that are on the edge of Anatolian civilization. And he’s making alliances, he’s learning how to lead, he’s learning how to fight, he’s learning how to poison. His nickname is the Poison King because he just poisoned so many people. This is in the first century BC, isn’t it? I understand. Yes, that’s right. Yeah. Yeah. And so he also, one of the things he’s really famous for was developing basically like a universal antidote. And we don’t know if he really succeeded in doing it or not. There’s kind of like conflicting, you could say conflicting evidence. But the thing that he’s famous for is developing something called Mithridatum is what it’s usually called now named after him. And it’s the idea of basically it’s got a small amount of every single poison in it. And so you take a dose of this every day and you build up an immunity, diocaine powder for those of us who are Princess Bride fans. So Mithridates, he did that. He had this dose that was like all these herbs and small amounts of poisons and stuff. And he took it every day. And he lived a really long time. So I don’t know what’s going on there. I’m pretty sure from a modern scientific standpoint, taking a little bit of arsenic every day is maybe not the best thing to do. And nobody really knows what was in it. No one knows. Yeah, it’s a lost formula. Yeah. Yeah, it’s a lost formula. But during the Middle Ages, actually, the whole lot of people tried to re-figure it out. It was like the philosopher’s stone of poison. Yeah. So anyway, so he comes back, poisons his mom and takes over the kingdom and becomes the worst enemy that the Roman Republic had fought since Hannibal Barca. And basically, he just becomes, he’s considered one of the three great enemies by the Romans themselves, who always respected their enemies greatly. He was considered, along with Pyrrhus and with Hannibal, one of the three great enemies of the Roman Republic. He’s eventually defeated by Pompey the Great and dies according to, according to history, dies by suicide. Of course, the story there is pretty fun. It’s that he tried to poison himself and it didn’t work because theoretically, he was immune to it. He was also just an enormous man, like physically enormous, very powerfully built. So maybe, you know, who knows? But anyway, so eventually, he either stabbed himself or he had one of the slaves stab him. But when he died, because he’d been such a nuisance to the Roman Empire, when he died, there were legends which began to arise almost immediately after his death, that he hadn’t actually died. These legends that he had actually gone, he had a wife who was like, one of his wives was like the Scythian Amazon warrior. And so he had even like at one point had this like group of Amazons like as his bodyguard. Really? Whoa. Like Gaddafi. Yeah, or like Wakanda or something. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He’s a fascinating guy. All the stuff that I’m saying, by the way, there’s a really fun book called The Poison King, The Life and Legend of Mithridates, Rome’s Deadliest Enemy. And it’s by Adrian Mare. And you can find it on Amazon and Audible and places like that. It’s a really fascinating piece of history. But anyway, so one of the legends is that actually he goes north with these Scythians, you know, these Amazons to Scandinavia. And that he is the origin of the Gothic people who come back for revenge against Rome a couple of hundred years later. Interesting. Yeah. So or a couple hundred. But and so all the way into the time, like when Rome starts dealing with a really serious barbarian invasions, one of the beliefs that they had in Rome was that this was Mithridates coming back and actually they identified Mithridates with Odin. And they and so it was actually a like a pre-Christian euhemerizing of Odin where they identified this this figure from their past with this very fierce warrior god, but was also I mean, Odin’s not just a warrior god. He’s a trickster figure. Like he’s always tricking people into things, which is very much like Mithridates and his the way that he did things. So you have this idea then that let’s say the pattern and this is where the pattern of it’s both the pattern of Christ and of Antichrist, right? The idea that you have a principality that is cut off, but then it reappears somewhere else unexpected later on. And so Mithridates is kind of the type of this. And one of the really interesting things that happens later in Roman history after Nero’s death is that a lot of this gets transferred to Nero. So when Nero dies and this is in, I mean, we talked about the Sibylene oracles last time, right? This is in the Sibylene oracles. The resurrection of Nero or the resurrection of Nero. Yeah. And the idea is that Nero didn’t really die, but that he actually escaped and he went to Persia. So it’s always from the East, right? So he escapes and he goes to Persia and then he’s going to come back basically as this Antichrist figure as God’s instrument of judgment against the Romans. That’s how it is in the Sibylene oracles. So there is this idea that Nero, again, the idea of the principality being cut off and disappearing and coming back. Now I said this is the pattern of both Christ and Antichrist because of course, within the Hebrew tradition, you have the idea of the stump or the root of Jesse. So the idea, this is in the prophecy of Isaiah, so that’s in like the 700s BC, that the line of David, the line of Jesse is going to be cut off, right? And so a lot of times, like our King James translation says, the root of Jesse, but the word in Hebrew is really the word for a stump. And so the idea that the line of Jesse, like a tree, will be cut off and it’ll be just completely obliterated. And then in a time that’s unexpected, that’s unlooked for, they’re going to start being these shoots that come up. And that’s, of course, the church understands that as the Theotokos and as Christ. So that’s the kind of basic pattern that we can establish. And so by the time we get to the book of Revelation, we see this pattern, both in Christ and in the figure of Antichrist, right? So you’ve done a really great video on the, what do you call it, the system of a beast? Is that what it’s called? Yeah. I’m really waiting for part two. I’m very excited. It’s becoming the most complicated thing I’ve ever written. I’m trying to write this video on the mark of the beast and explaining what a mark is to people. It’s so deep that I struggled to do it in a way that won’t just go over people’s heads. It just kind of not seem like what I want to make it seem like. So it’s coming. I worked on it last night, very late in the night. Good. Good. I’m glad to hear that. I’m really looking forward to it. So in the book of Revelation, you have both this pattern of Antichrist, right? The little horn in Daniel and all that stuff, right? So it’s the idea of a principality that gets cut off and then it comes back again later. But then also ultimately, that’s also the pattern of Christ. And so it’s not hard to understand the Antichrist as being sort of like the dark mirror of Christ. So if Christ is the master pattern, the Antichrist is the inversion of that somehow. But what I think a lot of people don’t understand or what they get really hung up on is you’ve got people who want to go and do just a purely historical reading of Revelation. And so they’ll say, oh, well, this Antichrist figure here, the beast or whatever, that’s a Nero. It’s only Nero. It’s just Nero. And the Christians mistakenly believed that he was going to come back. And he never did. And so there you can see Revelation is bunk. Yeah. I mean, it’s silly because like you said, there are so many versions of this pattern. And it does have to do with something like the scapegoat. It has to do with something like the enemy or the evil that is cast out, but goes and wanders in the desert, let’s say. But that this wandering can end and that this thing can come back because those remainders never get dealt with. There’s an ancient Scandinavian story about what is the demon Surt, I think he’s called, where he comes to kind of attack the world and judge the world on a chariot made of everybody’s fingernails. And this is the best image of what this is about. It’s like you clip these little things off, these remainders of your body, your hair, your fingernails, all these remainders, and those have a power. I talked about this in the video. I did actually, sorry, I realized it’s a patron only video on the symbolism of the inverted pentagram. We’ll talk about how that was such a good video. The idea that black magic is about understanding the power of these remainders and how if we see the world that because we understand that the world has a totality, that anything you cut off, it has a power, it has a possibility of returning in revenge, let’s say. This is a totally random question, but did you ever read a book by Terry Pratchett called The Hogfather? Someone sent it to me and I have it, but I haven’t read it yet. It’s a fun book. It’s one of my favorite books. It’s kind of like fantasy, but it’s also satire and everything. But a major part of the plot revolves around collecting all of the discarded teeth of children so that they can do some magic, like something nefarious. They have to infiltrate the two fairies’ castle and all this different stuff. Anyway, it’s a kind of a funny story, but also it’s one of those stories that has these moments of symbolic intuition that are just like a little two on the nose. There are many versions of this story, the problem of the castaway, the problem of the remainder. It’s funny because talking about Santa Claus, the entire story of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, the one, the TV show, that’s what it’s about. The land of misfit toys, all of this idea of these castaways that continue to kind of exist in the margins. And at some point, when the walls break down, they return. It’s the same with Gog and Magog, the idea of putting these things out of the world and then they’re returning. And so the idea of the Antichrist is obviously, in Christianity, it’s a way to deal with this. It’s a way to understand that this is inevitable, that as Christ comes, he casts a shadow, and that shadow gets kind of put out of the world, but it has to return for things to become complete. And the story kind of has to be resolved in a way that will encompass all of it together. And so that’s why when I talk to people about the image of the New Jerusalem as being something like that, as being something like the crown of thorns, as the crown of thorns as being an image of trying to resolve the problem of these remainders that come in the fall, that this problem of cutting off aspects of reality and pushing them to the outside. I really love, just as a kind of a side note, I really love thorns as a, you know, that we see in the Genesis story and of course, ultimately in the crown that Christ has on his head, as a symbol of the fall, as a symbol of chaos, because the thing with a thorn bush is that it’s something that literally has too many points. And this is the, I mean, literally, it’s got too many points. And this is the, I mean, that’s the world that we live in today. It’s a world where there’s too much, everything is vying for significance. Like everything is disorganized. There’s no real hierarchy of information, of knowledge, of attention, and just everything. I mean, just the news cycle, Twitter, things like this, where everything is basically constantly coming into our view and saying, I’m the most important thing. Give me your attention. I just had a totally unprecedented rate. Exactly. Too many points. And so, but there’s an idea, there’s a sense in which this is part of the process. It’s as if, it really is the mystery, one of the mysteries of Christ, which is that as this multiplicity gets filled up in a way that sometimes is light, sometimes is scandal, in a way it’s almost as if for Christ, all of this is coming together. You can’t totally discern what’s going on until finally this whole thing gets caught up together into a final revelation. The image that Christ says that scandal must happen, I always come back to that image. But woe to those by who it happens, but the scandal is part of the revelation of Christ. So the spoiler is that Jesus wins, right? Spoilers. Yeah, but in a way that might be very surprising to us. Like that’s the thing. Yeah. So you’ve got something like a book of revelation where here’s this Antichrist figure, this beast figure that is clearly Nero. And it would be useless to deny that, right? Because we know, you can read all the things that the early church wrote about him and that even like non-Christian sources wrote about Nero. It wasn’t just Christians who believe that Nero might come back as this really negative force, right? The pagans believe that too. So you have this figure that’s clearly Nero. I would say Nero’s coming back right now. That’s what I think. Well, okay, but you say that. I don’t know if you saw this, but I think it’s the British Museum, is just opened this exhibit about why maybe Nero was actually not such a bad guy. It’s inevitable. When I saw that, I was like, well, of course, what else could have happened this week? It’s very hard to surprise me at this point. So here’s the inversion that we’re dealing with right now is that everyone hates Constantine, basically, I mean, except for us, like you, me and Dr. Mario. I had a great exchange with him. It’s really fun. And I’m actually really glad that you guys recorded your video before he saw our video. Because it was just like this independent confirmation. The thing is he knows so much more detail than I do about Constantinople itself. And so for instance, I knew about the palladium being taken to Rome. I had no idea that Constantine brought it or had one made or whatever in Constantinople. But that really takes that Troy connection we were talking about, makes it- Yeah, brings in it is. In a way, it’s like he wanted it to not be Troy, but Troy at the same time. He wanted to create something that was both connected to the ancient, but totally new at the same time. Yeah. So I loved that video. It was great. But everyone hates Constantine. But even as we’re hating on Constantine, they were talking about taking down a statue of him in York as part of, I don’t know if they ever actually did it. But back when America was tearing down all the Confederate monuments and things like this in England, they were doing something similar. And one of the things that they were talking about was there’s this statue of Constantine in York, which I think is actually my cover photo on Facebook right now. Yeah, I saw it. Yeah. But they were talking about taking it down. I don’t know if they did or not. I hope they did. But so even as they’re trying to get rid of Constantine, they’re saying, hey, but maybe Nero wasn’t such a bad guy. I mean, if you think about what’s going on right now, it’s very much, it’s exactly the pattern of Antichrist. Right? Yeah. And the pattern of Nero is really powerful, like in terms of if you want to look at, if you want to understand what’s happening now, because one of the things people struggle to understand is how what we notice around us right now is a weird mix of ultimate decadence and tyranny on the horizon. And people think, well, how is that possible? How can you have both extreme degeneracy and tyranny at the same time? But if you want to understand that, look at Nero and you can see how that plays itself out. Yeah. And how Nero imposes degeneracy on others. Nero’s, you know, like his desire to do that is, because a lot of people think like, well, just let people be degenerate. Like, does it, it doesn’t matter, but that’s not how it plays out. It ends up coming into a point of tyranny where Nero was imposing his, all his darkness on the people around him and the people submitted to him. I, so you’re an artist. I was just thinking about, about this day to day, like, what is the significance of the fact that Nero thought of himself as an artist? Like, that’s what he saw himself as doing. I mean, if we, you know, that the story about his death is that his last words were something like, how great an artist the world is losing, you know, something like that. Right. So what’s this? I mean, what is it? You mean in the world where, okay, 20 years ago, the idea, the things that we’re seeing the U S president do would have been completely unimaginable. Now, when Bill Clinton went on the Arsenio Hall show and played his saxophone, the world went crazy. This was like the massive scandal. Like, how can the president be involved in this entertainment world? And now it is taken completely for granted. Donald Trump was a wrestling villain. Like Donald Trump was, Donald Trump has so much of Nero, like not all the aspects of Nero, but he has certain aspects of Nero in him, like the Sheryam. Even some people who are afraid he’s going to come back. Exactly. Or want him to come back. Because some people at the time of Nero wanted him to come back too. Yeah. So I don’t think, I don’t think Donald Trump is like, it’s totally Nero, but I think that there are elements of Nero popping up. Like the idea of the entertainment president, the idea of the president as a spectacle, you know, all of this is becoming almost taken for granted. We think this is completely abnormal, but it’s taken, it’s completely taken for granted. Yeah. So, yeah. So the beast of revelation. Barack Obama went to work for Netflix. Yeah. Right. Like this is something which in any, I mean, it was started even with Ronald Reagan, like the idea that an actor could become president, you know, tell the founding fathers that. They would have just laughed in your face. Tell anyone, I mean, like even pagan Rome despised actors. Like actors were the lowest, they’re the lowest level of society. Like they’re under prostitutes as far as respectability goes in the ancient world. And so when, when you have somebody like, it wasn’t just, it was just, it wasn’t just Nero, like there was some decadence leading up to, up to Nero. So for instance, during the reign of Tiberius Caesar, according to, I think it’s Tassadus, one of the historians, I’m pretty sure it’s Tassadus. He talks about Baraius and the street fights that broke out in Rome during the reign of Tiberius over these rival troops of dancers, because there was like one troop of dancers that some of the aristocracy backed and there was one troop of dancers that the emperor really liked. And people are having fights, like riots in the street over these different things. And Tassadus saw this, I think rightly as a sign of, as a sign of the decadence and the sort of the impending, you know, problems in Roman society, because you had people, actors and dancers, and those are sort of the same thing in, you know, at this time in history, who are supposed to be on the very bottom strata of society. And now suddenly they’re driving policy and they’re driving intrigue and they’re driving politics. And basically, like, if you had an actor driving politics, you know, it’s the same thing with like somebody like, what’s his name, Joaquin Phoenix’s character in Gladiator. Yeah. Commodus, Commodus, who really did fight in the arena. Like, that’s a thing he historically did. In fact, one of the things that Commodus did, I just have to go on a little tiny Commodus rant here, I’m very sorry. One of the things that Commodus did is that he would get a bunch of crippled war veterans together and he would tie them all up, like 10 or 15 of them, tie them up in a big bundle in the middle of the arena. Of course, they’re crippled, they’re hobbled, they can’t walk. And then he would dress as Hercules in like the lion skin cape and everything, take a club and beat them to death one by one in the arena for his own amusement and the amusement of people around. I mean, these are crippled war veterans who can’t fight back. Right. And he would say, what he would say was that he was Hercules slaying the giants. Yeah. That was what he, yeah. So I think you’re absolutely right. Like this idea of like a celebrity, like an actor, an entertainer, an artist, then suddenly becoming like the highest thing, like the principality that’s now driving things. That’s definitely part of the pattern of Antichrist. And it’s really interesting to watch what’s going on right now on both sides. In America right now, Republican or Democrat, the same pattern is happening. Yeah. Yeah. It’s a circus. So the beast in Revelation, to kind of get us back on track a little bit. Yeah. The beast in Revelation is Nero, right? But he’s also more than just Nero. Right. This is something we talked about in our previous video. Reality lays itself out in these fractal patterns, right? So that, you know, these patterns that we have happening over and over and over again. And what the, you know, what’s good. So what’s going on in Revelation is taking history and recent history, the history that, you know, especially like the recent pain of persecution and of, you know, wondering, okay, where is God and all of this pain that’s going on around me, right? Which is a very frequently asked question, you know? And then taking history and looking at history really through the lens of the liturgy. And I, you’re probably aware of this, but there are now quite a number of biblical scholars and also some people who have done a sort of more mystical read of actually looking at the structure of ancient Christian liturgy and then reading the book of Revelation through that structure. And so that you actually see, you know, there’s this moment, you know, where John eats the book, right? And that sort of corresponds to, you know, so there’s, that’s where it corresponds to the, you know, the moment of communion and the liturgy. So the idea is that you get this one vision of history that’s like before communion, and then the whole thing is recapitulated again, but it’s through the eyes of like through the sacramental lens. So you actually sort of get this view of history twice. And, you know, I’m not a Revelation scholar. I don’t know how much there is or isn’t to that. I think it’s very interesting. But I think that on a certain like symbolic sense or in a sense of, you know, the patterns that we find in the book of Revelation, I think there’s definitely something true about that. So it’s basically, so what Revelation is doing then, it’s taking history, but it’s saying there’s something more going on here than just history. Something more is going on here than just the things that happened yesterday. You know, that the things that happened yesterday actually participate in this cosmic pattern, the end of which is that the New Jerusalem will descend. Right. Yeah. So you can sort of take comfort in the final victory of Christ. And so we have these two patterns. So we have the pattern of Antichrist, which also appears as a kind of mock resurrection or as a resurrection. We see it in the Revelation itself as the idea of the fatally wounded beast that returns to prove the power of the beast. And so you can see that almost like as a mock resurrection, we saw it in the story of Nero. We see it as the return of this evil figure, whether it be certain in the ancient, in those kinds of ancient cosmologies, whether it be the unleashing of Gog and Magog at the end of the world. All of this is part of how, when you come to the end of things, that which has been rejected will reign again. It will show itself because it has been cast out to the edge of the world. And so when you get there, it’s like, you know, you’re traveling, they’re waiting for you. It’s like, you’re traveling, you’re traveling towards the end and you keep, you push these things back, right? You push on things, like, because they’re not part of the world, like they’re not, they’re not conducive to the existence of the world. But then at some point you reach the end where there’s more of that, which you rejected than that, which where you came from. And so you end up in a, in a circus and, you know, the freak show, all of this kind of stuff that, that chariot of finger bands. Exactly. And so, so the idea of this, this idea of the return of Antichrist or the, the appearance of this at the end of the world makes sense, even in terms of any normal, any normal process of the development of any story or any cycle or any, you know, any, anything that exists. And so then you, so you have this pattern of Antichrist, but then there’s a bigger pattern or there’s something which there’s a mystery, which, which flips it back, you know, and like, which defeats Antichrist or uses Antichrist against itself or swallows Antichrist, you know, there it’s hard to sometimes completely understand it, but it’s as if, you know, when you reach the end, all these things, even the scandals, even the breakdown, all of this then suddenly gets brought together and it makes sense in the whole. So maybe, maybe a good example of this that we can give people the sort of like key into on a narrative level would be the Arthurian material, which is really important for English speaking people, even though ironically, like most Arthurian material actually comes from France. But it’s, it’s funny, like in, in the middle ages, they basically considered there, there were three kinds of stories or three cycles of stories that were worth telling and retelling. There was the matter of Britain, which is written mostly by French people. There’s the matter matter of France, which is written mostly by Italians. And then there’s, and then there’s, of course, the matter of Rome, which is like the old Greco-Roman. Yeah, the ancient, the ancient stuff, the ancient mythology, right. And basic and people realize that there was a high degree of fiction involved in these things. Like they weren’t naive, they just didn’t really like, but that didn’t bother them. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And the matter of Rome also included Alexander, which is matter of Rome, Alexander. Yeah, yeah. So to talk a little bit, last time we talked about the idea that, that Britain is founded by Trojan exiles and that Constantine kind of comes out of this. And if you read Jeffrey of Monmouth, he has this idea that there’s this, there’s this idea in the genealogies that he presents for Constantine and ultimately for Arthur, where the, the proper line keeps getting lost and that survives somewhere else. So it was like, there was a, so the idea is you have like, here’s the king, this guy’s the, the rightful king of Britain, but then he dies and all of his kids get killed, except for the youngest son who was in France at the time. So he survives and he comes back, right. So it’s the idea of the principality that gets cut off and then resurfaces. And that happens over and over again until, until eventually Arthur kind of comes about. And so Arthur has multiple iterations of this pattern of the, like the Messianic pattern in his, in his lineage already. And so this idea, so the idea is that this line of romance, of these, the idea of Roman British Trojans eventually produces via this repeated pattern, it produces Uther, Pendragon, and of course his, his more famous son Arthur. And I just have to point out here that if somebody says, you know, starts talking, you know, a few years ago, like maybe a hundred years ago, there was this huge search for the historical King Arthur and every, every few decades, like that becomes a thing again. I think the most recent time was like in the early 2000s where that was like a really big focus in academia. But if somebody, if somebody talks about the historical art, King Arthur being a survival of a Roman British general or something like that, but not really contradicting the legendary material, and they’re not really saying anything very important about it, right? Because the whole story of Arthur is the story of the seed falling to earth being lost and then shooting up again in kind of this unexpected place. And of course, in the case of Arthur, something you said in our previous video is that England is the edge of the world. Right? So, so, so we have the seed falling to earth being lost and then shooting up again on the margin of the Western, the margin of the Roman world. And of course, you know, this is the, this is the Messianic pattern, right? Again, going back to the idea of the stump of Jesse, which is the springing up again of the long lost Davidic kingdom, once again, on the margin of the Roman empire. And then he becomes the Pentecost or, you know, the idea is that Christ becomes something beyond the Roman emperor himself, which nonetheless contains the idea of the Roman emperor, which is by the way, one of the things that happens in some of the Arthurian stories, Arthur actually is sort of acknowledged as like the emperor. And that’s in Mallory and some other places. Yeah. There’s some versions where they actually take Rome. Yeah. Yeah. So it’s amazing. If the story of Arthur contains Christ, we shouldn’t be surprised that it also contains Antichrist, right? That there’s something, and this actually begins with Arthur’s birth, that there’s something ambiguous and even kind of sinister sort of left-handed about the parentage of Arthur himself. So in the very early legends, Uther, Pendragon, is actually himself a shapeshifter. So he changes shapes and uses those powers to beget an illegitimate child on Princess Ygraine of Cornwall. And in the later, this is later amended that he did this with the help of Merlin, who we probably just need a whole video to talk about maybe Merlin. And I know you’ve done some in the past, but he’s a very interesting figure. So by the time of Mallory’s Lamorte d’Arthur, the idea of illegitimacy is actually removed from the story. It’s clarified that, okay, yes, Uther did rape Ygraine, but when Arthur was conceived, it was already after they’d been legitimately married. So like they have to sort of clarify that Arthur is actually a legitimate son and therefore it’s okay for him to be king and all this stuff. But the problem here of illegitimacy that exists in the seed of the Arthurian story is never fully removed. It just gets transferred to these other characters in Arthur’s immediate circle. So the story of Arthur that develops, particularly in the francophone world, and again, most of the stories that we remember as the Arthurian legends like Lancelot, Guinevere, the Holy Grail, all that stuff come from French authors. There are these really intricate patterns of, you could say, sexual deviancy in these stories, which include things like incest, adultery, cuckolding. And I think that these stories are problematic. I hate that word problematic. I shouldn’t use that. But they’re difficult to sort of like look at and respond to. And to the point that when I was a kid, I wasn’t actually allowed to read the Arthurian stuff. And it wasn’t really because my parents had read it themselves, I don’t think, but they just sort of knew that there was some adultery and some other stuff happening. And so I wasn’t actually allowed, I mean, I read them anyway. I read Howard Pyle’s The Boy’s Own King Arthur, which actually doesn’t have any of that in it. It’s kind of sanitized and just really fell in love with the Arthurian stories as a kid. But I think that people who have been paying attention to your videos recently, especially, and this is the Lil Nas X, or I don’t even know how to say his name, but the Lil Nas X King Arthur connection that all of your viewers have been waiting for here, okay. I think that if people go back and watch that video that you made on Lil Nas X and WandaVision talking about the pattern of witchcraft, right, and sexual deviancy and the way that all relates to each other, that you will actually be able to understand something really profound about the Arthurian story. And that is that in the most popular versions of the Arthurian legend, Arthur’s relationship with his queen, Guinevere, is sterile, right. And there’s no biological cause given for this. In fact, it doesn’t appear to be like a problem with Arthur, right. He does actually sire a son due to a case of sort of accidental incest with his half-sister, Morghaz. And this character Morghaz, you know, is the queen of Orkney. She’s really interesting because she’s from an island in the middle of the sea, right. This, you know, Orkney is this basically a rock in the middle of, you know, the North Sea. So she’s from an island in the middle of the sea. You can think about the symbolic implications there. And then, and she is, she’s also the sister of Morgan Le Fay, you know, who’s this, and like her, she’s associated, particularly in the later literature, both Morghaz and Morgan Le Fay are associated with witchcraft. So the point that eventually the two of them are combined into a single character. So in most modern retelling to the story, they combine these two characters because there’s this sort of sense, there’s this intuition that they’re a little redundant. And Morghaz is herself, she’s unfaithful to her own husband multiple times. And all four of her sons, including Mordred, who is Arthur’s, you know, bastard child, they’re portrayed in the francophone Arthurian material. And this includes Gawain, right, who is actually like a great dude in the British story. Like he’s the original King Arthur’s best knight. And then he eventually gets replaced by Lancelot in the French versions of the Arthurian material. And when he does, right, because yeah, yeah, because Lancelot is French. And so when he does, then suddenly all of these guys from the Orkneys, which if you’re French, that’s the literal edge of the world, right? They become, they’re portrayed as being uncouth, dangerous, capable of both great loyalty, but also great harm. Like they’re deeply loyal until they think you’ve betrayed them, even if they’re wrong, and then they stab you in the back. They are, in other words, sort of, you could say, shifty characters like the sea, right? And so this doesn’t, like I said, this includes Gawain. And although even in the British versions, and this is still in Mallory, Gawain has powers that are cyclical, that they, he becomes stronger or weaker with the cycle of the movement of the sun across the sky. So like he’s strongest at noon and he’s weakest at night. So there’s something even in his British origins, there’s something like cyclical and kind of wave-like about him. But the second reason for Arthur’s lack of a legitimate heir is that he is cuckolded by Guinevere and Lancelot, right? So Guinevere carries on an also sterile affair with Lancelot, who has an illegitimate son of his own, right? So again, the problem is not Lancelot. Lancelot can totally have kids. And Lancelot’s illegitimate son is Galahad, who is like the only really pure, righteous, virginal knight in the later Arthurian versions of the legend. And so what we can see there is kind of this perpetuation of that Uther to Arthur fractal pattern of you have like a wicked father, or like maybe not so much wicked, but just like a shifty father who begets this totally righteous son, right? That has to do, like just to help people understand also, is that we, in order to understand this, we always have to remember that this is happening on the edge of the world. Like the Arthurian stories are about how, it’s almost like how can there be resurrection or how can the seed be planted in unrighteousness and come up in righteousness? Like how is that possible? Like how does the world end and start again? And so all these irregular patterns that you see, all the sexual deviancy, all the incest, all of this has to do with the problem of dealing with this. It’s almost like it was a way for these French authors to sort of take their own, take what’s going on in their own society and then place it on the edge so they can deal with it, I think. Yeah. But it’s also trying to deal with the mystery, like the mystery of something, of resurrection or the mystery of the, you know, this is one of the strangest and most difficult mysteries that you find in scripture, which is the mystery of the levirate, the idea of how resurrection comes out of death through a taboo act. And so the incest of the levirate is justified. But in any other situation, the levirate is actually, you know, the idea of taking your brother’s wife is completely a sin. Like it’s a sin, it’s a taboo, it’s unacceptable because it breaks the laws of causality. It breaks the laws of natural causality. It’s like if you marry, if you have a child with your brother’s wife, then that child, like what is he to you? He’s a confused identity because he has multiple sources. Is that your nephew or is that your son? Exactly. And so that’s the problem of incest is that it actually breaks the world apart in confusion. But so with the idea, so you can understand that that’s kind of what’s happening on the edge of the world, all this confusion, all this breakdown. But in that darkness, you know, you could almost say like despite that darkness, then a seed appears in that darkness that becomes the seed for the future world, you know. And so it’s very mysterious. It’s a mysterious pattern and it’s a dangerous pattern if you take it the wrong way. But it’s also very much a Christian pattern. So the thing that’s really interesting to me about Mordred, right? So Arthur’s illegitimate son, it’s his nephew, but it’s his son. By the way, there’s that pattern, that basic pattern of accidental incest followed by a character who is your nephew but then ends up killing you. That’s actually also in Scandinavian legends. In fact, it’s alluded to in Beowulf. So almost every time in medieval literature, when the text makes a point of saying, and so-and-so was so-and-so’s nephew and he succeeded him, that’s a way of saying that something happened there. It’s like a nice way of saying, yeah, something happened here that shouldn’t have happened. But so in the final version of the Arthurian legend, it’s Mordred himself who raps on Lancelot and Guinevere. He’s the one that reveals the adulterous affair of his aunt, who’d sort of been his mother, right? But of his aunt and King Arthur’s best knight, which what’s interesting is, and T.H. White in his retelling of the story, he really suggests that Arthur probably knew this was going on the whole time. I mean, how could you not know, but exposing this in publicly in this way, like uncovering the nakedness, forces Arthur to confront it and the resulting fallout destroys society, destroys the round table. So the sterility of Arthur’s marriage and the way that it brings about the downfall of his kingdom, which is kind of the symbolic end, you could say, of the Trojan Roman British line. After that, it’s the Saxons who come in, aka the English, right? They take over. But I think that this pattern is actually foreshadowed in the legend of Excalibur, right? The sword, Arthur’s legendary sword. And so in the version that Mallory has, there are two different swords. There’s the sword and the stone, but that’s not, that one actually breaks in battle. And so he’s given Excalibur as a replacement by the Lady of the Lake. And again, there’s this idea of there’s this feminine presence in the water, which is related to, like, there are all these like sort of troublesome feminine characters in the Arthurian legend, and they’re all tied to like bodies of water in some way. So, but in this case, it’s a positive presence, right? So the feminine presence in the water, and she gives Arthur the gift. But what most people don’t remember is that in the main version of the story, in Mallory, it’s not one gift, it’s two gifts. There’s the gift of the sword. And anybody injured with a sword will, like the sword makes wounds that can’t be healed. Okay, and that’s what the sword does. But there’s also a second gift. And the second gift is the scabbard. And in the legend, if you wear the scabbard, any injury that you’re dealt will heal, right? And so it’s so basically, there’s this, there’s in the gift, there’s the capacity to both wound and to heal. And of course, the, the, in Mallory, the scabbard, which of course, the word for scabbard in Latin is, I’ll let people go look it up. But it’s, it’s, it’s a sexual word. Like, where do you put a sword, right? Early on in his career, Arthur is tricked out of the scabbard, the possession of a scabbard, which is the proper resting place for his sword by Morgan le Fay. So Morgan le Fay actually tricks him out of the scabbard, steals it and throws it into a lake. And so Arthur, for the rest of his life, he has the sword, but he doesn’t have a proper resting place for the sword. Hence the sterility of his life. Hence the sterility, right? And so, so the idea is that if you think about the way that, that Morgan le Fay and Morgan le Fay are often sort of conflated as the same character. And so Morgan le Fay is the witch that steals Arthur’s seed, right? So Arthur has this bastard child. It makes it impossible for him to bear a legitimate heir. And note that by the way, we’ve now come full circle all the way back from the Greek princess that gave giant birth to the giant Albion, right? This, this idea that you had, you had an improper union with a principality that results in the creation of this monstrous child. And so the resulting illegitimate heir of Mordred manifest here as Antichrist. And of course, the Arthurian legend ends with this apocalyptic battle, you know, Camlodon when, where, where Mordred and Arthur injure each other. Arthur kills his son and then Arthur is himself mortally wounded. And what maybe a lot of people don’t know is that in the middle English alliterative Mort Arthur, Mordred is wielding another one of Arthur’s sword. And the sword that he’s wielding is the sword Clarent, which is, which, which is Arthur’s sword of peace. It’s not supposed to be used in war. It’s only supposed to be used to knight people and for other ceremonies, but it’s never supposed to be drawn at violence. And you can think about in going back to the, the apocalypse, the, the promise of peace that’s associated with the beast with the Antichrist, that this is what people believe he’s going to bring. He’s going to bring peace. So I think that Arthur’s death and, and it’s notable that the most famous versions of his story are always called the death of Arthur. They never called that. There’s no story called the life of King Arthur. You know, there’s the death of Arthur and, and Arthur’s death involves two movements that, that involve magical women in the sea. And the first is the return of the sword. So in Malory, Arthur instructs one of his knights to return Excalibur to the lady of the lake. Of course it takes three tries. The sword is beautiful. He doesn’t want to throw it away, but he eventually cast it into the lake where the lady catches it and it returns to the place that it came from. And the second is the passage of Arthur himself. This is to me, one of the most mysterious things in medieval literature is that Arthur has taken away to Avalon, to the Island of Apples, to be healed of his wound. And he’s taken away by three magical queens, one of whom is Morgan Le Fay. Like what’s going on there? Why has she switched sides? What is happening? And so in, in, in Malory, you know, to finish the story out, Guinevere and Lancelot end their lives with the only happy ending that you could have in a story like this, which is they both become monks. They both become monastics and they end their lives, Lancelot as a hermit and Guinevere as the abbess of the monastery. They take monastic vows and they become holy. They repent. Right. And so in this way, you can sort of see the sterility of Arthur’s reign is transformed into the holiness of consecrated celibacy. So there’s this resurrection that actually kind of takes place there. And Arthur himself continues to participate in the same pattern, which gives him birth. So he becomes the once and future king, which is almost the very last lines of the death of Arthur, the Lamorte d’Arthur is, you know, here lies Arthur, the once and future king. So there’s this idea that Arthur is going to return to Britain one day, you know, in the eschaton, right? He becomes the once and future king. He becomes the seed that falls to earth or goes over the sea, you know, to the margin. So he’s going to spring up in that unlooked for place. And I think it’s the fact that it’s not just the antichrist that’s on the margin, but it’s also the messiah, the messianic figure that goes to the margin so that when you reach there, you hit the antichrist first. But then Christ is also there, right? He’s filled all things with himself. Yeah, that’s the image of Christ moving from east to west that you find in scripture, like that, you know, like, like lightning moving from east to west, that, you know, that it’s this is this is the hardest thing is to understand. So for example, like you said, you know, why is Morgan Le Fay there? Why is Morgan Le Fay part of those that bring Arthur into this hidden place, you know, for him to return? And I think that this is, this is, this is, of course, that this is these are attempts to try to deal with this problem, like to deal with the problem of the end, and to deal with the problem of, you know, how is it that how is it that things can start again without re-encompassing even let’s say the dark elements of the story? You know, it’s, it’s difficult because, you know, this is, this is like the final, this is the final image is, is the idea that somehow all of these things will participate in, right, in the eschaton in some transformed way. And it’s hard to totally understand it, we can see it, like we can have a little glimpse of it. I think in the conversion of Rome is a place where we can have a glimpse of it, you know, where as Rome was Antichrist, was the, you know, Rome destroyed the temple, Rome persecuted Christians, you know, the emperors did all of that. But then in a strange turn, you know, from who was also this persecuted and persecuting emperor, to, to Constantine, who kind of changed all kind of flipped the story, but also reuse the elements of the story, right, we have a sense that, you know, there’s a Puritan sense that we always kind of have in our mind, which is that, that Christ brings a kind of purity where all the things are going to be cast aside and, right, and, and there’ll be something new, but that, that new has to be nonetheless made out of the, the gathering in of, of everything together. And so there’s like a destruction and recreation, but that return to potential and that bringing together of a new body has to be made out of that which was there before. And so what’s the difference? This is, this is a question that I have, like, I’m not sure you can even answer that. What’s the difference between the demon cert who gathers the fingernails of all the fallen to create a chariot on which to destroy the world? What’s the difference between that and the resurrection of the dead? Like there’s a difference, of course there’s a difference, there has to be. And, and, but the fact that they look like each other, the fact that they look like each other makes it difficult. I think makes you understand why in scripture there’s a sense in which even Christians will be duped by antichrist, right? Because it’s going to look like the resurrection. He says, even if it were possible, he would deceive even if it were possible, the elect rights, the idea that a lot of people, and of course this is why, you know, St. John and his, his, his letter to spiritual children, he he’s warning his, his, his, you know, you know, you know, there, there are many antichrists will come into the world. You know, that’s what he tells, that’s what he tells them. He’s saying, listen, these antichrist figures are going to pop up and people are going to say, oh, there is Christ, oh, there is Christ, oh, there is Christ, right? And that every time somebody says that you have to just be still because like what, I mean, when Christ like people will know there won’t be any ambiguity about it, right? So this is, this is interesting to me because one is I think that it’s the difficulty in telling the difference between these two things that is why some Christians get hung up on the idea of universalism. Because, you know, there is this, the sense in which all the margins are accounted for. And, but there’s also the sense in which like there will be some things that will be outside the walls of the city and sort of like perpetually eternally forever outside the walls of the city. Some things can’t be integrated. Yeah, one of the images of the New Jerusalem in Revelation, it says that that all the glories of all the nations will be gathered into the New Jerusalem. It’s like, that’s a beautiful way of understanding. It’s like all that which is glorious of all the stories will be gathered into that final image. But like, but then there’s also things that won’t be gathered in like, you know, there are aspects which will, that will, but it’s hard to understand it because, okay, so here’s another image. It also says that there will be no ocean. Right, no more sea. No more sea. Yeah. That means that there’s no remainder. Yeah. So I don’t totally understand it. I mean, obviously, obviously I can’t understand it, but it’s like this image of, on the one hand, this image of the New Jerusalem, because there are these images where it says like out that there are things that are outside, like with the dogs and there’s all these images of what is outside of the New Jerusalem. But then there’s also this image that there’s nothing remaining. These two contradictory images are difficult to, for me to reconcile. That’s why Revelation is so difficult to think about. Yeah. So this idea of, you know, the principality who’s cut off and returns, right? Obviously you have Arthur is the example that most people who are listening to this video are going to be really familiar with. Yeah. But I just want to point out that in the Middle Ages, this pattern manifests itself in places other than Britain. So for instance, there are stories about the idea that Charlemagne is going to come back. Really? I didn’t know. I had no idea. Yeah. There are stories, the stories about the return of either Charlemagne or Frederick II, the Holy Roman Emperor, Frederick II, the idea that, you know, in the final showdown with the enemies of Christianity, right? In other words, basically the final showdown with Islam, that Charlemagne or Frederick will return to lead the armies of Christians in kind of one final battle. In Denmark, it’s actually not a king. It’s one of Charlemagne’s paladins, Auger the Dane, or Holger of Danse, who is the, he’s the one that’s going to return. And he’s in, there’s a 16th century legend about him actually conquering all of the countries from Jerusalem at the center of the world, all the way to paradise in the east. So the idea is that he went all the way from the center to the margin and basically converted all of them to the Christian faith. And so then the idea is that he’s going to, he’s going to, he’s sleeping now, he’s slumbering, right? And that he’s going to come back and rescue Denmark, which is on the edge of the world, right? He’s going to come back and rescue Denmark and it’s in its hour of need, kind of at the end of time. In your video with Dr. Mario, you talked about the, you know, the Marble Emperor, right? This idea that Constantine Peleologus, that he, you know, who dies in battle with the Turks, you know, not all of the last, not all of the Byzantine Emperors in the waning days of the empire were like awesome people, let’s just say. But there’s a reason why things wane. Yeah, there’s a reason why things, there’s a reason they were in decline at that point. But the last guy, I mean, he goes out the way that you’re supposed to go out, right? He, you know, at least from a, at least from the perspective of a Germanic philologist, right? You’re supposed to die facing the enemy, right? But there’s this legend, you know, that he didn’t die, that he was basically like turned into marble by an angel and buried beneath the gate of Constantinople and that one day he’ll awaken and he’ll return, you know. Yeah, there are these stories, crazy stories about the fall of Constantinople, about how all the priests and the people serving the, that they were serving the liturgy during the attack and that all the priests and the people actually kind of entered into the walls without finishing the liturgy, without reaching the point of communion and that, you know, at the end it will come out and serve the last liturgy in the constant. But it’s very romantic, but it also is a testimony to the pattern of this resurgence of light, the resurgence of the pattern itself, that how, as the pattern breaks down, there is in that breakdown a promise that it’s going to return inevitably because it’s what holds the world together. So in that, in that kind of, in that legend, I think there’s something particular about the very Byzantine insistence, the very Christian insistence that there is something liturgical to the pattern of the world, right? So you can think about this idea that we find, I think that this is in St. Nicholas Cavazillas and his The Life in Christ, but I could be wrong, but there’s this idea that we find in the Fathers that communion is the eschaton, right? That in some sense, and like this is why, and I know that you’ve recently had a conversation with Eugene Vatoloskan, which I’m really excited to see, but in his book, in Loris, which I think is a really important book for where we are right now, one of the things that, one of the main themes in Loris is that a lot of people are anticipating the end of the world because they’re approaching the end of the sixth millennium since the creation of the world according to the Byzantine reckoning. And so a lot of people are anticipating the end of the world. But there’s this one point where one of the priests in the book basically says, listen, you don’t know when the world is going to end, but you have a pretty good idea of when you’re going to die. So prepare for that, right? I know as a matter of fixed certainty that sometime in the next 50 or 60 years, I’m going to die. Like, you could bank on it. But there’s this sense that’s kind of related to that, that when you take communion, even if you’re in some cities, some cultures in the Middle Ages, a lot of people only commute at Easter and Christmas or only at Easter. But this idea that communion is the, well, this is in St. Maximus. There we go. In his ecclesiastical mystagogy, he talks about this idea that every part of the liturgy corresponds to a moment in history of salvation. And that the, for instance, the dismissal of the catechumens is the last judgment, right? And that, so what’s beyond that, which is the Eucharist, it’s the liturgy of the faithful, that’s the eschaton, that’s the life of God, the life of the Trinity, the life of the age to come. So you’ve got to prepare yourself for that. Don’t worry about like, when is Jesus coming back? We know that Jesus is coming to my mouth like this Sunday. So get ready, confess and prepare yourself. But so this idea then that the liturgy is interrupted in the fall of Constantinople and that it’s going to be finished one day. That’s the eschaton itself. That is a very true pattern. That idea would have made really deep intuitive sense to people in the Middle Ages. Even if it’s really fabulous or difficult to get your, like no one’s treating it as a historical fact or something like that, but there is a sense in which the liturgy was interrupted. But it is going to finish. It will. Tell us about the last emperor, the virgin that’s found in the apocalypse of Pseudomethodius. That’s what I was getting to. And I think that we could get to the end of this and then just sort of tease Ethiopia and then maybe come back and talk about Ethiopia in another video. So this is in, again, this is the apocalypse of Pseudomethodius. So there’s this idea that we have in the apocalypse of Pseudomethodius. There are two ideas that are really important. One is the coming of the Antichrist. And of course, the apocalypse of Pseudomethodius is really dealing with the rise of Islam and why Jesus has already come and the empire converted. So why are we losing? What’s going on? But what’s really interesting is that the actual Antichrist himself does not come from Islam in the apocalypse of Pseudomethodius, that he follows the Church Fathers in saying that the Antichrist is going to come from the tribe of Dan, that he’s going to basically be one of these, in other words, from one of these Israelite tribes that was wiped out, that vanished, but is going to, again, resurface at the end. And so he talks about the Antichrist and he says, this man is born at Corazan and will be raised at Bethsaida and will rule at Capernaum. And Corazan will be glad because he was born in her and Bethsaida because he was raised in her and Capernaum because he will have ruled in her. So he’s quoting Old Testament prophecies. And he says, for this reason, in the gospel, the Lord three times passed the sentence of woe, saying, woe unto the Corazan, woe unto the Bethsaida, and unto thee Capernaum, if thou hast been exalted unto heaven, thou shall be brought down to hell. So these are the places where Christ did, like most of his earthly ministry, and those are the places where the Antichrist is going to manifest in the last days. So that’s one pattern, this pattern of Antichrist. The other pattern that we see coming up here at the end of the apocalypse of Pseudomethodius is the idea of the last king of the Romans. That’s how he’s referred to in the Latin version of the text. He’s called the Rex Romanorum, so the king of the Romans. So in other words, the last Roman emperor. And there’s this idea that the last Roman emperor survives hidden, that the line of the emperors survives hidden within the nation of Ethiopia. And that in the last days, the last Roman emperor manifests himself, and he rules over sort of like one last moment of Christian revival, of Christian conquest over their enemies, of Roman conquest over their enemies, because there’s the same thing by this time, before the Antichrist comes. And that when the Antichrist comes, this is what it says, it says, the king, in other words, the last Roman emperor, will take the crown from his head. So he’ll take the crown off of his head, and he will place it on the cross. And then he will spread out his hands to the heaven and deliver the kingdom of the Christians to God. And then the cross will be taken up into heaven along with the king’s crown. So this is a prophecy, and this is a long time. This is written several centuries before the fall of the Roman emperor empire, right? That it prophesies that there’s a day coming when the king’s crown, so the Roman empire will still sort of exist, but only Christ will be, will only have Christ as an emperor, because the earthly empire will have been brought to an end. Yeah, and it’s almost like it’s the end, but it’s the resolution within that end. It’s becoming fully what it was supposed to be in its end at the same time. An interesting manifestation of this is when, you know, in the Orthodox Church, we put our bishops in the, partially in a garb of the Byzantine emperors, right? The sacos, the main vestment of the bishop is, it’s not originally an Episcopal vestment. It’s an imperial vestment. Even Charlemagne, when he was coronated, he sent off to Byzantium to get one, because he wanted to associate himself. So he was, when Charlemagne was crowned, he was coronated in the garb of the Byzantine emperor. Interesting. Yeah, very deliberate. Yeah, well, I know that he really wanted to see himself as the continuation of the Byzantine empire. Yeah. You know, in his succession, he’s like the, he succeeds Irene’s dead husband, basically. Right. So when we put our bishops in this garb, one of the things that we’re sort of saying by that is that the kingdom continues, but now it’s totally vested in Christ. Right? And of course, the bishop is just like the icon, the living icon, you know, of Christ within the community of Christians. So it says that, it says that when this happens, that 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 across itself will commence to appear before him at his coming as a refutation of the treachery of unbelievers. And the prophecy of David will be fulfilled, which says in the last days, Ethiopia shall stretch out her hands unto God, because from the seed of the sons of Chusuf, the daughter of Ful, the king of Ethiopia, these last will stretch out their hands to God. So again, there’s this idea that the last Roman emperor somehow survive or endured in Ethiopia manifested in the last days, and then the kingdom, and then hands the kingdom over to Christ. Yeah. And it makes sense in terms of the role of Ethiopia. We’ll talk about it in another episode of what the cosmic role of Ethiopia seems to be in this universal story for sure. And so, you know, and then from that point, the story goes kind of the place that you would expect it to go, which is the Antichrist rules over mankind in the absence of the true Roman emperor. Things get really bad, the faithful are persecuted, and then Christ returns and the righteous shine forever as stars in the world, which is how it ends. Interesting. So it’s a really beautiful, you could sort of say extension of revelation. Like, there’s nothing in the, which by the way, one of the things that you get a kick out of is that early on in the apocalypse, we get the origin of dog headed men, like which son of nowhere they’re descended from. So just tease that out there for people who want to go looking for it. Yeah, exactly. But there’s- We can guess. Yeah. But I really love the apocalypse of Pseudomethodius because it really functions as an extension of revelation. Like there’s nothing in it that’s incompatible, like the two sort of map onto each other really, really well. And what the apocalypse is doing is it’s trying to, Pseudomethodius is doing is it’s trying to clarify what’s the role of Rome. It’s trying to clarify when the Roman empire falls, and this is, you know, hundreds of years before it falls, you know, but when the Roman empire falls, is Christianity invalidated? Does it cease to exist? And the answer is no. That basically this pattern that we see, first see in the apocalypse of Saint John and that we see foreshadowed in Alexander, in Constantine, in Nero, like all these patterns that they continue to work themselves out in a way that is consistent with the ultimate victory of Jesus Christ, right? The coming, the sign of the coming of the Son of Man, as the text says. Yeah. And there’s also a sense in which Rome persists, you know, even today, people think that’s a funny idea, but you know, the ideal of Rome is still continued on, you know, whether it is in the Two-Headed Eagle that ended up in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, or the same Two-Headed Eagle that ended up in the Russian Empire. They saw themselves as a continuation of Rome, whether historians like that or not, or whether they think it’s legitimate or not. It means that Rome had not yet passed, and in a way Rome hasn’t yet passed. I would say we’re very close to the end of Rome in a bigger scale, because it’s like the idea of Rome is kind of, has this weird last glimmer in the unified Europe, but it’s a kind of strange, perverted, you know, fragmented version of it, but the idea of Rome is still there, and it’s not completely dead. So can I throw one last idea at you? Go for it, and then we’ll have another conversation. Yeah. So, Sir Nicholas II, the last Russian Caesar, right? There’s a, like, it’s to the point where it’s, you know, maybe sort of a meme of, like, these young guys who convert to orthodoxy, and then just develop the biggest possible man crush on Sir Nicholas II. Like, I don’t know if you’ve noticed this. Oh, yeah. Well, you see it in the facial hair. Yeah. We don’t even have to ask them, because they start to sport the hair, the same facial hair as Sir Nicholas. Yeah. So what’s really interesting to me here is that I think that this is really, this is that same pattern manifesting itself, that the seed is cut off, right? And then it springs up again. And what’s the most unlikely place in the world for the veneration of a Russian emperor to spring up? I would say West Virginia, you know, like, you know, I would say Texas, like, you know, there’s, you know, in America, we have multiple layers of, you know, we don’t like kings, you know, but also, like, we don’t like Russians. And so, you know, for the veneration of, like, the last Russian emperor to spring up in such a surprisingly strong way, you know, the devotion, you know, to the royal family. But it’s also because everybody knows that there’s a relationship between Britain and Russia, right, in terms of that final emperor, like, that the connection is so strong that one of them became a saint. It’s like, it’s so, so, so it’s, That’s one of our family saints. My daughter is named after St. Elizabeth. And so it’s not, it’s not, it’s not as far again, just like the idea of Troy and Arthur and Constantine and Arthur, you know, in these surprising joining together, the connection between the extreme East and the extreme West, or the, these two extremes of the world in the character of Tsar Nicholas is something which I think is playing a narrative function as well. And that’s, I mean, so in our last episode, you famously said that America is the whore of Babylon. So, but we’re also- And I stand by that. I know, I know. It’s fine. We’re also the end of the world. Yes, no, I agree. In fact, one of the things that’s, I’m going to try to have a conversation, I think, with Paul VanderKley about why did the medieval model, why did we lose it? Like what happened? Why did that transition happen? And one of the things that people don’t always understand is that one of the things that brings about the end of the medieval model is the discovery of the new world, that there is such an influx of resources, gold and other things from the new world. Like we can’t even understand how, how much it just destroyed the traditional trade networks and economy, economic things that were kind of holding Western Europe together. But basically, America is the sort of, it is the end. In one sense, it’s the ultimate margin. Yeah. Right. Especially- California. California. Yeah, that’s exactly what I was getting to. California, Seattle, right? It’s as far west as you can go. Like that’s the end. Yeah, it is. You can’t go west any farther. After that, it’s east. Yeah, exactly. But there’s something also interesting. Like if you look at California, it’s an interesting, it’s interesting how you can see some of the seeds. How can I say this? Like California also has a microcosmic form, like structure. And it has aspects of it, which is actually the most like traditional, most spiritually alive place and also the worst degeneracy that you can ever imagine in the same spot. Where was Father Seraphim Rose? That’s right. He’s in California. He’s in California. He’s like as, you know, like a sort of like hardcore traditionalist as you could sort of possibly imagine. Right. Yeah. And yeah, because it’s, but it’s the same thing. You get to the edge, you get to the end of the world and all that’s left is the remainder. You know, so- So King Arthur will land, you know, on the west coast or in California. I wouldn’t be like totally surprised if that happened, honestly. But anyway, I think that Sir Nicholas is, I think that he is manifesting, he’s manifesting his pattern. And that’s why, like, I don’t really mind. Like, I’m happy to see, you know, a lot of these guys, like they know intuitively, like in their hearts, they need a king, you know, and, you know, of course, then ultimately that’s Christ. But then to also, to also like have this deep love for kind of like the last emperor who is manifesting again, you know, as a saint, he’s manifesting again in the most unlikely of places, I think is, I think that’s another way that we see this pattern kind of playing out in the Orthodox Church right now. And I do think it’s actually ultimately a beautiful thing. Yeah, I think so too. All right. Well, look, we, I think this problem might have been the longest conversation that I’ve had in probably on my channel. How long was it? I don’t know, like an hour and a half, maybe, which is totally cool. I didn’t even, I didn’t even notice that. It was, it was great. And so next, next, next conversation, we will definitely go into all the mysteries of Ethiopia. And I’m looking forward to that. Definitely. So thanks everybody for your time and your energy and Richard, go ahead and plug again, all the things you’re involved in, because yeah, so the big thing is, of course, I’m on the Amityab podcast, if you want to hear me talk Tolkien, I’m actually pretty excited about this next episode that will be coming out on the 10th of June, because I had Dr. Lisa Kudras back on to talk about Marian figures in Tolkien’s legendarium. And this is the, the, like, I’m always nervous about talking about the mother of God, because I feel like she’s the sort of like, you just can’t talk about her. You have to, you have to venerate an icon. I don’t know what else to say. And yet I keep finding myself places where I’m, where I am talking about her. So this is like the most Marian thing that I’ve ever done on the internet. And I’m pretty excited about this episode. We’re, we are also still working on getting a website up for a book that I want to publish. And hopefully you’ll be contributing to it. And some other people will be contributing to, contributing to it’s called Finding the Golden Key, essays on a toward a recovery of the sacramental imagination. And it’s kind of, I’m hoping it’s going to be sort of a nexus for this project of re-enchantment that we’ve all kind of been involved in. So look for that. I’m hoping the website will go up in the next week or two, and you’ll be able to, people will be able to actually submit abstracts for essays to be included in the volume. So. All right, everybody. So stay tuned. And, and we’ll definitely be back with some, some other surprising and wondrous, wonderful, wondrous stories. So thanks everybody.