https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=jeL6IM6ZJYc
The gates of the north will be opened up, and out will come the powers of the nations which were enclosed within, and the whole earth will reel from their face, and men will cry aloud and flee, and hide themselves in the mountains and in the caves among the gravestones. And they will be deadened with fear, and many will perish, for none will be to bury bodies. For the nations coming from the north eat the flesh of men, and drink the blood of beasts like water, and eat unclean things, snakes and scorpions, and all abominable and disgusting beasts, and the reptiles that creep upon the earth, and brutal things, and dead bodies, and the aborted fetuses of women. And they will slaughter infants, even producing them from their wombs, and they will boil the meat and eat it, and they will corrupt the earth and befoul it, and deface it, and there will be no one able to stand before them. And basically, this is the thing that precipitates the end. This is Jonathan Pajot, and welcome to the Symbolic World. So hello everybody, we are here with Richard Rowland once again, and he’s wearing some great symbolic world merch of Ethiopian Cross, which will be related to what we’re going to talk about today. Because today we’re going to talk about Gog and Magog, we’re going to talk about the crazy hordes of nomads, which come down from the steppes and devastate the world, and how this was inscribed mythologically in our different texts, and also how it kind of played out historically. So Richard, thanks for coming, I’m excited about this. Yeah, this is going to be, I mean, this is one of those, this is one of those topics for me, this is one of those topics where there’s like a kind of meta-symbolism at play, which is when you start trying to talk about the symbolism of the steppe hordes, there is a literal flood of information that just kind of comes overwhelming, and makes it impossible to talk about in any kind of a structured way, but we’re going to do our best today. So yeah. So let’s start, we are going to start with going back into the apocalypse of Pseudomethodias, because this has kind of been in some ways an example of universal history, which was extremely influential both in the East and the West, and which has all these kind of narrative mythological images, which can help us understand, you know, kind of how we can link actual historical events to this grand narrative. So start us off, Richard. Yeah, so to dial things back even a little bit further than that, in the book of Ezekiel, the prophet Ezekiel chapter 38, we get this reference to, it says, son of man, sit thy face against Gog, the land of Magog, the chief prince of Meshach and Tubal, and prophesy against him. So this is a prophecy against basically the barbarian hordes of Northern Europe. And just as one example, the Jewish Roman historian Josephus identifies Gog and Magog with, or Gog from Magog, which is what it is here in Ezekiel, identifies that with Scythia, right? So the Scythians are a group of essentially, well, they’re an ancient nomadic people who live in, or who came from the region that today is what we call Kazakhstan. But they’re basically on the Russian steppes of Siberia and eastern Ukraine, and they invaded, during the classical period, they invaded the Pontic steppe. And that’s kind of how they came into contact with the biblical world. They’re probably an Iranian people in origin. And anyway, the main thing to understand is they were an aggressive nomadic people. They rode on horseback, they shot bows. And pretty much all the people that we talk about today are going to be aggressive nomadic people who rode on horseback and shot bows. And so this is back in the time of Ezekiel, you know? And it gets carried forward to, for instance, the book of Revelation, Revelation chapter 20, verse 8, when Gog and Magog, so it sort of changes the Hebrew Gog from Magog to Gog and Magog, but where they’re seen as these barbarian hordes of the North, right? And so we talked a little bit last time about if you draw a map facing East, then the North is on your left hand, right? And if you’re a Lord of Spirits listener, for instance, you know that North is the liturgical direction from which evil comes, from which darkness comes, from which the enemy comes. And there are still some Christian traditions today that actually, for this reason, at certain services, they read the gospel facing North, because it’s a proclamation of the victory of Christ to the enemies of God and the enemies of the people of God, who have sort of historically come down out of the North if you lived in the Levant, right? So we talked about this is a Jerusalem-centered view of the world. If you go to other cultures, you’ll find that other cultures have their traditional direction of evil is going to be maybe situated differently depending on where they’re from. Yeah. So there’s a general notion that the West and the North are somewhat sinister, because the West is the place where the sun goes down and the North is the place where the sun never goes. And so the North is naturally dark in the way that we actually experience it. And not only that, but the way we experience the North is also related to the cold and to desolate areas in terms of the North Pole, but also in terms of mountains. We always have to understand the way that even in Israel, looking North, they would have had those mountains that would have been white caps. And so- Yeah. It was sort of that whole that Psalm that says, I lift up my eyes onto the hills and I was towards the North. From where does my help come? Those are two separate phrases. Sometimes English translations make it sound like it is the hills from which my help is coming. But it’s the other way around. It’s like, I’m looking at the hills. I’m looking at the mountains. I’m looking towards the North. Who’s going to help me? Who’s going to save me? Right? It’s what that Psalm was asking. So yeah, the basic idea here is that you have hordes of barbarian nomads, barbarians being anyone who doesn’t speak Greek or just, and then much later on the usage just means people who are situated outside of that sort of Roman household, the Roman world. So you’ve got hordes of barbarian nomads. And typically speaking, the nomads are horse archers, right? Which I don’t know how nerdy you want to get here because I’m still super into this stuff. When I was a kid, I would go to the library and just check out every single book they had on horse nomads because I’ve always found that one of the most fascinating phenomena of history, this basic, basically you have one piece of technology, which is the composite recurve bow. And that one piece of technology makes possible the largest land empire that has ever existed in human history. And obviously everyone knows, I heart the Romans, you got to love your parents. For all the things that are messed up about Rome and for all the good things too, I love Roman history. But I got to give it to the Mongols here. If you’re just going sheer size of empire, maybe not so much lasting cultural artifacts, but sheer size of empire, the Mongols have it for sure. It’s also interesting to read about the horse archers because of the madness of the accounts. Some of the accounts make them sound like these superheroes, even their own accounts, the way that they describe the amount of arrows they’re able to shoot, the idea of catching an arrow midair and putting it in your bow and shooting it back, that kind of crazy stuff. I mean, that is just amazing. Yeah, that stuff is awesome. Yeah, that stuff is just awesome. So I’m super into this stuff. Several years ago, there was this amazing Genghis Khan exhibit that was touring the country. And it came to Dallas. And so I took my wife and some of my family members. And that was amazing. And they had a bunch of his stuff, like his armor, some of his arrows, things like this, all there. And then there were three people that showed up to do the throat singing, which is super cool. So anyway, all that to say, this has been something I’ve been really interested in for a long period of time. And so when I talk about this stuff, it’s definitely from a place of love and as much as is appropriate, a place of admiration. Obviously, there’s a lot about the Mongols that would not be admirable from any kind of a civilized point of view. All the genocide, for instance, it’s a little problem. Yeah, it’s a little problem. Yeah. But for all that, it’s a really fascinating historical area of study, I guess you could say. And actually, if somebody wants to just really take a deep dive into just Mongol history, from a Mongolian point of view. Yeah, Dan Carlin’s Hardcore History Podcast. He’s got a series on the Mongols. And I don’t know if it’s still free. You might have to pay for it. But even if you do pay for it, it’s totally worth it. It’s pretty long. So you get a lot of hours of listening, a lot of days of listening out of it. And he goes into really deep detail on a whole bunch of facets of Mongolian history. There are a few things in there that when I was listening to it, I was like, I don’t think that’s quite right. And so I went and checked primary sources that I have access to and know about. And I was like, oh, no, he got this little detail wrong or something. But on the whole, it’s quite good. So yeah, people might want to check that out. All right. So you got this. So we got Gog and Magog inscribed in Revelation, now moving into the Alexander legend or corpus. Yeah. So we talked about the Alexander romance quite a bit. And it’s really like some people have said Alexander romance is not so much a text as it is like a genre, because there are actually a whole lot of different Alexander legends. There’s a Syriac one that is quite important, although I don’t think it’s really a good English translation of it right now. But there are some pretty good Greek editions that will also have the interpolations for the Syriac is different. They’ll include that in there. There’s a pretty decent one from Penguin classics, I think. So in the Alexander romance and in other works that refer to it, I mean, obviously, the Apocalypse of Pseudomathorius, when we’ve been talking about, this is right here towards the beginning. We have Alexander the Great do something that is actually going to I don’t know if it’s the very first precedent for this, but it’s definitely it sets a certain pattern, which then lots of which then we’ll see play out historically in a lot of different ways and places. And so what he does, there’s this the story of the gates of Alexander. And I think in our very first Ethiopia video, we actually talked about this. But the gates of Alexander, the idea is that he goes up and there are a few different geographical formations that were later named the gates of Alexander. And they’re actually actual walls and gates that were named the gates of Alexander, for instance, the Persians built one in, I want to say the sixth century. And they called it the wall of Alexander, like a very, very conscious member, like Alexander, everybody is to claim Alexander because he’s he was the king of everything back then. And people Indian legends, their legends, which legends and then and obviously, Islamic legends much later. And and all these everybody kind of run like there’s in the in the in the Quran. Yeah, like that’s in the Quran. I mean, this this story of Alexander’s gates is is in the Quran as well, I believe. Yeah. Although he’s got a different name. He’s not called Alexander. He’s kind of there. Yeah. Yeah. So anyway. So the idea is Alexander goes and he builds these unbreakable gates. And for instance, in the you know, the gates are usually made out of oracalcum or some other kind of magical metal. Yeah, like an alloy, like a weird. Yeah. Yeah. Some kind of a weird alloy, because the idea is, it’s got to be magic proof, because the people that he’s he’s sort of banishing beyond the the furthest reaches of human civilization, they’re monsters, they’re and we can go into all kinds of ways in which they are monsters, you know, the different texts described them differently. The thing that they all tend to have in common is that they’re cannibals. Sometimes they have the heads of dogs that eat bugs. They they eat, you know, aborted babies and like all this different stuff, like they’re really monstrous, you know, and they’re banished beyond the they’re banished beyond you can just understand the gates of Alexander as being like the furthest point of human civilization. Right. So there’s like, there’s like human civilization, including like the edge. And then beyond the edge, there’s the wall. And beyond the wall, there’s monsters. Yeah. And we can we need to understand it as really a mythological representation of something which has many historical iterations, some which precede the apocalypse and some which come later, whether it be the Chinese wall, whether it be the walls in in the UK. Yeah. So this is a wall like this. Yeah, this is the thing that I want to point it wanted to point out is that historically in the East, there were several different walls which were built. Obviously, there’s the Great Wall of China, Alexander’s wall, which is the second, I think the second largest wall ever built. And actually, bigger in than some of the early sections of the Great Wall of China. But that was built in built by the Persians to keep out a group called the White Huns. And but then, yeah, you’ve got the same thing going on in the UK. Yeah, the Antonine Wall and the Hadrian’s Wall. Yeah, they build two different walls to keep out the Picts and other, you know, the really crazy, really out there barbarian civilizations that were like, you know, England, you know, the island of Britain, that’s the edge of the Roman world, literal the edge of the Roman world. But there’s crazier stuff beyond that, like monsters beyond that. And they built walls to try to try to keep that stuff out. Of course, the the the story of all of these walls is that eventually they fail. You know, eventually they fail. And they usually fail because people, people stop keeping the watch or people were bought off, and people were bribed, or, or, or the, you know, they didn’t have money to maintain the wall anymore, or something like that. Like, it’s always, it’s always, you know, not a failure of, you could say, like the physical structure itself, but a failure of the vigilance. Failure of attention. Yeah, failure of attention. Yeah, failure of attention. And so they, and so something happens, they stop keeping the watch on the wall. And that’s when the monsters start coming in. And, and so this is like, kind of the basic pattern of Gog and Magog. And it, it basically informs the way that the Levantine world, by what, by, and when I say Levantine world, I mean both the Christian, the Jewish, and also the, the, the Islamic world of the Middle East during the Middle Ages. That this, this colors and affects the way that they think about and experience these steppe hordes, which from their perspective are coming kind of out of the East and out of the North. And we talked a little bit last time about, for Scandinavian peoples who at a slightly earlier, who at a slightly earlier juncture in history were Gog and Magog, right? That’s, that’s the, that’s the thing to say about this, this idea of Gog and Magog is a little flexible, right? The way I like to talk about it, that it’s a category like friend and stranger. So the category of stranger, when I say that’s a stranger, it’s a, it’s a category which is true and which exists, but that, but finds body in whatever embodies it. And so it’s almost like the word barbarian itself. So the word barbarian doesn’t actually, it’s not a, it’s not like an ethnic word. It’s a word that talks about that, which is outside. And so I think Gog and Magog seems to play that role as well. Yeah. A kind of a weird or goofy, or maybe even at this point in history, sensitive example of this, just so that we say nothing at all controversial in Jonathan’s channel, is, is when I was growing up, you know, growing up in this evangelical setting, the, you know, in the South, in the South of North America, in the American South, so I live in the Dallas area and Dallas is actually the home of the origin point of a kind of theology called dispensationalism, which all that left behind stuff, the rapture stuff, all that stuff. You’re guilty. We invented that. So you’re all welcome. You’re all welcome everyone. Like, where would you guys be without like a Nicolas Cage remake of a Kirk Cameron movie? I mean, that is a thing, that is a thing that happened. Like people, I don’t know. It’s, yeah, it’d be amazing. But, and so in this, in this kind of dispensationalist point of view, I mean, I can remember when I was a kid, I would just check out, I read every book in our church library. We had a, I don’t know if that’s a thing that, a lot of the churches that I grew up in had like a church library. At my parish now, we have a church bookstore, which is not quite the same thing. But, but we had a church library and you could, and actually I volunteered at the church library, surprising to everyone. I volunteered to the church library. So I would go and I would, I would work there on Sunday afternoons after church to help people check books out and check books back in and contact people who are late on their books and so on. And anyway, so the, but this church library was mostly books about the end times, about end times prophecy. I mean, that was, it was a very small room. There were probably two, 300 books and they were mostly about end times prophecy. And at some point in the process of my childhood, I read all of these books. I was just really fascinated by this stuff. And one of the things that, I read this one book and the thing is like, I didn’t know how old some of these books were. Like a lot of these books were written in like the seventies and eighties. Yeah. And so this is the thing. This is, this is where this long and rambling story is going, is that I would read this story and it, I’m reading a book that’s written during the Cuban missile crisis, right? And so Gog and Magog are Cuba and Russia. And then I’d go home and I’d be like really freaked out and like, dad, do you know about these missiles in Cuba and all this stuff? And he’d be like, actually that, that happened like a long time ago. And it’s not, you know, when, you know, that happened before you were born. It’s not a problem now. It’s, you know, but yeah. So, so this is the thing is that, that Gog and Magog were, you know, Russia and China or Russia and Cuba, or, you know, they’re basically like whatever, whoever the other is, whoever the enemy is, whatever the sort of unknown. And it’s kind of like, I mean, in, in currently like political correct, critical race theory discourse and things like that, there’s this, there’s a lot of talk about not othering people, right? But there’s, there’s something to that, right? And what I mean by that is, is basically as soon as, as soon as like something becomes really familiar to you, you could say, as soon as it becomes sort of domesticated, you know, so as, so if you, if you don’t know, I mean, for instance, you know, Russia is the bad guy, you know, right now in America. So like, if you don’t know a whole lot about Russian politics or culture or things like this, then it’s really easy. And, and obviously this Russia is Gog and Magog stuff has been making the rounds again, right? Because of that. If you do know a lot about the political situation over there, then you might not, you know, you can say, oh, this war is terrible. We need to pray for these people, all this stuff. But, but in your mind, they’re the sort of, they’re other human beings. Nations have wars all the time. We need to pray for the situation, but, but there’s not that, not that same sense that, you know, they’re the barbarian horde on the edge of the world. Right. So it’s, it’s a, so this is an identity that is always kind of looking for a home. You could say, yeah. Well, that’s why, that’s why one of the reasons why I emphasize St. Christopher so much is because I think that the icon of St. Christopher and the story of St. Christopher is a way to both acknowledge the strangeness, but then give you a method by which to, to domesticate it and then engage it. So I think that that’s, it’s important to understand that. And I, what you see in the old Pentecost icons is something like that too, which is like, we acknowledge the strangeness of the, of the foreigner, but then we don’t, we don’t see that as an absolute limit. Like it is possible to slowly enter into contact with them and then, and then, you know, kind of bring them into our, bring them into a relationship. But that’s not a, but it’s, so it’s not, it’s when people say, don’t other, others, like don’t other them. That’s like, you can’t do that. We’re made that way. Like this is something that we do automatically. If you don’t realize that you do it, then you’ll do it unconsciously. And, and you won’t even realize just as you’re criticizing people from, for othering, you’ll be doing it at the same time. Exactly. So it’s better to recognize it as a normal mechanism of perception that we see strange things as kind of monstrous, kind of hybrid, you know, off key. And then how is it then that now we can domesticate that to the extent that it’s possible? Sometimes you’d also don’t because I’m, there are some strange things that are dangerous for you, you know, it’s like that, that, that really could. So if you, if you see a dark stranger in an alleyway, you know, you don’t know who it is, but you might not want to domesticate that dark stranger in an alleyway. It might be better to walk away because that dark stranger in the alleyway might just kill you. You know? Yeah. I mean, weird food is another great example. I mean, I grew up eating in kind of like an Asian American household. So kind of living these two worlds, we ate a lot of, ate a lot of Chinese food, like really traditional Chinese food and a lot of traditional Chinese food and let’s say like traditional poor people food in general. Right. The way that, the way that something like, I’ll pick on you because you’re French-ish, the way that, the way that a snail becomes a delicacy, right, you’re not supposed to eat snails. You’re not. Snails are bugs. They crawl around on the ground. They’re slimy. You shouldn’t eat snails, but if you’re poor enough, you will figure out a way to cook a snail so that it kind of tastes good. And that’s when there are, a flip happens and you have all these things that used to be basically poor people food. I mean, a great example is shrimp or octopus or any other invertebrate that comes out of the ocean. That’s all trash food. Yeah. Right. That’s Mediterranean trash food. That’s why it’s, that’s why you’re allowed to eat it during a fast because it’s a bug. Right. So that’s trash food. It’s crawling around in the filth at the bottom of the ocean, right? Literally the bottom of the abyss, right? At the bottom of hell, there’s a bug crawling around eating garbage and you’re allowed to eat that. But eventually people figured out a way to like cook that so it was really tasty. And, and that’s why like in the United States, shrimp, lobster, et cetera, are delicacies. So, I mean, that’s a good way to, to, to understand the process of domesticating a certain thing, but then there’s stuff that’s like even beyond that a little bit. I took the kids to the Dallas world aquarium, aquarium yesterday, and they had like a bunch of puffer fish in the tank. And I was looking at showing them the puffer fish and, and unfortunately, none of them got angry at us. I was hoping we’d see one of them kind of, you know, pop up, but, but we were talking about puffer fish and I was explaining to them how puffer fish work and what they do and how they protect themselves. And, but then also explaining that, you know, puffer fish are extremely toxic and potentially lethal to eat, but that hasn’t stopped them from being a delicacy in certain Asian countries. Japan in particular, right? And so, so then that’s like, that’s like taking that to the very edge of what you can do in terms of domesticating something, right? But then there’s stuff that nobody can do, right? There’s, there’s stuff that nobody can integrate. Yeah. But I think, and the images that we see in the way they represent Gog and Magog, right. That they say that they’re cannibals. The fact that they say that they, that they eat human fetuses, you know, like that other images that could be used would be incest or all these kinds of taboos that cannot be integrated, that they just can’t. Like if we integrate them, they could destroy society. Yeah. Yeah. And, and, you know, drinking the blood of animals, which is actually a thing that a lot of these nomadic tribes certainly did, you know, drinking, drinking mare’s blood, drinking, you know, eating, eating horse flesh, things like that. Horse flesh is a, let’s say a, a gray area when it comes to food taboos. A lot of, a lot of societies don’t eat horses for the same reason that they don’t eat dogs. It’s like, it’s a little, it’s an animal that’s a little, a little too close to the human experience in some way, but also, also unclean for, you know, other reasons as well. So, yeah. So you’ve got, so you’ve got the symbolism of Gog and Magog out on the edge. You’ve got the gates of Alexander. And then that, that idea of the gates of Alexander actually manifests itself literally a bunch of times in throughout history, right? So you can, I mean, this is the way to read this apocalyptic literature is to look for the pattern and then see the way the pattern is manifested. And, but in the apocalypse and in the Alexander romance and in the Islamic legend, the idea is that at the end of the world, one of the things that will bring about the end of the world or while the end of the world is playing out, the gates of Gog and the gates of Alexander will be breached and Gog and Magog will be unleashed on the world to kind of devour it, judge it, all that stuff. Yeah. Yeah. So this is this idea that we find in the apocalypse of Pseudomethodius, but we actually find it way before this in the Old Testament and in the book of Revelation, for that matter, right? In all of this apocalyptic literature, even in things like the prophecy of Habakkuk, right? What the prophecy of Habakkuk is all about, why would God use these heathen barbarian nations? In this case, the Neo, what are called the Neo-Assyrians by historians today in the Bible, they’re called the Babylonians. Why would God use them to, why would God use them to punish his own people, right? Isn’t that, and this is a big question, I mean, there’s a bunch of the Ezra literature, so like, there’s a whole genre of literature in the Second Temple Jewish period around the prophet Ezra and his apocalyptic visions. And so this starts out with a book called Fourth Ezdras, which is actually in the Russian Orthodox Bible. So if you’re in the Russian tradition, it’s in your Bible, you should go read it. It’s actually pretty rad. It’s super cool. And it’s all about this idea, like why would God use unjust people to punish his own people, which is this question that comes up over and over again in the Holy Scriptures. And then kind of more generally, like why would God use barbarians to punish Roman civilization? Why would God use demons to chastise humankind? Things like this, right? It’s that same question kind of over and over again. And we see that question kind of expressed here, like that’s one of the main things the Apocalypse of Pseudomethorius is dealing with. The time of the writing here is probably during the Muslim conquest of much of the Levant and much of the Byzantine world. And so that’s one of the things that the author is trying to really come to terms with, is to say, why are we, what’s going on here? What happened to the Kingdom of God? What’s going on? Which is also a question that a lot earlier, for instance, Augustine is trying to answer, St. Augustine tried to answer when he writes the City of God, right? It’s the same kind of a question when we’re confronted with history that doesn’t seem to be going the way we think it should. We have to step back and get this apocalyptic perspective. And that’s what an apocalypse is for. It’s to show you, here are the patterns of the ends of things, but also the larger pattern of how God is working in the world. And so this is what it says. It says that after the conquest of Bezos, or in other words, the Byzantines, by Ishmael and Ishmael’s children, that he’s going to, he’ll eventually be defeated. Ishmael will eventually be defeated and he’ll be defeated by two things. One will be the resurgence of the King of the Romans coming out of Ethiopia, which you’ve already talked about. And then the other thing that’s going to happen is going to be that the gates of the North will be opened up and out will come the powers of the nations which were enclosed within. And the whole earth will reel from their face and men will cry aloud and flee and hide themselves in the mountains and in the caves among the gravestones. And they will be deadened with fear and many will perish for none will be to bury bodies. For the nations coming from the North eat the flesh of men and drink the blood of beasts like water and eat unclean things, snakes and scorpions and all abominable and disgusting beasts and the reptiles that creep upon the earth and brutal things and dead bodies and the aborted fetuses of women. And they will slaughter infants, even producing them from their wombs and they will boil the meat and eat it and they will corrupt the earth and befoul it and deface it and there will be no one able to stand before them. And basically this is the thing that precipitates the end. The king of the Romans after this shortly he gives up the kingdom, we’ve talked about this already, he gives up the kingdom to God and when he gives up the kingdom to God the antichrist appears and then the end comes. So there’s this idea that as part of the end of, you could say like the end of a cycle or the end of a period or the end of the world, as part of what happens at the end is that the barrier is broken down and all the things that you were keeping out they show up and they show up as this powerful destructive force but also as sort of what Saint Gregor Mnissot would refer to as the left hand of God. They show up and their destruction is not without a purpose. It becomes sort of like a wildfire where it kind of burns down all the stuff that shouldn’t, all the corruption, all the decadence that’s building up. And also a flood, it’s really related to the flood. Definitely related to the idea of the flood that comes. But people, and I think just maybe to kind of point to the symbolic aspect how people understand that this is really the description of death in general. It’s a description of how something ends. So you have, that’s what death is when the outside things finally break in. That’s what death is. So you’re there, your body, you’re fighting the outside, your body is holding together and kind of let’s say integrating some outside things, ejecting some things. But then at some point your body stops to do that and then the worms, the things, everything breaks apart and everything from the outside comes in and then there’s no difference between the inside and the outside. You basically decompose. And so this image of the barbarians coming in, finally breaking the barrier, that’s what it is. It’s the same thing like I have an apple falling to the ground and then ultimately it starts to get mushy and finally it breaks down and then the inside and the outside coalesce. But it also is a breaking down which can produce fertile ground for a new beginning at the same time. And that’s just a natural pattern of things. Did you ever read The Last Battle, like the final Narnia book? I read it when I was like 11. Yeah, that book is like one of the most insightful books to read if you just want to see the pattern of the end of the thing. And this is one of the things that happens at the very end as the, I mean it starts with the ape which is like a false man and the donkey which is like a false lion and all this stuff. Really beautiful symbolism. We should like read that and talk about it one day because I think people would really get a kick out of it. But as the world is ending, as Narnia is kind of ending, the stars fall out of the sky. Of course in Narnia, just like in our world, stars are people. And maybe not just like in our world but similarly. And so one of the things that happens as the world is ending is that there are all these monsters that live in the northern wastes. So it’s again in the north. And this is the nice thing about Narnia, if you’re trying to get a sense of things in like a biblical cosmology or framework, Narnia is also east facing, which means all your bad stuff comes out of the north because it’s to the left. And whereas for reasons we talked about in the previous video, Tolkien’s legendarium for instance is west facing. Although bad guys also live in the north in Tolkien’s legendarium. But the really scary stuff comes out of the east. But all these monsters, and they’re just described as being like dragons, giant lizards, giant snakes, all these different things, they’re at the very end of things, they are released out of the north and they come down and they just eat everything until there’s nothing but barren rock and then they die. And the idea is it’s just like a cleaning or like a scouring that takes place. And this is one of these things, you know, Lewis’s symbolic intuition was really strong in certain places. So yeah, that’d be a fun book to look at sometime. I keep coming across things that I’m like, you know, if we did a symbolic world, like a read through kind of like a universal history reading club or something like that, there’s some stuff that would be kind of fun to go over. That’d be great. Yeah. So we have the description of these monsters, barbarians that are up in the mountains. And then we have examples, like let’s say fractal examples of that happening when these groups pour in from the steps and basically ravage society, you know, try to turn society into grazing pasture, basically. Yeah. So the earliest examples of this were basically the Germanic peoples that in Western European history, this is what is referred to as the barbarian invasion starts in fifth and sixth centuries. And it is what basically precipitates the breakdown of the Western half of the Roman Empire. There are a bunch of different people groups that are involved in this. And basically you get successive waves, because basically you have one really big group in the back, which was the Huns, and they’re pushing all the other groups forward. And so it’s like you have a most monstrous group. And then they’re pushing the second most monstrous group who are pushing the third, who are pushing the fourth. So you start out by having, oh, you think these people are really uncivilized, but actually they’re kind of civilized because they’ve lived in contact with Roman civilization for a long time. And those guys invade and they invade and they settle. And then what the Romans end up doing is hiring those guys to fight the next wave of invaders. Yeah. And that’s a great, I mean, that if you want to understand an image of reality, that’s a really, that’s a good reality itself. And it’s a way that you could say, and it’s how civilization puts on garments of skins, you could say, is like taking the, taking the, you know, like a literal garment of skin would be something like I kill an animal and I wear it skin. Right. So you have this, you have this, you know, basically I integrate a new civilization and I wear that civilization skin. So I, I mean, this happened in the United States when the Quakers came and settled Pennsylvania. Big shout out to the, the forest of William Penn. I’ll be there next week with father Andrew. But when the Quakers settled Pennsylvania, they had all these problems with, with the native Americans that were living around them because Quakers are pacifists and turns out the native Americans were not. And so they, what they did is they invited all of these Scotch Irish to come and settle on either side of them. Right. The Scotch Irish being famously bellicose people, you know, because they didn’t want to fight. So they, they took somebody that was like a little more barbaric than they were and settled them on either side of them so that they would have somebody to do their fighting, you know, for them. So, I mean, this is a thing that, that this is, it’s a thing that happens. And so it can help you understand then that when you’re dealing with this problem of identity, there are two things, there are two things you want to do. One is you want to, you always have to understand the function of the fringe on the edge, because the fringe on the edge can sometimes be a little annoying. But if you get rid of it, there’s a bigger fringe waiting for you behind it. So that’s why you always have to be careful when you remove, you’d say the things that don’t fit from your society, because behind that are things that really don’t fit. And not only don’t fit, but actually want to devour you. Yeah. Yep. Yep. So in the Roman Empire, the way this worked is they would, as these barbarian tribes invaded, they would fight them for a little bit. And then eventually they would buy them off. They would buy them off and pay them to fight the next wave. And obviously there are a lot of historians. Gibbon is the most famous one who wrote the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. And he basically sees the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, which he really sees as being the Western Empire. He did not have any kind of a love for the East. But he basically sees the decline and fall of the Roman Empire as being a result of two things. One is Christianity coming and emasculating good, you know, hard Roman virtue. Not a big fan of Christianity was… Yes, we know that. Yeah. But then the other thing that you saw as being a major cause of the downfall of the empire was the way that they were hiring, the way that they weren’t producing their own soldiers anymore. They kept hiring new barbarian mercenaries. But I mean, the sort of the problem with that is that the thing I think Gibbon didn’t understand super well is that this is just, this is the normal pattern. Like in America today, for instance, our military is an entirely volunteer force, right? And so, and of course, living in the United States, especially in the South, there is certainly a tendency to kind of glorify our military where I live. For instance, yesterday here from when we’re recording this in the States was Memorial Day, which is a day to remember. And if you’re an Orthodox Christian, it’s also a day to pray for fallen American soldiers. Nothing wrong with that. However, we sort of forget that historically the reality has been you do your army is not made up of your best people. Armies tend to be made up of the people who cannot fit in society otherwise, right? The, let’s say the dog headed men in your society. And you said those are the guys that you send out to fight the bigger monsters on the edge, right? And so this is the same pattern, the same pattern that was happening in Rome during the late Republic period. But now it’s just being extended further, right? As the empire reaches end. And so the two biggest groups that come in, the first one is the Goths who cause all kinds of trouble for Rome. They cause all kinds of trouble for Christianity in that the Goths are, when they were evangelized, they were primarily evangelized by Aryans. They were invading and coming to contact with Rome really right during that period of the Aryan controversy. So a lot of them were evangelized by Aryans. Although also they actually, in an ironic twist, they also killed the last Aryan emperor in battle. So there you go. So they sort of solved that problem, but also caused another problem. And the Goths in Spain, particularly the Visigoths remained Aryan for a really long time. And there are some people who believe or say that the Filioque originated in Spain and the Iberian Peninsula as a way to kind of combat this among the Visigoths. Yeah, which is probably, probably true. So all that to say, you’ve got the Goths and then behind the Goths come the last big scary group of this long procession of barbarians. And that is the Huns. Right. So I think most people, like, even if you don’t know the details of the Hunnic invasion of the Roman empire, like you probably have heard of Attila the Hun. You have images of Attila the Hun somewhere in your mind. Yeah, right. Like, it’s a, I mean, that is a cultural memory, which has left such a deep scar in all peoples of Western European or Northern European descent, or Eastern European for that matter. And I mean, the thing about the Huns is like, we don’t even totally know who they were. They were certainly a big confederation of tribes. But for instance, a lot of the Hunnic names that we have, Attila being a good example, are actually Gothic. So they were basically, there were Goths fighting the Huns, but there were probably also a bunch of Goths among the Huns. Right. So at the very end, it was just this big conglomeration that had sort of picked up, had probably started in what is now Mongolia. But as it made its way across Eurasia and ended up in Western Europe, it had just picked up all of these other people groups as they went. So Attila’s name, This Is Fun, actually is a Gothic word for little daddy. So it was like, probably like a term of endearment from his Gothic soldiers. Yeah. Yeah. But he’s also known as the Scourge of God. Yeah. He’s also known as the Scourge of God. Yeah. And I mean, it’s one of the great moments in history is when he’s invading, he’s marching towards Rome and the Pope goes out. Yeah. He goes out to meet him and they have some kind of a conversation and Attila turns around. That’s like one of the most mysterious moments in history. You can’t, trying to understand what happened there is very difficult. Yeah. I mean, really quite amazing. But something to say about Attila, and this will be also true for Genghis Khan much later in history, is that Attila was very conscious of the role that he was playing in terms of being this sort of left hand of God. Right. So he, let’s say he leaned into this Scourge of God identity. Right. And of course, Attila had grown up, let’s say he was no stranger to Roman culture. He’s no stranger to Christianity. Right. There had been like some fostering and hostage swapping and things like that, that had gone on during his childhood. So he’d spent a lot of time around Romans and he had basically like foster brothers who were the sons of Roman consuls and emperors and things like this. So he was no stranger to Roman culture, no stranger to Christianity. And he was very familiar with like, he understood the role that he was playing and he really kind of leaned into it. And of course he’s eventually defeated and driven back at a very famous battle. But his invasion, I mean, that sets, you know, the earliest bit of Germanic poetry that we have, the earliest bit of Norse poetry that we have is this poem called The Battle of the Goths and the Huns. Like that’s the very oldest bit of written poetry that we have, you know, from that society. So it left like a deep, deep memory in all of these different cultures. So much later on, you have the Mongols. And before we talk about the Mongols, this is a good place to introduce. So we have this idea of Gog and Magog, right, coming out of the North. We also have this idea of Prester John. And we talked a little bit about Prester John at the end of the last video. The idea of Prester John is basically this idea of that there’s this king who is in the extreme East or maybe the extreme South. Sometimes he’s in Ethiopia, other times he’s in India. And we talked about how the reasons for which those are kind of the same location in the Roman world. And he’s the title Prester in English. This is an adaptation of the Greek word for priest. And it’s a cognate with our own word, priest. And the basic idea of Prester John is that he’s this king of the East, but he’s a priest king. Now the whole priest king thing is a, this is one thing that tells you that he is legendary or mythical, but also that tells you that he sort of belongs to another world or like another more extreme world. Because like the, you know, there are lots of priest kings in the ancient world. And then in the kingdom of Israel, the priesthood and the kingship, those gets more or less permanently separated. And they’re only actually unified in Christ. Right. And so the idea is that there’s this Melchizedek priesthood is this really ancient priesthood. One of these days we should talk about Melchizedek. Because there’s all kinds of freaky legends, which maybe they can’t, maybe they cannot or should not talk about on Lord of Spirits, but we can definitely talk about in this context. There’s some weird stuff around Melchizedek, man. But so there’s this idea that there’s this king out there, this king in the East and the, this, you know, and these legends are predicated on these ideas. The reason we laid all the groundwork we did last time, right, is because there’s this idea there was this fourth son of Noah who was enlightened. He went to the Far East. There is this, there is this king of India that was evangelized by the apostle Thomas. Right. So there’s all these different legends, especially in Syrian Christianity of a king in the East. Yeah. So, but you can also understand that there were the Presser John figure is really a function. It’s not an individual. Yeah. Yeah. This is people are looking for him a thousand years later. Like, you know, people, you know, Christopher Columbus is still looking for Presser John or whatever. Like this is, it really is something like this function that exists in the East of a Christian, a Christian kingdom that could, that we could be connected to. Yeah. So it’s like you just said, it’s really important to understand that this is a role, right? And so the fact that it, so the actual legend of Presser John first materializes in, probably starts to trickle in via oral accounts, especially during the Crusades as people from Western Europe are going East a lot, but also just across the trade routes. These rumors have been trickling in for hundreds of years, but they’re first written down in the 12th century in a Chronicle, actually a work of universal history, a deliberate work of universal history by Otto of Friesing in his Chronicon, which he wrote in about 1145. And just as a side note, I would love to actually like, there’s not a good translation of the Chronicon into English. And maybe if I have just excessive amounts of free time, one of these days, I’ll try to do one, because I think people might get a huge kick out of reading an actual work of medieval universal history and just see that we’re not making any of this stuff up. But yeah, so in his Chronicon, he recounts that he had met this guy named Hugh, and Hugh was the Bishop of basically the Crusader kingdom of Edessa. And so he was like a Western, like a Latin Bishop in Syria at that time, because of the Crusades. And he ran into Hugh at the court of Pope Eugene III. And Hugh told, and basically Hugh was on an embassy that eventually results in Pope Eugene calling for the Second Crusade. But Hugh tells Otto, who is writing this all down in the Chronicle, he tells him that Prester John, who is this King of the East, who serves in the dual position of priest and king, had basically conquered the kingdom or the city of Eqbatana, which is a very important ancient Persian kingdom or city from that he had conquered it from the Islamic Caliphate in a great battle. So there’s this rumor that there was this Christian king out there who was sort of eating away at the Caliphate from the Eastern side. But what’s interesting is that Otto mentions in this account that he was supposed to then be marching out to rescue Jerusalem and conquer the Holy Land, but that the swollen waters of the Tigris River had forced him to return back to his own country. And there’s an idea here that comes up again in some of the later Prester John accounts, which is there is this Christian King of the East, he’s conquering the Caliphate, but he probably won’t show up at Jerusalem anytime soon, so you can’t count on his help. And I think that it was very important, like they’re trying to get Crusades going, you know, so it’s very important to say, listen, you can’t just count on these guys to do it yourself, we got to do our bit too. But, and there may have been some, for instance, there are several historians who have connected this with real historical events of when the one of the Khanates, one of the Mongolian Khanates actually did defeat the Seljuk Turks in Persia in a pretty large battle about four years before this account. So there probably is like a historical event, you could say, that that kind of ties into this. Yeah, so already people are going to hear that there ends up being a connection between Prester John and the Mongols. Yeah, and specifically between Prester John and what we could call the Nestorian Christians, or the Church of the East under Prester John. So at this point, we should just say a little bit about this. Most people who follow symbolic, the symbolic world are probably at least a little bit familiar with the fact that there was a major church council called the Council of Ephesus, which is also sometimes referred to as the Third Ecumenical Council. And it was at this Ecumenical Council that the theology of Nestorius, who said that Mary was not the mother of God, that she’s only the mother of Christ, and so that she only, let’s say, gave birth to his human nature, not his divine nature. And this churching was repudiated by the church at the Council of Ephesus, specifically through the theology of St. Cyril of Alexandria, who said, listen, mothers don’t give birth to natures that give birth to persons, right? Very simple. And so because of this, it is, it is, it is meet and right, one could say, to call Mary the Theotokos, the mother of God, the one who gave birth to God. And so the churches that rejected this, which were, you know, the majority of churches that rejected this sort of fell outside of the, the, what was really the Roman Empire, the Roman world, the Roman sphere of influence at the time. The churches that rejected this became known as the, as either as the Nestorian church, Nestorian Christians. And some people say that that’s like a pejorative term, we should use that to talk about them. And I mean, I don’t know. I’ve talked to folks from the Church of the East who, who, you know, definitely consider Nestorians to be a saint, is one of their saints and identify themselves as Nestorians. But some people prefer the term Church of the East. So whatever floats your boat, people. And, and so the Church of the East or the Nestorian Church, this is, this is the basically the majority of Christians in Persia, what is modern day, like Iraq, Iran, and going all the way to China. And so we talked last time, we talked last time about this, this, for instance, Rabban Bar-Salma, who’s this Chinese monk who makes a pilgrimage all the way from Beijing to basically makes it as far as Paris. One of the longest overland journeys ever recorded, actually. And makes it to Paris. And while he’s there in Paris, he actually communes King Edward I at mass. So I mean, that’s a pretty, pretty wild story. But he was, he was what we consider an historian. And the Christian missions in China were Nestorian. Yes. Yeah. And there’s a lot of really good documentation now about the, basically, there was a, there was a relatively successful Nestorian mission where, you know, under a certain dynasty, under the Tang dynasty, where Christianity was highly tolerated in ancient China. And so, and so it grew and flourished. And you can like look at early documents where it seems like they’re really struggling to speak to the Chinese people in their own language. And then there are later documents where you can see they’ve done that basically the same thing that Christianity did with the language of Greek philosophy. They do that with like the language of Daoist philosophy and are able to, are able to more successfully talk about Christ in a way that the Chinese people can kind of comprehend. And then there is a big wave of persecution and it almost gets completely wiped out. And then it has another resurgence under the Mongols. So part of the Mongols, part of the people associated with the Mongols that were part of the Mongol tribes would have been Nestorians. Certain sections, certain tribes, certain groups, and the big kind of… Yeah, the Nestorians were never a majority in the Mongols, but there were whole tribes of Mongols who were Nestorian Christians. And there were a lot of… You have the same kind of thing going on in early Roman history where it’s like the majority of Romans aren’t Christians, but there are like a suspicious number of wives and mothers of powerful Roman men who are. I don’t know. It’s like, it’s kind of a thing about Christianity and mothers. I don’t know. And so you have the same kind of thing happening in the Khanates. So there were whole tribes of the Mongols who were Christians and actually marched to battle behind the sign of the cross. And this is actually, this is an important detail because this is one of the things there is in the 1160s. There’s this letter that circulates called the letter of Prestor John. This circulates all throughout Western Europe. And it describes the glories of the kingdom of Prestor John and his armies and things like this. And part of the reason that I spent so much time talking about the Alexander romance and the letter of Alexander to Aristotle in our previous video is because a lot of this letter is sort of, you could say, cribbed from the Alexander stuff. And some of it’s cribbed from other sources like the Acts of Thomas. And so there’s this basically, you could say the Western world, and I’m including like Constantinople in the Western world in this particular frame, had a vocabulary for talking about the great king of the East. And so they took that vocabulary and they used it to describe this sort of legendary figure of Prestor John. But one of the things that’s described in there is his army is marching to battle behind the sign of the cross, which you can see being like a kind of a comforting thing for crusaders and for other people who are fighting in the Middle East themselves marching to battle behind the sign of the cross. And then they hear, hey, there’s somebody else way over there who’s doing that too. But there is a historical reality, like from a modern historical perspective, there’s a reality behind that, which is there really were Mongols who were marching to battle behind the sign of the cross. And lots and lots of famous descendants of Genghis Khan, for instance, several of his grandsons, sons-in-law, daughter-in-law, who is an historian Christian. So there were lots of there were lots of historian Christians, and actually one or two of these historian Christian bishops who actually converted to Chalcedonian Christianity, and it did not go super well for them when they did that, but it is the thing that happened. So there’s a lot more that could be said about this, but for our purposes, it’s just important to understand this. And I mean, the thing is most people maybe don’t know very much about the Mongols at all, other than that, you know, they were scary and they invaded and Genghis Khan and like they’ve seen Mulan, you know, whatever. Although I think in the Mulan cartoon, they’re actually fighting the Huns because that was like a less politically dangerous thing to do. Image to use. Yeah. But all this to say, there was a significant historian or Church of the East Christian minority among the Mongols during this entire period. And this led to lots of alliances between the the Latin Crusader kingdoms or the let’s call them the Franks, because that’s fun. But I mean, those alliances are called the Franco-Mongolian alliance, right? Yeah. There’s an embassy, there was an ambassador all the way to France, one of the Mongolian ambassadors, and there are texts, there are letters that you can read and the king asks the ambassador like how’s Professor John doing? He’s like, oh, he’s doing fine. It’s like, yeah, he’s just thinking he’s regretted that he exists. It’s not just that. Like, for instance, Dokuz Katun, who’s the wife of Hulugakan and the mother of Abakakan, right? With Hulagakan, Hulagakan, there we go, being the guy that sacks Baghdad, right? So this is his wife. She and her her mom, I think, I might have that wrong. It might have been her one of her daughters, but they’re referred to, no, it’s she and like a cousin or something, that’s another female relative of hers. They’re referred to in letters to the French and in letters to the Emperor of Constantinople. They are referred to as being the daughters of Professor John. And actually, do we know their parents? Who they’re? I don’t know. They’re the ones who are the ones who are the ones who are the ones who are the ones Do we know their parents? Who they’re? I have no idea. But Dokuz Katun, who’s Hulagakan’s wife, her daughter, or sorry, her son, Abakakan marries Maria Peologina, daughter of the Byzantine Emperor Michael the Eighth. So literally, at one point, there was a marriage alliance between the Mongolian Khanate and the Yeah, a historian, basically a historian. And then a Byzantine princess. So at one point, the Khan was the son-in-law of the Byzantine Emperor. Yeah. That’s the thing that happened, which is crazy. It’s wild, right? Well, it can help you understand a little more what’s going on or why it is that these types of legends appear. Because they’re difficult, because they’re so vague and they move around. That’s why they appear also in this kind of mythological form, because there’s something real that’s happening. But it’s also hard to point down because it’s so slippery that it ends up boiling into this character. It’s like, oh, we can’t talk about all these weird Mongolian tribes and these Christians among them. It’s like, okay, Professor John, this is the way we talk about it. And so it can help people understand also why things appear in mythological forms. Because it’s a way to talk about phenomena that it’s sometimes hard to encapsulate. Yeah, because there’s too much detail. Even me trying to describe something like the Frankish Mongolian Alliance or the Byzantine Mongolian alliances or the ways that they coordinated together to defeat the caliphate and all this different stuff, there’s just too much detail. But I can basically just say, Prester John. It actually encapsulates all of these different scenarios. One of the crazy things that we mentioned together before we started is that we have to remember that the Apocalypse of Pseudomethodius is also a Nestorian, Assyrian type. Not Nestorian, but probably non-Calsedonian. Yeah. So you have the Third Ecumenical Council, which is rejected by the Nestorian churches. And then you had the Fourth Ecumenical Council, which is rejected by the groups that we now call the Oriental Orthodox. So that’s a really recent label. This would be the Cops and the Ethiopians and the Armenians. And also some of the other St. Thomas Christians are like the Syrian versus Assyrian. So you have Syrians who are non-Calsedonian and then Assyrians who rejected the Council of Ephesus, but did actually formally accept the Council of Chalcedon. So it’s kind of an interesting kind of a thing. So then the Apocalypse of Pseudomethodius would have been the non-Casidonian. Yeah. Which again, we talked about this because in the Apocalypse of Pseudomethodius, the place where Byzantium and Ethiopia come back together happens at Chalcedon. Yeah. So all of this is to kind of say, we should probably at this point talk about the really big place where this prophecy kind of comes to pass. So this idea is you have these barbarian kingdoms out of the North, these monsters on the edge of the world. And if you just read the way that, for instance, the Muslim caliphates, the Umayyad caliphate and the other ones, the way that they experienced the Mongols when the Mongols invaded, they understood the Mongols as being the wrath of God. And in fact, again, Genghis Khan, much like Attila the Hun, Genghis Khan leaned into this. So when he would show up to invade somewhere, there’s this great quote, my favorite Genghis Khan quote, and it goes something like, your sins must have been really terrible for the God of heaven to have set me loose upon you. Like just, yeah. And even the really pro-Christian or at least Christian-friendly Khans, when they would send embassies to talk to the Pope or to the King of France or something, they actually started out interacting mainly with the Pope. And then at some point they realized, I think it’s actually the King of France that is running Europe. And so they switched to just talking to him, but they would send these embassies and they would be like, yeah, the God of heaven has ordained that you’re going to bow the knee before us. So you should probably get on with that. And we’d be more than happy to help you with your problem in the Middle East, but you should probably get on with sending tribute. Please, please, please address your tribute payments too. Here’s the address, kind of a thing. Really, I mean, even the really the friendliest Mongolian embassies were like this. And so they saw themselves functioning in this kind of way as the left hand of God and they leaned into it. They saw themselves as the judgment of God or the God’s. Mongolian society is pretty pluralistic sometimes, but they saw themselves basically as the judgment of God on these different countries. And so this kind of culminates, for instance, in the destruction of Baghdad and destruction of Baghdad under Hulagu Khan is probably one of the most starring and most complete military victories, genocides in the history of humanity. Yeah. Unless you’ve read a lot of literature from this period, you cannot understand. I mean, the city of Baghdad was an incredibly developed city, extremely wealthy, extremely advanced, extremely decadent, all these things and very powerful. And when it was destroyed, it was cataclysmic. It was analogous to the fall of Constantinople for the Muslim world. Yeah, but even much worse because it actually was raised to the ground. The libraries were burned. There were like, you know, mounds of skulls. Like it was just insane. Yeah, I’m not even going to describe the atrocities because they were really bad. But you can go and look this stuff up. Yeah. I mean, just like somebody did the math one time on how many, I mean, this here’s the thing about the Mongols. Like people don’t understand the Romans were also good at this is that the Mongols and the Romans both worked out because you’ll read they massacred this many people, this many tens of thousands of people over this many hours. So then like you’d have to start like you can do the math on that and figure how many people per hour would you have to kill to massacre that number of people. And you realize that at some point these people, I mean, the Mongols were not at some point, they figured out the most efficient ways of quickly killing large numbers of people. I don’t know how to say it. Like, like we’re talking genocides. Yeah. unprecedented in human history up to that point. And yeah, so somebody’s done the math on the siege of Baghdad and like how many people they had to be slaughtering per hour. But one of the things that happens in the siege of Baghdad is that Dokuz Khatun, you know, this Christian wife of the Khan, she intercedes on the behalf of the Nestorian Christians living in the city of Baghdad at the time. And they are largely spared the destruction. I don’t think they’re totally spared. I mean, you know, sacking a city is real messy, Jonathan. But they are largely spared the destruction of the city. So this is a way that this, you say this legend of Prester John manifested itself in this kind of ultimate or final way. Yeah. It’s really got a way. But in a dark way. Yeah. And I will say after this, the Mongols and the Byzantines and the Franks like did continue to work together. And there are differing, you know, over the next two or three generations, and there are kind of differing perspectives from modern day scholars and historians as to how effective their efforts were or were not. But if people want to read about that stuff, they can go out and look it up. So it’s important for people to understand that there are images of Hulagu and his wife or Hulagu and his mother, I think, that are represented as Constantine and Helen holding a cross in the center. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, again, this is wild stuff. And people should not for a moment take away that, you know, like we’re endorsing something like genocide in the name of Christ, right? Or something like that. Because it’s not at all, A, that’s not at all what we’re talking about. And B, like, you would just have to understand the, this is the symbolism of the edge, like the gates of Alexander being open. This is what happens. And it’s something that happened historically. And, you know, obviously in this dark and terrible way, it was an awful, awful time for probably everyone involved. But it did happen. And the way that from the perspective, this Jerusalem centric perspective of history that we’ve been talking about, of understanding the world, the way that they describe that was through these legends of Prester John, this King of the East, this Christian King of the East, which, by the way, Doku’s Khutun, or sorry, Hulagu Khan himself was not a Christian. No. In fact, he was a shamanist and converted probably to Buddhism at the end of his life, despite the wishes of his wife. So he wasn’t a Christian. Nobody’s really saying he was. But he was participating in this pattern of Prester John that was so important to the sort of, you could say, Franco-Byzantine world at the time. So the last thing I want to mention, maybe before we finish, is that there is also an interesting and important understanding of this kind of wind or fire that comes from the North. And when we talk about how it is both a force of destruction, but also a force of renewal, is a way that we can also see if we look at the historical precedent of how that works. So you can see that what happens when the people come down from the North usually is that they bring something like strength, but they don’t bring identity. Their identity is mixed. Their identity is confused. It’s a mixture of tribes. It’s a mixture of religions. It’s all this kind of wild kind of chaos. And then they come in from the North. They destroy, and then they usually become fertile ground for something new. And what ends up happening is that the strength of these Northern invaders gets taken up by the identity of the people they invaded. That’s like the weirdest thing, but it’s important to understand that. So when the Germanic Goths and all these Germanic people come down and try to destroy Rome, they end up becoming the defenders of Rome and end up becoming the continuation of the Roman Empire. When Charlemagne becomes Holy Roman Empire and all these Northern people kind of take up the Roman identity, we see the same when the Vikings are coming down. They’re given Normandy. They convert to Christianity, and then they become the place of strength for Western Europe. It becomes in Normandy, and the Normans become the strength. We see the same with the Russians. Scandinavians come down to Russia. They convert to Orthodox Christianity. The same with the Mongols. The Mongols come down. They become the emperors of China. They become the emperors of India. They become all these powerful figures, but that don’t actually preserve their Mongolian identity. They end up taking up the identity of Islam or of Buddhism or of the different groups that they encounter. And so this is a type of interaction that we often struggle to understand. We don’t think in these terms, but it’s important to see that this is a type of interaction which is possible and which exists. And also understanding that strength and identity are not the same thing. Power and identity are not the same thing. And that sometimes even a minority that has identity can take over a very, very powerful group. It’s not just about strength and about military might. Yeah, I mean, there’s a plethora of historical examples of this where you have a a small but powerful minority who brings in strength and then adopts the identity of the larger groups such as they become the new guardians of what it really means to fully embody that identity. There’s a whole string. All the best emperors of a certain period of the Roman Empire were Elyrians who were all barbarians, but they were skilled generals. They were effective leaders. And so what they were able to do is actually embody Roman identity in a way that the Romans themselves had lost the ability to do. There are lots of other examples of this as well that you can find throughout history. And yeah, I mean, it’s important to say that the Ill-Khanate destroyed Baghdad, but the Golden Horde, which was the longest lasting remnant or the longest lasting part of the Mongolian Empire, and of course, obviously ruled over Russia and lots of other Orthodox territories for a long time. And then the Turks, the Turks are the same. Yeah, but the Golden Horde was Muslim, right? They adopted, they eventually adopted the identity of the people that they conquered. And I mean, this is powerful even within Christianity right now, right? Not just in Orthodoxy, but in pretty much every kind of Christianity that sees itself in a traditional way, let’s say. We have lots of people who are coming in from really difficult backgrounds, really rough backgrounds, who were not Christians before, who were not, who were maybe even the enemies of Christianity before. And then as they’re converting, they’re becoming really vocal defenders of their faith. And maybe not always in the, you know, people who have been Christians a long time are like, oh man, I don’t, you shouldn’t talk to people that way or something like that, you know, but we need to understand what’s going on here, that this is actually something that’s really vital and important in terms of how we are sort of, you could say like this new strength, this new potential that’s coming into Christianity right at this moment. So, yeah. All right, folks. I think we’ve done enough talking about the crazy history of Gog and Magog. So we’ve appreciated everything. Is there a last thing you want to say, Richard, before we go? Yeah, it’s just, I think something I’d like to circle back on a little bit is in our previous video, one of the things that you mentioned that I think is worth really thinking about is, and it relates to what you just said about strength encountering identity, is that the most honest and sincere way to encounter the edge, right, is to fully embody the identity of the thing that you belong to. As we, you know, many of your viewers are Christians. And so I’ll just speak to Christians for a moment. Like as we are, as we are encountering, you know, the monsters on the edge of the world, this strange place of hybridity that we’re moving into, this influx of new converts to Christianity, which I am all for, okay? This influx of new converts to Christianity, this influx of new ways of, I mean, the internet itself, the fact that you’re listening to this video on YouTube, guys, that’s a weird thing, right? That’s a thing that’s happening kind of, you know, the ways that the internet sort of functions as the end of the world, right? As we’re doing all of this, the best thing that we can do, the most powerful thing we can do as we encounter all of these things at the edge is not to like freak out or panic. It’s not to try to, you know, exclude other people from the gospel, who really desire it, really need it, because, you know, they’re going to lower the property value, so to speak, of our neighborhood, things like this. The most important thing that we can do is to fully embody Christ, right? Is to, and the way that we do this, I mean, this is the big paradox of Christianity, is that, you know, Christ says that, you know, at the last judgment, we’re going to stand before him, and he’s going to say, Hey, why didn’t you visit me when I was in prison? Right? Why didn’t you feed me when I was hungry? Why didn’t you clothe me when I was naked? And we’re going to say, Lord, we never encountered you in any of those situations, because we weren’t looking for you out there. And so this is the thing, as we encounter this stuff, we need to fully embody our identity as Christians, go to liturgy, read the lives of the saints, be a Christian, like as thoroughly and as authentically as you can be, because it’s the only way that as we encounter the destructive forces of the culture around us, that’s the only way that we’re going to kind of survive that, and we might not survive it in terms of keeping the empires we’ve been trying to build for ourselves. Christianity always wins through martyrdom. All right, everybody. On that note, thanks for your attention, and we’ll be back with more with more Universal History very soon. Bye bye. Make sure to check out Richard’s second podcast, which he hosts in collaboration with Father Andrew Damick called Amun-Sul, which looks at the relationship between Tolkien and orthodoxy. This podcast has also inspired in me some ideas for creating some images, whether it be the king under the mountain, whether it be the grail or beautiful Ethiopian traditions. I’ve created some products which you can find on my store, the symbolicworld.store, and there will probably be more of those to come very soon. So stay tuned. This conversation is ongoing, and there is still very much to explore in the Universal History.