The SECRET Demons Hidden in the Bible

Some medieval priests believe that they could summon demons and even use them to rob the antichrist. They believe that demons were hiding treasure to fund the end of the world. And if a priest could cast a demon out of somebody, why couldn't they force it to hand over money? Well, today Dr. Justin Sledge joins me to explore some of the strangest stories in all of religion and occult literature. We're talking about the book of Enoch and the flesh-eating giants, a human who becomes an angel called the Little Yahweh and two men who claim to receive an angelic language letter by letter backwards. We also get into Justin's argument that the oldest passages of the Bible reveal God as a warrior and storm deity. How did these beliefs develop and which ones are still shaping the way that we see the world today? Dr. Justin Sledge is absolutely brilliant. I'm a huge fan of his work and his YouTube channel Esoterica and today he brings up a lot of really fascinating and really challenging pieces of literature and ancient texts that make me question what we really know about the Bible, occultism and all of Western religion. So sit back, relax, and welcome to camp. Dr. Justin Sledge, thank you for joining me. Yeah man, thank you. Thank you for having me on. Looking forward to chatting. I am so excited. I've been watching a bunch of YouTube content for a pretty long time now and I just love your approach to the esoteric as you could sort of frame it that way. You have a background in philosophy and really just you are an expert in looking through ancient texts and really understanding them through a scholarly lens and I don't have the scholarship but I do have the same curiosity and a fascination with these ancient texts. So could you just explain to the people how you came to love this sort of facet of academia and what draws you into this? So I think I like a lot of kids in the 80s. I grew up with Arthur C. Clark's mysterious world and Leonard Nimoy's in search of and like horror movies like Evil Dead with the necronomicon summoning demons and it's I grew up in a world of like they two love craft stories and playing Dungeons and Dragons and I got so interested in that kind of material in Atlantis and ghosts and big foot and grim wars and all this sort of thing and I think that there's kind of two paths that happened to most people right either you sort of grow up and everything becomes disenchanted and frankly boring and you lose interest in all of that and it's all mythology or you become sort of a dyed in the wool true believer and now you're like you know really about going and finding Atlantis and the wall of bimini or whatever with Edgar Casey. So you sort of become a true believer or you become a skeptic and I think that what happened to me is I got lucky and I became both right I became a skeptical believer which means that I'm I'm interested in the material but I'm also what I would consider myself as sort of a classical skeptic in a sense that my job is to withhold judgment not to judge a or nay but to look at the material and say this made sense to someone in the past how can I like steal man them so that it makes sense to us again so looking at anastic text or a grim wars or whatever so it was never it was never for me a thing that I believed in but it was also a thing that I never felt that I could just sort of put on the shelf and be like oh that's just a bunch of nonsense right so that's the kind of how I get into it how it why stay into it is really you know part of what I love about sort of esoteric material is that you know no one no one comes to esotericism by accident like you like you don't accidentally become an occultist so that's the thing you have to like work at yeah this material is difficult to get access to a lot of it's in like old books a lot of it's in arcane languages a lot of it's like difficult to get you know to get into it's it's it's it's it's esoteric and so in those texts and in those practices and in that literature they're always asking the biggest possible questions like what is the fundamental nature of reality hidden from us how can I manipulate occult forces so as to change the world I'm always talking with people most of them dead about just that question the biggest possible questions and I feel like that's just a thing that's really healthy for people is to be able to be in dialogue about these really big questions yeah and I feel like even if I don't agree to the answers that someone like Cornelius Agrippa or John D or Gianna Bruno even if I don't agree with the answers that they come to the fact that they were on that quest their whole lives inspires me and I want to be on that quest even if I can't share with them that we come to the same conclusions and I find that they motivate me to to be on that quest yeah and that's a deep sense of numerous all yeah and I really am very thankful for for them and for this tradition for a giving my life that sense of numerous all I feel the same way that even if I don't fully believe what is sort of codified within these ancient texts or I don't come to the same conclusion I believe that they believed it and to me that is fascinating like when John D is sort of you know looking in front of a bowl you know experiencing some type of heightened state where he's understanding prophecies of the world I'm like what was going on with him was he just delusional was he actually doing something like what was actually going on here and I can't really hang my hat on any element of this being 100% one way or the other but the question is just so enticing to me and I just want I want to know more that's the way that's you know it's again I think what's great for me is that I come at this material like I said for the skeptical lens which means not disbelieving it but just by trying to make sure that I'm withholding judgment as much as I can and just letting the the sense of mystery be palpable to be real and for me to be humble enough you know God willing that I can be humble enough just to say I don't know and I'm not going to know and that's okay and so what I need to do is present the mystery not debunk it not encourage other people to believe X Y and Z not to sell someone a story about what really happened with Edward Kelly and John D because I don't know that what I do know is this is really mysterious and I need to sit in the mystery yeah and that's you know that's a hard thing to do because we all want we all want the answers and they're not forthcoming well let's sit in some ancient mysteries okay there's a few that I think about all the time so the one that I would love to start with is the I sort of how the my understanding the Catholic Church and much of Christendom understands the demonic to have been born and it is this story that comes from Genesis that also has a lot of crossover with the book of Enoch and it is this idea of these watchers coming down and they're supposed to observe humanity what they don't and what do they do instead they procreate with human women and they create Nephilim which are these sort of like giant kind of half breed sort of things and then the Nephilim die and their bodily form is you know decomposing into the earth but their souls continue to sort of sort of habitate this realm and that is kind of an explanation for the demonic now what do you understand from going through the actual sources and your understanding of this literature what do you make of that story and sort of where it came from and what it says about how these people thought about magical thinking and demons so we can think about this in the context of a development of a form of Judaism that scholars call apocalyptic Judaism now apocalyptic that's not a category ancient people used it's a category we've imposed upon them so we have to be careful about the category because it's again when you're using categories upon historical people that they didn't develop it's it's a fun house mirror right right and then when you say apocalyptic I just want to be clear are you talking about the revelatory nature of apocalyptic yeah it's literally the word apocalyptic which means to to reveal or unveil something so most of us hear the word apocalyptic and we hear the end of the world doomsday arm again arm again yeah and that's one thing that they were interested in right it's just so happens that that word is now taken on that flavor almost exclusively in the way that we commonly use it so let's you know let's zoom out a little bit and so part of the apocalyptic mode of Judaism which develops in the fourth century or so before the common era of which the book of Enoch is a classic example and of which the apocalypse of John is also an example but one of the things they're really interested in is in the primordial past they're really interested in the apocalyptic literature about where the world came from and specifically where evil came from because there's just a basic theological problem at stake here if God is all good where did the bad stuff come from and so there's a lot of answers and part of what we find in the apocalyptic literature is actually a range of theories it's a range of theories one of which is the Enoch what we might call the Inokian theory of evil and that theory is that there were divine beings angels whatever that means and that for whatever reason they decided to come down and mate with human women and they were led in the book of Enoch by one of these entities called Semyaza Semyaza's Hebrew air make for the one that sees the name so this must have been a relatively high ranking being because in so far as God's name is representative of the divine itself this is an entity who sees the name of God and traditionally no one really sees or even knows the true name of the the creator yeah it's completely you know it's the the glory of the of the of the maker makes it so that no one can really see the maker you can see the glory but nothing nothing behind the throne which is there a remnant of that still to this day when I'm texting my Jewish friends and they say thank God and I'll be right back with you guys. And then they put a dash in the G. - A dash instead of that. - Absolutely. Yeah, it's still a custom, and even me, when I'm in, I can be in scholarship mode and I can be in religion mode and when I'm in religion mode, I also, I'm saying, Hashem, Bruch Hashem, the name, right? Hashem, literally the name, plus it be the name, but you don't wanna say it, or think it, or whatever. But this angel did, solve the name. - That's big. - Simya, this is a hybrid suite. - That's exactly. - Yeah, it's an executive angel. And he convinces a bunch of other angels to go down. In fact, they swear like an oath that if they go down together, they, whatever happens to one of us, happens to all of us. And in the book of Enoch, they go down and mate with human women. What's great about that story is that it's not in the book of Enoch, but it's in a side literature called The Midrush, where the first woman they actually come to, she realizes that these guys are up to no good. They're kind of, and again, we think of demons in a way that we're used to the exorcists, right? It's super spooky evil demons. The demons in the book of Enoch are the watchers or Simya's on his band are more like horning teenagers. - Yeah. - They're just like out to get laid. Yeah, they're not like super spooky. They're just kind of like creepers. - Yeah. - So they come across-- - They're really kind of like bad uncles in a way, where they're like, they're teaching the people bad stuff. They're like, "Yo, here's how you like smoke cigarettes. Here's what weed is." They're like cosmetics, metallurgy, metallurgy. You know, here's the, yeah, there are like the bad uncle. - And exchange for that, they're like, "Hey, let's talk." - Yeah, come on real quick. - Yeah, come on, yeah, let's Netflix and chill. So they're just kind of creepers. - Yeah. - And anyway, one of the, one of the first woman that they meet, human woman they meet, she realizes these guys are like just weird. And she says, "Look, I'll sleep with you if you tell me God's name, right? If you tell me God's name, sure, like I'll sleep with you." And this idiot Angel says, "Sure." And he tells her the name of God and she pronounces it and immediately wields herself to become the Pleiades. - Whoa. - And so she, the first earth girl that they, earth girls are easy, except for when they're not, she tricked them and she's permanently becomes the Pleiades. - Now, when you say the Pleiades. - The seven stars in the sky, the constellation of the Pleiades. - And that was sort of an ancient kind of, - Ancient idea. - Apocalyptic understanding of like where the star system came from. This was a human woman that learned the name of God. And she transformed herself to avoid these rapacious angels. So she used the divine name to transform herself into the seven stars of the Pleiades. - It's gonna come up. - It's a cool story. I love that story. And every time I, now every time I look at a Subaru, right? Subaru is just the Japanese name for the Pleiades. - Oh, wow. - The seven stars are on there and I always think of her when I see a Subaru passport. - Wow, good for her. - Yeah, so it's a cool story. - Hey, real quick, most people who watch this channel aren't subscribed. And when you subscribe, you help the channel grow and you stay in the loop with every new drop. Religion camp, history camp, and camp gagnon. Well, let's get back to it. - So, but anyway, that's one story, right? That's one story is that these watchers came down, made it the women, created these giants. And the problem with the giants was that they were evil. We're not evil in the sense of malevolent, the way we think of demons as being malevolent. They were rapacious in the sense that they had massive appetites. And the book of Enoch said they just started eating everybody. And they were just eating everybody. And at some point, God was like, look, they're going to kill everything. And again, when you read the Genesis creation story or the flood story, it says the world was full of Hamas was full of violence. And so part of what they're trying to figure out is what exactly is this violence the world was full of. And the book of Enoch explains, it was just literally giants eating people alive and eating all the livestock. And eventually, this got to a situation where God just had to flood the earth in order to get rid of them. And of course, that didn't quite work either. - Yeah. - So that's one story. The air mag word for violence. What was the word you say? - A Hebrew word, Hamas. Yeah. And of course, you can people hear the word Hamas. It's a, it's a, it's a. - Is it spelled similarly? - I don't know if it spelled the same in Arabic, but it's, it's a. - People have made this connection before. - Yeah, I think people have, people have noticed this. And it's one of those things where it's an interesting overlap in languages. I think it's a false, a situation of false friends, obviously. 'Cause Hamas and Arabic is an acronym for, for the camera, the exact name for it in Arabic. - Wow. - But yeah, and in Hebrew, it says the world's full of violence. And that's the word actually four of violence. - Okay, not to get into modern politics, but it's just a crazy overlap. - It's just a weird overlap. - Wow. - So, but yeah, but that's just one theory, right? So the other theory, by the way, that theory didn't win. The theory that evil came from angels coming down, meeting women, teaching us bad stuff. So that theory actually did not win out. The book of Vinoch, aside from one quotation and the book of Jude and the New Testament, ultimately doesn't get absorbed into Christianity or Judaism for that matter. The theory that God absorbed is the rebellion in heaven theory, where there were actually angels in heaven and rather than coming down to earth, they rebelled against God and were thrown out of heaven. And that's the story that got taken up into Christianity, but not Judaism. The for Judaism demons are actually entities that were created right before the first Shabbat. And God basically ran out of time to give them bodies. They didn't get bodies. And so their souls, their ruchot, their souls, they have all the desires that we have, the bodily desires we have, but they can't satisfy them. And they see us satisfying our desires and being complete entities with bodies and souls. And this inspires jealousy in them and they paid us. They really ravaged against us. And the Gamara says that if you could see them, they're called the Shedim in Hebrew. If you could see the Shedim, that would be all that you could see. They're just literally everywhere. So that's a particularly Jewish theory on the origin of the demons. - Jellis of this Epicurian life where we can eat and drink and procreate and things like that. Whereas these demons are just all soul and no flesh. - All soul and no flesh with all the desires of us. So just imagine being able to, the feeling of being hungry but never being able to eat. - Is it an ancient explanation for possession as well? - Yeah, yeah. And Judaism and Christianity, possession became a big thing. And it's interesting that in the history of Judaism, or rather I should say that in the divorce between Judaism and Christianity, right? When you go through a divorce, you have to divide up what you get and what the Christians got was exorcism. Judaism basically shelved exorcism for about 1500 years until you can start getting the first possession cases again and suffered in the 16th century. And by then it's not demons possessing people anymore. It's the evil dead. It's dead people who've come, the spirits actually end up possessing people. So totally different. And Judaism demons don't possess people anymore at least. And in Christianity, dead people don't possess people. So it's very different in terms of what the etiology of evil influences in both religions. - Right, so there's this swirling sort of explanation for how evil is introduced cosmologically in Christians and Jews kind of pick up different versions, so to speak. But they both still have Adam and Eve as far as the introduction to humanity. - Right. - And that story is essentially the same. - It's understood wildly differently depending on what your group of Christianity you belong to or what your group of Judaism you belong to. But yeah, there's a sense of something went wrong there with the one exception, of course, with the monastics who think, no, something went right there. - Right. That's the great example where we have a complete inversion of that story by some of the Sethian nostics and antiquity who are fascinating. - Right. So the story of Enoc is written by someone, we don't necessarily know who is kind of written pseudonymously, kind of attributed to this person, Enoc, who is referenced in the Bible. - Yeah, man, it says that Enoc is famous because he lived for 365 years and he went to go with God. - So he went into heaven. He didn't have it. He never dies. Him and Elijah are really the two who never die in the Hebrew Bible. And so the fact that he lived for 365 years, which seems to be somehow aligned to some astrological, calendrical, something there. And then the fact that he didn't die, there becomes an entire literature. Of which the first book of Enoc actually isn't even one book. It's between five and eight books depending on how you carve them up. And then there's second Enoc and third Enoc. So we shouldn't talk about the book of Enoc. We should talk about the kind of the library of Enoc and literature of which there's some Dead Sea Scrolls stuff that's Enoc and there's a whole library. I mean, if you were to take it all and put it together, I mean, it would be a tomb, a real tomb, hundreds of pages. So what does the scholarship say about this person that is ostensibly quite important to God? And if you are a Christian and you're hearing this or even a Jewish person you're hearing this, you appreciate the Hebrew Bible and you understand the Old Testament to be the inspired word of God. You're like, "This Enoc guy is pretty important." But yet not mentioned a ton. And then there's all this literature around him that is non-canonical. The church doesn't really include in their theology and any capacity. There seems like there's a gap here. And I think this gap is why there's so much interest around Enoc. So what can we say from the scholarship that is verified about this person and about the writings around him? And what was the conversation like for ancient Jews or even early century Christians that were talking about Enoc? - So we don't know anything about the mythological character, Enoc, and then the Bible just has a few throwaway verses. The Bible has a terrible tendency of saying really provocative things and moving on. - So it makes it so good. - It makes it so good, right? And it's just an invitation to fanfiction at that point when you just say things like, "Oh yeah, and then Enoc was transformed into this." And you're like, "What?" And there were enough. in the earth and you're like, right? And the Bible just like, just like, yeah, didn't you know? - Yeah, and it creates a quantity for modern Christians 'cause it's like, look, I believe the whole Bible, Jesus is good, love your neighbor, giants are real, wait, what was the-- - What's that last line? - Yeah, and this is a common thing in ancient literature where they'll just say like wild stuff. I mean, even in Norse mythology sometimes you'll just be like, and I want to go visit so and so, and I got into a duel with this guy, and then this troll talked to me for a while, then we went over here and I talked to a spirit, and then I went to farm for the season, you're like, okay, I got two questions, but who is the troll? And again, that's just the way that ancient literature worked. But with Inak, what's really clear about the literature is that Inak as a character was important to these apocalyptic Jews and Christians because he clearly had some special access to God. And when you get access to God, you get insight into the nature of the universe. You get shown things, the rest of us civilians don't get shown. And so a lot of the literature in the Inak literature, a lot of us like that first story with the fallen ones and the watchers, but most as a rest of that book is Inak getting shown around the universe. You learn how the universe works, how it came to be, how the clinical system can be changed. So for instance, one of the things that was really up for debate in the ancient world was how do you keep time? And the Jewish calendar is an interesting calendar because it's lunar, but if you do a lunar calendar, and you have, like for instance, we're about to come up on a harvest holidays, if you have harvest holidays on a lunar calendar, and you don't correct that calendar, the harvest holidays will just move through the calendar. And y'all said you're having harvest holidays in February, which makes no sense. So you have to do something to the calendar to stop that from happening. Well, one thing you can do is you can correct it by using a solar calculation and you can insert basically in the Jewish calendar a leap month and that's how modern Judaism solves it. The Inokic literature solved it by saying, let's get rid of the lunar calendar. Let's introduce a 365-day solar calendar. And we know that solar calendar was used by the people who wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls. They were on a solar calendar. - These are SE and G. - Yes. - The scenes maybe, they never call themselves that, so we have to be careful about, they just call themselves the Yachad, the community. But probably they were what Josephus calls the Essenes or a sect of them perhaps. But they use this Inokian calendar. And in fact, if you look at the amount of scrolls recovered by text from the Dead Sea Scrolls, I think Inach is the books of Inach are the third most attested group of scrolls. - When you say attested, what do you mean? - So when we say there's fragments of Genesis, fragments of Exodus, fragments of Leviticus, fragments of whatever. So if you look at the amount of copies of scrolls that they had, Inach is higher than other books of the Bible. It's like I think third down. So this community was really taken with this book, it really mattered to them enormously. And again, when you go through those sections in the book of Inach about the calendar, most of our eyes kind of glaze over 'cause we don't really care about calendrical issues. But if an eternal God has commanded you to keep certain holidays forever, you need to know when to keep those holidays. And how do you do it? You do it by doing what we would now call astrology or astronomy. And so there's a huge chunk of that in the book of Inach. So that's the kind of stuff that really, really interested ancient people. How do we organize, how is the universe organized? What does that mean for us? What kind of secrets can we learn about the universe from its organization? And that's the kind of stuff that's really in the book of Inach in a big way. Obviously the origin of evil is important too. But that's the kind of stuff that's in there. But yeah, I mean clearly whoever wrote the book of Jude, which is in the New Testament, they quote the book of Inach as authoritative. So for whoever that person was, the book of Inach was authoritative enough to use it as a proof text for a theological point they wanted to make. The real question, or another question rather, I should say the real question is, how is this relating to other Jews at the time? Because for instance, the temple in Jerusalem is certainly not using this in Nokia and calendar, whereas the folks out there at Kumran, the Dead Sea Scroll folks, they are, which means they're not celebrating the same holidays and the same dates anymore. I mean, that's a real big issue. And so that's just a place where it seems kind of boring until you think about the day you celebrate a holiday is a reflection of the entire structure of the cosmos. And you have to know how it all works. And part of what the book of Inach does is tell you. And that's, I think, again, a part that some people's eyes glaze over, but I'm like, you don't really get it, how important it is. You don't really get how important this is until you put yourself into the shoes of a person in the first century. - Yeah, I think there's also a real assumption, and at least for me, when looking at antiquity to be like, all right, you know, Christians in 200 AD thought this. And Jews in 200 BC, they thought this. But there's a massive diversity of thought, even within the same region. In any given period of time. And it seems like just even the small fragments of these ancient texts that we have kind of show us. People were talking about all sorts of different things. And believing different things and even celebrating holidays, which are massively important to every religion on different days. - Based on Ezra Terrick revealed texts. - Right. - Right, like that's really a wild thing to think about. - Yeah. - That the folks out there at the Dead Sea Scrolls, they were calculating their dates based on the revelations from Inach, who by the way, and some later literature of the Inokian literature is transformed into an angel called Metatron. And Metatron is referred to as Yahweh Katan, the little Yahweh. And for a monotheistic religion, that is a bizarre claim that this human being is transformed into an angel Metatron. You can hear that word, it's not Hebrew. It sounds like Greek kind of. But Metatron, and Metatron is called Yahweh Katan. And it's just mind-boggling. - Where does that word Metatron, is there an understanding of where that comes from? - There's a lot of debate. A lot of debate. There's no consensus. I mean, people say it's like Metatronos like above the throne or beyond the throne. It seems like Metatron is associated with the throne of God. And in fact, in the Gamara, there's a famous pericopy where there's these four guys that are doing mystical practices to enter into the inner sanctum of God and they make it to the throne room of God. And it's quite dangerous. But when they get there, one of them sees Metatron sitting on the throne of God. And he apostasizes. In fact, the text does him call him by name. It calls him Acher, the other one. 'Cause he's so, he's so much a heretic. But he declares that there are two powers in heaven. There are two gods and it's shocking. And Metatron's actually beaten with pulsed anoray with fiery lashes because he misled this rabbinical cosmonaut. And so it's a bizarre story, but it's right there in the Talmud. We were sitting here in Williamsburg. We could walk right over to a eschiva. I could show you in the text and it's a strange story. But there it is. The one of the most authoritative books in Jewish history where this angel Metatron, which is Inach, is sitting on the throne of God and gets beaten by another angel with fiery lashes for deceiving this guy who's snuck into the throne room of God. Fascinating. It's fascinating stuff. And what do these stories tell us about what they understood about monotheism or rebellion against the creator God? The fact that there's discussion about like, yeah, you know, human beings can not only become divine, but also challenge God's authority. And become God. Yeah, and this is pretty controversial. Extremely controversial. It's a theological problem that sets the heart of monotheism. The problem with monotheism is that a sufficiently transcendent God isn't related to our world anymore. And you have to have a story about how a really transcendent God created our world and is somehow still related to us. 'Cause you can't have a religion where God is completely absent. You know, it's like you don't want the God that went out for a pack of smokes and never came back. And I know I want that God. And so you can't, you need to do something to fix it. And so what do you do? You say, well, we're gonna preserve God's utter transcendence. And we're gonna have to add something. Christianity squares us with Christ. You incarnate Him in a person you get a trinity out of the deal. Right? So then you have the father who's sort of the deos, absconditos removed, Christ is imminent, and sort of the Holy Spirit is the relationship of the whole thing, the imminence of God. Yeah, that's the solution. It seems like Paul, who was, you know, sort of innovating Christian theology at the very ground floor, it seems like he knew about some of this stuff. In fact, there's even a line in second Corinthians where it says, and I was taken up to the third heaven. And I heard unalterable things. Well, we know that other rabbis at the time were engaging in strange yoga-like body posturing and breathing techniques to alter their consciousness to actually ascend into or descend actually into various divine realms called hechalopaluses. And it seems like part of what emerges out of that palace literature is the idea that you don't get to see God, but you get to see something, some kind of expression or manifestation of God. Sometimes it's called the cavaud, the glory of God. So God's still hidden, but God's glory is apparent. And it just so happens that God's glory is this angel. called metatron. So, it's what ends up emerging out of this extreme transcendence is biciism. You need some hidden god, or if you're going to have a hidden god, transcendent god, you need some imminent representation of it. And so, Jewish biciism emerged. And in fact, it repeats itself over and over. You look through the history of Jewish mysticism. You'll see it emerge. And then the rabbi is like, nope, monotheism. And it'll go away for a while, then it emerged again. And they're like, nope, monotheism. Interesting. Yeah, it's a bit of an inverse of Christianity in a way, theologically speaking, that god became man. Whereas, in this kind of idea, it's sort of like, well, man becomes god. Yeah, it's a different path up the heavenly ladder. And so, yeah, this idea of deification, theosis, becomes a thing. And Judaism, and even to this day, Kabbalah is very much wrapped up in a kind of theosis. Right. Now, my understanding, at least from the Talmud, is it's not necessarily prescribed dogma, that it is sort of rabbinical commentary of rabbis throughout the decades and centuries sort of debating with each other. So, just the fact that it's referenced in the Talmud, does that necessarily mean that it is prominent within Jewish thought? Is it something that is required dogmatically? Or is it just like, here's an idea of some guy throughout? And here's going to rabbi's sort of debating it. Yeah, it's a huge range. I mean, what they would say is, this is an interesting story that might have some meaning. And maybe it's just an interesting story. One of my favorite examples of this is, there's a whole long debate about demons in the Talmud. And they go on and on and on for pages about the how you can see demons, where if you take the afterbirth of a cat and burn it to ashes and smear that in your eyes, you can see the shading. And they have, if you want to see them, you can put a flower around your bed and they have like little chicken feet that they walk around in. You can see them after you. All kinds of stuff like on and on and on about demons. And then at the end of this going on and on about demons, they say apparently some guy from the west from from from from air to trail says, we don't believe any of that. And so it's like, and the guy, you must have been like the guy, you know, sitting in the flannel all being like, well, what? So I think that it again, it's just local customs, you know, and some, you know, you always have this, you know, the weird uncle. Yeah. He's like, yeah, you want to see some demons. And then you're like, and then you know, the other guy's like, there's no demons. What are you talking about? Yeah. So yeah, that's the funny thing about the the Talmud in which also makes it susceptible to people quoting out of context. And and saying, Oh, yeah, like Jews believe that if you sprinkle flower around your bed, you can see demons. Now like that you did. Yeah. Well, this is kind of I've gone into like conversation with people about the Talmud because people see like a Twitter thread and they're like, you know what the Talmud says about Jesus, you know, this is what Jews believe about Jesus, boiling an excrement. Yeah, of course. And I'm like, Oh, well, that's what maybe again, but we're looking at like weird sort of like transliteration is trying to understand who they're actually talking about. But perhaps someone said that, but it's just like some guy, right? This is this is not codified into Jewish literature. That right. And again, I think yeah, you read that section. He's been boiling an excrement and like, okay, like that's what one guy thought for sure. And I'm sure he did believe that. And I'm sure they're I'm sure that there are people out there that do believe that now. I think you ask most other people like, yeah, he was just one of like a dozen apocalyptic preachers that did miracles. You know, that that we know of in the Galilee alone around Jesus's time, we know four or five other guys who were doing similar kinds of things, Chenein de Bendosa and other kinds of Shimon Barayochai, so we have other kind of Galilee and they even have a term for them in Hebrew that are called Ishma se, men of deed. And they were known to be miracle workers. They could do exorcisms and shoot lasers out of their eyes and all kinds of stuff. So I think that they would be like, I think you could ask a lot of people there. Yeah, he was one of those guys. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I asked most of my Jewish friends, I'm like, yeah, you heard about this. And like the vast majority are like, I've never heard of that. And then the ones that are a little bit more learned and maybe they went to a Shiva, they're like, yeah, you know, there was a lot of people at the time kind of talking about this and doing similar things and it's short. Maybe we got one wrong. You know what I mean? Like they kind of like give it almost as like a joke. Like, all right, maybe we get maybe we got maybe we missed the Messiah, you know, but there was a bunch of Messiahs. You got to understand where we were coming from. Yeah. It's kind of a funny like a way to like contextualize like, all right, whoops. It's a great quote by, isn't Martin Boober who says that when the Messiah comes, I hope I'm close enough to get his ear or her ear and whisper in their ear. Look, they're going to ask you, is this your first visit or your second? And for the sake of heaven, do not answer that question. That's funny. So I was like, yeah, if I ever get the Messiah's ear, yeah, like I'm going to ask you, blow them off. Give him a riddle. Yeah. Yeah. Answering some weird parable. Yeah, exactly. That's the move. You seem to be good at that. Yeah, exactly. Hey, guys, we're going to take a break really quick because I want to tell you about brunch workwear. Yeah. Right here, I got the Marin boot and honestly, what I love about them, what impressed me is just how immediately comfortable they were right out of the box. They look great. They're suddenly built and you don't have to suffer through a long break-in period for them to actually feel good on your feet. 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So you just had to bruntworkwear.com, B-U-R-N-T, workwear.com. Use the code camp anywhere good to go. And after you order, they're going to ask where you heard about them. Make sure you tell them working crystals from the campsite, sentia. Now let's get back to the show. Okay, so going back through sort of magical thinking of the time. E-Knock is fast. And just for so many reasons, kind of like it gets tied in with, you know, aliens, stuff like that. Watchers coming down. Get given people stuff. And then as a Christian, you kind of have to like accept, like the Nephilim were something. Right. Like if you believe the Bible, you got to be like, "All right. There's something going on." But yeah, they're not, they're an off-Noskey flood. Noah movie does a great job with like making them sort of big monster, rock giant peeve. Yeah. And you kind of got to accept that. Yeah. They're there. They're in the Bible. You can't get rid of them. Why is there a reference about cosmology? No. Cosmetic. Cosmetics. Like the fact that it's brought up with all these other things. So like you're reading it and they're like, the watchers came down. They thoughts of people, you know, they taught them metallurgy. And how to make weapons. I'm like, "Oh, that's pretty bad." They talk about war. I'm like, "Oof." I don't like that. They talk about lipstick. And I'm like, "Well, that seems weird to group these things together." So why was there in this time? Why were they talking about cosmetics to the same degrees or talking about war? I think that the one that's misogyny, right? It's just sort of like associative with women and we don't like women. They're bad. Yeah. So it's a lot of those turns. A lot of those things get associated with women, formal copaya, like some of the working with roots and stuff also. So there's some of the misogyny there. The other thing I think of is just that at some level cosmetics were associated with sex work. So there's associations there of prostitution and sexual impropriety in general. And also, I mean, they are deceptive. I mean, it is a way of deceiving people. It's making yourself look a certain kind of way that you don't actually look. And I do think that we have this tendency to think that natural is better, which is kind of, sometimes refer to this as a whole foods fallacy. I go into whole foods and it says all natural. And I'm like, it gets me. Yeah, I'm like, I mean, for me, I'm like, you could just crap in a bottle and call it all natural. And you'd be right. I don't want to. Uranium's all natural. Yeah, yeah, it's all natural. It's like natural. But I think we have the idea that nature is good and that we should keep things natural and cosmetics are a place where we unnaturalize ourselves. So even in that time, they're kind of falling into this fallacy. Yeah, or just that, you know, I mean, they still hear people say things like, you know, that make up is a lie. Again, it's funny because, you know, they're wolf and associated with women. But I don't ask guys like, you know, how much hair products do you use? You wearing deodorant? Like those cosmetics too. I'm going to beard for a reason. Yeah, it's aesthetics. So yeah, I think that the cosmetics thing is, it's associated with women, sex work, sexual decadence. Right. And something about the fact that it's deceptive at some level. Right. I think that's some of that kind of stuff. But yeah, it's, that's, that's, it is an interesting sort of addition that gets put in there. Also, it's interesting. I don't know what that, what the guess word is for that word because it's not preserved in our make or Hebrew. You said guess. Yes, guess. The book of you know, is only preserved in the guess language, which is the classical language of Ethiopia. So it's a, think about it like Ethiopian Latin. Modern Ethiopian speak on Hark, the classical language is guess. It's only preserved in that because they included in the canon. Yeah, they have it in their canon. Their canon, the Ethiopian canon is a lot bigger than, than any other canon. And so they have it, they preserved it there, which by the way, it tells you that some Christians, specifically Ethiopian Christians, and thought it important enough to continue copying it and to preserve it. But did they take it from the Ethiopian Jewish tradition? So it seems like it was originally written, the Book of Enoch was originally written in Aramaic, and ultimately it was transmitted at some point to the Christians, or to the Jews living Ethiopia, and those Ethiopian Jews converted to Christianity and kept it. So that community clearly thought the Book of Enoch was authoritative enough to continue copying it, at least. I mean books in history, sometimes we have the idea of history of like the Inquisition kicking the doors in and burning stuff. That typically isn't how documents were lost, because you can only kick the doors in if so many places, and if there are 50 copies, it's hard to destroy all of them. You need one to survive. You need one. You just need one. And typically what ends up happening is that books don't survive because they're just not copied. And that means that a community did not value them enough to use the labor power to copy, because every time you're copying a book, you're choosing that book and not that book. And part of what happens is that things just go through filters and they don't get copied. And if all it takes is the one generation, not to copy a book, and that's it. So it's not the case that sometimes we say things like, "Oh, the Catholics and the Nicene Council said that the Book of Enochus condemned and they ordered them all burned," I mean, that didn't happen at the Council of Nicia at all. They weren't talking about canon issues. They're talking about Aryanism and calendrical stuff. But most of it is just what communities choose, matters to them, and then using the labor power to copy it. And, you know, meaning you think about how much Augustine survives versus almost any other Latin literature. I mean, you can take the collective works of Augustine and put them on one side of a scale and put almost all Latin literature on the other side in Augustine just about balances out how much it survived. Why? Because when the Roman Empire Christianized in the West, Augustine really mattered. And, you know, this paganism stuff didn't matter. And it wasn't like those monks that burned it. They were just like, "Don't copy it." You don't have to banish things that there's a cultural atrophy and the things that persist are the things that are important at least. It doesn't necessarily have a bearing on the truth value, but it has a lot of bearing on how much it matters. Yeah. And books are, you know, especially ancient books. It just takes one bad storm to blow in. And the books damage beyond repair are humidity. You know, humidity can just destroy papyrus. Yeah. And, you know, it's the reason why, you know. But we do have cases where certain books were banned. And it's interesting because we have cases where Christians hid them. And they hid them. Maybe to come get them later. Or they hid them because they didn't want to destroy them. And that said an agamadi library. Right. Mathinatius said, you know, "Latitude decree. All these books that are not authoritative, they are to be like, you got to get them out of your library." You didn't say what you had to do with them, but you have to take them out of the master's libraries. And sure enough, you know, if you look at where the agamadi library was found, it was found really close to a monastery. And probably they took those books out of the library following the rules and didn't quite destroy them, buried them. It's like when your wife tells you you got to stop smoking cigarettes and you're like, "All right, fine." But then you hide one little one in the basement. So what's your thing is I have to stop smoking them here. Exactly. But I can throw a little latex glove on to go for a drive. Yeah. So I think that that's, you know, this is again, this is a place where, you know, again, we sometimes tilt stories with the big bad church, band all the books, and got rid of all the stuff, you know, that they, you know, are sometimes like they, it was left out of the Bible, or it was kept out of the Bible. Right. That's not how it happened. The church decided what was going to be in the New Testament based on certain criteria. And certain things just were left out when those criteria were laid out, the same way that Pluto ceased to be a planet. Right. We had never defined what a planet was. Then we defined what a planet was. Pluto didn't meet the definition anymore. Right. So it wasn't like big bad science. God, I said, we're kicking Pluto out. We're banding Pluto. We're banding Pluto. It's the same thing happened with Christianity. It wasn't that they, they were like the book of you like has to go guys. It was like we're going to have certain criteria by which things are in and out. And it just so happens that that was out. In fact, there was even debates about books that made it in second Peter. They were debates about it, like the famous Christian theologian origin was like, I think this was forgery. I don't think it's really real. Wow. And I didn't know that. Yeah. And James, James was sought to be curious. In fact, Martin Luther wanted to get rid of James. I knew that one. It's like called a guy an epistle straw. Yeah. And so he talks about doing good stuff. James is like, hey, be a nice guy. Martin Luther was like, how dare he? Faith. Faith. Is the Catholic speaking, I mean, I apologize the process. But yeah, so it's, you know, but even in even the books that made it in, I mean, the apocalypse of John, certain people thought, no, this is not. It's a little out there. Not really. It's not authoritative. Although it's interesting, because I would say that of all the books of the New Testament, if I were a first century Jew, and you were to put any of the books from the New Testament in front of me, the Gospels would look pretty weird. The book Vax would look like sort of classic literature at that time with shipwrecks and stuff. The letters of Paul would have been like, why are you showing me some random dues letters? Yeah. This is a male. This is a crime. Yeah. What is this? Look at how the guy's male is crazy. But if you were to put the apocalypse of John in front of me, I'd be like, oh, yeah, stuff in Jewish literature. That's the most Jewish thing in the whole Bible. Oh, yeah, I got that one. 12 tribes and this and that and Jerusalem. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We got that too over here. The symbolism. All that. All the whole thing. And so that, again, this is a thing that I think many people don't take for granted or don't really, really appreciate is that the apocalypse of John is much more representative in its out thereness of Jewish literature of the time than the Gospels are or whatever else. That's so funny. It's also interesting that it's the book that so many modern Christians are so obsessed with. Of course, the Gospels, those are going to be, you're starting line up. Of course. But then you're going to throw a revelation and there is a six-man off the bench like this one's fire. Yeah. And it's the most like sort of non-Christian, so to speak. Yeah. It seems apparently non-Christian, but it's the most definitely the most Jewish book. If you think about Judaism in the apocalyptic mode of like the first and second century, talking back against like Daniel and Daniel. But also, I mean, again, if you take the entirety of the apocalyptic literature as we have it and put it into one volume, which you can't. If you take the collected apocalyptic literature right now, it's about two volumes about Yeh Thich. It's massive amount of literature. And that's just what survived. We have all kinds of apocalypses that were written that didn't survive. And so it was a hugely important kind of literature. And the reason why the apocalypse of John was written was because the Christians at some level knew how to write that way. The writer of that was definitely Jewish. And I think definitely knew that literature very well. And he was doing what everyone was doing. They were telling these coded stories about what was going on and what was going almost Nero. And that's, you know, the beast 666. And it's almost certainly like Gamatriya for Nero and the persecutions that the communities were experiencing. Right. So it's it's a fascinating glimpse into that world. And again, it appears to us to be a really outsider text. But once you get a wash and apocalyptic literature, this is part of the course. So when someone says a band book, like if I were to come to you and be like, okay, show me a real band book. Right. Enoch was a book that was kind of forgotten sort of like put on the outsides on the fringe and wasn't like contested to the same degree. What is a real band book where there was like a whole debate. They're sort of setting the canon within sort of the Christian context. What was a book that was like so close, but banned. So the Catholic Church doesn't actually start banning books until the 15th century. So long. So long. I mean, there are books that they thought of as Spurious. They thought of as, for instance, the apocrypha, which the Catholics preserve with the Protestant stone, those seven books in the middle between the Old Testament and the New Testament. The Catholics realized they're good for the edification of faith, but no doctrine can be drawn from them. So even the church realized that those books were. We're going to hedge a little. They're hedge a little. They're just Spurious. But the church wasn't really in the book banning business until the 15th century. And the first book to be banned was Pico della Morandola's 900 Deceses, his 900 conclusions. And the reason why I got banned is relatively straightforward. He argued that magic and Kabbalah were the best proofs for the truth of Christianity. And then he challenged. He can't do that. He challenged people to debate him. He's a comedy bro. And the Pope was like, yeah, I think Pico was in his early 20s at that point. And he was like, I'm going to defend all 900 of these ceases. I'm going to defend that Kabbalah and magic are the best proof of Christianity and come at me. And the Pope was like, arrest this guy. Well, who does this guy think he is? Was he Jewish? He wasn't Jewish. We had Jewish friends though. In fact, he was actually getting money from some aristocrats and funneling money to both nonconverted Jews and converted Jews to translate stuff from the Kabbalah into Latin so we could read it. So he's like really bringing in some authentic stuff and some authentic inauthentic stuff. But he's really reading publicistic literature in Latin for the first, for really some of the first time. And here he publishes these 900 Theses and says, you know, debate me bro. And does it prove me wrong like campus debate? Yeah, like it's really like, you know, changed my mind. Wow. And the Pope was like, no, like arrest this guy. Yeah. And then the Pope died. And Pico survived. He was not arrested. He ultimately ended up being poisoned by his own secretary. What? - See, it's the ones that you didn't at least suspect. You know, it's the ones closest to you. - Yeah. - So he starts, his book is the first band book. It's called The Index for Hibitorum. And these are books that are forbidden for you to own. They're forbidden for you to print. And they're forbidden for you to sell. Now, we all know about the stress and effect nowadays. - Yeah. - There was nothing better for your book than for it to get banned. - Yeah, they didn't know about Barber's stress and back then. - Yeah, no, no, no. - Yeah, yeah, they should not yet emerge into the world. But so this is what happens is when you get the, and this is right before the, right at the onset of printing and it's at that point, the church begins to actually keep an active list of banned books. Some of which, you know, which is interesting because we often think of the Inquisition, which would often enforce the will of making sure that heresy wasn't being taught in the wider world. Sometimes we have the vision of them as book burners. And sometimes they did burn books, but the Inquisition was an investigatory old body. They built cases against people. They needed to have evidence. They had trials. And often the evidence was books. - Well, they put the Talmud on trial. - Infimously. - Infimously, yeah. - They did burn it earlier on. So they do have cases of book burning. It's not to say that there weren't book burnings. But often the Inquisition was pretty meticulous about keeping records and many of the books that they seized ended up in the Vatican archives. - Oh, wow. - And so you can find copies of hundreds of banned books that the church was like, well, we're gonna hold onto these because they're good evidence if we need to bring them, bring something to trial later. And this would run from everything from a grippos, three books of a cult philosophy, which I brought a 17th century copy of, all the way to Spinoza. And so all this stuff ends up in places like the Vatican archives, which it's a funny situation where the archives of the Catholic church contain a pretty healthy dose of heresy. - I think that's so funny. - It's one of those cases of like, hey, we're gonna keep it here that way we know what not to read. - Yeah, you know what I mean? - Yeah, it's like, you know, it's wink, wink, nudge. (laughing) So yeah, but the Vatican archives is a funny place because people associate it with so much conspiracy that they have the holy grail or the archivic covenant or the menorah down there. What, you know, the real true copies of the book of Enoch, but it's funny, the truth of the matter is, it's so vast that not even the church knows what's in there. - Yeah, it's miles and miles long. - Huge, huge. - But scholars are in there all the time and they, they often find things the Vatican didn't even know where they're. And they'll publish it. They're like, we found this random manuscript of Spinoza. They're like, Vatican's like, couldn't even know we had that. - Sick. - Yeah, publish it, cool. So it's a fun thing, you know, that when you get down in there and see it, it's not, you kind of wish it to be like the last scene of Raiders of the Lost Ark where it's just like the giant room and he's like wheeling the archivic covenant in. The secret to the universe reveals. - Everything, but it's just like rows and rows and rows of like very boring theological, you know, treaties. In fact, that book of Spinoza that the scholar found, the only reason why she found it was a complete accident. The spine just read day dayo on God. How many books do you, in the Vatican archives, do you think are called day dayo? - On God. - On God. - That's fire. - It's like, hello. - You're going through and you're like, who wrote this one on God? - Yeah, and she just happened to notice that where it was happened to be in that time period where this Spinoza, this Lost Spinoza manuscript was and took it off the rack and sure enough, a Lost manuscript of Spinoza's ethics, a band book. - Wow. - I was sitting there in manuscript, hiding there in plain sight. - It's kind of funny that things are lost on a library shelf, right? When you're thinking of discovering a Lost Book, you want to be like out in the desert, digging up a hole or something. - Not going to a library or something. - Yeah, you're in an air conditioned warehouse. You're like, this is lost. - Yeah, I mean, it's so little in history is done through conspiracy. Almost everything in history is done through negligence. - Yeah. - It's just like, 'cause most people are, none of us is stupider than all of us. You get a bunch of people together, just make really complex stupid decisions. It's so much of what I find in history when we discover some of these books. Again, I think about the three books of a cult philosophy by Cornelius Agrippa. The Inquisition did try to kick the doors in and stop the printing of the book and they did temporarily. And then Agrippa just wrote his buddy, the Archbishop of Cologne was like, "Hey, tell the Inquisition to stop." And the Inquisition was like, "No." The Archbishop was like, "I'll write the Pope." They're like, "Okay." - And then they just chilled out. - They just chilled out and they later printed the book. - And then it was fun. - I mean, it was banned, but it did what they could. But you can just imagine, again, we think of the Inquisition as having all this power. And they're just, he's like, "I'll tell the Pope on you." - They're like, "Okay." - Yeah. - That's so funny. So it's just like a, you know, you would think that if the church had the kind, if the medieval and early modern church had the kind of power that sometimes we see in like the television, like in damn brown books, none of this stuff would survive. - Right. - But we have tons of it. You know, we have lots of books that were on the Index for Hibitorum where I used to have a copy of Pico de la Merendo, the Theses, I used to have a copy that in front on the cover was written in Latin prohibito, banned. - But he was leaning in. - Oh yeah, the book even had right on the cover, prohibited. And I'm like, the nice try. - To have for TV. - Like, did it work? - Didn't work at all. I still, I'm literally holding it in my hands like 300 years later. - Yeah. - This, you know. - So when people talk about banned books, like the Gospel of Judas, the Gospel of Thomas, these sort of like non-canonical sort of things that seem to tell us a different version of Christianity, generally not banned. - I mean, the Gospel of Judas, I don't think that, by the time they were banning books, I didn't know it existed. Go back to the fourth century. Yeah, they knew all these books existed. They knew that, you know, all of these books. And they, we have list of them. So they knew they existed. I think that the church recognized them for what they were. They recognized them as fanfiction. And they were like, yeah, these books are forgeries. They're not really real. You know, the Gospel of Thomas or the Gospel of Judas, or, you know, the, whatever, the, the Pock font of John. I think the church was just like, this is just not really written by these people. In fact, even like I said, even within the canon, people were like, I don't think second Peter's right either. - Right. - But it's funny because clearly these books mattered. I mean, you think about the Infancy Gospel of Thomas where famously Jesus makes stones and turns them into birds. That story mattered a lot because it ends up in the Quran. - Right. - And so clearly Christians were telling that story. And by the time that Muhammad heard it, you know, in the seventh century, it had been big enough that it ended up in the Quran. So I actually have a replica copy of one of the, the, the Gospels of, of Didymus Thomas. Nagamadi Codex too. - Oh yeah, it's, it's not the, that's the Gospel. That's the very end of the Pock font of John and the very beginning of the Gospel of John. - Yeah. - Here. - Yeah, yeah, that's cool. - It's a cool fact. Similarly, I've seen this in Cairo at the Coptic Museum. - And what do you think? Does it look pretty good? - It looks pretty good. - It's made by a good pal Wes Huff. - Oh yeah. Good job Wes. - Yeah, he did a great job. It looks amazing, right? - Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, you can see here, you know, according to John, the Pocker font, the hidden book according to John, that's the end of it. We, they put, they put the titles of the ends, beginnings and ends of books. And then it begins, these are the secret teachings of Thomas and whoever. Here's them will not taste death. - What an opening. - Yeah, that's a banger. - I mean, an absolute heater to start a book. - It's like Camu level. - Yeah, no, it's a good one. Whoever understands them will not taste death. - I mean, like, how do you not read that? - Yeah, of course. - Yeah, you want to be about it. You make big promises, no questions, can you? You know, I've read the gospel, Thomas. Am I going to taste death? - Well, you have to be saying it, you haven't died yet. - Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, I guess you have to understand them. So maybe I don't understand them. 'Cause there are some weird ones in there. - Yeah. - The last one being, especially, you know, like what in the world? - Is that the gender one? - Yeah, I'm saying that. Mary's not worthy of life, 'cause she's a woman. Well, I'll make her a man. You're like, okay, hold on a second. - Yeah, and people were like, yeah, but it can't mean literally that. I'm like, I don't know what it means. - Yeah. - To becoming one is what is it a saying gospel as they said? - Yeah, it's a saying gospel. It's one of these gospels that scholars think may have pre-existed the gospels as we know them. That what we had of collections of say, Jesus is saying. But we know the gospel of Thomas is relatively late. So it may preserve some teachings that are really ancient. There's a great teaching in there about the Apostle James. James always gets done under the bus in Christian history. It's Peter and Paul that become the, you know, Peter's the rock of the church and Paul becomes in some sense the big gospel teacher. And the James really sort of fades into the background, which is especially conspicuous, considering that he was Jesus' brother and was there the entire time Jesus was teaching. And seems to have been the head of the community in Jerusalem. - Allegedly, as a Catholic, I rebuked this. - Did you? - Yeah. - I'm in here lately, and trust me. Well, it won't be the first time. But there's an interesting line in the gospel of Thomas thought James. And it says that all of the earth was made just for James. And it's just like, like, whoa. - I wonder who wrote this. - I mean, it sounds like James. It's a Jamesians. - I mean, what is the story for the New Testament where the two apostles are running and they make a reference for their like, and this apostles faster than the other one. Are you familiar with this? - Oh, the story. - Could you give me a Google search, maybe go to Gip and ask real quick, 'cause it's so funny to me and I think you'll enjoy it. But there's a discussion, I think, some type of like miracle happens, and the two apostles are gonna go tell the rest of the apostles. I think it's the resurrection. If I'm not mistaken, we're like, they go to the tomb, Jesus isn't there. And they're like, oh my goodness, we gotta tell everyone. And then they go on a race. And then in the text, it goes, and I was faster than the other guy. And it's like, I don't know if you really need to include that, but just out of his own hubris, he's like, well, you know, if I get busted. - Yeah, yeah, no. I love those moments. Like, I think it's, it isn't second Peter, which against Spurious, where it says, and don't trust Alexander the Copper Smith. And I left a coat there. Make sure you bring it back, you know? - That's in there. - It's in there, yeah. I mean, we don't think Peter really wrote it, but there's a moment where it seems like the letter really is just like a regular letter. Just like, don't trust this guy. And also, I left a coat. (laughing) Like, you know, I don't love that. It's just one of these moments where Hoover was writing these letters, didn't think they were writing the Bible. They just were writing letters. And some body, and negative thing, this is a great, we, at Liam, I'd love to have no more about this. But at some point, someone in the second century, mid-second century, just basically wrote to every church they knew and said, "Do you have any letters of Paul?" And if you do, send them to me, copy them and send them to me. And that's the collection we have. - Wow. - Someone had to have done that. - That is such a good point. They didn't know they were writing the Bible. - No, of course not, they were writing letters. Paul is just writing letters. And so, someone had to go and like, I know that, so I'm going to write to Ephesus and Corinth and all these places and just ask, like, do you have any letters of Paul? And they must've had letters there. And somebody, we will never know who they were, decided in their infinite wisdom, or depending on your opinion of Paul, they collected them into one bag and that is the letters of Paul as we have them. - Wow. - And it's just one of these great moments in history where someone took what were letters and transformed them into scriptures. - Right. - And, you know, for instance, we don't have like Corinthians, we have like first Corinthians, but we know the second Corinthians seems to have, you know, there was another book in the letter in the middle, we've lost. And so, yeah, you know, when he was writing those letters, he wasn't thinking about writing the Bible. - And just the idea, like, your emails would all of a sudden become canonized, it's so funny. - It's so weird. I mean, just like, be careful what you write. You know, your grandma will tell you like, you know, don't write anything that you don't want on the cover of The New York Times. - Yeah. - Don't write anything you don't want to be the Bible. - Yeah, best out. - Yeah. - That's pretty good. - It's like, you know, whatever weird thing you say about, you know, you know, again, I think it's sometimes of Paul's writings where he's like, well, there'll be three lines. And you're like, oh, wow, like the entire doctrine of predestination rides on those three lines. - Right. I mean, the rapture, right? - Yeah. - Like, this one word of like, they will be swept up or something, or stolen. I think it's the translation technically. And you're like, oh, a whole theology, or a whole understanding of end times within Protestant Christianity is kind of hinging on, not only that, I don't want to be too reductive, but like a couple of words. - Yeah. - It's like one study Bible of Derby. - Derby, Derby, yeah. - Yeah. - Like he popularized it and became the left behind series. - Yeah. - And like evangelicals everywhere, you know, really follow this kind of idea. And then, yeah, it's, and again, this is what I want to point to is that, it's often not conspiracy-based contingency. - Mm-hmm. - It's just, it just so happens that that word gets used, and John Ylson Derby does it, and then this. - Right. - Yeah, it's not like, again, there's no way you could have planned it, I don't think. - This is the reference that I was talking about, John 20 verse one through 10. It's an empty tomb account. Mary Magdalene tells them Jesus' body is missing. Peter and the disciple whom Jesus loved, traditionally identified as John, raised to the tomb, John arrives first, but waits outside, Peter arrives afterwards, and then immediately enters. So just to put it in there like, hey, we did a foot race. I got there first, I chilled, and then my boy came up, and then it says like, yeah, John was the one that made it there, which is so funny. The beloved disciple, and he's the fastest. - Of course. - And it's written in the gospel, John. - Yeah, of course the thing, yeah, yeah, yeah. You gotta be your own wing, man. You gotta be your own hype guy. - Yeah, exactly. - So this is gonna do it for you. - That's such a good point. - Fellas, this episode is sponsored by Blue Choo. Look, life is about preparation. You gotta prepare for a camping trip, for your job, for a podcast, and you gotta prepare for all of the things happening in your life, and sometimes when the vibe is right, everyone's being an adult, you're on the same page. 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You're also gonna get an additional 10% off, plus free overnight shipping on your very first order, when you visit bluechoo.com, use the promo code Gagnon, and you can check out more details and important safety information. Thanks so much, Blue Choo. Let's get back to the show. Now, can I ask you about the wisest king of Israel? Shlomo Malach. Solomon. Absolutely. So Solomon is so interested in me, because of course we have these lesser keys, these stories, again, when we're talking about like, band books, which is good for YouTube, and the way that we talk about these things. Sure, yeah. And they exist in a really interesting kind of space, where there's the story that kind of comes from it, where Solomon, the wisest king, he's built in a temple, and is able to use demons to construct the temple, and then is able to control them or in a way even capture them within his ring. And on the ring is a famous seal that is now kind of what we describe as the star of David, at the time, perhaps, the seal of Solomon. And it kind of exists like maybe in like, I don't know, when we talk about like apocryphal literature, but where does that story square with ancient Judaism? And how do Jews of the modern day interpret that story? And like, where do I file that in my brain? So it's a complex story, as all these stories are. So the first problem is that in the Bible, it says that the altar for God has to be made of unhewn stone, which means stone that's not been worked with iron tools, which is fine for like stacking up a bunch of rocks to like make a small altar that you're gonna slaughter an animal on. When you gotta make it into a giant temple, and you know, when you think about the temple of Solomon or the second temple, these are relatively large structures. And so what happens is you end up with sort of a technical problem. How do you make a structure big enough to be a temple without hewing the stones? 'Cause they're not gonna work otherwise. And so the rabbis come up with all kinds of stories. My favorite one is there's a magical worm that carves all the rocks. In the magical worm, it's called the Shamir. And the Shamir is only the demon Asmodeus knows where the Shamir is and the demon Asmodeus won't tell anybody, it's a whole big story. - And where's the story found? - It's in the Babylonian Talmud and Tractic Cateen, I think. So there's a whole story about how they did it with the magical worm, the Shamir. And apparently the Shamir wouldn't reappear as will be the time that the Messiah comes back 'cause you gotta have the Shamir to make the third temple. Another story that was seemed to have been, again, sort of associated with demons of the time was the story found in the testament of Solomon. And the intestinal Solomon, which was relatively early Jewish text, although all the versions we have have been Christianized. So we don't have the original Jewish, completely Jewish version. But in that text, in order to construct a temple, what ends up happening is that Solomon gets demons to do it. And so there we have the idea that Solomon can bind and control demons through the use of either a ring or some kind of other device. The text is sort of all over the place. And even the image on the ring, the signet of Solomon, the seal of Solomon, there's no graphical depictions of it until the medieval period. So we know that there was a ring associated with Solomon, probably had some kind of symbol on it. And it had power over demons. We know that going back to Josephus when there were exorcism stories. Even the Dead Sea Scrolls, there are exorcistic Psalms found in the Dead Sea Scrolls associated with Solomon. So this goes back, who knows how far it goes back? Really, really, really, really anciently. So we don't see the actual image that was on the seal until the Middle Ages until we see it on some Byzantine manuscripts. So that's the story. It's like, it's a, it was clearly a Jewish idea that Solomon had some control over demons. It was one of the ways of solving this problem. How do you build the temple without human stones? You can use a magical worm or you can use demons. And demons were the story. And when the demon story got into the testament of Solomon, and the testament of Solomon exists, and I think three recensions could be wrong about that, to be careful when you're quoting manuscript recensions. But I think it survives in three recensions. The first recension is completely descriptive. Here is how Solomon, or here is the list of demons that Solomon used to build the temple, and here's all the jobs they did, which are mostly boring jobs, like carrying water and making plaster and stuff. I'd be pissed if I were a demon. - Yeah. - With the ancient eternal being or whatever, now you have to like, shlet water around. But it's interesting though, is that you get these demonic this list of demons and you learned all the interesting things they can do. And by the C rescension, you begin seeing that the language in the text is being increasingly shifting from descriptive to proscriptive. Here's how you can do it. It switches from being a story about how Solomon used demons to build the temple to how you can use demons to do X, Y, and that is the nucleus of what becomes the very disparate traditions, or very disparate sort of discourse of texts that become Solomonic magic. It's the idea that there's something about Solomon, something about a seal, something about other forms of magic, and you can use that to bind and control demons. And what's interesting about all these many things, interesting about that, but what's interesting about it is that a lot of that magic seems to have combined Jewish elements, Muslim elements, Christian elements, and you get this sort of, I don't want to call it tradition because that makes it sound like it's much more coherent than it really is, but there's a kind of way of writing where you invoke the power of Solomon as a way of binding and trolling demons, and of course the most important text of that is the so-called lesser key of Solomon, which doesn't show up until the 17th century, so it's actually quite quite 17th century. It's a text of the 17th century. It contains demonic ledgers, or what we call demonic categories or demonic catalogues, that probably go back to the Middle Ages. It's sort of a funny story actually. The list of demons in the lesser key of Solomon is actually pulled from an English translation of a book making fun of the idea that people thought they could conjure demons. It's a book called the pseudomonarchia de monum, the false kingdom of the demons, written by Cornelius Agrippa student Johann Vier. And Vier says, "There are these stupid people that think they can summon demons, and here's all these stupid demons I think they can summon." And he basically listed them off to make fun of it. He's like, "Yeah, they think that these demons they control this, and you do this to summon them." In some way, they made fun of Scientology on a South Park, like they really believe this. It's called the, it's a theory of expose. If you just tell people what people really believe, people will think it's stupid. Well, Vier tried this, and it failed spectacularly, because another book, also making fun of belief in witchcraft, called the discovery of witchcraft, an English book, reproduced into English the Latin text of Johann Vier. And whoever saw that was like, "That's a great idea." Bang. And Lesser Keel Solomon, as we know it, comes out of a parody, a parody of a parody. But it relied on an earlier text called the Libre Oficium Spiritorum, the book of the offices of the spirits that was a real, grimoire, primarily in France. And what year is that one roughly? We don't know. I mean, it's, it's kind of, we know that by the 15th century, Johannes Trathemius, who is a Grippa's teacher, has a copy of it in his library, which was without a doubt, the abbey at Spawnheim had the best collection of occult literature in that time period. So we know it existed at least then, and there's some reason to believe that it copy goes back to the 15th or 14th century, maybe in France, because a lot of it, a lot of the, that Latin text gets translated into French a lot, and that usually gives us some idea about where it may have originated. But we don't know. I mean, these books aren't exactly, they're not terribly well studied, which is a shame. And part of what's a problem about them is that, well, the writers of them aren't going to go out of their way to be like, hey, my name is Jacques, and I wrote this. Please come kill me. Right. So they're, they're, they're going to hide. And often what they will do is obliterate where the book's coming from and dating it and dating it gets really difficult. So there's this French grimoire that then sort of is maybe kind of amalgamating these rumors and these stories and perhaps generating some, as well as like pulling on an older tradition, that thing gets turned into a parody, a Latin, by a Dutch guy. Yep. And then that then turns into an English translation of the parody of the parody, which is meant to parody people who believe in witchcraft generally and then original scots discovery witchcraft and a manuscript. So before original scots discovery witchcraft has printed a manuscript copy, which was clearly in circulation, becomes a foundation for the lesser key of Solomon. And so then does anyone believe it by the 17th century? Oh, yeah. People are reading a lesser key of Solomon. They're like, ah, oh, for sure. This is it. This is it. Oh, yeah. And what's interesting is that Johann Vier's version of it in the discovery of witchcraft version, they have the text about the demons, but not their seals. So there clearly was a sealed tradition too. And the sealed tradition and the text tradition get mashed together. And that becomes, you know, if you ever open a copy of the lesser key of Solomon, of course the lesser key of Solomon is actually not one book. It's several books that have been all stuck together, which includes the ours, Paulina and other kinds of things. But it's that first book that we all know because primarily because Alistra Crowley published it in the early 20th century or the late 19th century. And in fact, he even said weird things about how the demons are actually like parts of your brain, which is a particularly strange thing for Crowley to say, like a monkulous kind of thing. Like that I think you know, I think he literally says it's like regions of your brain. Like this demon bile is like part of your brain. It's like a region of your brain. I think that Crowley repudiated that belief later, but it is a particularly strange thing that he said. I mean, Crowley says a lot of strange interesting things, but it's a particularly weird thing that he says in the first printing of it. And it's still there. If you go buy a copy of the Crowley McGregor Mathers version of the Leicester Keele Solomon, it's still in the introduction. So then who's drawn to the Leicester Keeve Solomon by the 17th century? Is it Jews that have a understanding of the literature? Is it occultist that are just completely kind of apostate from any type of modern faith? Like who sees this and is like, ah, this is the key to understanding those secrets of the universe. So we do know that some Jews were interested in it because there's a translation of it from Latin into Hebrew of Mafftech Shlomo, the Keele Solomon. So we know that some Jews were interested in it because they translated into Hebrew. But I think the thing to imagine here is that we shouldn't just oppose occultist versus Christian. They were the same thing. We think about what we now call the clerical necromanic underground. The only people capable of reading Latin, knowing how to do rituals, knowing how to procure incense, knowing how to get weapons like swords. The only people capable of really knowing how to do any of that were priests. That's, you think like, like Olaf the farmer knows how to like, read complicated books and Latin and make elaborate candles. That's not his bag. I mean, he has his own magic, right? They're doing folk magic. So they have their own magical traditions too. But in some of those do survive, by the way. We have things like the powwow magic of the Pennsylvania Dutch, which was a big deal in this part of the country. You still sometimes see like barns painted with magical signs from the folk magic tradition. In this country, you can drive down and through Pennsylvania and upstate New York and see barns with like sigils on them. They come from the powwow tradition. What I know as a sigil, what I know is like decorative. I think you would look at it. If you know you know, you would see it. I mean, even like the hanging horseshoes on barns, which we've all seen is folk magic. So there's folk magic traditions that are deep in Christianity that, you know. These would be for the purpose of like a harvest. You know, harvest agricultural stuff, you know, the kind of things that farmers, the kind of thing that all of us should care about, you know, where our food comes from. Like, look, dude, if you got to do some folk magic to get the corn to come, yeah, you know, you've got to do you. I'm not going to get involved in that. Yeah, but then you're eating witchcraft corn and it's a whole thing. Hey, you know, I'm not going to ask a lot of questions, but it's either, if I have to choose between the witchcraft corn and the not corn, yeah, I'm going to talk to a priest about that. Yeah, I don't know. Just got in the fields and hit it with all of it. But in the lesser key of Solomon, what we have, what we have in in that literature is downstream of what we say, what scholars call the clerical necromatic underground, because the only people capable of getting out there in the middle of the night in a giant circle, you know, screaming at demons and Latin, there's only one group of people and you're really capable of that in their early Middle Ages. That's the priests. Are they doing an alignment with their Catholic faith? Yeah, of course. I mean, they see demons as something like wild animals that need to be broken and made useful. And the same way that you might tame a horse to like ride around and collect charity. Well, you can tame a demon to go help you find Barry Treasurer. And if you use the demon to help you find Barry Treasurer, well, you'll give your chair to the church. So yeah, they see the necromancers of the Middle Ages don't see themselves as anti-Catholics or anti-Christian. What they what they're using is a basic kind of logic. And the logic goes like this. Exorcism is a sacramental is a thing that any good priest can do. In fact, there's an entire legion of priests, the exorcist priest, which are the lowest level sort of priests that exist in the church that must do minor exorcisms for babies when they get baptized. So the logic is pretty simple. If you can if you can give a demon can get into a person and the demons know stuff. They're old. They're smart. They've been around since creation. They're powerful. They know things. They can get things done. If you can take a demon and cast them out of a person through exorcism, then you could also put them to work. The same thing that draws them out that compels them to do things, right? You know, the blood of the martyrs compels you. The name of Jesus compels you. We've all seen the exorcist. That language of compulsion. Well, if I can draw [BLANK_AUDIO] you out what else can I make you do, right? Well, maybe you know where Barry Treasure is. In fact, it was a very common belief that demons knew where Barry Treasure was. Why? Because they collect treasure, bury it in the ground so that when the antichrist comes, the antichrist has a bunch of money. This was a very common belief in the Middle Ages that if you found treasure in the ground, demons put it there as like a storehouse for the coming antichrist. So is it so bad to rob from the antichrist? Not at all. Give it to the church. Exactly. You get a small percentage. You can give them their 10% cut, but you know, now all of a sudden you're looking pretty good. Right. You know, like be fruitful, multiply. You're having a hard time finding a girl out there. You know, this is a day before the app. It's not that the apps are helping guys, but you know, it was this hard out there for a guy. You guys have a gold boolean. All of a sudden, you're prospectually. You can maybe get a woman to fall in love with you using magic. Maybe you want to, you know, studying sucks. I don't know if anyone has ever had to study Latin. It's not exactly the most fun thing in the world. Maybe you just want to learn all of it instantaneously. And maybe a demon because of the way that demons interact with the human mind because demons don't interact with us the way that you and I interact with each other. We have to do. We're mushy flesh creatures. Demons can impress beliefs and ideas directly onto your mind until they can teach you things instantaneously. Now if I were to go to a priest with this idea today, I imagine he'd be like, hey, don't do that. I'm going to summon a priest to get rich and then give all my money to church because I love God. I feel like he would tell me this is verboten. Oh, yeah. Yeah. So the official line on all this was absolutely not even at the time, even at the time. But look, I mean, we've all prayed for stuff, right? You've had that calculus test where you're like, dear Lord, if you just helped me pass this test, yeah, you know, I'll go and do that. Well, we've all knocked on that door and we got a big load of nothing. Yeah. Well, if you're desperate and you knock on the door and you don't hear from God or the church, you might knock on the other door. And the demons are out there. And so is it is it the kind of thing that your priest is going to tell you to do? Absolutely not. Is it the kind of thing that that very priest might be doing when they locked the church up at night? It was. We know it was because it could have only have been them. Have you ever read a compelling case where you feel like a priest was a fortuitous after working in this type of world? Like the, well, who's I got Brian Johnson, the banjo player that went to the Crossroads infamously? Oh, yeah, yeah. Is that his name, Brian Johnson? No, no, no, Jack Johnson, not Jack Johnson either. Johnson. Oh, come on. Yeah, a priest, I was going to find it. Yeah, he's a Mississippi. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Goes down to the Crossroads, creates like, still Mississippi. Yeah. And it holds up his guitar and he's like, teach me how to play this and learns how to play it overnight. And then learns how to play Robert, Robert Johnson, Robert Johnson. Yeah. Robert Johnson. Yeah. And you can still listen to his recordings, which are still kind of creepy. Yeah. So like that type of like kind of Faustian sort of thing. Yeah. The Faustian thing. I mean, Faust is a famous example of someone who allegedly got to learn all this magical stuff before being drugged to hell. Everybody sort of, once they're safely dead, these stories begin to accrue around them. A grip of famously had a black dog that was allegedly the devil and could teach him all kinds of things. Allegedly, a grip of new events that were happening all over Europe that he couldn't have known. And he would say like over in Spain, this is happening. And he would get a letter two weeks later. And he could kind of see, remote view what was going on. Do those stories trustworthy? I don't know. I'm like, I'm skeptical of them. Sure. Are there any of the you've read that you're like, this one, I'm less skeptical of than the others. You know, I think that the stuff that, well, I guess I can say that, you know, the John D and Edward Kelly stuff when they're talking to angels and they get this so called a Nokia in language. And that, that body of literature, the John D Edward Kelly sessions, that's perhaps the most strange and compelling case to me. Now, I mean, so strange and compelling that I literally went to Amsterdam to study her metasism just to be like, I want to just study this. And like I really just wrote everything on D and Kelly or D and Kelly. And I would say that that's one of the stranger cases. I mean, you have Kelly speaking in a language that he doesn't know letter by letter backwards in reverse order and revealing entire long texts, relatively long texts that are not gibberish. They are language. They have their words decline, words seem to conjugate. There is syntax. There's grammar. It's not speaking in tongues. And there's just no way. And again, as a, as a hard bit and skeptic, there's no way for me to look at that and go, this is just weird. I don't know what to make it this either. He was inventing like a very complex language, just kind of him and his body sort of figured it out or something else something was going on. I mean, Kelly was a con man. I mean, he has years cut off for, you know, doing cons. And we know that he had access to D's library. So he had a grip on and he had all the text you would need to do something like that. So it's possible. People have done far more strange cons and he was being paid well for the, you know, if it was a con, you know, if it were him being a con. And Kelly was kind of different in a lot of ways. Dending paid well through the Queen. 3D. He was paying him 50 pounds a year, which was a pretty decent salary. And John D was getting the money through the Royal Family? Well, he was getting money from the, from the royals. He also had his own estate and he was also spying. And so there's a whole espionage. Of course, 007. 007 and all the, all the stuff. And again, people forget that after all the weird and no key in language stuff, the very last sections of the No key in magic are the ability to spy on any country at any time. It's, it's, it's, it's like CAA style remote viewing, but done through magic. And it's just for anyone who's studied Elizabethan politics and you know that espionage and codes and all that trapped up together, it's like, hold on, where does the magic end and the espionage part begin? And what's really going on and all this? So I will say that the, the Dean Kelly stuff and clearly Dean Kelly believed it. I mean, they switched wives. They swapped wives, at least for a night and for one night. We know that definitely happened. They even tried to blot it out in the manuscript and it's still there. And it's just awful. I mean, you read the section where De tells its wife and she just breaks down hysterically sobbing. She hated it with Kelly. And the idea that basically she was being forced to sleep with this guy was just, I feel horrible for Jane, for Jane D and Joanna Kelly on Kelly's wife. I just like, and you know, the angel asked them were you faithful, were you faithful in the, the accomplishing I can remember the exact language. And I think D writes very closely, pocket them, fact them. The deed was done. Weird. These things always go that way, though, right? It's always some weird sex stuff in the end. Did you join a cult? Because you think it's going to be just fun and community and then, ah, this guy's banging your wife. Yeah, it's just every single time. It's just like David Kuresh, you're like, so what's about to end? And I have to have all the wives. They're like, yep, should have read the fine print. Yeah. And it's always always some weird, always weird sex stuff. Yeah. But you know, after that, after D, after the D and Kelly episode, you know, Kelly went his own way and became court-alchemist for Rudolph II. But we forget that D went back to England and continued talking to angels for I think 14 more years with another scrior named Batholavi Hickman and all those records are destroyed. So we have, we have seven years of D and Kelly. And we know that D was talking to another scrior before he was talking to Kelly, a dude named Barnabas Saul, who we have a little bit from. But he had, he had twice the amount of years talking to angels with Batholavi Hickman. And I think that D decided it was all demonic and burned all the records. But it seems like what happened with the D and Kelly stuff is he, he put them all in a secret compartment of a chest and forgot about them. And because he forgot about them and then conveniently died, the chest ended up with someone else and by chance they broke the chest and all this papers fell out. And they're like, holy shit. Whoa. That's dude talking to angels. I just am so curious to know what's happening. These are just delusional guys that are making up a store. Are they doing drugs? Are they just like lying? Is it a hoax? Or is there some other thing happening? I think that, you know, I sometimes talk about that there's a no man's land between being a con man and being a true believer. And we want, we want to put people in boxes. We want to say, you know, Joseph Smith will con man. You know, that's he was a con man. And we want to say, you know, this guy not a con man. And we want to have this idea that that either you're one or the other. And I think that there is a no man's land. Sometimes I call it a pious fraud where the, you can't tell the difference anymore. The mask kind of eats the face. Yeah. And I think that Kelly, I mean, we know scientifically, just like straight science, we know that if you take low light candles, crystal ball, stare at it, you will see things. I don't care who you are. I don't, you can be the most hard bitten, red at atheist. Your brain will generate imagery into that, into those hypnagogic states. If you've ever had been, you've been lying down and you find, you're in that weird state between dreaming and asleep, you've experienced it. We can induce those states just with wide, wide awake. You can, you can get in those states. Kelly was in those states. I don't have any doubt about that. Now, to what degree is he in those states, seeing things, adding his own twist to make sure he's getting his bit to. And again, there's nothing more powerful than human mind. And when the human mind is set into this sort of relaxed state, And also Kelly, I mean, we also sometimes forget too, Kelly was unhinged. I mean, he attacked random people with swords. He would scream blasphemy as randomly. Like, we actually look at Kelly's behavior just sort of regularly. He was not a well person. Something was off about him, and again, I don't want to pathologize people in a amount of psychologist. But something was, something was, Dee would be like, you can't just shout blasphemy in my house. Like, that's not a normal thing to do. Something was up with this guy. So you take a person who's already sort of maybe unhinged. You put them into a highly suggestible kind of environment. You begin to increasingly force them to do this for hours a day. Like Kelly, it's not like Kelly can just like leave. He's under the back and call this guy. So Dee's to blame in all this. People always say, Kelly's a con man. I'm like, if he were, it's Dee who's putting him up to it. And then you add in the apocalyptic fervor of the day. Everybody thought the world's coming to an end. And you just like add all that together. And I don't think you need drugs. I don't think you need even angels. I mean, if there are angels talking to them, great. But I think that you can do that alone, that perfect storm. And I think you can get the kind of things that we see. And what do we see in those texts? We see the world's about to end. You're important in the process. We're going to reveal to you the mechanisms by which the world's going to come to an end, et cetera, et cetera. And I think that you can, I think you can account for a lot, maybe not everything, but you can account for a lot of one on those sessions by just looking at them from a scientific point of view, knowing that what science indicates to us is that our mind is capable of inducing states without drugs, without anything, with inducing states that are extremely novel and strange. And I would tell somebody, you can do it. I don't care. Again, you can be the most reddit atheist you want to be. Ghosts sit in a quiet room with the low light, with a flickering candle, and just stare into a crystal ball. Just do it for an hour, and an hour is a long time. But you will see things, I've done it, and I'm like, do I think I'm seeing angels in there? I'm not sure what I'm seeing. But there's a moment where the extension of the mind is creating things, and unsurprisingly would the apocalyptic fervor of that time period, it's creating that apocalypse. And yeah, it's wild stuff. Hey guys, we're going to take a break really quick because I want to tell you about GLD. Yeah, GLD sent me this chain, the chain that I'm wearing right now, if you've ever seen an episode of this show for the past like probably nine months, I'm wearing this exact chain. Sometimes brands will send you stuff, and they'll be like, yeah, try other thing, and every now and again, you're like, alright, whatever. This one is actually amazing. What impressed me is how substantial it feels in your hand. Like it actually has a real weight, like the clasp feels extremely well made. It feels like really durable, and it looks even better in person. It's comfortable to wear, and it kind of elevates every single outfit that I'm putting on without having to overthink it. Their pieces are sweat proof, waterproof, and made to be durable and guaranteed for life. I literally wear this every single day, I never take it off. What's amazing is that GLD has something for every style and price point from an 18 karat gold plated piece to a solid gold piece with natural diamonds, and they have collaborations with like the NFL, NBA, WNBA, MLB, literally anything you can imagine. There's something there for you. I mean, obviously, as a Catholic, I had to bust out the crucifix, but they have crosses that are for Protestants even. They got everything you can imagine. So if you want to elevate any outfit, GLD is for you. And for a limited time, only new customers are getting an insane deal. You're going to go to GLD.com and use the code camp, and you're going to get 40% off. Yeah, 40% off with the code camp at GLD.com. You can get the exact same crucifix that I'm wearing right now. Maybe we put that in the description so people can see exactly the one that I'm wearing. And after you purchase, they're going to ask where you heard about GLD, make sure you tell them that Mark and Christos from the campsite sent you, and let's get back to the show. Hermes. Trust me. Trust me. Trust me. Megistas. Hermes. Trust me. The thrice. Great. Well, this from these works creates this whole school of hermeticism. What exactly is that? So the hermeticism, hermeticism was an ancient school of soteriology, which is just like a $4 word. It's a school of salvation. So in the ancient world, there are lots of schools of salvation around. Christianity was one of those schools of salvation, and it was obviously the one that won out. But hermeticism was another one. And what hermeticism taught was that when we were born, we were actually born from the true being, which is the being of light, and that the world that we live in is a kind of false world, not bad, but not real. So that's different than narcissism. Narcissism would say, this is actually evil. We're in a cage. We're in a prison. We have to escape the flesh. And we have to escape this clay prison and get back to the realm of the one. Hermeticists were a bit more optimistically said, the world is good. In fact, made by God, but it's not fundamentally going to last forever. But the soul that we have will last forever. And the task is once we die, our soul needs to return to where it came from, which was God. Right. A lot more of this. Yeah. And so, but the bad news is that when your soul passes down through the planets, the planets are actually sort of malignant intelligences, and they infect your soul with fate. And so Jupiter infects it with some kind of fate, and Saturn infects it with fate, and Mars infects it with fate. And so a lot of the dispositions you have, like friends, if you have a, I don't know, anger problem, it's because the Martian influence on your soul is so strong that that's why you're having this like anger problem. And so the task, if you're melancholic, you have depressive personality, so you have too much subterranean influence on your soul. The task for the, for the hermeticists were, was to realize that all these dispositions that you have are actually demonic and that you need to like exercise them out of your body, so that they're sort of cling to your soul, like dirt clings to a rag, clean the rag, clean the soul. Once you die, you're ready for death, you can get your soul back up to the one, and you return back to the true light, the true what is. What if you're in cumbersome, the barnacles of Saturn, and you die? So then you can, so different things can happen, you can get trapped down here, and you get reincarnated, which is typically what happens, you do round two, kind of go back up and then back down. Or you can become trapped, and you can become sort of like ghost. That's not good. Not as real bad. So you got to purify yourself. You have to purify yourself, and they did this through, we think they may have invedetarians. We think they did, we know they did music as a way of purifying the soul. We have some of their songs, or at least the sound of them. We don't know exactly what they sounded like. We have some of the sounds, and also part of it was teaching. It was just letting people know, hey, like you're a being of pure light, all the things about you that you think are bad, or actually just demonic influences, and you need to rediscover your true self. And I think this is part of the reason why her metasism is seeing a bit of a renaissance right now, even in the actual renaissance, because we like the language of true self, and my true self isn't these, you know, my anger problems are not really myself. I'm really, I want to purge the shadow, and sort of a Jungian language, or whatever. But at any rate, we have a collection of writings called the corpus somaticum that survived from antiquity, and they were translated and published by Marcelo Fichino in the 15th century, the 1560s, and they became enormously popular in the renaissance because people believed that this was the primordial wisdom that actually had been delivered to the ancient Egyptians, and that Hermes Trismagistus, Hermes the Thrice Great, the Revealer of all this was in fact the teacher of Moses, and in fact, you can go to Siena in Italy, go to the Siena Cathedral, and on the floor of that cathedral, it's huge, is an image of Hermes Trismagistus teaching Moses, Hermesism, which just sounds like the wildest pagan thing you would never imagine. Poet up Cathedral. How does that become a part of Catholic Church? Because the idea was, look, there's a primordial truth, that truth is Christ, but everyone had access to it in different ways, and it terms out that every nation has some share of it, and that Hermes Trismagistus was an expression of it, and you have early church fathers like Tantius saying, "Yeah, like Hermes Trismagistus taught a kind of pre-Christianity, and that's the reason why it survived." Now is there any validity that Hermes was a real person? Probably not one person, this is probably a community of belief of which Hermes Trismagistus becomes the mouthpiece for these beliefs, but yeah, if you just pull up the Siena Cathedral or Hermes Trismagistus, which I know is a mouthful, but if you spell it, it'll probably pop up. It's a beautiful cathedral, by the way, the Siena Cathedral. They always are. And Hermes, you're being mind-bogglingly beautiful. Right. It's one of the perks to be a Catholic, because you walk in here, and you're like, "This is us." Yeah, totally. It's funny. In Abraham Joshua Heschel, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the Catholics built cathedrals of space, but the, the Sabbath is the, the cathedral of time. Mmm. And I love the idea that like, you, that the Catholics get this amazing, these, these, these spatial beauties. And if Jews, if we take it, we have a cathedral of time, and that's the, that's the Sabbath. Damn, you got us on that one. I don't know. I don't know. I think we should work together. We should get, we should rent out our space and time. Yeah, I'm scared. Yeah, I know. You kind of got us on a technicality. Like, look. Your thing is cool, but have you ever thought about hours? I've got time. Damn. Time. Yeah, here we have it, right? There's Hermes Trismagistus there. talking to Moses and that That, the thing on the two Cherubim is the hermetic wisdom, and yeah. So where was this thought proliferating? So, originator in Egypt. We don't know where in Egypt exactly, but actually in Egypt. Yeah, so we know that the actual school of thought originated in Egypt. There was a major site where Thoth, so Hermes, Trismagistus, is a sort of Greek-sized version of Thoth. It was sometimes referred to as Jehuti werewareware, Thoth, great, great, great, and you translate that into Greek. You have Hermes, Trismagistus. So it's kind of a Greek-ified version of the Egyptian god, Thoth, which is also a god of magic and wisdom. And so Hermes becomes a thing, and again, what's fascinating about this, right? You have the Bible there on the left with this Moses on the left, and Hermes really towering above him. It's so tall. It had as wiggle. It's really kind of, you know, it's really amazing, and look, he's reaching for what is basically pagan wisdom, and it's not clear who's handing what to whom. And this is, I think, the ambiguity of this image, and again, this is inek, the cathedral. This is not just sort of, in some weirdo Catholic, and this is a huge, this thing is, I think, two meters by two meters, something, it's massive on the floor, it's huge. But here we have Hermes Trismagistus, a pagan Egyptian, seemingly teaching Moses. This just gives you some idea about how powerful an idea this was in the Renaissance, that in a cathedral, you could make this image, and it'd be basically, I mean, not just, not persecuted, but encouraged. Do we know anything about the artist or the story that the artist sort of told the bishop? I don't know. That, I don't know. And for an artist's story, and how in the world did this get on the floor of a cathedral? Because you know, Michelangelo was like putting little Easter eggs in the Sistine Chapel. Right, right. And I guess it's disputed to whether or not how much the Pope knew. And so it's like, oh yeah, here's the creation of Adam, and he's in a brain, and the brain is actually, we're creating God in a brain. Things like that were like, he's putting, like, potentially his own personal skewer. Sure. So I wonder if there's a guy being like, no, no, no, no, that's a depiction of God, and God's came in. I mean, it says, Mark. It says, Hermes Trismagistus. I mean, it's not an Easter egg. It's front and center. Wow. And so in the Renaissance, this idea that Hermes Trismagistus was one, one. There were lots of these guys that had sort of, they were sort of Christians before Christianity, and they have this primordial wisdom. And Zora Astra was one, Hermes Trismagistus was one, Moses was another. And that the idea was, there was this, there was this Christian perennialist idea that we could recover this lost wisdom, and that became printed in the corpusimedicum. And it became, I mean, I think it went into thirty-something editions until the wet blanket of the 17th century hit and the scholar proved that the texts were Roman. They weren't primordial. They were from the Roman period. Interesting. And this sort of through the wet blanket on the idea that this ancient Egyptian wisdom, and so, or ancient wisdom going back to the very first foundations of wisdom itself. And that, you know, I won't say I put the nail in the coffin, but it was a wet blanket on the idea that this was as ancient as people thought it was. And how many people would you say were Hermesists in like the heyday, the peak of it? It's hard to say. I mean, it's not the kind of thing that you, you come out loud and proud saying you're Hermesist. In fact, the first person to say they were, they identified as a Hermesist, was a Christian Hermesist named Ludovico Lazzarelli. He says, "Christianosum et Hermeticus, I am Christian and a Hermesist." So and that was in print and no one batted an eye and the book was never banned. So it was at least kosher enough to do that. This is popular in Italy? It was very popular in Italy, but it got exported north of the Alps. So you're seeing big in Italy, then it goes into Germany and England. But yeah, I think that many people, you know, again, we're talking about a very tiny group of elite, smart people who are reading these kind of books. But I think that there was enough people who were on board with this that it's enough that we could teach a class on it. I could teach an entire seminar on these people and we could talk about like Christian Hermesism and we can see their books. I mean, there's a commentary, a six volume commentary written on the corpus somaticum that stretches into thousands of pages that was written, instigated by a pope, a pope, got a guy to write it. And so there was a desire to combine this ancient primordial Greek pagan Egyptian wisdom with Christianity. And it was so worrying, back in antiquity, at least that Augustin really felt that it was a threat and Augustin really railed against it. And so in the east, they were much more comfortable with it and they preserved it in the east and then the west, it wasn't preserved with one exception of one text, the Escalapius. Like the Orthodox churches? Yeah, the Orthodox churches preserved it in a way that the Greeks or the Romans didn't have. But this idea of Hermes Trismagistus being a sort of font of perennial wisdom, it still goes on today. I mean, there was a channeled text in the 20th century called the Emerald Tablets of Thoth, which again, people sort of rolled their eyes at, you know, or the Kabbalion, right, that people also were like, that's really not, it's not a historical, hermetic text, but it claims that authority. And I think the fact that whether you think that the Emerald Tablets of Thoth or the Kabbalion, whether you think they're authentically hermetic, that's a question, yeah, that's something me and Mitch Orowitz could have, I think a really cool conversation about, and I'm not going to down the hill of authenticity one way or the other because that's not my, that's not my bag. But what I can say is that the fact that they felt the need to vouch safe the text authority by associating them with Hermi Stras Magistus shows that this still has some cache, some currency. Right. Yeah, it's interesting that there's a resurgence to an extent, that like, there's conversations about it. And like, we do this a lot, like even the way that you're describing this, it sounds sort of theosophical a bit where it's like, there are these sort of elders that pertain sort of the secrets of the universe, and they're sort of cast around the world, and you can find them, and they can tell you secret teachings, like sort of guru types. And it seems like they're kind of harkening on the same thing, where they're like, Hermes was one of these elders, and you have other people throughout the ages that retained this wisdom. And we're kind of proto-christians, and that it kind of tied in with Christian theology is so fascinating. Yeah, it's perennialism. I mean, it's the idea that there have always been, the truth is one, and we're all blind men with the elephant, and that the better the blind men were Hermes and Zoraster and Jesus or whatever. But the idea that the church was condoning it though is so strange. Yeah, condoning it, but in that case, more than condoning it, I mean, just letting your Hermes flag fly. So it just shows you that, again, we have images of the Catholic church as being this tyrannical, you must believe in the Orthodoxy, or we will purge you with the Inquisition. They put a pagan guy giving Moses wisdom right there in major cathedral in Renaissance Italy. So it just shows you that there's a lot more latitude in these institutions than we often think. Right. Massive sort of floor piece dedicated to this sort of Egyptian god giving Moses ancient wisdom. If you told me that was in the Catholic church, I said, there's no way. It's mind-blowing. You couldn't do it now. No, anyway, when many ways we're far more conservative, feel logically now than they were in the Renaissance. Right. And that just shows you that, again, that we think of ourselves as like progressive and enlightened and liberal. Yeah. And I'm like, eh, give me the Renaissance. Yeah, they think of pendulums. Yeah. Yeah. Now, another ancient tradition that has caught fire amongst, you know, sort of the Hollywood elite, so to speak, is Kabbalah, or Kabbalah. I guess it's pronounced more accurately. I mean, I think that, yeah, typically in Hebrew, you put the stress in the last syllable, but it's funny, because in my, when I'm talking academically, I say Kabbalah, but I'm talking religiously in my Ashkenazi accent, I say Kabbalah, so it's completely all over the place. And then you get some whiskey, I mean, God knows where it's going to be. It's just interesting. You see so many celebrities with like a red string and they're kind of like, like Madonna really popularized it, right? Which is so strange for the form, because it's something that is this sort of mystical branch of Judaism that is reserved for the very few kind of initiated that were worthy enough to really study it, right? There's all sort of, I guess stipulations that are required to even read the Zohar, get into this text. I think you have to be 40 years old. You have to be Jewish. You have to be a man. You have to be married. Other things, I'm sure. Yeah. I mean, those girl really actually got put on after a whole failed Messiah bit with the Shabbatite Zvi. It's only after the Shabbatite Zvi moment where folks may know this. There was a Messianic claimant in the 17th century that said he was a Messiah and about half the world's Jews seemed to have agreed. But is the Shabbatite Zvi? Yeah, Shabbatite Zvi. They packed their bags and in 1666 he converted to a song. Yeah. It was incogniving it. Which is a brilliant move politically speaking. Yeah. I was like, political philosophy. He was arrested and the Sultan said, look, we're going to prove you're the Messiah. So we're about to shoot you with a bunch of arrows or you can convert. So either you're the Messiah or you're a dead man. Yeah. Shabbatite converted it. Yeah. He also saw the beauty in the light of Islam. It was like, this seems pretty good. This seems good. I can do. Why not both? Yeah. - It still exists as a religious group in Turkey. The Shabbatians are still, they're still some out there. - And they believe that even though he was on the surface, Muslim, he was still practicing his Jewish beliefs. - He was doing both, we know he was doing both. - Oh really, that's different. - He was kinda, yeah, oh yeah, he was, I mean, we know a lot about him. But yeah, so, but after the whole event with Shabbatized V, Kabbalah was so wrapped up in how he justified or how his wingman, how his hype guy, and Nathan of Gaza justified Shabbatized V himself, I think, I don't know who knows what he believed from one minute to the next. - And this is always the way it goes with these guys, right? There's always like sort of one sort of enlighten to Guru and then kind of the business person on the side that like, makes it, makes it work. - Jesus has to have a Paul. - Yeah. - You know, I don't think that Jesus would have, the Jesus movement would have never gone anywhere without Paul. Shabbatized had Nathan of Gaza, you know, I think that, yeah, often you have, you have the, your hype guy, you know, the Buddha had his cousin, Ananda. So you have, yeah, you have these guys. But yeah, after the Shabbatized V thing, that's when you get all these girlfriends, I see. Because so much of his, so much of how he justified, or he was justified as being the Messiah was based on Kabbalistic teachings. And this guy, Nathan of Gaza, I think the rabbis were like, okay, we gotta, this needs to be a little bit more, we gotta button this up. A button to stop. And the reason why is because that prior to that, there was, again, this apocalyptic fervor, they didn't affect just Christians that affected Jews too. And part of the apocalyptic fervor was, we need to teach the Kabbalat to everybody. And if we teach it to everybody, the Messiah will appear. And so there was a huge push to publish Kabbalistic texts and teach Kabbalah publicly, in a way that it never happened before. - To everybody, men, women, kids. - Do you even, yeah, not even on Jews, all right? That's why you have Jews teaching Christians about this stuff. And so once it got out, I mean, once you kind of let the cat out of the bag, it's hard to put it back in. And, but that's what they tried to do. After this traumatized Vivid, it was such a huge disaster that they were like, we have to put guardrails on Kabbalah. It's just too, and I will say that, you know, of all the mystical practices and all of the mysticism stuff that I've seen, the one that I've seen people go off the rails on, the most is Gammatria. - Right. - It's like seeing pattern, seeing numbers, seeing letters, seeing letters, numbers adding this and dividing by that and doing this. I mean, I would tell people if you suffer at all from OCD or anything like, don't just, don't look at it. - Yeah. - 'Cause it's just every, it's like pikes with me in the movie, the air of Darren Arvnowski movie, Pai. - Right. - I've seen more people go off the rails from that stuff than anything else. - Because Gammatria, I think in its purest form, is just another way to interpret the text. Like if there is this understanding of buy-in that this text is divinely inspired, that in the text there is the truth of the universe. And so of reading it in just the straight up language, just reading in Hebrew is going to get you one version. But then there's another interpretation where you can break it down into numbers. And then if you understand what the numbers mean and associate numbers with other numbers, there's a deeper level of understanding. And there's like what, 30 different ways you can ascertain knowledge and wisdom from one text using all different sorts of modalities. - Oh, and also Gammatria, there's, you can do all kinds of tricks, you can decompose the letters and the numbers, you can read the text as anagrams. Again, this is why I think it's just, it's not dangerous in some kind of spiritual sense, it's just like this is what happens when you start to see patterns everywhere. - Yeah, unfortunately it just gets a frantic episode. - I've seen it perfectly. - Yeah, I'm not sure. - Or obsessive-compulsive stuff. And also now you see like, oh, that belief has 18 things on it. And that means chai and chai add this to that. And you're like, here we're off of the races now. - Yeah. - So. - What's app groups are going crazy? - I think it's not healthy. - Well, you know that the Monster Energy logo is 666. - 666, yeah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Which is actually not 666 and like Hebrew letters? - No, don't look into it. You just take my word for it. Which is funny, that's actually the 666 is a great example of really early Gammatria and the Hebrew Bible or in the New Testament. If it's probably Caesar's name, it's a Neuros name. And it's interesting 'cause some of the early manuscripts have 616. And if you decompose the name into Aramaic letters or Hebrew letters or in degree letters, you get either 616 or 666. And it depends on what language you're thinking and it depends on what number you get. - Right. So what if you had to do like Kabbalah 101? What is it and why is it so popular with a cold literature? Why is there so much crossover with occultism and Kabbalah? - So the second part of that question is easy to answer 'cause we've already answered it. It's the Kabbalah is that secret teaching that Moses got. So you have the public teaching which is the Torah and the law and you have the secret teaching and that is the Kabbalah. - It's sort of an oral tradition. - It's an oral tradition, but even a secret oral tradition. And so we have that in an Judaism. It's the secret oral, the secret tradition and Judaism. And part of the reason why it's popular and this is sort of a funny bug of history is that when the principal text of the Kabbalah was being written down, so what's called the Safer Zohar, the Jews at the time were engaged in basically a meme war with the Christians that they were taking elements of Christianity like the Trinity and Mary and other things and they were actually introducing them into the Zohar. And they were doing it because Jews were converting the Christianity in mass because of a lot of pressure from the Spanish crown and other reasons. - It's one true faith. - Yeah, and so it's what it is. - Sure, your mileage may vary. And it's funny, there's lots of those things, but here when the Zohar is being written, they were sneaking some of these Christian stuff in. And then a few hundred years later, Christians were finding it. And they were like, oh wow, the Zohar, these Jews are stupid, they don't really understand what's really in their own text, but look, the Trinity's right there. Oh, Mary's right there. - Oh, interesting. - And so they kind of found what had been smuggled into the text, not knowing that it had been done on purpose. And so Christians like Pico de la Marandola and other Christian cobblists, Piojana Sreuchlin and D and other people, they were like, oh yeah, the Kabbalah is actually the true Judaism. Like the Judaism of the Jews is a degenerate, legalistic, feroceic, bad thing. But this Kabbalah stuff, right? 'Cause even Christianity is hidden inside of it. So they preserved this ancient, primordial truth given to Moses precisely because they didn't even know what it was. - Interesting. - So the Christians really, really went hall hog into Kabbalah, sort of translating Kabbalistic texts and stuff like that. So what is it? What is the Kabbalah? Primarily the Kabbalah, it just literally means received. So tradition. But it is the idea that the divine being is made up of different moments of divine power. There are these emanations that are called sfewelt. Literally the word means numerations, but there are these moments of divine power. So God's compassion, God's wrath, God's beauty, God's, whether, you know, the God's mercy. And there are these moments where the divine body exists in a kind of equilibrium and that equilibrium has come undone for technical reasons. And the undoneness of this divine body needs to be reestablished that divine body needs to be reharmonized and it gets reharmonized by doing the Jewish law, by doing the meats of vote, by doing keeping the Sabbath, eating kosher, putting the felon on. Again, if you ever see someone on the street asking, are you Jewish? Did you put the felon on the day? They're wanting to put the felon on that person because they think that every time someone does it, it sort of realigns the divine body. And once the divine body's realized, then we all go back to perfection again. It's releasing a divine spark. Well, we are the divine spark and the task is to get it back up. And we do that. And again, this sounds like our metacism, right? 'Cause they're all drinking from the same water here. And so it's getting that divine spark back in Kabbalah, you do it through the proper observance of Jewish law. Specifically, you do it through when you do a commandment, like putting on the Tefilum, you actually, it's, you'll say, "Lashim Yakhud for the unification of God's name, I am doing X, Y, and Z." And then you, it's called a Yakhudim. It's a, it's a oneness with God that you are putting massive amounts of intention into doing that commandment. And that kind of like regaligns, God's body, just one more click, I guess. And so that's the task is that it's a mystical understanding of the Torah where you're understanding the Torah, not just as a bunch of rules, but as a road map for realigning the divine body. And that's the spirit people have seen in the tree of life. And so the idea is that the reason, and it tells you why the world's kind of broken and how to fix it. And that's, you know, that's what's the great appeal of it is. So why is it so big, why is it such a big deal in the occult? You know, if you look at any sort of magical circle where there's summoning the spirit, it's almost always Hebrew letters there. It's because of this book, the Safer Yitzira, which is, in some cases, depending on how you wanna think about it, one of the earliest books of Kabbalah. And the Safer Yitzira argued that God created the world through speech, that all of the universe came into speech, or it came into the through speech. And that unlike us, we're just schmucks. When I say let there be light, nothing happens. But when God says, yeah, he or, vahia, he or, let there be light, vahia, he or, and there was light. And God's speech is metaphysically generative. It had the Hebrew actually has power, not just his random speech, but as literally the metaphysical backbone of being. And the reason why you see all that Hebrew is because they've incorporated that complistic idea into the magic. And so you've ever seen Abraham, Abraham, Abraham is pretty butchered, Aramaic. But it literally means I create as I speak. No. So that is like the core complistic idea coming from this book, say for Yetzera, in that idea being incorporated into the occult because how often does magic work? Speech. You're commanding demons, you're willing things into creation. And even into the modern period with things like the idea of manifesting, you know, it's the idea that somehow your will, by will alone, you can, you know, enforce reality to obey the will. This is just an extension of this much older form of occult thought. Wow. That is so interesting about Abraham. I've never heard them. It's a funny. It's again, there's some debate about exactly what it means. But the best going theory is it's sort of a butchered, Aramaic phrase for, you know, I create as I speak. Wow. The creation story in the Zohar as it's understood by Kabbalah is interesting as well that it's creation through contraction. Is that right? Yeah. There's a new strata of Kabbalah, there's the Kabbalah of the Zohar. And then a couple centuries later, there was a brilliant Kabbalist named Isaac Luria. And Isaac Luria developed a, I wouldn't say a different form of Kabbalah, but he developed Kabbalana in a much more creative direction. And in that story, yeah, we have the idea of Sim Sum, the idea of contraction that used to be there was only God and that in order to make space for our realm, God like sometimes I imagine like a dude who's like, you know, sucking his belly into like, yeah, put a, put a belt on. It's like sucking in a little bit and like in that gap, the God shot a ray of divine light. But the, the vessel, the empty vessel couldn't hold it in the divine light shatters. And that becomes these sphere root. And the task again is, it's a reparation and we, you, you can go to any synagogue and ask about Tikkun Olam, the idea of repairing the world. And for most Jews, that means like doing acts of social justice and giving to charity and, you know, making sure that people aren't oppressed or whatever. But for Kabbalists where the idea originally comes from, it's Tikkun Olam, Olam doesn't mean the world in the sense of the moral world, it means literally the cosmos. You are doing acts of religious piety in order to repair the metaphysical structure of the world. Fascinating. It's, it's an intense belief system because everything that you do, every intention you set, everything, it's, it's either undoing the world or fixing it. And you know, for instance, in the Zohar, maybe the most horrifying thing in the Zohar is like masturbation. Like, if you like spill, semen, not in its appropriate container, you can imagine where that goes. But if you, if you do that, then it generates demons and it makes the world worse. Right. So all these like demons come out of like, you know, semen. And you're confronted with these and like the afterlife, right? Yeah, they're, they're, yeah, I mean, they're, yeah, you have to be purged of all this stuff. Ari Shafir talks about this in a special, which is very funny. I don't know if you've seen it. It's hilarious. Yeah. You, I wonder if you would like it. They did a whole special, he grew up, I believe orthodox, modern orthodox. But was in a Yashiva and was like, you know what, I'm done with this and then became a standard comedian. And did a whole special, an hour long special talking about like sort of his Jewish faith and kind of the things that he was taught and what he finds funny about them. And he mentions this. Yeah, it's, it's a huge, you know, and again, I know Catholics also have a horror of masturbation as well. Yeah. But it doesn't generate, it doesn't generate demons. No, ours is more just like guilt and like the idea like my dead relatives can see me. Yeah. Like, it's more weird. Yeah. It's a good deterrent. Yeah. I get good work. But the idea that yeah, you just made a bunch of demons and now you got to deal with that. Yeah. Very, you know, you know, in the Hasidic world is infused with this, this couple is the ideas. And again, it's why we could, you know, again, walk down the street and find some guy standing on the street corner being like, hey, did you put the villain on the day? Right. Can I put the villain on you? It's not. And you feel like why would he care? It's because he's trying to beat back the semen demons or whatever, you know? Um, you put it that way. I'm not sure. I don't want to tribute anything to the guy. Right. I don't know. Hey, guys, we're going to take a break really quick because I want to talk to you about getting old. I turned 30 this month. Yeah. It's sad. And my body is not responding the way that it used to. I could feel exhausted all day and then I get into bed and then now I'm suddenly wide awake. I'm not recovering as quickly. My motivation is kind of inconsistent. My gym habits are not as sharp as they were. And it felt like a bunch of unrelated problems. But the one thing that I can connect to all those issues is cortisol. It's my body stress hormone and it's supposed to rise when I'm under pressure and then come back down the problem is between work and podcasts and stand up and answering emails and meetings and trying to raise a family and being a dad and staring at screens all day and doom scrolling. My stress response is constantly activated and that's why I've been taking Mars men. You can hear this bottle is basically empty because I legit take this every single day. And they sponsor the episode and I love them. Mars men uses natural ingredients designed to support healthy testosterone production while helping your body manage cortisol levels. 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That's men go to Mars dot com for 50% off and three free gifts at checkout and after you purchase, tell them the market crystal sent you now let's get back to the show. It's such an interesting way to frame it like most orthodox juice or most heredity juice that you would say are probably cobblistic. Definitely the chastity community is the the you know there's still some juice that are actively opposed to the Kabbalah they see it as like a basically a fraud they see it as a medieval fraud in a heresy. But overwhelmingly I think juice have accepted the Kabbalah at some level. If you've ever been to a Friday night service in a synagogue you've been to a service called Kabbalah Shabbat and Kabbalah Shabbat was invented by Kabbalahs in the 16th century. Is this from Isaac Gloria? So the people that came right after him are right before him. But yeah if you're sung like Hadidi or then the sort of the whole business of what is called Kabbalah Shabbat it's a completely kabbalistically invented service. Is this the same as regular Shabbat? So it's what it's what it's how you bring in the Sabbath bride and the Sabbath bride is the Shchina it's the visible manifestation of God in the world which is a woman. The feminine aspect of God the Shchina and that's again I just mentioned a minute ago that the incorporation of Mary and elements into the Zohar you know anything you know anything you can do I can do better like you know you have the mother of God well our God just is a woman. Wow. And so the Shchina is the you know the Sabbath bride and the the man of any time God manifests God itself it's always a Shchina according to Kabbalah it's always the feminine the male remains hidden and it's the feminine that's revealed. That's true. So yeah it's just you know and it runs deep the Kabbalah stuff is it's there are commentaries in the Zohar that go into dozens of volumes that have never been translated. Really? Oh it's a huge I mean the Kabbalah the Zohar just the principal text of the Kabbalah it only got completely it's not even completely translated yet. So the Daniel Matt and his crew thank God they put out twelve volumes but they're still probably five more volumes to do. Wow. Do you find that these teachings culturally influence Jewish thought? I mean I would say that in some sense Jewish theology is just Kabbalah I mean there's my monodies too and sometimes they want to get you know modern Orthodox people typically like my monodies more than the Kabbalah. So it's a lot of the biggest people you'll see kind of going up against Kabbalah will be modern Orthodox people but but yeah they're like more like rationalistic my monodies. Yeah I would say that in so far as there is Jewish theology and you ask someone like how to God make the world they're going to tell you about Simpsum or something like that. So yeah it's extremely influential. Right. This idea of Teekun Alam is so interesting that the world is broken through no fault really of anyone kind of like a mistake so to speak is that a fair way to phrase it. It's not so much a mistake it's just that the power of God. Yeah the power of God the infinite power of God could not be stored in a finite vessel. There was a kind of a cosmological contradiction and it's broke and it's interesting because you see this kind of mythology playing itself out in anosticism you see it play out play though right in play though you have the idea that the Demiurge looks at the perfect forms and tries to impose the perfect forms on the imperfect matter and we get an imperfect world. You know if you make a you make a chair the chair is only as good as a lumber and so we live in an imperfect world and many of these stories these myths have some and they have to give us the reason why the world is the that it is. It's not a great world out there sometimes. And the way that they tell the story about why it is defective, or broken, or imperfect, or even evil in the case of the Nostics, they always give us a story about how it came to be the way that it is. And this goes back to the whole apocalypticism material that we began with earlier on. One of the things I will say often is that there really isn't Judaism, Christian, and Islam. Those are just downstream of apocalypticism. Apocalypticism is the religion of the West. It just manifests as Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. Apocalypticism is our religion. Right. Well, Islam's eschatology is also fascinating. Moon breaks apart and the dajjal comes. Jesus comes back. Jesus comes back to fight the dajjal. It's awesome. It's like Rambo. It's so cool. Yeah, it's just like, yeah, I love, you know, it's funny because the Christians have this really amazing eschatology. The Muslims have this really developed one. And you go to the synagogue and say, what's going to happen in the world? Rambo is going to be like, I don't know. We're not there yet. Yeah. There's so little speculation. There's a great line in the Talmud that says that every time that you calculate when the Messiah is going to come, God pushes the date back by that many years. It says, cursed be the calculators. That's so funny. There's like, don't even try. Don't do it. You're just like pushing it back, man. Don't try to like, you know, if we take this and divide it by four and add this by the book of Daniel, get this. It's like, that's such a frustrated mother way of doing it. Yeah, it's like, mom, you said we could have candy in five minutes. Well, every time we bring it up, I'm pushing it back. Push it back. That's the way that's what it says in the Talmud. That's so funny. So it's, you know, we get so little glimpses of the eschatological stuff because Judaism is not really concerned with that. It's like, it's your kosher. It's your kitchen kosher. Is your, are you a mezzus kosher? Right. Like the Messiah, he'll sort himself out. Right. Like, don't worry about that. Like, when the Messiah comes, you'll know. I'm so curious. Like, the, I always found that Tikon Alon was, in some ways, different than Christianity, in sort of how it manifests and how people kind of think about their faith and how they interact with the world, that I find at least amongst a lot of like evangelical Christians that I talk to and kind of the space that I grew up in through middle school and high school. There's a little bit of a defeatist kind of attitudes, so to speak. Like, and again, not all. I don't even think this is dogmatic. I just find this my personal experience that there's a feeling of like the world is broken. And it's broken because of Adam and Eve, original sin, humanity's broken, and through Christ and Christ alone, that brokenness is healed. And so it's not really on us. It's on Christ and Christ is the Savior, the Messiah that will fix everything. And it's sort of offloaded in a way, whereas Tikon Alon feels a little bit more like there's agency in the individual actors. It's like, hey, the world is broken. And we can do something about it. And we have to. And not only, yeah, not only can we, but we must. Yeah, in fact, it says that the, there's a section of the time that says that the Messiah will only come on two conditions that the world is made so perfect for the Messiah that the Messiah, sorry, you got to roll the red carpet out and the Messiah will come. Or the world's so broken that only the Messiah can fix it. And the idea is we need to do the, the latter. And yeah, the idea is that you got to fix the world. But we're going to fix itself. And because original sins are not really a, it's not really a Jewish idea. You know, is even as Ezekiel says that fathers don't, you know, sons don't inherit fathers sins. So I think it's just a different orientation. I don't know that one is better than the other. I'm sure they're plenty of, you know, they're wonderful Presbyterians out there, you know, predestined to do the right thing and doing it. Right. And there are lots of terrible Jewish landlords out there being mean to people and not doing the Tikun Alam. So, you know, there's, I think it's always like, you know, sometimes I say, right, there's no religions, there's just people. Right. And at the end of the day, you know, whether it's this guy or that guy, if they're bad people, they're going to be bad people. I'm curious, do you think it, this may be a leap here. And now we're kind of in speculation mode. But like culturally, do you think it affects the way that like modern Jews interface with the world and how they feel like they should interact? And I think about like inventions. And there's a disordered amount of like inventions or contributions done by like Jewish scientists, for example, like, hey, here's some penicillin, here's some, you know, these types of like so many different inventions. I'm sure we can pull up a list. Oh, yeah, so the the Jewish mother thing is always to tell you how many Nobel, what percent of Nobel prize winners are Jewish people make you feel bad that you're not one. Right. Exactly. So I wonder, is it just like cultural pressure of just like a highly literate group of people that are generally like ethnic and religious minorities in a country trying to create some type of values that they're not ostracized? Or is there maybe both an element within the culture where it's like, hey, we have to do good things because that's what we're commanded to buy Hashem. Yeah, I wonder. It's more a sociological question than anything else. Not when I'm I don't know if I'm super qualified for it. But I think it's also just a result of like anti-Semitism like Jews were sworn allowed to do other boring things like own land or so they were forced into these trades like textiles, textiles, doctors and lawyers and bureaucrats and intellectuals and it just so happened that the enlightenment happened and that that kind of intellectual labor really, really got valued and science was a thing you could do in a lab and it didn't hurt you owning land. In fact, it benefited you to live in a city and have high, you know, be able to do high levels of intellectual specialization. And you don't have to work on Rosh Hashana. That's true, you don't know. Right. And it's like, you know, so you have to, you know, it doesn't matter if you don't work on Fridays or in Saturdays. Right. So I think that part of the reason why European Jews were, because it's not so much true of Jews and other parts of the Jewish world, you know. So I think it has something to do specifically with how Jews were treated in Europe. And it just so happened that that what was a pretty bad system of oppression had a kind of weird silver lining in some ways. Yeah. As oppression, some ways tends to do. Right. It can make you know, it's I think about after Americans, right. We're given, you know, these horrifyingly bad combinations of food we're able to generate basically some of most amazing cuisine in the world. Right. Because of, you know, they had to improvise and take terrible food and spice it up and make barbecue and stuff. And so yeah, it's these these these unfortunately bad situations of racism or whatever. Yeah, they can generate these off-kilter boons. Yeah. And so maybe it's the case that, you know, it's the reason why Ashkenazi Jews specifically are gifted in these ways. But I don't know. It's one of the things where, you know, it's more of a sociological question. Right. Well, I also think that high literacy due to sort of the Yashiva system early on also gave like a large advantage. Like, hey, there's like, I think historically, like Jewish communities were more literate than the rest of the surrounding communities. I also think the divine nature of argument. Like I've read, and I don't know where this is, you know, by the way, but like there's midrouch about argument and how argument is good. And like, I mean, Abraham negotiated with God. Man, most of us argue with God. Jacob quite literally wrestled. Yeah, wrestle. And so this idea of the like, and I think it doesn't really exist in like sort of Christianity in America and to the same way. But that argument is good and not only is it good, it brings us to truth and that it's a helpful sort of fast. Do you find that that comes up in like Jewish literature? That's one of our favorite stories to tell, right? There's two great rabbinical households, the household of Hillel and the household of Shamai. And they never agreed, right? They always fought and they disagreed about everything. And even just devolved into violence. They would, you know, raid each other's schools and kill each other. It was really bad. And there's a story that the house of Hillel guys on the top of the building and the other guys and topics and shouting each other. And, and diametrically opposed positions on things, right? Like should the Moses go like this? Or should it go like this? Right? You can't be both. You know, it turns out they negotiated needs like this. That's true. Yes. Hallelujah. That was like, you know, do you light the Hanukkah candles with starting with all the candles and reduce some day by day? Or do you start with none and add them up? Right? This is the base they had. Yeah? Because you how do you like the damn thing? And, you know, Hillel said you take all the candles and you put them all there and you take one away every day. And Arno Shamai said and Hillel said, no, no, you add them up. You never, we never decrease holiness. You only add holiness. This is the debates. So they're shouting about Hanukkah candles and stuff. And, you know, and the sky cracks open. And God says, Aluva, Alu, these and those, and says, any disagreement for the sake of heaven, a Machluch at the Sham Shamayim, any disagreement for the sake of heaven will be rewarded in heaven. And so that there's an idea that if you're disagreeing on good principles for good reasons, both of you are right in some sense, and you'll get your reject reward. It's not about who's individually right. It's about like a, again, a Machluch at the Sham Shamayim of disagreement for the sake of heaven. But I will say in Christianity too, you see it. I mean, I think of like the scholastics, Thomas Aquinas and Don Scotus and these guys arguing. And they're arguing, I think, in a deep way trying to establish, you know, its faith seeking understanding. And in that scholastic way of Augustin and Thomas and Don Scotus and William Vacham, those guys aren't agreeing. They're disagreeing with each other. And they're, you know, but they're disagreeing in a relatively polite way. And I think I find great, you know, I love reading the Catholic Scholastics. Yeah. So yeah, there is a tradition in Judaism where, you know, Machluch at the Sham Shamayim, disagreement for the sake of heaven will be rewarded in heaven. And so I think there is a custom of, you know, bickering for the sake of heaven. So I think that there is some, there is a there there of that. And you know, it's funny, I'll be in an argument with people. And I'll ask myself, is this the Machluch at the Sham Shamayim? Am I trying to be right? Am I, am I just doing this for my my own ego 'cause I wanna be right. All right, actually, is there a principled position here and I wanna get to the principles, what matters? And sometimes I've had it and I can't say that's often, but there are moments where I'm like, I'm just trying to be right, right? I'm not really doing this for the sake of heaven. - Yeah. - And it can be a good, litmus test. You know, like, no, it's just my ego. - Yeah, it's just fascinating. I think it's a great quality that at sometimes, at least for me, again, going into Bible study, like, you hear things, you can ask questions, but it's always like, you don't wanna rock it too much. You know, you don't wanna do too much disagreeing. And I don't know if it's like a respect thing. It's like, hey, just like, listen. Like, I think the hierarchy maybe of like my Catholic upbringing was a little bit like, okay, if the priest has something, you kind of just like, take it, walk away, think about it, maybe come back and be still have questions. That was kind of how it was for me. Whereas-- - I think you go in orthodoxy, Shiva. It's not gonna be much different. - Really, I mean, there's good, I mean, look, I think every religion's gonna, every religion's gonna have its bumpers. And there's gonna be that moment where you're like, be like, okay, so it's like, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh. So it's like, can I be gay? I know. (laughing) - Really full stop, you can be gay, but you can't have sex with dudes. - But see, now we're getting into the funny part. - Yeah, so the feeling now, but the Catholic church is the same thing. Like, yeah, be gay, just don't have sex with dudes. - Right. - You know, or ladies, what do you mean, you know? So it's, they're bumpers. It's just not like, you know, you're gonna be walking to a Shiva and, you know, with pork on the menu. No, that's not on the menu. No, there's no arguing your way to pork. - But lab grown. - Yeah, that's a bit, it's actually a debate right now. - No, now we're at sea. - Yeah, there is a debate about, you know, and there's a worry, right? It's my Ryan, like, don't be seen to be doing evil things. Like, you can't wear leather on Yom Kippur. Can you wear imitation leather on Yom Kippur? You shouldn't do that because it looks like you are, and that's not good. It might give someone else the wrong impression. So I've seen arguments about this lab grown pork. You're like, yeah, but if you're eating a pork truck in public, people are gonna think it's really a real pork shop. So maybe you're leaving on those grounds, it's not allowed. - Right. - But yeah, there's bumpers. I mean, it's, it's, this is guardrails. I don't think that, you know, an orthodox, the Shiva, it's gonna be any more, any more liberal on certain kind of things and any other fundamentalist religion. I'm sure the orthodox guys and the opus day guys will get along swimmingly in the fact that they're all on the same fundamentalist team. - Right. - It's fundamentalism Olympics. - I know people online will sometimes like scoff at what they would consider like loopholes of like orthodox Judaism. I find them to be interesting outcomes of spurious debate where it's like, we're going back and forth trying to decide what this means. We have this text that's ancient that maybe doesn't apply to the modern day, how do we understand this? And like, what does it mean for the day to set? When does night really begin? What does it mean to ignite fire with your hand? To do work, like all of these things I find, maybe just from like a comedic perspective, I'm like, what does work mean? Right, like. - It's great. I mean, that's why we get such great Jewish comedians. - Right. - But the religion's so absurd. It's like, my favorite example of that is what is magic. So this is a place where, again, overlaps with my work. So there's a entractate Sinhedron in the town where they're discussing what is Kishuf, what is sorcery, because it's a death penalty case. If you're convicted of it, you can be put to death. - I'm serious. - And so, it takes it pretty high, so you need to define it what it is and what it isn't. And the problem is that in the Bible, where you see all these Hebrew words for species of Kishuf, of magic sorcery, there are all words that we don't know what they mean with a few exceptions. So it says, "Don't be a Yidda Oni." What is a Yidda Oni? It says, "Don't be a Ma'onin." Well, we can kind of see what that word means. It means something like cloud. The word Anon's in there. It's a cloud-duer person. Don't be a chiver of chauver-- There's all these words that says, "Don't do that." But no one knows what these words mean. And if you look at the Bible translations, you can flip those sections of Deuteronomy and every Bible translation is all over the place. Like, "Don't be a diviner or a Southseer or a whatever." But the text says things like, "Don't be a minachash." And minachash means something like snake-duer person. It's from Nakhash, the word snake. But snake-charmer maybe? I don't know, no one knows. And because it's ambiguous, the rabbis say, we're not allowed to do those things. And because it says, "Don't do them," that's it. Anything else that's not that, you can do. And so the rabbis say, "Well, what's an example of a thing that's clearly like weirdly magical that you're allowed to do?" And what does the Ghamara say? It says, "If you're righteous enough, you could create-- you could create all I mean worlds." But none of us have that righteous, right? We're conch slubs. And it says, "Well, what could you do?" It's like, "Well, I know a couple of rabbis who used, say for Yitzira, to make a calf and eat it on Shabbat. And they also made a man, and they animated him and brought him to life." And he walked to another, one of these guys, and the rabbis said, "Who are you?" And this entity couldn't speak. And he made him go back to the dust. And this becomes the tradition of the golem, the golem. So of all the weird magical things, right? Like, you can't do certain kinds of magical things. What you can do is make people and get people to do stuff. I mean, one of the most famous medieval rabbis Solomon Imingabi role was famous 'cause he had a golem housekeeper. What does this mean? I mean, allegedly, he brought to life an artificial person and they were his housekeeper. And people came and saw this housekeeper. I mean, there are accounts of people coming to see his golem housekeeper. What a tale. I mean, my first assumption again, going from the skeptical side, I'm sure you've probably thought the same thing. You're like, "Okay, is this just like a person?" "Is this just Polish?" Yeah. It's just like a Slavic guy, like you've never seen one of these. Yeah, you're like, "Look at this guy." Or like, I mean, even more morbidly again. Like if someone had like a disability or something. And they're like, "Yeah, this is the half human half." Like, is it possible that it inhabits that world? Is it possible it's just a non-corroverted story that ends up in this legend? Yeah, I mean, I've seen a couple accounts of the people go, yeah, it's always people, I know a guy, right? It's always that. I know a guy who saw the golem housekeeper who had been sawed on a golem role. So I don't know. But there are all stories, there's many, many stories of people making golems. And the word only appears once in the Hebrew Bible. It's describing an unborn baby, a fetus. It's like the Hebrew word for fetus. So it's kind of like a half-made person. Almost human. Almost human. They can't, typically they can't speak. And they often will run a monk. They go crazy and cause all kinds of problems. Kind of, the Frankenstein story is an extension of the golem story in some ways. All right, animating and creating life. Creating life from non-life and how it goes awry. Mostly that's Dr. Frankenstein's fault 'cause he was an irresponsible bastard, but you know, it's something monstrous fault. But it comes out of this book. This is say for you, this is the first printing of say for you, this is a mantra of 1562. But the commentary's on this book, tell you how to do it. How to make a golem. How do you do that? So you become really pure. So that's hard. And then-- - I followed the Jewish law. - I followed the Jewish law. You're abstaining from sex and fasting and, you know, wearing white garments. You, you and your helpers, you gather virgin clay together and you shape it into the shape of a human being. And then you start pronouncing out loud various divine names and various kind of combinations. And these combinations are very long. I mean, it's like hundreds and hundreds of divine names. And by basically chanting these combined divine names, you seemingly become like God. And the same like God was able to bring Adam to life. I mean, Adam and Hebrew just means Adam, I mean, clay. And God was able to summon this clay being into life. Apparently, if you're righteous enough, your God like enough, you can do it too. And you do it by basically enunciating the divine name in all of its permutations. And by enunciating the divine name in this way, it animates this creature. Into the religious folks of the time, they didn't see this as like infringing on God's divine name. So you would think, right? This is the kind of thing where we, we even say now, right? We muck about with a DNA or something. Oh, you're playing God. You should be doing that. I mean, the, the, the Talmud says explicitly, this is exactly what you're allowed to do. It's also a big claim, right? Like oftentimes like mystics and sorcerers and things like this would like kind of hide their method. They're like only the initiated know. And it's like they never really call their shot, right? But for someone to say like, hey, here's a brownie mix and here's all the ingredients, test it yourself. Yeah, how's it do it? And there it's in there. It's in, like I said, it's in the commentary. So this, now those, you know, now does it tell you exactly, what does exactly version clay, how, how do you supposed to announce these? Mm-hmm. You know, there's a lot of wiggle room for when it doesn't work. Sure. You know, you go to your Kavala guy and you're like, I tried the golden thing, broad didn't work. Did you pronounce all the names four times? You're not pure enough. Yeah, you're not pure enough. There's always an escape hatch. Mm-hmm. But no one's done it successfully. I think, I mean, the time when it says people did it and then saw the name of Gabi Role, their stories of golems through the Middle Ages and the modernity. I mean, there's the, you know, the, the, the famous golem of Prague. Actually, there's a story invented by a non-Jewish person, so it probably didn't happen. But their stories of like, they're being golems, like in the Warsaw ghetto uprising. Like, I don't know. I don't know. These stories get really wild. nothing. talk yet. Nothing yet. Yeah, you see that. You know, you know, the here's how to go and create a goal on YouTube channel. Yeah. Three in the morning. Yeah, it's so interesting. Like I wonder, so often about like these miracles from the Bible, like, and I would consider this miraculous to an extent, of course, right? Like creating human life. It's not a miracle to do the miracles. Yeah. Okay. Do these things persist because people see them, they corroborate them, like we talk about like the resurrection of Christ. There was a apparition to like 5,000 people or some number of a large crowd that saw Christ in this resurrected state, which is amazing. Or Lazarus coming back from the dead. These kinds of things that are divine, divinely inspired. I mean, if they happen today, like there'd be no doubt that people would say, like, oh, this guy's got something special going on. How did these things get corroborated in the ancient times? And do you think that there's any, do you find that the veracity of the claims of the miracle specifically to be coherent or withstanding criticism? I don't know. I mean, I don't find the, to me, it's one of these things where either you kind of have to accept that all the miracles happened or kind of none of them did at some level. I mean, because you just have miracles from everybody. It's like the Aztecs have miracle claims. The Hindus have miracle claims. You know, the Egyptians say that, you know, and the ones of Jesus or the ones of Shimonbar Yohai, I mean, which one do I trust more than the other? I don't know. For me, I think that they're great stories. And there's no way for me to verify them. And there's no way for me to go back in time and vouch for them. And even if I saw a guy come back from the dead, there's a part of me that would think, oh, I've just lost it actually. You know, like what is more likely that I'm gone crazy or the destitute, you know, you know, was, and then also, you know, we see accounts of other miracles like exorcisms, people falling down and thumping at the mouth and people uttering words over them for a few minutes and they, they stop. I'm like, that looks like a lot like epilepsy to me. Right. You know, or something like that. I think about the Ark of the Covenant, like the fact that someone touched it and they died or this thing had like the supercharged energy and I've heard all these different theories. Radiation. Right. I love the fact that the one time we have someone, you know, so there, there are cases where when people touch it and they die. But in the case of the Philistines actually sees it and take it to the Philistine city and they all get hemorrhoids. Where's that? It's in the Bible. They get hemorrhoids? Yeah, it's like the, it seems like the worst that it can do is like give a bunch of Philistines hemorrhoids. Weird. It's a, it's a strange story. And then the Philistines give it back. They're like, I just think it gives all the hemorrhoids. Yeah, we're suffering over here. We're in the middle of the desert, no badays. Yeah, it's just funny. And it's funny because many people know that story where they go to touch it. They go to almost drop it and they got touched as it dies. No one ever tells the hemorrhoid story. Yeah. Because it just seems kind of not divine all of a sudden. It's like they stole it and it made their butt hurt. But the banality of it almost makes you wonder if there's something happening where like is there a herb that's in it that maybe causes a weird medical thing? God of the Hebrew Bible is a weird God. I mean, some of my favorite stories are the ones that never get told. Like the time that God used like a trickster angel to get a king killed. Oh, this is the best story of the Bible. Like God like addresses all the angels and saying, I want to get Ahab killed. And I need a lying spirit to go down and like possess all the prophets to tell the the king of false prophecy so that he'll go out and fight them and get killed. And the angels, one of the angels shows up, yeah, I'll go tell him. And it's like God literally sends a secret agent to like basically possess a bunch of prophets to tell them a false prophecy to get this king killed. Yeah. It's like the most CIA massage secret agent with stuff. Is it is this? Oh, this is, I see. This is the, yeah, first Samuel. Yeah. Five to six. The Bible's plague of hemorrhoids. Oh, that's the Philistine one. Yeah, this is the Philistine one. Wow. It's really, it's this, this is just slept on. Why is this not like, you know, yeah, the king Ahab, the God permits a lying spirit to perhaps inflate Ahab prophet to encouraging against him killed. Wow. Ahab disguises himself and enemies shoots an era at random and mortally wounds him fulfilling God's judgment. Yeah. So this is just, these are just great stories in the Bible that just don't like, like people say things like, well, God would never lie to us. So I'm like, God literally send a lying spirit. I'm like, yeah, you know, or like the hemorrhoid thing. It's like, it's just one of these, it's these stories that I find to be some of the most interesting because they're, they're kind of embarrassing. Yeah, it's difficult to reckon with. They're weird. They're like, oh, yeah, like this God just, why did God just kill him? Yeah. It's God. I think about like, hardening Pharaoh's heart. Exactly. This is one of the most bizarre ones. That's super strange. But in that case, it actually tells you why I want to do this so I can commit all these, these plague so that people will know how powerful my name is. Okay. It's a flex. Yeah. It's like, I know, I'm not saying it's morally good. But God does have a logic there. Mm-hmm. Yeah. It's just like, I'm doing this because I'm like going to show how I'm like, how bad I am. But free will and agency is like the most supreme sort of human feature that we have. At least for us. Right? Like, maybe back in the Iron Age, there wasn't that they, that was not their principal concern. Yeah. It just is something that I contend with is, no, it's a tear of someone that grew up Catholic. It's like, well, is God going to harden my heart? Like, is my free will now suspended? Why did, why did I have to get punished if you got hardened? It's hard. It's, it's, it produces all these, these interesting theological problems that are interesting because they're, they're problems for us in a way that whoever wrote the text, they want problems for. But they must have been problems for the early church. Like, I can't imagine that I'm the first guy to be like, no, this hardening thing is pretty weird. No, they, and then they have to, and there's all kinds of mental gymnastics that, oh God, it wasn't that he hardened his heart is really what it meant is that he, he simply gave Pharaoh what Pharaoh really wanted. And Pharaoh had already made his mind up and God just like, kind of doubled down on helping him do that. So there's all kinds of ways of reading it so that you get your theology back. Right. And you get your free will back or you get Pharaoh's free will back. Or you read that where God's not deceiving people and sending lying angels to trick people or, I guess, the magic hemorrhoids thing. It's not the worst thing in the world. I guess that's, that's kind of weird. But yeah, of all the things that God would program the Ark of the Covenant to do. Right. You know, or the she bear that comes and kills the kids. Kills the kids. And I like the fact that it is specifically a she bear and the number of the kids is really specific. Yeah. How many kids? I forget. It's like 30 something. It's like a very particular number of kids. Yeah. But also for a bear to get 30 kids. I mean, that's a pretty crazy. Yeah, they're doing the kids would have ran. You would think, oh, maybe there's like a hundred kids and like there's 30. Yeah, just malls. A few of them. Yeah, but it's like it's specifically go I'm a go up baldy going up baldy. Yeah. God send the she bears. Yeah. I mean, but this also like, there's also horrifying songs blessed be he that smash the head of a children against the rocks. I don't like that. It's bad. It's like a bad vibe. Bad look. Which is kind of, this is also why I'm like, I try to take heed and encourage my my Catholic Christian friends to be like whenever you see a verse from like the Talmud, the Quran, really any sort of religious text and it's one line. It's like, look, I know that line from the Talmud doesn't look great, but we have some lines that don't look great. And if they wanted to proliferate these messages about us, like I wouldn't be stoked. Yeah, I mean, yeah, I think that if you want to it's like a streamer, right? Sometimes like people are streaming 24/7. They say like, they're like, oh, yeah, he said this one crazy thing one time. I'm like, yeah, he's streaming 24/7. It's like crazy stuff. The, you know, the Bible, these traditions have long legs and you're going to get people say horrifying, weird, bad stuff. Yeah. And the Bible itself, I mean, like I said, it's like, do I trust like God to not be sending lying angels to get me to go do bad stuff? So yeah, he sent the lying angels sledge. So he'd get in the airplane today and crash the plane. Yeah. God forbid. You're like, I don't want the lying angels to be bothering me. Who is this guy? Or like the angel of death that comes down and kills all the kids? Yeah, you're like, there's an angel of death. There's a hitman angel. Yeah. And even more terrifying in Hebrew, it's the word means like destroying angel, but the root is actually the word for like to cut someone's throat. So it's even more visceral like, yeah, it's even more like a gory in the Hebrew original. It's like because it never calls it the angel of death. It just calls it destroyer. Yeah. But the word actually, it's the same word you do. So cut the photo of an animal when you're like, butchering it. Right. And you did a whole episode. It's now like you're most viewed episode on Yahweh. Such a bizarre thing that like, in my specializations in Western Azatarisism, and I just woke up one morning, and I just like, I think I was looking at something on YouTube and it was just like, there's not good content about Canaanite mythology. Of which, you know, the Israelite God Yahweh is one part of Canaanite mythology. And I kind of have a, you know, shoot from the hip theory as to why I think Canaanite mythology is slept on. And I, that my shoot from the hip theory of that is like, once you do Canaanite mythology and once Yahweh becomes part of a pantheon, then you have problems. Right. But God just becomes a God. And you know, the big three don't want that. But yeah, I just woke up one morning. I was like, that's not good stuff on Yahweh. I'm going to write an episode on Yahweh. And how would you summarize the thesis of that episode? So the basic thesis is that the God Yahweh has a history, right? That's, and that's a shocking thing to say for whatever reason. I know that like, if I told you that Zeus had a history, no one would bat an eye, or Quetzy Quotal had a history, no one bat an eye, but to say that Yahweh has a history also means that this is not a timeless eternal being. But the basic thesis is that if you take the Hebrew Bible, if you take the archaeological evidence, we have very little archaeological evidence for God. We have a maybe one Egyptian inscription, and then we have another inscription, the Macea Steli, which actually describes Yahweh as being defeated. So the first time Yahweh ever shows up in history is because a king is bragging, that he like broke into a Yahweh shrine, stole some vessels, and dragged them before his God, Hemosh. So the first time Yahweh shows up in history really definitively is someone like flexing on having defeated Yahweh. And then when you're saying Yahweh, you're describing the four-letter-- Yeah, the tetragramm-- The tetragramm-- The yodhavvah. We don't know how it was said, and I know that some people are going to go, "How can he be trying to save them to my name?" It's not allowed. I'm just saying a scholarly approximation of what we think the name was. In fact, I don't think it was actually pronounced like that. In fact, we have pretty good reason to think how it was pronounced, because it's still attached to lots of people's names, like Netten Yahu. That Yahu, it's probably how it was pronounced. The name was probably Yahu, I think, probably they're not Yahweh. Is that why he chose that name? Or is it just like a popular-- I don't know why he-- I don't know what his specific name is, but it's in Yerimahu, like Jeremiah. Any name you hear that that Yah-- at the end of a name in English, it's Yahu. Elijah, Ely Yahu. My God is Yahu. So, I mean, people are like, "You can't say the name." I'm like, "Do you know someone named Elijah?" Yeah. Because Ely Yahu and Hebrew just-- My name-- My God is Yahu. The Delta Gate Age, it might be saying the name. Yeah, so people get their hair and a twist about this name, but I'm like, you're probably saying it all the time. Interesting. It's just preserved in formal names. Right. But I mean, the thesis is that-- So, if you take the Hebrew Bible, the Old Testament, it's a book composed over a long period of time. And just like English, if I were to take a newspaper and put a random paragraph of Shakespeare in there, you would know something had happened. You would be like, you know, this part of the text isn't an older form of English. We all know that Shakespeare is an older form of English. Something happened similarly in Hebrew, that there are some sections of the Hebrew Bible that are in one form and then there are some forms that are recognizably archaic. If we take just those archaic sections and just take all of them out and look at them, theologically, what emerges? What kind of God do we get? And the God that we get is a storm god. The God that we get is a warrior god. And the God that we get seems to be associated with an area south of what is modern day Israel, Palestine and the region of Mounts the ear. So, somewhere down in the southern Jordan or northern Saudi Arabia, actually. And it seems like that god, the really archaic sections are describing that warrior storm god. And at some point that god immigrated into the Judean Hill country near what is now Shuloh. And that seems to have been the case that during the Bronze Age collapse that this god immigrates into that region and ultimately transforms. So, for instance, that Yahweh God, which is a young warrior storm god, becomes assimilated to the elder god of the Canaanite Pantheon, L. And if you've ever imagined what God looks like in the image of God that you get as an old guy on a throne with a beard, you're not imagining Yahweh. You're imagining L. L is the elderly guy on the throne with a big beard. Yahweh is a youthful storm deity. And L and Yahweh get mixed. And also, the Canaanites already have their own indigenous storm god named Baal. And Baal, we have literature about Baal. Yeah, we don't like Baal. And no one likes Baal, except for the Canaanites. And what ends up happening is right, two storm gods when they get mixed. Man, so what ends up happening is that Yahweh and Baal are basically put into combat and ultimately Yahweh triumphs. But really, it's a narcissism of minor difference. There in many ways, identical gods. Baal in Yahweh. Baal in Yahweh. Man, if you look at the literature of the Baal cycle, which is preserved in Ugaritic, they're very similar gods. In fact, there are hymns to Baal that are so similar to hymns and the Psalms that if I just switched the names out, you'd never know. Really? Yeah, they're like really, really similar. I mean, in fact, some scholars have said, and this is pushing it a little bit further than I would be comfortable with. But some have even said that there are Psalms where they originally ball hymns that have just been Yahweh's, like they just cut and pasted the names. Whoa. So, and again, this is the reason why the Bible and the Elijah's cycle is so obsessed with Baal. It's because the gods are so similar. And cities not big enough for both of us. So, I think that the Yallwists, they win not because of divine sanctions, because the North gets destroyed by the Assyrians in 722. And what is happening is that in the South, you know, there's no Baal really in the South, and the Judeans are what survive. And so the axon of history is that that Yallwist ultimately defeats Baal because kind of the North gets defeated. So, what is the relationship between L, Yahweh, and then the Elohim plural? Yeah, so the Elohim were probably, and we don't know exactly the words plural, eventually it becomes singular in use, but it's plural and grammar, probably refers to the divine council of which there are remains in the Bible, where God is addressing, you know, the line spirit we're just talking about, that God seems to be addressing a bunch of other quasi-divine beings. Job, he kind of does this, there's a council, like a court. A court? Yeah, and in fact, the satan, the satan, the Satan, which always has a title, it's always, almost always has satan, the accuser as opposed to a name, and then Job, it's not a name, it's a title. And there seem to have been this council of divine beings, and at some point that council gets demoted into just sort of an angelic army that severed the angelic Marines basically. So, yeah, clearly it wasn't, you know, in fact, there's even a very peculiar line in the inner Deuteronomy where God is giving Yallweh a portion of the earth, and clearly the writer of that thought of there being kind of a hierarchy of gods of which Yallweh was a more minor character than this LL-Young God, and this LL-Young God is giving Yallweh a portion of the world, and that portion of the world, of course, is Palson, Israel. So, there are fossils, theological fossils in the Hebrew Bible, where Yallweh was a God among gods, and it's not until, and this is a debate, you know, if you listen to Dan McClellan, he's going to give you a later date than I would, but I would say that monotheism in any recognizable form doesn't emerge until the Babylonian exile. Wow, sometimes I joke that Israelite religion goes into exile, Judaism comes out, Yallweh goes into exile, God comes back. What is the reference of Yallweh inheriting a portion of the earth? Is that in the Bible Bible? It's at the very end of Deuteronomy, yeah. That's like Deuteronomy 36. Could you pull that up? I'm so curious the language that would appear in like the Bible I have at home. Yeah, I'd be curious. It all depends on the translation. I'm usually trying to read it in Hebrew, but yeah, it's peculiar verse, and it's archaic. It's in one of these archaic poems. So yeah, it's, you know, the, and it's funny because sometimes people get really upset with me about this, they're like, how dare you accuse the ancient Israelites of being polytheists or not monotheists or whatever. I'm like, have you read the prophets? The prophets are constantly complaining about this. Like the evidence for this is not new. The evidence for this is in the prophets. What do they say? The prophets like quit worshipping the gods, quit worshipping Asherah. And we have inscriptions from several different sites that mention Yallweh and his Asherah, which is probably his wife. Because I mean, ancient people, ancient dudes are like modern dudes. Like you don't want a bachelor god. That's like a, that's a weak sauce god. You want a god with a, well, the consort with the wife or the woman. You know, so you had him sort of had a real normative thing. You know, of course, God's hands up, you know, and again, L, right, had a wife up their rot. And when Yallweh becomes assimilated to L, he inherits God's wife, who in Hebrew is not off their rot. And she's Asherah. Is that the sort of Gideon? Does Gideon come in and destroy the Asherapoles? Yeah, it's the same thing. And it's, you know, this, these are Asherapoles. We're not quite sure exactly how they functioned in Israelite religion and stuff like that. But, but yeah, it was probably the case that again, one, first of all, Israelite religion was probably never monolithic. It's not monolithic now. I mean, you go to reforms in a god and go to a herady neighborhood in Williamsburg and ask them about Judaism. They're going to get two different forms of Judaism. And they're not going to agree with each other to think that if it's that diverse now, imagine in the ancient world where you're talking about geographic distribution over hundreds of miles, where people were even more isolated. It's the case that the way they do Israelite religion up there at Tel-Dan, it's going to be very different than we do it down here and Tel-A-Rod, which is interesting because we have a Yallweh shrine archaeologically preserved at Tel-A-Rod, where the, the surface of one of the altars has cannabinoid residue on it. Oh, yeah, they're burning cannabis on the altar. We don't know how much, we don't know why, we don't know, it seems like a shrine that probably was torn down by Josiah. during his reforms or whatever. But yeah, it was a yalway shrine and when they tested it, it's in the Israel Museum, I've seen it. And when they tested it, they found trace evidence of cannabinoids, which means, again, we don't how big the shrine was and we don't know, it was certainly, it was a Holy of Holies, it was certainly inside of the shrine. Who knew how big it was in there, but I mean, we all know what happens, you burn cannabis inside of a small room. - Yeah. - I mean, it could be hotboxing in the Holy of Holies for all we know. - Whoa. So we don't know. I mean, it's, you know, and again, this is sort of grist for the mill for people who want to say, oh yeah, it was all DMT and- - Yeah, the Acacia Wood and you burn it. - You burn it and you get the, you see this. And it's really, the instance is really DMT. I'm like, I don't think so, but look, the evidence is the evidence, that's the data. - Fascinating. - Yeah, so they will say, oh yeah, kind of not both them, was cannabis. And I'm like, that's a false friend, bad linguistics. But I'm like, but there are cannabinoids detected on the telerod shrine. And it's just the only, we just happened to have that shrine. Every other shrine's been destroyed. There's the tele, tele-down shrine. There's a Jerusalem shrine, which is obviously not there anymore. - Why would they be destroyed? - Well, the Jerusalem was destroyed by the Babylonians and by the Romans. So that, that shrine was destroyed. The tele-down shrine was destroyed. I don't know exactly when it was destroyed. The Shiloh shrine, we never found it. People are desperately looking for it. Mattel Aradshrion was probably destroyed by Josiah because Josiah was really interested in consolidating Yahweh worship in Jerusalem as part of his larger political religious consolidation. - Why is exile good for developing monotheism as a religious technology? - God's the ancient world where largely thought of as geographically bound. God's were God of this land. And when the text describes the temple as the house of Yahweh, we should really read that literally. This is where Yahweh lives. Like when God orders stuff from Amazon and gets delivered there, it's a bit animistic in a way. - In a way, yeah, it's like this is a spirit of this land. This is the land that this deity has sovereignty over. And if you go over there, that's Kimosh's land. And up there, that's Baal's land. And over there, that's the Egyptians and their gods, like Ross land. So gods are geographically bound in a way. Well, if you get exiled and you're now not in the land anymore, and you wanna maintain belief in God, you have basically a theological problem. How is it that you can still worship your God and believe in your God if you're not geographically in the land that God has sovereignty over and that God's gotten defeated, frankly? Well, you make it your fault. We violated the covenant and God allowed the Babylonians to do this to us. And our God isn't the God of that land. Our God is the God of all the lands. In fact, our God is the God of all this and your gods are all fake. And you see that move later in the what is called sometimes called Deutero Isaiah, where you begin to get what I think. And again, people like Dan McClellan would disagree with me, and I think there's scholarly debate on this, which is the way it should be. But there in Deutero Isaiah, you begin to see sort of a pretty radical what I think of monotheism or God is saying things like, I create good and I create, I create the light in the dark. I create good and the evil. Which by the way, the rabbis are so concerned about that verse that when it's used in the daily prayer service, they change it. They change it from I create the light in the darkness. I create the good and all things. They don't like the, you know, it's the order of Rechosech, you know, they don't like the bra, the evil. 'Cause it's pretty terrifying that God creates evil. Yes, it's a problem. It's a problem, but that's what Isaiah says. And the rabbis are so uncomfortable with it, they even altered in the prayer book to get rid of it. - Interesting. - They neuter Isaiah to do this. But yeah, in that section of the sections of Isaiah, it's like, no, your gods are just rocks and wood. Yeah, they're not gods. Like our God is really God, just God's implicator. So I think I read in those texts, I think it's more than just what we call monotheistic rhetoric. I think we see monotheism being born. And it's interesting that when the Jews come out of exile and go back to, when they're set free by King Cyrus, who by the way is the only person ever called a Messiah in the Hebrew Bible, they call King Cyrus a Messiah. And when they come back, you don't see a trace of the polytheism anymore. It just doesn't seem like it's there. And in fact, that's when you see Judaism as a religion really emerged at some time third century or so fifth century, it's hard to say exactly. - And do you think they tell themselves like, "Hey, we figured it out, which is why we're now freed from exile and life is good?" - Maybe so. I'm not sure what exactly theological moves they had in their head, but I do think that when the community comes back, and again, most of the people, not everyone came back. A lot of people chose to stay with the people who come back, which I think were probably the hardcore, yallist partisans. I think that they come back with an idea that there aren't other gods. That feature is extremely exportable. - It's maybe the most, it means the biggest meme ever, right? It's like you're no longer bound to any geographic region. You can be a diasporic religion, or rather, it's not even diasporic, it's just that God is everywhere. Your God is just the only God. And then to think about how bizarre an idea this was, I mean, the Romans really thought Judaism was extremely strange. They accepted it as an authentically ancient religion. They're like, your God is invisible and everywhere, and but has to be worshipped in this one temple, and the Romans were like, it's really weird that your God is like, does your God do stuff? Like, 'cause our God's do things. And the Jews are like, no, God's sort of like up there. Other dangels and stuff, they do everything else. They're like the janitors of the universe. And the Romans thought it was an extremely peculiar religion that monotheism struck them as an extremely strange idea. I mean, intimacy didn't they call the Christians like atheists? Yeah. And they're like, you guys only believe in one God? Like, that's basically zero. Yeah, it's the idea that you're certainly not. I mean, atheism is an interesting translation. Sometimes that gets translated as a Greek word a sebia, which means like impiety. That's what Socrates was convicted of. But yeah, it's like you're doing God wrong. Mm-hmm. Like you're God-ing wrong. Were the Roman gods confined kind of to their geography? They were certainly manifested primarily in certain regions. And even the Romans were trying to square through circle two. They built a whole building to deal with this problem called the Pantheon, the All God. And it was intentionally designed to basically be a place where like, you know, it was like the Costco of God. You could go do all the gods there. And so, yeah, even the Romans, I think, were dealing with, in philosophy also, this is a period of middle plateenism. And they were coming to increasingly monism, even if it were still polytheism and expression, but a kind of radical theological monism. So yeah, it's, you know, we think of paganism and polytheism as being the same thing, but that's not necessarily true. And you can see why monotheism wins out. Just from that explanation, if these people are nomadic, their God is not tied to a land. They are tied to the people. And when the people are gathered, God is there. Now it can spread very quickly. And as Christianity comes later and Islam comes later, you can now build this framework anywhere. Yeah, it's the religions are universal. I mean, Judaism is not quiet. It's never going to be the universal's Christianity because of the ritual requirements, circumcision and food. It makes it difficult to convert in, especially for adults, or adult men. But yeah, I think this is part of the reason why Christianity is successful. It's also successful because it tells a very powerful message about Jesus. The last to be first, the first will be last. You're going to go to heaven because you treat people right. You know, everyone's equal in the kingdom of heaven. It's the greatest story ever. It's even if you don't believe it as like-- It's a fence, it's an amazing spiritual truth. I'm like, it's just insanely compelling. Especially when the third of the population of the Roman Empire slaves. Right. You'd imagine the first, you know, a pistol coming into the slave quarters of a giant Roman mansion. Great news. Yeah, good news. All those sacrifices are not going to get you to heaven, just believe. And those people upstairs, God will punish them for what they're doing. Fire. I mean, we can do that. The last will be first and the first will be last, the sheep and the goats. You can easily imagine why soldiers on the battlefield. You don't have to do all these sacrifices to mythos. You don't have to just trust in Christ, have peace, peace, have faith. And for a soldier, you know, and this-- and there's a joke, right, about the Romans of Christianity. It was a religion of slaves and women, you know. And I'm like, yeah, I understand why slaves. Because at the end of the day, the slaves will be first. And even women, to an extent, I mean, not to broadly stereotype, but like extreme sweeps of empathy and charity and like, I think it really speaks to like an emotional element that I don't know if the sort of faiths of the time we're doing. To the same degree. And women are prominent in the church in a way that they weren't prominent with the exception of the Vestal Virgins and other things like that. But we have prominent women from the very beginning of the Jesus movement. His mother, Mary Magdalene, you know, so we have women prominent. We have other women that are mentioned in the pause letters and other texts. So women were playing a prominent role in the religion. I mean, the churches were originally at homes. Women were in charge of homes. Men were in the public. to your women or the private sphere, the churches were in homes up into the second century. Right. So you're in the domain of the woman, right, the literally worship is happening in that domain. And so, yeah, when the Romans say it's a religion of slaves and women, I'm like, huh? This so happens. A third of the population is slaves and a half of the population is women. It's like powerful. It's like, the Christians play numbers game, and they're also building a state within a state. They're hospitals, they're building soup kitchens. They're building libraries. They're building, you know, they're building institutions. And this is a time period as Christianity begins to see as a scent. This is a time period where their empire itself was falling into decadence. I mean, I tell people like, you know, if you want to, if you want to shorten your life, become a Roman emperor, like the clock is ticking, the Praetorian guards killing you tomorrow. Yeah. You know, this is just warring, intern, intern, they sign mass murder. The Roman state was a gangsterocracy, right, that was coming apart. You know, you have the year of four emperors. This is not a stable political system. And underneath it, inside of it, the Christians are building a state within a state. And so when Constantine converts as much as he does, he's not really converting to anything. He's just admitting the situation on the ground. We've fallen apart. Yeah, but basically like the Roman Empire is Christian, whether you like it or not, he's admitting the truth. And he's not really not even baptizing to his deathbed. He remains an ardent follower of Apollo until the end. And also Christianity was pretty cool with syncretizing to a degree. What do you mean syncretizing? It would allow some degree of the old religion to be incorporated into Christianity so that, you know, one of the interesting things that we love to tell ourselves is we don't like to compromise. But everybody is pretty good at compromising. That's how civilization works, it's by people compromising. And you can go to stave churches in Norway and Sweden where you can see pictures of the apocalypse slash Ragnarok where you have clearly Jesus and Thor like fighting fin rear. And you're like, that guy's clearly Odin because he has one eye and that guy's clearly Jesus because he's like crucified hands. And this is like an alter piece. Wow. And you're like, oh yeah, the, it's, it's, it's, some bishop was like that side. There's a plasticity to it. It's like, look, they believe in the end of the world. We believe in them. The world. They, you know, like, if we get some closer to Jesus, we're probably, we're playing a long game. Yeah. We're playing a long game. And so, so I think that Christianity has the ability to, to do that and did. And again, we have the story of Christianity won by the sword and you can count on one hand many times Christians came into a pagan area and start killing people. In fact, it was far more likely for Christians to kill other Christians than it was for them to be killing pagans. You can look at the abagency and crusades or something like that or the third crusade for that matter. But yeah, it's part of the successful Christianity was to create a state within a state. Interesting. And, you know, it outorganized, you know, the, it outorganized the Romans. Right. And again, I think this is a thing that, um, yeah, you get to this day, you know, like how many Catholic charities and Catholic soup kitchens and Catholic schools, all of those are downstream of what the church was building through the, the first and second centuries. Right. Oh, that's fast. It didn't come out of nowhere. Right. I mean, a lot of like modern movements, like Christians like to hang their hat on this. They're like, yeah. So, right. It's women's suffrage. Like, a lot of them were like, the Christian roots in a lot of ways. Yeah. It's a, it cuts in two ways, right? I mean, you know, how many, how early do you see Christians calling for abolition of slavery? Yeah. It took a little bit. Right. It's because it's, they got there. You know, they end up like John Brown and stuff that really like sort of led the, the, the call. And so it's a, it's a, it's a mix of back. Because again, like I said, there, there's no such thing as Christianity. There's people. Mm-hmm. And some people were slavers and some people weren't. And some people were like, this is bad. Um, but it's funny, you know, it's, uh, you look at historically, what was the most preached book in the American South during slavery days? I mean, the Bible. Yeah. You think it was a Bible. It's what, what a pistol. What a pistol from the Bible. Yeah. Look at the Bible. You think was a big one in, in ancient, in like a slave days and, and I'm going to assume Exodus. You would see you would think Exodus. That's a terrible story to be preaching because a slave to get free. Oh, you're saying amongst the slaves. Among slavers. Yeah. Oh, I mean, the one where they're like, treat your slaves good. Yeah. It's like the one where an escape slave goes to Paul, Paul sends them back and says, both be slaves in Christ. Mm-hmm. Like me and you are equal. Slaver and slave are both equal, both slaves of Christ. Yeah. And you can easily, I mean, it's right there in the Bible. Sure. It's a really short little epistle. But it had, you know, we look at the amount of like Southern, you know, sermons on that, you know, the Google index search, right, you know, so it's just people. Well, now no one reads that and I think people who do read it, read it, will read it with some degree of horror. Yeah. Kind of like, wait a second. Like that. They should've said this was really bad, right? You sent the slave back. Yeah. But, but no. Again, I'm not picking on Paul. Like, you know, the Stoics were some of the most virtuous people of the ancient world in terms of really accumulating virtue and really claiming that all people are equal and that we're all cosmopolitan. There's no barbarians. Stoics were really big about that, but name me a single Stoic that called for abolition of slavery. Yeah. It was just how society functioned. There was no, there was no, it was unquestionable in the same way that like, I mean, there's weirdo vegans now, but like most people are not calling for the abolition of ammon agriculture. Right. I mean, we're close made. Mm-hmm. You know, like we're all you and I when everybody will say, yes, slavery sucks. Yeah. Until we like pick up our iPhones and our shirts that are made and factories are so horrible that they have to put nets around them to keep people jumping out. Right. Yeah, sure. It's like, yeah, slavery is forbidden until you do some really really bad. Yeah, and you get incarcerated. Yeah. And then we put you to work in the governor's mansion in Louisiana. Right. I wonder if they exist in the same kind of moral ambiguity that we have, at least I can speak for myself. From like, 13th Amendment is not great, right? Like you can just like force people around incarcerated work, even like, you know, the fact that like they're just out there like just cleaning and doing shit for free. Oh, yeah, working at McDonald's and stuff. It's crazy. Oh, working at McDonald's. Like you can like, I mean, it's amazing. Like it's really like it's the American Southwest wild place having grown up there. Yeah, it's crazy. It's possible that a contractor can have an incarcerated person working at a McDonald's. And I don't like it. But at the same time, I'm not like, I'm not in the streets protesting. Yeah. Like if my kids in a hundred years or great, great, great kids, if they're like, what was like, great, great, grandpa doing during this atrocious, you know, human calamity? They're like, he was doing podcasts about the Bible and what he wasn't out there like protesting. I wonder if there's an element of the stoics that are like, the slavery thing's not great, but it is what it is. We're going to rock the boat. Yeah, it's a mile gun. But yeah, I don't know. Yeah, I teach ethics sometimes at the university. And one of the first things I tell my students is like, we're okay. We're not good. Like we're not really good. And we're not most of us aren't bad actually. We're just okay. I'm like, let's just start there. Yeah. Like, no, most of us aren't engaging in active harm. But most of us also aren't looking at the world, you know, this is what makes profits insufferable. You know, Spinoza says that profits are people that have a profound moral feeling. And the same way that if you were to see a person just being assaulted on the street, you would find, you know, moral outrage. You would be like, absolutely. Now, some kid being hurt, you would just like intervene immediately. No question, right? Your moral, your moral compulsion would just drive you to like, help that kid. Most of us have a strong moral compulsion when we see it in front of our face. And most of us don't have a super strong one when it's out, not in front of us. Spinoza says that's what makes profits profits. Profits are people that have the same moral compulsion when it's in front of their face as when it's in their imagination. And that's why you never invite a profit to a party. Because they're horrible. They ruin all your fun because you're just trying to have a good time, couple of couple drinks. And here comes Amos. Woe to you, cows of Bushon. You let kids work in sweatshops and you've been slave animals and you're like, who is this guy? Not right now. I mean, yeah, we're complicit in this terrible therapy of American capitalism. Sure. Yeah. But stop it with the moat. But who is this guy? And people are like, oh my god, they put the profits to death. I'm like, they're annoying. They're annoying. You go get a, you want a profit in your house? Imagine you're a king and you have all this power and this guy's just like outside your window at doing the morning. Yo, you're bad. Yeah. You worship y'all. You should be worship only y'all. And you're like, oh, god, this guy's back again. That's such an interesting way to frame it. So it's, you know, I think that, but if we were living in Antiquity, we would have been good. We wouldn't have done all the slavery stuff. Come on. We're great. Yeah. We're all great. We're a plus. We wouldn't have done any of the bad stuff. We'd have been, you know, we'd have been wokies and 100% for the first century wokeness. I would have been protesting out there with your sign in Latin. 100%. How dare you? Yeah. Zero no slaves. If I was there at the trial of Jesus, I would have been like, guys, this is crazy. This is the Lord. It's the wrong thing here. They would have put me in the Bible. There would have been like, there was one guy there with long hair, who would kind of like use himself. And he was big on defending him. And they're like, then he was arrested by Pontius by the earth by next to the guy. Exactly. But I would have spent eternity in paradise. Exactly. I would have been on the cross next to him and like, not. It'd take me with. Yeah. It's like, man. We're keeping it real. It goes wrong. Yeah. Well, Dr. Slavs, this has been fantastic. Thank you. I really appreciate the time. And I would love to do this again next time you're back in the city. Yeah. No, I'd love to be back. Part of what I love about this material is that we let it become in human. We let it become like cold and sterile and like it becomes too holy to take it seriously. And part of what I love about the Bible and the cultism and other stuff is that it's alive. It has life. These stories are like oh the architect covenant gave Philistines, hemorrhoids. That's hilarious. It's just real. There's something about it. It hits different. And what I love to do is just I love to have these conversations where these important texts from a cultism to the Bible, whatever y'all are. You know Faulkner said that the past isn't the past isn't dead. It's not even past. And I think that he's right about that as one southerner talking to another southerner. For Faulkner I really hear that and my job is to be able to say no it's not not even past. It's happening right now. We're in it. We're in the shadow of it. We're living it. The debates never end. I mean the amount of times that I've read like a love letter from an old general or even a debate that happens in the Old Testament you're like oh people are still debating this. Like it never really changes. Even the fascination with the trismis thrice great. It's like the same kind of hermetic no. No. Hermes trust me. Trust me. I guess to trust me. I guess this. I always must. The fact that that's coming up and people like oh there's ancient Egyptian truth that we need to discover. It's like that's what people are doing right now. People are fascinated by like the truth of the ancient Egyptians. They just history never repeats but it does rhyme. It does and again my job is to be like it's not our first rodeo. Yeah well I'm glad you're here and I hope this is not our only rodeo. Let's write a shem. Let's do it again with a shem.