So the big idea that I wanted to sort of pitch is that there's only
one Pentecost, and that this Pentecost happens at one point in like an eternal
moment, and Noah and Abraham and Moses and the Apostles all participate in that
day of Pentecost. But so did the people at the Tower of Babel.
Yeah, so did the people at the Tower of Babel. And that if
you participated it correctly, then it will unify and also multiply. And if
you don't give it your focus, if you don't give it your attention correctly,
then you're going to be divided and you're going to be scattered. This
is Jonathan Peshel, Welcome to the Symbolic World. So hello everyone. I
am back with Richard Rowland for Universal History. This is the first episode we're
recording after this saball Growth Summit, if I remember right, that's right.
Yeah. And so what we want to do is go back into the Tower
of Babbel story, because Richard had some amazing reveals about that story and how
it connects, you know, to the to the Old Testament, I mean,
how it connects to Pentecosts in crazy ways. That that. Yeah,
it just blew me away when I found them out. So I think that
we definitely need to go back into that. So Richard, take us,
take us away. Yeah, so I'm going to kind of give away the
farm. Now, there were some things that I was teasing a little bit
in the last Tower Babbel video that we did, and I said, you've
got to come to the summit to get the rest of it, and of
course lots of people couldn't come to the summit. So the good news is,
I'm gonna I'm going to basically kind of give you guys what you know,
what was missing because actually at the summit, I still couldn't say everything
that I wanted to say because because uh, it just wasn't time and I
was trying to be respectful of the other speakers and not take their time,
because that's like the unforgivable sin as a presenter, is going over your time.
So so I'm going to talk a little bit. There will be like
a little bit of repeat, because what I want to do is to uh
just just frame things up a little bit. So there'll be a little bit
of a repeat here. But we can we can go. But that'll that'll
be all right. So we talked last time about the Book of Jubilees,
and the Book of Jubilees is really important to the Christian tradition. Actually,
it doesn't matter if the Book of Jubilees is not in your Bible. It
doesn't even matter if at some point the reading of the Book of Jubilees was
maybe banned in your church sometime a long time ago. There are a lot
of things, well that did I don't think that happened with Jubilees. I
know what happened with Enoch in the in the West. But but the Book
of Jubilees just has a lot of inform that you probably take for granted as
a Christian. That's but it's actually stuff that's not explicitly in the scriptures.
If you've ever had the idea that the devil and other demonic spirits are fallen
angels, the idea that the sons of God mentioned in Genesis are fallen angels,
or the idea that the sons of God mentioned in Genesis are descendants of
set actually both of those ideas come from this whole body of literature that includes
Jubilees. Even the idea that righteous people go to a place called heaven or
paradise, and wicked people go to a place called hell, and that there
are rewards and punishments that are proportional to your righteousness or your wickedness. These
are things that are not explicit in the Old in the Old Testament, unless
you have Third Esdras in your Old Testament, which some of us do,
in which case than your your gold. But anyway, yeah, so so
some of us, I love say, some of us, like, who
is the US that has It's just the Russian Orthodox Church. Really, I
didn't even know that. If you're in that sort of like Slavic Russian Orthodox
tradition, then you can make the case that third address is actually in your
old Testaments. Well luckily we are, so we are. That's right,
third address, but one is getting us ready for Dante, by the way,
that is yeah, third esdres As. I mentioned in yesterday in the
retrospective that we did for the summit. Somebody asked a really fun question about
apocrypha in the retrospective, and I said, you know, my favorite apocryphal
book, although actually it's in my Old Testament, is third Esdras, and
it's actually one of the important foundational texts for understanding the divine comedy, which
I think is something most people don't know. So if you like this sort
of thing we'll be doing, we'll be starting our first class on the Divine
Comedy. It'll be five weeks. It'll be just on the Inferno, and
then we'll come back in a few months and do Purgatorio and then Peridisio.
And it's starting Orthodox Bright week. So that's the week of I'm just going
to go ahead and tell people because I think you'll be able to order the
class. It's going to be the week of the fifth. So that'll be
Thursday the ninth May the ninth, Thursday May the ninth is when our first
class will be. So anyway, okay, So all of these things that
people assume to be true about the scriptures and how we read the scriptures come
from Jubilees and from these other works generally referred to as the apocrypha. And
so with that kind of being sad, I want to look at specifically the
idea of feasting and sacrifice in the Book of Jubilees real quick. So one
of the main themes of the Book of Jubilees is the idea that the Old
Testament liturgical calendar, that is, the feasts of the Law are ontological realities.
That the way the Book of Jubilees puts it is that these feasts have
been celebrated in heaven since the creation of the world. So and this includes
things like the observance of the Sabbath and then also the Great Feast of the
Mosaic Covenant. Now, obviously you can see the establishment of the Sabbath in
the Genesis story, right, but Jubilees sort of takes this idea farther.
So jubiles is kind of what you could call like a mid rasher, like
a commentary, a really like an expansion of Genesis. Sometimes that's called like
lesser Genesis for that reason. And so it takes this idea a little bit
further, and it says that along with the observance of the Sabbath, that
the Great Feast of the Mosaic Covenant, which which importantly Genesis predates the giving
of the Mosaic Covenant. Right, So the Great Feast of the Mosaic Covenant
actually predate the Covenant. Now, what's the implication of that, by the
way, for Christians, Well, is that you keep celebrating these feasts,
like even if you're not part of the Mosaic Covenant, you would keep celebrating
these feasts. More on that in a minute. And the reason that their
ontological realities is because they basically they basically like reflect How do I say this?
You could say that these fees reflect certain heaven reality, heavenly realities that
are kind of baked into the world at its creation. So participating in these
days of rest and feasting like the Sabbath, the day of Atonement, first
Fruits, tabernacles, the hidden significance of the eighth Day, and of course
Posco or Passover, which is the last those are the feasts that are introduced
in Jubilees. Wait, so in Jubileezer is already an introduction of the eighth
day idea, because I know it's in rabbinical text. People have told me
that that in rabbinical commentary there are places where it says when the messicons,
we will no longer celebrate on the sixth day, but on the seventh day.
And I was like, what that's wild? This is in uh,
this this happens in Jacob's visions that he has around the birth of Benjamin and
the death of Rachel in Jubilee. Yeah. Yeah, so this is that's
that that that is in there. Wow, that's in there. Yeah.
So all of this stuff is kind of there in Jubilees. And as as
we're going to talk about in a minute, this becomes very important for the
formation of the Christian liturgical year. Yeah. So the idea is that by
pertin disipating in these things, it's a way to join human life and activity
that is bounded by time to eternal realities. Right, so that you know,
you could say, somebody might say, so that God's will is done
on earth as it is in heaven. Right, someone might say someone might
say that so much of this reflects and the community community that wrote the Book
of Jubilees, or that at least copied and preserved it was a community that's
very concerned with calendars, the festal cycle, all these different kinds of things.
Father Stephen Dejung has a great book on the Apocrypha. It's just called
Apocrypha, and he's got you know, if you want to get the historical
background who wrote these things and who preserved them. By the way, almost
all these texts were preserved almost exclusively in Christian monasteries, so that's how we
still have them. So other than the Sabbath, the first fruit to the
first feast to be instituted in Jubilees is the Feast of the First Fruits,
and this is known variously in the Old Testament and the Jewish tradition of Chevrot,
which is the feast of weeks. It's also called the festival of Reaping
and also simply called Pentecost, although it's not usually called Pentecost in Jubilees because
Pentecost refers to the fact that it's the fiftieth day after Pasco or Passo,
which hasn't actually been instituted yet, like humanity is given Pentecost before they're given
Passover in the in the narrative in Jubilees. So but yeah, but I'll
probably call it Pentecost mostly or the Feast of the first Fruits. So we
shouldn't be surprised to find that this feast has a certain primacy of place in
Jubilees. And this is because the law is given to Moses on the feast
of the First Fruits. So when Moses goes up the mountain and he received
the Law from God that is happening on Pentecost. And so the thing that
Pentecost is, you could say, is primarily a It is a celebration of
the giving of the Law of God, which is actually a revelation of who
God is. And then the making of a covenant between God and man,
or the making or the renewal of a covenant between God and man. So
that's what Pentecost is. That's the We'll talk about maybe the shape of more
of the shape of the feast in a minute, but that's the event.
So Jubilees has a frame narrative, and the frame narrative is that the Angel
of the presence, who is Jesus. By the way, we know this
because Jesus quotes himself in Jubilees, in the in the Gospel according to Saint
Matthew, and by the way, Jesus and various apostles quote in reference even
Saint Stephen in his in his his sermon before they stoned him to death,
right St. Stephen, the proto Martyr, he makes several references to things
in Genesis that aren't in Genesis, but they're in Jubilees. Wow, So
he's either quoting from Jubilees, or he's quoting from some a related tradition.
Right, So the frame narrative is that the Angel of the Presence is giving
the law to Moses, which is an event that happens on Pentecost. And
so therefore Pentecost is the most important feast throughout the book of Jubilees. It's
even more important than Pasca, which isn't actually introduced unto the very end.
So what we're told is that the very first Pentecost, the very first feast
of first fruits, happens in the aftermath of the Great flood when Noah offers
up his offering to the Lord. Now, as you would expect if you
know the story in Genesis, Noah's offering pleases the Lord, and God makes
a covenant with Noah. And the covenant is not to destroy the earth again.
But one of the things that people forget, or not with a flood
anyway, one of the things that people forget, though, is that God
also when he made the covenant, he also gave certain laws what it's usually
called like the Noah Kayde laws donat the meat, yes, and actually certain
laws that don't affect certain laws that affect animals. By the way, one
of the things that happens is God puts the fear of mankind into animals.
That's why animals run away from you usually when you're in the forest, right,
and things like that. Like, so there's a there's a change in
the state of what creation is right that happens at the giving of this law
and of this covenant. Yeah, many people like By the way, even
today, Jews understand that that law in some ways precedes the law of Moses
because it is the standard by which all of humans are judged. And so
all the non Jews are not judged by Moses's law, but are judged by
Noah's law. That's right, And you still have this understanding in for instance,
the very first church council, the first Council of Jerusalem in the Book
of Acts, that's what they said. Basically, they take the Noahaide laws
and they apply those to gentile converts to say, for gentiles coming into the
church, you have to live by these laws, but you don't have to
keep the Torah. They explicitly, I forget, they explicitly say which laws
those are, and they're exactly the laws that are. Yes, yes,
Yeah, it's donty things strangled, abstained from fornication, all that stuff,
because basically all of that stuff goes along with idolatry. That's kind of the
subtext there is that is that even fornication in the ancient world, like there
were just random prostitutes in towns in the ancient world, of course, but
most prostitution in the ancient world is connected to the cults of certain deities.
Right, So even fornication and things like this, I mean, even if
you're like committing adultery or something, you would still say that there's like a
god involved in that. It's like arrows or something. So the things that
were specifically supposed to abstain from, as they understood in the Book of Acts,
are things that have to do with idolatry. And that's also a tradition
that comes from Jubilee. So I'll just kind of go over the account of
the giving of the Noakhaide laws as it is in the Book of Jubilees.
We're told that humanity can need all animals, which the implication, by the
way is that's not something they were doing before, but that they can never
eat meat with the blood in it, so nothing strangled. And in Jubilees
this is connected to specific instructions about worship and sacrifice. Mankind should offer worship
to God and seek his forgiveness each morning and evening. So this is the
establishment of the cycle of the morning and evening offerings, the morning and evening
sacrifice, which is something that we still basically maintain in the church with the
services of Matten's investments. And then also that mankind should keep the festival of
the First Fruits each year. So this is the third thing. And now
we'll note something that's been sort of added to what you find in Genesis.
So it says and he gave to Noah and his sons a sign that there
should not again be a flood on the earth. He said, his bow
in the cloud for a sign of the eternal covenant that there should be by
the way, bou means like literally his weapon. That's what a rainbow is.
I super hate. All the people are like, it's actually a circle,
and that's to make you think of a wedding ring, and like this
is a common explanation for the rainbow. It's like, well, nobody knew
what that meant until we got in airplanes, and then we flew above the
world and we aw that from the air, rainbows are circles, and therefore
it's a wedding ring. And that's why the wedding ring is the sign of
the covenant, and like whatever, this is the thing you hear at Protestant
weddings sometimes. By the way, anyway, super annoys me. It's his
bow, because it's his bow, it's his weapon. It's the weapon with
which he destroyed the world. Right, that's what a bow is. Anyway,
this is very common, like ancient Eastern Semitic language. So he said
his bow in the cloud for a sign it the eternal covenant, that there
should not again be a flood on the earth to destroy it all the days
of the earth. For this reason it is ordained and written on the heavenly
tables. So that this idea of the heavenly tables is language that Jubilees comes
back to again and again, and it's the idea that there's a heavenly torah
or there's a heavenly law, and that's what everything is referencing back to.
And that's basically you could say, that's the thing by which the world consists,
is that by the heavenly law and the earthly law, like the tory
that's given a Moses is like the earthly manifestation of ripresent of that. But
the real one is this divine laws. So it's ordained written on the heavenly
tables that they should celebrate the feast of weeks in this month once a year,
to renew the covenant every year. And this whole festival was celebrated in
heaven from the day of creation until the days of Noah twenty six jubilees and
five weeks of the year. And Noah and his sons observed it for seven
jubilees and one week of years until the day of Noah's death, and from
the day of Noah's death his sons did away with it until the days of
Abraham. This is an important detail, and they ate blood, and as
we're going to see here in a minute, eating blood is connected to idol
worship. But Abraham observed it, and Isaac and Jacob and his children observed
it up to thy days, that is Moses' days, and in thy days
the children of is real forgot it until you celebrated anew on this mountain.
So remember that The context here is the giving of the Law at Sinai.
And do thou command the children of Israel to observe this festival and all the
generations, for a commandment unto them one day in the year is that in
this month they shall celebrate the festival, for is the feast of weeks and
the feast of first fruits. This feast is twofold and of a double nature.
According to what is written and engraven concerning concerning it, celebrate it.
So these laws are written or engraven upon the heavenly tables of the Law,
and by keeping them, what God promises. He goes on to promise Noah
is that if you keep these laws, so don't eat things strangled, which
is related to idolatry, worship God twice a day, morning and evening,
and keep the festival of Pentecost every year. If you do these things,
then God promises that humanity will continue to cohere, that they will be safe
from the ravages of chaos, as exemplified by the flood. And there's a
really interesting reference here by the way, to the double nature of the feast.
Damn that what are they referring to? Not everybody agrees on this.
It might refer to the two occasions of the giving of the Law and the
covenants, right after passing through the flood and then after passing through the Red
Sea, but it might also refer to the fact that it has a heavenly
and earthly nature. That the say that every ancient agricultural society has a feast
of first fruits, right, that's just something that everybody has. But it's
like a joining of that part of the earthly cycle to a heavenly reality.
And by the way, this is not a problem whenever somebody like looks at
a Christian feast or a Jewish feast and like, oh, this is just
a leftover from some fertility religion or whatever. Like God made the world and
the cycle of the seasons is is what it is? Like, Yeah,
it's it's not. It's it's so silly to think that that that the relationship
between the natural cycle and heavenly realities should be arbitrary. In fact, no
Christian has ever really thought that. And when I say this, I mean
like we have had arguments and even even sisms over calendars, and I know
that the calendar thing is something that some types people are like, oh,
that's just stupid whatever, And I'm not trying to start a calendar argument so
that nobody, nobody come at me. You know, I'm on whatever calendar
my bishop is on. But yeah, there you go, the idea that
a calendar doesn't matter, that it's arbitrary and not really important. It's not
really a Christian idea. Yeah anyway, all right, so so so yeah,
my question is too, like the double aspect of the of the feast.
You know, one of the things I'm seeing with these, with the
notion of Pentecost, is that it seems to be a feast that is that
is about the man in which Heaven and Earth touch each other, right,
like this, that's exactly what it's about. And so when heaven and Earth
touch each other, then you and it makes sense with the idea also first
fruit, which is the idea that you see if you think about it in
terms of agriculture as well, right, so you see the effect of the
seed, the first effect of the seed that has come from Heaven in the
world, and that would be the equivalent of the law, because the law
is is a fruit. It's not it's a fruit of the connection of Heaven
and earth, it's not the actual connection, and it's like the it's like
the fruit of that. And so you can imagine the same with all the
laws or all the manifestations of that covenant. And so in that sense already
you can kind of see that sometimes you know some you know, when Jesus
talks about how you know you the wheats and the tears grow together. Yes,
right there that there is also an aspect of the fruits or the first
fruits that can be maybe negative. Anyways, all right, continue on and
we'll see. No, that's good, that's good. That yes. So
the Angel of the Presence then goes on to give us certain details in Jubilees
about the history of the feast after Noah. Noah kept it and also the
related laws of daily worship, not eating meat with the blood in it,
et cetera, and it's forgotten after his death, and this leads to the
scattering of the nations at Babbel Abraham. Abraham is then the first person to
start keeping it again, and also his sense Isaac and Jacob keep it.
And this is all in Jubilees. We get actually accounts of when did Abraham
keep cost For instance, we'll come to that in a second, but their
descendants also forget it, and that leads to their captivity in Jacob. Right,
So if you don't keep the feast, then you're scattered or you go
into captivity. And structurally this will set up for set us up for the
next episode in the Genesis material that we find in Jubilees, and that's the
Tower of Babel. So in between the account of the aftermath of the flood
and that of the Tower of Babel in Jubilees, we get several important details
which really help kind of fill in the gaps of Genesis, which is the
whole against the whole point of Jubilees, and and help us understand the tower's
significance. So first we get the account of Noah's drunkenness, which is also
there in which is also there in Genesis. Obviously. Now the account of
Noah's drunkenness is very important to the pattern of the feast of Pentecost. I'll
talk about this maybe more in a minute, but every time that Pentecost is
celebrated in the scriptures, you'll have somebody receives the law from God and they
come down to the people, and then there's some strange episode of drunkenness that
happens for Noah. It's it's he gets drunk, right, and then his
son takes advantage in whatever whatever that means. We want to well, well,
there's there's there's a couple of things that it means it. I think
there's a strong case Father Steven de Young is written about this. But I
noticed the same thing too, like there's a strong case to mean that there's
a strong case to be made that it means that he had incestuous relationship with
his mother while Noah was drunk, because that's what if you look at the
phrase uncovering your father's nakedness everyone else in the Old Testament, that's what it
means. It means, and then that makes that that makes canaan. Then
this, you know, like a product of incests, which explains why the
curse comes on him instead of on him anyway. Anyway, Yeah, we
talk. We have a video about that with father Stevens. So yes,
I know, I know, I know, I know. So yeah,
I just yeah, people go back and watch that if if you want to.
But uh yeah, pleasant stuff. So but another example, another example
is of course the Apostles, right when the apostles are at Pentecost there well,
actually we'll talk about the Apostle in a second. But another easy example
is when Moses comes down, you know, at Pentecost, right, he's
received the law. He comes down the mountain and there's for people. The
people are, you know, engaging in like a giant drunken orgy. Right,
So there's this weird thing of like drunkenness happening at the end of Pentecost,
which I think is which I think is interesting. So we have that
and the Curse of Ham and then right after that we have Noah's sons divide
the earth among themselves by lots, and this basically foreshadows the Table of Nations
in Genesis, which is, as we've talked about many times, is a
vital passage to understanding the whole idea of medieval universal history. So after this
happens, Noah makes a kind of a final testament in which he restates the
Noahai laws and then shares his fears or what is going to happen to his
sons and their sons after his death, you know, as far as they're
going to stop keeping the laws, and that all of these things are going
to happen. Of course, that's what happens. And then what we're told
is that unclean spirits, so demons and the offspring of demons led by a
mastema who is also Satan or the devil like He's got kind of different names
throughout Jubilees, but they're used interchangeably. They torment humanity and they start to
lead humans astray after the flood, and so this this sets up another very
important idea in the New Testament is that on the prayers of Noah, these
demons are imprisoned in the underworld, all of them except for one tenth,
who are allowed to continue to roam the earth and test mankind. This is
an idea which Saint Peter will refer to when he talks about uh talks about
the ones chained in Tartarus. Right, this is the one. This is
like the whole idea when when uh, you know, Jesus you know comes
to the demons that are inhabiting Yeah, you know them before our time.
Yeah, that the time is the end of is the day of the Lord,
right, which they think is the end of the world, But the
Day of the Lord is actually that's when God comes to you, right,
So, so I mean that's the subtext there is it actually is their time.
But yeah, so anyway, all of this once again see father Stephen
de Young's published works. But so they're allowed to continue to run the earth
in test mankind and including by afflicting them with like various diseases. And so
we are told that Noah is then given a series of books, and he's
actually given them according to a related tradition, he's given them by the archangel
Raphael, who's the sort of the patron angel of like healing. That's he's
given a series of books with the knowledge of the medicines and seductions of the
demons and how to combat them, interestingly with herbs from the earth. This
is such an interesting idea to me because it's like you can already see the
idea of the garments of skin or like the old word for this is pharmicon,
right, the thing that like it's death, but also you can use
it to ward off death. Right, That's what is where we get our
word pharmaceutical from. It's also interesting to think that in some ways it's it's
the redemption of the you know, of the of the Book of Enoch,
story because in some ways those things were revealed to humans by the demons,
and so the archangel Gabriel has to in some ways reveal them with their solution,
you know. And so it's like it's the it's this completion of the
pattern of how civilization and and this is also makes sense because that's what Noah
is and that's where that's who Noah is. Noah is the one who takes
techne, who takes these revelations from this the sons of God that became civilization,
became technology and weapons, and he makes the arc out of it,
you know. And that's why Noah is often said to be married to Tubulcane's
sister, because he integrates, he's able to use this aspect of the world
kind of turn it. And so the idea that you believe that Gabriel would
reveal Raphael, but yes, right, sorry, sorry, that Raphael would
reveal this again to no uh, you know, the more pharmacon aspect of
it, which was part of the the the Enoch tradition, it makes a
lot of sense. Well. And and the fun thing is that Raphael does
this again in Tobit, right, So so the book of Tobit which is
actually is in your Old Testament. For the majority of Christians that that have
lived, you won't have it if you're if you're a Protestant, then it'll
be an apocrypha. But but most most Christians at most times have had the
Book of Tobat in their Old Testament. And uh, Patristic commentaries on Tobit,
by the way, are awesome, very very fun. Uh the venerable
bed An Anglo Saxon Anglo Saxon Monk and and and and uh you know,
writer theologian, et cetera. He he's a wonderful commentary in Tobatt. But
anyway, in the Book of Tobit, this is exactly what this is exactly
what the uh, the archangel Raphael does is he comes to he comes to
uh Tobit and and actually helps him, helps him overcome the wiles of the
demons by doing things that Part of the reason that Luthor didn't like Tobad is
because he felt like it was too magical, Like there's too many things,
too many things that are like magic. Is like, oh, you're going
to go catch a certain fish and do the certain thing with it, and
then you'll make some incense and the incense will drug the demon away and things
like this and that really like you know, when they're trying to like purge
all the superstition you know, from the world or whatever, like Tobad has
to go. But but but but this is this is this is kind of
like I mean, that's the thing that Raphael does. That's what Raphael does.
Like he's a healer, but he's more than just a healer. He
shows the basically shows the way the demon works and then gives you a way
to counteract it. So yeah, so uh and then we're told that in
the days of Peleg, the city, the Tower of Babel, or really
the city of Babel is built, and it's not simply a tower. It's
a city and a tower. And Father Stephen de Young I made a point
about this at the summit. Father Stephen de Young got onto me. It
was like, well, obviously there's a city around it. I will just
continue to maintain that. Most people don't always don't necessarily connect the tower with
the city. Really, like, well, when I was a kid,
we knew there was some kind of connection between Babyl and Babylon. Obviously they're
the same thing, but we knew there was some kind of connection between the
two. But I think that I was always told that the Tower of Babel
was built first, and then later people came along to the ruins and it
built the city of Babylon or something like this, something like this, But
the tower was always just like like even go look at artistic depictions of it.
Sometimes it's shone with a city, but most of the time it's shown
alone, just like a big tower standing out in a field or whatever,
which which makes no sense if you think about it for like three seconds.
But a surprising number of people, myself included, grew up with like that
mental image, and so I think it's worth mentioning. So we're told in
Jubilee that it takes forty three years to build. We get its dimension.
These are details we don't get in Genesis, of course, and we're told
that it's, you know, again, not simply a tower. It's a
city and a tower. The city is in a square or rectangle, and
so the idea of the city being a perfect squur so it's not a round
wall, it's a perfect square. This is actually very important to understanding you
know, the apocalypse, right, and the scent of the New Jerusalem,
and the Lord says, And in Genesis the Lord says, now nothing will
like nothing will be impossible for them, or something like that. But in
Jubiles it's like a little clearer. It says the Lord says, now nothing
will escape them, which I think communicates very well the totalizing nature of the
spirit of Babel. Right, and then he confuses the tongues. So after
the confusion of the tongues, a great wind comes and casts the tower down.
And the mention of the wind which destroyed the tower references this very old
Jewish tradition, which by the way, is also found in the Sibiling Oracles
and also in Josephus and Josepha's account of the fall of the Tower of Babel.
So this is something everybody in the ancient world believed about the Tower babbel
Is that had been destroyed by a great wind, although this it's not a
detail in Genesis. And this passage is bracketed by two passages concerning master men
and the evil spirits, one of which I mentioned just a moment ago.
And these passages make it very clear that the context in which we are meant
to understand the building of the Tower of babel is that of idolatry. So
it says the sons of Noah began to war on each other, to take
captive and to slay each other, and to shed the blood of men on
earth, and to eat blood, and to build strong cities and walls and
towers, and individuals began to exalt themselves above the nation. Boy, that's
not a fun thing that you think about, and to found the beginnings of
kingdoms, and to go to war with people against people, and nation against
nation, and city against city, and all began to do evil and to
acquire arms, and to teach their son's war, and they begin to capture
cities and to sell male and female slaves. And or the son of Cassad
built the city of Ur of the kladies, and called this name after his
own name and the name of his father. And they made for themselves molten
images, and they worshiped each idol the molten image which they made for themselves.
And they began to make graven images and unclean simulacra, which is not
I don't want to know what they mean by that. And malignant spirits assisted
and seduced them into committing transgression and uncleanness, and the Prince Mastima exerted himself
to do all of this, and he sent forth other spirits, those which
were put under his hand, to do all manner of wrong and sin,
and all manner of transgression, to corrupt and destroy, and to shed blood
on the earth. And it goes on. It's a really bad time.
So basically, so now I was talking about the foundation of Er. Yeah,
so that so Ura is built after Babel falls. Okay, yeah,
But basically the point of these two episodes before and after the Tower of Babel
is to show that the idea of building a city in a tower is connected
to the idea of idolatry, right, that that's what it's for. So
this general state of affairs continues until Abraham, and Abraham is pious and as
the is the first man since the death of Noah to reject idolatry and to
worship the One True God. This is what we're told in Jubilees. So
as a result of his piety. By the way, there are other traditions
that actually have Abraham like contemporary with Nimrod, and like he's there at the
fall of the Tower of Babylon. That stuff is really fun. But anyway,
that's not necessarily in Jubilees, the timeline is like a little foggy.
Yeah. So as a result of his piety and his efforts in defying the
work of Masdema, destroying his father's idols, so on and so forth,
God sends an angel to open Abraham's mouth and ears so that he can understand
Hebrew. And Hebrew is the knowledge which has been forgotten since the fall of
the Tower of Babel. It actually says that the word, the language of
Hebrew has been lost since the fall. So if you're reading that in like
a post Augustinian context, you would be like, oh, since since Abraham,
sorry says Adam, since Adam and Eve like just that tower, But
it probably means the fall of the tower. That's the most recent fall that's
been talked about, and that's where you know confused, tongues are confused and
everything else, and that the fall in Eden was not like before Augustine.
It's not the defining fall for everybody, certainly not for ancient Jews. There's
various ones. So he's given the knowledge of Hebrew, and this allows him
to read the books of his father Tera. Now we don't know exactly know
what these books are. They seem to have been passed down from Noah,
so maybe these are the books that Raphael gave him. But they recount the
true history and the nature of the world up to that time. And it
is from these books that Abraham learns the law of God. And all of
this is many generations before the same law is going to be given again to
Moses on Sinai. So all this culminates in Jubilee chapter fifteen, when Abraham
sacrifices at the feast of the First Fruits and offers a sacrifice to God.
God accepts Abraham's sacrifice, and this is the occasion of the first giving of
the Abrahamic Covenant. So this is the next covenant that we meet in Genesis,
and everybody knows the story. Abraham cuts the the animals in half and
then like God comes between them, like a smoking lamp and a burning furnace
and all this stuff. But in Jubilee that happens very explicitly at Pentecost.
So Noah celebrates Pentecost and God makes a covenant with him. Abraham celebrates the
Pentecost and God makes a covenant with him, and all of this is being
told to us when Moses is celebrating Pentecost and God is making a covenant with
him. Is there is there in Abraham? Is there a case of drunkenness
after that? Or so? I was just wondering that I can there is
something and I can't remember what is now? Hold on, what's the story
right after the right after this? Oh? So in in Jubilees it is
Sarah's laughter. Huh that comes after the Yeah, and and and I think
this is sort of like to counteract the drunkenness, right, it's the institution
of circumcision. So that's right right after that. Okay, so right after
the which first the laughter first, Yeah, it's circumcision first. Oh.
The other fun detail that you get in Jubilees. And this is something that
I think Father Doom Deong has talked about, is we're told right after the
institution of circumcision that all of the nations have been given to have been given
to demons to rule, which it self is a kind of disorder. It
says the laws for all the generations forever, and there's no circumcision of the
days, and no omission of one day out of the eight days for his
an eternal ordinance or dan didn' written on the heavenly tables. Everyone that is
born, the flesh of whose forcekain is not circumcised on the eighth day,
belong if not to the children of the covenant which the Lord made with Abraham,
but to the children of the destruction. And it goes on. It
says, for the angels of the Presence and all the angels sanctification have been
created from the day of their creation, and before the angels of the Presence
and Angel of sactification, he has sanctified Israel. So actually Israel has been
set apart even before the angels were made, so that they should be with
Him and with his holy angels. And do thou command the children of Israel,
and let them have deserve the science of this covenant for the generation as
an eternal ordinance, and they will not be rooted out of the land,
for the command is ordained for a covenant. So this is still the giving
of law. And there's a by the way says for Ishmael and his sons
and the brothers, and his brothers and Esau. The Lord did not cause
to approach him, and he chose them, not because they were the children
of Abraham, because he knew them and he chose Israel to be his people.
And then it goes on and yeah, we get Sarah's we get the
announcement of the prediction of the birth of Isaac, and Sarah's laughter and the
angelic visitation like all of that stuff, and then the destruction of Sodom and
goodmore. It all comes right in that sequence, which is the same sequence
you get in Genesis. I think, I think finding the drunken this parallel
here is maybe a little difficult. It might be difficult, but yeah,
I'll think about that a little bit, but we have to think about it.
Symbolism. The laughter is a kind of counter reaction to the revelation,
right, it's like this this this, this lack of control, that's the
you know, that's so give gives Sarah a black by the way, people
like, you know, that's what else would you do? Like I think
that, no, we often have to put ourselves in position of these characters.
Like some of the reactions even that God will punish, are completely reasonable,
like the arc falling over and someone going to like to stop it.
It's like what would you do? I would do that, you know,
Yeah, yeah, I think that's like Sarah's uh, Sarah's laughter, like
is one of those things, like it's not a haha, that was funny
laughter. It'd say what else do you do but laugh? Like in the
face of somebody of God telling you this when you're in your nineties, Like,
what else do you do? But anyway, okay, so we'll think
about that a little bit more. I think that there probably is something there.
I mean, like all the Sodom and Gomora stuff happens right after that.
Yeah, so that's something that something I got to think about. Now
at this point, I have to confess to everybody that I bury the lead.
So this is the big secret. I apologize for all the repeated material,
but I wanted to set this up. So this is the big secret
that we didn't share in the last video. Here, I must once again
mention that the author of Jubilees is hyper attentive, like obsessively attentive to calendars.
He always tells you the day or at least the week in which significant
events are occurring, and if you pay very close attention, you will find
that God descends to confuse the tongues and scatter the nations from Shinar in the
fourth week, which is how Jubilees usually introduces the feast of Pentecost. In
other words, for instance Jubiles chapter fifteen, the context of Babel is thus
a bad It's it's a celebration of Pentecost. That's what's happening at babylting when
the tower is destroyed, celebration of Pentecost. They're celebrating Pentecost, but it
is a act of false celebration of idolatrous worship. And the Lord descends what
happens at Pentecost. God descends like Earth meets Heaven. Right. So God
descends as he did with Noah and with Abraham, but this time it's not
to make a covenant or give God's law, but it is rather to bring
confusion and scattering, which is the promised consequence of idolatry. So Jubilees relates
to us this tradition, which contrasts the worship and the giving of the covenant
to two righteous men Noah Abraham and actually later Isaac also celebrates Jubilees Pentecost,
and Jubilees to idolatry and therefore confusion and dispersion. It contrasts the generation of
babble against the people like the people of God. And so these are we
could say, three different events in linear history. But remember that Pentecost has
been celebrated in heaven since the world was created. This is what we're told.
Well that means Pentecost is always been celebrated in heaven, right, Like
it's always like it's a reality there that our experience of linear time is connects
to through the act of celebration, right, And this is this is a
really important way. I mean I I the symbolism of feasts and celebration,
and I know it's Heaven meeting Earth. Like you can just say that or
what, But like if you really think about, like what is happening when
you celebrate something, I feel like that's the whole Like to me, that's
the whole enchilada. Like if you could just understand like what's going on with
celebration, then you'd understand everything in the Bible and also everything about the world.
Like it's I just like I get stuck on it so much because it's
celebration. Is the act of celebration is the way by which we connect to
higher or lower realities, right, and it's it's really it's the way that
you know, you you gave this great keynote at the summit talking about how
human attention right through the figure of the Son of Man, right is the
thing by which the world orders itself. But celebration is the primary action that
gives attention. Like that's the primary where you give something attention is by giving
it a celebration. So we need really this is to me this this idea
that Pentecost and the idea of the first fruits, and also the notion that
this has to do with multiplication, Like that's actually what because you let's say
we look at Theophany for example, like our celebration of Theophany, Theophany is
also a joining of heaven and earth, right, so the spirit comes down
on the waters, the earth is gathered up together. You know, there's
definitely a relationship between the two. But the idea that that Pentecost would be
related to the multiple multiplication, yeah, is makes a lot of sense.
It also makes a lot of sense of this weird covenant that Abraham does.
It's the weirdest thing in the world. How why in the world, Like
I've never understood that why would you cut things in half? Like why are
you cutting these bulls in half? And then you're walking through the middle.
There's no good explanation for that outside of this. By the way, people
will again like covenant theology is like a big deal in like reform circles that
it came from, and people would always be like, yeah, the word
covenant comes from the word cutting because you have to like kill something to make
the covenant or you know, something like this, but you have to kill
it and you have to split it in half and then and then what God
reveals himselves like animal did it this way? Yeah, but this makes a
lot of sense. It makes a lot of sense of it in the sense
of, you know, first of all, this idea that God manifests himself
emits the cutting like amidst the separation. Right, it makes sense of the
separation of the waters in the in Genesis one. But then it also makes
sense of the idea that you know, if you think about how creation works,
there's two aspects of it. One is unity, one is unifying,
and one is separating. That's how the world works. In order for any
identity to exist, two aspects have to be true. You have to separate
it from other things, and you have to unify it to itself. And
so the idea, the idea of that is what the logos does, or
that is what the influence of heaven does, is that it unified and it
separates. And and what's interesting about the Pentecost image is that it seems to
be God revealing himself in the separation right in the multiplication. Right, So
it's like think about its first fruit. So you know, the seed comes
down, all these fruits appear, and then God manifests itself in this multiplying.
But if but if it's not celebrated, then it's just separation. Yeah,
right, so if it's not if if it's not celebrated properly, then
the influence of heaven becomes scattering. It's like it it will it's the scattering
without the unifying. And you can think about it like everything makes sense,
Like think about the judgment of God too, you know, that's what that's
what happens when the you know, the idea of the goats going away,
scattering away, or the idea of the burning of the chaff, this idea
that in some ways you know when heaven and earth, when God manifests himself.
That's what happens, unity and separation. But if it's not proper,
then it then it ends up being and that ends up separating that unity and
diversity, those two things together is that's that is the trinity, right and
and and and in this point, I think that I can say non heretically
always like I'm nervous about speaking about the trinity in public because you're gonna do
like an accidental heresy, but that this is this is an essential aspect of
of divinity. This is what God is, right, is these two things
together like unity, but really really it's a community like community, right,
a communion of love. And that this is an essential thing to the way
that God is. And and when he reveals that aspect of himself, if
you don't celebrate it, or you try to instead focus on yourself and celebrate
yourself, there's there's this sort of self reflexivity to idolatry, I think.
And if you try to like sort of celebrate yourself or focus on yourself,
even that that that chilling sentence people put the exalted, the individual over the
nation, right, that even that kind of an idea, Right, that's
then yeah, by the way Richard, I think. Okay, so it's
not Sarah's laughter, what is it. It's lots drunkenness. It has to
be so stupid, of course it is. It has to be lots of
drunkenness, and his incest with his daughters like this right down stream from I'm
very dumb. That is that's correct, that's that's right. Well I'm dumb
too, because it's so obvious, and it's like it's always like just let
it run, Johnathan, run out there. At some point it's like there,
of course, I mean, that's and and what does that lead to?
That leads to the the even the sort of the scattering of the of
the seed, because like lots of a righteous man and he's part of you
know, but then it creates Moab and it creates Ammon like these two like
long long term ancestral enemies of Israel. Right, it's creazy. Yeah,
okay, that's there we go, right, so now we need so we
need to bring it. That's the second that's also like the second incest connection
with Pentecost too, if you take that one interpretation of what Ham did.
Yeah anyway, okay, super weird, all right, Yeah, So to
kind of like bring this down. So the basic idea, I think we
talked a lot in our last video, and we're kind of running through our
time here, so I'm not gonna restate all of this. But we talked
a lot in our last video about the account of Pentecost in Acts chapter two
and paralleling it to these accounts of Pentecosts and the Old Testament actually to the
Tower of Babble, which is something in the Orthodox Church we literally have,
you know, hymns of old the tongues were confounded because of the audacity and
the building of a tower, but now the tongues are made wise for the
sake of the glory of divine knowledge. Right, And so even by the
way, like the way that all of this interacts with language is also something.
And the the like connection and jubilees of like language and law and those
two things together, like this is something I'm still trying to think about.
But so so I mentioned last time that there's this early tradition that you can
still find recorded in the writings of many of like Oriental Orthodox communities, that
the day of Pentecost is the occasion actually of the first Divine Liturgy. So
in the Divine Liturgy, we have a part called the Epiclesis, which is
the calling down of the Holy Spirit upon the gifts. In the Divine Liturgy
of Saint John Christism, for instance, we say, send down your Holy
Spirit upon us and upon these gifts here set forth right. And so if
you think about it, like, what are the apostles gathered together to do?
Well, they're all still basically pious Jews, right. Christ always kept
Pentecost. We know this from the gospels. So they're gathered together in the
Upper Room to celebrate Pentecost together. So they're keeping this sort of ancient law
that's written on the tables of Heaven. And they're celebrating Pentecost together, and
they call down the Holy Spirit. Of what happens, this wind descends on
them, and the wind unifies and multiplies, but it also scatters. Remember
that there are people there who think the apostles are drunk. Now, and
this is a weird thing, because if you pay very close attention, you
will find that the apostles are not. For instance, is not an example
of of glossalalia. They're not just like babbling like you know, like Pentecostals
or something. I'm not trying to throw anybody any shade. But that's not
what's happening in the Book of Acts. People here in their own language.
People hear them in their own language, but some people hear drunkenness. Yeah,
and that is a weird thing. But it only makes sense if you
kind of have this understanding. Because some people here drunkness white because they're not
keeping the feasts right. They're not they don't have their attention oriented correctly.
So what they hear and they experience it as drunkenness and scattering. They say,
these guys are drunk, what do you what are you? Guys listening
like they're just babbling right, And and in that sense, it's like a
funny almost like kind of a funny pun on the whole Tower of Babel thing,
right, that word that means confusion and has come in our in our
language now to mean a particular kind of linguistic confusion. So the big idea
that I wanted to sort of pitch is that there's only one Pentecost, and
that this Pentecost happens at one point in like an eternal moment, and Noah
and Abraham and Moses and the Apostles all participate in that day of Pentecost,
but so did the people at the Tower of Babel. Yeah, so did
the people at the Tower of Babel. And that if you participated it correctly,
then it will unify and also multiply. And if you don't give it
your focus, if you don't give it your attention correctly, then you're going
to be divided and you're going to be scattered. So we've been making these
Universal History videos for about a little over two years now. I think we,
you know, by my last count, probably had like twenty three videos
in the series. Maybe this will be number twenty four. They've been genuinely
generally popular, very well received. I've gotten such an outpouring of appreciation from
people, which I'm very grateful for. But I do get some funny questions.
And sometimes these funny questions are just people like missing the whole point of
a video. And sometimes it's people like trying to educate me about their favorite
forms of like heterodoic esoterica, like have you tried you know taro, or
have you tried like psychedelics or whatever. It's like no, no, no,
thank you. But one of the most common questions that I get from
people like normal people. Is what do you mean by universal history? Where
the emphasis is on the second word, right, and the word history like
in its early sense from Greek, means like inquiry or knowledge gained from inquiry,
and so we still preserve this in the sense of terms like the natural
history, museicu and so forth. By the time the word makes its way
into Old English via Latin, it's picked up sense of being the account,
the description, the written account of past events, a story or a narrative,
and by the twelfth century, when it's being used in the Middle Ages,
it means something like the account of events as relevant to a group of
people or people in general. So the story of your people mattered because it
was your story, because participation in that story makes you a part of your
people. And if you forget yourself, you cut yourself off from reality.
And this is what happens at the Tower of Babel, is that people forget
Noah. They forget the laws that were given to Noi, they forget the
covenant God. But they're really forgetting themselves. They're forgetting what it means to
be human. And so taken in this sense, universal history is a history
of everything at everyone it's a history of who we are, how we got
to be where we are, and how the laws and the customs and the
rituals and traditions of our people give us meeting and allow us to continue to
cohere so that we could be long in the land. And every work of
Jewish and Christian history, from the first writings of the Books of Moses until
modern times has seen it necessary to begin at Genesis, because Genesis has the
answer to these questions. So the Anglo Saxon Role, a work which is
mostly concerned with events in the eighth and ninth centuries in England, begins with
the incarnation but also takes pains to trace Alfred back to Noah. So later
on our nineteenth century German friends will try to move history closer to the sciences
to make it a vision shot and there was. As one of the fathers
of modern source based historiography put it, history should be concerned with what really
happened, but that this is only knowable through what he called genuine and original
documents, and so this attitude towards history. So what that meant was you
couldn't actually trust ancient historians like you have to ignore them and you have to
go for like other things. And this attitude towards history is it's not unlike
the obsession with, like the idea of like the original articles in biblical textual
criticism, which has driven many people away from the faith quite frankly since since
we don't have any such articles. So this is how this all released costs
taken in the medieval sense. Jubilees is this work of history. This is
why I'm so interested in it. We'll probably do more videos about it.
It's a work of universal history because shows the way in which the basic patterns
of religious life, which are feasting and fasting, Sabbaths and Holy days,
are the very shape of reality itself. That's the whole point of the Book
of Jubilees. And by conforming our lives to these patterns, we exist and
cohere, we remember ourselves, and we host angels. Like if I could
tell on myself a little bit, when I was a Protestant, there was
like one year and I was on staff at the church, so I'm telling
on myself there was one year when people just sort of forgot that Easter was
next week, and so it was rolling around and we're like, oh,
crap, Easter's next week. We didn't plan anything, and somebody said,
well, let's just push it out a month, because there's no reason we
might have act. You've been on old calendar Easter of that year. I
don't know, but they were like, well, let's just pushed out a
month. It doesn't really matter when we celebrate it. Right, If you
live this way, your life and your society, your culture will be scattered
and overtaken by a royaling chaos of competing principalities, because all of these lower
principalities are basically fighting over a vacant throne. And I think that we see
that the account of Pentecost and Acts alone is enough to kind of convincingly show
versus the way that histories like Jubilees are seen by the inksit Jews, by
the Apostles, by the early Church. And there are a lot of other
examples of that that I haven't mentioned. But when I first kind of conceived
of this talk, I was just thinking, let's just do neat extra biblical
traditions about Genesis, like and I'll just talk about that at the summit.
But as I started digging into Jubilees more closely, and the more closely.
I looked at the traditions around the Tower of Babbel. I realized that this
is really a perfect case study for the whole idea of universal history. Right,
this is why we're doing this project. It's my deep belief that the
time of Scripture is the time of our own lives. That we're not fundamentally
different people from the human beings who first attempted to build Babylon the Great right.
So the question that I'm asked most frequently by listeners is how do you
integrate all this universal history stuff into your daily life? Like what should I
do? And the suggestions that people sometimes come up with worry me a little.
Sometimes it seems like everybody's reflex is to like make up some own little
rituals or practices to give their lives meaning. And I just want to say,
like, don't do that. That's what I want to just tell people
is don't try to roll your own okay, Instead, start by doing what
God commanded Noah. According to the Book of Jubilees, every human being that
has ever lived is commanded to pray each morning and evening, together with your
family or with other people if you can, if you need help figure out
what to pray. I have suggestions. Keep yourself clean from idolatry, and
keep the feast of Pentecost, and I mean really keep it. Be present
in church on the day of Pentecost, participate in the sacrifice of the people
of God. And of course a Saint Peter ends his his great Pentecost sermon
repent and be baptized, Right, that's how he ends it. Actually,
like I like, I like how even Saint Peter ends with go to church.
So yeah, so that's but he says, he says that when he
says repent and be baptized for the giveness, forgiveness of sins, he says,
this promise is for you and for your children. And this idea of
the promise being for you and for your children. Even in there, there's
this idea that thing we're doing in religion, in Christianity or really any other
religion for that matter, isn't just like here's a nice individual choice that I
am making on behalf of myself, but rather I am joining myself and also
the people who come after me to a community, to a story. Right,
and therefore the promise and what's another word for promise, Well, it's
covenant, right, is for you and for your children, and so Peter
is showing them the way. Here's how Now, if you want to participate
in the covenant, right, God's law coming and being written as it was
prophesied in the Old Testament, not on tables of stone, but on our
hearts, if you want to be a part of that, you have to
join that covenant and and come in, you know, come in as a
family, into the family, so to speak. So anyway, that's that's
just a some of that's rehashing some of that stuff that I ran out of
time to stay the summit. So but I think the big, the big
interesting review, at least for people interested in the idea that Pentecost is the
anti babble, right. We hear that at church, and when you see
the story in scripture, you can see it. But it's very odd.
It's kind of you get a sense of what it is. But then the
best way to understand it is that Pentecost is really the full revelation of that
pattern because it has both, you know, the unifying and the multiplying right
in extreme in an extreme way, because the multiplying is an aspect of unifying
right, so as the people here in their own tongue, as there's this
celebration of diversity right in the right way, which is that the logos can
manifest themselves all the way into your own culture. Which is what we keep
saying in terms of what universal history is, is that all the true cultures,
all true stories, can be connected to the universal ones, right to
the story of the Logos manifesting in the world without completely losing its quality,
right, because that's also what Christianity is. And so in the story of
Pentecosts, you really get in some ways the full revelation of what universal history
is. And you know this image of this wind, sorry, the wind,
I mean it's the wind. The same wind is the same wind.
The wind that knocks over the tower is also the wind that feels the holy
that the apostle is the Holy Spirit, like in both cases, Like I
mean, I'm sorry, I I interrupted you. But just like the idea
that of like God manifesting as wind, by the way, is something that
really bothers me, like in a good way, but like it's like,
well, you know, it's so funny because the people people, they're they're
so hung up, like as soon as when you start to see it.
A good example, do you know, if you you know, during the
liturgy, if there are several priests in the altar, they'll take the I
forget what the name of the cloth is, right, and then they'll do
this over the yea yeah. And so I remember a priest one saying,
oh, we have proof that maybe this is just to chase away the flies,
and I'm like, really, to chase away the flies? Well,
actually maybe it is to chase away the flies, but that doesn't that doesn't
prevent it from being all exactly what it is, which is the descent of
wind onto the even even the action of chasing way flies, by the way,
is that bipally symbolic action, Like yeah, it's exactly like this.
You want the things that don't belong to scatter, and you want to win
to come and unify that which is there. It's by and by the way.
Do you know why it's called the air? No? What do you
mean? Well, I'm trying to remember if if that the particular thing that
moving is their I think the air is actually the veil that you put over
the Some priests out there will correct me on this. I think the air
is actually the you know what, I have a theory about this, but
I'm gonna stop talking to me. I think I've got words confused in my
head and I don't want to embarrass anybody. So but but for sure,
what you can see is that you know, even in the story in the
Gospel, when Jesus actually blows on the disciples, like he just he just
blows on them. You know, all of these things which which it is
the air. It is the air. Okay, what is the air?
It's it's called the air a e r A e r. That's what the
cloth is called. And it's but it's I mean, the word means like
air, it means it means the atmosphere. M h. And if you
uh, there's that prothesis ritual, like the liturgy before the liturgy, the
little thing that the priest and the deacon do to get the gifts ready prepared,
and if you pay attention to the service, they're actually like it's like
it's the it's the recreation of the world, the genesis, but it's also
the crucifixion, and both of those things are happening. So the air is
like, that's the that's the atmosphere. That's the air. Yeah, the
dome, the dome Heaven that's placed there. So anyway, that's always been
super cool to me because like when Saint Maximus the Confessor says something like,
uh, you know, when Christ was on the cross, he was creating
the world or like finishing the creation of the world, right, Like you
actually see that in the pro thesis ritual itself. Like it's it's like that's
just baked in and I'm sure nobody did that on purpose, so to speak,
like it's just like this is what we do. But anyway, yeah,
so so but yeah, that that that the air, like the wind
descending, the air descending the spirit. I mean, that's what the word
is, right air. We don't and we don't have to, you know,
once you understand that these things are not separated, that that the use
of the physical, it's a manifestation of the deep pattern is not a superstition,
right, it is the uniting of heaven and Earth. And so of
course blowing on something is not sufficient like I could if I blow on and
if I blow on the on a cup just out of in my it does
not make it the Eucharist. But in the proper context, within the proper
meaning structure, you know, in the proper hierarchy. Then this physical act
becomes the vehicle for the higher pattern necessarily, because that's actually how the world
functions, just two more instances of like air and blowing. Right. So,
Christ when it comes to the apostles, when he appears to them after
his resurrection, says that he breathes on them. That says, received the
Holy Spirit. And of course, like the fullness of that doesn't come till
Pentecost, which is a weird thing by the way. Yeah, no,
I don't really understand why. But it's also to show that, look,
folks, the spirit that the disciples receive from heaven is all ready the spirit
that makes the world exist. It's like there is a newness to it,
but there's also a deep continuity. It's not like this thing that all of
a sudden happens and this, ever it is, it is in some ways
something both new but also a repetition of something that has always been true.
So I'm not I don't want to to say that. Can I say this?
I don't want to diminish the reception of the Holy Spirit after baptism,
but it is activating something which is true about being human. So there's an
important difference between something being new and something being novel. Like novel is like,
oh, I've never seen this before. Something being new is in the
sense of like it it hasn't like hasn't decayed, right, you know.
Like so it's like you can have something that's that's that's new in the sense
of its like the we seing in like the Pascal canon. Come let us
drink the new vintage. Right, this is the new vintage. This is
the new wine. Right. But it's not like Pasco or wasn't around before,
right, but this is the this is the better vintage, right,
you know. And it's not like Adam wasn't literally created that way, right,
exactly, created by this Holy Spirit, the same spirit down Pentecost,
the one you receive after baptism going into Adam. And that's actually how humans
are made. So and that brings me to the other example, which is
when we make a catechumen in the Orthodox Church. Okay, the priest reads
exorcism prayers and by the way, those exorcism prayers kick all kinds of butt,
they're so cool. He reads extorcism prayers and he comes over to the
catacumen, and we'll actually do this, even if it's a baby or an
adult or whatever, will come over and he'll breathe three times in the face,
over the face and breast of the of the person who's being received in
the shape of a cross. And that breathing is especially with connection to baptism.
Right, there is a sense of like God breathing a spirit into Adam.
Right. But it's all so it's also like a scattering, right,
because it comes with the exorcism, right, it comes with the exorcism.
The whole point of that breath it does. Like, I don't like there's
there there's there's probably like a more intellectual way to explain this, but yeah,
like you're just like, it's a it's a it's a wind that scatters
the demons, right, it blows the demons out, like and and and
there's something about the in the context of the right that's being performed, in
the context of the person who's doing who is a priest, who's who's you
know, been ordained for the purpose, et cetera. Like, But but
it's it's just I mean, that is to me, that's one of my
favorite that's one of my favorite rights because it's so earthy and and you get
to spit on the devil. And I know that some people are like,
oh, let's spitting on the devil. Thing that probably came later and and
and whatever, like I don't care. I like it. But anyway that
the the like, there's no way to like explain this stuff to to like
a modern person without them like feeling it's perstitious. But more and more I
think people are are coming back around to being able to understand the world in
this way. And it's it's it's the like for for a child or for
a saint, it's very easy to understand what's he doing. He's blowing the
demons away? Right, And then if you ask a stupid person like me,
then you what's he doing? Oh well, it's like the bread and
and you know, like it's symbolism and stuff like this, like I have
to I have to like pouch on all these things. But then like basically
you know it's but it's both of those things. It's the way it's the
way that the wind works, right, A great name for like a seventies
like I don't know, like Celtic band. Anyway, the way that the
wind works. It's the it's the it's the way that the wind works in
terms of it gives life, but then it also blows things away they shouldn't
be there. So yeah, going back again to like keeping the flies off
the gifts or whatever, which is you know, this is one of the
purposes of like the liturgical fans as well. Right, well, that has
nothing that that does not in any way negate like the symbolism of what's happening
on a spiritual level, Like that's the whole point. Yeah, Somebody's like
this was to get rid of the flies. I'm like, I know,
I know, but like you know, there's literally a demon called Lord of
the Flies, so you know, you do what you want to do with
that. But anyway, so I'm rambling now, but this is good.
So I think I think that you know what the point I wanted to make
before we end is mostly to understand how this is what universal history is.
Universal It is about this idea, the pentecost as being the possibility of both
multiplicity and unity. Fully, you know that everybody hearing the word in their
own story, in their own logos, in their own uh the logos,
hearing the logos in their own their own lives and in their own traditions.
All of this is possible. It doesn't mean that everything is good and that
everything is kept in it's all good. That's not what it means. But
it means that that possibility is there, and that the connection between the two
will reveal what is true and what is good about about the story. So
yeah, yeah, all right, it's beautiful. It's beautiful like that.
And that's why, like when I started looking at I was like, this
is what this is what we have to talk about, because it's the whole
projects, the whole thing that we've been tryed to do, like all contained
in a single story. And I would just tell people, listen, you're
going to celebrate Pentecosts actually whether or not you want to. And and the
society, the society that you live in is trying to build Babbel, right
and we'll see. You can see what's happening. You can see the scattering
coming, right, so you know, celebrate Pentecost be like Noah, be
like you know, and then yeah, anyway, that's it all right everyone,
And so so yeah, this is we're continuing on with the universal history.
Pay attention. We you know, we're coming back, so we'll see
you very soon. And everyone pay attention because, as we hinted at earlier,
Richard and I are going to go to Hell very soon. Actually we're
going to go to Hell after Pasca, which is a bit odd. Yeah,
well Lent was really busy, too busy going to Hell in other ways
another ways, exactly so, and so we are going to do a first
pass at Dante. We're going to go to to do the Inferno, you
know, We're going to do the contos, go through the contos. We're
going to give ourselves a lot of time now for each episode to listen to
Richard's analysis, but then also I'll do some symbolic interpretation as well with questions.
This is going to be a massive symbolic world feast, and so we're
definitely looking forward to going to Hell with all of you after Pasca. My
favorite thing about Dante is that by the time you get through the comedy,
you will have talked about everything it is. It is in many ways the
sort of the apex of the whole universal history project of the Middle Ages.
Because Dante leaves almost nothing on the table. He integrates something from everything that
came before him, and so it's going to be incredible. I love the
comedy as most people do. I've taught through it several times, so I'm
looking forward to doing this with the Symbolic World community. So that's coming out
May the sorry, did we are to say the day? May the ninth,
So that's coming up May the ninth, and you should be able to
sign up for the class on symbolic World too, but I think there's already
like a place, so you can go to symbolic world dot com and you
will find a place where you can sign up, so you get the news
as soon as we open the class, and so there's already quite a few
people in there, so we're excited to see how it comes. So everybody,
talk to you soon. Bye bye,