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Speaker 1: We're used to thinking that magic bad and everything that's

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not scientific is basically sorcery and evil, and that's the

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way it's kind of treated as in mainstream Christian thinking.

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But that is not in the Middle Ages. That is

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definitely not how it was treated, and not during the

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Renaissance and not during the Reformation. It's kind of moving

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towards that as we as the Age of Enlightenment comes,

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because in some ways some of the oppositions to all

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forms of magic are actually a conflict between science and

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religion rather than a conflict between Christianity and some you know,

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some of these practices.

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Speaker 2: This is Jonathan Pehel.

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Speaker 3: Welcome to the Symbolic World.

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Speaker 1: Hello everyone, I'm here with Deacon Seraphim, who now properly

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looks like the true intellectual that he is. Is getting

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set he is set up. We're finally seeing all the

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books that he talks about. We are we're finally realizing

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that they exist. They're not just they're not just in

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his mind.

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Speaker 2: You don't really know somebody is a serious intellectual unless

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they have books behind them on YouTube.

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Speaker 1: So but it's nice to see your studio kind of

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coming together and h and you becoming more and more

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of a of a deacon. With the hair growing and

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the kassak and everything. It's like soon the ponytail. It's wonderful.

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We love it right well, you know it's dressed for

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the job you want. I guess I don't know, it's just.

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Speaker 4: The job you want. So what are we talking about today?

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So I thought we would talk about magic.

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Speaker 2: And usually when I do these videos with you, it's

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really because I have things I can't figure out, and

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so I do all of this work to get basically

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like so that we have the premise of recording a

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video together. And then somewhere in the middle of this conversation,

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I'm just gonna throw out random, Jonathan, what's actually going

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on with this weird thing? So we're gonna do that

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with magic today, so there won't be any warning. I'm

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just gonna throw it at you and be like, please

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explain this bit of like this weird thing. I don't

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understand why it's a thing. Now. So everybody has been

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clamoring for, you know, the universal history of America for

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quite some time now, and there's a lot of different

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angles that we could kind of hit that with. One

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of them is that we could just take a look

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at the the you know, like the American civil religion

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and things like that, and I do intend to do

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that at some point. It's really interesting to me today

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is actually an American Civil Holy Day, which is why

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we get to record because I have to be at work.

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But the the the thing that I'm kind of really

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more interested in is actually kind of American religion and

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why American religion is the way that it is, which

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is like actually pretty odd historically speaking. Even the fact

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that you know, there's some kid that grew up Baptist

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in like the buckle of the Bible belt and he

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could become an Orthodox deacon, Like, that's a pretty that's

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a pretty weird thing to be able to happen. And

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So what I want to do is, over the course

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of the next two or three Universal History episodes, probably

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I want to look at some of the aspects of

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American religion, and along the way we will also handle

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I know, everybody on X got super excited because I

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tweeted like a picture of a particular critter from Appalachian

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folklore and folk magic, and everybody is like, oh, we're

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going to get a cryptid episode. Are you going to

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talk about like Chewba kabra and stuff like this. Not

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this time. We will probably do that at some point,

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because it would be fun to actually talk about some

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of the American monsters. I think it's a great to

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do that. You get your but but I have a

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I basically have like a planned segue into this. And

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so since we're talking about the symbolism of America, we

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are of course going back to Europe today and specifically

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Europe at the time of the Reformation. So I thought

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it would be good to talk about. So what I

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what I really want to talk about today is American

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folk magic in the context of American Christianity and the

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way that those things interrelate. And to do that, we

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have to go back to the Reformation and look at

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how magic, superstition, sorcery, witchcraft, alchemy, astrology, divination, the way

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that all of these things are basically handled at the

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time of the Reformation, which I think will probably surprise

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some people.

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Speaker 1: Yeah, because we're used to thinking that magic bad and

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everything that's not scientific is basically sorcery and evil, and

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that's the way it's kind of treated as in mainstream

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Christian thinking. But that is not in the middle ages.

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That is definitely not how it was treated and not

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during the Renaissance and not doing the Reformation. It's kind

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of moving towards that as we as the Age of

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Enlightenment comes, because in some ways, some of the oppositions

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to all forms of magic are actually a conflict between

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science and religion rather than a conflict between Christianity and

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some you know, some of these practices.

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Speaker 2: So do you want to define for us what magic

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is or like, what do you think magic is? Because

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because actually this seems to be one of the big

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questions actually is like where's the line between religious practice

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and magic?

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Speaker 1: Yeah, well, I think that the way to understand magic

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is to understand it as influence. And so it's something

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like influence through meaning and influence through will they way

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that will influences the world and the way that that

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that that happens. So that is a very vague description,

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but I think it it encompasses. The most magicians kind

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of understand that our intentions and are our meaning making

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can affect reality and they and they develop certain practices

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in order to kind of master those effects in different ways,

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And that is the basic idea. But then it can

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also obviously be a way to tap into other forms

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of meanings to let's say higher or you know, transum

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post transhuman forms of meaning. And that's when you enter

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into like demonology and the idea of invoking spirits and

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all of that.

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Speaker 3: So you can see how they're related.

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Speaker 1: But basic, basic kind of sympathetic magic, wearing amulets, uh,

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you know, the the the idea that there's a relationship

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between causality and meaning and we can influence that does that?

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Speaker 2: Is that a good enough I think that's nice and

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broad and good for what we're talking about today. Now.

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I guess as follow up question I told you I

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was going to throw these things at. A follow up

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question would be something like, what's the difference between magic

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and superstition or is there a difference?

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Speaker 3: Well, they're not. They're definitely related.

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Speaker 1: They're definitely related because in some ways they're related to

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the noticing of superstition. Usually it's about avoiding things. Not always,

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but a lot of it's about avoiding things. So you

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perceive certain patterns and then you have to do something

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to counter those patterns and when you in the symbols

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of massive class I did a few analyzes of some

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of these superstitious patterns, and now they're actually deeply meaningful

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most of the time because they've just been refined for

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thousands of years.

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Speaker 2: So yeah, I really liked your explanation for some of

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those things. In the masterclass I was talking to. You know,

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so I come from like a Protestant mission missionary family,

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you know, and so a lot of times they'll talk

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about how, you know, just like in these circles are

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run in family and friends and things like that, people

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talk about how they, you know, they have these certain

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practices in the old world and this is all obviously

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just superstition, and we need to cut that stuff out.

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And it's not you know, not just among you know,

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uh uh, you know, Pagans like you know, in my case,

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my my family were missionaries in Asia, so it's like

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Buddhist Daoists and so on. So it's not just those practices,

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but it's also the practices of you know, Christians who

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come over, but maybe they bring something like syncrist with

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a Syncretists with them, or obviously the superstitions of other

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kinds of Christians like Orthodox Roman Catholics, et cetera. And

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it's also you find that like, yeah, all of that

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stuff kind of gets like lumped together. So that's the

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first thing I want to do.

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Speaker 1: Let's let's disambiguate the idea, the modern idea of superstition

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and the you know, the you could say the Enlightenment

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vision of superstition is that rich walation is meaningless. There

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is no relationship between ritualized behavior and the effects in

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the world. And you see that if you listen to

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some of the new atheists they talk about magical thinking.

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That criticize magical thinking, which is the idea that you

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can perceive meaningful structures and you can invoke meaningful structures

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and that will affect the world. That that is superstitious,

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That the world actually doesn't work that way, right, The

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world is a bunch of things bumping into each other

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and it's all this these types of mechanical causes. But

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I think that at this point most people watching these

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videos will realize that that's just not the case, That

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in fact, there is a verticality to meaning, even if

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it's only the very identities that you perceive in the

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first place. You know, there's a reason why you perceive them,

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and therefore there is always verticality in the way the

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world lays itself out and there's always you know, if

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you can disambiguate some of the mythology around magical thinking,

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you realize that you do it all the time.

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Speaker 3: You're always doing action at a distance.

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Speaker 1: When you use influence, you're if you ask someone to

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do something for you, you're using you're using words to

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get something to happen that you're not doing yourself, you know,

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which is in the magical mythology that gets there's a shortcut.

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But you're always kind of doing things like that where

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you're in using your influence and meaning making in order

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to make things happen in the world.

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Speaker 2: Yeah, and very often magical traditions, even like folk magic

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traditions within a Christian context, which is kind of what

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we're going to be talking about today. Magical traditions use

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the idea of like bringing down something higher, something like

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more powerful. So a good example will be in a

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lot of Protestant folk magic in the United States, which

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we'll talk about a little bit later in this video.

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One of the things that is used as a as

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like a major part of what like a modern person

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or anthropologists would consider to be folk magic is psalms,

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Like they use different psalms for things and and from

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a folk from from like an anthropological perspective, or you

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could say like a very let's say, like a very

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pure version of Protestantism, which I'm basically going to argue

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I don't think has really ever existed anywhere, not in

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the way that you know, like you would like it

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to be like laid out on paper. And that's not

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a dig, by the way, guys, that's I'm just I just,

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you know, like I want to be really clear when

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I'm talking about these things today when I'm what I'm

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trying to what I'm trying to do is talk about

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the actual experiences that people had and actually brought over here. Yea.

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And in those in those uh you know, in so anyway,

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in that way of studying it, you would say, oh,

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so so and so is sick and there's this you've

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got to use this herb and you've got to say,

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you know, you've got to say these prayers, and it

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starts you have to use these psalms, and you're sort

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of like from a from like a modern perspective, you'd say, oh,

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you're using the psalm like it's a magic spell, right,

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And they would say No, it's like this is like

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it's the psalms, it's like a holy thing. And I'm

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not really arguing for the folk magic either, but I'm

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just saying from their perspective, the thing they're doing kind

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of makes sense because from their perspective, what they're doing

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is they're bringing in something that has the power of

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God and they're bringing that in and they're trying to

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basically use that to get an outcome that they're hoping for.

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Speaker 1: Right, So yeah, someonays you're you're you're basically seeing scripture

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as a type of incantation that is influencing the world,

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and therefore it's like if you say these these words,

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if you if you use these words, you can have

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you can influence the disease. Obviously, it's not it's not

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a there's not a trade off. You really do believe

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that God is acting through this. It's not like it's

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I don't think it's cheap, but but right, it's a

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it is That's what it is. It's saying here's a

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certain kind of incantation, I can use it.

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Speaker 3: And therefore it will affect the world.

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Speaker 2: Yeah, And the question then is, of course, like what's

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the difference between that and prayer, Like.

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Speaker 1: In this particular case, I don't think there is a difference.

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I think I think it very much is prayer. We

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in the Orthodox tradition, we have prayers for the sick.

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We you know, we ask God to heal people. We

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have certain prayers that we that we do. We also

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will pray and invoke, you know, the prayers of certain saints.

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Will ask certain saints to pray for for for the sick,

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and for us, and so these things are very similar,

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you know.

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Speaker 2: Yeah, all right, So we'll come back to more some

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more of the maybe the kind of differences between these things,

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and I will share some I will share some secret

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lore from my childhood that is actually related to all

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of this. But so I want to begin with this,

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this kind of idea that we sometimes have about the Reformation.

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It was certainly like the idea of the Reformation. I

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was taught growing up just as a refresher, you know.

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I grew up in a very uh you know, kind

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of like Reformed Baptist tradition. And in fact, we on

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October thirty first every year we had a Reformation Day party.

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While all the all the cool kids were doing Halloween

256
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or like Trunker treats down a make a church down

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the street. We had a Reformation Day party and people

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would literally come dressed as like Martin Luther and uh.

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One one year, this girl actually came dressed in a

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in a pickle barrel because of the story about uh

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Katerina Luther's wife who was like a nun and they

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smuggled her out of her monastery in a pickle barrel.

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And so anyway, like when it comes to like these guys.

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Speaker 3: People will come dressed up as the Bible.

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Speaker 2: Only the nerds did that. I mean the nerds did that. Yeah, yeah,

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But I mean we put on like a ref We

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put on like a like a play, like a Reformation

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Day like play. I wrote several of those bites so

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like I I you know, like when it comes to

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like uh, when it comes to these reformers, I mean

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these are characters I know. Well, this is a big

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part of my childhood. And of course, the the sort

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of the things that we tell, the stories that we

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would tell, is something like you know these you know,

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there's all this clutter, there's all the superstition, and then

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these guys come in and they remove all the clutter,

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They remove all the superstition, and all you have left

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is pure doctrine, right, the doctrines of grace, like the

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pure doctrine. So one of the guys who did this,

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who's not as well known as like Luther and Calvin,

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but is quite important. He was he was working during

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he kind of came to prominence during Luther's kind of

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time in exile or you know, there was a time

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when Luther wasn't writing. A lot of people thought he

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was dead and his but it was actually his university

286
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chaplain Andreas Karlstadt, and he publishes a treatise called on

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Holy Water and Sacred Salt, and this is a really

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important treatise in the early days of the Reformation that

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is published in fifteen twenty and basically his argument in

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this and I'll just take this from Carlos Erie's wonderful

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book called Reformations, which is a book I just strongly

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recommend to people if you want a really even handed

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look at the period about the three hundred year period

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leading up to and then following the Reformation. The wonderful

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thing about this book is that it does not treat

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the Protestant Reformation as this thing that came along that

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was like totally sui generous, like just appeared out of nowhere.

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Everybody's blindsided by it. But he shows that there's actually

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a continuity of reform movements that happens over the fifteenth, sixteenth,

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seventeenth centuries, of which the Protestant Reformation is essential part. Anyway,

301
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So in his summary of this Unholy Water and Secret

302
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Salt text, which as far as I know, I've never

303
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been able to find a translation of it, I've read

304
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it in German, but I've never been able to find

305
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a translation of it in modern English. So somebody has

306
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a good one and they want to send them my way,

307
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I will share it because it's quite interesting, and to

308
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me it really kind of sums up the shift that's

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happening at that time, or at least the shift that

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the sort of intelligentsia of the German Reformation is trying

311
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to push at that time. And here I would not

312
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but you know this, this this was a kralshtat goes

313
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a bridge too far for Luther. So again just will

314
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be totally fair. Like a lot of the things that

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Karlstadt is saying or things that Luther would not have

316
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would not have accepted. But what he basically argues in

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this treatise on Holy water and sacred salt. Why holy

318
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water and sacred salt, you ask, because these are the

319
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main things that are used in Western Roman Catholicism to

320
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combat demons. Right, even though sort of like the pinch

321
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of salt over his shoulder, Right, that's all related to

322
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this association of holy water and sacred salt in particular.

323
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Obviously salt is used part of a sacred salt is

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part of what is used in the purification of water

325
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for baptism and so on. That these are things that

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are used specifically for as like parts of spiritual warfare.

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And in this text Karlstadt argues that matter and spirit

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are so radically different from each other that they are

329
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completely incompatible. So you can never have a physical object

330
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or a set a series of physical actions that affects

331
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the spiritual world in any way, at least not in

332
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a positive way. And this is a very important qualification

333
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because of course, everybody believes that you can continue like

334
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you can do things with your body that are sinful

335
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and that will damn you and send you to hell. Yeah, right,

336
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everybody continues to believe that. But the idea that there

337
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could be something physical that actually somehow results in the

338
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purification of the world, the exorcism of the world, you know,

339
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like those things Karlshat really kind of tries to push out.

340
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Speaker 1: And so wow, that's amazing because it actually accounts for

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a lot of things, like why people don't kneel, why

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you know, any kind of physical action that you would do,

343
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any kind of physical discipliney can discipline, a fasting. All

344
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of this stuff is actually seen as suspicious because it

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seems because of this and I never thought that that

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people still believe the opposite, still believe that in some

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way the body can drag your spirit into into into sin,

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but not not.

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Speaker 2: And my guess is that if Karlstadt were you know,

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like if you were to push them on this, he

351
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would say, oh, well, that's because it's a it's a

352
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the the things you're doing with your body are downstream

353
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of like your will, and it's like the will is

354
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choosing to rebel against God. So that's actually the thing

355
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you're being punished for, not actually the physical action, know,

356
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with your body. But so like that's my guess about

357
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how that would probably be would be rationalized. But the so,

358
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so what what he argues, is basically that material symbols

359
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cannot convey spiritual benefits. That's the that's the that's the idea.

360
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So that the material symbols are signs that point that

361
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could maybe like but they're like road signs that maybe

362
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point to a higher unseen reality, but they don't have

363
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But but but the sign is.

364
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Speaker 1: Arbitr right, we formed by the spiriting, right, like radical

365
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separate that spirit forms matter, but rather that their spirit

366
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and there's matter, and they're separate, and they have their

367
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separate rules and separate ways of functioning.

368
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Speaker 2: And basically you could decide to make the sign something

369
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else that would be okay, yeah, yeah, wow, And so

370
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hellenomenalism like yeah, yeah, exactly right. Yeah. So so Carlstatt argues,

371
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He says, he wants Christians to stop acting like brute beasts, right,

372
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so the idea is like, if you want to be like,

373
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you know, like stop living this animalistic existence where you're

374
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like in the world and instead let go of this nonsense.

375
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He follows us up a year later with the Treatise

376
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on Vowels in particular clerical celibacy and monastic vowels, but

377
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then also in there also against the cults of the

378
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Saints against holy images, basically, you know, making the argument

379
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that all of us is idolatry, which again is not

380
00:20:58,960 --> 00:21:03,680
something Luther would have really agreed with. And then he

381
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and then he you know, follows that up with another

382
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treatise about a few months later called on Both Forms

383
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of the Holy Mass, which is basically an attack on

384
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the eucharistic theology of the Roman Catholic Church. And so

385
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it's it's it's proposing, it's denying the sacrificial dimension of

386
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the Eucharist and then also spiritualizing the understanding of like

387
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Christ's presence in the bread and the wine, like we're

388
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not we're not quite to like Zingly yet, but we're

389
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we're getting there. So again, it's just this decoupling of

390
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the world of spirit and matter and basically treating those

391
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two worlds like they're totally separate from each other. They

392
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don't have anything to do with each other. The world

393
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of spirit and the world of matter. They have they

394
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can have associations, but the associations of the signs are

395
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essentially arbitrary. So that's the that's the idea. And so

396
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this this the idea is that this is supposed to

397
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be this sort of the pristine idea that the Reformation

398
00:22:04,279 --> 00:22:08,279
brings about. Like on paper, everything is nice and clean, now, right,

399
00:22:08,359 --> 00:22:12,720
you know. So, so in in one of the Swiss towns,

400
00:22:13,200 --> 00:22:15,759
you know, they they they throw out all the images,

401
00:22:15,759 --> 00:22:18,599
they pain over all the frescoes, and vainly writes in

402
00:22:18,680 --> 00:22:25,160
his journal all the churches are so beautifully white, and

403
00:22:25,160 --> 00:22:30,160
and that's on paper. That was like, that's the triumph.

404
00:22:30,880 --> 00:22:33,799
We cleared out all of the clutter. We got rid

405
00:22:33,839 --> 00:22:36,400
of all the stuff that that that's that's kind of

406
00:22:36,480 --> 00:22:39,279
associated overly associated with matter overly. So so now we

407
00:22:39,319 --> 00:22:43,920
can worship God with our minds because things that are

408
00:22:43,920 --> 00:22:47,240
in your mind are truth. Yeah right, things that are

409
00:22:47,240 --> 00:22:48,680
in your mind are spiritual. I mean to me, this

410
00:22:48,799 --> 00:22:51,960
is like one of the basic in my opinion. Obviously

411
00:22:52,039 --> 00:22:54,079
it's a flaw, but it's one of the basic assumptions

412
00:22:54,079 --> 00:22:56,119
of the modern world, is that stuff that you do

413
00:22:56,160 --> 00:22:59,200
with your mind is spiritual, as though your mind is

414
00:22:59,240 --> 00:23:02,319
also not part of your body, you know. So in

415
00:23:02,359 --> 00:23:08,519
any case, the idea is we're supposed to restore the

416
00:23:08,640 --> 00:23:11,240
church to this ancient pristine form where everything is clean

417
00:23:11,359 --> 00:23:15,319
and everything is spiritual. And so the way that erie

418
00:23:15,359 --> 00:23:18,559
describes this is this idea that there's like barnacles on

419
00:23:18,640 --> 00:23:20,599
the ship of Salvation, and what they're trying to do

420
00:23:20,720 --> 00:23:22,960
is just like scrape all of that so everything can

421
00:23:23,039 --> 00:23:26,119
be perfectly clean, so the ships, the churches can be

422
00:23:26,119 --> 00:23:31,480
beautifully white and so on. And the idea is that

423
00:23:31,880 --> 00:23:35,319
is that once we do this, we did it, guys,

424
00:23:35,599 --> 00:23:40,240
we got rid of all the superstition. This idea of

425
00:23:40,279 --> 00:23:46,000
the Reformation basically only existed for like five minutes, very

426
00:23:46,240 --> 00:23:52,079
very very quickly. Magical traditions, folk magic, superstition, all these

427
00:23:52,079 --> 00:23:56,599
different things kind of start pressing in. And in this sense,

428
00:23:56,680 --> 00:24:00,720
I even think that maybe when like my viewer talks

429
00:24:00,720 --> 00:24:05,160
about the idea of like the disenchantment that the Protestant

430
00:24:05,200 --> 00:24:07,720
Reformation brought to the world, which viewer, by the way,

431
00:24:07,799 --> 00:24:11,960
thought was a good thing, he's very pro disenchantment that

432
00:24:12,680 --> 00:24:18,720
this never really existed on a like a ground level.

433
00:24:19,119 --> 00:24:22,319
And I will try to actually give some examples again

434
00:24:22,440 --> 00:24:25,119
kind of from my own life and experience. So in

435
00:24:25,160 --> 00:24:28,640
the Middle Ages or like coming out of the Middle Ages.

436
00:24:29,799 --> 00:24:37,519
In the Middle Ages, superstition is very it's very particularly defined.

437
00:24:37,519 --> 00:24:42,160
So for instance, Aquinas defines superstition as a vice opposed

438
00:24:42,240 --> 00:24:46,799
to religion by way of excess. So it is not

439
00:24:46,880 --> 00:24:48,880
because in the worship of God it does more than

440
00:24:48,960 --> 00:24:52,440
true religion, but because it offers divine worship to beings

441
00:24:52,480 --> 00:24:55,559
other than God, or offers worship to God in an

442
00:24:55,599 --> 00:25:02,160
in proper manner. So for Aquinas and for basically medieval theologians,

443
00:25:02,640 --> 00:25:05,200
that is what superstition would be. It would be if

444
00:25:05,240 --> 00:25:08,599
you were offer worship to someone other than God, which

445
00:25:08,640 --> 00:25:12,279
everybody agrees you should not do. Now, you we might

446
00:25:12,279 --> 00:25:16,119
disagree about whether you know, there's a difference between worship

447
00:25:16,160 --> 00:25:18,559
and veneration, et cetera, et cetera, like all the polemics,

448
00:25:18,599 --> 00:25:20,480
it's not important to get into that stuff here. But

449
00:25:21,160 --> 00:25:24,640
everybody agrees only worship should only be offered to the

450
00:25:24,680 --> 00:25:29,839
most like God. All Christians agree on this. So superstition

451
00:25:29,920 --> 00:25:32,559
is something that either offers worship to someone other than

452
00:25:32,599 --> 00:25:36,480
God or that offers worship to God in a manner

453
00:25:36,759 --> 00:25:40,839
in which He has not asked to be worshiped. Yeah,

454
00:25:40,839 --> 00:25:43,079
and so this is you know, the good example of

455
00:25:43,119 --> 00:25:45,839
this in the Old Testament is the strange fire that

456
00:25:45,880 --> 00:25:48,799
the sons of Aaron offer. Right, we don't exactly, we

457
00:25:48,799 --> 00:25:50,599
don't even know what the strange fire is, like it's

458
00:25:50,640 --> 00:25:53,000
some kind of incense or it's some kind of sacrifice.

459
00:25:53,920 --> 00:25:56,559
But it's the point is is that probably something like

460
00:25:56,599 --> 00:25:59,880
they're offering worship to God in the after the manner

461
00:25:59,920 --> 00:26:02,440
of the nations around them instead of the way that

462
00:26:02,480 --> 00:26:04,680
He has commanded in the law. It's something like that,

463
00:26:04,799 --> 00:26:05,079
and so.

464
00:26:05,039 --> 00:26:06,799
Speaker 1: God, I mean there you can imagine all kinds of

465
00:26:06,880 --> 00:26:09,720
weird things that would pop up in even in Christian

466
00:26:09,799 --> 00:26:13,599
churches that of course random people people decide, I don't know,

467
00:26:14,000 --> 00:26:15,880
they decide that they're going to come to church with

468
00:26:15,960 --> 00:26:18,599
like some some red symbol painted on their forehead, and

469
00:26:18,640 --> 00:26:20,960
then they're like, what's happening. People start doing weird things,

470
00:26:21,000 --> 00:26:23,480
and someone the priests and the bishops have to say, okay,

471
00:26:23,599 --> 00:26:26,920
this practice here, this is not this is not traditional.

472
00:26:26,920 --> 00:26:30,440
This is just some aberration that has that has appeared.

473
00:26:30,480 --> 00:26:33,319
Like one of the traditions in for example, that led

474
00:26:33,359 --> 00:26:37,359
to the Iconoclassic controversy was people would scrape the paint

475
00:26:38,359 --> 00:26:40,880
and then would drink it as a kind of remedy.

476
00:26:40,880 --> 00:26:42,720
In the church was like, no, no, that's not how

477
00:26:42,759 --> 00:26:47,240
I got images. They're not like material The materiality the

478
00:26:47,400 --> 00:26:49,640
icon is is quite secondary to its fund.

479
00:26:49,680 --> 00:26:54,519
Speaker 2: Shit, I'll give you a fun example from France, since

480
00:26:54,599 --> 00:26:57,079
that's that's my bit now is just slagging off the French.

481
00:26:57,279 --> 00:27:01,200
Speaker 4: So now after a bit, now, yeah, well you know

482
00:27:01,480 --> 00:27:02,799
you've never done that before.

483
00:27:03,279 --> 00:27:07,359
Speaker 2: Yeah, very kind of notorious case. In the thirteenth century,

484
00:27:07,799 --> 00:27:11,200
there was some Dominican inquisitor who found that some peasants

485
00:27:11,200 --> 00:27:14,119
in southern France you probably know the story where had

486
00:27:14,119 --> 00:27:17,160
been trying to revive dead infants by dunking them in

487
00:27:17,240 --> 00:27:20,640
a local stream where a dog had had drowned, and

488
00:27:20,680 --> 00:27:23,400
the dog kind of became like this local became basically

489
00:27:23,519 --> 00:27:26,200
venerated as a saint by the community there. So I

490
00:27:26,240 --> 00:27:28,519
love dogs. I have eleven right now, by the way,

491
00:27:28,519 --> 00:27:30,920
if anybody wants a puppy, just to hit me up.

492
00:27:31,240 --> 00:27:35,799
But we have. So there's a local dog that they

493
00:27:36,240 --> 00:27:41,119
named Seemed. Yeah there it is, thank you. Yeah. I

494
00:27:41,119 --> 00:27:44,160
was like, I don't know how to say frenchworths. So

495
00:27:44,920 --> 00:27:47,200
they would they were like sort of dunking dead infants

496
00:27:47,200 --> 00:27:49,599
in this stream, trying to revive them, hoping you know,

497
00:27:49,680 --> 00:27:51,480
that the dog was going to like save them in

498
00:27:51,559 --> 00:27:53,319
some kind of a way. And there's probably some kind

499
00:27:53,359 --> 00:27:55,519
of a story where you know, the dog saved an

500
00:27:55,559 --> 00:27:58,160
infant or something like that. But it basically became this

501
00:27:58,240 --> 00:28:01,759
full custom and eventually, you know, church officials came along

502
00:28:01,759 --> 00:28:03,920
and they said, you guys cannot be doing this. This

503
00:28:04,000 --> 00:28:07,319
is not how this works. Right, So this is what

504
00:28:07,359 --> 00:28:11,160
superstition is considered in the Middle Ages. Now, if superstition

505
00:28:12,200 --> 00:28:16,440
is offering worship to beings other than God, and we've

506
00:28:16,440 --> 00:28:18,759
decided that the veneration of saints is in fact worship,

507
00:28:19,680 --> 00:28:22,839
and if it's worshiping God in an improper manner, and

508
00:28:22,880 --> 00:28:27,480
we've decided that anything that is ritualistic or embodied is

509
00:28:27,519 --> 00:28:31,039
an improper way of worshiping God, then sort of it

510
00:28:31,240 --> 00:28:35,400
follows necessarily that all of the practices of the Roman

511
00:28:35,400 --> 00:28:38,680
Catholic Church which were rejected by the Reformation, that those

512
00:28:38,720 --> 00:28:43,440
things would become superstition. And also anything that looks like

513
00:28:43,519 --> 00:28:47,119
those things or like bears some kind of superficial similarity

514
00:28:47,039 --> 00:28:50,279
to them, would also kind of be lumped into this superstition.

515
00:28:50,319 --> 00:28:55,240
So superstition is one category. There is also the there's

516
00:28:55,240 --> 00:29:05,000
also the category of of the uh witchcraft or meleficium, right,

517
00:29:05,079 --> 00:29:10,519
the the the actual invocation and interaction with the devil,

518
00:29:10,720 --> 00:29:13,880
right and so this is actually a second category from superstition,

519
00:29:14,839 --> 00:29:19,079
and then beyond that there are the related but distinct

520
00:29:19,079 --> 00:29:28,119
practices of alchemy, astrology, and divination. And so what you

521
00:29:28,119 --> 00:29:31,400
would sort of maybe expect if you look at it

522
00:29:31,519 --> 00:29:35,000
on paper is that as the Reformation is coming along

523
00:29:35,119 --> 00:29:38,799
getting rid of the idea that the way that you

524
00:29:39,039 --> 00:29:42,559
that you can you can purify demons using incense and

525
00:29:42,599 --> 00:29:45,720
holy water and sacred salt, that they would also get

526
00:29:45,799 --> 00:29:49,319
rid of the idea that that that would be something

527
00:29:49,319 --> 00:29:52,559
you needed to do. And the way that some scholars

528
00:29:52,599 --> 00:29:55,160
have described it is to say that the Reformation gets

529
00:29:56,039 --> 00:29:58,279
rid of the idea of the real presence, like the

530
00:29:58,279 --> 00:30:01,920
physical presence of Christ in the world, but it retains

531
00:30:02,480 --> 00:30:06,200
embraces and intensifies the real presence of the devil in

532
00:30:06,240 --> 00:30:08,799
the world. So it actually takes away the way it

533
00:30:08,839 --> 00:30:11,160
means of combating demons and the demonic in the world,

534
00:30:11,200 --> 00:30:13,000
but it holds on to the belief in them in

535
00:30:13,039 --> 00:30:16,880
a big way. I mean, Luther had a bunch of

536
00:30:16,960 --> 00:30:19,599
encounters that he really believed was like the devil coming

537
00:30:19,599 --> 00:30:23,960
after him specifically, and uh, this is this is kind

538
00:30:23,960 --> 00:30:26,920
of all over the literature, and like the political cartoons

539
00:30:26,960 --> 00:30:30,519
of the Reformation. As the Reformers were getting into spats

540
00:30:30,680 --> 00:30:32,640
with each other, they would actually accuse each other of

541
00:30:32,640 --> 00:30:35,759
being like demon possessed and you're a servant of the devil,

542
00:30:35,880 --> 00:30:38,599
and you know all this stuff. And so this this

543
00:30:38,720 --> 00:30:42,799
idea of like this perfect Reformation that strips away everything

544
00:30:42,920 --> 00:30:44,640
so that we can go to this pure kind of

545
00:30:44,960 --> 00:30:50,480
solomensous Christianity that's been stripped bare of all superstitions, never

546
00:30:50,599 --> 00:30:54,000
really lasts for more than a few minutes at the

547
00:30:54,039 --> 00:30:57,880
beginning of the Reformation, at least not on a popular level. Yeah,

548
00:30:58,119 --> 00:31:00,480
and so, and I want to I want to be

549
00:31:00,599 --> 00:31:02,680
really clear here. We're not just talking about Okay, some

550
00:31:02,759 --> 00:31:05,079
peasants in some corner of the of the of Germany.

551
00:31:05,519 --> 00:31:10,559
You know, they're still you know, performing whether Mancy to

552
00:31:10,599 --> 00:31:12,119
see whether or not a badger is going to come

553
00:31:12,119 --> 00:31:14,279
out of its hole on the feasts of the present,

554
00:31:14,359 --> 00:31:17,119
the presentation of Purification of Mary, which which, of course,

555
00:31:17,160 --> 00:31:19,000
as we've talked about on this channel, is the origin

556
00:31:19,000 --> 00:31:24,519
of Groundhog Day. But we're talking about kings. We're talking

557
00:31:24,519 --> 00:31:30,599
about the intelligencia of the day. One of Luther's sons,

558
00:31:31,519 --> 00:31:34,960
I think it's Paul was was an alchemist like he

559
00:31:35,000 --> 00:31:37,720
wasn't just an alchemist. He was an alchemy tutor, right.

560
00:31:37,799 --> 00:31:43,000
He taught alchemy to like rich nobles as like a as

561
00:31:42,519 --> 00:31:49,839
a profession. So these are so so you have all

562
00:31:49,839 --> 00:31:57,000
these kind of practices that continue to to uh, they

563
00:31:57,000 --> 00:32:01,119
perpetuate themselves throughout the Reformation and and throughout the for instance,

564
00:32:01,200 --> 00:32:05,440
during the Thirty Years War, Johannes Kupler, you know, we

565
00:32:05,519 --> 00:32:09,000
have like a whole telescope named after him. He was

566
00:32:09,400 --> 00:32:13,599
he was basically the the court magician for Gustavs Adolphus,

567
00:32:13,640 --> 00:32:16,599
the king of Sweden. Like basically he was his alchemist,

568
00:32:16,680 --> 00:32:23,079
his astrologer. Adolphus actually had a bunch of different birthdays

569
00:32:23,119 --> 00:32:27,079
circulating so that nobody could like accurately make a horoscope

570
00:32:27,079 --> 00:32:29,559
for him and like predict when he was going to die, right,

571
00:32:29,599 --> 00:32:31,279
you know, things like that. So like this was like

572
00:32:31,359 --> 00:32:33,319
big I mean, this was like big business and it

573
00:32:33,359 --> 00:32:36,480
was a big part of you know this is this

574
00:32:36,519 --> 00:32:38,680
is a man who's like literally making war on Roman

575
00:32:38,680 --> 00:32:41,519
Catholic states and believes that potpoury is like the worship

576
00:32:41,599 --> 00:32:44,119
of the devil. But he's got his own magician because

577
00:32:44,160 --> 00:32:46,920
he believes that this stuff also works, you know, So

578
00:32:47,000 --> 00:32:50,559
it's anyway, the actual picture of magic on the ground

579
00:32:50,599 --> 00:32:53,319
at the time of the Reformation is more complicated than

580
00:32:53,559 --> 00:32:54,440
we often make it look.

581
00:32:54,480 --> 00:32:56,759
Speaker 1: That's the main thing I give The Court Magician is

582
00:32:56,799 --> 00:32:59,720
one where people don't think that that's real, but it was.

583
00:33:00,079 --> 00:33:02,000
Speaker 2: It was totally a thing man, totally.

584
00:33:02,319 --> 00:33:05,200
Speaker 1: You have very famous ones, obviously John D being the

585
00:33:05,240 --> 00:33:05,920
most famous.

586
00:33:05,960 --> 00:33:07,119
Speaker 3: Most people know about John D.

587
00:33:07,319 --> 00:33:10,960
Speaker 1: But most kings would have had characters like that, and

588
00:33:11,240 --> 00:33:14,920
and it seems like they actually did dress somewhat like

589
00:33:15,039 --> 00:33:17,720
the images we have, which is that you know, robes

590
00:33:17,759 --> 00:33:20,039
with like stars on them and like pointy hats and

591
00:33:20,079 --> 00:33:23,440
like that kind of this kind of wild way of dressing.

592
00:33:23,559 --> 00:33:26,519
Speaker 2: Yeah. And I'm personally really happy about that because it's

593
00:33:26,559 --> 00:33:29,480
just kind of like when you find something in real

594
00:33:29,519 --> 00:33:31,640
life that's just like this is too good, Like there's

595
00:33:31,640 --> 00:33:33,079
no way this could be real, Like this is just

596
00:33:33,119 --> 00:33:41,039
too SuperFect. Yeah. Yeah, So you have What eventually happens

597
00:33:41,200 --> 00:33:46,799
is that all of this stuff in the the uh

598
00:33:48,039 --> 00:33:51,119
in puritan within Puritanism, which is a very particular strain

599
00:33:51,720 --> 00:33:54,680
of the Reformation, but it's one that has had a

600
00:33:54,799 --> 00:33:58,839
very important effect on the early history of America. You

601
00:33:58,920 --> 00:34:04,960
have you have superstition, idolatry and papestry, those are all

602
00:34:05,000 --> 00:34:09,880
basically synonymous, and so but then like what do you

603
00:34:09,920 --> 00:34:13,800
do with some of this other stuff? So a good

604
00:34:13,880 --> 00:34:16,039
question to ask is, you know, you find yourself in

605
00:34:16,360 --> 00:34:19,719
you're living in a Puritan settlement in New England, and

606
00:34:19,880 --> 00:34:22,960
you find yourself really really sick. Maybe it's some kind

607
00:34:23,000 --> 00:34:25,760
of embarrassing illness that you don't really necessarily want to

608
00:34:26,840 --> 00:34:30,159
want to admit to in public for various reasons. Maybe

609
00:34:30,199 --> 00:34:32,840
it's just the fact that it is something which is

610
00:34:34,920 --> 00:34:37,920
it's it's a you know, you've tried all the normal

611
00:34:37,960 --> 00:34:39,840
medical things, nothing is working. So what do you do?

612
00:34:40,159 --> 00:34:44,639
What do you do? Well, historically what people do is

613
00:34:44,760 --> 00:34:48,920
they go to a they go to a witch, they

614
00:34:48,960 --> 00:34:54,800
go to what's sometimes called granny magic or broucherie or

615
00:34:54,840 --> 00:34:56,960
there's like a bunch of names for this sort of thing,

616
00:34:58,039 --> 00:35:00,480
and many of these things are still kind of in

617
00:35:00,519 --> 00:35:05,360
various parts of Appalachia and Pennsylvania, North Carolina, places like

618
00:35:05,400 --> 00:35:11,079
that where you go and it's sometimes called focused prayer,

619
00:35:11,280 --> 00:35:13,480
it's sometimes called it has all these kind of different names,

620
00:35:13,920 --> 00:35:18,440
and it has a lot of weird kind of overlaps

621
00:35:18,519 --> 00:35:20,159
just in terms of practice. It has a bunch of

622
00:35:20,239 --> 00:35:25,800
kind of weird overlaps with let's say more charismatic forms

623
00:35:25,840 --> 00:35:28,400
of Christianity and like the way that it looks, and

624
00:35:28,440 --> 00:35:31,280
so sometimes you'll, you know, one of these folkillers. They'll

625
00:35:31,320 --> 00:35:33,360
have something like a charm or an amulet, and they'll

626
00:35:33,360 --> 00:35:35,079
like touch it to different places in your body, and

627
00:35:35,119 --> 00:35:38,159
when they touch the place where the sickness is, they'll

628
00:35:38,559 --> 00:35:40,920
you know, like go into spasms or like you know,

629
00:35:41,079 --> 00:35:43,239
like if you just look at videos of like people

630
00:35:43,239 --> 00:35:45,239
being slain in the spirit and things like this, which

631
00:35:45,239 --> 00:35:48,719
again not at all the kind of Protestants that I

632
00:35:48,719 --> 00:35:51,719
grew up as. I'm not trying to say that's everybody's experience,

633
00:35:51,840 --> 00:35:55,119
but you know, I'm I'm I'm a Baptist. So we

634
00:35:55,159 --> 00:35:58,000
have no upper arm strength. We can't do this during

635
00:35:58,440 --> 00:36:06,320
we can't do this during prayer. Yeah, the the But

636
00:36:06,679 --> 00:36:09,920
so you have all of these these practices that look

637
00:36:10,840 --> 00:36:13,199
that that that have this overlap, and most of these

638
00:36:13,239 --> 00:36:18,039
practices are happening in a totally Protestant context very often,

639
00:36:18,159 --> 00:36:20,840
like in a totally like Anabaptist. The Amish have their

640
00:36:20,880 --> 00:36:25,079
own sort of folk magic healing tradition and it's never

641
00:36:25,280 --> 00:36:28,119
it's never like a totally accepted thing. There's always witch

642
00:36:28,199 --> 00:36:30,800
hunts going on. Obviously a lot of famous witch hunts

643
00:36:31,280 --> 00:36:35,480
in you know, in these different parts of New England, right.

644
00:36:36,360 --> 00:36:40,840
Those witch hunts themselves are though, uh uh, very much

645
00:36:40,880 --> 00:36:44,960
associated with the reality of folk magic among the people there,

646
00:36:45,039 --> 00:36:46,800
and that it's like, well, okay, if it works a

647
00:36:46,800 --> 00:36:51,440
little too well, or if somebody is able to affect

648
00:36:51,519 --> 00:36:55,880
certain cures, well, what's keeping them from also what's keeping

649
00:36:55,880 --> 00:36:59,519
them from also uh doing the reverse, right, you know?

650
00:36:59,599 --> 00:37:02,360
And so this sort of like becomes the big question.

651
00:37:02,400 --> 00:37:05,159
And once you've identified there's somebody in your community who

652
00:37:05,239 --> 00:37:07,599
is that kind of power or has that kind of ability,

653
00:37:07,679 --> 00:37:10,320
or you just think it's possible that somebody in your

654
00:37:10,320 --> 00:37:13,679
community might have those kinds of abilities, and then it

655
00:37:13,719 --> 00:37:16,119
suddenly becomes this really potentially kind of a threatening thing.

656
00:37:17,760 --> 00:37:23,639
So all of this is, all of this is related

657
00:37:24,079 --> 00:37:27,679
to and and as I mentioned, a lot of a

658
00:37:27,719 --> 00:37:31,840
lot of these folk magic traditions which which still very

659
00:37:31,920 --> 00:37:36,119
much exist within American Christianity. In all of these folk

660
00:37:36,159 --> 00:37:42,840
magic traditions there are are there are heavy use of

661
00:37:42,840 --> 00:37:46,280
the scriptures made like extensive use of the scriptures, extensive

662
00:37:46,360 --> 00:37:50,079
use of things like psalm Versus as part of an

663
00:37:50,119 --> 00:37:52,440
incantation or a charm. And usually it'll be like you

664
00:37:52,480 --> 00:37:54,840
pair this herb with this Psalm verse and you pray

665
00:37:54,920 --> 00:37:57,039
and you put it on that part of the body

666
00:37:57,079 --> 00:37:58,800
like where the pain is or something like that.

667
00:38:00,199 --> 00:38:00,960
Speaker 1: And uh.

668
00:38:04,760 --> 00:38:06,719
Speaker 2: So this is where I'll tell a kind of a

669
00:38:06,760 --> 00:38:10,960
fun story from my own childhood. So, as I mentioned,

670
00:38:11,000 --> 00:38:14,719
I grew up in this this very kind of strict

671
00:38:15,440 --> 00:38:21,639
Baptist fundamentalist, you know, Reformed tradition. But because we also

672
00:38:21,719 --> 00:38:24,880
had this association with this large parachurch ministry that was

673
00:38:24,960 --> 00:38:27,800
much more ecumenical in the sense of basically as long

674
00:38:27,840 --> 00:38:30,079
as you were not Catholic, you could be a part

675
00:38:30,119 --> 00:38:32,840
of it. I did. We did have exposure through that

676
00:38:32,960 --> 00:38:37,920
group to a lot of other things. And this was

677
00:38:38,519 --> 00:38:41,960
So I'll tell two stories about this kind of this

678
00:38:42,199 --> 00:38:44,159
sort of like you could say, like magical thinking or

679
00:38:44,199 --> 00:38:49,440
like folk magic within a modern Protestant tradition. One, do

680
00:38:49,480 --> 00:38:51,320
you remember the Prayer of Jabez stuff?

681
00:38:51,599 --> 00:38:51,840
Speaker 3: Yeah?

682
00:38:51,920 --> 00:38:55,000
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, the Prayer of Jabez is one that was

683
00:38:55,239 --> 00:38:59,320
favorite examples of this. First of all, like genius marketing

684
00:38:59,360 --> 00:39:02,400
idea of Jabez. Guy made so much money. I mean,

685
00:39:02,480 --> 00:39:04,800
my goodness, you still see those books in like Walgreens

686
00:39:04,880 --> 00:39:05,320
or something here.

687
00:39:05,360 --> 00:39:06,679
Speaker 3: Now explain it to people.

688
00:39:08,039 --> 00:39:11,760
Speaker 2: So there's a prayer in the Old Testament that was

689
00:39:11,800 --> 00:39:14,400
prayed by a guy named Jabez, and he basically prays,

690
00:39:15,159 --> 00:39:17,880
you know, God, you know, do this, do this, do this,

691
00:39:17,960 --> 00:39:19,800
and do this for me, and then he prospers. And

692
00:39:19,880 --> 00:39:21,559
so there is a guy.

693
00:39:21,480 --> 00:39:26,119
Speaker 1: That increase my increase my my my orders.

694
00:39:26,199 --> 00:39:28,880
Speaker 2: Yeah, something like that. Yeah, I'm going to get the

695
00:39:29,000 --> 00:39:32,000
exact scripture up just so people know. For some of

696
00:39:32,000 --> 00:39:33,360
you are going to be like, oh yeah, prayer of

697
00:39:33,400 --> 00:39:37,239
Jabez totally, and then there's going to be other people

698
00:39:37,239 --> 00:39:38,920
who are going to be like, I'm sorry, what are

699
00:39:38,960 --> 00:39:41,960
you talking about now. So the prayer of Jabez is

700
00:39:42,280 --> 00:39:45,719
first Chronicles four ten. Jabez called out to the God

701
00:39:45,719 --> 00:39:48,239
of Israel, if only you would bless me and enlarge

702
00:39:48,239 --> 00:39:51,000
my territory. May your hand be with me and keep

703
00:39:51,039 --> 00:39:53,320
me from harm, so that I will be free from pain.

704
00:39:53,840 --> 00:39:56,360
And God granted the request of Jabez. And part of

705
00:39:56,400 --> 00:39:57,880
the reason this pura jumps out to you is because

706
00:39:57,880 --> 00:39:59,960
it comes to the middle of like all of this,

707
00:40:00,119 --> 00:40:01,440
you know, like a lot of chronicles. It is just

708
00:40:01,480 --> 00:40:03,559
like genealogies, like a lot of the Old Testament is

709
00:40:04,199 --> 00:40:06,760
and so like suddenly in the middle of all the genealogies,

710
00:40:06,800 --> 00:40:09,639
you have this prayer. It's like, enlarge my territory, May

711
00:40:09,639 --> 00:40:11,199
your hand be with me and keep me from harm,

712
00:40:11,239 --> 00:40:13,800
so that I will be free from pain. And you

713
00:40:13,880 --> 00:40:16,519
read that and you're like, ooh, wouldn't that be nice

714
00:40:16,639 --> 00:40:20,400
if my territory would be enlarged and if I would

715
00:40:20,400 --> 00:40:22,400
be kept from harm and be free from pain, that

716
00:40:22,440 --> 00:40:25,679
would be awesome. And so they made this whole There

717
00:40:25,719 --> 00:40:27,360
was this guy that wrote this whole book about it,

718
00:40:27,400 --> 00:40:29,239
and he was like, here's how to pray the prayer

719
00:40:29,239 --> 00:40:31,800
of Jabez, and if you pray it in this way.

720
00:40:31,960 --> 00:40:35,840
And people in my circles really pick this up and

721
00:40:35,880 --> 00:40:40,199
they're like, well, okay, it can't be magic because it's

722
00:40:40,239 --> 00:40:43,400
in scripture, right, Yeah, so we're going to use the

723
00:40:43,440 --> 00:40:46,280
prayer from Scripture and it's going to have this effect

724
00:40:46,320 --> 00:40:48,280
on our life. So you're going to pray the prayer

725
00:40:48,320 --> 00:40:50,639
of Jabez and then your territory is going to be enlarged,

726
00:40:50,679 --> 00:40:52,719
whatever that means, and then you're going to be kept

727
00:40:52,719 --> 00:40:54,440
from harm and your life is going to be free

728
00:40:54,480 --> 00:40:57,960
from pain. And there were these prayer of Jabez devotionals

729
00:40:57,960 --> 00:41:01,320
on like little booklets and videos and like summits, like

730
00:41:01,519 --> 00:41:04,039
conferences where you'd go to and learn how to pray

731
00:41:04,159 --> 00:41:06,159
the Prayer of Jabez. And it was kind of this

732
00:41:07,000 --> 00:41:09,719
your territory. Yeah, it was very much this kind of

733
00:41:10,159 --> 00:41:13,480
what's the what's the what's the thing. It's like it's

734
00:41:13,480 --> 00:41:18,880
not visualized, it's a it's a manifesting rights. Yeah, yeah,

735
00:41:19,360 --> 00:41:22,039
name and unclaim it like manifested, you know. Like the

736
00:41:22,360 --> 00:41:24,840
idea is like, there's this thing that your life could be,

737
00:41:25,079 --> 00:41:27,039
and here's here it is, guys, we found it. There

738
00:41:27,079 --> 00:41:29,559
was a hack like hidden in the Bible. There's this

739
00:41:29,599 --> 00:41:33,199
one little verse and man, if you pray this, it's

740
00:41:33,239 --> 00:41:35,800
going to happen and you can't argue against that because

741
00:41:35,800 --> 00:41:39,559
this is in the Bible, right right. So there was

742
00:41:39,599 --> 00:41:42,199
the Prayer of Jabez thing, which which I very vividly

743
00:41:42,239 --> 00:41:44,440
remember when I was when I was young. There was

744
00:41:44,519 --> 00:41:50,960
also something called the what was this called this one's

745
00:41:50,960 --> 00:41:53,000
a little more this one's a little more niche. But

746
00:41:53,039 --> 00:41:55,880
people out there, some of the people out there watching

747
00:41:55,920 --> 00:41:59,239
this will know this. Yeah. So there was this book

748
00:42:00,400 --> 00:42:06,039
that was published called The Power of Crying Out, and

749
00:42:06,119 --> 00:42:08,320
the idea was that if you were praying for something

750
00:42:08,320 --> 00:42:15,719
in your life. This is This is published by Bill Gothard,

751
00:42:15,800 --> 00:42:18,800
who I've talked about in some other things other places.

752
00:42:18,920 --> 00:42:23,920
I used to clean his carpets and which in retrospect

753
00:42:23,960 --> 00:42:28,559
is pretty weird. But he read this book called The

754
00:42:28,559 --> 00:42:30,280
Power of Crying Out and it was endorsed by like

755
00:42:30,320 --> 00:42:33,159
all the big you know, like evangelical people like Bruce

756
00:42:33,159 --> 00:42:37,800
Wilkinson and people like this, and the the the idea

757
00:42:37,880 --> 00:42:39,480
was that if you were praying for something in your

758
00:42:39,480 --> 00:42:45,519
life and you weren't getting it, it's because you're not

759
00:42:45,679 --> 00:42:48,679
praying correctly. And the way to pray when something is

760
00:42:48,719 --> 00:42:54,559
really like serious is to cry out. And so there

761
00:42:54,559 --> 00:42:58,320
would be there was like a little liturgy for this,

762
00:42:59,400 --> 00:43:02,360
and so the took it from like all these different passages,

763
00:43:02,440 --> 00:43:04,440
especially in the Psalms, where people cry out to God

764
00:43:04,719 --> 00:43:07,519
right in their distress, etcetera. Which you should do if

765
00:43:07,719 --> 00:43:10,039
if you're suffering, you should cry out to God like

766
00:43:10,079 --> 00:43:13,480
you should do that, you should pray, you should especially

767
00:43:13,480 --> 00:43:18,199
pray the Psalms. But what would Gother did in this

768
00:43:18,239 --> 00:43:21,880
book was to take the these psalm passages and actually

769
00:43:23,360 --> 00:43:26,599
systematize it. So there was a certain way that you

770
00:43:26,639 --> 00:43:28,400
had to cry out, and you always started out by

771
00:43:28,440 --> 00:43:30,679
saying and you would so you would have one person

772
00:43:30,719 --> 00:43:33,400
that was leading, and then it's more the more people

773
00:43:33,440 --> 00:43:35,039
you get involved, the more powerful it is. So you

774
00:43:35,039 --> 00:43:36,920
want to get as many people as possible to cry

775
00:43:36,920 --> 00:43:39,599
out with you, and you have one person who's leading,

776
00:43:40,119 --> 00:43:44,239
and it's it's repetition. So if I'm the one that's leading,

777
00:43:44,280 --> 00:43:46,960
I cry out, Oh God, and then everybody else cries out,

778
00:43:46,960 --> 00:43:49,119
Oh God, and then I cry out help us. And

779
00:43:49,159 --> 00:43:50,920
you're supposed to do it at the top of your voice.

780
00:43:50,920 --> 00:43:53,400
You're supposed to make it as loud as possible, and

781
00:43:53,440 --> 00:43:56,760
it's supposed to like all do it together. And uh,

782
00:43:57,119 --> 00:43:58,800
and this is the power of crying out. And there

783
00:43:58,880 --> 00:44:02,679
again like books, seminar ours, courses, all this stuff, like

784
00:44:02,880 --> 00:44:04,760
I didn't know about that one resulted from the power

785
00:44:04,800 --> 00:44:09,280
of crying out and the uh and this was this

786
00:44:09,440 --> 00:44:11,440
was endorsed by, like this is endorsed by like a

787
00:44:11,480 --> 00:44:14,760
lot of kind of big names in that particular part

788
00:44:14,760 --> 00:44:18,719
of the evangelical world. And again, there's nothing wrong with

789
00:44:18,800 --> 00:44:21,840
like getting together crying out to God, you know, in

790
00:44:22,000 --> 00:44:24,360
doing it in even like a liturgical way, Like obviously

791
00:44:24,360 --> 00:44:27,920
all those things are great. But the idea was that

792
00:44:28,039 --> 00:44:31,480
the idea was that there's these hidden secrets about how

793
00:44:31,519 --> 00:44:33,079
to pray in the Bible, and you have to read

794
00:44:33,079 --> 00:44:35,079
the Bible kind of like esoterically in this way and

795
00:44:35,119 --> 00:44:37,039
you find the hidden secrets, like you find the Oh,

796
00:44:37,039 --> 00:44:39,719
here's the prayer of Jabez. Nobody's noticed this before. But

797
00:44:39,719 --> 00:44:42,119
if we pray this goblin, larger territory will be free

798
00:44:42,119 --> 00:44:44,480
from pain. Or it's here's all the stuff about crying out.

799
00:44:44,559 --> 00:44:47,199
Nobody's noticed this before. But if we get together and

800
00:44:47,239 --> 00:44:50,679
we like all in this kind of like actually liturgical

801
00:44:50,800 --> 00:44:52,559
kind of call and response way, then God is going

802
00:44:52,639 --> 00:44:54,519
to hear our prayer and answer it in a way

803
00:44:54,559 --> 00:44:56,599
that he would not do otherwise. And so there's like

804
00:44:57,039 --> 00:44:59,119
the idea is like here's a method and if we

805
00:44:59,639 --> 00:45:02,199
if we this method, then we're more likely to get

806
00:45:02,239 --> 00:45:05,559
the thing that we're asking for. Yeah, So those are

807
00:45:05,599 --> 00:45:08,559
some examples of kind of you could say, like sort

808
00:45:08,559 --> 00:45:11,039
of Bible based where you could almost consider to be

809
00:45:11,119 --> 00:45:13,840
kind of folk magic. And again, like what's the difference

810
00:45:13,840 --> 00:45:18,280
between that and prayer. I do think there's a difference

811
00:45:18,280 --> 00:45:21,159
in the sense that when we when we pray and

812
00:45:21,199 --> 00:45:22,960
ask God for something or even when we ask for

813
00:45:23,000 --> 00:45:25,119
the intercessions of a saint, I think that it should

814
00:45:25,119 --> 00:45:28,800
always be with the the intention of the understanding that

815
00:45:29,360 --> 00:45:31,719
God will do what he will do, and you have

816
00:45:31,800 --> 00:45:35,079
to also kind of I mean, this is why, this

817
00:45:35,159 --> 00:45:37,280
is why, like most of the saints don't pray. It's

818
00:45:37,360 --> 00:45:39,239
it's sort of like the midwd meme. There's like kind

819
00:45:39,239 --> 00:45:41,800
of a prayer bell curve, you know, where like the

820
00:45:41,920 --> 00:45:44,199
very simple person and the very holy person can both

821
00:45:44,199 --> 00:45:46,920
say God, please make it rain, and it will just rain.

822
00:45:47,599 --> 00:45:48,920
And then for most of us in the middle, the

823
00:45:48,960 --> 00:45:50,960
thing we just need to pray is that your will

824
00:45:50,960 --> 00:45:52,639
be done because we just don't know what to ask for,

825
00:45:53,000 --> 00:45:56,840
right and we don't you know. So anyway, all this

826
00:45:56,960 --> 00:45:58,760
to say, I'm not trying to make this just about that,

827
00:45:58,800 --> 00:46:00,320
but I do want to say like there is there

828
00:46:00,360 --> 00:46:02,400
does seem to me to be some kind of a distinction,

829
00:46:03,440 --> 00:46:08,320
and you know, the difference. The tagline for this book,

830
00:46:08,320 --> 00:46:11,400
The Power of Crying Out, was when prayer becomes mighty,

831
00:46:12,719 --> 00:46:14,599
you know. So it's like, if you want mighty prayer,

832
00:46:14,639 --> 00:46:16,800
if you want to like then then like here's my method.

833
00:46:17,320 --> 00:46:18,719
And when you need to buy my book and learn

834
00:46:18,719 --> 00:46:22,480
my method, and then you'll be able to And there's

835
00:46:22,599 --> 00:46:25,800
something about that. There's something about that that I think

836
00:46:25,880 --> 00:46:29,199
is very much connected to these like old folk magic traditions.

837
00:46:29,559 --> 00:46:31,440
Speaker 1: So I think that I think that you've got it

838
00:46:31,679 --> 00:46:35,440
right in some ways. You could say that the sympathetic

839
00:46:35,679 --> 00:46:41,119
type magic stuff, it's usually about serving one's will, like

840
00:46:41,199 --> 00:46:44,239
we want you want something there, and you're trying to

841
00:46:44,480 --> 00:46:47,920
kind of funnel you're trying to funnel, meaning you're trying

842
00:46:47,920 --> 00:46:50,639
to funnel intelligence, You're trying to funnel all that towards

843
00:46:51,000 --> 00:46:52,400
towards getting what you want.

844
00:46:52,679 --> 00:46:52,880
Speaker 2: See.

845
00:46:52,880 --> 00:46:54,840
Speaker 1: The problem with some of this stuff, like the problem

846
00:46:54,880 --> 00:46:58,679
with the idea of manifesting and naming and claiming is

847
00:46:58,719 --> 00:47:02,079
that sometimes it actually work, like because that is actually

848
00:47:02,079 --> 00:47:05,280
how things function, in the sense that if you want

849
00:47:05,320 --> 00:47:07,840
something to happen and you focus your will on it,

850
00:47:07,920 --> 00:47:10,880
there's definitely a better chance that it's going it's.

851
00:47:10,760 --> 00:47:13,320
Speaker 3: Going to happen sometimes through causes that you can.

852
00:47:13,679 --> 00:47:16,440
Speaker 2: Yeah, even if you explain that through natural So I

853
00:47:16,440 --> 00:47:18,519
will tell you, like, we have stories in my family

854
00:47:18,679 --> 00:47:23,639
about you know, like you know, large family pastor salary,

855
00:47:23,719 --> 00:47:25,559
not a lot of money, et cetera, and like you know,

856
00:47:25,639 --> 00:47:27,639
we like we cried out to God and then like

857
00:47:27,679 --> 00:47:29,280
a check showed up in the mail the next day.

858
00:47:29,679 --> 00:47:31,119
You know those kinds of things that we do have

859
00:47:31,159 --> 00:47:34,480
those stories. So it's interesting. Like and the thing again

860
00:47:34,599 --> 00:47:37,159
is that when I'm talking about all them.

861
00:47:37,199 --> 00:47:39,719
Speaker 1: Even for darker things like like you if you want

862
00:47:39,760 --> 00:47:42,400
a new ferrari, if you want like a new pair

863
00:47:42,440 --> 00:47:45,719
of shoes, like, sometimes that will happen. Like if you

864
00:47:45,880 --> 00:47:48,159
want something really a lot, and you focus on it

865
00:47:48,199 --> 00:47:51,079
and you you try to to get it through your

866
00:47:51,119 --> 00:47:53,360
thoughts and through that, like, the possibility that it will

867
00:47:53,400 --> 00:47:56,320
manifest is greater than if you didn't want to.

868
00:47:56,320 --> 00:47:58,199
Speaker 2: I want to be very clear that when I'm describing

869
00:47:58,239 --> 00:48:00,599
these things, I am not trying to say that I

870
00:48:00,639 --> 00:48:04,519
don't believe magic works. Yeah yeah, like I'm not that guy.

871
00:48:04,679 --> 00:48:07,880
Like I definitely believe, like you know, and if you

872
00:48:07,960 --> 00:48:08,599
tell me like I.

873
00:48:09,199 --> 00:48:12,519
Speaker 1: Think the difference is that the problem is like, be

874
00:48:12,559 --> 00:48:14,639
careful what you wish for. That's also one of the

875
00:48:14,679 --> 00:48:19,480
issues is that you know, when you're wishing for a ferrari, uh,

876
00:48:19,519 --> 00:48:22,639
and the ferrari comes to you the idea that this

877
00:48:22,840 --> 00:48:26,519
is good for you, Yeah, it doesn't mean that it's

878
00:48:26,559 --> 00:48:29,119
good for you. Sometimes you get what you want, but

879
00:48:29,159 --> 00:48:32,360
it's not. It's not to the the to the benefit

880
00:48:32,440 --> 00:48:34,000
of your soul. And so I think that that's in

881
00:48:34,000 --> 00:48:37,159
some ways the difference. Like you said, true prayer is

882
00:48:37,639 --> 00:48:42,239
always in service of something higher. So it's like when

883
00:48:42,280 --> 00:48:46,559
we pray for for health, when we pray for we

884
00:48:46,800 --> 00:48:49,320
when we pray for God to give us the things

885
00:48:49,320 --> 00:48:52,159
we need, we kind of understand that it's not for

886
00:48:52,400 --> 00:48:54,960
our increase in that sense. It's not like, so that

887
00:48:55,039 --> 00:48:57,320
I become more powerful, so that I so that I

888
00:48:57,400 --> 00:49:00,400
have more girls, so to have more whatever, more stuff.

889
00:49:00,440 --> 00:49:02,119
Speaker 3: That's not that's not the point.

890
00:49:04,079 --> 00:49:06,559
Speaker 1: So rat so that we can that we can continue

891
00:49:06,559 --> 00:49:08,960
to serve our family, continue to serve God, continued to be,

892
00:49:09,840 --> 00:49:11,639
you know, in the loving relationships.

893
00:49:11,199 --> 00:49:13,719
Speaker 2: And if you look at the prayers for healing that

894
00:49:13,800 --> 00:49:16,239
we use, for instance, in our tradition in the Orthodox Church,

895
00:49:16,679 --> 00:49:19,239
the prayers for healing are always like raise, raise this

896
00:49:19,320 --> 00:49:23,079
person up, so that they will have more time to repent, right,

897
00:49:23,159 --> 00:49:25,559
you know, Like the thing that you're always thinking about

898
00:49:25,679 --> 00:49:27,360
is the fact that you know you're going to die

899
00:49:27,360 --> 00:49:30,559
eventually and then you're going to be judged, and so

900
00:49:30,599 --> 00:49:32,119
the more time you have to sort of get your

901
00:49:32,159 --> 00:49:34,639
life together and not be kind of like, you know,

902
00:49:34,679 --> 00:49:38,239
that's the prayer against you know, it's in the litany's

903
00:49:38,320 --> 00:49:40,800
you know, a Christian ending to our life painless, peaceful

904
00:49:40,800 --> 00:49:43,559
and unashamed, and a good defense before the fearful judgment

905
00:49:43,679 --> 00:49:46,360
seat of Christ. Like the part of that is asking

906
00:49:46,440 --> 00:49:49,800
for like time, like not to be taken suddenly, but

907
00:49:49,840 --> 00:49:52,920
to have adequate time to make a good repentance, make

908
00:49:52,920 --> 00:49:56,519
your last confession, receive communion, like all these things because

909
00:49:57,039 --> 00:50:00,239
because then because then comes the judgment. Right, So so

910
00:50:01,039 --> 00:50:03,480
I think that ultimately, like one of the things to

911
00:50:03,519 --> 00:50:06,000
look for if you're which is this is not the

912
00:50:06,000 --> 00:50:07,920
topic of this video, but if you want to look

913
00:50:07,920 --> 00:50:09,880
at like what's the distinction between these things, one of

914
00:50:09,920 --> 00:50:11,920
the things would be, you know again like who are

915
00:50:11,920 --> 00:50:13,719
you going to for help? That's one thing to ask.

916
00:50:14,119 --> 00:50:16,000
And the second bit would be just to say why

917
00:50:16,079 --> 00:50:17,920
are you asking for this help? Like is it is

918
00:50:17,960 --> 00:50:21,360
it self serving? Or is it because is it because

919
00:50:21,639 --> 00:50:23,519
it's got something to do with your repentance?

920
00:50:23,599 --> 00:50:26,400
Speaker 1: So, but there is I think that the idea is

921
00:50:26,400 --> 00:50:29,559
also to kind of to not I don't have a

922
00:50:29,599 --> 00:50:30,800
black and white thinking on this.

923
00:50:31,440 --> 00:50:34,480
Speaker 3: I see really that there is a scale. It is completely.

924
00:50:34,039 --> 00:50:37,480
Speaker 1: Normal to want certain things like that this is just

925
00:50:37,559 --> 00:50:39,719
part of being human and to in some ways have

926
00:50:40,119 --> 00:50:42,679
our secret prayers that have moments where we where we

927
00:50:42,840 --> 00:50:44,440
kind of wish or we ask God, you know, if

928
00:50:44,480 --> 00:50:47,039
if it's your will, I would like this this to

929
00:50:47,039 --> 00:50:50,159
to come to me. There's nothing wrong with that. It

930
00:50:50,280 --> 00:50:53,679
really is about you could say that the scale of it,

931
00:50:53,760 --> 00:50:56,519
and the image of the sorcerer is a good image

932
00:50:56,559 --> 00:51:00,679
to understand when that becomes excessive, like it's a mythological

933
00:51:00,679 --> 00:51:02,920
image where you usually the image of the source would

934
00:51:02,960 --> 00:51:06,119
be something like I'm going to sacrifice someone else, right,

935
00:51:06,199 --> 00:51:09,039
So it's kind of magical idea that in order to

936
00:51:09,079 --> 00:51:12,480
get what I want, I have to give someone that uh,

937
00:51:12,719 --> 00:51:15,079
someone that I love, right, I have to sacrifice them.

938
00:51:15,400 --> 00:51:15,880
Speaker 2: You saw that.

939
00:51:16,119 --> 00:51:18,519
Speaker 1: We see that a lot in kind of African the

940
00:51:18,719 --> 00:51:22,559
African folk magic tradition was if something really good was

941
00:51:22,559 --> 00:51:25,320
happening to someone, there was this suspicion that they had

942
00:51:25,360 --> 00:51:27,960
sacrificed someone in their family. They would always watch to

943
00:51:27,960 --> 00:51:30,079
see if someone would get sick and they'd say, oh,

944
00:51:30,159 --> 00:51:32,519
they sacrifice this person to get what they want. But

945
00:51:32,639 --> 00:51:35,840
that type of practice which is happens both in magic,

946
00:51:36,159 --> 00:51:39,079
like in a magical way, you could imagine really doing

947
00:51:39,159 --> 00:51:41,440
something ritualistic to get there, but you could also do

948
00:51:41,480 --> 00:51:44,519
it in a more mundane way, which is basically like

949
00:51:44,719 --> 00:51:47,480
not go see your mother ever because you're too busy

950
00:51:47,800 --> 00:51:49,719
making a lot of money and you don't care. You

951
00:51:49,880 --> 00:51:52,639
just like forget about about her because you're just focused

952
00:51:52,639 --> 00:51:56,239
on your career. But you can see it mythologically in

953
00:51:56,320 --> 00:51:59,760
magic on how that is the sinful aspect, right, That's

954
00:51:59,760 --> 00:52:01,679
where it becomes really horrendous.

955
00:52:02,000 --> 00:52:07,159
Speaker 2: Yeah, So one of the I was actually thinking is like, yeah,

956
00:52:07,280 --> 00:52:10,480
that that basic idea applies to a lot of economic

957
00:52:10,559 --> 00:52:13,840
systems actually just just the idea I mean. And the

958
00:52:13,840 --> 00:52:17,360
thing is like you even know people who will be like, oh,

959
00:52:17,519 --> 00:52:21,039
this good thing is happening to that person, but all

960
00:52:21,079 --> 00:52:23,239
this bad stuff happens to me, And so there's like

961
00:52:23,280 --> 00:52:25,559
this this like you'll talk to people who have kind

962
00:52:25,559 --> 00:52:28,480
of the simplicit idea that you know, my suffering is

963
00:52:28,519 --> 00:52:31,079
necessary so other people can be happy. I'm the I'm

964
00:52:31,079 --> 00:52:33,639
the one person in my friend group who's not allowed

965
00:52:33,679 --> 00:52:35,400
to be happy, or I'm the one person like everybody

966
00:52:35,400 --> 00:52:37,320
else is getting married, I'm not getting married, or everybody

967
00:52:37,360 --> 00:52:39,800
else has got a great job, but my job sucks,

968
00:52:39,840 --> 00:52:41,840
and like this is sort of this idea that that

969
00:52:43,079 --> 00:52:49,599
being sacrificed. Yeah, but also you can see how so

970
00:52:49,639 --> 00:52:52,159
there is a dynamic that happens in friend groups and

971
00:52:52,239 --> 00:52:55,360
every sitcom, for instance, does this. So this is where

972
00:52:55,360 --> 00:52:57,239
we're gonna pive and talk about Seinfeld for a moment.

973
00:52:58,559 --> 00:53:01,400
So no, no, So every every sitcom does this where

974
00:53:01,440 --> 00:53:07,199
you'll have one person in the friend group who is

975
00:53:07,280 --> 00:53:10,360
the loser. Yeah, right, like who's a little bit of

976
00:53:10,360 --> 00:53:12,960
a loser or the nerd, but they're basically the person

977
00:53:13,039 --> 00:53:15,679
in the group that everybody else can kind of mock

978
00:53:16,559 --> 00:53:20,800
and in doing that, they actually kind of elevate themselves

979
00:53:20,840 --> 00:53:22,960
a little bit and they actually do become kind of

980
00:53:23,000 --> 00:53:26,360
more successful in the world, and they sort of get

981
00:53:26,400 --> 00:53:28,920
there by pushing this person down a little bit. Like

982
00:53:28,960 --> 00:53:31,760
that's that is like a social interaction which I've observed

983
00:53:31,760 --> 00:53:34,119
many times in the real world. And it's it's again

984
00:53:34,159 --> 00:53:36,079
it's a key element of like a lot of sitcoms,

985
00:53:36,719 --> 00:53:38,400
and that is that same kind of the same kind

986
00:53:38,400 --> 00:53:39,840
of an idea that you have to sort of push

987
00:53:39,920 --> 00:53:44,000
somebody down to raise yourself up. So okay, So but

988
00:53:44,119 --> 00:53:44,719
it's also I.

989
00:53:44,719 --> 00:53:46,800
Speaker 1: Think it's mostly to help people understand and this is

990
00:53:46,920 --> 00:53:50,079
it's hard because we're modern people, but to understand that

991
00:53:50,320 --> 00:53:54,800
the notions of magic are not removed from your experience.

992
00:53:54,840 --> 00:53:59,760
They're often concentrated mythological versions of things that you go

993
00:53:59,840 --> 00:54:03,440
through all the time. Right of how will affects the world,

994
00:54:03,519 --> 00:54:07,159
you know, how some people are able to make things invisible,

995
00:54:07,280 --> 00:54:10,199
make things disappear. We see things disappear all the time

996
00:54:10,239 --> 00:54:14,280
in media today. There's that those are magical actions, and

997
00:54:14,400 --> 00:54:17,559
so we need to re understand it that way because

998
00:54:17,920 --> 00:54:20,440
or else what are we even talking about, Like this

999
00:54:20,480 --> 00:54:23,679
isn't Harry Potter, you know, shooting lightning bolts out of

1000
00:54:23,840 --> 00:54:26,639
out of ones or whatever, like that's not magic and

1001
00:54:26,679 --> 00:54:27,880
it's never been magic.

1002
00:54:28,119 --> 00:54:31,400
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, nobody, nobody's ever actually thought that was magic. Right,

1003
00:54:32,079 --> 00:54:36,320
And and in fact, the main thing that people sort of

1004
00:54:37,559 --> 00:54:39,719
you could say like that there are these different categories

1005
00:54:39,760 --> 00:54:42,880
for magic. So the what we've just described the ability

1006
00:54:42,880 --> 00:54:45,360
to kind of like harm at a distance or like

1007
00:54:45,360 --> 00:54:48,199
like sacrifice something so that you get some power out

1008
00:54:48,239 --> 00:54:50,719
of it, whether it's like I'm going to sacrifice my soul,

1009
00:54:51,079 --> 00:54:53,760
you know, like the like the fausty impact, Yeah, but

1010
00:54:53,800 --> 00:54:56,440
the selling your soul idea is the idea that whatever

1011
00:54:56,480 --> 00:54:59,199
comes next, I don't care about that. So like the afterlife,

1012
00:54:59,199 --> 00:55:00,960
whatever the devil can have me then, but right now

1013
00:55:01,000 --> 00:55:02,719
I get everything that I want. Right.

1014
00:55:02,760 --> 00:55:05,440
Speaker 1: But you every time you sin, you're doing your selling

1015
00:55:05,480 --> 00:55:07,239
your soul to some time you take not alone.

1016
00:55:07,800 --> 00:55:11,039
Speaker 3: Yeah, you're you're picking to now instead of eternity.

1017
00:55:11,239 --> 00:55:13,840
Speaker 2: So it's like the same thing like every time you

1018
00:55:13,880 --> 00:55:15,519
take out a loan, you're doing that a little bit.

1019
00:55:16,039 --> 00:55:19,119
You're saying you can have this much of my yep, yep,

1020
00:55:19,800 --> 00:55:22,920
you're saying, like you can have this, I guess, so

1021
00:55:23,360 --> 00:55:25,079
like you can have this as much of my time

1022
00:55:26,199 --> 00:55:29,559
and labor and money and and attention, you know, because

1023
00:55:29,599 --> 00:55:32,320
like when once you once you owe money, like it's

1024
00:55:32,400 --> 00:55:34,960
it starts to eat like occupy the space in your

1025
00:55:34,960 --> 00:55:38,119
mind all the time. Right, So like like, uh, you're

1026
00:55:38,119 --> 00:55:39,960
saying you can have this much of my time and attention,

1027
00:55:40,000 --> 00:55:41,559
et cetera in the future. But what I want right

1028
00:55:41,599 --> 00:55:44,760
now is a car, right and you know, and so

1029
00:55:45,000 --> 00:55:47,519
like you justify that to a certain extent, and and

1030
00:55:47,800 --> 00:55:51,119
you know, basically that's what our whole economy runs on.

1031
00:55:51,679 --> 00:55:53,719
Speaker 3: Whole economy is based on magic.

1032
00:55:53,960 --> 00:55:56,480
Speaker 2: It is actually I mean okay, but like go look

1033
00:55:56,559 --> 00:55:59,239
up new monetary policy. I'm so sorry. I don't know

1034
00:55:59,280 --> 00:56:02,239
how we got here, but like yeah, like like I mean,

1035
00:56:03,440 --> 00:56:06,119
certainly the whole economy is based on the idea of

1036
00:56:06,119 --> 00:56:09,000
of like attention is value, right, right. You know when

1037
00:56:09,039 --> 00:56:12,920
when somebody says something like you know, the you know,

1038
00:56:12,960 --> 00:56:15,519
we're off the gold standards, so now our money is worthless,

1039
00:56:15,559 --> 00:56:19,119
it's like, well, it's not exactly true. Money is always

1040
00:56:19,119 --> 00:56:22,639
worth what everybody agrees that it's worth, right, And it's

1041
00:56:22,679 --> 00:56:25,320
just sort of this that's how it works. That's actually

1042
00:56:25,320 --> 00:56:27,760
how it works with gold as well. But the thing

1043
00:56:27,800 --> 00:56:31,039
is that with historically with gold, you can make things.

1044
00:56:31,920 --> 00:56:35,320
And yeah, so okay, so I don't want to go

1045
00:56:35,360 --> 00:56:37,840
down like a whole rabbit hole here about the FED,

1046
00:56:38,079 --> 00:56:42,000
et cetera, et cetera. So we're gonna we're gonna, yeah,

1047
00:56:42,000 --> 00:56:42,599
you gotta.

1048
00:56:42,400 --> 00:56:45,000
Speaker 1: Going the universal history of America. We're gonna have to

1049
00:56:45,039 --> 00:56:45,960
talk about the FED itself.

1050
00:56:45,960 --> 00:56:47,679
Speaker 2: We will actually have to talk about well, okay, so

1051
00:56:47,719 --> 00:56:49,719
it is it is actually related to where I want

1052
00:56:49,719 --> 00:56:52,519
to go in a few weeks. And so all right,

1053
00:56:52,559 --> 00:56:54,760
So the kind of magic that we've just talked about now,

1054
00:56:54,760 --> 00:56:57,559
which would be like uh, harm at a distance or

1055
00:56:57,599 --> 00:57:00,599
like control at a distance, where like enlarging yourself at

1056
00:57:00,639 --> 00:57:02,920
the expense of some other thing that you sacrifice. Right,

1057
00:57:05,199 --> 00:57:10,519
that's the what would normally be considered to be like

1058
00:57:10,639 --> 00:57:15,760
witchcraft when it's done in an improper way, right, the melaficarum. Right.

1059
00:57:16,199 --> 00:57:22,320
So another really important kind of magic, especially during the Reformation,

1060
00:57:23,199 --> 00:57:27,079
is what we would call divination. So there are basically

1061
00:57:28,000 --> 00:57:30,719
there are basically two ways to do divination, and one

1062
00:57:30,719 --> 00:57:33,400
of them has always been totally rejected by Christianity and

1063
00:57:33,400 --> 00:57:38,039
the other actually has always been basically accepted. So this

1064
00:57:38,079 --> 00:57:41,679
will this is a plug for my Lord of Spirits

1065
00:57:41,719 --> 00:57:44,239
talk later this year. If people are coming to the

1066
00:57:44,239 --> 00:57:46,559
Lord of Spirits conference where I'm going to say all

1067
00:57:46,599 --> 00:57:48,639
the things about astrology out loud. It's going to be

1068
00:57:48,679 --> 00:57:52,480
really fun. I'm very excited about it. Yeah, it's gonna

1069
00:57:52,480 --> 00:57:55,519
be awesome. But you have to like drive to like

1070
00:57:55,599 --> 00:58:00,280
rural Pennsylvania to hear it. So it's like, you know, yeah,

1071
00:58:01,159 --> 00:58:05,920
So divination is when you either you call out to

1072
00:58:06,039 --> 00:58:11,440
some spiritual power, like, for instance, like a god, like

1073
00:58:11,519 --> 00:58:14,199
you know, let's say like Marduk, who's you know, the

1074
00:58:14,280 --> 00:58:16,039
king of the Gods, and like the god of war.

1075
00:58:16,440 --> 00:58:18,719
And so you say, I went to invade the neighboring

1076
00:58:18,960 --> 00:58:21,840
city state, you know, in the Mesopotamian Bronze age, I

1077
00:58:21,840 --> 00:58:23,360
want to. I want to. I want to invade the

1078
00:58:23,360 --> 00:58:26,800
neighboring city states. So I'm going to sacrifice an animal

1079
00:58:26,920 --> 00:58:29,400
to Marduke, and then we're going to look at the

1080
00:58:29,800 --> 00:58:33,400
liver of that animal, and there's somebody who is trained

1081
00:58:33,440 --> 00:58:36,840
on interpreting animal livers, and they're going to basically look

1082
00:58:36,840 --> 00:58:38,320
at that and tell me whether or not Marduk will

1083
00:58:38,320 --> 00:58:41,599
give me a favorable outcome. Then there is the observation

1084
00:58:41,840 --> 00:58:47,239
of natural signs and events. These are in Greek German.

1085
00:58:47,280 --> 00:58:50,320
These are called wunder like wonders, but like as in

1086
00:58:50,400 --> 00:58:57,079
like signs and wonders. And this kind of divination is

1087
00:58:57,239 --> 00:59:00,599
based on the interpretation of things that happen out of

1088
00:59:00,639 --> 00:59:06,000
the ordinary in the natural world. Astronomical anomaies, strange lights

1089
00:59:06,000 --> 00:59:10,679
in the sky, cloud formations, dragons flying overhead, beached whales,

1090
00:59:10,840 --> 00:59:14,960
deformed animals, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Right, these

1091
00:59:14,960 --> 00:59:17,800
are things that are not normal but do happen, and

1092
00:59:17,840 --> 00:59:22,760
so when they happen, this tells you something. And so

1093
00:59:22,800 --> 00:59:24,880
the question then is like, what does it tell you?

1094
00:59:24,920 --> 00:59:27,719
So famously, for instance, there's a bunch of a bunch

1095
00:59:27,760 --> 00:59:29,920
of wonders, a bunch of you know, like two headed

1096
00:59:29,960 --> 00:59:33,239
calves being born, and or you know, various you know,

1097
00:59:33,280 --> 00:59:37,280
comments in the sky, et cetera, the night before Caesar's assassination. Right,

1098
00:59:37,960 --> 00:59:39,599
if you read even in the chursh Fathers, they will

1099
00:59:39,599 --> 00:59:42,400
talk about things like how the passage of comets predicts

1100
00:59:42,440 --> 00:59:44,920
the birth of kings, and they would not have considered

1101
00:59:44,920 --> 00:59:48,360
that to be astrology in the sense of the first sense,

1102
00:59:48,400 --> 00:59:52,000
which again, you know, is like let's sacrifice something to

1103
00:59:52,000 --> 00:59:54,440
a pagan god and ask them for an outcome, because

1104
00:59:54,440 --> 00:59:58,000
the idea is the world is made by God and

1105
00:59:58,079 --> 01:00:03,000
so God can communicate things to us through the natural world. However,

1106
01:00:03,719 --> 01:00:06,280
that's not always so clear. Yeah, And what's.

1107
01:00:06,119 --> 01:00:08,320
Speaker 1: Interesting is that you can see the difference that we're

1108
01:00:08,360 --> 01:00:11,159
trying to point to right in those two examples, which

1109
01:00:11,199 --> 01:00:16,920
is that the idea of invoking a deity and offering

1110
01:00:16,960 --> 01:00:20,519
a sacrifice in order to control what it is you're

1111
01:00:20,559 --> 01:00:22,960
going to do in order to know you know what

1112
01:00:23,000 --> 01:00:25,800
you should do, and especially in terms of things like

1113
01:00:25,880 --> 01:00:28,719
battles and all of that, you can see why that's

1114
01:00:28,760 --> 01:00:32,840
different from in some ways, being attentive and noticing what

1115
01:00:33,079 --> 01:00:35,840
is being given to you, like noticing the signs that

1116
01:00:35,880 --> 01:00:38,599
are given to you and then trying to make sense

1117
01:00:38,599 --> 01:00:42,840
of them, Like one is this willful desire to increase

1118
01:00:42,920 --> 01:00:46,360
my power, and the other is a kind of attention

1119
01:00:46,639 --> 01:00:50,519
to the language of creation in order to understand what

1120
01:00:50,519 --> 01:00:51,679
it is that's happening to us.

1121
01:00:52,039 --> 01:00:57,239
Speaker 2: So the medieval West, the Catholic Church very carefully regulated

1122
01:00:57,280 --> 01:00:59,559
the kinds of divination you were and were not allowed

1123
01:00:59,559 --> 01:01:03,519
to practice. Yes, so for example, it's against the law

1124
01:01:04,480 --> 01:01:07,199
of the Church to make a birth chart that is

1125
01:01:07,199 --> 01:01:11,440
a horoscope for yourself if it is for unless it

1126
01:01:11,480 --> 01:01:15,079
is for medical purposes, so you would have basically like

1127
01:01:15,199 --> 01:01:17,360
medical astrologers. I mean, this was actually just a part

1128
01:01:17,400 --> 01:01:19,440
of learning to be a physician in the ancient world,

1129
01:01:19,960 --> 01:01:21,679
because the idea is that different parts of the heavens

1130
01:01:21,719 --> 01:01:25,440
correspond to different influence have influences corresponding to different parts

1131
01:01:25,480 --> 01:01:28,519
of the body. And so you were not allowed to

1132
01:01:28,800 --> 01:01:30,599
because most of the time when people make a horoscope,

1133
01:01:30,599 --> 01:01:33,480
what they want to know is I'm talking about like

1134
01:01:33,519 --> 01:01:36,239
real astrology back in the day, not like whatever your

1135
01:01:36,280 --> 01:01:38,639
weird aunt does now. But you know, although other I

1136
01:01:38,679 --> 01:01:42,199
mean obviously they're kind of related, but the old stuff,

1137
01:01:42,239 --> 01:01:43,920
you know, very often it it has to do with like,

1138
01:01:43,960 --> 01:01:45,679
am I going to be? You know, it has to

1139
01:01:45,679 --> 01:01:48,440
do with wealth and power basically those things, right, increasing

1140
01:01:48,480 --> 01:01:50,519
your wealth and power. It's not always like, oh, am

1141
01:01:50,519 --> 01:01:52,480
I going to meet somebody or something like that, you know,

1142
01:01:52,519 --> 01:01:54,719
which seems like what most horoscopes are about now. But

1143
01:01:54,880 --> 01:01:58,800
it's about wealth and power. So if you're doing that,

1144
01:01:58,880 --> 01:02:01,079
you're doing it for a bad reas and and ultimately

1145
01:02:01,119 --> 01:02:03,199
for like a reason that's really harmful to your soul.

1146
01:02:03,639 --> 01:02:07,079
When the Church bans astrology, it is not because they

1147
01:02:07,079 --> 01:02:11,480
don't believe it works the other way around, right, And

1148
01:02:11,519 --> 01:02:15,679
when the so like if you're a doctor who's doing

1149
01:02:15,719 --> 01:02:18,679
this as part of a medical examination, well that's for

1150
01:02:18,719 --> 01:02:21,760
the purpose of healing somebody, So it's it's different. That's

1151
01:02:21,760 --> 01:02:27,199
how they treated it. Now. When the Protestant Reformation comes along,

1152
01:02:27,960 --> 01:02:31,719
they do not get rid of these practices. In fact,

1153
01:02:31,960 --> 01:02:37,079
they intensify them. So for instance, in Zurich, which is

1154
01:02:37,119 --> 01:02:42,519
the ultimate citadel of the Swiss Reformation, that's where sorry Geneva,

1155
01:02:43,199 --> 01:02:47,000
that's where that's whereas Vingley, for instance, you know says, oh,

1156
01:02:47,039 --> 01:02:50,000
how gloriously white all the churches are. Right, They had

1157
01:02:50,440 --> 01:02:57,920
entire libraries where they collected massive amounts of what were

1158
01:02:57,960 --> 01:03:01,880
called wonder literature, which is basically people would write, usually

1159
01:03:01,880 --> 01:03:06,039
pastors would write and collect here's all the weird signs

1160
01:03:06,079 --> 01:03:09,159
that are happening right now in the place where I live,

1161
01:03:09,679 --> 01:03:13,599
you know. Just for instance, in fifteen seventy eight, there's

1162
01:03:13,639 --> 01:03:18,119
a deformed lamb born in the village of Cedarsdorf, and

1163
01:03:18,679 --> 01:03:22,760
so one of the local pastors immediately publishes a pamphlet

1164
01:03:22,760 --> 01:03:26,639
about this and interprets this four eared, eight legged monster

1165
01:03:26,760 --> 01:03:29,199
with a snake's mouth, and this is like God is

1166
01:03:29,239 --> 01:03:31,800
sending a message to the people of this village that

1167
01:03:31,840 --> 01:03:34,559
you're all wicked and you need to repent. And here's

1168
01:03:34,599 --> 01:03:37,360
the things about you that are specifically wicked, and here's

1169
01:03:37,360 --> 01:03:40,559
what The ways that the lamb is deformed are allegories

1170
01:03:40,599 --> 01:03:42,039
of the way that you're deformed. And this is a

1171
01:03:42,079 --> 01:03:44,000
sign from God, and you should get your life right right,

1172
01:03:44,039 --> 01:03:46,800
that kind of thing. And so people publish pamphlets like this,

1173
01:03:46,960 --> 01:03:52,599
and the publication of them massively ramps up during the Reformation,

1174
01:03:53,280 --> 01:03:55,840
so that by like fifteen eighty five. You have entire

1175
01:03:55,960 --> 01:04:00,760
libraries across Germany and Switzerland basically just full of this

1176
01:04:00,880 --> 01:04:04,360
kind of literature and which also includes things like how

1177
01:04:04,400 --> 01:04:06,639
to interpret the different kinds of science when they come

1178
01:04:06,679 --> 01:04:10,199
along and things like this. So these this kind of

1179
01:04:10,280 --> 01:04:13,400
divination is uh is like at a really kind of

1180
01:04:13,599 --> 01:04:19,840
larger like cosmological scale, but it's associated with some other

1181
01:04:19,960 --> 01:04:23,239
kinds of divination at a at a much at a

1182
01:04:23,280 --> 01:04:27,239
much smaller scale, which which have to do again, it

1183
01:04:27,320 --> 01:04:29,159
has to do with folk magic and things like this,

1184
01:04:29,639 --> 01:04:33,679
and among this is the practice of like water witching.

1185
01:04:34,440 --> 01:04:38,320
So this is something I've never understood, Jonathan, I don't

1186
01:04:38,360 --> 01:04:38,920
know what that is.

1187
01:04:40,480 --> 01:04:40,679
Speaker 3: You know.

1188
01:04:40,719 --> 01:04:43,480
Speaker 2: You see like, uh, like an old movies. You just

1189
01:04:43,559 --> 01:04:46,760
see somebody like with like a stick with like a

1190
01:04:46,880 --> 01:04:49,400
like a fork a fork branch. They're holding it by

1191
01:04:49,400 --> 01:04:53,280
two ends and they're like walking across the the ground

1192
01:04:53,320 --> 01:04:55,719
and they're looking for water, looking for the water, and

1193
01:04:55,800 --> 01:04:58,000
just about to feel like some kind of vibration in

1194
01:04:58,000 --> 01:04:59,440
the stick or something that would tell you that there's

1195
01:04:59,440 --> 01:05:00,320
a source of water here.

1196
01:05:01,239 --> 01:05:04,880
Speaker 3: I mean, look, man, I have to be honest with you.

1197
01:05:05,320 --> 01:05:06,599
I know someone who does that.

1198
01:05:07,239 --> 01:05:10,159
Speaker 2: I do too. Please explain. Let's go. And again, when

1199
01:05:10,199 --> 01:05:12,239
I talk about these things, I'm not saying they're not

1200
01:05:12,400 --> 01:05:15,119
really what's going on.

1201
01:05:15,320 --> 01:05:16,840
Speaker 3: And it's been interesting.

1202
01:05:17,679 --> 01:05:20,960
Speaker 1: It's actually been interesting talking to him about it because

1203
01:05:21,960 --> 01:05:24,840
it's something that he discovered, and he wouldn't want this.

1204
01:05:26,039 --> 01:05:29,199
It's someone he had another job. And ultimately what happened

1205
01:05:29,199 --> 01:05:31,440
to him is that he was he had the sense

1206
01:05:31,440 --> 01:05:32,920
that he really had to quit his job and to

1207
01:05:32,960 --> 01:05:38,079
start a water detection like water infiltration detection company, and

1208
01:05:38,159 --> 01:05:41,400
so he I think he was like making furniture or something,

1209
01:05:41,519 --> 01:05:44,559
quit his job, bought all the equipment in order to

1210
01:05:44,599 --> 01:05:48,239
help people detect water infiltration in their houses and their

1211
01:05:48,280 --> 01:05:51,039
buildings and stuff. Started doing that, and then at some

1212
01:05:51,079 --> 01:05:54,000
point started realizing that he didn't need the equipment, and

1213
01:05:54,039 --> 01:05:55,880
so he would walk into the building and be like,

1214
01:05:55,880 --> 01:05:57,880
I'm using the equipment for the client, but I know

1215
01:05:58,000 --> 01:05:59,519
exactly where the leak is.

1216
01:06:00,000 --> 01:06:00,239
Speaker 2: He said.

1217
01:06:00,239 --> 01:06:02,519
Speaker 3: It's someone he would just he just would just he said,

1218
01:06:02,679 --> 01:06:03,280
same time.

1219
01:06:03,119 --> 01:06:06,159
Speaker 1: I walked into a building and I went up and

1220
01:06:06,199 --> 01:06:09,039
like he said, I punched through the gypsum and I

1221
01:06:09,119 --> 01:06:10,920
grabbed the pipe and it was like, that's where the

1222
01:06:11,000 --> 01:06:13,159
leak was, and I just knew where it was. And

1223
01:06:13,199 --> 01:06:15,039
so he didn't know anything about it. He started looking

1224
01:06:15,079 --> 01:06:17,239
online about what that is and what it is, and

1225
01:06:17,280 --> 01:06:19,480
so he ended up buying like a copper rod because

1226
01:06:19,519 --> 01:06:22,039
these they saw that that's what people were doing, and

1227
01:06:22,079 --> 01:06:23,519
so he started like.

1228
01:06:23,519 --> 01:06:25,079
Speaker 3: He started using it.

1229
01:06:26,039 --> 01:06:28,239
Speaker 1: Uh and uh, and it was like, I mean, so

1230
01:06:28,480 --> 01:06:32,480
what's interesting is that this is this is so interesting,

1231
01:06:32,519 --> 01:06:34,840
so you could you could, really this is something that

1232
01:06:34,880 --> 01:06:38,679
you could totally explain naturalistically, right, the idea that some

1233
01:06:38,719 --> 01:06:42,760
people have an intuition about where water is.

1234
01:06:42,800 --> 01:06:45,400
Speaker 3: This is something that would be completely normal animals have.

1235
01:06:45,559 --> 01:06:47,039
Speaker 2: I'm sure that, Yeah, you could make some kind of

1236
01:06:47,039 --> 01:06:48,639
like evolutionary psychology explain it.

1237
01:06:48,800 --> 01:06:51,639
Speaker 1: There's a completely you know, but then you could what's

1238
01:06:51,679 --> 01:06:55,039
harder for people to understand is to what extent certain

1239
01:06:55,360 --> 01:06:58,800
physical disciplines, certain disciplines of ways of acting or ways

1240
01:06:58,800 --> 01:07:02,440
of or are also of relating to the history of this.

1241
01:07:02,679 --> 01:07:05,239
All of these would actually increase that capacity in you

1242
01:07:06,199 --> 01:07:09,679
where you know, by that's a learning from someone who's

1243
01:07:09,719 --> 01:07:12,360
done it before. If you already have the intuition, would

1244
01:07:12,440 --> 01:07:15,239
also help you kind of refine that and be better

1245
01:07:15,280 --> 01:07:19,079
at it. But definitely, I mean, I don't completely I

1246
01:07:19,119 --> 01:07:22,199
mean I think that I think that even naturalistically, you

1247
01:07:22,239 --> 01:07:24,440
could understand this type of behavior this time.

1248
01:07:24,480 --> 01:07:26,880
Speaker 2: So I mean, I'll do you one weirder well. It's

1249
01:07:26,880 --> 01:07:29,239
not weirder. Actually, I do have a weirder thing than that,

1250
01:07:29,239 --> 01:07:30,840
but I'm not going to say it while we're recording.

1251
01:07:30,880 --> 01:07:37,039
I'll tell you later. But there's a I have a

1252
01:07:37,079 --> 01:07:39,639
series of books that somebody actually a podcast fan sent

1253
01:07:39,719 --> 01:07:43,440
me recently, and it's just it's a collection of the

1254
01:07:43,719 --> 01:07:47,760
life the life and like recorded miracles and stories about

1255
01:07:47,840 --> 01:07:51,400
Saint Porphyrius, one of my favorite modern saints. One of

1256
01:07:51,440 --> 01:07:55,440
the most common miracles that he performed was to find

1257
01:07:55,440 --> 01:07:59,000
locations for wells. Yeah, like and he would just know,

1258
01:07:59,119 --> 01:08:01,039
like he didn't have like a tool he did or

1259
01:08:01,159 --> 01:08:03,079
like a like a copper rod or something. He would

1260
01:08:03,119 --> 01:08:06,079
just be like, Oh, He's like, you're going to drill

1261
01:08:06,119 --> 01:08:09,000
a well here in three years, and that well will

1262
01:08:09,039 --> 01:08:11,280
be contaminated and you're going to figure that out too

1263
01:08:11,320 --> 01:08:13,239
late because you're not going to take my advice. So

1264
01:08:13,280 --> 01:08:15,239
you're going to drill a well there and that well

1265
01:08:15,320 --> 01:08:18,600
is actually contaminated with diesel fuel. But then after you

1266
01:08:18,680 --> 01:08:21,319
figure that out, you're going to dig one over there,

1267
01:08:21,319 --> 01:08:23,079
and that one's going to be pure and then like,

1268
01:08:23,119 --> 01:08:25,800
you know, three years later the guy laughs all that off,

1269
01:08:25,800 --> 01:08:27,319
But three years later he digs a well where he

1270
01:08:27,359 --> 01:08:29,800
wanted to dig a well and turns out it's contaminated,

1271
01:08:30,000 --> 01:08:32,279
and then digs a well where saying Porphyrius tells him

1272
01:08:32,279 --> 01:08:35,960
to dig the well and the water is there. Right, So,

1273
01:08:38,520 --> 01:08:41,359
accepting that this is basically this is a thing that

1274
01:08:41,720 --> 01:08:43,840
some people could do. I know people who can, like

1275
01:08:43,920 --> 01:08:46,560
more than one person who can do this kind of thing,

1276
01:08:48,199 --> 01:08:51,720
what is it the symbolism of that? Like, what's it mean? Like,

1277
01:08:51,760 --> 01:08:54,960
what's the symbolism of like finding hidden water?

1278
01:08:56,720 --> 01:09:01,520
Speaker 1: I mean, we it's also finding fresh water. It's not

1279
01:09:01,560 --> 01:09:05,199
just about finding right water, it's about finding fresh water.

1280
01:09:05,520 --> 01:09:07,000
You know, it's related definitely.

1281
01:09:07,359 --> 01:09:07,560
Speaker 2: You know.

1282
01:09:07,600 --> 01:09:09,800
Speaker 1: The idea also that they have this rod that they're

1283
01:09:09,880 --> 01:09:12,960
using is related to the story of Moses and the tree.

1284
01:09:13,079 --> 01:09:15,680
Speaker 3: Right, So the rod Moses has this tree what is

1285
01:09:15,680 --> 01:09:16,119
a rod?

1286
01:09:16,560 --> 01:09:19,119
Speaker 1: And then he you know, he he puts it in

1287
01:09:19,199 --> 01:09:23,800
the salt water and it becomes it becomes pure water,

1288
01:09:24,960 --> 01:09:27,880
and so you know, it's related to how how can

1289
01:09:27,920 --> 01:09:30,199
I say this, Like it's it's an image of how

1290
01:09:30,319 --> 01:09:35,319
humans are able to find value, like because clean water

1291
01:09:35,600 --> 01:09:38,199
is heavenly water. Right, it's water that I know it's

1292
01:09:38,199 --> 01:09:40,920
hard because it comes from below, but it is it

1293
01:09:41,000 --> 01:09:43,439
is it is like it's like a well, is this

1294
01:09:43,920 --> 01:09:47,920
pure like pure water? And so I don't see. Like

1295
01:09:47,960 --> 01:09:49,960
to me, it's pretty simple, like you know, it's the

1296
01:09:50,000 --> 01:09:54,560
capacity of humans to find value, to find meaning, to

1297
01:09:54,600 --> 01:09:57,279
find things that are that are that are important to us.

1298
01:09:57,479 --> 01:09:59,359
Speaker 2: It's always seemed to me that there is a connection

1299
01:09:59,479 --> 01:10:01,720
between the symbolism of like being able to find water

1300
01:10:01,800 --> 01:10:04,239
and like looking for buried treasure in the sense.

1301
01:10:04,039 --> 01:10:07,119
Speaker 1: That sure, actually, my friend, this friend that can that

1302
01:10:07,560 --> 01:10:08,880
this is going to get Now it's going to get

1303
01:10:08,880 --> 01:10:11,680
a lot weirder. My friend that can find water, he

1304
01:10:11,720 --> 01:10:15,600
also realized he can find other things and and and

1305
01:10:15,720 --> 01:10:18,920
he at some point there's this guy who was this

1306
01:10:19,000 --> 01:10:22,399
guy was skiing like a water skiing, and he was

1307
01:10:22,439 --> 01:10:23,960
a guy who had like a fake leg, like he

1308
01:10:24,000 --> 01:10:26,039
had like a prosthetic leg, and he was water skiing,

1309
01:10:26,680 --> 01:10:28,479
which doesn't seem like the smartest thing to do.

1310
01:10:28,560 --> 01:10:31,439
Speaker 3: But he fell lost his leg. The leg fell into

1311
01:10:31,439 --> 01:10:31,760
the water.

1312
01:10:31,880 --> 01:10:34,720
Speaker 1: Nobody could find it for like days, people were like

1313
01:10:34,760 --> 01:10:37,279
trying to find it, couldn't find it. And because obviously

1314
01:10:37,279 --> 01:10:39,079
the boat was going super fast, they couldn't find it.

1315
01:10:39,640 --> 01:10:41,560
Speaker 3: Uh, And so my friend.

1316
01:10:41,600 --> 01:10:44,640
Speaker 2: I'm trying not to laugh at your disabled friend, like that's.

1317
01:10:44,520 --> 01:10:46,520
Speaker 3: Yeah, and so I don't know the guy with.

1318
01:10:46,560 --> 01:10:48,199
Speaker 2: The leg, Okay, we can laugh at.

1319
01:10:48,479 --> 01:10:50,560
Speaker 1: And so my friend find out about this and and

1320
01:10:50,640 --> 01:10:52,039
he said, well, take me out on the water. And

1321
01:10:52,039 --> 01:10:53,680
they took him out on the water and he said,

1322
01:10:53,720 --> 01:10:55,880
it's here, and then they just went down and it

1323
01:10:55,960 --> 01:10:59,239
was right there. And so he discovered that he can. Yeah,

1324
01:10:59,239 --> 01:11:02,399
he can find things, and so it's definitely related. I mean,

1325
01:11:02,439 --> 01:11:04,000
now it gets weird because people are like, oh, well,

1326
01:11:04,079 --> 01:11:05,720
you can't explain that naturalistically.

1327
01:11:06,880 --> 01:11:09,039
Speaker 2: But the thing is that I can, though, because my

1328
01:11:09,079 --> 01:11:12,039
wife is better at finding things than I am. Yeah,

1329
01:11:12,079 --> 01:11:15,239
and like like i will look for half an hour

1330
01:11:15,520 --> 01:11:18,199
for something around the house and I'm like so frustrated,

1331
01:11:18,680 --> 01:11:20,319
do you know where this is? And she's like no,

1332
01:11:20,399 --> 01:11:22,880
but let me look, and then like literally three minutes later,

1333
01:11:23,039 --> 01:11:25,079
she'll find the thing that I'm looking for. Like some people,

1334
01:11:25,159 --> 01:11:27,760
some people are better at finding things. It seems not

1335
01:11:27,840 --> 01:11:31,840
unreasonable that you could then extrapolate that, but yeah, it.

1336
01:11:31,800 --> 01:11:34,279
Speaker 1: Does become a little harder to at least like played

1337
01:11:34,319 --> 01:11:37,159
with normal naturalism. Yeah, yeah, yeah, definitely more of a

1338
01:11:37,239 --> 01:11:38,800
vertical of a vertical thing.

1339
01:11:39,159 --> 01:11:42,279
Speaker 2: So, boy, I've got a weird story to tell you

1340
01:11:42,359 --> 01:11:44,880
later when we're not recording. But in any case, okay,

1341
01:11:44,880 --> 01:11:47,159
So this kind of brings me to one of the

1342
01:11:47,199 --> 01:11:51,600
most interesting to me folk magic traditions in America. So

1343
01:11:51,720 --> 01:11:53,399
this is this is it, guys. We're going to tie

1344
01:11:53,439 --> 01:11:56,039
in the last video the idea of like titular spirits

1345
01:11:57,359 --> 01:11:59,159
and guardian spirits and things like this. We're going to

1346
01:11:59,239 --> 01:12:03,880
tie that in because one of the most common folk

1347
01:12:03,920 --> 01:12:07,319
magic traditions in North America. And this is very closely

1348
01:12:07,399 --> 01:12:12,279
tied with like Protestant folk magic. And again, like I'm

1349
01:12:12,279 --> 01:12:14,279
not saying, I'm not saying it should be like, it's

1350
01:12:14,279 --> 01:12:18,000
not like a I don't know, I'm just just reporting,

1351
01:12:18,039 --> 01:12:20,920
like historically, this is the reality, right and so, and

1352
01:12:20,960 --> 01:12:23,199
this particular happens in a part of upstate New York

1353
01:12:23,199 --> 01:12:25,960
that's usually referred to as the Burned Over District. It

1354
01:12:26,079 --> 01:12:31,199
was like this heavily charismatic region of New York State

1355
01:12:31,800 --> 01:12:35,399
where a lot of important spiritual movements happened that a

1356
01:12:35,399 --> 01:12:37,279
lot of people know about. And some of you already

1357
01:12:37,319 --> 01:12:38,800
know where I'm going with this. When I mention it

1358
01:12:40,840 --> 01:12:43,960
in the Burnover district. There were a lot of folk

1359
01:12:44,079 --> 01:12:48,399
magic traditions that are part of this part of this

1360
01:12:48,479 --> 01:12:51,840
kind of like wider, kind of more mystical is not

1361
01:12:51,880 --> 01:12:56,279
even the right word, but definitely more like you know,

1362
01:12:56,319 --> 01:12:58,560
the idea that you certain kinds of prayer, like you

1363
01:12:58,600 --> 01:13:00,439
say this prayer under a full moon and you'll get

1364
01:13:00,439 --> 01:13:03,199
this result, right, So like like much more like folk

1365
01:13:03,239 --> 01:13:06,680
magic traditions that are also associated with this highly revivalistic

1366
01:13:06,800 --> 01:13:14,319
version of Christianity. And this includes things like folk killing,

1367
01:13:14,359 --> 01:13:18,720
folk medicine, folk magic, also things like divination. As we've mentioned,

1368
01:13:20,000 --> 01:13:23,680
one of the main forms of divination was the ability

1369
01:13:23,800 --> 01:13:28,439
to find buried treasure. So this is what it's usually

1370
01:13:28,439 --> 01:13:31,159
called money digging, is what they called it money digging.

1371
01:13:31,880 --> 01:13:34,560
And the way that it would work is that you

1372
01:13:34,600 --> 01:13:39,600
would you would have a vision. You would receive a vision,

1373
01:13:39,680 --> 01:13:41,880
usually through like a scrying stone of some kind, which

1374
01:13:41,920 --> 01:13:46,239
is like comes from your ultimately comes from European alchemy, right.

1375
01:13:46,279 --> 01:13:48,119
You would have a scrying stone of some kind like

1376
01:13:48,159 --> 01:13:49,560
this is like a stone that used like like a

1377
01:13:49,560 --> 01:13:51,760
big pug of quartz or something like that, and you

1378
01:13:51,760 --> 01:13:53,479
would look into it and you would have visions in

1379
01:13:53,520 --> 01:13:57,800
the stone, right, and the visions would tell you where

1380
01:14:00,239 --> 01:14:01,760
is located. That's one of the main things they used

1381
01:14:01,760 --> 01:14:04,000
it for. But they also used it to find Bury treasure.

1382
01:14:04,359 --> 01:14:08,399
Now whether or not anybody actually refound Bury treasure doing this,

1383
01:14:08,960 --> 01:14:12,560
I do not know, but lots and lots and lots

1384
01:14:12,560 --> 01:14:14,920
and lots of people were trying. In fact, in the

1385
01:14:14,920 --> 01:14:18,079
early nineteenth century there was a massive wave of this

1386
01:14:18,159 --> 01:14:20,439
kind of treasure again going on throughout New England, not

1387
01:14:20,520 --> 01:14:22,960
just in New York but all around New England. And

1388
01:14:23,039 --> 01:14:24,600
the way that it would work is you'd have somebody

1389
01:14:24,680 --> 01:14:28,279
who's a seer and who had this gift of being

1390
01:14:28,279 --> 01:14:30,880
able to find water and being able to find Bury treasure,

1391
01:14:31,600 --> 01:14:35,079
and they would look into the stone and they would

1392
01:14:35,119 --> 01:14:37,960
find they'd have a vision. They'd say, Okay, it's right here.

1393
01:14:38,000 --> 01:14:42,119
But here's the problem. Bury treasure is always guarded by something.

1394
01:14:42,560 --> 01:14:46,279
Everybody I think knows this intuitively, you know, like, obviously

1395
01:14:46,319 --> 01:14:48,279
if there's Bury treasure, there's going to be something guarding it.

1396
01:14:49,000 --> 01:14:50,840
Speaker 3: And is the reason why if someone buried it.

1397
01:14:51,239 --> 01:14:55,279
Speaker 2: Yeah. In a medieval alchemical like tradition, the idea like

1398
01:14:55,359 --> 01:14:58,880
Bury treasure is or hidden treasure is also associated with

1399
01:14:59,000 --> 01:15:02,239
like a like a dragon, or like a small like

1400
01:15:02,239 --> 01:15:04,840
a dragon's spirit, like a familiar that would like be

1401
01:15:04,880 --> 01:15:06,239
guarding it. So you have to, like if you want

1402
01:15:06,279 --> 01:15:08,720
to get the alchemist's secrets, you have to get past

1403
01:15:08,800 --> 01:15:12,159
his familiar kind of a thing. And so they would

1404
01:15:12,159 --> 01:15:16,920
have this, they would have this. They would say, all right,

1405
01:15:16,960 --> 01:15:20,279
there's right here, there's buried treasure under here. But the

1406
01:15:20,319 --> 01:15:24,319
problem is that there is a garden guardian spirit guarding it.

1407
01:15:24,800 --> 01:15:29,800
And the guardian spirit is usually supposed to be the

1408
01:15:29,840 --> 01:15:34,000
spirit of like Native Americans who used to live there,

1409
01:15:34,000 --> 01:15:36,920
and maybe they're the ones that buried the treasure, or

1410
01:15:38,079 --> 01:15:42,159
specifically sometimes they had this idea that when the treasure

1411
01:15:42,239 --> 01:15:45,720
was buried, they killed a warrior like on the spot,

1412
01:15:45,800 --> 01:15:47,760
and so that his spirit would remain there to guard

1413
01:15:47,840 --> 01:15:50,439
the treasure. Right, that kind of an idea. So you

1414
01:15:50,520 --> 01:15:54,119
have to do is you have to placate the spirit

1415
01:15:54,279 --> 01:15:57,159
in some way. This isn't New England, this is in

1416
01:15:57,279 --> 01:16:00,760
New England. This is in the nineteenth century, Jonathan wild Man,

1417
01:16:01,079 --> 01:16:03,359
It's like the early nineteenth century. And so the way

1418
01:16:03,399 --> 01:16:08,000
that you would plicate the spirit is by offering it

1419
01:16:08,039 --> 01:16:11,279
a sacrifice of some kind, usually an animal sacrifice. There

1420
01:16:11,279 --> 01:16:15,600
were always like rumors about like they would like you know,

1421
01:16:15,680 --> 01:16:19,119
like you would. There were rumors about like being a

1422
01:16:19,199 --> 01:16:21,399
human sacrifice, like you would murder one of your company

1423
01:16:21,600 --> 01:16:25,079
and like offer their blood to the spirit. I again

1424
01:16:25,119 --> 01:16:28,119
don't know if this ever really happened, this is the rumor,

1425
01:16:28,479 --> 01:16:30,680
but usually it was like a rooster or a dog

1426
01:16:30,800 --> 01:16:34,800
or something like that. So you kill this animal, you

1427
01:16:34,880 --> 01:16:37,119
offer the blood as a sacrifice to prolicate the guardian

1428
01:16:37,119 --> 01:16:40,640
spirit of the place and then very importantly, the seer.

1429
01:16:40,680 --> 01:16:44,239
This is part of being this kind of diviner, is

1430
01:16:44,279 --> 01:16:46,960
that you know that there's a certain number of things.

1431
01:16:47,600 --> 01:16:51,600
There's certain ritual, procedural things you have to do, and

1432
01:16:51,680 --> 01:16:53,439
if you violate any one of them, even in a

1433
01:16:53,560 --> 01:16:57,560
very small detail, the guardian spirit will wake up or

1434
01:16:57,600 --> 01:17:00,520
be displeased. And then what it what they will do

1435
01:17:00,640 --> 01:17:04,439
is they will draw the treasure down deeper into the earth. Okay,

1436
01:17:06,479 --> 01:17:09,960
so I don't want to be overly cynical. I think

1437
01:17:09,960 --> 01:17:11,760
I've established I'm the sort of person who's like not

1438
01:17:11,880 --> 01:17:13,479
cynical about spiritual.

1439
01:17:13,039 --> 01:17:17,560
Speaker 5: Real however, but I don't even understand, I mean, what

1440
01:17:17,560 --> 01:17:22,880
what treasure would would like Ancient Native American people already

1441
01:17:23,039 --> 01:17:23,760
gold Man.

1442
01:17:25,600 --> 01:17:27,680
Speaker 2: It's always like golden, I mean, just like treasure. Like

1443
01:17:27,720 --> 01:17:28,920
it's like, I mean.

1444
01:17:29,079 --> 01:17:32,279
Speaker 4: The the I mean you think about think about England,

1445
01:17:32,359 --> 01:17:34,399
Native Americans, like care about gold.

1446
01:17:34,439 --> 01:17:37,760
Speaker 2: That doesn't matter. That's got nothing to do with this, Jonathan,

1447
01:17:38,439 --> 01:17:40,279
like I and I don't know the answer to that.

1448
01:17:40,399 --> 01:17:42,680
But also it doesn't matter, like it's it's got nothing

1449
01:17:42,720 --> 01:17:44,920
to do with this. Like if you think about part

1450
01:17:44,920 --> 01:17:47,119
of the symbolism of the New World, right, is this

1451
01:17:47,199 --> 01:17:50,319
idea of there's a fountain of youth, or there is

1452
01:17:50,520 --> 01:17:53,399
a or there's you know, treasure in the terms of

1453
01:17:53,479 --> 01:17:55,880
like you know, gold and silver, you know, especially from

1454
01:17:55,920 --> 01:17:57,920
like South and Central America, which is where most of

1455
01:17:57,960 --> 01:18:01,159
that was coming from. But like when people exploring I mean,

1456
01:18:01,199 --> 01:18:03,640
we'll talk about some of these explorers at some point

1457
01:18:04,840 --> 01:18:06,760
if we ever get to them, but like when they're

1458
01:18:06,800 --> 01:18:09,279
exploring the New World, they're looking for the fountain of Youth,

1459
01:18:09,279 --> 01:18:11,319
They're looking for elderod of the City of Gold, like

1460
01:18:11,319 --> 01:18:13,239
all this stuff, and that is farther south than New England.

1461
01:18:13,239 --> 01:18:15,439
But the point kind of stands that the part of

1462
01:18:15,479 --> 01:18:17,880
the symbolism of the New World is that it is

1463
01:18:17,920 --> 01:18:23,600
this unprecedented source of riches. Yeah, Like the thing that

1464
01:18:23,680 --> 01:18:27,359
ends the Middle Ages is Spanish gold. Like, they have

1465
01:18:27,399 --> 01:18:30,039
so much gold and silver coming over it totally changes

1466
01:18:30,079 --> 01:18:35,279
the eastward orientation of Europe and basically like just like

1467
01:18:35,439 --> 01:18:38,319
changes everything. That's one of the major things that brings

1468
01:18:38,359 --> 01:18:44,359
the Middle Ages to an end. But once you're there

1469
01:18:45,359 --> 01:18:47,319
and you're living now in this land of plenty, and

1470
01:18:47,319 --> 01:18:49,079
you find out it's actually really hard and you have

1471
01:18:49,159 --> 01:18:53,479
to farm most of the time. Like, well, instead of

1472
01:18:53,520 --> 01:18:56,199
the gold being over there, now it's under here. Right,

1473
01:18:56,239 --> 01:18:58,399
There's supposed to be some kind of a treasure here.

1474
01:18:58,479 --> 01:19:00,960
There's gold in them in our hills. It's supposed to

1475
01:19:01,000 --> 01:19:03,119
be some kind of a treasure here.

1476
01:19:04,039 --> 01:19:04,239
Speaker 3: Yeah.

1477
01:19:04,279 --> 01:19:06,760
Speaker 1: For sure, all of America, the gold rush and all

1478
01:19:06,760 --> 01:19:09,079
of this, the whole esthetic of the gold of like

1479
01:19:09,159 --> 01:19:11,960
the gold hunting is important for sure.

1480
01:19:12,079 --> 01:19:15,760
Speaker 2: Yeah. And so the and just this idea in general

1481
01:19:15,760 --> 01:19:18,119
that there's some resource that we haven't tapped yet, and

1482
01:19:18,159 --> 01:19:20,039
if we tap that, I mean this is this is

1483
01:19:20,079 --> 01:19:22,760
of course a human desire, but it's one of the

1484
01:19:22,800 --> 01:19:28,119
main things that drove European exploration, settling, colonization, et cetera.

1485
01:19:28,239 --> 01:19:30,520
Of the New World. Was this idea that there's there's

1486
01:19:30,560 --> 01:19:32,840
this untapped resource out there, and if we just tap that,

1487
01:19:33,199 --> 01:19:36,359
it's gonna fix all of our problems. We're gonna heal,

1488
01:19:36,520 --> 01:19:39,760
we're gonna cure aging, We're gonna cure and we're still

1489
01:19:39,760 --> 01:19:41,960
doing all of this, we're still looking for every one

1490
01:19:42,000 --> 01:19:47,399
of these things. So they, uh, so, imagine that you

1491
01:19:47,479 --> 01:19:50,720
are somebody who has at least convinced other people that

1492
01:19:50,760 --> 01:19:53,239
you have this gift right, that you have the gift

1493
01:19:53,359 --> 01:19:55,600
to find water, to find treasure, et cetera, et cetera.

1494
01:19:56,079 --> 01:19:57,119
And then all we have to do is we go

1495
01:19:57,159 --> 01:19:59,039
out here, we make a little sacrifice. We kill a dog,

1496
01:19:59,600 --> 01:20:01,880
sacrifice the blood, we piece of guardian spirit, and then

1497
01:20:01,920 --> 01:20:06,279
we start digging. We start digging. We dig and we

1498
01:20:06,319 --> 01:20:08,439
dig and we dig. After like a day of digging,

1499
01:20:08,520 --> 01:20:10,439
we've been keep in mind like we had to hire

1500
01:20:10,479 --> 01:20:13,359
like an entire digging crew plus my fee, you know,

1501
01:20:13,640 --> 01:20:16,920
so it's not a cheap endeavor. And after a couple

1502
01:20:16,960 --> 01:20:20,439
of days of digging no treasure, what you say is

1503
01:20:21,439 --> 01:20:25,039
is that guy over there this yere No, no, no,

1504
01:20:25,399 --> 01:20:26,960
you at the sere you say it was that guy

1505
01:20:27,000 --> 01:20:30,119
over there. He talked when he wasn't supposed to talk.

1506
01:20:30,479 --> 01:20:32,199
Speaker 3: He did he didn't follow the us.

1507
01:20:32,199 --> 01:20:34,079
Speaker 2: One of the words that you're not supposed to use,

1508
01:20:34,119 --> 01:20:35,560
and that woke the guardian spirit up. And now the

1509
01:20:35,600 --> 01:20:38,039
treasure is pulled down even deeper. It's actually going to

1510
01:20:38,079 --> 01:20:42,800
take more money and time. Yeah. Yeah, So then it's

1511
01:20:42,840 --> 01:20:44,479
like the only people actually getting wealthy off of the

1512
01:20:44,479 --> 01:20:48,039
treasure digging are the treasure finders themselves, right, that's the idea.

1513
01:20:49,159 --> 01:20:55,520
So all of this to say, one of the great

1514
01:20:56,000 --> 01:20:59,199
money finders, one of the great money diggers of New England,

1515
01:21:00,159 --> 01:21:04,800
was a guy by the name of Joseph Smith, who is,

1516
01:21:04,840 --> 01:21:10,920
of course the founder of Mormonism. Joseph Smith had two

1517
01:21:10,920 --> 01:21:14,600
scrying stones that he used that he kept and he

1518
01:21:14,640 --> 01:21:16,880
would put it in his hat, so the way you

1519
01:21:16,920 --> 01:21:19,560
had to we work with a scrying stone. It's actually

1520
01:21:19,600 --> 01:21:21,840
fun woodcuts of like a guy looking into a hat

1521
01:21:21,880 --> 01:21:24,560
with like light coming out or that's like that's Joseph Smith.

1522
01:21:25,239 --> 01:21:27,239
Maybe we could put one up on the screen for subuquency.

1523
01:21:28,199 --> 01:21:32,760
Joseph Smith, he was a seer, like he was somebody

1524
01:21:32,760 --> 01:21:35,199
who had at least convinced the people around him that

1525
01:21:35,239 --> 01:21:37,439
he had these certain gifts, this ability to kind of

1526
01:21:37,439 --> 01:21:42,960
find this lost treasure, this buried treasure. And the way

1527
01:21:42,960 --> 01:21:44,239
that he would do it is he had these two

1528
01:21:44,279 --> 01:21:46,399
scrying stones like chunks, of course, and he would put

1529
01:21:46,399 --> 01:21:48,920
them in his hat, because to make a scryingstone where

1530
01:21:48,960 --> 01:21:51,000
you have to blot out all other sources of light

1531
01:21:51,079 --> 01:21:52,560
so you can see the light that's shining out of

1532
01:21:52,560 --> 01:21:54,920
a stone. So he would put it in his hat,

1533
01:21:54,960 --> 01:21:56,359
and then he would hold his hat up to his

1534
01:21:56,399 --> 01:21:58,319
face and block out all the other sources of light.

1535
01:21:58,399 --> 01:22:01,399
And then as he's staring into this growing stone in

1536
01:22:01,479 --> 01:22:03,960
his hat, he would start weeping. He would start kind

1537
01:22:03,960 --> 01:22:06,560
of like speaking in tongues. He would start doing all

1538
01:22:06,600 --> 01:22:09,520
these things, and then he'd say, I've seen it. I've

1539
01:22:09,520 --> 01:22:11,079
seen the vision. I know where the treasure is, I

1540
01:22:11,159 --> 01:22:13,399
know where the thing is. As far as we know,

1541
01:22:14,960 --> 01:22:21,680
never actually found anything, until, of course, he found the

1542
01:22:21,960 --> 01:22:29,600
vision of where these golden tablets are. Yeah. So Harold Bloom,

1543
01:22:29,600 --> 01:22:32,239
the great literary critic American literary critic, in his book

1544
01:22:32,319 --> 01:22:37,239
The American Religion, he makes the argument that American religion

1545
01:22:37,359 --> 01:22:41,279
is fundamentally gnostic in all the senses that this means.

1546
01:22:41,319 --> 01:22:45,520
And importantly, Bloom does not think this is a bad thing. Yeah, Okay,

1547
01:22:45,840 --> 01:22:48,319
so he's he's not he's not saying this like in

1548
01:22:48,359 --> 01:22:50,760
a negative way. If I said something was fundamentally gnostic,

1549
01:22:50,840 --> 01:22:53,000
you would note that it means I don't like that thing.

1550
01:22:53,319 --> 01:22:55,920
But for Harol Blooms is actually a good thing. And

1551
01:22:55,960 --> 01:22:59,159
so one of the trademarks of narcissism, well, for Bloom,

1552
01:22:59,239 --> 01:23:02,600
it's the common of the separation of the material from

1553
01:23:02,640 --> 01:23:05,359
the spiritual. And then it also has to do with

1554
01:23:05,560 --> 01:23:07,640
the idea of there being kind of like echelons or

1555
01:23:07,680 --> 01:23:10,239
like deeper levels of esoteric knowledge that you can move into.

1556
01:23:10,640 --> 01:23:14,000
So for Harold Bloom, American religion is fundamentally gnostic, which

1557
01:23:14,000 --> 01:23:16,439
he sees is a good thing. And he sees that

1558
01:23:16,800 --> 01:23:22,880
and in his view, Mormonism is the most purely gnostic

1559
01:23:23,319 --> 01:23:29,119
and therefore the most purely American form of religion. And

1560
01:23:29,159 --> 01:23:32,640
that's where we're going to stop today. It's going to

1561
01:23:32,720 --> 01:23:36,319
leave that out there, and in a few weeks when

1562
01:23:36,319 --> 01:23:38,239
we pick this up again, what I want to do

1563
01:23:38,279 --> 01:23:41,319
is actually look a little bit at the early history

1564
01:23:41,359 --> 01:23:44,720
Mormonism and some of the folk beliefs and practices as

1565
01:23:44,840 --> 01:23:48,319
folk magic from Europe gets carried over as also gnostic

1566
01:23:48,800 --> 01:23:53,000
influences from other things. I mean, I didn't even talk

1567
01:23:53,039 --> 01:23:57,399
about all the Puritans. Some of the Puritans who are

1568
01:23:57,439 --> 01:23:59,960
involved in some of the witch hunts that we mentioned earlier,

1569
01:24:00,439 --> 01:24:04,039
some of them were very interested in and extensively studied

1570
01:24:04,079 --> 01:24:08,119
like cobblah. So there's a lot of weird stuff that

1571
01:24:08,159 --> 01:24:09,680
I want to look at as we look at kind

1572
01:24:09,680 --> 01:24:12,359
of the weird history of like early American religion and

1573
01:24:12,439 --> 01:24:16,880
this kind of esoteric thrust that it takes. So that's

1574
01:24:16,880 --> 01:24:17,399
where we're gonna be.

1575
01:24:17,439 --> 01:24:19,000
Speaker 3: And it's amays it. It's funny because it looks like

1576
01:24:19,079 --> 01:24:19,800
a contradiction.

1577
01:24:20,039 --> 01:24:22,479
Speaker 1: But if you because at first we started with the

1578
01:24:22,520 --> 01:24:26,319
idea that in the early Reformation you have this split

1579
01:24:26,399 --> 01:24:28,920
of heaven and Earth where in some ways there's this

1580
01:24:29,399 --> 01:24:32,560
but what happens and you see it, you know in

1581
01:24:32,600 --> 01:24:35,439
the split right away, very soon, is when you see

1582
01:24:35,479 --> 01:24:38,640
freemasonry being developed. You kind of see these secret societies,

1583
01:24:38,680 --> 01:24:42,039
and in some ways this split is creating a type

1584
01:24:42,079 --> 01:24:47,520
of esoteric thinking and magical thinking that becomes divorced in

1585
01:24:47,560 --> 01:24:51,720
weird ways from the basic belief of people and becomes

1586
01:24:51,720 --> 01:24:54,680
this kind of secret thing that people participate in. And

1587
01:24:54,760 --> 01:24:57,279
so although it looks like a contradiction, it is in fact,

1588
01:24:58,239 --> 01:25:01,920
if you don't have a completely in graded vision of

1589
01:25:01,960 --> 01:25:04,359
how it is that God acts through his saints, you know,

1590
01:25:04,399 --> 01:25:07,199
through his angels into the world and how you know,

1591
01:25:07,199 --> 01:25:09,720
we're meant to ask God to show us to to

1592
01:25:09,720 --> 01:25:12,680
to to help us, uh, and that we it's embodied

1593
01:25:12,680 --> 01:25:15,439
in the turgical practice. It's not that those will go away,

1594
01:25:15,560 --> 01:25:18,479
is that they'll just become weirder and weirder and weirder.

1595
01:25:18,119 --> 01:25:21,199
Speaker 3: Because it's a it's it's a human need that people have.

1596
01:25:21,640 --> 01:25:24,399
Speaker 2: One of the things that I think that I'm ready

1597
01:25:24,439 --> 01:25:27,560
to start pushing back against actually is the idea of

1598
01:25:27,600 --> 01:25:32,199
re enchantment in the sense that I don't think the

1599
01:25:32,239 --> 01:25:35,319
magic ever really went out of the world, but I

1600
01:25:35,359 --> 01:25:39,880
think that what happened is something more like modernity. And

1601
01:25:39,920 --> 01:25:42,239
you can see this. I mean, there are extreme cases

1602
01:25:42,239 --> 01:25:44,600
where you have like nuclear physicists who are also like

1603
01:25:44,640 --> 01:25:48,000
practice practicing occultists and things like that, and that stuff

1604
01:25:48,039 --> 01:25:52,079
is well relatively well known, But I don't think it

1605
01:25:52,159 --> 01:25:56,840
is really the case that this, you know, Weber's idea

1606
01:25:56,840 --> 01:26:00,680
of like disenchantment like just totally sucked all the enchantment

1607
01:26:00,720 --> 01:26:02,760
out of the world and now we can just deal

1608
01:26:02,760 --> 01:26:05,319
with the world in this rational basis. But is that

1609
01:26:05,359 --> 01:26:09,520
when the you could say there was like a hierarchical

1610
01:26:09,560 --> 01:26:15,079
way within Christianity of approaching these things in the world.

1611
01:26:15,199 --> 01:26:17,119
And as we kind of established in our last video,

1612
01:26:17,560 --> 01:26:20,159
there was like some messiness on the edges of that

1613
01:26:20,840 --> 01:26:23,239
where you're like, okay, but what about this fairy. Maybe

1614
01:26:23,319 --> 01:26:25,199
she can be saved, maybe she can't. We'll see if

1615
01:26:25,239 --> 01:26:26,840
she can hack it as a monk for seven years

1616
01:26:26,920 --> 01:26:30,239
or like whatever. Like there's like there's folk traditions and

1617
01:26:30,319 --> 01:26:32,279
legends and things like that kind of on the edges.

1618
01:26:33,399 --> 01:26:39,520
But then you have this kind of solidity in the center. Yeah,

1619
01:26:39,560 --> 01:26:42,520
and when that is kind of stripped away from the cosmos,

1620
01:26:42,840 --> 01:26:45,680
what we don't get is this kind of perfect everything

1621
01:26:45,760 --> 01:26:48,800
is now rational and explainable and understood. What we get

1622
01:26:48,800 --> 01:26:52,399
in said is this really where everything kind of becomes ambiguous.

1623
01:26:52,920 --> 01:26:55,039
And so then what you need is you need to

1624
01:26:55,039 --> 01:26:58,199
find the secret. And maybe the secret is you know,

1625
01:26:58,920 --> 01:27:01,960
for a lot of of Christians, even in like the

1626
01:27:02,039 --> 01:27:04,760
kind of a modern American Protestant context, this is meant

1627
01:27:05,079 --> 01:27:07,000
trying to go back to Judaism or some form of

1628
01:27:07,079 --> 01:27:10,279
Jewish mysticism, right, say, well, they you know, like Christianity

1629
01:27:10,279 --> 01:27:12,039
came from Judaism, So maybe we can go back to

1630
01:27:12,079 --> 01:27:14,560
those things. For other people, it has meant, you know,

1631
01:27:14,680 --> 01:27:20,319
the creation of basically gnostic hierarchies of knowledge and esotericism.

1632
01:27:21,000 --> 01:27:22,680
And for a lot of people it has meant things

1633
01:27:22,760 --> 01:27:25,960
like here, I am reading my Bible every morning like

1634
01:27:26,000 --> 01:27:29,159
I'm supposed to, and I'm reading the genealogies and first chronicles,

1635
01:27:29,479 --> 01:27:32,119
and this is really boring. But every part of the

1636
01:27:32,119 --> 01:27:34,039
Bible is just as important as any other part of

1637
01:27:34,039 --> 01:27:37,640
the Bible, and so there must be a reason to

1638
01:27:37,640 --> 01:27:39,640
read the genealogies and bam, right in the middle of

1639
01:27:39,680 --> 01:27:43,760
the genealogy, here's a prayer. Here's the secret. And if

1640
01:27:43,800 --> 01:27:47,079
you say this prayer, your life is going to be ordered.

1641
01:27:47,760 --> 01:27:50,039
And I think that is a very kind of important

1642
01:27:50,520 --> 01:27:54,000
thing for us to understand about ourselves. And the reason

1643
01:27:54,119 --> 01:27:58,760
that this is important to me is because you know,

1644
01:27:59,479 --> 01:28:02,760
there's there's as we talk about like the re enchantment movement,

1645
01:28:02,800 --> 01:28:05,199
and obviously, like you have been featured in books about

1646
01:28:05,239 --> 01:28:07,680
re enchantment, right, you know, so like you're you're here

1647
01:28:07,840 --> 01:28:10,520
kind of at ground zero, and as we talk about

1648
01:28:10,520 --> 01:28:13,159
these things like there there definitely is a dark side

1649
01:28:13,199 --> 01:28:18,479
to some of the stuff. And there's also like you know, uh,

1650
01:28:18,840 --> 01:28:20,560
it's very easy to get carried away and kind of

1651
01:28:20,600 --> 01:28:24,359
lose sobriety as we're as we're kind of dipping our

1652
01:28:24,359 --> 01:28:26,000
toe in these things. So I think just kind of

1653
01:28:26,079 --> 01:28:29,359
understanding where some of these motivations come from, especially for

1654
01:28:29,399 --> 01:28:31,840
those of us who are Americans, and this is actually

1655
01:28:31,880 --> 01:28:35,319
like a really key part of our a really key

1656
01:28:35,359 --> 01:28:39,479
part of our our tradition, our culture, the symbolism of

1657
01:28:39,479 --> 01:28:41,399
what it means to be an American. It will be

1658
01:28:41,479 --> 01:28:43,640
important to help tease some of those things out. So

1659
01:28:44,399 --> 01:28:46,720
all right, promise guys, we will get to Bigfoot eventually.

1660
01:28:46,840 --> 01:28:49,119
I just like, we'll get there when we get there.

1661
01:28:49,199 --> 01:28:49,920
Speaker 3: There, when we get there.

1662
01:28:50,079 --> 01:28:53,640
Speaker 1: So next episode you can Seraphin takes on the history

1663
01:28:53,680 --> 01:28:54,279
of Mormonism.

1664
01:28:54,479 --> 01:28:57,680
Speaker 2: Everybody, I guess you're doing, extend all of your hate

1665
01:28:57,680 --> 01:28:58,359
mail to Jonathan.

1666
01:29:00,199 --> 01:29:01,680
Speaker 3: All right, everyone, talk to you soon.

1667
01:29:01,760 --> 01:29:02,319
Speaker 2: Bye bye.

1668
01:29:02,920 --> 01:29:05,800
Speaker 1: If you enjoy these videos and podcasts, please go to

1669
01:29:05,840 --> 01:29:08,520
the Symbolic World dot com website and see how you

1670
01:29:08,520 --> 01:29:09,760
can support what we're doing.

1671
01:29:10,039 --> 01:29:12,279
Speaker 3: There are multiple subscriber tiers with perks.

1672
01:29:12,520 --> 01:29:15,000
Speaker 1: There are apparel and books to purchase, So go to

1673
01:29:15,039 --> 01:29:17,920
the Symbolic World dot com and thank you for your support.