Camp Gagnon - The SECRET Demons Hidden in the Bible

Episode Date: October 6, 2026

Dr. Justin Sledge ( @TheEsotericaChannel  ) joins us today to dive deep into the hidden history of Western esotericism, forbidden ancient texts, and the mystical traditions that shaped religious thought. In this episode, we explore the origins of fallen angels and demonic lore, the secret knowledge of the Watchers, Enoch’s transformation into Metatron, and what really lies inside the Vatican archives. From the magic of the Lesser Key of Solomon and ancient priestly sorcery to the profound teachings of Kabbalah, the Zohar, and the creation of a Golem, we examine the evolution of monotheism, lost gospels, and the enduring power of sacred scripture. Welcome to Camp! 🏕️ Shoutout to our sponsors: Brunt, Gld, Blue Chew and Mars Men -Visit https://mengotomars.com and get 50% Off FOR LIFE, Free Shipping, and 3 Free Gifts with Code 'CAMP' at Checkout. -Get $10 off at BRUNT with code " CAMP " at https://www.bruntworkwear.com/CAMP #bruntpod -New Customers get 40% OFF With Promo-Code: "CAMP" When They Visit: https://GLD.com Want the even WILDER theories? SIGN UP TO THE PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/cw/CampGagnon 👕🧢 Shop CAMP Merch: https://camp-rd.com/collections/ufo 🎟️ 🎫 Comedy Tour Tickets: https://markgagnonlive.com 🎩👽 Daily Dose Of History: https://www.dailytodayinhistory.com Timestamps: 0:00 Drawn to Mystery 4:55 Enoch’s Fallen Angels 13:28 Judaism Demons 16:30 Enochian Literature  24:21 Metatron + Enoch Becomes an Angel 29:39 Talmud Teachings + Other Miracle Workers 33:54 Forbidden Knowledge of Watchers 36:54 How Ancient Books Survive? 45:09 First Banned Books + Vatican Archives 53:03 Lost Gospels + Lost Letters of Paul 1:01:31 Lesser Key of Solomon 1:12:06 Priests Who Practiced Magic 1:19:44 Speaking to Angels 1:28:55 Hermeticism’s Connection to Moses 1:42:56 Kabbalah + False Prophets 1:46:53 Dangers of Gematria 1:49:28 What Is Kabbalah + Divine Speech 1:55:59 The Zohar + Repairing the Cosmos 2:01:25 Tikkun Olam 2:09:41 Importance of Argument 2:16:15 Jewish Sorcery + Creating a Golem 2:23:07 Miracles + Biblical Hemorrhoids 2:31:50 Origins of YHWH 1:38:26 The Divine Council + Gods Wife 2:44:36 Exile Leading to Monotheism 2:50:26 Why Christianity Spread 2:56:34 Slavery + Role of Prophets 3:02:48 Why Ancient Text Survive #demon #dark #darkhistory Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Some medieval priests believe that they could summon demons and even use them to rob the Antichrist. They believed that demons were hiding treasure to fund the end of the world. And if a priest could cast a demon out of somebody, why couldn't they force it to hand over money? Well, today, Dr. Justin Sledge joins me to explore some of these strangest stories in all of religion and occult literature. We're talking about the Book of Enoch and the flesh-eating giants, a human who becomes an angel called the little Yahweh and two men who claim to receive an angelic language letter by letter backwards. We also get into Justin's argument that the oldest passages of the Bible reveal God as a warrior and storm deity. How did these beliefs develop and which ones are still shaping the way

that we see the world today? Dr. Justin Sledge is absolutely brilliant. I'm a huge fan of his work and his YouTube channel, Esoterica. And today he brings up a lot of really fascinating and really challenging pieces of literature and ancient texts that make me question what we really know about the Bible, occultism, and all of Western religion. So sit back, relax, and welcome to camp. Dr. Justin Sledge, thank you for joining me. Yeah, man. Thank you. Thank you for having me on. Looking forward to chatting. I am so excited. I've been watching a bunch of your YouTube content for a pretty long time now. And I just love your approach to the esoteric, as you could, you could sort of frame it that way.

You have a background in philosophy and really just are an expert in looking through ancient texts and really understanding them through a scholarly lens. And I don't have the scholarship, but I do have the same curiosity and a fascination with these ancient texts. So could you just explain to the people how you came to love this sort of facet of academia

and what draws you into this? So I think I like a lot of kids in the 80s. I grew up with Arthur, Clark's mysterious world and Leonard Nemoy's in search of and like horror movies like Evil Dead with a Necronomicon summoning demons. So I grew up in a world of like H.P. Lovecraft Stories and playing Dungeons and Dragons. And I got so interested in that kind of material, Atlantis and ghosts and, you know,

Bigfoot and grim wars and, you know, all this sort of thing. And I think that there's kind of two paths that happened to most people, right? Either you sort of grow up and everything becomes disenchanted and frankly boring and you lose interest in all that. And, you know, it's all mythology. Or you become sort of a dyed in the wool true believer. And now you're like, you know, really about going and finding Atlantis and the wall abimony or whatever with Edgar Casey. So you sort of become a true believer or you become a skeptic. And I think that what happened to me is I got lucky and I became both, right?

I became a skeptical believer, which means that I'm interested in the material. but I'm also what I would consider myself as sort of a classical skeptic in the sense that my job is to withhold judgment. Not to judge, yea or nay, but to look at the material and say, this made sense to someone in the past. How can I, like, steal man them so that it makes sense to us again? So looking at a Gnostic text or a grimorrs or whatever. So it was never, it was never for me a thing that I believed in, but it was also a thing that I never felt that I could just sort of put on the shelf. and be like, oh, that's just a bunch of nonsense. Right.

So that's the kind of how I got into it. Why I stay into it is really, you know, part of what I love about sort of esoteric material is that, you know, no one comes to esotericism by accident. Like you don't accidentally become an occultist. So that's the thing you have to, like, work at. And this material is difficult to get access to. A lot of it's in, like, old books. A lot of it's in arcane languages. A lot of it's, like, difficult to get, you know, to get into.

It's, it's esoteric. And so in those texts and in those practices and in that literature, they're always asking the biggest possible questions. Like, what is the fundamental nature of reality hidden from us? How can I manipulate occult forces so as to change the world? I'm always talking with people, most of them dead, about just that question, the biggest possible questions. And I feel like that's just a thing that's really healthy for people, is to be able to be in dialogue about these really big questions. Yeah. And I feel like even if I don't agree to the answers that someone like Cornelius Agrippa or John D

or Gino or Bruno, even if I don't agree with the answers that they come to, the fact that they were on that quest, their whole lives inspires me. And I want to be on that quest, even if I can't share with them that we come to the same conclusions. And I find that they motivate me to be on that quest. Yeah. And that's a deep sense of numinous awe. Yeah.

And I really am very thankful. for them and for this tradition, for giving my life that sense of numinous awe. I feel the same way that even if I don't fully believe what is sort of codified within these ancient texts, or I don't come to the same conclusion, I believe that they believed it. For sure.

And to me, that is fascinating. Like when John Dee is sort of looking in front of a bowl, you know, experiencing some type of heightened state where he's understanding prophecies of the world, I'm like, what was going on with him? Was he just delusional? Was he actually doing something? Like, what was actually going on here?

And I can't really hang my hat on any element of this being 100% one way or the other. But the question is just so enticing to me. And I just want to know more. Yeah, that's same way. It's, again, I think what's great for me is that I come at this material, like I said, with a skeptical lens, which means not disbelieving it, but just by trying to make sure that I'm withholding judgment as much as much as I can. and just letting the sense of mystery be palpable, to be real. And for me to be humble enough, you know, God willing that I can be humble enough just to say, I don't know.

And I'm not going to know. And that's okay. And so what I need to do is present the mystery, not debunk it, not encourage other people to believe X, Y, and Z, not to sell someone a story about what really happened with Edward Kelly and John D. because I don't know that. What I do know is, this is really mysterious, and I need to sit in the mystery. Yeah. And that's, you know, that's a hard thing to do

because we all want the answers, and they're not forthcoming. Well, let's sit in some ancient mysteries, okay? There's a few that I think about all the time. So the one that I would love to start with is the, sort of how the, my understanding, the Catholic Church and much of Christendom understands the demonic to have been born. And it is this story that,

It comes from Genesis that also has a lot of crossover with the book of Enoch. And it is this idea of these watchers coming down and they're supposed to observe humanity, but they don't. And what do they do instead? They procreate with human women and they create Nephilim, which are these sort of like giant kind of half-breed sort of things.

And then the Nephilim die. And their bodily form is decomposing into the earth, but their souls continue to sort of habitate this realm. And that is kind of an explanation for the demonic. Now, what do you understand from going through the actual sources and your understanding of this literature? What do you make of that story and sort of where it came from and what it says about how these people thought about magical thinking and demons? So we can think about this in the context of a development of a form of Judaism that scholars call apocalyptic Judaism. Now, apocalyptic, that's not a category ancient people used.

It's a category we've imposed upon them. So we have to be careful about the category because it's, again, when you're using categories upon historical people that they didn't develop, it's a fun house mirror, right? Right. And when you say apocalyptic, I just want to be clear. Are you talking about the revelatory nature of apocalypse? Yeah, it's literally the word apocalypsis, which means to reveal or unveil something. So most of us hear the word apocalyptic and we hear the end of the world. Doomsday, Armageddon.

And that's one thing that they were interested in, right? It just so happens that that word is now taken on that flavor almost exclusively in the way that we commonly use it. So let's, you know, let's zoom out a little bit. And so part of the apocalyptic mode of Judaism, which develops in the fourth century or so before the common era, of which the book of Enoch is a classic example and of which the apocalypse of John is also an example. But one of the things they're really interested in is in the primordial past. They're really interested in the apocalyptic literature about where the world came. from and specifically where evil came from.

Because there's just a basic theological problem at stake here. If God is all good, where did the bad stuff come from? And so there's a lot of answers. And part of what we find in the apocalyptic literature is actually a range of theories. It's a range of theories. One of which is the Enoch, what we might call the Enochian theory of evil. And that theory is that there were divine beings, angels, whatever that means, and that for whatever reason they decided to come down and mate with human women.

And they were led in the book of Enoch by one of these entities called Simyaza. Simyazza is Hebrew or Aramaic for the one that sees the name. So this must have been a relatively high-ranking being because insofar as God's name is representative of the divine itself, this is an entity who sees the name of God. And traditionally, no one really sees or even knows the true name of the creator. Yeah, it's completely, you know, The glory of the, of the, of the maker makes it so that no one can really see the maker.

You can see the glory, but nothing, nothing behind the throne. Which is there a remnant of that still to this day when I'm texting my Jewish friends and they say, thank God? And then they put a dash in the jeep. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, it's still accustomed, you know, and even me, when I'm in, you know, I can be in scholarship mode and I can be in religion mode. And when I'm in religion mode, I also, you know, say Hashem, Bruch Hashem, you know, the name, right? Hashem, literally the name. Blessed be the name, but you don't want to say it or think it or whatever.

But this angel did. Saw the name. That's big. Simeasa. This is a high ring. That's an executive. Yeah, it's an executive angel. And he convinces a bunch of other angels to go down.

In fact, they swear like an oath that if they go down together, whatever happens to one of us happens to all of us. And in the book of Enoch, they go down and mate with human women. What's great about that story is that it's not in the book of Enoch, but it's in a side literature called the midrash. where the first woman they actually come to, she realizes that these guys are up to no good. They're kind of...

And again, we think of demons in a way that I... We're used to the exorcist, right? It's super spooky evil demons. The demons in the book of Enoch are The Watchers or Simiaz and his band are more like horny teenagers. Yeah. They're just like out to like get laid.

Yeah. They're not like super spooky. They're just kind of like creepers. Yeah. You know, so anyway, they come across... They're really kind of like bad uncles in a way. They were like, they're teaching the people bad stuff. They're like, yo, here's how you like smoke cigarettes.

Here's what weed is. Yeah, it's like cosmetics. Metallurgy. Yeah, yeah, there are like the bad uncle. In exchange for that, they're like, hey, let's talk, you know. Yeah, yeah, come on. Yeah, Netflix and chill. Yeah.

So they're just kind of creepers. Yeah. And in every one of the, one of the first woman that they meet, human woman they meet, she realizes these guys are like just weird. And she says, look, I'll sleep with you. if you tell me God's name, right? If you tell me God's name, sure, like, I'll sleep with you. And this idiot angel says, sure. And he tells her the name of God.

And she pronounces it and immediately wills herself to become the Pleiades. Whoa. And so she, the first Earth girl that they, you know, Earth girls are easy, except for when they're not. Yeah. She tricked them and she's permanently becomes the Pleiades. Now, when you say the Pleiades. The seven stars in the sky, the constellation of the Pleiades. And that was sort of an ancient kind of.

Each an idea. Apocalyptic understanding of like where the star system came from. This was a human woman that learned the name of God. I knew God and she transformed herself to avoid these rapacious angels. So she used the divine name to transform herself into the seven stars of the Pleiades. It could come up. It's a cool story. I love that story.

And now every time I look at a Subaru, right? Supero is just a Japanese name for the Pleiades. Oh, wow. The seven stars are on there and I always think of her when I see a Subaru pass by. Wow, good for her. Yeah. So it's a cool story. Hey, real quick, most people who watch this channel,

aren't subscribed. And when you subscribe, you help the channel grow and you stay in the loop with every new drop. Religion camp, history camp, and camp gagnon. Now, let's get back to it. So, but at any rate, that's one story, right? That's one story is that these watchers came down, made of the women, created these giants. And it's, and the problem with the giants was that they were evil. We're not evil in the sense of malevolent, the way we think of demons as being malevolent. They were rapacious in the sense that they had massive appetites. And the book of Enoch said they just started eating everybody. they were just eating everybody.

And at some point, God was like, look, they're going to kill everything. And again, when you read the Genesis creation story or the flood story, it says the world was full of Hamas, was full of violence. And so part of what they're trying to figure out is what exactly is this violence the world was full of. And the book of Enoch explains it was just literally giants eating people alive and eating all the livestock. And eventually this got to a situation where God just had to flood the earth in order to get rid of them. And of course, that didn't quite work either. Yeah. So that's one story.

The Aramaic word for violence? What was the word you said? The Hebrew word, Hamas. Yeah, and of course, people can hear the word Hamas. It's a, it's a... Is it spelled similarly? I don't know if it's spelled the same in Arabic, but it's... People have made this connection before.

Yeah, I think people have noticed this, and it's one of those things where it's an interesting overlap in languages. I think it's a false, a situation of false friends. obviously because Hamas in Arabic is an acronym for for the camera or the exact name for it in Arabic. Wow. But yeah, in Hebrew, it says the world is full of violence and that's the word actually for violence. Okay, not to get into modern politics, but that's just a crazy overlap. It's just a weird overlap. Wow.

So, but yeah, but that's just one theory, right? So the other theory, by the way, that theory didn't win. The theory that evil came from angels coming down, mating women, teaching us bad stuff. So that theory actually did not win out. The book of Inach, aside from one quotation in the book of Jude in the New Testament, ultimately doesn't get absorbed into Christianity or Judaism, for that matter. The theory that God absorbed is the rebellion and heaven theory, where there were actually angels in heaven.

And rather than coming down to earth, they rebelled against God and were thrown out of heaven. And that's the story that got taken up into Christianity, but not Judaism. For Judaism, demons are actually entities that were created right-well. before the first Shabbat, and God basically ran out of time to give them bodies. They didn't get bodies. And so their souls, their Ruhut, their souls, they have all the desires that we have, the bodily desires we have, but they can't satisfy them. And they see us satisfying our desires and being, you know, complete entities with bodies and souls.

And this inspires jealousy in them. And they hate us. They really, you know, they ravage you against us. And the Gamara says that if you could see them, they're called the Shadim in Hebrew. If you could see the Shadim, that would be all that you could see. They're just literally everywhere. So that's a particularly Jewish theory on the origin of the demons. I'm jealous of this Epicurean life where we can eat and drink and procreate and things like that, whereas these demons are just all soul and no flesh.

All soul and no flesh with all the desires of us. So just imagine being able to the feeling of being hungry, but never being able to eat. Is it an ancient explanation for possession as well? Yeah, yeah. So in Judaism and in Christianity, possession became a big thing. And it's interesting that in the history of Judaism, or rather I should say that in the divorce between Judaism and Christianity, right? When you go through a divorce, you have to divide up what you get and what the Christians got was exorcism. Judaism basically shelved exorcism for about 1,500 years until you could start getting the first possession cases again in Safed in the 16th century.

And by then, it's not demons possessing people anymore. It's the evil dead. It's dead people who've come, whose spirits actually end up possessing people. Right. So totally different. In Judaism, demons don't possess people anymore, at least. And in Christianity, dead people don't possess people. So it's very different in terms of what the etiology of evil influence is in both religions.

Right. So there's this swirling sort of explanation for how evil is introduced cosmologically. and Christians and Jews kind of pick up different versions, so to speak. But they both still have Adam and Eve as far as the introduction to humanity. Right. And that story is essentially the same. It's understood wildly differently depending on which group of Christianity you belong to or which group of Judaism you belong to. But yeah, there's a sense of something went wrong there.

With the one exception, of course, with the Gnostics who think, no, something went right there. Right. And that's the great example of where we have a. complete inversion of that story by by some of the Sethian Gnostics and antiquity who are fascinating. Right. So the story of Enoch is written by someone. We don't necessarily know who is sort of written pseud anonymously.

Kind of attributed to this person Enoch, who is referenced in the Bible. Yeah. Yeah, it says that, you know, Enoch is famous because he lived for 365 years and he want to go with God. Assumed in a heaven. He assumed in heaven. He never dies. Him and Elijah are really the two who, ever die in the Hebrew Bible. And so the fact that he lived for 365 years, which seems to be

somehow aligned to the, there's some astrological, calendrical, something there. And then the fact that he didn't die, there becomes an entire literature, of which the first book of Enoch actually isn't even one book. It's between five and eight books, depending how you carve them up. And then there's second Enoch and third Enoch. So it's, we shouldn't talk about the book of Enoch. We should talk about the, the kind of the library of inokian literature, of which there's some Dead Sea Scroll stuff that's inokian, there's a whole library. I mean, if you were to take it all, then put it together, I mean, it would be a tomb, a real tomb, hundreds of pages. So what does the scholarship say about this person that is ostensibly quite important to God? And if you are a Christian and you're

hearing this or even a Jewish person, you're hearing this, and you appreciate the Hebrew Bible and you understand the Old Testament to be the inspired word of God, you're like this Enoch guy is pretty important, but yet not mentioned a ton. And then there's all this literature around him that is non-canonical. The church doesn't really include in their theology in any capacity. There seems like there's a gap here. And I think this gap is why there's so much interest around Enoch. So what can we say from the scholarship that is verified about this person and about the writings around him? And what was the conversation like for, you know, ancient Jews or even early century Christians that were talking about Enoch.

So we don't know anything about the mythological character Enoch. I mean, the Bible just has a few throwaway verses. The Bible has a terrible tendency of saying really provocative things and moving on. That's what makes it so good. It makes it so good, right? And it's just an invitation to fan fiction at that point when you just say things like, oh yeah, and then Enoch was transformed into this. And you're like, what?

And there were Nephilim in the earth. And you're like, right? And the Bible was just like, just like, yeah, didn't you know? Yeah, and it creates a quandary for modern Christians because it's like, look, I believe the whole Bible, Jesus is good, love your neighbor, giants are real. Wait, hold on, what's that last one? And this is a common thing in ancient literature where they'll just say like wild stuff. I mean, even in Norse mythology sometimes you'll just be like, and I went to go visit so-and-so, and I got into duel with this guy, and then this troll talked to me for a while. Then we went over here, and I talked to a spirit, and then I went to farm for the season.

You're like, okay, I got two questions about it. Who is the troll? And again, it's just, you know, that's just the way that ancient literature worked. But with Enoch, what's really clear about the literature is that Enoch as a character was important to these apocalyptic Jews and Christians because he clearly had some special access to God. And when you get access to God, you get insight into the nature of the universe. You get shown things. The rest of us, civilians, they'll get shown. And so a lot of the literature in the Enoch literature, a lot of us like that first story with the fallen ones and the watchers. But most of the rest of that book is Enoch getting shown around the universe.

Right. You learn how the universe works, how it came to be, how the collegial system can be changed. So, for instance, one of the things that was really up for debate in the ancient world was how do you keep time? And the Jewish calendar is an interesting calendar because it's lunar. but if you do a lunar calendar and you have, like, for instance, we're about to come up when I harvest holidays, if you have harvest holidays on a lunar calendar and you don't correct that calendar, the harvest holidays will just move through the calendar and all of a sudden you're having harvest holidays in February, which makes no sense. So you have to do something to the calendar to stop that from happening. Well, one thing you can do is you can correct it by using a solar calculation and you can insert basically in the Jewish calendar. elite month, and that's how modern Judaism solves it. The Anokic literature solved it by saying,

let's get rid of the lunar calendar. Let's introduce a 365-day solar calendar. And we know that solar calendar was used by the people who wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls. They were on a solar calendar. These are Essian Jews. The scenes, maybe, they never call themselves that, so we have to be careful about, they just called themselves the Yakhad, the community. But probably they were what Josephus calls the Ascines. or a sect of them perhaps. But they use this Inokian calendar. And in fact, if you look at the amount of scrolls recovered by text from the Dead Sea Scrolls, I think Inoch is the third, the books of Inoch are the third most attested group of scrolls.

When you say attested, what do you mean? So when we see like there's fragments of Genesis, fragments of Exodus, fragments of Leviticus, fragments or whatever. So if you look at the amount of copies of scrolls that they had, Inach is higher than other books of the Bible. It's like, I think, third down. So this community was really taken with this book. It really mattered to them enormously. And again, when you go through those sections in the book of Enoch about the calendar,

most of our eyes kind of glaze over because we don't really care about calendrical issues. But if an eternal God has commanded you to keep certain holidays forever, you need to know when to keep those holidays. And how do you do it? You do it by doing what we would now call astrology, astronomy. And so there's a huge chunk of that in the book of Enoch. So that's the kind of stuff that really, really interested ancient people. How do we organize? How is the universe organized? What does that mean for us? What kind of secrets can we learn about the universe from its

organization? And that's the kind of stuff that's really in the book of Enoch in a big way. Obviously, the origin of evil is important too. But that's the kind of stuff that's in there. But yeah, I mean, clearly who have wrote the book of Jude, which is in the New Testament, they quote the book of enoch as authoritative. So for whoever that person was, the book of Enoch was authoritative enough to use it as a proof text for a theological point they wanted to make. The real question, or another question, rather, I shouldn't say the real question is, how was this relating to other Jews at the time? Because, for instance, the temple in Jerusalem is certainly not using this Inokian calendar, whereas the folks out there at Qumran, the Dead Sea

scroll folks, the Ascenes, they are, which means they're not celebrating the same holidays and the same dates anymore. I mean, that's a real big issue. And so that's just a place where it seems kind of boring until you think about the day you celebrate a holiday is a reflection of the entire structure of the cosmos. And you have to know how it all works. And part of what the book of Enoch does is tell you. And that's, I think, again, a part that some people's eyes glaze over, But I'm like, you don't really get how important, you know, you don't really get how important this is until you put yourself into the shoes of a person in the first century. Yeah, I think there's also a real assumption, at least from me, when looking at antiquity,

to be like, all right, you know, Christians in, you know, 200 AD thought this. And Jews in 200 BC, they thought this. But there's a massive diversity of thought, even within the same region in any given period of time. And it seems like just even the small fragments of these. ancient texts that we have kind of show us like people were talking about all sorts of different things and believing different things and even celebrating holidays which are massively important to every religion on different days based on based on esoteric revealed texts right right like that's a really a wild thing to think about yeah uh that you like the folks out there at the

dead sea scrolls they were calculating their dates based on the revelations from enoch who by the way in some later literature of the Inokian literature is transformed into an angel called Metatron. And Metatron is referred to as Yahweh Katan, the little Yahweh. Whoa. And for a monotheistic religion, that is a bizarre claim. Mm-hmm. That this human being is transformed into an angel, Metatron, which you can hear that word's not Hebrew. It sounds like Greek, kind of.

But Metatron and Metatron is called Yahweh Katan. And it's just mind-boggling. Where does that word, Metatron, is there a understanding of where that comes from? A lot of debate. A lot of debate. There's no consensus. I mean, people say it's like Metatronos, like above the throne or beyond the throne. It seems like Metatron is associated with the throne of God.

And in fact, in the Gamara, there is a famous pericope where there's these four guys that are doing mystical practices. to enter into the inner sanctum of God, and they make it to the throne room of God, and it's quite dangerous. But when they get there, one of them sees Metatron sitting on the throne of God, and he apostatizes. In fact, the text doesn't even call him by name.

It calls him Achere, the other one, because he's so much a heretic, but he declares that there are two powers in heaven. There are two gods. And it's shocking. And Metatron is actually beaten with Pulsed de Nure with fiery lashes because he misled this rabbinical cosmonaut. And so it's a bizarre story, but it's right there in the Talmud.

We're sitting here in Williamsburg. We could walk right over to a yeshiva. I could show you in the text. And it's a strange story. But there it is. And one of the most authoritative books in Jewish history where this angel metatron, which is Inach, is sitting on the throne of God and gets beaten by another. angel with fiery lashes for deceiving this guy who snuck into the throne room of God. Fascinating.

It's fascinating stuff. And what do these stories tell us about what they understood about monotheism or rebellion against the creator God? The fact that there's discussion about like, yeah, you know, human beings can not only become divine, but also challenge God's authority. It's become God. Yeah. I mean, this is pretty controversial.

It's extremely controversial. It's a theological problem that's at the heart of monotheism. The problem with monotheism is that a sufficiently transcendent God isn't related to our world anymore. And you have to have a story about how a really transcendent God created our world and is somehow still related to us. Because you can't have a religion where God is completely absent. You know, it's like you don't want the God that went out for a pack of smokes and never came back. Right. And no one wants that God.

Right. And so you can't, you need to do something to fix it. And so what do you do? You say, well, we're going to preserve God's utter transcendence. and we're going to have to add something. Christianity squares us with Christ. Right. You incarnate him in a person, you get a Trinity out of the deal.

Right. So then you have the father who's sort of the deos absconditus removed. Christ is imminent and sort of the Holy Spirit is the relationship of the whole thing. The imminence of God. Yeah, that's a solution. It seems like Paul, who was, you know, sort of innovating Christian theology at the very ground floor, it seems like he knew about some of this stuff. In fact, there's even a line in 2 Corinthians where it says,

and I was taken up to the third heaven, and I heard unutterable things. Well, we know that other rabbis at the time were engaging in strange yoga-like body posturing and breathing techniques to alter their consciousness to actually ascend into or descend, actually, into various divine realms called Hegelot, palaces. And it seems like part of what emerges out of that palace literature is the idea that you don't get to see God, but you get to see something, some kind of expression or manifestation of God. Sometimes it's called the cavode, the glory of God. So God's still hidden, but God's glory is a parent. And it just so happens that God's glory is this angel called metatron. So it's

what ends up emerging out of this extreme transcendence is bitheism. You need some hidden God, or if you're going to have a hidden God, transcendent God, you need some imminent representation of it. And so Jewish bitheism emerge. And in fact, it repeats itself over and over. You look through the history of Jewish mysticism. You'll see it emerge. And then the rabbi's like, nope, monotheism. And they'll go away for a while. Then it emerge again. And they're like, nope, monotheism. Interesting. Yeah. It's a bit of an inverse of Christianity in a way, theoretically speaking, that God became man. Whereas in this kind of idea, it's sort of like, well, man becomes God. Yeah, it's a different path up the, up the heavenly ladder.

And so, yeah, this idea of deification, theosis. Right. It becomes a thing in Judaism. And even to this day, Kabbalah is very much wrapped up in a kind of theosis. Right. Now, my understanding, at least from the Talmud, is it's not necessarily prescribed dogma, that it is sort of rabbinical commentary of rabbis throughout, you know, the decades and centuries, sort of debating with each other.

So just the fact that it's referenced in the Talmud, does that necessarily mean that it is prominent within Jewish thought? Is it something that is required dogmatically? Or is it just like here's an idea of some guy threw out and here's a bunch of rabbis sort of debating it? Yeah, it's a huge range. I mean, what they would say is this is an interesting story that might have some meaning and maybe it's just an interesting story.

One of my favorite examples of this is there's a whole long debate about demons in the Talmud and they go on and on for pages about the how you can see demons where if you take the afterbirth of a cat and burn it to ashes and smear that in your eyes.

You can see the shade them. And they have, if you want to see them, you can put a flower around your bed. And they have like little chicken feet that they walk around in. You can see them after you. All kinds of stuff. They go on and on and on about demons. And then at the end of this going on and on about demons, they say some, apparently some guy from the west from, from Eritusrael says, we don't believe any of that. And so it's like, the guy, you must have been like the guy, you know, sitting the fly on the wall being like.

What? So I think that it, again, it's just local customs, you know, and some, you know, you always have this, you know, the weird uncle. Yeah. He's like, yeah, you want to see some demons? And you're like, and then, you know, the other guy's like, there's no demons. What are you talking about? Yeah. So, yeah, that's the funny thing about the Talmudan, which also makes it susceptible to people quoting it out of context and saying, oh, yeah, like, Jews believe that if you sprinkle flour around your bed, you can see demons.

And I'm like, that Jew did. Yeah. Well, this is kind of, I've gotten into, like, conversations with people about the Talmud, because people will see, like, a Twitter thread, and they're like, you know what the Talmud says about Jesus. You know, this is what Jews believe about Jesus. Oiling an excrement. Yeah, of course. And I'm like, oh, well, that's what, maybe, again, we're looking at, like, weird sort of, like, transliterations trying to understand who they're actually talking about.

But perhaps someone said that. But it's just, like, some guy. Yeah. Right. This is not codified into Jewish literature. Yeah. And again, I think, yeah, you read that section of using bowling and excrementing and like, okay, like, that's what one guy thought for sure. And I'm sure he did believe that.

And I'm sure there, I'm sure that there are people out there that do believe that now. I think you ask most other people that are like, yeah, he was just one of like a dozen apocalyptic preachers that did miracles. You know, that we know of in the Galilee alone around Jesus' time. We know four or five other guys who were doing similar kinds of things. Haninda Bendoza and other kinds of Shimon Bar Yochai. So we have other kind of Galilee. They even have a term for them in Hebrew. They're called Ishma Se, men of deed.

And they were known to be miracle workers. They could do exorcisms and shoot lasers out of their eyes and all kinds of stuff. So I think that they would be like, I think you could ask a lot of people there. Yeah, he was one of those guys. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I asked most of my Jewish friends, I heard about this? And like, the vast majority are like, I've never heard of that.

And then the ones that are a little bit more learned and maybe the one to a Shiva, they're like, yeah, you know, there was a lot of people at the time kind of talking about this and doing similar things and sure, maybe we got one wrong. You know what I mean? Like, they kind of like, it's almost as like a joke. Like, all right, maybe we get, maybe we got,

maybe we missed the Messiah, you know, but there was a bunch of messiah. You got to understand where we were coming from. Yeah. It's kind of a funny, like, a way to like contextualize. Like, all right, whoops. It's a great quote by, is it Martin Buber, who says that when the Messiah comes,

I hope I'm close enough to get his ear, or her ear, and whisper in their ear, look, they're going to ask you, is this your first visit or your second? And for the sake of heaven, do not answer that question.

That's funny. So I was like, yeah, if I ever get the Messiah's ear, like, they're going to ask you. Blow them off. Give them a riddle. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Answering some weird parable.

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So you just head to bruntworkware.com, B-R-N-T-workware.com, use the code camp, and you are good to go. And after you order, they're going to ask where you heard about them. Make sure you tell them Mark and Christos from the campsite sent you. Now, let's get back to the show. Okay, so going back through sort of magical thinking of the time, Enoch is fascinating, just for so many reasons, kind of like, it gets tied in with, you know, aliens and stuff like that, and watchers coming down.

The watchers coming down. And then as a Christian, you kind of have to. to like accept like the Nephilim were something. Right. Like if you believe the Bible, you gotta be like, all right, there's something going on. But yeah, the Darren Afnowski Flood Noah movie does a great job with like making them sort of big monster rock giant people.

Yeah, and you kind of gotta accept that. Yeah, they're there. They're in the Bible. You can't get rid of them. Why is there a reference about cosmology? No. Cosmetics. Like the fact that it's brought up with all these other things.

And like, you're reading it and they're like, the watchers came down. They taught to the, people, you know, they taught them metallurgy and how to make weapons. I'm like, oh, that's pretty bad. They talk about war. I'm like, ooh, that's, I don't like that. They taught them about lipstick. I'm like, well, that seems weird to group these things together. So why was there in this time, why were they talking about cosmetics to the same degrees they're talking about war? I think that the one that's misogyny, right? It's just sort of like associated with women and

we don't like women. They're bad. Yeah. So it's a lot of those terms, a lot of those things get associated women, pharmacopeia, like some of the working with roots and stuff also. So there's some of them, there's some of misogyny there. The other thing I think of is just that at some level, cosmetics were associated with sex work. So there's associations there of prostitution and sexual impropriety in general. And also, I mean, they are deceptive. I mean, it is a way of deceiving people. It's making yourself look a certain kind of way that you don't actually look. And I do think that we have this tendency to think that natural is better, which is kind of sometimes refer to this as a Whole Foods fallacy. I go into Whole Foods and it

says, all natural. And I'm like, gets me. Yeah, I'm like, I mean, for me, I'm like, you could just crap in a bottle and call it all natural. And you would, you'd be right. I don't want to. Uranium's all natural. Yeah, yeah. It's all natural. You know, arsenic, fully natural, you know. So, you know, it's, but I think we have the idea that, that, uh, nature is good. and that we should keep things natural. And cosmetics are a place where we unnaturalize ourselves. So even in that time, they were kind of falling into this fallacy. Yeah, or just that, you know, I mean, do you still hear people say things like, you know, that makeup is a lie or, again, it's funny because, you know, we'll often associate women, but they're going to ask guys like, you know, how much hair products do you use?

You're wearing deodorant, like those cosmetics, too. I'm growing a beard for a reason. Yeah, it's aesthetics. So, yeah, I think that the cosmetics thing is associated women, sex work, sexual decadence. Right. And something about the fact that it's deceptive at some level. Right. I think that's some of that kind of stuff.

But yeah, it's, that's a, it is an interesting sort of addition that gets put in there. Also, it's interesting. I don't know what that, what the Gez word is for that word, because it's not preserved in Aramaic or Hebrew. You said Gez? Yes, Gez. The Book of Enoch is only preserved in the GES language, which is the classical language of Ethiopia. So it's a think about it like Ethiopian Latin.

Modern Ethiopian speak Amharic. The classical language is Gez. It's only preserved in that because they can include it in the canon. Yeah, they have it in their canon. Their canon, the Ethiopian canon is a lot bigger than any other canon. And so they have it, they preserved it there, which by the way, it tells you that some Christians, specifically Ethiopian Christians, thought it important enough to continue copying it and to preserve it. But did they take it from the Ethiopian Jewish tradition? So it seems like it was originally written, the book of Enoch was originally written in Aramaic, and ultimately it was transmitted at some point to the Christians or to the Jews living Ethiopia.

And those Ethiopian Jews converted to Christianity and kept it. So that community clearly thought the book of Enoch was authoritative enough to continue copying it, at least. I mean, books in history, sometimes we have the idea of history of like the Inquisition kicking the doors in and burning stuff. That typically isn't how documents were lost. Because you can only kick the doors in of so many places. And if there are 50 copies, you know, it's hard to destroy all of them. You need one to survive. You need one. You just need one.

And typically what ends up happening is that books don't survive because they're just not copied. And that means that a community did not value them enough to use the labor power to copy. Because every time you're copying a book, you're choosing that book and not that book. And part of what happens is that things that go. through filters and they don't get copied. And if it all it takes is the one generation not to copy a book and that's it. You know, so it's not the case that the, sometimes we say things like, oh, the Catholics and the Nicene Council said that the book of Enoch is condemned and they order them all burned. I mean, that didn't happen at the Council of Nicaa at all. They weren't talking about

canon issues. They're talking about Aryanism and calendrical stuff. But most of it is just what communities choose matters to them and then using the labor power to copy it. And, you know, when you think about how much Augustine survives versus almost any other Latin literature, I mean, you can take the collective works of Augustine and put them on one side of a scale and put almost all Latin literature on the other side. And Augustine just about balances out how much has survived. Wow. Why? Because when the Roman Empire Christianized in the West, Augustin really mattered. And, you know, this paganism stuff didn't matter.

And it wasn't like those monks that burn it. They were just like, just don't copy it. You don't have to banish things that there's a cultural atrophy. And the things that persist are the things that are important, at least. It doesn't necessarily have a bearing on the truth value, but it has a lot of bearing on how much it matters. Yeah. Yeah. And books are, you know, especially ancient books.

It just takes one bad storm. Right. To blow in. And the books damage beyond repair are human. Humidity. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Humidity can just destroy papyrus.

Yeah. And, you know, it's the reason why, you know, but we do have cases where certain books were banned. And it's interesting because we have cases where Christians hid them and they hid them, maybe to come get them later or they hid them because they didn't want to destroy them. And that's an Agamadi library. Right. Athanasius said, you know, issued a decree, all these books that are not authoritative,

they are to be like, you got to get them out of your library. You doesn't say what you have to do with them, but you have to take them. take them out of the Mastic libraries. And sure enough, you know, if you look at where the Nagamati library was found, it was found really close to a monastery. And probably they took those books out of the library, following the rules, and didn't quite destroy them. Bared them. It's like when your wife tells you got to stop smoking cigarettes and you're like, all right, fine, but then you hide one little one in the basement. So what's your saying is I have to stop smoking them here. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But I can throw a little latex glove on and go for a drive. Yeah. Yeah. So I think

that that's, you know, this is a place where, you know, again, we sometimes tell stories with the big, bad church, banned all the books and got rid of all the stuff, you know, that they, or sometimes like they, it was left out of the Bible or it was kept out of the Bible. Right. That's not how it happened. The church decided what was going to be in the New Testament based on certain criteria and certain things just were left out when those criteria were laid out. The same way that Pluto ceased to be a planet. Right. The, the, they, we had never defined what a planet was, then we defined what a planet was. Pluto didn't meet the definition anymore. Right. So it wasn't like big, bad science, got out and said, we're kicking Pluto out.

We're banning Pluto. We're banning Pluto. The same thing happened with Christianity. It wasn't that they were like, the book of being like has to go, guys. It was like, we're going to have certain criteria by which things are in and out, and it just so happens that that was out. In fact, there was even debates about books that made it in, Second Peter. There were debates about it. like the famous Christian theologian origin was like, I think this was forgery. I don't think it's really real. Wow.

And I didn't know that. Yeah, and James, James was thought to be spurious. In fact, Martin Luther wanted to get rid of James. I knew that one. It's like, called a guy an epistle straw. Yeah. And so. Because he talks about doing good stuff.

James is like, hey, be a nice guy. Martin Luther was like, how dare he? Faith, man. You have faith. This is the Catholic speaking of me. Yeah. I apologize to the Protestants. But yeah, so it's, you know, but,

Even in the books that made it in, I mean, the apocalypse of John, certain people thought, no, this is not. It's a little out there. It's a little out there. Not really. It's not authoritative. Although it's interesting because I would say that of all the books of the New Testament, if I were a first century Jew and you're to put any of the books from the New Testament in front of me, the Gospels would look pretty weird. The book of Acts would look like sort of classic literature at that time with shipwrecks and stuff. The letters of Paul would have been like, why are you showing me some random news letters?

Yeah, this is a male. Yeah. This is a crime. Yeah, like, what is this? Looking at a guy's male, it's crazy. But if you would put the apocalypse of John in front of me, I'd be like, oh, yeah, it's definitely Jewish literature. That's the most Jewish thing in the whole Bible. Like, oh, yeah, I got that one.

The 12 tribes and this and that in Jerusalem. Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah. We got that too over here. Symbolism, all that, the whole thing. And so that, again, this is a thing that I think many people don't take for granted or don't really, really appreciate, is that the apocalypse of John is much more representative in its out thereness of. Jewish literature of the time than the Gospels or or whatever else. That's so funny. It's also interesting that it's the book that so many modern Christians are so obsessed with. Of course, the Gospels. Those are going to be your starting lineup. Of course. But then you're going to throw Revelation and there is a six man off the bench like this one's fire. Yeah. And it's the most like sort of non-Christian, so to speak. Yeah, it seems apparently non-Christian, but it's the most, definitely the most Jewish book. If you think about Judaism in the apocalyptic mode of like the first and second century.

Mm-hmm. Harkening back, I guess, to like Daniel and... Daniel, but also, I mean, again, if you take the entirety of the apocalyptic literature as we have it and put it into one volume, which you can't, if you take the collected apocalyptic literature right now, it's about two volumes, like, yay, thick. It's massive amount of literature. And that's just what survived. You know, we have all kinds of apocalypses that were written that didn't survive.

And so it was a hugely important kind of... of literature and the reason why the Apocalypse of John was written was because the Christians at some level knew how to write that way. The writer of that was definitely Jewish and I think definitely knew that literature very well. And he was doing what everyone was doing. They were telling these coded stories about what was going on and what was going on was Nero. And that's, you know, the beast 666. And it's almost certainly like Gametria for Nero and the persecutions that the communities were experiencing. Right. So it's a fascinating glimpse into that world.

And again, it appears to us to be a really outsider text. But once you get awash in apocalyptic literature, part of the course. This is part of the course. So when someone says a banned book, like if I were to come to you and be like, okay, show me a real band book, right? Enoch was a book that was kind of forgotten, sort of like put on the outsides, on the fringe,

and wasn't like contested to the same degree. What is a real band book where there was like a whole debate, they're sort of setting the canon within sort of the Christian context, what was a book that was like so close but banned so the catholic church doesn't actually start banning books until the 15th century so long so long i mean there are books that they thought of as spurious they thought of as um for instance the apocrypha which the catholics preserve with the protestant stone those seven books in the middle between the old and the testament and the new testament the catholics realized they're good for the edification of faith but no doctrine can be drawn from them.

So even the church realized that those books were... We're going to hedge a little. They're a hedge a little. They're a spurious. But the church wasn't really in the book banning business until the 15th century. And the first book to be banned was Pico della Miranda's 900 Theses, his 900 conclusions. And the reason why I got banned is relatively straightforward. He argued that magic and Kabbalah were the best proofs for the truth of Christianity.

Whoa. And then he challenged, he challenged people to debate him. He's like, come with me, bro. And the Pope was like, I think Pico was in his early 20s at that point. And he was like, I'm going to defend all 900 of these Theses. I'm going to defend that Kabbalah and magic are the best proof of Christianity and come at me. And the Pope was like, arrest this guy. Who does this guy think he is?

Was he Jewish? He wasn't Jewish, but a Jewish friend, though. In fact, he was actually getting money from some aristocrats and funneling money to both non-converted Jews and converted Jews to translate stuff from the Kabbalah into Latin so he could read it. So he's like really bringing in some authentic stuff and some authentic, inauthentic stuff. But he's really reading Kabbalistic literature in Latin for the first, for really some of the first time. And here he publishes these 900 Theses and says, you know, debate me, bro. And does it prove me wrong like campus debate. Yeah, like it's really like,

you know, changed my mind. Wow. And the Pope was. He was like, no, like arrest this guy. Mead really not, yeah. And then the Pope died and Pico survived. He was not arrested. He ultimately ended up being poisoned by his own secretary. See, it's the ones you at least suspect, you know? It's always the ones closest to you.

Yeah. So he starts, his book is the first band book. It's called The Index Prohibitorum. And these are books that are forbidden for you to own. They're forbidden for you to print and they're forbidden for you to sell. Now, we all know about the Streisand effect nowadays. Yeah. There was nothing better for your book than for it to get banned.

Yeah, they didn't know about Barbara Streisand back there. Yeah, no, no. Would have blown them right. Yeah, yeah. She had not yet emerge into the world. But so this is what happens is when you get the, and this is right before the, right at the onset of printing. And it's at that point the church begins to actually keep an active list of banned books.

Some of which, you know, which is interesting because we often think of the inquisition, which would often enforce the will of making sure that heresy wasn't being taught in the wider world, sometimes you have the vision of them as book burners. And sometimes they did burn books. But the Inquisition was an investigatorial body. They built cases against people. They needed to have evidence. They had trials. And often the evidence was books. Well, they put the Talmud on trial, infamously. They did burn it earlier on. So they do have cases of book burning. It's not to say that there weren't book burnings. But often the Inquisition was pretty meticulous about keeping records. And many of the books that they seized ended up in the Vatican Archives.

Oh, wow. And so you can find copies of hundreds of banned books that the church was like, well, we're going to hold on to these because they're good evidence if we need to bring them, bring something to trial later. And this would run from everything from, you know, Agrippa's three books of occult philosophy, which I brought a 17th century copy of all the way to Spinoza. And so all this stuff ends up in places like the Vatican archives, which it's a funny situation where the archery. of the Catholic Church contain a pretty healthy dose of heresy. That's so funny. So it's one of those cases of like, hey, we're going to keep it here that way we know what not to read. Yeah.

You know what I mean? Yeah, it's like, you know, it's a wink wink, wink, nudge, nudge. So yeah, it's, but the Vatican Archives is a funny place because people associate with so much conspiracy that they have the Holy Grail or the Ark of the Covenant or the menorah down there, what, you know, the real true copies of the book of Enoch. But it's funny. The truth of the matter is that it's so vast that not even the church knows what's in there. It's miles and miles long. Huge, huge. But scholars are in there all the time, and they will often find things the Vatican didn't even know we're there.

And they'll publish it. They're like, we found this random manuscript of Spinoza. They're like, Vatican's like, couldn't even know we had that. Sick. Yeah, publish it. Cool. So it's a fun thing, you know, that when you get down in there and see it, it's not, it's not, you kind of wish it to be like the last scene

of Raiders of the Lost Ark, where it's just like the giant room and he's like wheeling the Ark of the Covenant in. The secrets of the universe revealed. Everything, but it's just like rows and rows and rows of like very boring theological, you know, treaties. In fact, that book of Spinoza that scholar found, the only reason why she found it was a complete accident.

The spine just read De Deo on God. How many books do you, in the Vatican archives, do you think are called Deo? On God. On God. That's fire. It's like, whoa. You're going through and you're like, who wrote this one, on God?

Yeah, and she just so happened to notice that where it was happened to be in that time period where this Spinoza, this lost Spinoza manuscript was. And took it off the rack and sure enough, a lost manuscript of Spinoza's ethics, a banned book. Wow. Was sitting there in manuscript, hiding there in plain sight. It's kind of funny that things are lost on a library shelf. Right? When you're thinking of discovering a lost book, you want to be out in the desert digging up a hole or something. Doggumadi library or something.

Yeah. You're in an air-conditioned warehouse. You're like, this is lost? Yeah. I mean, it's... So little in history is done through conspiracy. Almost everything in history is done through negligence. Yeah.

It's just like... Because most people are, you know, none of us is stupider than all of us. You know, you get a bunch of people together. Just make really complex stupid decisions. It's so much of what I find in history when I, we discover some of these books. You know, again, I think about the three books of occult philosophy about Cornelius Agrippa. The Inquisition did try to kick the doors in and stop the printing of the book. And they did temporarily.

And then Agrippa just, like, wrote his buddy, the Archbishop of Cologne was like, hey, tell the Inquisition to stop. And the Inquisition was like, no. And the Archbishop was like, I'll write the Pope. Like, okay. And then they just chilled out. They just chilled out. And he printed the book.

And then it was fine. I mean, it was banned. They did what they could. Yeah. But you can just imagine, like, the inquisition, you know, again, we think of the Inquisition as having all this power. And they're just, like he said, I'll tell the Pope on you. Oh, great.

Yeah. That's so funny. So it's just like a, you know, you would think that if the church had the kind of, if the medieval and early modern church had the kind of power that sometimes we see in, like, the television, like in Dan Brown books, none of this stuff would survive. Right. But we have tons of it. You know, we have, we have lots of books that were on the index prohibitorum where I used to have a copy of Pico de la Mirando, the the Theses.

I used to have a copy that in front on the cover, was written in Latin, prohibito, banned. He was leaning in. Oh, yeah, the book even had right on the cover, prohibited. And I'm like, nice try. Too hot for TV. Like, it didn't work. It didn't work at all.

I'm literally holding it in my hands like 300 years later. Yeah. This, you know. So when people talk about banned books, like the gospel of Judas, the gospel of Thomas, these sort of like non-canonical sort of things that seem to tell us a different version of Christianity, generally not banned. I mean, the Gospel of Judas, I don't think, that by the time they were banning books,

they didn't know what it existed. Go back to the fourth century, yeah, they knew all these books existed. They knew that, you know, all of these books, and we have lists of them. So they knew they existed. I think that the church recognized them for what they were.

They recognized them as fan fiction. And they were like, yeah, these books are forgeries, they're not really real. You know, the Gospel of Thomas or the Gospel of Judas or, you know, the whatever the apocryphon of john i think the church was just like this is just not really

written by these people in fact even like i said even within the canon people are like i don't think second peter's right either right um but it's funny because clearly these books mattered i mean you think about the infancy gospel of thomas where famously jesus um makes uh stones and turns them into birds right that story mattered a lot because it ends up in the koran right and so clearly christians were telling that story, and by the time that Muhammad heard it, you know, in the 7th century, it had been big enough that it ended up in the Quran. Mm-hmm. So I actually have a replica copy of one of the Gospels of Didymus Thomas, Nagamati Codex 2.

Oh, yeah, yeah, that's not, that's the gospel. That's the very end of the apocryphon of John and the very beginning of the gospel of John. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. It's a cool facsimile. I've seen this in Cairo at the Coptic Museum. What do you think? Does it look pretty good?

It looks pretty good. This was made by a good pal Wes Huff. Oh, yeah. Good job, Wes. Yeah, you did a great job. It looks amazing, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, you can see here, you know,

according to John, the Apocryphon, the hidden book according to John, that's the end of it. They put the titles of the ends, beginnings and ends of books, and then it begins. These are the secret teachings of Thomas and whoever hears them will not taste death. What an opening. Yeah, that's a banger. I mean, an absolute heater to start a book. It's like Camus level. Yeah, no, it's a good one.

Whoever understands them will not taste death. I mean, like, how do you not read that, right? Of course, yeah, you want to be about it. You make big promises. No question, can you, you know, I've read the gospel, Thomas. Am I going to taste death? Well, yet to be seen. You haven't died yet.

Yeah, yeah. So, I guess you have to understand them, so maybe I don't understand them. Because there are some weird ones in there. Yeah. The last one. being especially you know like what in the world like is that the the gender one yeah yeah yeah mary's not worthy of life because she's a woman well i'll make her a man you're like skr okay hold on a second you know and you know people are like yeah but it can't mean literally that i'm

like i don't know what it means yeah uh two becoming one is what is it a sayings gospel as they say yeah it's a saying's gospel it's one of these gospels that scholars think may have pre-existed the gospels as we know them um that what we had of collections of say jesus's sayings But we know the gospel of Thomas is relatively late. So it may preserve some teachings that are really ancient. There's a great teaching in there about the Apostle James. James always gets thrown under the bus in Christian history. It's Peter and Paul that become the, you know, Peter's the rock of the church.

And Paul becomes, in some sense, the big gospel teacher. And the James really sort of fades into the background, which is especially conspicuous, considering that he was Jesus' brother and was there the entire time Jesus was teaching. and seems to have been the head of the community in Jerusalem. Allegedly, as a Catholic, I rebuke this. Did you? Yeah, I'm in heresy land. Trust me. It won't be the first time.

But there's an interesting line in the gospel of Thomas about James, and it says that there's that all of the earth was made just for James. And it's just like, like, whoa. I wonder who wrote this. I mean, it sounds like James. Yeah. It's the Jamesians. I mean, what is the story from the New Testament where the,

two apostles are running and they make a reference where they're like, and this apostle is faster than the other one. Are you familiar with this? I know the story. Could you give me a Google search? Maybe go to Jip it and ask real quick because it's so funny to me and I think you'll enjoy it. But there's a discussion, I think some type of like miracle happens and the two apostles are going to go tell the rest of the apostles. But I think it's the resurrection.

If I'm not mistaken, we're like, they go to the tomb and Jesus isn't there and they're like, oh my goodness, we got to tell everyone. And then they go on a race. And then in the text, it goes, and I was faster than the other guy. And it's like, I don't know if you really need to include that. But just out of his own hubris, he's like, you know, I fucking busted him. Yeah, yeah, no. I love those moments. Like, I think it's, isn't Second Peter, which against Spirious, where it says,

and don't trust Alexander the copper smith. And I left a coat there, make sure you bring it back, you know. That's in there? It's in there. Yeah. I mean, we don't think Peter really wrote it. But there's a moment where it seems like the letter really is just like a regular letter. Just like, don't trust this guy.

And also, I left a coat. Like, you know, I don't love that. It's just one of these moments where Hoover was writing these letters didn't think they were writing the Bible. They just were writing letters. And somebody, and this is a great, you know, I'd love to have no more about this. But at some point, someone in the second century, mid-second century, just basically wrote to every church they knew and said, do you have any letters of Paul? And if you do, send them to me, copy them and send them to me. And that's the collection we have.

Wow. Someone had to have done that. That is such a good point. They didn't know they were writing the Bible. No, of course not. They were writing letters. Paul is just writing letters. And so someone had to go and like, I know that, so I mean, write to Ephesus and

Corinth and all these places and just ask, like, do you have any letters of Paul? And they must have had letters there. And somebody who we will never know who they were decided in their infinite wisdom or, depending on your opinion of Paul, they collected them into one bag. and that is the letters of Paul as we have them. Wow. And it's just one of these great moments in history where someone took what were letters

and transformed them into scriptures. Right. And, you know, for instance, we don't have, like, Corinthians, we have like First Corinthians, but we know Second Corinthians seems to have, you know, there was another book in the, another letter in the middle we've lost. And so, yeah, you know,

when he was writing those letters, he wasn't thinking about writing the Bible. And just the idea like your emails would all of a sudden become canonized. It's so funny. It's so weird. I mean, just like, be careful what you write. You know, your grandma will tell you like, you know, don't write anything that you don't want on the first, on the cover of the New York Times. Yeah.

Don't write anything you don't want to be the Bible. Yeah, best seller. Yeah. That's pretty good. It's like, you know, whatever weird thing you say about, you know, uh, you know, again, I think it's sometimes of Paul's writings where he's like, well, there'll be three lines. and you're like, oh, wow, like the entire doctrine of predestination rides on those three lines. Right. I mean, the rapture, right? Like, this one word of like they will be swept up or something, or stolen, I think is the translation technically. And you're like, oh, the whole theology, our whole understanding of end times within Protestant Christianity is kind of hinging on not only that. I don't want to be too reductive, but like a couple of words.

Yeah, those are the one study Bible. Darby. John's Darby. Yeah. Like he popularized it and became the left behind series. Yeah. And like evangelicals everywhere, you know, really follow this kind of idea. And yeah, it's, again, this is what I want to point to is that it's often not conspiracy is contingency. It's just, it just so happens that that word gets used and John Nelson Darby does it and then this. Right. You know, it's not like, again, there's no way you could have planned it, I don't think. This is the reference that I was talking about, John 20, verse 1 through 10. It's an empty tomb account. Mary Magdalene tells them Jesus is, body's missing, Peter and the disciple whom Jesus loved traditionally identified as John

raised to the tomb. John arrives first but waits outside. Peter arrives afterwards and then immediately enters. So just to put it in there like, hey, we did a foot race. I got there first. I chilled. And then my boy came up. And then it says like, yeah, John was the one that made it there, which is so funny. The beloved disciple. And he's the fastest. And it's written in the gospel of John. Of course, you gotta be your own wingman. You gotta be your own hype guy. Yeah, exactly. Who else is gonna do it for you?

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things. Sure, yeah. But they exist in a really interesting kind of space where there's the story that kind of comes from it, where Solomon the wisest king, he's built him the temple, and is able to use demons to construct the temple, and then is able to control them or, in a way even capture them within his ring. And on the ring is a famous seal that is now kind of what we described as the star of David. At the time, perhaps the seal of Solomon. And it kind of exists like maybe in like,

when we talk about like apocryphal literature. But where does that story square with ancient Judaism and how do Jews of the modern day interpret that story? And like, where do I file that in my brain? So it's a complex story. as all these stories are. So the first problem is that in the Bible, it says that the altar for God has to be made of unhewn stone,

which means stone that's not been worked with iron tools. Which is fine for, like, stacking up a bunch of rocks to, like, make a small altar that you're going to slaughter an animal on. When you've got to make it into a giant temple, and, you know, when you think about the temple of Solomon or the second temple, these are relatively large structures. And so what happens is you end up with sort of a technical problem. How do you make a structure big enough to be a temple without hewning the stones?

Because they're not going to work otherwise. And so the rabbis come up with all kinds of stories. My favorite one is there's a magical worm that carves all the rocks. In the magical worm, it's called the Shamir. And the Shamir is only the demon Asmodius knows where the Shamir is. And the demon Asmodius won't tell anybody. It's a whole big story. And where's the story found?

It's in the Babylonian Talmud and Tracta Ketene, I think. So there's, there's a whole story about how they did it with a magical worm, the Shamir. And apparently the Shamir, when it reappears, will be the time that the Messiah comes back. Because you've got to have the Shamir to make the third temple. Another story that was seemed to have been, again, sort of associated with demons of the time, was the test, the story found in the Testament of Solomon. And then Testament of Solomon, which was a relatively early Jewish text, although all the versions we have have been Christianized. So we don't have the original Jewish, completely Jewish version. But in that text, in order to construct the temple, what ends up happening is that Solomon gets demons to do it.

And so there we have the idea that Solomon can bind and control demons through the use of either a ring or some kind of other device. The text is sort of all over the place. And even the image on the ring, the signet of Solomon, the seal of Solomon, there's no graphical depictions of it until the medieval period. So we know that there was a ring associated with Solomon, probably had some kind of symbol on it, and it had power over demons. We know that going back to Josephus when there are exorcism stories, even the Dead Sea Scrolls. There are exorcistic Psalms found in the Dead Sea Scrolls associated with Solomon. So this goes back. Who knows how far it goes back really, really, really, really anciently.

So we don't see the actual image that was on the seal until the Middle Ages until we see. it on some Byzantine era manuscripts. So that's the story. It's like, it was clearly a Jewish idea that Solomon had some control over demons. It was one of the ways of solving this problem. How do you build the temple without hewning stones? You can use a magical worm or you can use demons. I mean, demons were the story.

And when the demon story got into the Testament of Solomon, and the Testament of Solomon exists in, I think, three recensions. could be wrong about that. You know, to be careful when you're quoting manuscript resentions. I think it survives in three recensions. The first recension is completely descriptive. Here is how Solomon or here is the list of demons that Solomon used to build the temple. And here's all the jobs they did, which are mostly boring jobs, like carrying water and making plaster and stuff.

I'd be pissed if I were a demon. Yeah. The ancient eternal being or whatever. Now you have to like schlep water around. But it's interesting, though, is that you. get these demonic, this list of demons, and you learn all the interesting things they can do. And by the C recension, you begin seeing that the language in the text is increasingly shifting from descriptive to proscriptive. Here's how you can do it.

It switches from being a story about how Solomon views demons to build the temple to how you can use demons to do X, Y, and Z. And that is the nucleus of what becomes the very disparate traditions or very disparate sort of discourse of texts that becomes Solomonic magic. It's the idea that there's something about Solomon, something about a seal, something about other forms of magic. And you can use that to bind and control demons. And what's interesting about all the many things interesting about that. But what's interesting about it is that a lot of that magic seems to have combined Jewish elements, Muslim elements, Christian elements, and you get this sort of, I don't want to call it a tradition because that makes it sound like it's much more coherent than it really is, but there's a kind of

way of writing where you invoke the power of Solomon as a way of binding and trolling demons, and of course the most important text of that is the so-called Lesser Key of Solomon, which doesn't show up until the 17th century. So it's actually quite late. 17th century. 17th century. It's a text of the 17th century. It contains demonic ledgers, or what we call a demonic categorical.

gories or demonic catalogs that probably go back to the Middle Ages. It's sort of a funny story, actually. The list of demons in the Lesterke of Solomon is actually pulled from an English translation of a book making fun of the idea that people thought they could conjure demons. It's a book called the pseudomonarchy demonem, the false kingdom of the demons, written by Cornelius Agrippa student, Johann Weir. And Veyer says, there are these stupid people that think they can summon demons. and here's all these stupid demons they think they can summon. And he basically listed them off to make fun of it. It's like, yeah, they think that this demons in control of this,

and you do this to summon them. It's ha, ha, ha. In the same way, like, you know, they made fun of Scientology on South Park. Like, they really believe this. It's called the, it's a theory of expose. If you just tell people what people really believe, people will think it's stupid. Well, Veyer tried this, and it failed spectacularly. Because another book, also making,

fun of belief in witchcraft called the discovery of witchcraft in an English reproduced into English the Latin text of Johann Weyer and whoever saw that was like that's a great idea bang and Lesser Keel Solomon as we know it comes out of a parody a parody of a parody but it relied on an earlier text called the liber officium spiritorum the book of the offices of the spirits that was a real grimoire primarily in France and what year is that one roughly we don't know how I mean, it's, it's, it's, we know that by the 15th century, Johannes Tretemius, who is Agrippas teacher, has a copy of it in his library, which was, without a doubt, the abbess, the abbey at Spahnheim had the best collection of occult literature in that time period. So we know it existed at least them, and there's some reason to believe that it copy goes back to the 15th or 14th century, maybe in France, because a lot of it, a lot of the, that Latin text gets translated into France.

French a lot and that usually gives us some idea about where it may have originated, but we don't know. I mean, these books aren't exactly, they're not terribly well studied, which is a shame. And part of what's a problem about them is that, well, the writers of them aren't going to really go out of their way to be like, hey, my name is Jacques, and I wrote this. Please come kill me. Right. So they're going to hide. And often what they will do is obliterate where the book's coming from and dating it. dating and it gets really difficult.

So there's this French grimoire that then sort of is maybe kind of amalgamating these rumors and these stories and perhaps generating some as well as like pulling on an older tradition. That thing gets turned into a parody in Latin by a Dutch guy. Yep. And then that then turns into an English translation of the parody, which is meant to parody people who believe in witchcraft generally. And then- Original Scots discovery of witchcraft and a manuscript, so before,

original Scott's discovery witchcraft has printed a manuscript copy, which was clearly in circulation, becomes a foundation for the lesser key of Solomon. So then does anyone believe it by the 17th century? Oh, yeah. People are reading the lesser key of Solomon. They're like, ah. Oh, for sure. This is it.

This is it. Oh, yeah. And what's interesting is that Johann Weyer's version of it, in the discovery of witchcraft version, they have the text about the demons, but not their seals. So there clearly was a sealed tradition too, and the sealed tradition and the text tradition get mashed together. And that becomes, you know, if you've ever opened a copy of the Lesser Key of Solomon. Now, of course, the Lesser Key of Solomon is actually not one book. It's several books that have been all stuck together, which includes the Aris Paulina and other kinds of things.

But it's that first book that we all know, because primarily because Alastair Crowley published it in the early 20th century or the late 19th century. And in fact, he even said weird things about how the demons, are actually like parts of your brain, which is a particularly strange thing for Crowley to say. Like a homunculus kind of thing? Like I think he literally says it's like regions of your brain. Like this demon bile is like part of your brain. It's like a region of your brain.

I think that Crowley repudiated that belief later. But it is a particularly strange thing that he said. I mean, Crowley says a lot of strange and interesting things. Right. But it's a particularly weird thing that he says in the first printing of it. And it's still there. If you go buy a copy of the Crowley McGregor-Mather's version of the Leser Keele of Solomon, it's still in the introduction.

So then who's drawn to the lesser key of Solomon by the 17th century? Is it Jews that have a understanding of the literature? Is it a cultist that are just completely kind of apostate from any type of modern faith? Like, who sees this and is like, ah, this is the key to understanding those secrets of the universe? So we do know that some Jews were interested in it because there's a translation of it from Latin into Hebrew, Mafteach Shlomo, the key of Solomon. So we know that some Jews are interested in it because they translated into Hebrew. But I think the thing to imagine here is that we shouldn't juxtapose occultist versus Christian.

They were the same thing. You know, we think about the sort of what we now call the clerical necromanic underground. The only people capable of reading Latin, knowing how to do rituals, knowing how to procure incense, knowing how to get weapons like swords. The only people capable of really knowing how to do any of that were priests. that's you think like Olaf the farmer knows how to like read complicated books in Latin and make elaborate candles and that's not his bag

I mean he has his own magic right they're doing folk magic they have their own magical traditions too but and some of those do survive by the way we have things like the powwow magic of the Pennsylvania Dutch which was a big deal in this part of the country you still sometimes see like barns painted with magical signs from the folk magic tradition in this country You can drive down and through Pennsylvania and upstate New York and see barns with like sigils on them.

Really? They come from the Powhat tradition. Would I know them as a sigil or what I know them is like, ah, decorative? I think you would look at it. If you know, you know, you would see it. I mean, even like the hanging horseshoes on barns, which we've all seen is folk magic. So there's folk magic traditions that are deep in Christianity that, you know. These would be for the purpose of like a harvest, I presume.

Yeah, harvest, agricultural stuff. you know, the kind of things that farmers, the kind of thing that all of us should care about, you know, where our food comes from. Like, look, dude, if you got to do some folk magic to get the corn to come, you know, you got to do you. I'm not going to get involved in that. Yeah, and then you're eating witchcraft corn,

and it's a whole thing. Hey, you know, I'm not going to ask a lot of questions. But it's either, if I have the choose between the witchcraft corn and the not corn. Yeah, I got to talk to a priest about that. Yeah, I don't know. Just go out in the fields and hit it with all of them. But in the lesser key of Solomon,

what we have, we have in in that literature is downstream of what we like I said what scholars call the clerical and acrimatic underground because the only people capable of getting out there in the middle of the night in a giant circle you know screaming at demons in Latin there's only one group of people and you're really capable of that in their early middle ages and that's the priests are they doing it in alignment with their catholic face of course I mean they see demons as as something like wild animals that need to be broken and made useful and this is something same way that you might tame a horse to like ride around and collect charity. Well, you can tame a

demon to go help you find buried treasure. And if you use the demon to help you find buried treasure, well, you'll give your chair to the church. So yeah, they see the, the necromancers of the Middle Ages don't see themselves as, as anti-Catholics or anti-Christian. What they, what they're using is a basic kind of logic. And the logic goes like this. Exorcism is a, is a sacramental. It's a thing that any good priest can do. In fact, there's an entire, Legion of priests, the exorcist priests, which are the lowest level sort of priests that exist in the church. They must do minor exorcisms for babies when they get baptized. So the logic is pretty simple.

If you can, if a demon can get into a person and the demons know stuff, they're old, they're smart, they've been around since creation, they're powerful. They know things. They can get things done. If you can take a demon and cast them out of a person through exorcism, then you could also put them to work. The same thing that draws them out, that compels them to do things, right? You know, the blood of the martyrs compels you. The name of Jesus compels you. We've all seen the exorcist. That language of compulsion, well, if I can draw you out, what else can I make you do? Right. Well, maybe you know where buried treasure is. In fact, it was a very common belief that demons knew where buried treasure

was. Why? Because they collect treasure, bury it in the ground so that when the Antichrist comes, the Antichrist has a bunch of money. This was a very common. This was a very common. This was a very common. very common belief in the Middle Ages that if you found treasure in the ground, demons put it there as like a storehouse for the coming Antichrist. Whoa. So is it so bad to rob from the Antichrist? Not at all. Give it to the church? Exactly. You get a small percentage. Yeah, you can't give them their 10% cut, but you know, now all of a sudden you're looking pretty good. Right. You know, like be fruitful multiply. You're having a hard time finding a girl out there. You know, this is the days before the app. It's not that the apps are helping guys, but, you know,

it was this hard out there for a guy. You get some gold bullion. All of a sudden, your prospects are a little better. Yeah, prospects a little better. You can maybe get a woman to fall in love with you using magic. Maybe you want to, you know, studying sucks. I don't know if anyone has ever had to study Latin. It's not exactly the most fun thing in the world. Maybe you just want to learn all of it instantaneously.

And maybe a demon because of the way that demons interact with the human mind, because demons don't interact with us the way that you and I interact with each other. We have to do, we're mushy flesh creatures. Demons can impress beliefs and ideas directly onto your mind. And so they can teach you things instantaneously. Now, if I were to go to a priest with this idea today, I imagine he'd be like, hey, don't do that. If I'm like, dude, I'm going to summon a priest to, like, get rich and then give all my money to the church because I love God. I feel like he would tell me this is verboten.

Oh, yeah. Yeah. So the official line on all this was absolutely not. Even at the time. Even at the time. But look, I mean, we've all prayed for stuff, right? You've had that calculus test where you're like, dear Lord, if you just help me pass this test. Yeah.

You know, I'll go and do that. Well, we've all knocked on that door and we got a big load of nothing. Yeah. Well, if you're desperate and you knock on the door and you don't hear from God or the church, you might knock on the other door. And the demons are out there. And so is it the kind of thing that your priest is going to tell you to do? Absolutely not. Is it the kind of thing that that very priest might be doing when they locked the church up at night?

It was. We know it was because it could have only. have you ever read a compelling case where you feel like a priest was fortuitous after working in this type of world like the who's I got Brian Johnson the banjo player that went to the crossroads infamously oh yeah yeah yeah is that name Brian Johnson no no no Jack Johnson not Jack Johnson either Johnson oh come on yeah Creece is gonna find it yeah he's in Mississippi yeah goes down the crossroads crates like Clarkdale Mississippi yeah and it holds

up his guitar and he's like teach me how to play this and learns how to play it night and then learns how to play Robert Johnson Robert Johnson yeah Robert Johnson yeah and you can still listen to his recordings which are still kind of creepy yeah so like that type of like kind of Faustian sort of yeah the Faustian thing I mean Faust is a famous example of someone who allegedly got to learn all this magical stuff of being before being drug to hell um you know everybody sort of once they're safely dead these stories began to accrue around them or grippa famously had a black dog that was allegedly the devil and could teach him all kinds of things Allegedly Agrippa knew events that were happening all over Europe that he couldn't have known.

And he would say, like, over in Spain, this is happening. And he would get a letter two weeks later. And he could kind of see remote with the view what was going on. Do those stories trustworthy? I don't know. Like, I'm skeptical of them. Sure. Are there anything that you've read here?

Like, this one I'm less skeptical of than the others. You know, I think that the stuff that, well, I guess I can say that, you know, the John D. and Edward Kelly stuff when they're talking to Am. and they get the so-called Inokian language. And that body of literature, the John D. Edward Kelly Sessions, that's perhaps the most strange and compelling case to me. Now, I mean, so strange and compelling that I literally went to Amsterdam to study hermeticism just to be like, I wanted to study this.

And then like, I really just wrote everything on D and Kelly, or D and Kelly combined. And I would say that that's one of the stranger, cases. I mean, you have Kelly speaking in a language that he doesn't know, letter by letter, backwards in reverse order and revealing entire long texts, relatively long texts that are not jibberish. They are language. They have their words decline. Words seem to conjugate. There is syntax. There's grammar. It's not speaking in tongues. And there's just no way. And again, as a, as a, as a hard-bitten skeptic. There's no way for me to look at that and go, this is just weird. I don't know what to make of this. Either he was inventing like a very complex language, just kind of him and a buddy

sort of figuring it out. Or something else. Something was going on. I mean, Kelly was a con man. I mean, he has ears cut off for, you know, doing cons. And we know that he had access to Dee's library. So he had Agrippa and he had all the text he would need to do something like that. So it's possible. People have done far more strange cons. And he was being paid well for the, you know, if it was a con, you know, if it were him being a con. And Kelly was kind of different in a lot of ways. Getting paid well through the queen?

Through D. D. D was paying him 50 pounds a year, which was a pretty decent salary. And John D. was getting the money through the royal family? Well, he was getting money from the, from the royals. He also had his own estate and he's also spying. And so there's a whole espionage. Yeah, of course, 007. Yeah, 007 and all the stuff.

And again, people forget that after all the weird Anokian language stuff, the very last sections of the Anokian magic are the ability to spy on any country at any time. It's like CAA-style remote viewing, but done through magic. And it's just for anyone who's studied Elizabethan politics and you know that espionage and codes and all that's wrapped up together, it's like, hold on, where does that? the magic end and the espionage part begin and what's really going on and all this. So I will say that the D and Kelly stuff, and clearly D and Kelly believed it. I mean, they switched wives. They swapped wives, at least for a night, for one night. We know that definitely happened. They even tried to blot it

out in the manuscript. No. Oh, it's still there. And it's just awful. I mean, you read the section where Dee tells his wife and she just breaks down hysterically sobbing. She hated it with Kelly. And the idea that basically she was being forced to sleep with this guy was just, I feel horrible for Jane D. And Joanna Kelly, Kelly's wife, just like, and, you know, the angel asked him, were you faithful in the accomplishing? I can remember the exact language. And I think Dee writes very tersely poctum factum the deed was done. Weird. These things always go that way, though, right?

It's always some weird sex stuff in the end. You join a cult because you think it's going to be just fun and community. And then, ah, this guy's banging your wife. Yeah. It's just every single time. It's just like David Koresh. You're like, so the world's about the end and I have to have all the wives. You're like, yep.

Ah, should have read the fine print. Yep. And it's always always some weird, always weird sex stuff. Yeah. But, you know, after that, after the Dee and Kelly episode, you know, Kelly went his own way and became court alchemist for Rudolph the second. But we forget that Dee went back to England and continued talking to angels for, I think, 14 more years with another scryer name.

Bartholomew Hickman and all those records are destroyed. So we have seven years of Dee and Kelly. And we know that Dee was talking to another scryor before he was talking to Kelly, a dude named Barnabas Saul, who we have a little bit from. But he had twice the amount of years talking to angels with Bartholomew Hickman. And I think that Dee decided it was all demonic and burned all the records. But it seems like what happened with the D and Kelly stuff is he put them all in a secret compartment of a chest and forgot about them. and because he forgot about them and it inconveniently died,

the chest ended up with someone else, and by chance they broke the chest, and all this papers fell out. They're like, holy shit. Whoa. It's a dude talking to angels. I just, I'm so curious to know what's happening. Are these just delusional guys that are making up a store?

Are they doing drugs? Are they just, like, lying? Is it a hoax? Or is there some other thing happening? I think that, you know, I sometimes talk about that there's a no-man's life. land between being a con man and being a true believer. And we want to put people in boxes.

We want to say, you know, Joseph Smith will con man. You know, that's a he was a con man. And we want to say, you know, this guy, not a con man. And we want to have this idea that either you're one or the other. And I think that there's a no man's land. Sometimes I call it pious fraud where the, you can't tell the difference anymore. The mask kind of eats the face. Yeah.

And I think that Kelly, I mean, we know scientifically, just like straight science. We know that if you take low light, candles, crystal ball, stare at it, you will see things. I don't care who you are. You can be the most hard-bidden Reddit atheist. Your brain will generate imagery into those hypnagogic states. If you've ever had been lying down and you find, you're in that weird state between dreaming and asleep, you've experienced it. We can induce those states just with wide awake.

You can get in those states. Kelly was in those states. I don't have any doubt about that. Now, to what degree is he in those states, seeing things, adding his own twist to make sure he's getting his bit too? And again, there's nothing more powerful than the human mind. And when the human mind is set into this sort of relaxed state, and also Kelly, I mean, We also sometimes forget, too, Kelly was unhinged.

I mean, he attacked random people with swords. He would scream blasphemies randomly. Like, you actually look at Kelly's behavior just sort of regularly. He was not a well person. Something was off about him. And again, I don't want to pathologize people and I'm not a psychologist. But something was something was, D would be like, you can't just shout blasphemy in my house. Like, that's not a normal thing to do.

Something was up with this guy. So you take a person who's already sort of, maybe unhinged, you put them into a highly suggestible kind of environment, you begin to increasingly force them to do this for hours a day. Like Kelly, like he's, it's not like Kelly can just like leave. He's under the beck and call this guy. So D's to blame in all this. You know, people always say, okay, Kelly's a con man. I'm like, if he were, it's D who's putting him up to it. And then you add in the apocalyptic fervor of the day. Everybody thought the world's coming to an end. And you just like add all that together. And I don't think you need drugs.

I don't think you need even angels. I mean, if there are angels talking to them, great. But I think that you can do that alone, that, that perfect storm. And I think you can get the kind of things that we see. And what do we see in those texts? We see the world's about the end. You're important in the process. We're going to reveal to you the mechanisms by which the world is going to come to an end, you know, et cetera, et cetera. And I think that you could, you can, I think you can account for a lot, maybe not everything, but you can account for a lot of one on those sessions by just looking at them from a scientific point of view, knowing that what science indicates to us is that our, that our mind is capable of inducing states without drugs, without anything, with, with the

inducing states that are extremely novel and strange. and I would tell somebody you can do it. I don't care. Again, you can be the most reddit atheist you want to be. Go sit in a quiet room with the low light with a flickering candle and just stare into a crystal ball. Just do it for an hour. An hour is a long time. But you will see things.

I've done it. And I'm like, do I think I'm seeing angels in there? Like, I'm not sure what I'm seeing. But, you know, it's a part, there's a moment where, like, the extension of the mom mind is creating things. And unsurprisingly, with the apocalyptic fervor of that time period, it's creating that apocalypse. And yeah, it's wild stuff. Hey guys, we're going to take a break really quick because I want to tell you about GLD. Yeah, GLD sent me this chain. The chain that I'm wearing right now, if you've ever seen an episode of this show for the past like probably nine

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Now, let's get back to the show. Hermes trismeggistis. Tres megastis. Hermes, Tris Magistis. The thrice great Hermes. Yes. Now, this, from these works creates this whole school of hermeticism. What exactly is that?

So the hermeticism, Hermeticism was an ancient school of soteriology, which is just like a $4 word, it's a school of salvation. So in the ancient world, there are lots of schools of salvation around. Christianity was one of those schools of salvation, and it was obviously the one that won out. But hermeticism was another one, and what hermeticism taught was that when we were born, we are actually born from the true being, which is the being of light. and that the world that we live in is a kind of false world. Not bad, but not real. So that's different than Gnosticism.

Gnosticism would say this is actually evil. We're in a cage. We're in a prison. We have to escape the flesh. And we have to escape this clay prison and get back to the realm of the one. Hermeticists were a bit more optimistic. They said, the world is good, in fact, made by God, but it's not fundamentally going to last forever. But the soul that we have will last forever.

And the task is, once we die, our soul needs to return to a world. where it came from, which was God. I don't bore of this. Yeah, it sounds, yeah. And so, but the bad news is that when your soul passes down through the planets, the planets are actually sort of malignant intelligences, and they infect your soul with fate. And so Jupiter infects it with some kind of fate, and Saturn affects it with fate, and Mars affects it with

fate. And so a lot of the dispositions you have, like, for instance, if you have a, I don't know, an anger problem, it's because the Martian influence on your soul is so strong that that's while you're having this like anger problem. And so the task, if you're melancholic, you have depressive personality, it's you have too much Saturnian influence on your soul. The task for this,

for the hermeticists were, was to realize that all these dispositions that you have are actually demonic and that you need to like exercise them out of your body so that they're, they sort of cling to your soul, like dirt clings to a rag. Clean the rag, clean the soul.

Once you die, you're ready for death. You can eat your soul back up to the one. and you return back to the true light, the true what it is. What if you're encumbered with all the barnacles of Saturn and you die? So then you can, so different things can happen. You can get trapped down here and you get reincarnated, which is typically what happens. You do round two, kind of go back up and then back down. Or you can become trapped and you can become sort of like a ghost.

That's not good. That's real bad. So you've got to purify yourself. You have to purify yourself. And they did this through, we think they may have been vegetarians. We think they did, we know they did music. as a way of purifying the soul. We have some of their songs,

or at least the sound of them. We don't know exactly what they sounded like. We have some of the sounds. And also part of it was teaching. It was just letting people know, hey, like you're a being of pure light. All the things about you that you think are bad are actually just demonic influences,

and you need to rediscover your true self. And I think this is part of the reason why hermeticism is seeing a bit of a renaissance right now, and even in the actual renaissance. Because we like the language of true self, and my true self isn't these, you know, my anger problems are not really myself. I want to, you know, purge the shadow in sort of Jungian language or whatever.

But at any rate, we have, we have a collection of writings called the Corpora Sematicum that survive from antiquity. And they were published, translated and published by Marcellio Ficino in the 15th century, 1560s. And they became enormously popular in the Renaissance because people believed that this was the primordial wisdom that actually had been. delivered to the ancient Egyptians and that Hermes Trismegistus, Hermes of Thrace Great, the revealer of all this was in fact the teacher of Moses.

And in fact, you can go to Siena in Italy, go to the Sienna Cathedral, and on the floor of that cathedral, it's huge, is an image of Hermesststis, teaching Moses hermeticism. Which just sounds like the wildest pagan thing you would never imagine. Pull it up. Cathedral.

How does that become a part of a Catholic church? Because the idea was, look, it's, there's a primordial truth. That truth is Christ, but everyone had access to it in different ways. And it turns out that every nation has some share of it and that Hermes Trismogistus was an expression of it. And you have early church fathers like Lactantius saying, yeah, like Hermes Trismegistus, like taught a kind of pre-Christianity. And that's the reason why it survives. Now, is there any validity that Hermes was a real person? Probably not one person.

This is probably a community of belief of which Hermes Trismagistus becomes the mouthpiece for these beliefs. But yeah, if you just pull up the Siena Cathedral, Hermes Trismegistis, which I know is a mouthful, but if you spell it, it'll probably pop up. It's a beautiful cathedral, by the way, the Siena Cathedral.

They always are. I love these European catholics. Mind-bogglingly beautiful. Right? It's one of the perks to be a Catholic as you walk in here and you're like, God, this is us. This is us.

Yeah, totally. It's funny. in Abraham Joshua Heschel, the Jewish Deologian said that for sure the Catholics built cathedrals of space, but the Sabbath is the cathedral of time. And I love the idea that like that the Catholics get this amazing, these spatial beauties. And if Jews, if we take it, we have a cathedral of time. That's the Sabbath. Dang, you got us on that one. I don't know. I don't know. I think we should work together. We should get, we should rent out our space and time. Yeah, that's fair. Yeah, I know. You kind of got us on

the technicality like look your thing is cool but have you ever thought about hours have you like time damn time yeah here we have it right there's hermes just we get us there uh talking to moses and uh that the the the thing on the two cherubim is hermetic wisdom um and uh yeah um so where was this this thought proliferating so it originated in egypt uh we don't know where in egypt exactly actually in egypt yeah so all so we know that the actual school of thought originated in Egypt. There was a major site where Thoth, so Hermes, Trismogistus, is a sort of Greek-a-sized version of Thoth. Thoth was sometimes referred to as Jehouti, where, where, where. Thoth, great, great, great. And you translate that into Greek, you have Hermes, Trismegistus.

So he's kind of a Greek-ified version of the Egyptian god, Thoth, which is also a god of magic and wisdom. And so Hermes becomes a thing. And again, what's fascinating about this, right? you have the Bible there on the left with this is Moses on the left and Hermes you know really towering above him yeah he's so tall and his hat is way cool it's really it's like kind of you know it's a really amazing and he look he's reaching for what is basically pagan wisdom and it's not clear who's handing what to whom and this is i think the ambiguity of this image and again this is in a cathedral this is not just sort of in something weirdo catholic this is a And this is huge.

This thing is, I think, like, two meters by two meters something is massively on the floor. It's huge. But here we have Hermes Trismegesis, a pagan Egyptian seemingly teaching Moses. And this just gives you some idea about how powerful an idea this was in the Renaissance, that in a cathedral you could make this image and it be basically, I mean, not just not persecuted, but encouraged. Do we know anything about the artist or the story that the artist sort of told the bishop? I don't know.

That I don't know. That'd be a great question for like an artist story and like how in the world did this get on the floor of a cathedral? Because you know, Michelangelo was like putting little Easter eggs in the Sistine Chapman and things like that. And like, I guess it's disputed to whether or not how much the Pope knew. And so it's like, oh, yeah, here's the creation of Adam

and he's in a brain and the brain is actually we're creating God in our brain. Things like that were like he's putting like potentially his own personal skewer. So I wonder if there's a guy being like, no, no, no, no. It's a depiction of God and God's game. I mean, it says Hermes, it says, you know, it says Mercurius Trismegistus. I mean, it's not an Easter egg. Yeah. It's front and center.

Wow. And so in the Renaissance, this idea that Hermes Trismegistus was one, one. There were lots of these guys that had sort of, they were sort of Christians before Christianity, and that they have this primordial wisdom. And, you know, Zoroaster was one. Hermesstis Mugistus was one. Moses was another. And that the idea was there was this, there was this Christian, perennialist idea that we could recover this lost wisdom and that became printed in the corporate sematicum and it became I mean I think it went into 30 something additions until the wet blanket of the 17th century hit and a scholar proved that the texts were Roman they weren't

primordial they were from the Roman period interesting and this sort of threw the wet blanket on the idea this was ancient Egyptian wisdom and so our ancient wisdom going back to the very first foundations of wisdom itself. But that, you know, I won't say it put the nail in the coffin, but it was a wet blanket on the idea that this was as ancient as people thought it was. And how many people would you say were hermeticists in like the heyday, the peak of it? It's hard to say. I mean, it's not the kind of thing that you, you come out loud and proud saying you're hermeticist. In fact, the first person to say they were, they identified as a hermeticist was a Christian hermeticist named Ludovico Lazzarelli.

He says, Christianu Suem et Hermetician. Medicus. I am Christian and a hermeticist. So, and that was in print, and no one batted an eye, and the book was never banned. So it was at least kosher enough to do that. This is popular in Italy? It was very popular in Italy, but it got exported north of the Alps. So you're seeing big in Italy, then it goes into Germany and England. But, yeah, I think that many people, you know, again, we're talking about a very tiny group

of elite, smart people who are reading these kind of books. But I think that there was enough people who were on. on board with this that it's enough that we could teach a class on it. I could teach an entire seminar on these people. And we could talk about Christian hermeticism and we can see their books. I mean, there's a commentary, a six-volume commentary written on the Corpus Sematicum that stretches into thousands of pages that was written instigated by a pope. A pope, got a got to write it.

And so there was a desire to combine this ancient primordial Greek, pagan Egyptian wisdom with Christianity. And it was so worrying back in antiquity, at least, that Augustine really felt that it was a threat and Augustine really railed against it. And so in the east, they were much more comfortable with it and they preserved it in the east. And in the west, it wasn't preserved, with the exception of one text, the Asclepius. Like the Orthodox churches. Yeah, the Orthodox churches preserved it in a way that the Greeks or the Romans didn't. So, but this idea of Hermes Trismegistus being a sort of font of perennial wisdom, it still goes on today. I mean, there was a channeled text in the, in the, uh, 20th century called the Emerald Tablets of Thoth. Yeah.

Which again, people sort of roll their eyes at, you know, or the Kabbalion, right? The people also were like, that's really not, it's not a historical hermetic text, but it claims that authority. Mm-hmm. And I think the fact that, whether you think that the Emerald Tablets of Thoth or the Kabalian. Whether you think they're authentically hermetic, that's a question, you know, that's something me and Mitch Horowitz could have, I think, a really cool conversation about,

and I'm not going to die on the hill of authenticity one way or the other, because that's not my bag. But what I can say is that the fact that they felt the need to vouchsafe the text's authority by associating them with Hermesstress, andegist shows that this still has some cachet, some currency. Right.

Yeah, it's interesting that there's a resurgence to an extent. that like there's conversations about it. And like, we do this a lot. Like, even the way that you're describing this, it sounds sort of theosophical a bit where it's like there are these sort of elders that retain sort of the secrets of the universe and they're sort of cast around the world

and you can find them and they can tell you secret teachings, like sort of guru types. And it seems like they're kind of harking on the same thing where they're like, Hermes was one of these elders and you have other people throughout the ages that retained this wisdom and were kind of proto-Christians. and that it kind of tied in with Christian theology is so fascinating.

Yeah, and it's perennialism. I mean, it's the idea that there have always been, the truth is one, and we're all blind men on the elephant. And that the better of the blind men were Hermes and Zoroaster and Jesus or whatever. The idea of the church was condoning it, though, so strange. Yeah, condoning it, but in that case, right, I mean, more than condoning it. Yeah, I mean, just letting it. letting your Hermes flag fly.

So it just shows you that, you know, again, we have images of the Catholic Church as being this tyrannical, you must believe in the orthodoxy or we will purge you with the inquisition. They put a pagan guy giving Moses wisdom right there in a major cathedral in Renaissance Italy. So it just shows you that there's a lot of,

there's a lot more latitude in these institutions than we often think. Right. The idea that there's a massive sort of, floor piece dedicated to this sort of Egyptian God giving Moses ancient wisdom

if you told me that was in a Catholic church I said there's no way it's mine by I think you couldn't do it now no idea in many ways in many ways we're far more conservative theologically now than they were in the Renaissance

and that just shows you that again that we think of ourselves as like progressive and enlightened and liberal yeah and I'm like eh give me the Renaissance yeah they think of pendulums yeah stuff goes all over the place now another ancient

tradition that has caught fire amongst, you know, sort of the Hollywood elite, so to speak, is Kabbalah, or Kabbalah, I guess it's pronounced more accurately. I mean, I think that, yeah, typically in Hebrew you put the stress in the last syllable, but it's funny because in my, when I'm talking academically, I say Kabbalah, but when I'm talking religiously in my Ashkenazi accent, I say Kabbalah. So it's completely all over the place, you know, then, you know, I get some whiskey in me and God knows where it's going to go. It's just interesting that you see so many celebrities with like a red string and they're kind of like like Madonna really popularized it, right?

Which is so strange for the form because it's something that is this sort of mystical branch of Judaism that is reserved for the very few kind of initiated that were worthy enough to really study it, right? There's all sort of, I guess, stipulations that are required to even read the Zohar, get into this text. I think you have to be 40 years old. You have to be Jewish. You have to be a man. You have to be married. other things, I'm sure. Yeah, I mean, those girl rules actually got put on

after a whole failed Messiah bit with the Shabbatite's V. It was only after the Shabbatite's V moment where folks may know this. There was a messianic claimant in the 17th century that said he was a Messiah and about half the world's Jews seem to have agreed.

Sabatized the? Yeah, Shabotites V. They packed their bags, and in 1666, he converted to Islam. Yeah. And so that was inconvenient. Which is a brilliant. It's an important move politically speaking.

You want to talk about like political philosophy? Yeah, it was, you know, he was arrested and the Sultan said, look, we're going to prove you're the Messiah. So we're about to shoot you with a bunch of arrows or you can convert. So either you're the Messiah or you're a dead man. Yeah. You know, Shaptai converted. Yeah.

He also saw the beauty in the light of Islam was like, this seems pretty good. It seems good. I can do, why not both? Yeah. So that's still, it still exists as a religious group in Turkey. The Shabbatians are still, there's still some out there. And they believe that even though he was on the surface, Muslim, he was still practicing his Jewish beliefs.

He was doing both. We know he was doing both. Oh, really? That's confirmed. He was kind of, yeah, oh, yeah. He was, I mean, we know a lot about him. And, but yeah, so, but after the whole event with Shaptites Vee, um, Kabbalah was so wrapped up in how he justified or how his wingman, how his hype guy,

Nathan of Gaza justified Shabbatite Z himself, I think, I don't know, who knows what he believed from one minute to the next. That's always the way it goes with these guys, right? there's always like sort of one sort of enlightened guru and then kind of the business person on the side that like makes it makes it work jesus has to have a paul yeah you know i don't think that jesus would have the jesus movement would have never gone anywhere without without paul um shabtai had nathan of gaza you know i think that yeah often you have to you have the your height guy you know uh the buddha had his cousin ananda so you have yeah you have these guys um but yeah after the shabotivvite's v thing that's when you get all these draw rails i see because so much of his so much of his so much of how he justified or he was justified as being the Messiah was based on Kabbalistic teachings.

And this guy, Nathan of Gaza, I think the rabbis were like, okay, we got to, this needs to be a little bit more. We got to button this up. I button this up. And the reason why is because that prior to that, there was, again, this apocalyptic fervor, it didn't affect just Christians. It affected Jews too. And part of the apocalyptic fervor was we need to teach the Kabbalah to everybody.

And if we teach it to everybody, the Messiah will appear. And so there was a huge push to publish Kabbalistic text and teach Kabbalah publicly in a way that it never happened before. To everybody, men, women, kids. Even, yeah, even non-Jews. All right? That's why you have Jews teaching Christians about this stuff. And so once it got out, I mean, once you kind of let the cat out of the bag, it's hard to put it back in. And, but that's what they tried to do.

After this chapititez vivit, it was such a huge disaster that they were like, we have to put guardrails on Kabbalah. It's just too. And I will say that, you know, of all the mystical practices and all of the mysticism stuff that I've seen, the one that I've seen people go off the rails on the most is Gametria. Right. It's like seeing patterns, seeing numbers, seeing numbers as letters, seeing letters as numbers, adding this and dividing by that and doing this. I mean, I would tell people, if you suffer at all from OCD or anything like, don't, just don't look at it. Yeah. Because it's just every, it's like, you folks have seen the movie, the Daron-Arvonovanovsky movie, Pi.

Right. I've seen more people go off the rails from that stuff than anything else. Because Gamantra, I think, in its purest form, is just another way to interpret the text. Like, if there's this understanding of buy-in that this text is divinely inspired, that in the text, there is the truth of the universe. And so reading it in just the straight-up language, just reading it in Hebrew is going to get you one version. But then there's another interpretation where you can break it out into numbers. And then if you understand what the numbers mean and associate numbers with other numbers, there's a deeper level of understanding.

And there's, like, what, 30 different ways you can ascertain knowledge and wisdom from one text using all different sorts of modalities. Oh, and also even with matriot, others can do all kinds of tricks. You can decompose their letters into numbers. You can read the text as anagrams. Again, this is why it's, I think, why it's just, it's not dangerous in some kind of, you know. spiritual sense. It's just like, this is what happens when you start to see patterns everywhere. Yeah, unfortunately, the schizophrenic episode goes perfectly. Yeah, I mean, our obsessive compulsive stuff. And also now you see like, oh, that leaf has

18, you know, things on it, and that means chai. And chai add this to that. And you're like, here, we're off the races now. Yeah. So. WhatsApp groups are going crazy. I think it, I think it's not healthy. Well, you know that the Monster Energy logo is 666. 666, yeah, vav, v, v, v, v. Yeah. Which is actually not 666 in Hebrew letters. No, don't look into it.

Yeah. letters or Hebrew letters or in the Greek letters, you get either 616 or 666. And it depends on what you're, what language you're thinking in. It depends on which numbers you get. Right. So what, if you were to do like Kabbalah 101, what is it and why is it so popular with occult literature? Why is there so much crossover with occultism in Kabbala?

So the second part of that question is easy to answer because we've already answered it. It's the Kabbalah is that secret teaching that Moses got. So you have the public teaching. which is the Torah and the law, and you have the secret teaching, and that is a Kabbalah. It's sort of an oral tradition. It's an oral tradition,

but even a secret oral tradition. And so we have that in Judaism. It's the secret tradition in Judaism. And part of the reason why it was popular, and this is sort of a funny bug of history, is that when the principal text of the Kabbala was being written down, the book called the Safer Zohar, the Jews of the time were engaged in the people,

in basically a meme war with the Christians, that they were taking elements of Christianity, like the Trinity and Mary and other things, and they were actually introducing them into the Zohar. And they were doing it because Jews were converting to Christianity in mass because of a lot of pressure from the Spanish crown and other reasons. Yeah, so, one true faith.

Yeah. Sure. Your mileage may vary. And it's funny. There's lots of things. But anyway, when the Zohar was being written, they were sneaking some of this, Christian stuff in. And then a few hundred years later, Christians were finding it. And they were like,

oh, wow, the Zohar, you know, these Jews are stupid. They don't really understand what's really in their own text. But look, the Trinity's right there. Oh, Mary's right there. Oh, interesting. And so they kind of found what had been smuggled into the text, not knowing that it had been done on purpose. And so Christians like Pico della Miranda and other Christian Kabbalist, Johannes Roichlin, and Dee and other people, they were like, oh, yeah, the Kabbalah is actually the true Judaism. Like the Judaism of the Jews is a degenerate, legalistic, Phariseic, bad thing.

But this Kabbalah stuff, right? Because even Christianity is hidden inside of it. So they preserved this ancient primordial truth given to Moses precisely because they didn't even know what it was. Interesting. So Christians really, really went whole hog into Kabbalah or translating Kabbalistic texts and stuff like that. So what is the thing?

What is it? What is the Kabbalah? Primarily the Kabbalah, it just literally means received, so tradition. But it is the idea that the divine being is made up of different moments of divine power. There are these emanations that are called Suuot. Literally the word means numerations, but there are these moments of divine power. So God's compassion, God's wrath, God's beauty, God's whether or whatever, or whatever, or, or, or, or, whether, God's mercy. And there are these moments where the divine body exists in a kind of equilibrium,

and that equilibrium has come undone for technical reasons. And the undoneness of this divine body needs to be re-established. The divine body needs to be re-harmonized, and it gets re-harmonized by doing the Jewish law, by doing the Mitzvot, by doing keeping the Sabbath, eating kosher, putting to Phelan. Again, if you ever see someone on the street asking, are you Jewish, did you put to fill in on today, they're wanting to put the felon on that person because they think that every time someone does it, it sort of realigns the divine body. And once the divine body is realized, then we all go back to perfection again. It's releasing a divine spark. Well, we are the divine spark, and the task is to get it back up. And we do that. And again, this sounds like her meticism, right?

Because they're all drinking from the same water here. And so it's getting that divine spark back in Kabbalah, you do it through the proper. observance of Jewish law. Specifically, you do it through when you do a commandment, like putting on the tofilim, you actually, you'll say, Lechem Yehud for the unification of God's name, I am doing X, Y and Z. And then it's called a Yehudim. It's a oneness with God that you are putting massive amounts of intention into doing that commandment. And that kind of like realigns God's body, just one more click, I guess. And so that's the task is that it's a mystical understanding of the Torah where you're

understanding the Torah not just as a bunch of rules, but as a roadmap for realigning the divine body. And that's the sphere of people have seen the tree of life. And so the idea is that the reason, and it tells you why the world's kind of broken and how to fix it. And that's what's a great appeal of it is. So why is it so a big, why is it such a big deal in the occult? You know, if you look at any sort of magical circle where they're summoning the spirit, it's almost always Hebrew letters there.

It's because of this book, the Seifer Yitzera, which is in some cases, depending on how you want to think about it, one of the earliest books of Kabbalah. And the Seifer Yitzera argued that God created the world through speech, that all of the universe came into speech. Or it came into through speech. And that unlike us, we're just schmucks. When I say let there be light, nothing happens. But when God says, Yehi Or, Vaya Heor, let there be light, via he or, and there was light.

God's speech is metaphysically generative. The Hebrew actually has power, not just as random speech, but as like literally the metaphysical backbone of being. And the reason why you see all that Hebrew is because they've incorporated that Kabbalistic idea into the magic. And so you've ever seen Abra-Kadabra,

abracadabra is pretty butchered Aramaic, but it literally means I create as I speak. No. And so that is like the core Kabbalistic idea coming from this book, Sayfer Yetzirah, and that idea being incorporated into the occult because how often does magic work? Speech.

Wow. You're commanding demons, you're willing things into creation. And even into the modern period with things like the idea of manifesting, you know, it's the idea that somehow your will By will alone, you can force reality to obey the will. This is just an extension of this much older form of occult thought. Wow.

That is so interesting about abracadabra. I've never heard that. It's a funny, again, there's some debate about exactly what it means, but the best-going theory is it's sort of a butchered, Aramaic phrase for, yeah, I create as I speak. Wow. The creation story in the Zohar, as it's understood by Kabbala, is interesting as well. That's creation through contraction. Is that right?

Yeah, and sort of, so there's two strata of Kabbalah. There's the Kabbalah of the Zohar. And then a couple centuries later, there was a brilliant Kabbalist name Isaac Luria. And Isaac Luria developed a, I wouldn't say a different form of Kabbalah, but he developed Kabbalana in a much more creative direction. And in that story, yeah, we have the idea of Sim-Sum, the idea of contraction. That used to be there was only God, and that in order to make space for our realm, God like, sometimes I imagine like a dude who's like, you know, sucking his belly into like, yeah, put a belt on.

It's like sucking in a little bit and like in that gap, God shot a ray of divine light. But the vessel, the empty vessel couldn't hold it and the divine light shatters. And that becomes these spherote. And the task, again, it's reparation. And you can go to any synagogue and ask about Tikunolam, the idea of repairing the world. And for most Jews, that means like doing acts of social justice and giving to charity and, you know, making sure that people aren't oppressed or whatever. But for Kabbalists, where the idea originally come from, it's Tikun Olam. Olam doesn't mean the world in the sense of the moral world.

It means literally the cosmos. You are doing acts of religious piety in order to repair the metaphysical structure of the world. Fascinating. It's an intense belief system because. everything that you do, every intention you set, everything. It's either undoing the world or fixing it. And, you know, for instance, in the Zohar, maybe the most horrifying thing in the Zohar is like masturbation. Like if you, like, spill semen not in its appropriate container.

You can imagine where that goes. But if you do that, then it just generates demons and it makes the world worse. Right. So all these, like, demons come out of, like, you, you know, know, semen. And you're confronted with these in like the afterlife, right? Yeah, they're, yeah, I mean, they're, yeah, you have to be purged of all this stuff. Ari Shafir talks about this in a special, which is very funny.

I don't know if you've seen it. It's hilarious. Mm-hmm. Yeah, you had, I wonder if he would like it. He did a whole special. He grew up, uh, I believe Orthodox, modern Orthodox, but was in a yeshiva and was like, you know what, I'm done with this and then became a stander comedian and did a whole special, an hour long special talking about like sort of his Jewish faith and kind of the things

that he was taught and what he finds funny about them. And he mentions this. Yeah, it's a huge, you know, and again, I know Catholics also have a horror of masturbation as well. Yeah. But it doesn't generate demons. No, ours is more just like guilt and like the idea like my dead relatives can see me. Yeah. Like, this is more weird.

It's a good deterrent. Yeah, yeah, it could work. But the idea that, yeah, you just made a bunch of demons and now you got to deal with that. Yeah. But yeah, it's a very, you know, you know, in the Hasidic world is infused with this, this Kabbalistic ideas. And again, it's why we could, you know, again, walk down. the street and find some guy standing on the street corner being like, hey, did you put the filling on today? Can I put the filling on you? It's not, and you feel like, why would he care? It's because

he's trying to beat back the semen demons or whatever, you know? Um, what do you put it that way? I'm not sure. I don't want to attribute anything to the guy. Right. I don't know what my knock on stuff, too, but, you know. Hey, guys, we're going to take a break really quick because I want to talk to you about getting old. I turn 30 this month. Yeah, it's sad. And my body is not responding the way that it used to. I could feel exhausted all day and then I get into bed and then now I'm suddenly wide awake. I'm not recovering as quickly. My motivation is kind of inconsistent. My gym habits are not as sharp as they were. And it felt like a bunch of unrelated problems. But the one thing that I can connect to all those issues is cortisol. It's my body stress hormone. And it's supposed to rise when I'm

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things separately, but that's going to take a ton of time and be super expensive. Or you just go to men, go to mars.com, and you can get all of it packaged into one simple supplement stack that's going to give you everything you need. And for a limited time, to listeners of this show, we're going to get 50% off for life. free shipping and three free gifts when they go to men go to mars.com. That's men go to mars.com for 50% off and three free gifts at checkout and after you purchase, tell them that Mark and Christos sent you. Now let's get back to the show. It's such an interesting way to frame it. Like most Orthodox Jews or most Haredi Jews, what you would say are probably

Kabbalistic. Definitely the Hasidic community is the, the, you know, there's still some Jews that are actively opposed to the Kabbalah. They see it as like a, basically a fraud. They see it as a medieval fraud and a heresy. But overwhelmingly, I think Jews have accepted the Kabbalah at some level. If you've ever been to a Friday night service in a synagogue, you've been to a service called Kabbalat Shabbat. And Kabbalat Shabbat was invented by Kabbalist in the 16th century. Is this from Isaac Loria?

Yeah. So the people that came right after him or right before him. But yeah, if you've ever sung Lakhaddadi or then the sort of the whole business of what is called Kabbalat Shabbat, it's a completely Kabbalistically. invented service. Is this the same as regular Shabbat? So it's what, it's how you bring in the Sabbath bride. And the Sabbath bride is the Shchina.

It's the visible manifestation of God in the world, which is a woman, the feminine aspect of God, the Shkinaa. And that's, again, I mentioned a minute ago that the incorporation of Marian elements into the Zohar, you know, anything, you know, anything you can do, I can do better. Like, you know, you have the mother of God. Well, our God just is a woman. Wow. And so the schreina is the, you know, the Sabbath bride and the, the, the, any time God manifests God's self, it's always a schreina, according to the Kabbalah. It's always the feminine. The male remains hidden, and it's the feminine that's revealed.

Fascinating. So, yeah, it's just, you know, and it runs deep. The Kabbalah stuff is, you know, it's, there are commentaries on the Zohar that go into dozens of volumes that have never been translated. Really? Oh, it's a huge, I mean, the Kabbalah, the Zohar, just the principal text of the Kabbalah, it only, it only is, it only. got completely, it's not even completely translated yet. So the Daniel Matt and his crew, thank God, they put out 12 volumes, but they're still probably five more volumes to do. Wow. Now, do you find that these teachings culturally influence Jewish thought? I mean, I would say that in some sense, Jewish theology is just Kabbalah. I mean, there's Maimonides too, and sometimes they want to get, you know, modern Orthodox people typically like Maimonides more than

the Kabbalah. So a lot of the biggest people you'll see kind of going up against Kabbalah will be modern Orthodox people. But, but yeah, and they are like more like rationalistic Maimonides. But yeah, I would say that insofar as there is Jewish theology, and you ask someone, like, how did God make the world? They're going to tell you about Simsoom or something like that. So yeah, it's extremely influential. Right. This idea of Tikunalam is so interesting, that the world is broken through no fault really of anyone kind of like a mistake so to speak is that a fair way to phrase it it's not so much a mistake it's just that the power of god yeah the power of god the infinite power of god could not be stored in a finite vessel right there was a sort of a

cosmological contradiction and it's broke and it's interesting because you see this kind of mythology playing itself out and in gnosticism you see it play out in plato right in plato you have the idea that the demiurge looks at the perfect forms and tries to in imposterousism pose the perfect forms on the imperfect matter, and we get an imperfect world. You know, if you make a chair, the chair is only as good as a lumber. And so we live in an imperfect world. And many of these stories, these myths have some, and they have to give us the reason why the world is the way that it is.

It's not a great world out there sometimes. And the way that they tell the story about why it is defective or broken or imperfect or even evil in the case of the Gnostics, they always give us some. a story about how it came to be the way that it is. And this goes back to the whole apocalypticism material that we began with earlier on. One of the things I will say often is that there really isn't Judaism, Christianity, Christianity, and Islam. Those are just downstream of apocalypticism. Apocalypticism is the religion of the West. It just manifests as Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. Apocalypticism is our religion. Right. Well, Islam's eschatology is also

fascinating. Oh, the moon breaks apart and the Dajal comes. Jesus comes back? Jesus comes back to fight the Dajal. It's awesome. It's like Rambo. It's so cool. Yeah, it's just like, yeah, I love, you know, it's funny because the Christians have this really amazing eschatology, the Muslims have this really developed one, and you go to

the synagogue and say, what's going to happen to the world? Rabbi's going to be like, I don't know, we're not there yet. Yeah. There's so little speculation. There's a great line in the Talmud that says that every time that you calculate when the Messiah is going to come, God pushes the date back by that many years.

It says, curse it be the calculators. That's so funny. There's like, don't even try. Don't do it. You're just like pushing us back, man. Don't try to like, you know, if we take this and divide it by four and add this by the book of Daniel, get this. It's like...

That's such a frustrated mother way of doing it. Yeah. It's like, mom, you said we could have candy in five minutes. And like, well, every time we bring it up, I'm pushing it back another five. That's the way that's what it says in the Talmud did. That's so funny. So it's, you know, we get so little glimpses of the eschatological stuff because Judaism is not really concerned with that. It's like, is your kosher, is your kitchen

kosher? Mm-hmm. Is your, are your muzzis culture? Right. Like, the Messiah, he'll sort himself out. Right. Like, don't worry about that. Like, when the Messiah comes, you'll know. I'm so curious, like, the, I always found that Tikunalam was in some ways different than Christianity in sort of how it manifests and how people kind of think about their faith and how they interact with the world that I find, at least amongst a lot of, like, evangelical Christians that I I talked to in kind of the space that I grew up in through middle school and high school. There's a little bit of a defeatist kind of attitude, so to speak. Like, and again, not all.

And I don't even think this is dogmatic. I just find this my own personal experience that there's a feeling of like the world is broken. And it's broken because of Adam and Eve, original sin. Humanity is broken. And through Christ and Christ alone, that brokenness is healed. And so it's not really on us. It's on Christ.

And Christ is the Savior, the Messiah that will fix everything. And it's sort of offloaded in a way, whereas Tuguan Olam feels a little bit more like there's agency in the individual actors. It's like, hey, the world is broken, and we can do something about it. And we have to. And not only, yeah, not only can we, but we must.

Yeah, in fact, it says that the, there's a section of the time, and it says that the Messiah will only come on two conditions, that the world is made so perfect for the Messiah, that the Messiah, you gotta roll the red carpet out, and the Messiah will come. Or the world is so burying, that only the Messiah can fix it.

And the idea is we need to do the ladder. And yeah, the idea is that you have to fix the world. The world is not going to fix itself. And because the original sins are not really a it's not really a Jewish idea. You know, even Ezekiel says that fathers don't, you know, sons don't inherit father's sins.

So I think it's just a different orientation. I don't know that one is better than the other. I'm sure there are plenty of, you know, they're wonderful Presbyterians out there, you know, predestined to do the right, thing and doing it. Right. And there are lots of terrible Jewish landlords out there being mean to people and not doing the Tikuna Lump. So, you know, there's, I think it's always like, you know, sometimes I say, right, there's no religions, they're just people. Right. And at the end of the day,

you know, whether it's this guy or that guy, they're bad people. They're going to be bad people. I'm curious, do you think it, and this may be a leap here and now we're kind of in speculation mode. But like culturally, do you think it affects the way that like modern Jews interface with the world and how they feel like they should interact? And I think about like inventions. And there's a disordinate amount of like inventions or contributions done by like Jewish scientists, for example. Like, hey, here's some penicillin. Here's some, you know, these types of, like, so many different inventions. I'm sure we can pull up a list. Oh, it's a, the Jewish mother thing is always to tell you how many Nobel, what percent of Nobel Prize winners or Jewish people make you feel bad that

that you're not won. Right. Exactly. So I wonder, is it just like cultural pressure of just like a highly literate group of people that are generally like ethnic, ethnic and religious minorities in a country trying to create some type of values so that they're not ostracized? Or is there maybe both an element within the culture where it's like, hey, we have to do good things because that's what we're commanded to by Hashem. Yeah, I wonder. It's more of a sociological question than anything else, not when I'm, I don't know if I'm super qualified for, but I think it's also as a result of, like, anti-Semitism, like Jews weren't allowed to do other boring things like own land. end or, and so they were forced into these trades like textiles.

Yeah, textiles, doctors and lawyers and bureaucrats and intellectuals. And it just so happened that the enlightenment happened and that that kind of intellectual labor really, really got valued. And science was a, was a thing you could do in a lab. And it didn't require you to own any land. In fact, it benefited you to live in a city and have high, you know, be able to do high levels of intellectual specialization. And you don't have to work on Rosh Hashanah.

That's true. You don't, yeah. Right. And it's like, you know, it doesn't matter if you don't work on Fridays and Saturdays. Right. So I think that part of the reason why European Jews were, because it's not so much true of Jews and other parts of the Jewish world, you know. So I think it has something to do specifically with how Jews were treated in Europe. And it just so happened that that what was a pretty bad system of oppression had a kind of weird silver lining in some ways.

Yeah. As oppression, some ways tends to do, right? Yeah, you know, it's, I think about African-Americans, right? We're given, you know, these horrifyingly bad combinations of food to eat and were able to generate basically some of the most amazing cuisine in the world. Right. Because of, you know, they had to improvise and take terrible food and spice it up and make barbecue and stuff. And so, yeah, it's these, these unfortunately bad situations of, you know, racism or whatever. Yeah, they can generate these off-kilter boons. Yeah.

And so maybe it's the case that, you know, it's the reason why Ashkenazi Jews specifically are gifted in these ways. But I don't know. It's one of the things where, you know, it's more of a sociological question. Right. Well, I also think that high literacy due to sort of the Yeshiva system early on also gave, like, a large advantage. It's like, hey, there's, like, I think historically, like Jewish communities were more literate than the rest of the surrounding communities. I also think the divine nature of argument. Like, I've read, and I don't know where this is, you'd know better than me,

but there's midrouch about argument and how argument is good. And, like, I mean, Abraham negotiated with God. Man, Moses argued with God. Jacob quite literally wrestled. Yeah, wrestle. And so this idea that like, and I think it doesn't really exist in like sort of Christianity in America into the same way, but that argument is good. And not only is it good, it can, it brings us to truth.

and that it's a helpful sort of facet. Do you find that that comes up in, like, Jewish literature? That's one of our favorite stories to tell, right? There's two great rabbinical households, the household of Hillel and the household of Shammai. And they never agreed, right? They always fought and they disagreed about everything. And even just devolved into violence. They would, you know, raid each other's schools and kill each other.

It was really bad. And there's a story that, you know, the house of Hillel guys on the top of the building and the other guys in top of them shouting each other. and diametrically opposed positions on things, right? Like, should the Mazzaa go like this or should it go like this? Right? You can't be both. You know, it turns out they negotiated and it's like this. Is that true?

Yes. Yeah. You know, do you light the Hanukkah candles with starting with all the candles and reduce them day by day? Or do you start with none and add them up? Right. This is the debates they had, you know, because how do you like the damn thing? And, you know, Hillel said you take all the candles and you put them all there and you take one away every day. And Arno Shemai said, and Hillel said, no.

You add them up. You never, we never decrease holiness. You only add holiness. This is the debates. So they're shouting about Hanukkah candles and stuff. And, you know, and the sky cracks open. And God says, Elu vahel, these and those.

And it says, any disagreement for the sake of heaven, a maklach al-lach al-ashem-sham-a-im. Any disagreement for the sake of heaven will be rewarded in heaven. Hmm. And so there's an idea that if you're disagreeing on good principles for good reasons, both of you are right in some sense. And you'll get your just reward. It's not about who's individually right.

It's about, again, a machlachal, the shame, shamay, and a disagreement for the sake of heaven. But I will say in Christianity, too, you see it. I mean, I think of like the scholastics, Thomas Aquinas and Dunsodas and these guys arguing. And they're arguing, I think, in a deep way trying to establish, you know, its faith-seeking understanding.

And in that scholastic way of Augustine and Thomas and Dunsodos and William Vakum, those guys aren't agreeing. They're disagreeing with each other. And they're, you know, but they're disagreeing in a relatively polite way. And I think I find great, you know, I love reading this Catholic scholastics. Yeah. So, yeah, there is a tradition in Judaism where, you know, Mahlok al-ashem and Shama,

and disagreement for the sake of heaven will be rewarded in heaven. And so I think there is a custom of, you know, bickering for the sake of heaven. So I think that there is some, there is a there of that. And, you know, it's funny, I'll be in arguments with people. And I'll ask myself, is this a Mahlachal Ashemimeim? Am I trying to be right? Am I, am I just doing this from my own ego? Because I want to be right.

Or I'm actually like, is there a principled position here? And I want to get to the principle is what matters. And sometimes I've had it. And I can't say this often, but there have been moments where I'm like, I'm just trying to be right, right? I'm not really doing this for the sake of heaven. Yeah. And it's, it can be a good, you know, litmus

test, you know. No, it's just my ego. Yeah, it's just fascinating. I think it's a great quality that sometimes at least for me again, going into Bible study, like you hear things, you can ask questions, but it's always like you don't want to rock it too much. You know, you don't want to, you don't want to do too much disagreeing. And I don't know if it's like a respect thing. It's like, hey, just like listen. Like I think the hierarchy maybe of like my Catholic upbringing was a little bit like, okay, if the priest says something, you kind of just like take it, walk away, think about it, maybe come back if you still have questions. That's kind of how it was for me.

Whereas. I think you go into Orthodoxy Shiva, it's not going to be much different. Really? I mean, there's good. I mean, look, I think every religion's going to, every religion is going to have its bumpers. And there's going to be that moment where you're like, be like, okay, so it's like, da, da, da, da, so it's like, can I be gay?

I'm like, no. Really? Full stop. You can be gay, but you can't have sex with dudes. But see, now we're getting into the funny part. You know, the Catholic Church is the same thing. Like, yeah, be gay. Just don't have sex.

with dudes. Right. You know, or ladies, what opinion, you know, so it's, they're bumpers. It's it's not like, you know, you and you walk into a yeshiva and, you know, is pork on the menu? No, it's not on the menu. No, there's no arguing your way to pork. But lab grown. Yeah, it's a bit. It's actually a debate right now. Now we're at sea. And there is a debate about, you know, and there's a worry, right? It's Marayan, like, don't be seen to be doing evil things. Like, you can't wear leather on Yom Kippur. Can you wear imitation leather on Yom Kippur? You shouldn't do that because it looks like you are and that's not good.

Right. It might give someone else the wrong impression. So I've seen arguments about this lab-grown pork, you're like, yeah, but if you're eating a pork chock in public, people are going to think it's really a real pork shop. So maybe you leave it on those grounds. It's not allowed. Right. But, yeah, there's bumpers. I mean, it's, there's guardrails.

I don't think that, you know, an Orthodox yeshiva is going to be. any more liberal on certain kind of things than any other fundamentalist religion. I'm sure the Orthodox guys and the Opus Day guys will get along swimmingly in the fact that they're all in the same fundamentalist team.

Fundamentalism Olympics. I know people online will sometimes scoff at what they would consider loopholes of Orthodox Judaism. I find them to be interesting outcomes of spurious debate where it's like, we're going back and forth trying to decide what this means. We have this text that's ancient that maybe doesn't apply to the modern day.

How do we understand this? And like, what does it mean for the day to set? When does night really begin? What does it mean to ignite fire with your hand? To do work. Like, all of these things I find, maybe just from like a comedic perspective, I'm like, what does work mean?

Right? It's great. I mean, that's why we get such great Jewish comedians. Well, right? The religion's so absurd. It's like, my favorite example. of that is what is magic. So this is a place where, again, overlaps of my work. So there's an intractate synhedron in the town where they're discussing what is kishuf, what is sorcery,

because it's a death penalty case. If you're convicted of it, you can be put to death. I'm serious. And so stakes are pretty high, so you need to define it, what it is and what it isn't. And the problem is that in the Bible, where you see all these Hebrew words for species of kishuf, of magic, sorcery, they're all words that we're. We don't know what they mean with a few exceptions. So it says, don't be a Yidaoni. What is a Yiddaoni?

It says, don't be a Ma'onin. Well, we can kind of see what that word means. It means something like cloud. The word Anon's in there. So cloud doer person. Don't be a chavre of hover. There's all these words. It says, don't do that.

But no one knows what these words mean. And if you look at a Bible translations, you can flip to those sections of Deuteronomy. And every Bible translation is all over the place. Like don't be a diviner or a sooth. or a whatever, you know, but the text says things like, don't be a minachash. And minahash means something like snake doer person. It's from from Nakhash, the word snake, but snake charmer maybe? I don't know.

No one knows. And because it's ambiguous, the rabbis say, we're not allowed to do those things. And because it says don't do them, that's it. Anything else that's not that you can do. And so the rabbis say, well, what's an example of a thing that's clearly like weirdly magical that you're allowed to do. And what does the Gamara say? It says, if you're righteous enough,

you could create, you could create Olamim worlds. But none of us are that righteous, right? We're kind of slubs. And it says, well, what, what could you do? It's like, well, I know a couple of rabbis who used, say, for Yetzera to make a calf and eat it on Shabbat.

And they also made a man. And they animated him and brought him to life. And he walked to another, one of these guys and the rabbi asked like who are you and the this entity couldn't speak and uh he made him go back to the to the dust and this becomes the tradition of the golem the golem so of all the weird magical things right like you can't do certain kinds of magical things but what you can do is make people and get people to do stuff i mean the most fame one of the most famous medieval rabbis Solomon M. Invin Gobi Roel was famous because he had a golem housekeeper.

What does this mean? He, I mean, allegedly he brought to life an artificial person and they were his housekeeper. And people came and saw this housekeeper. I mean, there are accounts of people coming to see his golem housekeeper. What a tale. I mean, my first assumption, again, going from like the skeptical side, I'm sure you've probably thought the same thing. They're like, okay, is this just like a person? Is she just Polish?

Yeah, it's just like a Slavic guy? Yeah, like, you've never seen one of these. Yeah, you're like, look at this guy. Or like, I mean, even more morbidly again. Like if someone with like a disability or something. Contribut. And they're like, yeah, this is the half human half? Like, is it possible that it inhabits that world?

Is it possible? It's just a non-corroborated story that ends up in this legend. Yeah, I mean, I've seen a couple accounts of the people go. It's always people I know a guy, right? It's always that. I know a guy who saw the golem housekeeper of it been settling in a guy role. So I don't know. I don't know. But they're all stories. There's many, many stories of people making golems. And the word only appears once in the Hebrew Bible. It's describing an unborn

baby, a fetus. It's like the Hebrew word for fetus. So it's kind of like a half-made person. Almost human. Almost human. They can't, typically they can't speak. And they often will run amok. They go crazy and cause all kinds of problems. The Frankenstein story is an extension of the golem story in some ways. Oh, right. Animating and creating life. Creating life from non-life and how it goes awry. Mostly that's Dr. Frankenstein's fault because he was an irresponsible bastard, but, you know, it's not really a monstrous fault. But it comes out of this

book. This is the first printing of Sefer Yitzera, this is the first printing of Sefer Yitzera of Manchu of 1562. But the commentaries on this book tell you how to do it. How to make a golem? How do you do it? So you become really pure. So that's hard. And then...

By following the Jewish law. By following Jewish law, you know, you know, abstaining from sex and fasting and, you know, wearing white garments, you and your helpers, you gather virgin clay together, and you shape it into the shape of a human being, and then you start pronouncing out loud various divine names and various kind of combinations. And these combinations are very long. I mean, it's like hundreds and hundreds of divine names.

And by basically chanting these combined divine names, you seemingly become, like God. And the same way God was able to bring Adam to life. I mean, Adam in Hebrew just means Adama. It means clay. And God was able to summon this clay being into life. Apparently, if you're righteous enough, you're Godlike enough. You can do it too. And you do it by basically enunciating the divine name and all of its permutations. And by announcing the divine name in this way, it animates this creature. And did the religious folks at the time? They didn't see this as like infringing on God's divine rate. think, right? This is the kind of thing where we even say now, right, when you muck about with

DNA or something, oh, you're playing God. You're going to be doing that. I mean, the Talmud says explicitly, this is exactly what you're allowed to do. It's also a big claim, right? Like, oftentimes, like, mystics and sorcerers and things like this would, like, kind of hide their method. They're like, only the initiated no. And, like, they never really call their shot. Right. But for someone to say, like, hey, here's a brownie mix and here's all the ingredients, test it yourself. Yeah, it's to do it. And there, it's in the, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, It's in, like I said, it's in the commentary. So this.

Now, those, you know, now does it tell you exactly, what is exactly version clay? How are you supposed to announce these? You know, there's a lot of wiggle room for when it doesn't work. Sure. You know, you go to your Kabbalaga and you're like, I tried the Golem thing, bro. I didn't work. You know, did you pronounce all the names? Right.

Four times? You're not pure enough. Yeah, you're not pure enough. There's always an escape hatch. Mm-hmm. But no one's done it successfully. I think, I mean, the time it says people did it. And then Solomon and Maggi Rol, their stories of golem's,

through the Middle Ages into modernity. I mean, there's the, you know, the, the, the famous Golem of Prague, actually, there's a story invented by a non-Jewish person, so it probably didn't happen. But their stories of, like, they're being golems, like, in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. Like, I don't know. I don't know. These stories get really wild. Nothing on TikTok yet.

Nothing yet. Yeah, you see the, you know, you know, the, you know, here's how to create a golem YouTube channel. Yeah. Three in the morning. Yeah. We did it. It's so interesting. Like, I wonder so often about like these miracles from the Bible.

Like, and it's, I would consider this miraculous to an extent, of course, right? Like, creating a human life. If it's not a miracle, it'll do the miracles get here. Yeah. Like, do these things persist because people see them, they corroborate them? Like, we talk about like the resurrection of Christ. There was an apparition to like 5,000 people or some number of a large crowd that saw Christ in this resurrected state, which is amazing. Or Lazarus coming back from the dead.

these kinds of things that are divinely inspired. I mean, if they happen today, there'd be no doubt that people would say, like, oh, this guy's got something special going on. How did these things get corroborated in the ancient times? And do you think that there's any, do you find that the veracity of the claims of the miracles specifically to be coherent

or withstanding criticism? I don't know. I mean, I don't find the, to me, it's one of these things where either you kind of have to accept that all the miracles happened or kind of none of them did at some level. I mean, because you just have miracle claims from everybody.

It's like the Aztecs have miracle claims. The Hindus have miracle claims. You know, the Egyptians say that, you know, and the ones of Jesus or the ones of Shemambar Yochai. I mean, which one do I trust more than the other? I don't know. For me, I think that they're great stories and there's no way for me to verify them

and there's no way for me to go back in time and vouchsafed them. And even if I saw a guy come back from the dead, I, there's a part of me that would think, oh, I've just lost it actually. You know, like, which is more likely that I'm gone crazy or that this dude, you know, was. And then also, you know, we see accounts of other miracles

like exorcisms, people falling down and thumbing at the mouth and people uttering words over them for a few minutes and they stop. I'm like, that looks like a lot like epilepsy to me. Right. You know, or something like that. I think about the Ark of the Covenant. the fact that if someone touched it and they died or this thing had like the supercharged energy and I've heard all these different theories radiation right I love the fact that the one time we have

someone you know there there are cases where when people touch it and they die but in the other case if the philistines actually seize it and take it to the philistine city and they all get hemorrhoids where's that it's in the bible they get hemorrhoids yeah it's like the this seems like the worst that it can do is like give a bunch of philistines hemorrhoids weird it's the strangest story. And then the Philistines give it back. They're like, I hate this thing. It gives my hemorrhoids. Yeah, we're suffering over here. We're in the middle of the desert, no bidetes. It's just like, yeah. So it's just funny. And it's funny because many people know that story where, you know, they go to touch it, they go to almost drop it and they got touches and he dies.

No one ever tells the hemorrhoid story. Yeah. Because it just seems kind of not divine all of a sudden. It's like, they stole it and it made their butt hurt. But the banality of it almost makes You wonder if there's something happening where, like, is there a herb that's in it that maybe causes a weird medical thing? You know, like, God of the Hebrew Bible is a weird God. I mean, some of my favorite stories are the ones that never get told. Like, the time that God used, like, a trickster angel to get a king killed. Oh. It's just the best story of the Bible.

Like, God, like, addresses all the angels and saying, I want to get Ahab killed. And I need a lying spirit to go down and, like, possess all the prophets to tell the king a false prophet. so that he'll go out and fight them and get killed and the angels one of the angel shows up He'll be like I'll go tell them and it's like God literally sends a secret agent to like Basically possess a bunch of prophets to tell them a false prophecy to get this king killed. Yeah, it's like the most CIA Massad secret agent with stuff is it a is this oh this is this is the yeah first Samuel Yeah, five to six is the Bible's plaguing of hemorrhoids. Oh, that's the Philistine one. Yeah, this is the Philistine one. Wow. It's really,

it's, this is just slept on. Why is this not like, you know, yeah, the King Ahab, the God permits a lying spirit to perhaps reflate Ava prophet to encourage him against him gets him killed. Wow. Ahab disguises himself, an enemy shoots an arrow at random and mortally wounds him, fulfilling God's judgment. Yeah. So this is just, these are just great stories in the Bible that just not like, like people say things like, well, God would never lie to us. I'm like, God literally send a lying spirit. I'm like, yeah. You know, or like the hymroid thing. It's like, it's just one of these, it's these stories that I find to be some of the most interesting

because they're, they're kind of embarrassing. Yeah, it's difficult to reckon with. They're weird. They're like, oh, yeah, like this God just, why did God just kill him? Yeah. It's God. I think about like hardening Pharaoh's heart. Exactly.

This is one of the most bizarre ones. It's super strange. Like. But in that case, it actually tells you why. I want to do this so I can commit all these, these, uh, plague so that people, will know how powerful my name is. It's a flex. That's cool.

Yeah. I'm not saying it's morally good, but God does have a logic there. You know, it's just like, I'm doing this because I'm like going to show how everybody all like how badass I am. But free will and agency is like the most supreme sort of human feature that we have. At least for us. Right? Maybe back in the Iron Age there wasn't that they, that was not their principal concern.

Yeah. It's just, it's something that I contend with is. No, it's a terrible. Someone that grew up Catholic. It's like, well, is God going to harden my heart? Like, is my free will now suspended? And why did, why did the Farad have to get punished? If God harden, it's hard.

It's, it produces all these, these interesting theological problems that are interesting because they're, their problems for us in a way that whoever wrote the text, they weren't problems for. But they must have been problems for the early church. Like, I can't imagine that I'm the first guy to be like, oh, this hardening thing is pretty weird. No, they have to, there's all kinds of mental gymnastics that, oh, God, it wasn't that he hardened his heart is really what it meant is that he, He simply gave Pharaoh what Pharaoh really wanted. And Pharaoh had already made his mind up and God just like kind of doubled down on helping him do that. So there's all kinds of ways of reading it so that you get your theology back.

Right. And you get your free will back or you get Pharaoh's free will back. Or you read that where God's not deceiving people and sending lying angels to trick people. Or I guess the magic hemorrhoids thing. It's not the worst thing in the world. I guess that's kind of weird. But of all the things that God would program the Ark of the Covenant to do, Right.

Or the she bear that comes and kills all the kids. Kill the kids. And I like it the fact that it is specifically a she bear and the number of the kids is really specific. Yeah, how many kids? I forget. It's like 30 something. It's like a very particular number of kids.

Yeah. But also for a bear to get 30 kids. I mean, that's pretty crazy. Yeah, they're stealing the kids would have ran. You would think, well, maybe there's like 100 kids and like there's 30. Yeah, just malls a few of them. Yeah. It's like it specifically, go on go up, baldy, going up baldy.

Yeah. God's send the she bears. Yeah. I mean, but this also. like, you know, there's also this horrifying Psalms, Blessed be he that smash it the head of the children against the rocks. I don't like that.

It's bad. It's like a bad vibe, bad look. Which is kind of, this is also why I'm like, I try to take heed and encourage my Catholic Christian friends to be like, whenever you see a verse from like the Talmud, the Quran, really any sort of religious text, and it's one line, it's like, look, look, I know that line from the Talmud doesn't look great, but we have some lines that don't look great.

And if they wanted to proliferate these messages about us, like I wouldn't be stoked. Yeah, I mean, yeah, I think that if you want to, it's like streamers, right? Sometimes like people are streaming 24-7. They say like, oh, yeah, he said this one crazy thing one time. I'm like, yeah, he's streaming 24 hours ago. He's going to say crazy stuff. Yeah.

You know, the Bible, these traditions have long legs. And you're going to get people say horrifying, weird, bad stuff. Yeah. And the Bible itself. I mean, like I said, it's like, do I trust, like, God to not be sending lying angels to get me to go do bad stuff? So, yeah, he sent the lying angels sled. So he'd get in the airplane today and crash the plane. Yeah.

God forbid. You're like, I don't want the lying angels to be bothering me. Who is this guy? Or like the angel of death that comes down and kills all those kids? Yeah, you're like, there's an angel of death. There's a hitman angel. Yeah. And even more terrifying in Hebrew, it's, it's, the word means, like, destroying angel.

But the root is actually the word for, like, to cut someone's, throat. So it's even more visceral, like, yeah, it's even more like gory in the Hebrew original. It's like, because it never calls it the angel of death. It just calls it destroyer. Yeah. But the word actually, it's the same word you do so cut the throat of an animal when you're like butchering it. Right. And you did a whole episode. It's now like your most viewed episode on Yahweh. Such a bizarre thing that like in my specializations in Western Naza terrorism and I just woke up one morning. And I just like, I think I was looking at something. something on YouTube and it was just like, there's not good content about Canaanite mythology,

of which, you know, the Israel like God, Yawa is one part of Canaanite mythology. And I kind of, I have a, you know, shoot from the hip theory as to why I think Canaanite mythology slept on. And my shoot from the hip theory of that is like once you do Canaanite mythology and once Y'alloy becomes part of a pantheon, then you have problems. Right. Like, God just becomes a God. and the big three don't want that. But yeah, I just woke up one Monday morning. I was like, there's not good stuff on Yahweh.

I'm going to write an episode on Yahweh. How would you summarize the thesis of that episode? So the basic thesis is that the God Yahweh has a history, right? That's a shocking thing to say for whatever reason. I know that if I told you that Zeus had a history, no one would bat an eye or Kwebzi Koto had a history. No one bad an eye, but to say that Yahweh has a history all of a sudden means that, This is not a timeless eternal being.

But the basic thesis is that if you take the Hebrew Bible, if you take the archaeological evidence, we have very little archaeological evidence for God. We have maybe one Egyptian inscription, and then we have another inscription, the Meshasteli, which actually describes Yahweh is being defeated. So the first time Yawai ever shows up in history is because a king is bragging that he broke into a Yawai shrine, stole some vessels and dragged them before his god, Chemosh. So the first time Yawai shows up in history really definitively is someone like flexing on having defeated Yawai. And then when you're saying Yahweh, you're describing the four letter. Yeah, the tetagrammatum. Yodhavha. We don't know how it was said.

And I know that some people are going to go, how can he be trying to say the divine name? It's not allowed. I'm just saying a scholarly approximation of what we think the name was. In fact, I don't think it was actually pronounced like that. In fact, we have pretty good reason to think how it was pronounced. because it's still attached to lots of people's names. Like Netanyahu. That Yahoo is probably how it was pronounced.

The name was probably Yahoo, I think, probably not Yahweh. Is that why he chose that name? Or is it just like a popular sort of a key name? I don't know why he, I don't know, I don't know what his specific name is, but it's in Yeremiahou, like Jeremiah. Any name you hear that, that, yeah, at the end of a name in English, it's Yahoo. Elijah, Eliyahu. My God is Yahoo. So, I mean, people are like, you can't say the name.

I'm like, do you know someone named Elijah? Yeah. Because Eliyahu in Hebrew, just my name, my God is Yahoo. The Delta Gate agent might be saying the name. Yeah. So people get their hair in a twist about this name, but I'm like, you're probably saying it all the time. Interesting. It's just preserved in formal names.

Right. But at any rate, the thesis is that if, so if you take the Hebrew Bible, the Old Testament, it's a book composed over a long period of time. And just like English, if I were to take a newspaper and put a random paragraph of Shakespeare in there, you would know something had happened. You would be like, you know, this part of the text is in an older form of English. We all know that Shakespeare is an older form of English. Something happens similarly in Hebrew, that there are some sections of the Hebrew Bible that are in one form and then there's some forms that are recognizably archaic. if we take just those archaic sections and just take all of them out and look at them

theologically what emerges what kind of god do we get and the god that we get is a storm god the god that we get is a warrior god and the god that we get seems to be associated with an area south of what is modern day israel palestine and the region of mounts the ear so somewhere down in the southern jordan or northern saudi arabia actually and it seems like that god the really archaic sections are describing that warrior storm god and at some point that god immigrated into the judean hill country near what is now shuloh and and we that seems to have been the case of that during the bronze age collapse that this god immigrates into that region and ultimately transforms so for instance that yahweh god which is a young warrior storm god

becomes assimilated to the elder god of the Canaanite pantheon, L. And if you've ever imagined what God looks like in the image of God that you get is a old guy on a throne with a beard, you're not imagining Yahweh. You're imagining L. L is the elderly guy on the throne

with the big beard. Yawai is a youthful storm deity. And L and Y'allai get mixed. And also, the Canaanites already have their own indigenous storm god named Ba'al. And Ba'al, we have literature about Ba'a'al. Yeah, we don't like Ba'all. Yeah, no one likes Ba'al, except for the Canaanites.

And what ends up happening is, right, two storm gods, one that they get mixed. Man, so what ends up happening is that Yahweh and Ba'u are basically put into combat, and ultimately, Y'alway triumphs. But really, it's a narcissism of minor difference. They're, in many ways, identical gods. Ba'all and Yahweh. If you look at the literature of the Ba'al cycle, which is preserved in Ugaritic, they're very similar gods.

In fact, there are hymns to Ba'al that are so similar to hymns in the Psalms that if I'd switch the names out, you'd never know. Really? Yeah, they're like really, really similar. I mean, in fact, some scholars have said, and this is pushing it a little bit further than I would be comfortable with, but some have even said that there are Psalms where they originally ball hymns that have just been Yawai's. Like, they just cut and paste of the names.

Whoa. So, and again, this is the reason why the Bible and the Elijah cycle is so obsessed with Baal is because the gods are so similar. And just, you know, the city's not big enough for both of us. You know, we can, you know. So I think that the yawists, you know, they win not because, not because of divine sanctions, it's because the North gets destroyed by the Assyrians in 722.

And what is happening is that in the South, you know, there's no Ba'al really in the South. And the Judeans are what survived. And so the accident of history is that, that Yahweh ultimately defeats Ba'al because kind of the North gets defeated. So what is the relationship between El, Yahweh, and then the Elohim, plural? Yeah, so the Elohim were probably, and we don't know exactly, the words plural. Eventually it becomes singular in use, but it's plural and grammar.

It probably refers to the divine counsel, of which there are remains in the Bible, where God is addressing, you know, the Lion Spirit we were just talking about, that God seems to be addressing a bunch of other quasi-jews, divine beings. Job, he kind of does this. There's a counsel, like a court. A court. Yeah. And in fact, the satan, the Satan, which is always has a title. It's always almost always ha satan. The accuser. The accuser, as opposed to a name. And then Job, it's not a name. It's a title. And there seemed to have been this council of divine beings. And at some point, that council gets demoted into just sort of an angelic army, uh, that Zeva Ote, the angelic Marines,

basically. So yeah, clearly it wasn't, you know, in fact, there's even a very peculiar line at the end of Deuteronomy where God is giving Yawai a portion of the earth. And clearly the writer of that thought of there being kind of a hierarchy of gods of which Yawai was a more minor character than this L. L. L. Yon God. And this L. O'L. Yon God is giving Yaway a portion of the world, and that portion of the world, of course, is Palestine and Israel. So there are fossils, theological fossils in the Hebrew Bible, where Yale was a god among gods. And it's not until, and this is a debate, you know, if you listen to Dan McClellan, he's going to give you a later date than I would, but I would say that monotheism in any recognizable form doesn't emerge until

the Babylonian exile. Wow. Sometimes I joke that Israelite religion goes into exile Judaism comes out yaway goes into exile god comes back what is the reference of yahweh inheriting a portion of the earth is that in the bible bible it's at the very end of duteronomy yeah that's like duneuron is 36 could you pull that up i'm so curious the language that would appear in like the bible i have at home yeah i'm curious that it all depends on the translation i'm usually trying to read it in hebrew but yeah it's it's a peculiar verse and it's archaic it's it's in one of these archaic poems. So yeah, it's, you know, the, and it's funny because sometimes people get really upset with

me about this. They're like, how dare you accuse the ancient Israelites of being polytheists or not monotheists or whatever? And I'm like, have you read the prophets? The prophets are constantly complaining about this. Like, the evidence for this is not new. The evidence for this is in the prophets. What do they say?

The prophets quit worshiping as the gods, quit worshiping Asherah. And we have inscriptions. from several different sites that mention Yahweh and his Asherah, which is probably his wife. Because, I mean, ancient people, ancient dudes are like modern dudes. Like, you don't want a bachelor god.

That's like a, that's a weak sauce god. You want a god with a consort, with a wife, with a woman. You know, sort of heteronormative thing. Of course God's hands of, you know. And again, L, right, had a wife, atherat. And when Yahweh becomes assimilated to L, He inherits God's wife, who in Hebrew is not atherat, and she's Ashira.

Is that the sort of Gideon? Does Gideon come in and destroy? The Asherapoles. Is that connected to this? Yeah, it's the same thing. And it's, you know, these Asherapoles, we're not quite sure exactly how they functioned in Israelite religion and stuff like that. But yeah, it was probably the case that, again, one, first of all, Israelite religion

was probably never monolithic. It's not monolithic now. I mean, you go to a reform synagogue and go to a Haredi neighborhood and Williamsburg and ask them about Judaism. They're going to get two different forms of Judaism and they're not going to agree with each other. To think that if it's that diverse now, imagine in the ancient world where you're talking about geographic distribution over hundreds of miles where people were even more isolated, it's the case that the way they do Israelite religion up there at Tel Don is going to be very different than we do it down here in Tel Arad, which is interesting because we have a Yawai

shrine archaeologically preserved at Tellerod where the surface of one of the altars has cannabinoid residue on it. Canapenoid? Oh yeah, they were burning cannabis on the altar. What? We don't know how much. We don't know why. We don't know.

It seems like a shrine that probably was torn down by Josiah during his reforms or whatever. But yeah, there was a Yawai shrine. And when they tested it, it's in the Israel Museum. I've seen it. And when they tested it, they found trace evidence of it. cannabinoids, which means, again, we don't know how big the shrine was, and we don't know, it was certainly, it was a Holy of Holies, it was certainly inside of the shrine. Who knows how big it was in there, but, I mean, we all know what happens.

You burn cannabis inside of a small room. Yeah. I mean, it could be hotboxing in the Holy of Holy of Holyes for all we know. Whoa. So we don't know. I mean, it's, you know, and again, this is sort of grist for the mill for people who want to say, oh, yeah, it was all DMT and. Yeah, the acacia wood and you burn it.

Yeah, you burn it and you see this. And it's really, you know, the incense is really DMT. I'm like, I don't think so, but look, the evidence is the evidence. That's the data. Fascinating. Yeah. So they don't say, oh, yeah, Kanabosem was cannabis. And I'm like, that's a false friend, bad linguistics.

But I'm like, but there are cannabinoids detected on this Telarod shrine. And it's just the only, we just happen to have that shrine. Every other shrine's been destroyed. There's the Tel-Dan shrine. There's a Jerusalem shrine, which is obviously not there anymore. Why would they be destroyed? Well, Jerusalem was destroyed by the Babylon. Villanians and then by the Romans. So that that shrine was destroyed.

The Tel Don shrine was destroyed. I don't remember exactly when it was destroyed. The Shiloh shrine, we never found it. People are desperately looking for it. Mattel Arad shrine was probably destroyed by Josiah because Josiah was really interested in consolidating Yahweh worship in Jerusalem as part of his larger political religious consolidation. Why is exile good for developing monotheism as a religious technology. God's in the ancient world were largely thought of as geographically bound. God, gods were God of this land.

And when the text describes the temple as the house of Yahweh, we should really read that literally. This is where Yahweh lives. Like when God orders stuff from Amazon, it gets delivered there. It's a bit animistic in a way. In a way, yeah. It's like this is the spirit of this land. This is the land that this deity has sovereignty over.

If you go over there, that's Himosh's land. And up there, that's Baal's land. And over there, that's the Egyptians and their gods, La Ra's land. So, gods are geographically bound in a way. Well, if you get exiled, right, and you're now not in the land anymore, and you want to maintain belief in God, you have basically a theological problem. How is it that you can still worship your God and believe in your God if you're not geographically in the land that God has sovereignty over and that God's gotten defeated for?

frankly. Well, you make it your fault. We violated the covenant and God allowed the Babylonians to do this to us. And our God isn't the God of that land. Our God is the God of all the lands. In fact, our God is the God is the God of all this. And your gods are all fake. And you see that move later in the what is called sometimes called Dutero Isaiah, where you begin to get what I think. And again, people like Dan McClellan would disagree with me. And I think there's a sky. scholarly debate on this, which is the way it should be. But there in Deuter Isaiah, you begin to see sort of a pretty radical, what I think of monotheism, where God is saying things like, I create good and I create, I create the light and the dark, I create good and the evil.

Which, by the way, the rabbis are so concerned about that verse that when it's used in the daily prayer service, they change it. They change it from, I create the light and the darkness. I create the good and all things. They don't like the, you're saying, or if I'm a very Rochechech, you know, they don't like the bra, the evil. Because it's pretty terrifying that God creates evil. Yeah, it's a problem. It's a problem. But that's what Isaiah says.

And the rabbis are so uncomfortable with it, they even altered in the prayer book to get rid of it. Interesting. They neuter Isaiah to do this. But yeah, in that section, the sections of Isaiah, it's like, no, your gods are just rocks and wood. They're not gods. Like, our God is really God. Just God simplicator. So I think, I read in those texts, I think it's more than just what we call monotheistic rhetoric.

I think we see monotheism being born. And it's interesting that when the Jews come out of exile and go back to when they're set free by King Cyrus, who, by the way, is the only person ever called a Messiah in the Hebrew Bible. They call King Cyrus a Messiah. And when they come back, you don't see a trace of the polytheism anymore. It just doesn't seem like it's there. And in fact, that's when you see Judaism as a religion really emerge. It's sometimes third century or so, fifth century. It's hard to say exactly.

And do you think they tell themselves like, hey, we've figured it out, which is why we're now freed from exile and life is good? Maybe so. I'm not sure what exactly theological moves they had in their head, but I do think that when they come, when the community comes back, and again, we're most of the people, and not everyone came back, a lot of people chose to stay, but the people who come back, which I think were probably the hardcore, yawist partisan. I think that they come back with an idea that there aren't other gods. That feature is extremely exportable. It's maybe the most of it. It's the biggest meme ever, right? It's like you're no longer bound to any geographic region.

You can be a diasporic religion, or rather, it's not even a diaspora. It's just that God is everywhere. Your God is just the only God. And just think about how bizarre of an idea this was. I mean, the Romans really thought Judaism was extremely strange. They accepted it as an authoritative. authentically ancient religion. They're like, your God is invisible and everywhere and, but has to be worshipped in this one temple.

And, you know, the Romans are like, it's really weird that your God is like, does your God do stuff? Like, because our gods do things. And the Jews are like, no, no, God's just sort of like up there. You know, other angels and stuff, they do everything else. They're like sort of the janitors of the universe. Right. And the Romans thought it was an extremely peculiar religion that monotheism, instruct them as an extremely strange idea.

I mean, infamously, don't they call the Christians, like, atheists? Yeah. And they're like, you guys only believe in one God? Like, that's basically zero. Yeah, it's the idea that you're certainly not, I mean, atheism is an interesting translation. Sometimes that gets translated of the Greek word as Thebia, which means impiety.

That's what Socrates was convicted of. But yeah, it's like you're doing God wrong. Mm-hmm. Like you're gauding wrong. Were the Roman gods, we confirmed? kind of to their geography? They were certainly, you certainly manifested primarily

in certain regions. And even the Romans were trying to square the circle too. They built a whole building to deal with this problem called the Pantheon, the all-god. And it was intentionally designed

to basically be a place where like, you know, it was like the Costco of gods. You could go do all the gods there. And so, yeah, even the Romans, I think, were dealing with it. In philosophy also,

this is a period of middle platonism. And they were coming to increasingly monism, even if it were still polytheism and expression, but a kind of radical theological monism. So, yeah, it's, you know, we think of paganism and polytheism as being the same thing, but that's not necessarily true. And you can see why monotheism wins out. Just from that explanation, if these people are nomadic, their God is not tied to a land. They are tied to the people. And when the people are gathered, God is there.

Now it can spread very quickly. And as Christianity comes later and Islam comes later, you can now build this framework anywhere. Yeah, the religions are universal. I mean, Judaism is not quite as, is never going to be as universal as Christianity because of the ritual requirements. Circumcision and food. It makes it difficult to convert in, especially for adults, our adult men. But, yeah, I think this is part of the reason why Christian is. is successful. It's also successful because it tells a very powerful message about Jesus. The last will be first. The first will be last. You're going to go to heaven because you treat people right. You know, everyone's equal in the kingdom of heaven. It's the greatest story over. Even if you don't believe it as like spiritual truth. I'm like, it's just insanely compelling. Especially when the third of the population of the Roman Empire, slaves. Right. You'd imagine imagine the first, you know, a apostle coming into the slave.

orders of a giant Roman mansion. Great news. Yeah, good news. All those sacrifices are not going to get you to heaven to just believe. And those people upstairs, God will punish them for what they're doing. Fire. I mean, you can know that. The last will be first and the first will be last, the sheep and the goats. You can easily imagine why soldiers on the battlefield, you don't have to do all these sacrifices to Mithras. You don't have to just trust in Christ, have pistees, have faith. And for a soldier, you know and this is a joke right about the romans of christianity it was a religion of slaves and women you know and i'm like yeah i understand why slaves because at the end of the day the slaves will be first and even women to an extent i mean not to broadly stereotype but like extreme sweeps

of empathy and charity and like i think it really speaks to like an emotional element that i don't know if the sort of faiths of the time we're doing to the same degree and women are prominent in the church in a way that they weren't prominent, with the exception of the Vestal Virgins and other things like that, but we have prominent women from the very beginning of the Jesus movement. His mother, Mary Magdalene, you know, so we have women prominent. We have other women that are mentioned in the Paul's letters and other texts. So women were playing a prominent role in the religion.

I mean, the churches were originally in homes. Women were in charge of homes. Men were in the public sphere, women were in the private sphere. The churches were in homes up into the second. century. Right. So you're in the domain of the woman, right? That literally worship is happening in that domain. And so, yeah, when the Romans say it's the religion of slaves and women, I'm like, uh-huh. This is what happens? A third of the population is slaves and half the population is women. Yeah, it's powerful. It's like the number, you're playing the Christians playing

numbers game and they're also building a state within a state. They're building hospitals. They're building soup kitchens. They're building libraries. They're building, you know, they're building institutions. And this is a time period as Christianity begins to see its assent, this is a time period where the empire itself is falling in the decadence. I mean, I tell people, like, you know, if you want to shorten your life, become a Roman emperor. Like, the clock is ticking. The Praetorian Guard is killing you tomorrow. Yeah. You know, this is just warring internecine mass murder. The Roman state was a gangsterocracy. Right. That was coming apart. You know, you have the year of four emperors. This is not a stable political system. And underneath it, inside of it, the Christians are building a state

within a state. And so when Constantine converts as much as he does, he's not really converting to anything. He's just admitting the situation on the ground. We've fallen apart. Yeah, that basically the Roman Empire is Christian, whether you like it or not. He's admitting the truth. And he's not really not even baptized into his deathbed. He remains an ardent follower of Apollo until the end. And also Christianity was pretty cool as syncretizing to a degree. What do you mean syncretizing? It would allow some degree of the old religion to be incorporated into Christianity. So that, you know, one of the interesting things that we love to tell ourselves is we don't like to compromise.

But everybody is pretty good at compromising. That's how civilization works. It's by people compromising. And you can go to stave churches in Norway and Sweden where you can see pictures of the apocalypse slash Ragnarok, where you have clearly, Jesus and Thor like fighting Finrere and you're like that guy's clearly Odin because he has one eye and that class clearly Jesus because he's like crucified hands and this is on like an altar piece wow and you're like oh yeah the it's it's it's some bishop was like let's slide there's a plasticity to it it's like look they believe in the end of the world we believe in the world they you know like

if it gets them closer to Jesus we're quobble we're playing the long game. Yeah. We're playing the long game. And so, so I think that Christianity has the ability to, to do that and did. And again, we have the story of Christianity won by the sword. And you can count on one hand how many times Christians came into a pagan area and started killing people. In fact, it was far more likely for Christians to kill other Christians than it was for them to be killing pagans. You can look at the Albigensian Crusades or something like that or the Third Crusade, for that matter. But yeah, it's part of the success of Christianity was it created a state within a state.

Interesting. And, you know, it out-organized, you know, it out-organized the Romans. Right. And, again, I think this is a thing that, yeah, you get to this day, you know, like, how many Catholic charities and Catholic soup kitchens and Catholic schools, all of those are downstream of what the church was building through the first and second centuries. Right. Oh, that's fascinating.

It didn't come out of nowhere. Right. I mean, a lot of modern movements. Like, Christians like to hang their hat on this. They're like, yeah, civil rights, women's suffrage. Like, a lot of them were like Christian roots in a lot of ways. You know, it cuts in two ways, right? I mean, you know, how early do you see Christians calling for abolition of slavery?

Yeah, it took a little bit. It took a bit, right? They got there. You know, and they end, like, it was John Brown and stuff that really like sort of led the the call and so it's a it's a mixed bag because again like I said there there's no such thing as christianity there's people and some people were slavers and some people weren't and some people were like this is bad um but it's funny you know it's uh you look at historically what was the most preached book in the american south during slavery days i mean the bible yeah you think it's the

bible it's what but what epistle what epistle from the bible you think was a big one in an ancient and like in slave days and i'm gonna assume exodus you would see you would think exodus that's a terrible story to be preaching because slaves get free oh you're saying amongst the slaves yeah oh i mean the one where they're like treat your slaves good yeah it's like the one where an escape slave goes to paul sends them back and says both be slaves in christ like me and you are equal slaver and enslaved are both equal are both slaves of christ yeah and you can easily i mean it's right there in the bible A short little epistle.

But it had, you know, we look at the amount of like southern, you know, sermons on that, you know, the Google index search. Yeah. So it's just people. Now no one reads that. And I think people who do read it, read it, would read it with some degree of horror. Yeah, kind of like, wait a second. Like that. They should have said this was really bad, right?

You sent the slave back. Yeah. But no, again, I'm not picking on Paul. Like, you know, the stoics for some of the most virtuous people of the ancient world in terms of really accumulating virtue. And really claiming that all people are equal. and that we're all cosmopolitans. There's no barbarians. Stoics were really big about that,

but name me a single stoic that called for abolition of slavery. Hmm. It was just how society functioned. There was no, there was no, it was unquestionable. Yeah. In the same way that, like, I mean, there's weirdo vegans now, but like most people are not calling for the abolition of ammo and agriculture. Right.

I mean, we're our clothes made. Mm-hmm. You know, like we're all, you and I, when everybody will say, yeah, slavery sucks. Yeah. Until we like pick up our iPhones and our shirts that are made in factories that are so horrible that they have to put nets around them. Right. They'll keep people jumping out of them. Right. Or like 13th Amendment in America. Yeah, sure. It's like you're everything. Slavery is forbidden until you do something really, really bad. Yeah. And you get incarcerated. Yeah. And then we'll put you to work in the government's mansion in Louisiana. Right. I wonder if they exist in the same kind of moral ambiguity that we have. At least I can speak for myself. Or I'm like, ah, 13th Amendment is not great. Right. Like you can just like force people that are incarcerated to work even like, you know, The fact that like they're just out there like just cleaning and doing shit for free.

Oh, yeah, working at McDonald's and stuff. It's crazy. Oh, working at McDonald's. Oh, yeah. I think you can, like, you can have, I mean, it's amazing. Like, it's really like, the American South is wild place having grown up there. Yeah, it's crazy. It's possible that a contractor can have an incarcerated person working out of McDonald's. And I don't like it. But at the same time, I'm not like, I'm not in the streets protesting. Yeah.

Like if my kids in 100 years, or great grandkids, if they're like, what was my great, great grandpa doing during this atrocious, you know, human calamity? They're like, he was doing podcasts about the Bible. He wasn't out there, like, protesting. I wonder if there's an element of the stoics that are like, the slavery thing's not great, but it is what it is. Are we going to rock the boat? You know, is my old going to be? Yeah, I don't know.

I teach ethics sometimes at the university. And one of the first things I tell my students is like, we're okay. We're not good. Like, we're not really good. And we're not, most of us aren't bad, actually. We're just okay. Mm-hmm. And I'm like, let's just start there.

Yeah. Like, no, most of us aren't engaging in active harm, but most of us also aren't looking at the world. You know, this is what makes profits insufferable. You know, Spinoza says that profits are people that have a profound moral feeling. In the same way that if you were to see a person just being assaulted on the street, you would find, you know, moral outrage. You would be like, absolutely. Now, some kid being hurt, you would just like. Intervene immediately.

No question, right? Your moral compulsion would just drive you to, like, help that kid. most of us have a strong moral compulsion when we see it in front of our face. Most of us don't have a super strong one when it's out, not in front of us. Spinoza says that's what makes prophets profits. Prophets are people that have the same moral compulsion when it's in front of their face as when it's in their imagination. And that's why you never invite a prophet to a party because they're horrible. They ruin all your fun because you're just trying to have a good time, get out a couple drinks.

And here comes Amos. woe to you cows of Bashan You let kids work in sweatshops And you're like, who is this guy? Yeah, not right now Yeah, I mean yeah We're complicit in this terrible thing Of American capitalism, sure

Yeah, like, but stop it with the moat But who is this guy? And people are like, oh my God, they put the prophets to death I'm like Yeah, they're annoying They're annoying You go get a, you want a prophet in your house Imagine you're a king and you have all this power

And this guy's just like outside of your window at two in the morning. Yo, you're bad. You worship y'all. You should be worshiping, only y'all. And you're like, oh, God, this guy's back again. That's such an interesting way to frame it. So it's, you know, I think that.

But if we were living in antiquity, we would have been good. We wouldn't have done all the slavery stuff. Come on. We're great guys. Yeah, we're all, we're a plus. We wouldn't have done any of the bad stuff. We'd have been, you know, we'd have been wokeies and first century wokenness. I would have been protesting.

Out there with your sign in Latin. 100%. How dare you? you yeah zero no slaves if i was there at the trial of jesus i would have been like guys this is crazy this is the lord yeah it's like we're doing the wrong thing here they would put me in the bible they would have been like there with long hair looks kind of like giz himself and he was big on defending him and they're like then he was arrested by poncha's pilot crucified next to the yeah exactly but i would have spent eternity in paradise exactly i would have been on the cross

next to him and like not it'd take me with yeah it's like oh man when putting it real goes wrong yeah well dr sledge this has been fantastic thank you i really appreciate the time And I would love to do this again next time you're back in the city. Yeah, no, I'd love to be back. And again, I love, part of what I love about this material is that we let it become inhuman. We let it become, like, cold and sterile. And, like, it becomes too holy to take it seriously. And part of what I love about the Bible and occultism and other stuff is that it's alive.

It has life. These stories are like, oh, the archaic covenant gave Philistines hemorrhoids. That's hilarious. It's just real. There's something about it that just like, it hits different. And what I love to do is just I love to have these conversations where these important texts from occultism to the Bible, whatever, Y'allah. You know, Faulkner said that the past isn't, the past isn't dead. It's not even past.

And I think that he's right about that as one Southerner talking to another Southerner. From Faulkner, I really hear that. And my job is to be able to say, no, it's not even past. It's happening right now. We're in it. We're in the shadow of it. We're living it. The debate's never end.

I mean, the amount of times that I've really. read like a love letter from an old, you know, the general or even a debate that happens in the, you know, the Old Testament, you're like, oh, people are still debating this. Like, it never really changes. Even the fascination with Trismus thrice great, it's like the same kind of hermetic, no, Hermes, Trismegistus. Trismegistus. I always must be the same. Like, the fact that that's coming up and people are like, oh, there's ancient Egyptian truth that we need to discover. It's like, that's what people are doing right now. People are fascinated by like the truth of the ancient Egyptians.

It just history never repeats, but it does rhyme. It does. And again, my job is just to be like, it's not our first rodeo. Yeah. Well, I'm glad you're here and I hope this is not our only rodeo. Bezreth Hashem. Let's do it again. Bezor Hashem.