Haunted Cosmos - On Dragons

Episode Date: June 26, 2024

Here it is everyone! At long last ... dragons get a full episode!Love Haunted Cosmos? Get access to our exclusive show, The Dusty Tome, early ad-free access to main episodes, monthly AMA's, and livestreams with Ben and Brian by becoming a patron of the show: https://www.patreon.com/c/HauntedCosmosBuy the Haunted Cosmos book: https://www.newchristendompress.com/cosmos PS: It's also available as an audiobook!Want to keep nefarious fairy Bigfoots away and also avoid icky seed oils, preservatives, artificial colorants, and other nasties in your daily shower routine? Then check out the vast array of homemade soaps from our friends at Indigo Sundries Soap Co.! Go to indigosundriessoap.com to learn more—and as our gift to you, use code HAUNTEDCOSMOS for 10% off your whole order!This episode is sponsored by New Dominion Design Co. Visit their website here and learn more!This episode is sponsored by Backwards Planning Financial. Visit Joe's website here or give him a call (615-767-2555).This episode is also sponsored by Stonecrop Wealth Advisors! Go to this link to check out their special offers to Haunted Cosmos listeners today.This episode is sponsored by Squirrelly Joe's Coffee! Visit their website here to get your first bag free!  Share Coffee. Serve Humbly. Live faithfully. This episode is also sponsored by Aaron D. Schneider. Visit his website here and support him!This episode is sponsored by Twenty Hills Publishing. Check them out here!Finally, this episode is sponsored by Gray Toad Tallow. Visit their website here and use COSMOS15 at checkout for 15% off your order.Support the show

This episode of Haunted Cosmosis brought to you by Indigo Sundry Soap, Backwards Planning Financial, New Dominion Design Co, 20 Hills Publishing, Grey Toad Tallow, Stonecrop Wealth Advisors, author Aaron Schneider, Squirrely Joe's Coffee, and our supporters at patreon.com. Did you know that our top two patrons get early access to all of our main shows, and all of our patrons get our main shows ad-free? Patrons also get access to our exclusive weekly show, The Dusty Tome, only available on patreon.com. So, if you like the show, consider becoming a patron today to get access to all these benefits and more. And now on with the show.

The sound of the ringing bell echoed through the alleyways of Carlisle as a solemn procession walked along the cobblestone. Accepting the sound of triumph and majesty ringing out from the cathedral. Only the pitter-patter of rain and sad feet stepping on wet rock and organic irregularly. could be heard. No voices joined the bell. No child could be heard laughing. No old men talked at shop doors and market carts in the city center. It was just gray, sad, and silent. Carlisle, a town now old and ugly compared to some of the other bastions of Christendom and Britain, had lost its heritage from heaven, and everyone got the sense that creation groaned in sorrow with them at his passing. The bishop of Carlisle, a man named Richard Bell, had passed in the night. The parishioners of this

small neighborhood in the West had woken to the sorry news of their spiritual father, finally departing to be with the Lord he loved so. As with every Christian at the passing of one they love, these people also felt deep within them the tension of sadness at the enemy of death and hope with a reminder of death being merely a doorway to greater life for those washed in Christ's blood. While each man, woman, and child in their own little way, suffered the tug of war this battle waged inside of their hearts. They filed into the cathedral Bishop Bell had faithfully served in for all those years to pay their civil veneration and respect in his memory. Upon the conclusion of the funeral service, the good bishop's body was placed into the semi-ornate sarcophagus the church had made

for him. This gilded deathbed was placed prominently in the mausoleum of the church, inside of its own tomb within the larger hall of bishops that had gone before him. The people then began work on the decoration of the tomb itself. They hammered bars of bronze like the golden hour sunset into rigid sheets of gleaming metal that was tacked around the doors guarding the coffin that resembled a glorified likeness of bell. Within these bronze linings, they carved images dedicated to preserving the memory of what this bishop had held most dear in his life and ministry. For the most part, these images reflected episodes and themes that one might expect from the life of a faithful minister. But one carving seems to betray a story that somehow got lost in the annals of history.

Researchers and historians today continue to scratch their heads in the face of this oddity. There, clearly marked and conspicuous in the polished metal, are the black lines which trace out the shapes of two saropods, two massive dinosaurs, whose necks are intertwined in an apparent symbol of love on the tomb of Bishop Bell. Why was this picture, this picture that seemed so random and out of place,

included in a slew of others that seem more natural in this setting. But this question puts the cart before the horse. The more important question, the one that really leaves people puzzled, is this. How did the artist know that dinosaurs had ever existed at all? You see, Richard Bell died in 1496. The first dinosaur bones weren't found. The idea of dinosaurs wasn't even introduced in mainstream science until about 300 years later.

What did a Christian have to do with a giant race of reptilian monsters that he and his people had no business even knowing about yet? Oh, and one more thing. The cathedral that Bell was buried in, where his body remains to this day, is one well known for a particular prevalence in its carvings. Within the pillars guarding the entry,

and within the nodes of saddled texture lining the ceiling, one will find frequent depictions of dragons, just something you might find interesting. Deep in the muggy and thick rainforests of Cambodia, there's a temple. It's known as the largest religious structure in the world, and it was built long ago by an Eastern king who had perhaps heard tell of the grand architecture put up by God's battalions in the high Middle Ages.

Thus, this now gray and weathered place of pagan worship was founded in the year 1150 and completed around 1186, and was used with reverence and frequency for centuries after that. But as is the case with a world grown more modern and with men everywhere ceasing to hold anything sacred, the temple fell into disuse and disrepair for almost as long as it had been used. Then in the 20th century, a restoration effort was initiated on the grounds with an eye towards making this ancient wonder a world heritage site for mankind. As students and researchers and monks alike,

carefully removed the foliage and harmful effects of centuries of weather from the walls and spires of a lesser temple set off. and a bit removed from the primary grounds, a little tributary of devotion called Ta Prom. Some of them found a carving in the wall that shocked them to their core. Though admittedly difficult to make out at first, a well-preserved bass relief

seemed to show the form of a creature that the builders of this sacred site should have known nothing whatsoever about. Raised out of the surrounded stone with elite craftsmanship, the strong legs, large body, and massive armored spine of a stegosaurus. stared back at the researchers with dead eyes.

Why did the mystic, ancient masons of this temple carve such a creature into its walls? And again, more importantly, how did they know about the creature's existence a full 600 years before modern man did? These examples of man apparently living alongside the beings of the dinosaurs start to pop up in many places once one goes looking for them. Even in our own state of Utah,

petrocliffs carved and stained into the red rock of Utah's southern deserts by Native American Indians depict massive forms of what appear to be Sarapods, long necks, with things like wings drawn on the backs of some of them. If one were to travel down the Kennebec River in Maine, one might catch sight of an ancient arrow-tailed dragon carved into the rock on the western bank. In Arizona, visitors to Wapotki National Park

can see Tyrannosaurus rex-like creatures on cave walls, which are drawn spewing some substance out of their mouths in an aggressive attack on the weak and helpless humans. But what does it all mean? We've been told a lie by the secular scientists of the world. We've been told that the strange race of the dinosaurs died out millions of years before the first man ever walked on the earth. For the Christian, the unavoidable fact is that this can't be true.

Whatever one thinks of dinosaurs, the Christian must admit that if they existed, then they existed alongside man. After all, who else would be there to name? and subdue them. And if we grant this, that man existed alongside the dinosaur, then we can begin to explore deeper questions that probe at the very seam connecting history to myth. What were they? Were they all merely creatures? Were some something more than that? And before you balk at such dramatic questions being asked about a group of lesser-known but otherwise run-of-the-mill animals,

perhaps you'd be interested in hearing the etymology of the word dinosaur. It's an old, word that comes from the mating of two older ones. The Greek words, denos, meaning terrible, and sar, meaning lizard. The dinosaur is the terrible lizard. Or we might say, the dinosaur is the dragon? In every ancient culture, the dragon bears a heavy weight of responsibility. It is a creature, an entity, some might say, that appears within the first pages of whatever myth one consults about the way of the world, its making, its nature, and its end. In Hesiod's Theogony, we read about the consummation of an affair between Gaia, the Earthmother, and Tartarus, the primordial incarnation of hell.

The product of this unholy union is a monster of fearsome legend named Typhon. The description given to us by the ancient bard is one that echoes in our hearts with dread. Quote, Strength was with his hands in all that he did, and the feet of the strong God were untiring. From his shoulders grew a hundred heads of a snake, a fearful one. dragon with dark flickering tongues and from under the brows of his eyes and his marvelous heads flashed fire and fire burned from his heads as he glared and there were voices in all his dreadful heads which uttered every kind of sound unspeakable for at one time they made sounds such that the gods understood but at another the noise of a bull bellowing aloud and proud ungovernable fury and at another

the sound of a lion relentless of heart and at another sounds like welps wonderful to hear and again at another he would hiss so that the high mountains re-echoed. End quote. His character becomes important for mankind, as he serves as one of the chief enemies of Zeus, the king of the gods who rebelled against the tyrannical titans, and set men free to live upon the earth in peace and harmony with one another. To the Greeks then, this serpentine and draconian worm of a monster, was the personification of evil and villainous hatred towards the mortals of earth.

The ancient peoples who would one day come together to form the powerful empire of China believed that in the beginning there was a featureless primordial formless state in which the universe floated on aimlessly. Eventually, this vast amorphous void coalesced into a cosmic egg that nourished itself for 18,000 years. As these years wore on, the opposing principles of Yin and Yang became balanced, and a single entity emerged to stand in the gap of these forces to keep them in stasis. This entity was a hairy giant humanoid named Pengu.

When the moment came for the egg to hatch and give birth to the chaotic infant state of our universe, Pengu woke up to the endless possibilities that existed within the ocean of force, light, element, ice, mineral, and heat that surrounded him. He began to form the world. He forged himself a great axe with which he severed Yin and Yang into discrete poles. From Yin came the murky earth, From Yang came the clear sky. As the two longed to force themselves back together, Pengu stood in the breach and pushed them apart, lifting the sky over the world with his infinite strength.

Every day that passed marked a further separation of about 10 feet between the sky and the earth. Thus, after another 18,000 years, the infant world was made from the still infant ocean of darkness swirling and slipping around it. But this is not the whole story. for as this benevolent god of the world crafted his masterpiece, he said to have had help. From his loins flew the great black tortoise, the fiery stallion, the undying phoinges, and the dragon. Four primordial archetypes of elemental force, serving to help Pengu fashion the earth in goodwill, and chief among them we find the dragon.

To the Chinese then, the dragon serves as a symbol of flourishing. In contrast to the west, the east saw the dragon. is one who orders the chaos on behalf of its Lord for the good of the world. It should not surprise us that every ancient Chinese ruler wore the form of the dragon emblazoned on his crown or breast to show his subjects that he too would be good to them. What king would not aspire to be akin to the wise and powerful and just dragon? The Eastern Hindus are similar to their further Eastern kindred in this regard. To them, the world is an endless cosmic sense.

cycle of birth, death, and rebirth. To that end, every human soul is a true microcosm, a miniature cosmos, and their participation in reincarnation. In each of these cycles, the story begins with the fountainhead representative of the Supreme One, Vishnu, sitting upon his boat while he drifts up and down the cosmic waves. The ethereal crests and valleys of light and dark bring him to the eventual place wherein he begins his work of recreation once more. He lays back upon the boat, and the ever-rising tide lifts him that much higher in reality. He then springs the Lord Brahma out of his navel, as if his stomach was the soil from which Brahma grows like an immense and fruitful tree,

whose leaves are given for the making of the world. Thus the earth is made again. To the Hindus, the lives of every person who's ever lived, and who will ever live on this planet, is a simple turn of Vishnu's boredom, while he drifts along helpless in the cosmic ocean like a desperate shipwreck victim, forced to forsake all joy and telos in life. However, this myth concerns us because of the nature of the boat on which Vishnu rides in his

eternal cycle, for it's not a boat at all. No, Vishnu could never condescend to ride upon some piece of carnal matter. He must ride upon a servant, a servant most trusted and loved, a servant whose service assures the proper carrying out of every world's creation. That servant is named Sheshah. He is a great snake, a dragon, who holds the planets and the folds of his many heads and who endlessly sings the praises of his Lord Vishnu. In a way strikingly similar to the Chinese, the Hindus see the dragon, their ancient serpent,

as an overwhelmingly positive force in the world, whose efforts in creation are so vital that without them, the entire universe would cease to exist altogether. Even ancient Babylon doesn't escape this motif, that saturates the deeply guarded memory of man's epic past. To them the world began with the fornicating union of two essences, Tiamat and Apsu. When Tiamat, the Eternal Sea, bore the elder deities, she noticed that they began to bear children themselves. The multiplying life became noisy, and the noise rose like a clanging gong in the ears of Tiamat and Apsu.

In wrath, Apsu began to kill his grandchildren and great-grandchildren as punishment for their clamor. but he overplayed his hand and was eventually vanquished by mythical heroes. And this led Teamot to great despair. She took up the banner of war against her offspring and reigned monster and divine weaponry of great power down upon the world. Eventually, though, she too was slain by the one who would become the high god of Babylon, the Lord of the Storm, Marduk. This fall of Teamot concerns us, because as you may have guessed by now, She was thought to be in the form of a great sea serpent, a dragon, the signified terror and wrath and death for all mankind.

Thus, mankind was driven to revere the pantheon of gods, led by Marduk, that had saved them. But what about the true myth? What about the real history of the world's beginning? What does the Bible have to say about the dragon and man? And maybe the best place to begin would be in the Book of Beginnings with a question. Why does Eve seem so unconcerned with a talking snake? The first time we see Eve in real action is when she begins her discourse with the serpent. Behind all of the existential meaning in their conversation,

the fact of the conversation itself is puzzling. Here we have the first woman, and she seems entirely unbothered by the prospect of this creature from the garden coming up and speaking to her. Why is this? There have been many answers to this question posed throughout history, perhaps the serpent was possessed by the devil, or maybe it was an earthly form assumed by the devil to sneak into the garden,

a tip of our hat to John Milton here. These answers are fair enough, no doubt, but they still don't help us understand why Eve is not surprised at a talking snake. Was she under a magic spell? Is this just a detail left out in the text? Some have said that it's because Adam and Eve spoke to all the animals before the fall, the green and angelic language of man's golden age that allowed all living creation to communicate.

But this is her metacism. It's an esoteric fairy tale. And though not all fairy tales are untrue, this answer does not seem to cohere at all with the rest of the Genesis story. So what then? Are we hopeless in finding an answer? Maybe not.

Maybe Eve was talking to the devil as the devil really was. Maybe the devil's true form was that of a serpent, a dragon. And maybe Eve was unfazed because she had spoken to dragons like this before. The word seraph appears seven times in the Hebrew Old Testament, twice in numbers, once in Deuteronomy, and four times in the prophecy of Isaiah. The meaning of the word, which is most clearly brought to the foreground in Isaiah,

is burning or burning one. We see the seraphim as angelic guardians of God's own holiness. Perfect holiness requires an eternal purity which God alone has. Hence, his ministers which guard his holy presence require a constant state of purification. fire being a purifying thing. Thus, the seraphim are fiery. But there's another connection to be made with the word seraph. The word only refers to angels in two of the occurrences of the word in Isaiah. The other five instances, again two in numbers, two other uses in Isaiah and one in Deuteronomy, actually serve another purpose. They are used in conjunction with the Hebrew word Nahas,

the word which refers to the serpent in Genesis 3-1, in order to create the translated English phrase, flying fiery serpent. These three words can be reduced to a single one, dragon. A flying, fiery serpent, however big or small it is, is a dragon. The connection this makes for us is striking. This means that one of the angelic titles, indeed that title that denotes the highest order of angels, is also a descriptor for a specific kind of serpent, one that flies and that is fiery. Could it be that one of the primary forms the seraphim takes is that of the dragon? Could it be a inherent in their nature somehow? Could it be that dragons are sometimes angelic entities, fallen or no? Well, again, maybe. The idea of the devil literally being a dragon, or of other angels being

dragons, gather strength when viewed in the light of certain other texts. For example, Revelation 12-9 states, and the great dragon was thrown down, that ancient serpent, who is called the devil and Satan, the deceiver of the whole world. He was thrown down to the earth, and his angels were thrown down with him. Who is the deceiver of the whole world but the tempter in the garden? Who is the great enemy of man but the devil and Satan? And here he is called the great dragon. And yes, the Greek word here is the Greek word for dragon dracon.

Additionally, Job 2613 uses that same serpentine word, Nahas, in reference to the dragon constellation in the northern sky. At the very least, we're meant to see the devil as if he was a dragon, the embodiment of chaos and evil. But also remember, can't all be metaphor. Maybe we're supposed to see the devil as a dragon, not only because that is what he is represented by in man's consciousness, but also because that is what he actually is in some sense.

So we return to the question. Why wasn't Eve shocked at a talking serpent? Perhaps because it was far from the first time that she had spoken to a dragon or dragon-like creature. If angels still communed with man at times after the fall, how much more so might they have done so before. It could have been normal for Adam and Eve to talk to angels. It could have been normal for some of those angels to be dragon-like.

Maybe dragons are real. Maybe some or all dragons even are some kind of fallen angel. And maybe the devil was one of them, even their chief. But beyond all this fascinating, but admittedly loose speculation, the Bible offers us history that removes all doubt. Dragons are real. That's a fact. Just think of Job's Levi.

or the Tannin that came from Aaron's staff to eat the Egyptian serpents. Oh yes, dragons are very real. And this makes man's interaction with them all the more important for us to remember. To Haunted Cosmos, we're glad that you're here. We're your hosts. My name is Aaron Banke. Welcome to Boar. Actually, that show's not boring.

It's not, and we should start over. But welcome to Haunted Cosmos. My name is Ben. This is my co-host, Brian Sovey. What's up, guys? We're glad that y'all are here with us today. We are glad that you're here. And thank you to everybody that came out to our conference. Come on.

We did our first ever live show at a conference featuring live spooky piano from our very own Cassie Miller. Shout out to Cassie. You know who you are. It was so much fun. It was. I won't spoil it, but we are hilarious. We are hilarious.

And here's what we're going to do. We're going to take what we talked about in the conference and kind of doll it up a little bit. We expand here. Yeah, expand, make it a little bit more Honod Cosmosy, main showy, and do it for you guys over again. With new stories, added stories, it's going to be a wonderful time. And more wild speculation. Yes, that's right. And what better topic to do that with than the topic of dragons?

Dragons are, this has got to be one of those topics that I don't know how it didn't make it into season one, quite frankly. Well, it kind of did. I mean, we talked about it some in episode one. Sea, sea serpents. High strangeness on the high seas. Which is still, for nostalgic reasons, my favorite episode. I don't remember, like, hardly anything about it except for that I listened back, and I was like, man, I sound so cringe. But I think that about everything that I listened back to with myself. We solved Atlantis.

We did. We personally did. Do the Eye of the Dragon. With original research. That's right. It's not stuff we've gotten from other people. No, no, no. We visited the Ricott structure.

We figured out that it was. was the place. Like, we did all of it. We read the primary sources. We did. So long. 100%. Not true. One hundred percent. You be the judge. Okay. Before we get into today's stuff, I have at least one housekeeping thing. Yeah, I got something to say. All right, cool, cool, cool. So mine is this. We're getting to the, to the end of filling up these here dusty tomes that we use to read the scripts. And we want to do a giveaway when we're done where it's like, you know, the first, two people to sign up for Patreon or two random, two random people to sign up for Patreon that day, get our books mailed to them. If none of you are interested in that, let us know in the comments

below of the YouTube video. And we'll ignore it. And we'll ignore it. And do it anyway. We'll still do it anyway. We'll do it anyway. Rest assured. Did you have any other housekeeping? Well, yeah, I was just going to say three things. Okay. Three things. First of all, I was going to say thank you to all of our listeners. You guys have made us, we recently broken. We recently broken of the top 500 patrons. Yeah. Top 500 Patreon channels

out of more than 250,000. So that says something. It's the top like 0.2% or something like that. Yeah. What it says, I think, is that people are interested in,

they're interested in understanding the true reality underlying the world. Yeah. They're disenchanted with this materialist hand-waving explanation of everything where everything's just meaningless collisions of atoms. And I also think it says

that the Patreon's a great experience. So I hope you guys sign up, support the show. If you like what we're doing, just remember, this is like a full time. This is how we make a living. Yeah. So, yeah, it's important. It's important to us. We really love it. We believe in it. And so because of that, we try to make Patreon extremely valuable. The goal is to always give people more value than what they're actually paying for. And I think that, you know, I have a clear conscience in saying that we really meet that goal most of the time. So, yeah, Ben's putting out a weekly dusty tome episode on Patreon there just for patrons. There's like 50 plus episodes. Yeah. At this point. In fact, at the time of recording this episode, which is a week before it releases to all of you,

just keep that in mind. There's been a few dusty tome episodes that have included sneak peeks at a chapter of our upcoming book. Yeah. And in fact, the one that I'm going to record this is going to include one as well. So if you're interested in kind of getting a peek behind the curtain of what our book is going to sound like and read like, then you might be interested in joining and checking those out. Yeah. So that's number one. Like the show, support it. We get more of what we subsidize. So if you like high quality Christian media like this, support the show. Support the show. Number two, if you haven't already, go leave us a five-star review wherever you're listening. Or, I mean, if it's on YouTube, we never say this.

but go leave us a good review. Every once in a while, people will be like, they said something rude about Black Lives Matter, one star. And I'm like, that was like one second of a show.

And also, like, thanks for the one star. Because one star has actually helped too. So maybe we should just... Don't actually... We should dunk on BLM more. BLM... I will take as many one star reviews

over saying BLM is an evil cash grab. Yeah. meant to manipulate gullible people into hating themselves and their own nation. So there you go. but that's for a different show, probably. And the only thing it accomplishes is making corrupt people more rich.

Yeah, so congratulations. You played yourself. So leave a five-star review. And lastly, tell a friend. I keep hearing, like at the conference, one of the coolest things about the conference was getting to meet a lot of people that have enjoyed the work we're doing at New Christenum Press, not just Haunted Cosmos, but everything we do in publishing books.

We actually just released our very first book from Pastor Zachary Garris of the PCA. It's called Honor by fathers. It's really good. It's really good. It's a, in the vein of historical resourcement. So it looks back at what did the, our reformed forefathers say about the first and second generation reformers. What did they say and on about the, you know, things like the family, the household, the role of men and women in the home and the church and the state.

And then also then bring that into today in the second half of the book and compare it to our views today. It's kind of, it's a great book. Yeah, it's really good. Pastor Garris also has a law degree, and he's a very clear thinker. Yeah. So it's an approachable read, too. It's not super lofty. He does a great job explaining things. And yeah, I think that people should check it out if that interests you. Check it out. And you can get a copy at newchristinimpress.com slash fathers. Another thing you can do, and I just decided that we're going to do this, is that we're going to pick like five people who sign up for our Patreon, the, the, day this releases.

Yes. Not the first five, but we'll just pick five at random. And then we'll also do a giveaway for our existing patrons, and we'll do five that we'll pick randomly, probably from interacting with a post or something like that on our Patreon. So we're going to give away 10 copies of that book total, but you should get one. Check it out. It's a great book. We think it'll benefit a lot of people.

But I was going to say, tell a friend, because one of the things we heard over and over at the conference was, man, I show this to my uncle or I. a coworker or something, not even a Christian or a Christian friend that I had at work. And we keep finding out that people are listening to Honod Cosmos from far and wide across the world. But in unexpected places, people that even don't even know any of the other stuff that we do at New Christenum Press are listening. Even like far and wide ideologies. Yeah. And I like that. I like that's, we're happy about that. Yeah, it's kind of a big tent sort of. thing, which isn't always good. But I think for a subject like this, it can be very good. It gives

people some common ground and something to share, even if there's some differences and opinion on other things. Yeah. We've heard a lot of non-Christians even listening and intrigued, compelled by some of the, you know, recognizing the bankruptcy of materialism as a worldview, this idea that the world is just stuff. Our whole thing is the world is not just stuff. And the triune God made all things, father, son, and spirit. And so, tell a friend, share it with someone you think might enjoy the episode, post about it on Facebook, Twitter. I know you guys, some of you probably feel like, oh, everyone knows about Haunted Cosmos, but really like we're a little Mike, this is a niche, little sort of thing. So share it. Don't think everybody's heard about it. It really helps get the

word out. Indeed. But what we should do now, Ben, I think. Well, wait, I have one more thought. I know, I know, I know. I had the smoothest transition. I know. I'm so, sorry. I just wanted to point out this amazing coffee mug was given to me by the first patron of Haunted Cosmos, a woman named Sarah Trice. Oh, wow. Great, great Christian lady. She actually has a podcast as well called The Stirty Discourse. That's very good. And she had me on as a guest one time, and we just chatted about folklore for like an hour and a half. And then she just sends me this. It's like a flower pot. Ben drinks like a gallon of tea per day from this. I drink so much tea. And this makes it, like I would have to refill my cup. Now it's just one stop shop. You know what they say?

A lot of tea, high tea. That's right. That's why my tea is like, the doctors are telling me to calm down. High tea intake? High tea guy. Yeah. And I think it's clearly true. So anyway, thank you to Sarah. And I don't remember the name of the company that made it off the top of my head, but they're also a great company. So if they could somehow remind me of their name. Just go to reformed pottery.com and buy one of my mugs, which is a Leviathan mug. So I mean, it's both of that crack. Hey, cheers. Hey, look at how much bigger. My mug could hold like four of your mugs. To scale, if you put that next to a Toyota Land Cruiser, that mug is bigger. All right then. But you know what I think we should do now then? We should talk about how many demons, ghosts, or vampires do you have in

your investment portfolio? Well, if you've invested in the S&P 500, it's probably more than you think, since it's full of companies who actively support causes that go against your faith. Stonecrop Wealth Advisors is here to help. Stonecrop offers faith-based portfolios to help you direct your hard-earned investment dollars away from those kinds of companies and towards companies that are having a positive impact on society. They also offer comprehensive financial planning to help give you peace of mind about your future that these investment dollars support. Get the demons out of your portfolio and instead invest in God's, kingdom while you grow your wealth.

Contact StoneCrop Wealth Advisors today by visiting Stonecropadvisors.com slash haunted cosmos. That's stonecroppadvisors.com slash haunted cosmos or just click the link in the description below. Investment advisory services offered through StoneCrop Wealth Advisors, LLC, a registered investment advisor with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. A boy finding monsters in shadowy ruins, an exile searching the edges of civilization,

a child who could change the fate of nations, disgraced dwarish soldiers fighting behind enemy lines. I'm Aaron D. Schneider, military and heroic fantasy author. You can find the stories that I've described to so much more at my website, Aaron D. Schneider.com. If you're looking for stories that are beauty wrapped in barbed wire, worship amidst war, and jagged characters carving their way to the truth, and check out my books at Aaron D. Schneider.com.

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Instagram at 20 underscore Hills for daring new projects. dragons. The big idea. The big idea, which is a big creature. Yeah. Often big. Well, could be small. Not always big, though. Right. Sometimes small. Sometimes they're babies. Sometimes pocket-sized dragons.

That's right. We've all read perilandra. We've all read in Harry Potter when they reach into the bag to pick which dragon that the tri-wizard tournament people are going to face. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Chinese Fireball, Hungarian Horntail. The Hungarian Horntail. You know, Swedish shorts now. Yeah, the Swedish Welsh.

Green. And they pull out a little mini-dri-track. That's historical. My Harry Potter reference game is like so bad. I just lost so much credibility with many of my friends for knowing anything about it. I know. I mean, I think it's a good story. Look, it's a good story.

I mean, is it Lord of the Rings? Absolutely not. It's like the Hobbit, but worse. It would probably go, I was going to offend you so bad with a joke. Were you going to say it's probably going to go like Harry Potter up here? Yeah, yeah. You know, Lord of the Rings up here and then like Silmarian. Oh my goodness.

That would have been really untrue though, so I'm not going to say it. I did just say it, though. So let's talk about dragons here because really, I think there's a couple main things that we want to emphasize in this show. We've some stories in. And one of them is that we need to stop believing the materialist cope that people have never lived with what I would call the animalian dragon. The dinosaur. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's kind of like the linchpin of this whole thing.

Yeah. Because my argument, I don't know if I'm speaking. for you, exactly. We'll find out. But my argument is that, of course, dragons existed. And most of the time, when we read, whether it be in myth, legend, or older history,

when we read about heroes fighting dragons, it's not made up. It actually did happen, and it is real, at least to some degree. You know, embellishment can always occur, but the bare bones of the story, I think, is always real. And so then the question is like, well, okay, what is the dragon

then? Like, at a metaphysical level, what is the dragon? Is it merely a creature? And I think that we can start there and say, it is a creature. Yeah. It could be more than that, but it is at least that.

And I think that it's safe to be like, well, we have this whole race of creatures known as dinosaurs that they aren't around very much today, or at all. That we know of. I don't think... I've been to Loch Ness.

I mean, Antarctica. I saw stuff. Underneath Antarctica, could be... Oh yeah, Loch Ness? Nessie. I've been to Anchorwat and Locknass. Hey, the Bear Lake Monster. And I've seen stuff.

And Utah, Idaho border? Bear Lake Monster. Yeah, I've been to Bear Lake, swim a mile in it, and I've seen stuff. Dang. I just keep saying I've seen stuff, implying I've seen monsters. It's like a boat. I just saw canoe. I did do the mile swim for Boy Scouts at Bear Lake.

I didn't get eaten. Humble brag. And I'm a tasty. Just got a tasty. I'm a tasty morsel to a sea monster. You are, too. Swimming across the water. Bloop, loop, loop.

Can you imagine, can you imagine what if a shark saw me on a plate? A shark would be like, give me that right now. No, but whatever you were saying. The point I was making was I do think dragons existed. I think that we just know them now as a different name, and that name is dinosaur. Yeah, we have lots of reasons to believe that humans witnessed and lived them in the midst of

and were aware of creatures called, these great lizard creatures that we now call, dinosaurs, terrible lizards, and that they came like in any genre of creature, in any genus. There were lots of different types of them. And some of them flew and some of them swam and some of them definitely breathed fire. And some of them were huge. And some of them were small. Some of them ate vegetables.

Some of them ate other dinosaurs. Other dinosaurs. Other dragons. People regularly fought them. This is also like when we read in scripture or other myth and people just like throw out dragon. They're just like, oh, that ancient, that ancient serpent, the dragon. How else would people know what that means unless they had some idea of what that means? Well, it's like in the Chinese, do you know what I'm saying? We talked about this before. Like, you have to have a reference point.

In the Chinese horoscope, like in the 12 months. Yeah. What's that called horoscope? The, the, dude, I can't even remember. Oh, I can't remember. There's like an animal for each month of the year. The astrological calendar thing. Whatever it's called. Yeah. And there's, 11 of them are just totally mundane animals like, you know, an ox, and, you know, etc. A monkey. Never mind. I don't actually know if a monkey's one of them.

I was about to say something mean. Just like totally unnecessary. Well, the 12th one is a dragon. Yeah. So, and we just assumed that all of a sudden they were like, oh, and then there's this totally made up thing. Like they're all other real animals. But then the dragon just made up. Yeah.

It's also like even the Chinese creation myth with Pengu. Yeah. And him sending out, you know, what was it like the ox, the phoenix, the, something else and then the dragon. Mm-hmm. And yeah, you could say that the phoenix is also mythological, though I would disagree with you. Thunderbird. Come on.

Much. Let me. But that's another example where it's like, why would they just have two random made-up things? Yeah. And where would be the reference point for what they mean when they say the word dragon? It's like that Jordan Peterson clip. Yeah. Where he's like, the, you're asking whether or not that happened begs the question.

What do you mean by happened? What do you mean by is? Yeah. What do you mean by what? But it's like when a super ancient writer, like when Gilgamesh mentions a dragon. Yeah. What did he mean by dragon? We have to get this.

There's a great little article from Bodhi Hodge over and answers. My guy Bodhi. And he talks about the different evidences. We mentioned some of them. The one in Utah is an example of some petroglyphic writings that are pictures and that depict basically drags. Dude, this article by... This article by Bodhi Hodge has found a lodge in my heart.

Thank you for bringing that quality. I know. I know. You were... He was writing that bar in his mind. He gives a list here, and I'm just going to summarize some of it, in Australia, in Queensland, the Aborigines from this one tribe, they not only described in their lore,

but they also painted a sea and lake monster that looks like a pleasiosaur. In Babylon, we've talked about this before, but there's the famous Ishtar Gate that was built by Nebuchadnezzar II and it displays a four-legged reptilian creature that looks just like a dinosaur. In China, of course, Chinese dragons are very well known.

They have the 12-year calendar cycle. Apparently that's what I was talking about, not the month, but there's the year. Now I'm remembering, obviously. You live in the year of the dog, year of the rat, year of the monkey. So it's a 12-year cycle. In one of those years is the dragon.

And it's the only one that's supposedly mythological. Marco Polo described some of these lanky serpents as short-legged with claws. And he claimed that the Chinese had, they even had special ways of killing these dragons. Yeah. They were like, they had a dragon hit squad and that some parts of the dragon were well known to be used medicinally. So they developed their own, like, medicinal dragon tooth and dragon claw stuff that they would use for, You know, healing warts and stuff. Dude, also, I'm just now thinking of this.

But this is such a good point. Like, Komodo dragons are dragons. Oh, come on. It is a dragon. Like, don't they have a poison? Big old nasty mouth. It's like bacteria in their mouth that just kills you. Like the old myth of dragons, Tolkien talks a lot about this with glower.

Their saliva is like the father of dragons. Is that he didn't spew fire instead he had a poisonous breath. Yeah. And then venomous spit. The same with like Sigurd and Fafnir. Which we'll get into, right? No. We were not getting into that. I thought we were.

Didn't we get into that in live show? Yeah, we did, but not here. Dusty Tome. Okay, there's a DT on it. Yeah. Anyway, so like a Komoto dragon, it actually does tick all the boxes of an actual dragon. It's also right there in the name. It says, it says Komoto. Anyway, Egypt, Herodotus in the histories, he said, quote, there is a place in Arabia,

which is now modern to Egypt, situated very near to the city of Buto, to which I went, on hearing of some winged serpents. And when I arrived there, I saw bones and spines of serpents in such quantities as it would be impossible to describe. The form of the serpent is like that of the water snake, but he has wings without feathers and as like as possible to the wings of a bat. Flying dragons in Egypt.

Yeah, a lot of people think that the T-Rex arms, you know, the little arms, they actually are supposed to be inverted and they were arms for wings. For like the leathery wings. Again, Bishop Bell, 1496, we talked about this. He cites it where there was like saropods. That's just crazy.

And I've seen the picture. In 15th century. You can just Google these. Yeah, the elites don't want you to know this. The elites aren't hiding them. You can Google these and see them, and it's crazy. North Africa, Cassius Dio. I think we're going to get into this, aren't we?

The Romans killed it by order of Regulus? Nope. Didn't we do that in a live show? Yeah, we did. Dusty Tom. Dude, we did that in the live show, too. do. Anyway, this is a story. I tried to put some news stories.

Yeah, no, this is great. I'm glad you did. You can go and hit the dusty tome on this, where there's just a story of the Romans and a general that just fought and killed a dragon. Yeah. And it's just presented like, and this happened. It was before the first Punic War, and it was at the River Bagrada. Dude, what a great river name. Yeah. Sweden, again, Beowulf.

You're familiar with Beowulf, of course. We will talk about Beowulf. And there's several encounters. The last one, a flying fiery serpent that lives underground and only comes out. any like hoarding gold yeah hoarding gold which dragons definitely did peru is known for dragon and dinosaur like creatures bode says in their pottery and artifacts artifacts for example the museum of the nation displays dragon like dinosaur on a piece of pottery which is from ad like the fifth century through the 12th century sometime in there and we will talk about another peruvian dragon myth veracocha later in this episode so so the point is

and I think we agree on this. I think Ben and I have come to accord as we've discussed this privately and also in our episode that we did, the live episode, that there is a whole category of creature that is good in meat to call dragons. And that's like the dinosaurs today,

a lot of different shades and varieties of them. And these are animals. And so, but there's also, and here's where I think it gets important to recognize the difference, there is also either, and here there's, there's kind of two branches of how you might think about this.

There's also either stories and encounters, both biblically and extra biblically, going back to Genesis and also extra biblically, of either some of these creatures being used as indwelt or being used as vehicles for unclean spirits or some kind of spiritual power, which would be like possession theory, where demons or angelic fallen beings can possess these creatures and use them.

So this is some people we mentioned in the Cold Open. That's how some people read Genesis 3, is that the serpent was a serpent, but that it was being possessed by the devil. If you've ever read Paradise Lost, this is what Milton assumes. Right. And funny enough, the devil in that story actually jumped from a couple animals. And they landed on the serpent, he was like, this is good.

The serpent like worked. And that's why the serpent gets cursed. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because it was like in a court. It's also interesting how after the curse, we have a lot of these myths depicting dragons as without legs. I just think that's interesting. Yeah, that is interesting.

Like tanon. Like with a, it's a serpent with no legs but has wings still. And then there's also, I think this is where you're going. Yeah, he's about to cut me right off. Well, no, no, go ahead. I'm just kidding. No, no, you go ahead. I was just going to say there's also this, like we see in script.

how angelic entities will take on certain forms to appear to man. Yeah. That's not their, like, angels are pure spirit. Yeah, their spiritual beings. Yeah, but they can appear as semi-corporial or corporeal beings in order to interact with mankind. And we see this in Isaiah. We see it in Revelation, how the cherubim, you know, they have legs of bronze, but like an ox. Yeah.

You know, it's the legs of an ox, but they're bronze. They have the head of a lion and the eagle and a man. Yeah. Like, they have all these different animalian characteristics and humanoid characteristics. And they're all mixed together. Yeah. And so this other argument is, what if some of the dragons that man has encountered throughout history haven't actually been animals, whether pure animal or an animal

indwelt by a spiritual entity, but they have just been a spiritual entity that's appeared in this corporeal form? It's a spiritual entity appearing. Yeah. This is where I would categorize something like Typhon. Hesiod's Typhon is, I think that Hesiod is writing history. That's my hot take, though it's corrupted. And so, and I think that in Typhon, we have a clear example of some spiritual entity

that is taking on the form, like a dramatized form, of something that you might see on the earth. So his wings have, you know, a hundred serpent heads. And he's made up of a hundred dragons, all these horrible things. It's this highly hyperboized version of a thing that actually does exist. Which, again, we see in the cherubim. Yeah. Where they're taking on the form of an earthly terrestrial creature that we know exists. And they're taking on that form to communicate something to man.

Right. The cherubim have the legs of an ox because they're strong. They have to carry God's throne. You know, they have the wings because they're quick. They have the lion because they're fierce. And so an evil entity might show the dragon because a dragon oftentimes terrorized man. A dinosaur would terrorize people. And so they're showing that they're a terror.

And some of the time what we do with spiritual, angelic, heavenly court encounters is we fill in the details according to our preconceptions. So in Isaiah, it has six wings. It's covering its head. It's covering its feet. It's flying. and it's bringing the live coal to Isaiah to cleanse his lips, and it's crying out to the other, they're crying out to one another,

holy, holy, holy is God, and they're doing all this stuff. And we fill it in, and we kind of see like the Gabriel figure in our head where it's just a man with six. But then when you start to see other accounts of many-eyed creatures and these cherubim, and you realize actually it doesn't tell us

that that's what they look like. In fact, there's, when you look at the associations we listed from the other sections of the, the seraphic language, the burning language, it is often associated with a kind of dragon creature. Yeah. And so the idea here is that either there is a class of spiritual being, like a seraph, which is a high order of angel, maybe even the highest order of angelic beings, see our published works on the Angels concerning Angels episode. Or just read Berkov's

systematic. Or just read Berkov's systematic theology. That either the angel, the seraph, his native form when you go to, whatever it means to go to the heavenly court and be there spiritually, and people go to that court and see things, whatever that means. Right. Because I don't know, like, could you poke it? And like, we just don't know. We don't know. Right. Or is it pure vision? Is it pure? Whatever that means that the native form of that seraph is normatively some kind of six-winged flying fiery dragon thing? Or, to Ben's point, it is just pure spirit, and that means you really can't see it, but that for God's, the purposes of it interacting with corporeal beings like man,

that that is a normative form for it to take or assume. And so that people don't write off that the former option, where like maybe there is some kind of spiritual corporeality, for lack of a matter of face. Native form, yeah. Like maybe, what if you could go to the heavenly court and poke a thing? We have Paul and 2 Corinthians going up in a vision or in body, he doesn't know. He didn't know. He was like, I don't know if I actually went there. But he saw things. Yeah. And it doesn't say that it was just, like metaphors for things. He said he saw things.

We know that Elijah and Enoch were carried to heaven before they died. Like their bodies were somehow taken to heaven. Their bodies weren't left. Yeah. This is really weird. It's really, what happened. It's this like mixture of seen and unseen that really like kind of breaks our brain. Were they glorified before time? I don't think. Like. so. Because that would kind of interrupt the biblical theology of resurrection and glory where Christ, I like how Douglas Wilson puts this, that the resurrection of Christ is like God reaching to the end, the culmination of history where man is glorified. And he pulls that glorification to the middle of history and makes it sprout up in Christ as the glorified God man. So I don't like the idea

that Enoch or these other men were glorified at that sense. I think some of the other, I'm pretty sure that some of the ways that other theologians have conceptualized this is something like they went up and they were essentially like their physical body was not glorified, but they

became like in the state that man would be now awaiting glorification. But we also don't know where their bodies went. Yeah, where did they come? At some point you have to just ask a question. I would like to say, though, on the glorified point,

you know, Christ would still be preeminent in all things because he would be the resurrection glory. So I think that there's a categorically different glorification that goes on. But I don't think that you would want to say that some other physical human body had experienced the glorification that Christ experienced prior to him. No, no. That's my point. Yeah, that's not what I'm saying.

Yeah. But I'm saying it's a categorically different glorification because they never resurrected. Yeah, I just don't know. Can you experience? Because it is like, we know that that's possible for Thessalonians. Well, I think that when you get to the rapture account, that there will be some who are caught up and changed, and then those who died will be resurrected and changed. And so they're not necessarily resurrected there, because they weren't dead. They're just glorified. So the point I'm making, I don't think you'd want, Theologically, to take either of those types of glorification, and like put them on Enoch.

No, I'm, you know. And I'm not. I'm saying. No, I wouldn't want to do that. But colloquially, we could, like, to our perspective, they are, they were glorified. Yeah. To, like, to, in some way. Not in the same exact way.

Like, it's imprecise language, but it's imprecise because no matter how you shake it, it's an exception to the rule. Like, Enoch and Elijah are exceptions. We just don't know what happened to their body. Anyway, dragons. Or if they were just held up there in the body, like, to your point, I think, Maybe God took them somewhere, and they were just held there in the body until the glorification. But then the thing that you have to reconcile is there, it says that they were in the presence of, like they went to be with God.

Yeah. Especially Hebrews clears this up with Elijah. He went to be with the Lord. He departed to be with the Lord. And can a corrupt human body be in the presence of God? No. I mean, Isaiah was. Well, that's true.

But even that was in anthropomorphism. John was. Well, it doesn't say, does it? And Paul wasn't sure. Paul wasn't sure. That's true. But then... I think we have to assume that in the text. I don't think that any of those texts actually tell us is my point. Well, but all theologians agree that it was in anthropomorphism. Because... I'm talking with Isaiah specifically. Like, because God doesn't have a robe. So it's an anthropomorphism. But this is to the point of the third heaven, like that Paul didn't know. Right. Yeah. So what does it mean? is actually at the heart of what we're talking about. What does it mean to be a person, even like the spirits under the throne of God who are crying out in Revelation? Yes, yes. Is the third heaven

a place? Right. I like to... We've talked about this before, or is it all, when it says that something is spirit, does that mean that it is, that there's no extension of it in any, is there another sense of being. Right. That is spirit that shares similar, like features of corporeality. Dimensionally bound.

Yeah, in the sense that is like, what is that, or is it like, because only God is omnipresent. It's almost to the point of, who's the philosopher, Barclay, I think he said, this is untrue, by the way, I'm not endorsing this,

but I think he said all that exists are minds and their ideas and his conception of reality philosophically, was that basically a simulation idea? That we're just minds that are projecting things. So not that idea, and it's in everything he meant, but is like spiritual existence itself,

are the seraphim in heaven, the cherubim, and God's throne and all these things, and where the souls are, is it all like spiritual in the sense that it's just minds interacting? Yeah, yeah. Or is there just another mode of being that is the spiritual,

that shares features at least, and this may be beyond our... And even like, I mean, you know, granted, this is pre-incarnate. So things have changed. Yeah. But Samuel was not in his body, but he still looked like Samuel. Like his spirit looked like. Yeah, like what is that?

The difficulty, here's how I like to present the difficulty to people. Because we aren't providing any answers because you can't provide it. You actually cannot provide any answers. You can talk about it, which is fun. But there's no dogma here. But here's how I like to present the difficulty. God does not have a body, but Christ has a glorified. He's a man forever. He's a glorified man forever. At the right hand of the father who doesn't have a right hand. And yet Christ has a body.

Like, this is, that's the difficulty. Yeah. It completely breaks man's intellectual capacity. We cannot comprehend the seeming paradox of God in his essence does not have a right. right hand. And yet, Christ, who has a body, is at the right hand of the Father. That doesn't, like, that doesn't compute. It's true. And yet we can't explain it. We can't comprehend it. And that is the realm that we're discussing here. And it is really genuinely difficult. No, and it's why it has import for the dragon discussion. Yeah. Back to Dragons. is that if we're going to conceptualize the serpent in the garden as some kind of fallen, you know, angelic being that had the corporeality or not in a physical sense,

but if its native form is actually dragon-like, or if that's a projection, or if it's actually just possessing a physical thing that exists, several of those options where we what we run into is that spiritual existence is a mode of being that we it's paradoxical because we constantly inhabit it because we are spiritual beings we know it's there but we also have no experience of it in the sense that we can't describe it using the sense data right of every other thing we experience it's something especially difficult for well all men, but especially the Western desire to systematize, completely breaks down. We can't do it. But on the option of a physical being that's inhabited by a spiritual entity, that gets us to our

first story. And so I think we should go into the story of St. Magnus and Boas. Let's do it. Sometime in the 8th century, a monk named St. Magnus set out from Switzerland with two companions, Tosso and Theodore, to serve as missionaries in the more pagan forests of southern Germany. Through the twist and turns of ancient journeyings, the intrepid trio eventually arrived at the gate of a then dilapidated city named Kempton. Peering in through the city walls betrayed a place utterly abandoned. A ghost town of gloom and darkness were jackals haunted.

Magnus naturally wondered why this was so. In the surrounding hills, small settlements and homesteads were peppered here and there. In the days after his initial arrival to the area, Magnus visited some of these places to proselytize and inquire as to why Kempton had been apparently left for dead. It didn't take long for him to learn why the town had suffered such a fate. Locals told him that nobody dared enter the city anymore for fear of the serpents that lived there and their monstrous leader, a great dragon named Boas, who viciously slew anyone stupid enough to intrude on his claim.

The righteous boldness and God-fearing hatred of the serpent, boiled up in Magnus's heart, and he resolved himself to do battle with the tyrannical dragon in the hopes of setting the local settlers free from its dreadful reign, that they might hear the gospel with heads and souls free of external anxiety. Thus, despite the pleadings of his companions, Magnus set up his dwelling just outside the limits of the decaying city, and dared the wicked Boas to try and send him cowering away. To the saint's delight, the dragon answered his challenge. In an hour of prayer, as Magnus knelt with head bowed and reverence to God, the ground began to rumble under him. His knees started to slide slightly outwards and grind

into the dry soil's gravel. The rumbles grew to thuds, and the thuds grew to a near constant quaking of the earth all in a matter of seconds. Magnus hastily ended his prayer and lifted his eyes to see the silic monster Boaz sprinting toward him with a murderous maw belching a flaming glow. Tozo fled up a hidden and high tree at the sight of the beast, but Magnus and Theodore, inspired by the courage of his teacher, stood their ground, made the sign of the cross about their chests, embraced for the fight. When Boas had nearly reached them, Magnus held out a wooden cross as he braced the staff of his former teacher in the other hand. He lifted his voice with divine embrace and commanded his foe to lie still with a war cry that rivaled the old

king, Manilaeus, garnishing his words throughout with the name of the name of the name of his own his Lord Jesus, he instructed the devilish power inside of the brute to kill the monster it possessed and enlarged. As he shouted this, he smashed the dragon's head with the staff in his hand, and an ancient and supernatural boom reverberated through the city and trees. The great worm's head lay smashed at the end of this other-worldly thing that extended prostrate behind it, brought to heal with but a word from one of God's soldiers. With the death of the snake's head, The body died soon thereafter as other lesser drakes fled Kempton in order to hide for succor in the shadowy and analog forests of the pseudo-Celtic landscape. Legions of unclean spirits and demon shades

were exercised from the town by Magnus and his emboldened friend Tozo. A stave church was erected in the city and townsfolk flooded back into their old haunts to be baptized and catechized. Kempton and being saved from Boaz was so to speak saved from sin. It became a Christian Christian bulwark for centuries. But why this response? Why this mass conversion and repentance at the killing of a single dragon? Years prior, Kempton had already been a Christianized place. The forefathers of the region were Christians, and society had been flourishing well for a time. Then apostasy struck heavy. The dark claw of heathen worship had wormed its way like leaven into the lump of the local people. As they turned their souls to the devil's religion, their own bodies and homes started to reflect the betrayal of the people. of their souls. Sickness spread quickly. As people died, their paganism took deeper root, with every

unfulfilled promise from their deities who demanded they give just a little bit more. As they near the end of their wits, Boaz arrived and the fullness of their sin became known to them. Thus, a generation passed and the children of these previous townsfolk began to understand that the dragon was a sign of their self-subjection to the forces of darkness in the world. Unfortunately, their fathers had not taught them the way out of it. They had not taught them Christ or repentance or faith. The people knew Boas was evil, but they had no clue as to what could make things right. So when Magnus defeated this dragon, this dragon that seemed to be all the forces of evil coalesced into one being by the villagers, they immediately knew by his invoking of Christ's

name that Christ is the one who saves, the one who's good, the one who is the true and beneficent king of the world. Thus they converted in mass and reclaimed the the true faith of their pre-apostate fathers and grandfathers. All of this because of one man's brave fight with the dragon. Today, if one journeys into Magnus's homeland of Switzerland and visits the parish that raised him in St. Gallen, they'll find a wooden carving prominently displayed in the well-kept lawn of the town's historical museum. Underneath some old wooden shingles to protect the carving from the rain, an image of St. Magnus triumphing over the great worm Boas is carved in deep relief into the grain of the belly of the wood. A monument to times past when people did not

think of dragon killing as an activity limited to the fairy tale. Now, I love this story. And one of the things I know people will immediately think is like, wow, what a cool mythological, like, hagiographical story. And I'm like, wow, that literally happened. Yeah, 100%. Like, of course. I'm at the point where I don't question any of that. Ben's like, I, what's the source? Because it's obviously a long, told tale through their folk, through the oral tradition. I just got it from besti, besti-areum.net.

Of course. So it's a dot net. So you can, you know it's legit. Slash magnus. Dot HTML. And also got it from this book called Dragon. facts and history, myth or legend. And, I mean, it comes from hagiography. It comes from hagiography. Yeah. But it also, it's just worth remembering that hagiography isn't just made up. It's rooted in

things that happened. And the whole point that I'm really trying to press is that I jokingly say that I don't question any of it. But I also don't, because that's not the point. The point is to realize that, yes, some things were probably embellished, but not everything. And even though things were embellished, nothing in these tales is just inserted at random. Yeah, like we... Does that make sense? Yeah. Like, there's always a reference point. So they don't just say, like, oh, Magnus went to this city and he was a missionary there. Let's turn that into it being a ghost town. Right. It was overrun by this dragon that we just made up. No, it's always rooted in something that actually did happen. It's also like, here is a person.

He lived at this time. He came from here. This was his hometown. He left with these people. These are their names. They went to this place. This is the name of that town. You can go visit it today.

Yeah. This is exactly what happened. And the carving, by the way, is really old. Yeah. And then they have these ancient carvings that record this entire story. And the whole town's like, yeah, that's what happened. This is how, you know, this is one of the biggest parts of our town's history. And the thing is the whole, should I question which parts of it are true or not?

And this is the funny thing is that we actually have no means. of verifying it anyway. Because the only way we have access to a story like this through the past is from accounts. An artifact. It's from witnesses. And if you go off artifact, then the most reliable part of the story is that he killed the dragon because that's the only thing that has always been remembered. Yeah. And people do this all the time, like the Bible project or, you know, let's find the historical Jesus. And they go into the gospels. And they, not that I'm comparing the story of Magnus in all details to the literal inspired Word of God. But the skeptical instinct is to do this.

They go into the scriptures and they basically say, well, let's Jefferson Bible it. Yeah. We're going to take out all of the soup. Jesus was a great teacher, but he certainly didn't multiply a kid's lunch to feed a crowd of 5,000 men plus women and children. Right. Oh, you know, Jesus was a great teacher, but he certainly didn't calm the wind in the waves. Right. With his word.

Right. But actually, here's the thing. He did do those things. And that is more miraculous than this. Totally. Yeah. That's the point. Like, this story is, if you just want to go off brute, like, believability, like rational believability, this is way more believable than literally any of the miracles that Christ did in his ministry. And that's worth remembering. Like, we live in a world that's not just stuff. That doesn't mean that everything is like filled with, you know, filled to the brim with supernaturalism and things. No, it's not that. But there's also things that have happened in the past for whatever reason we just, seem to have lost. And I think that man's, uh, relatively frequent battles with, with dragons is one of those things. Yeah, they were put down.

They were put down. We put down the dragons. Well, yeah. I mean, and it was the Christians that did it. Yeah. And it was Christians. We did it. Yeah. You're all, you're all welcome. The world would be over, like Utah would be overrun with dragons right now. This is where we see this. I mean, genuinely though, because we have footprints, you know? Like Utah had a bunch of dragons in it. It was teeming with dragons. But this is the, symbiosis of real history and then myth and legend, where we have this real thing in the dragon that exists in the world. And then in God's providence or by other things, too, that makes

sense that we just don't know for certain. The symbol of the dragon is used to represent evil, Satan. And he did actually come in the form of a serpent to Eve. Like, that literally happened. So it makes sense that that would be the symbol of evil and chaos. Yeah. And so then from that sort of more symbolic way of viewing the motif of the dragon, we started to look at the enmity that we're supposed to have between us and the serpent. Yeah. And rightfully say, well, those big ones are especially evil. They're really big. Let us kill them.

So we should kill them. And so seriously, like this is a, it's like this providential outworking of the, of the dominion mandate that was really important. both symbolically in man's history, but also for man's own preservation. Because the big dragons were killing people. And so not only do they preserve the immediate people, but they also show people through all of history,

look, this is the working out of what God said would happen. He said all the way back in the garden that this would happen, and now it's happening. Christ is king. Some of this reminds me as well, in terms of the folkloric element, the preserving of the stories through tradition, folklore, all these things, but where the core of the story is always the same, is something like

the beast of Jevoudin. Yes, of course. The werewolf. Are you familiar with that one at all? Isn't that the one that's like, it's French? It's French. No, I'm not. It's a wearable story.

We should do it at something. I don't know how that word is spelled. And so I don't know if I'm familiar. G-E-V-U-D-A-N-E, I believe. Okay, then you've done. So it's a wear-wold story, but it's highly documented. It's another one. It's like, this was the person's name.

He was the constable. Or like he was, and then this guy. And then they sent wolf hunters. And they tried to, because it was like, and it killed real, these people had names and they were like killed. killed by this beast. No, I did an episode on the dusty tomb on lycanthropy. Yeah.

And that was one of the stories. It's one of the, one of the most famous. Yeah. Lichenthropic type of stories. Indeed. Lichenthropic. Lichenthropian. Lichanthropian.

Lichanthropy. We had to work. Anyway, so, yeah, it's, you would expect for a modern to hear a story like that and just completely, just say, oh, it's all made up. Right. But most people actually believe that most people from most of history were like, yeah, they were dragons. Brian, I got bad news. The other day, I was using one of the big box soap products to wash myself.

And I got this weird urge to go buy a Stanley cup and fill it with iced coffee. And it started to feel a little cold in the house. I just wanted to wrap myself up in like a heavy wool blanket. And then also, I started Googling ticket prices to Taylor Swift concerts. Ben, what are you doing? Don't you know that these big box soap companies just jam all their soaps full of hormone disrupting chemicals? They're probably turning you into a girl.

Well, I know that now, but what am I supposed to do about it? Ben, you ignorant normie. All you've needed to do is go to Indigo sundry soap.com and support a great Christian family business that's making all sorts of soaps that are completely free of hormone disrupting chemicals and other nasties. Okay, I am literally going to Indigosundrysoap.com right now. Tell me what to buy. Ben, what I would recommend doing is clicking on bundles and then selecting the best one for you. You could get the men's six-pack. You could get my favorite, the clay bundle. Ooh, I like the pipe and jug bundle. That seems cool. Or a men-six pack, because that'll make me feel like I have something that I actually don't. So true, King. And you know what else I heard? Because they're such good friends of the show, Indigo Sundry's soap company is offering 10% off your order if you just use all caps, discount code haunted cosmos, no spaces. you're going way too fast. I didn't get all that. Is that information in the show description?

Ben, you ignorant normie. It's always in the show description. Okay, so I'm going to go to indigo sundry soap.com. I'm going to pick the men's six-pack bundle, and I'm going to use code Haunted Cosmos at checkout, all caps, no spaces. And if I forgot all that, it's in the description of the show. Of course, Ben. And if you just do that, then you will stop wanting to do all of those girly things. And maybe you'll, I don't know, maybe want to buy a classic car to restore or something dignified. We are living in the beginning of a new reformation. Christian content is being produced at a rapid rate. Art, businesses, publications, ministries, and a thousand other mediums are acting as agents to get us out of our current anti-Christian world.

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And there really is a category for, like, we actually have learned some things that ancient people didn't know. Like, for example, if someone has a seizure, we might say, like, that person's having a seizure, not immediately jump to. That person is clearly a witch being possessed by the devil right now. That could be the case. But we actually do know some things. But this is a whole category where if someone, like, no one sees a dog attacking someone, I don't care when you lived in the world. and they just jumped to like, that is a man.

It was like a man wolf that stood six feet tall. Who's turned into a dog. Like, no, these are things that it really does matter what they said about it back then, especially when they have such consensus. Yeah, when everybody was, and when you have common through lines, all these stories, that's why, like one of the themes of our show is that mythology really does often recount garbled and theologized retellings of history and the history of a people.

It's answering big questions, like, where did we come from? What are we for? Where are we going? What is the enemy? What is the goal? What is the good? What is the good life?

And it's trying to answer a lot of those questions. But one of the modern mistakes we can make is to say, therefore they did that via the vehicle of inventing entire religious histories of everything. But what's interesting, two things are interesting. One is all of those stories tend to rhyme with one another,

even in really like sharp details that aren't just central to like the hero arc, but details like a flood and a boat that escapes with one family and all these different across cultures that we don't know had any contact with each other. We'll talk about more of this

at some point with megalithic structures and a lot of the things that go on with those. But dragons are like that. This is one of those elements of mytho history where what I think we see, the modern say it's all made up or it's just something out of like,

you know, we see a lizard and so we imagine, what if there's a really big one of those? And we all sort of came up independently with this idea. And so sure, we have stories of bigfoots and werewolves and dragons from all cultures. But we're saying, no, those are garbled. They don't reliably bring you a 100% true world history.

But what they do is they show you through a veil, as through a glass darkly, they show you the true history. Yeah. That's a really, so this is a critical point for understanding our whole ethos for this show. But then also how one should approach myth in general. Myth, like to the people writing it, it just was history. It wasn't myth to them. They were writing things that they believed at least happened.

And the reason that we call it myth is because all of it's pointed in the direction of telos. So what does this tell us about man's end? What does it tell us about man's nature, like the ontological person of man? We don't do that anymore because moderns functionally deny that man has a telos. The empirical method, when you apply empiricism to everything, which is all, all that academia does now. Everything's empirical. It removes the purpose of academia. And it turns it into academia and not just like the study of nature. Whereas earlier, pre-modern, it wasn't empiricism. It was all geared towards what is the good life. What is man? What is my nature and what am I for?

And so it makes sense when you look at historical events through that lens, it actually does make sense to embellish certain things, to point people towards what this event is telling them about the world and about man. And it's not, is it like 100% factual? No, but it's not empirical. And so it's not trying to be. It's trying to be something more. And so you can do that and do it honestly. That's... Yeah, it's not that we stopped telling myth. It's that we came up with a new myth, whose moral was there is no moral. Right. Because what is the materialist evolutionary biology, I mean, including the entire question of cosmological evolution.

Yeah, and so now the tendency to steer someone through how you tell a story towards something true about their end is frowned upon. Yeah. I wrote a whole chapter about this in our upcoming book. Wow. About the story. Look out for the book. I think this is actually a good segue, though, into a sort of mythical history of Great Britain.

Yeah, yeah, it's time. Myth tells us that there was once a man named Brutus, and he was filled with wanderlust. He was drawn to the ocean most of all and gave into the waves' call in his youth. Thus he sailed and always sought out new lands and new things untouched by man. He was no small character either.

In fact, his lineage was one of the highest caliber and royalty, for he was the great-grandson of perhaps the most famous pilgrim the world has ever known. Anias, the Trojan founder of Rome and the bane of the goddess, Hera and Athena. Once during his travels, Brutus decided to sail for the legendary promised land to the north and west. It was said to be filled with adventure and riches. So it was that, after a long and dangerous journey, he finally landed on the shores of the lonely isle, that Tol Eresaea, which we today call Britain. This, according to the medieval historian, Jeffrey of Monmouth, is how the history of the English peoples began long ago in ages past. Beginning with Brutus, Jeffrey would end his story of

Britain with the conclusion of the 7th century king, the pseudo-mescianic figure remembered as King Arthur Pendragon. And while the historicity and credulity of Geoffrey's chronicles can and should be questioned, neither accepted nor rejected outright, the presence of one central character in the narrative has inspired man since he first appeared on those enchanted pages. That character is the wizard Merlin. Merlin is introduced in the form of a child sage, rescuing himself from the superstitious paganism of the Britannic king Vortigern. Vortigern, wanting to solidify and protect his claim upon the throne that he usurped and stole, attempted to build a mighty fortress for himself high in the Welsh mountains. A fortress able to withstand any siege attempt with ease given its setting in

robust internal defenses. However, after his workers had begun construction on the battlements and made fair progress, the towers suddenly fell down. Disappointed but not undaunted, Vortigern fronted the money for new materials right away and ordered his men to begin once more. But again, the tower suddenly fell when nearing completion. Enraged at the scoffing and uncaring disobedience of this unseen force pitting itself against him, Vortigernard ordered construction to begin in earnest a third time.

He was like a man angry with a rock for being there after he strikes it with his foot. This time, he incentivized his men to make haste, thinking that the completed fortress would be able to withstand whatever strange and malevolent attack this was. But yet again, the towers fell after being almost complete. Now dejected, Vortigern summoned his magi and astrologers to counsel him and how he might thwart the strange forces, which seemed personally offended at his attempts to build. assembled in the shadow of their dark arts and deceit,

the wise men told Vortigern that the gods were displeased at his wanton use of nature's bounty for such a selfish end. They demanded that he shows some sign of gratitude to them for his fortunes. Thus they told the king to bathe the foundations of his project in the blood of a child, but not just any child, one that had been born without a mortal father. Vordiagern ordered his court to go search the land to find this preternatural and strangely begotten child, and soon the court returned bearing a young boy named Merlin, a supposed product of a human mother and incubus father.

Merlin, though a youth, did not cower before the threatening intentions of the king, but rather informed him that he was a blind fool for trusting in the words of such twisted men who themselves were lovers of wretch. In an answer to what the king ought to do instead, Merlin told Vortigern that the base of the mountain on which he was building contains the den of two dragons. When these dragons, one bright red and one a blinding white, rise from the waters they sleep in, they fight one another to exhaustion. This fighting shakes the hills from deep within in such a way as to be almost imperceptible

to surface dwellers, but it nonetheless weakens the stone. This, Merlin said, is why the towers could not stand. Now, although the king was a wicked turncoat, he did not much desire to kill this unwitting child as a sacrifice to gods, he seldom thought were actually there. so Vortigern decided to give Merlin the benefit of the doubt and ordered his workers to delve deep and greedily into the mountain to determine the truth of the strange boy's tidings. And sure enough, after the earth had been well scarred,

Vortigern's men found the pool and observed the rising and fighting of the dragons with their own eyes. All of them, to a man, fled in terror at the vicious hatred of the drakes for one another. All save Merlin. The boy stood his ground with a smile on his face, clapping his hands at the grand display of power and balance given by the eternal foes of one another,

who are both themselves foes of all man. Finally, the red dragon fell and the white dragon vanished into the wall of the mountain's cavern to resume its rest before the red dragon would return with new strength in life. For this incredible prophecy, Merlin's life was spared, and the fortress was built with new supports

that protected it from the dragon's cycle. But Merlin also did not stop his discourse with the king there. He claimed that these dragons were also symbols and portents of a doom soon to come. He claimed that just as the Red Dragon was doomed to fall, so Vortigern would fall at the hands of the rightful claimant to the throne, a warlord of virtue named Pendragon. Not many years passed before this very thing occurred. Vortigern was burned with his fortress, while he screamed within its halls, and Pendragon finally retook the throne. When Pendragon died, his brother Uther succeeded him. and assumed his brother's name as his surname.

Upon Uther's death, Arthur Pendragon claimed the throne and ushered Britain into a golden age. In all these reigns, the wizard Merlin was still found in the king's court, whispering wisdom to him. After the reign of Arthur, a reign marked by sure Christian virtue. The early kings of Wessex, like Sinawulf and Beatric, began catechizing their people towards the way of God and Christ. But in a day so rife with temptations to syncretism

and unholy living among the newly converted northern peoples, seeking to lead by the moral standard of Christianity proved difficult, and many villages were filled with licentious sin that would go condemned by the later kings like Alfred the Great and his successors. In fact, some of those kings and members of their courts whensofar as to accuse the early sinfulness of the English as the reason for their greatest ancient Bain, the threat of the ambitious and unforgiving Viking raiders, the Danes.

Here we find a thread so rich in our study of dragons. For the events that will soon be related to you, the events surrounding the sacking of Lindisfarne and the Harbingers thereof, will almost certainly cause you to wonder, do dragons sometimes take sides in the wars of men? To understand how the men of Wessex might have answered this question, one has to know a bit about the structure of the English monarchy in the ancient days. The system of rule was based upon a society of trust that existed between the

king and his nobleman. These noblemen, themselves sort of governors over districts of the realm, were relied upon by the king for their loyalty. Now, in times of plenty and peace, this loyalty was not hard to come by, but in times of war, willingness to die for a king tended to decrease in the interest of self-preservation. So in the hopes of fostering in organic loyalty, the king would often call his nobleman to great feasts in his palace's mead hall. This hall, replete with a massive table and a fire in its center to keep men warm in the wet and cold, would host dozens of the king's closest allies and friends periodically. The mead would flow freely, the hogs would roast to perfect tenderness, and bards would retell the greatest stories of English history and song

and poetry. At some point in the night, a gilded horn of mead would be passed around in solemnity as each man took a sip from it, starting with the king. Afterwards, the king would distribute gifts to his men in the form of rings. This was a display from the king, the only one in the entire realm who was truly wealthy, generously giving of his own wealth to others beneath him, to show them that at the heart of it he was still just an Englishman. Those rings meant a brotherly bond, but that bond could be severed by disloyalty or cowardice in either direction. If a nobleman who had pledged his loyalty to the king then proved himself to lack integrity in a battlefield or in civil unrest, he would be kicked out of the meat hall in disgrace and would be an enemy of all Wessex.

And this image of a shamed and shunned man roaming the cold fields outside of the palace during one of these feasts, he'd still be able to hear the laughter and the singing. He could probably still smell the pork. Was a chief image of evil and barbarism to the English. The excommunicated wanderer was an inhuman enemy. So when these men heard the tale of the great hero, Beowulf, who slays the monster Grindle, They immediately knew the nature of this Grindel when they heard that he was one who wonders outside of the mead hall of the king, jealous and bitter towards the men inside. And though not a dragon explicitly, Grindel's mother, who was also a monster in her own right, certainly carried serpentine qualities about her.

This is how the men of Wessex saw the Danes, sons of Grendel and Grendel's mother, whose only friend in the world were brutes and dragons, just like the dragon Beowulf did eventually slay at the end of his life. life. All alike were enemies of all the earth's virtuous men. So do dragons take sides? Well, to the men of Wessex, of course. And whose side do they take? They take the side of the unfaithful wanderer shunned from the king's court, who in their mind was every single Viking man. The dragons and the Vikings were a team, just like Grindel and his mother and the dragon were a team against Beowulf, and so they needed to be vanquished together. And now we come to it at last. For during the reign of the Christian Beatric, imperfect as it was, the Vikings began raids on the English island in full force, and in a visceral brutality that remains difficult to imagine still today.

And it was before the first of these full-on raids, on the settlement of Lindisfarne in Wessex, that the English really saw the sheer amount of evil the Viking menace was to be to them. For this raid was preceded by portance of doom, warning the king and his men to prepare for bloody war. if only they had heated the warnings more seriously. We read this in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle about the events before the Lindisfarne raid of 793. Here were dreadful four warnings come over the land of Northumbria and woefully terrified the people.

These were amazing sheets of lightning and whirlwinds and fiery dragons were seen flying in the sky. A great famine soon followed these signs and shortly after in the same year, on the sixth day before the Iads of January, the woeful inroads of heathen men destroyed God's church in Lindisfarne Island by fierce robbery and slaughter.

And so the question is... Obviously. Well, obviously, the Lindisfarne account is just legit. A theme of Hanukasmos. But, yeah. Anything we read that is Christian... And cool.

Definitely happened. It all happened. But like whenever there's, you know, like the Chinese one, were like they made some of it up. Yeah. A Christian, like, they never lied. That man, he never, he did nothing.

At least we're self-aware. What murder. You ever seen that real? No, what is. I don't know what it's from. Okay. It's a deep cut. Yeah, it is a deep cut.

Wow, that's a deep cut. Dude, your references are out of control. Everyone knows it. Ben's been wanting someone to say that to him for years. Yeah, I know. It was from a movie that Jonah Hill is in. I don't know the movie, but I've seen the clip. It's probably not good.

Yeah, yeah. But that line is funny. From what I've seen on Instagram. Yeah. Dude, your references are out of control, man. Everybody knows it. And everybody does. Just like everybody knows that that story is a great example of how we see the weaving together of the myth and the historical.

Yet again, where we're seeing kind of like there's a vague border between the two. And you don't know where the one begins and the other ends. Yes. And you even see that. So with the Merlin thing, it's much more. pronouncedly mythical. Yeah, right. You know, it, but then we go into the Lindisfarne stuff, and you're starting to understand then

that maybe the Merlin story isn't as easy to write off as we thought. At least to the English people, they thought, no, this isn't untrue. This all really did happen. The dragons have been the enemy of the English for as long as we've existed. So when they see dragons in the sky coming with the Danes, they think, oh, those are bad. And they also see them as an active judgment of God. Yes, exactly. On the people for sin and apostasy and things like that.

It's interesting. I've been reading a book on the history of the English peoples now. And one of the throughlines of the British, of the origins of Britain as a nation, is Pelagianism. Really? Because Pelagius was local. Yeah, yeah. Right? So a lot of the British, in the early, there was an early divide between the British nationalist sort of party.

and the Roman party. So the British Nationalists wanted independence from Rome and they wanted to be out from under Roman colonization and, you know, govern themselves. And to be fair, Rome, like, didn't care that much

about Britain as a colony and, like, put very little effort into maintaining it. And they were just kind of, like, indifferent and didn't manage it very well. Yeah. So it was sort of fair. But the British nationalist party

was typically Pelagian. So deep, and actually the author is a Paul Johnson book, but it's called like the history of the English peoples. But when he traces their history, he often, and I don't have the background to be able to know whether Paul Johnson is making this, if this insight is correct. Or if he's exaggerating it or whatever. But he often points out that there's a deeply Pelagian instinct to much of British Christianity. and that it actually rears its head many times through their history to their detriment. This sort of total Pelagianism being the idea, the heretical idea that man is born without any kind of original sin or corruption and that he has a totally free will,

that he's able to choose the good in his original nature. He's a blank slate. Right, that he's basically a moral blank slate, contra the many clear passages in scripture that would demonstrate the noetic effect of sin. sin from our father Adam infected and affected the entirety of the human race as it went on down. And that includes every part of what it means to be human, including our will, our ability to choose our passions, our desires, that which we love and hate. Those things were corrupted as well.

So Pelagianism contradicts that heretically. Yes. And in doing so, ends up undermining the scriptures and the Christian gospel. So, but anyway, you see how oftentimes British religious folly in their extreme of Christian thought ends up airing in Pelagian directions, which I think is kind of interesting, but also interesting to see how this struggle for the, for the Brits, with basically heresy is early and well documented. And also historical accounts would add to that theological. error, all kinds of issues in turn, like when they talk about apostasy and yeah, sinfulness and the people, um, basically living debauched. Yeah. Lives.

You could see how right. God might judge a Christian nation with dragons and Danes. Well, it's also like, did the Danes ride the dragons? Probably. I mean, that's actually the origins of how to train your dragon. Their long ships were probably had a dragon. Prow. Definitely. I mean, you know, there's the principle that the oftentimes the judgment for sin is just more sin. Sin is its own punisher. Yeah. Because it, it harms you directly. Yeah.

And, and the others that are participating in it with you. And so that, I mean, that, that seems to to totally track. But the difference is, um, it is interesting to look at how judgment tends to carry certain flavors for certain widespread sins. You know, for example, America has her sins, and they are many. But the American sins are so Romans one, like they're so unnatural, you know, and they're so widespread that the judgment for them is just more. More abortion, more homosexuality, more, all these horrible things. Judgment's getting what you want. Exactly.

Whereas with a, I wonder, like, with a theological harrisse, he types in if it would be much more directly like a punch in the mouth. Like satanic. It hurts. Yeah. Yeah. Like, oh, you want to worship. Here you go.

Here's demons. Like, I'm not going to give you what you want. Instead, you're going to be rated by the, you know what I mean? Yeah. Yeah. That's interesting. So again, when you read these mythical accounts of early history, prehistory and all these, you know, different, from different cultures and places, including the ones that are woven

together with Christian faith. A lot of the time, like the Iliad, the Odyssey, the India, the Indian Gileshaga, a lot of these things... Hey, where's the Inglinga Saga from? It's from the north. Yeah, there you go.

Yeah, it's good. The northerness. Come on, dude. Come on, dude, the deep north. Dude, the westernness. It's where our hearts long for. That's right. Our hearts long for the deep north with Tolkien. That's right.

That's right. And I am Tom Bobadale. And the Undying West. Brian's wife made the mistake. Let's see if you're listening to this. I can't describe. She will. This is a huge L.

Huge dub. Like, Brian's wife said, yeah, you do kind of look like the Tom Bommadil picture on the cover of that CR Wiley book in the house of Tom Bommadil. And your personality is also just like Tom Bommodil. And I have never been more chuffed. That's like Tolkien saying, you know who I remind. Which Lord of the Rings character reminds me the most of me? Fairmere. The perfect character.

Yeah, or like, who's the elf, the half elf, Baron. Elrond? Oh, Baron's not a half-Elph, but he marries a mortal. Oh, yeah, he says like, I am Baron. It'd be like that. I'm basically, the character Baron was inspired by me. So I've never been more pleased than when my wife told me that. And since then, I'm painting my boots yellow.

That's right. And I'm going to sing even more. He's a merry old fellow. Anyway, back to it, these mythological stories, they often provide us garbled echoes of true history and also true history that is either warped or true true in accordance with the myth, the true myth or the false myth. Right. The seed of the woman or the seed of the serpent. Yes. And with that, I'm going to fire us off on the story of Leia Cohen.

I've got to hear this. So true. I am sitting here. I am begging. As you can clearly see if you're watching YouTube, I am on the edge of my seat. I am begging. Let's go. As the Greeks surged forward with vigor in their war against Troy, as the one side sought to avenge the fall of Achilles, while the other fought in memory of Hector, the gods, especially the goddesses Hera and Athena, looked down with revelry and bloodlust at all the chance for new glory. You see, Hera was at the head of a consort. of gods who especially hated the Trojans. Thus she gave the Greeks divine aid any time she could, fickle false goddess. Blood ran like crimson rivers over the sandy plains of the High

Levant's step. Troy besieged behind her strong walls, suffered a constant shower of threats and arrows and rams against her gates. Greece strained to the breaking point by the resilience of the city, suffered sordes from the Trojans on her flanks, and withered rations for her army, which grew ever thinner by each passing day. In the midst of the chaos and noise, screams of agony and anguish and terror and war beside the clashing of metal and wood and stone, people turned to madness. It was as if Hecate herself had enchanted the world with a masochist bent, and thus the war rolled on like a moldy millstone in the rut for full ten years before suddenly and overnight, it all stopped. The Trojans awoke on a bright day and peered over the walls to see nothing as far as

the horizon in every direction. The vast Greek army, so determined just hours before, had vanished in a second. Only one thing remained, the wooden effigy of a massive horse some leagues away from the chief gate of Iliam, a parting gift of peace from the cunning Greeks, but cunning they were. The elders of Troy questioned this apparent olive branch from her foe, wondering whether or not they ought to bring it in the city as a consolation prize from a stalemate in which both sides only lost. After a time, most of the elders of Troy, a city known for its piety and bluntness, agreed that they should accept the horse and move to rebuilding the destruction the war had caused. But one man remained who disagreed.

Leia Cohen was a priest of Troy, a chief attendant at the ornate temple to Poseidon, and he had carefully studied the nature of his enemy for the ten long years in which they had tried to annihilate he and his people. While other Trojans focused on their own maintenance of virtue in a trying time, Laoccoigne looked rather to how the Greeks could justify their action. What exactly did they see as virtuous? Surely random war was not their barbaric motivation, so what? Well, he found that, like their gods, the Greeks were easily offended, and were as shrewd as serpents. Indeed, they weren't afraid to be as guilty as them, too.

Countless times they had feigned peace while clutching a dagger behind a bag and a hand with crossed fingers. Leia Cohen warned his countrymen that this horse, whatever, was, was most certainly a trick. Thus he counseled the elders to burn the horse where it stood on the now emptied out hills over the Hellespont, but other forces were still working for the good of the Greeks. Their chief divine ally in the conflict, Athena, looked down on the wisdom of Leia Cohen with hatred and scorn. Enthrowned on that scoffer's chair, she sent two of her mightiest servants, serpent dragons with poison breath and a destructive cry, to kill the priest while he wandered the carnage.

It said that he mounted no defense against the monsters. Indeed, what could he hope to gain by that as an unarmed and aged man? But he instead met his doom with that unwavering Trojan piety that demanded him to remain unconquered to the last. As the wrath wrapped Laoccoen in death, the only voice of wisdom on the matter of the horse was snuffed out. Thus the horse was brought into the city. Of course, we know what happens next.

The plan of Odysseus burst forth in the form of Greek soldiers, who opened the city gates at night and allowed the hiding force to invade and sack Troy in such a way as to never allow her to rise again. But hope was kindled in the Trojans at the last, for mighty and steadfast Aeneas, with his aged father Ancises on his back and his young son holding onto his hand and running beside him, escaped the fray as his own home burned, fulfilling the prophecy of Poseidon. Annius's journey was storied and long and does not come into these tales. Rest assured, the heritage of Troy was marshaled in him until finally he settled in the Italian peninsula and founded the world's jewel, Rome the Great. Thus, in Rome's history, at its very

foundation no less, we find the threat of a draconian chaos seeking to break the small beginning before it starts. The dragon is always pitted against man's triumph. Okay, I'd like to say one thing. I forgot about, I forgot to comment on this after the previous story. let's hear it. I like how in the script it just said the word vanished and then unprovoked. Brian decides to pronounce it vanished. Okay. That was actually an accident. But I just rolled with it. You're always like, Ben, take out the like on twos. Meanwhile, you're like, vanished. We know, we know what happened next. When I read to my kids like from anything cool and old, I say like vanish it all the time. Right. And I let the, I let the, the, the inner voices win.

You let the, you let the dog out. I let the dog out. I didn't mean to. And then I was like, I'm not going back. Okay. Here's, here's the main, like, kind of the main point that I, that I'd like to draw from really all that we've set up till now. Yeah. There's the, there's this idea, we've talked about it in season one of the show, actually, from psychologist Carl Young. By the way, you can never trust a psychologist. Let me just say that. First of all. But, But Carl Young, he was an intelligent man. And he had this interesting idea that these like these motifs of myth like the dragon or like the flood or, you know, whatever, old man willow. These are all pieces of man's deep past that we maintain in a shared memory called the collective unconscious that reminds us of things that used to be great threats to us or of things that used to be great blessings to us.

and it's like an evolutionary mechanism that helps us stay alive. Yeah, people even say things like the hypnagogic jerk. Like when you're about to fall asleep. Took the words right out of my mind. Yeah, I knew you were about to go an hypogicurge jerk, which is like right when you're on the brink of falling asleep and all of a sudden you go, oh, like you're falling. They always have some kind of, oh, you know, evolutionarily.

When we were living in trees, if we fell asleep, we would fall out of the tree and then, you know, eaten by a jaguar. So ergo likes such as the Iraq. It's evolutionary. Although with me, when I jump, it's always because I'm riding a rollercoast for my dream. I doubt that was the case for, like, Nella, you know? The chimps.

The chimps were just riding rollercoast. The point is evolution is cringe. And here's my point. Like, it's a fascinating idea that Young puts forth. If you, like, if you suspend disbelief and say, you know, maybe, let's just assume evolution is right for a second, then his description is like, yeah, that's, That's interesting, you know. But what's actually more believable?

What's more believable? That, that we took these big threats and repackaged them in our minds. In our epigenetic. Right. To the point where they're basically like Grimm's fairy tales that are just meant to help the children obey. But they're wired into our DNA. Right. Exactly.

Like they're basically the crompest demon at Christmas that just scares children into obedience. Is that more believable? or is it more believable that it's just like, that's just what happened? Dragons were real. The dragons were real. This story of Leah Cohen and the founding of, well, the beginning of the founding of Rome, what if that's just how it happened? Or at least significant portions of it.

Like the general structure. What if that's just the way that it worked? That's what, that's all, that's my whole question. What's more believable? I think that's more believable. Because there's nothing in, there's actually nothing in the Iliad, that I'm like, no, that's not possible. Yeah.

I mean, especially if you assume like an anti-deluvian type setting. Like that we know that the Greek gods. The false gods, like I think they were real. The Greek gods. See my published works. I have reasons for that. You know, you got to,

if you're going to, like, kill people for worshipping false gods, like there has to be some false gods for them to worship. The demon Larp. Yes, exactly. And so that's, that's legit. In fact, the Greek gods. even with their own source material behave in a way that you'd expect. They act exactly like if our theory was correct in what they fundamentally are.

They're not, yeah. They act exactly like that. They demand to be worshipped, but they're not worthy of worship. Not at all. They're just bad. They're horrible. And so they act in ways that are like, yeah, that checks out. That checks out.

The dragon thing, it all checks out. And so I just, I keep going back to this thing. Like, I'm actually reading the Iliad again right now. And the whole time, I'm just like, yeah, this probably actually happened. There's just no reason not to think it did. If we're being totally just straight up 100. I like the way you think. If you're keeping it 100.

If you're keeping it 100. Brian and I came up with this phrase. Oh, you got to share it with them. When we were on vacation, I'm not going to tell them the whole background, because I don't want anyone to actually know it. I don't want them to know what it means. Just know that it doesn't mean anything. It's entirely like, it's innocuous.

It's vanilla. It means something totally great and normal and not weird. That everyone would like. But even that. Yeah, okay. Okay, but in no way. Non-sexual. Something you do.

Let's just make it clear here. It's very clear. It's not gross, okay? The phrase is touch peb. You just got to touch the peb. And we want everyone to start using this online as a zoomer phrase. Just see if you can make it a thing. That no one ever knows what it actually means except us.

Let me give you an example of a setting. if Ben and I were, like, let's say we just had like a long meeting. Yeah. And we were a little tired. We were a little tired. And we were coming out of the meeting and we were like, dude, do you want to just touch peb real quick? And it would. And it works.

And if Ben was just like, yeah, man, let's just touch peb. And everyone would be like, yeah, dude, you got to touch peb. Or if you just say something like every once in a while, you got to touch peb. Yeah. Or if you said like someone does something really cool. Like they win a, dude, they win a football game. And you see him, you give him a hug. You're like, dude, dude, sometimes you just, you can.

got to reach out and touchpad. Reach out and touch pad. Don't do, don't do. That's a blasphemous song. Don't listen to it. I don't even know what you're talking about. Oh, really? No, I don't even know the original song.

Oh, that's a real song. Yeah. It's the touchpad part. Yeah, of course, that is in the song. I don't know where I was going with that, but this is how Zoomer stuff starts. Yeah. I love the Zoomer. I consider myself like, Discipled to the Zoomers. He's an honorary Zoomer.

He's not technically a Zoomer. I'm a millennial. You're on the edge. Hold me now I'm six feet from the edge Dude drink out of your flower pot Get higed because we've got to We've got to roll out of this episode

That's right With some with a great closer I'm gonna tell you I'm gonna begin The close of this episode By taking a look A little closer to home Yeah we've enjoyed talking about dragons with you guys

We have indeed But it's time to start out Let's bring it back to the US of A That's right Let's bring it back to the land of the land of the free, home of the brave. Thus far, we've focused on the more easterly visions of the dragon, along with the early Western vision.

But what about the far ancient West, like Mesoamerica? What lies have lingered overlong in the fertile and wind-dark dirt in the forest of the early states? Interestingly, their take on the dragon seems to ring incredibly similar to the overall tenor of dragons in the Orient. from the feathered serpent dragon named Quetzokato who emerged from the waves of the sea after the great flood and who taught the Aztecs the ways of civilization to the fascinating Incan high god Viracocha

who surrounds himself with his dragon's servants always in his mightiest works of beneficence towards man These ancient peoples admired and revered the dragon with religious love and fear Some of the greatest temples pyramids monoliths and megalists on the American continents present us with strikingly vivid serpent and dragon imagery, all in an attempt to elicit affectionate wonder at the gods, who they themselves are or who they served. But even in old America, where man's thoughts toward the dragon were mixed and confused to the utmost,

we still find the lingering instinct of enmity between the serpent and the seat of the woman. If one drives along the byways following the mighty torrent and flow of the Mississippi River, far to the north of the Incan and Aztec and Mayan draconian legends, one will eventually see a strange mural painted along the retaining wall that marks the Mississippi's converging with the Illinois River. It's certainly not an inviting mural, far from the professionally done large-scale art

so often shoved into our minds by city planners today. It's rather an odd sketch of some yellowish, green, and scaly creature, bearded and sporting the antlers of a pronghorn, with menacing teeth and angry eyes staring down at you. At its feet are claws long and sharp. On its back are wings large enough to lift its hulking mass into the clouds. Surrounding it all is a long and thin tail like a whip, coiled and ready to dole out punishment on the weak serfs which live beneath this monster.

It is the Piazza bird. It's a rich Native American legend of a dragon which used to stalk the skies and hills of what eventually became the United States. The name means bird that devours men. Piazza said to have flown over the great father of the waters, aeons before the onset, of St. Brendan's party landing on the shores of Americas, wondering if it might be Eden long lost. It's said that long ago, as the Illini chieftain Ootaga opened his canvas tent to survey the well-being of his people,

a great force shook the world beneath his feet. He suspected the giants in the mother's belly, those thick shoulders of stone and fire, We're merely fighting once more. The young fishermen wavered in their boats as the river itself wobbled under them. Mountains echoed with the defeated shouts of their own stones being thrown off of them and deep into the cool wars and canyons below their summits. But soon, the tale of an earthquake was put to rest when the sky was filled with the horrible sounds of a deathly scream, some hellish sound that oppressed any ear, man or beast all around. A mass like a cloud cover the sky to the west as the piazza went up in anger to the heavens. Flames flashed forth from

its open and shrieking maw and the beating of its wings rent old and strong trees asunder. Soon those fishermen, who had before had been merely trying not to fall into the raging river, were taken by the long claws of this monster and villain to all mankind. They screamed in pain and fear as their voices were swallowed in the chaos of it all. In a fit of desperation, Oataga prayed to the great spirit for a full cycle of the moon's pale influence over their land. All the while, though he prayed and fasted, the Piazza continued its reign of terror. But finally, at the end of the cycle of witches, the chief awoke with the revelation that the Piazza's vitals were unguarded beneath the open wing. He enlisted his braves and the tribe prepared fresh

and poisoned arrowheads all through the night before climbing to the top of the nearest mesa before first light of the dawn. At that light, the Piazza, the Piazza, the Yasa let loose his familiar and nauseating screams from the depths of its unknown Atumno. It climbed into the sky and right away sighted the tribesmen atop the messa. It pounced with its mighty wings towards them, like a griffin trotting valiantly through death in Hades, before sinking its claws deep into the chief's flesh. He screamed and wrenched himself, trying to break free but could not. He held tightly to the root of a tree which hung half-held off the side of a cliff near to him.

Finally, the Braves stepped from the shades and shot the Piazza under the wings six times with the poison darts. The dragon let a new scream fly, one of clear pain, dropped the half-dead chief back to them, and flew away to die in the far western hills. Eventually, Oataga was nursed back to full health. And in order to celebrate their hero and commemorate his bravery, they painted a great mural of their foe upon the rocks over the river which sustained them. And so, the mural and story of the piazza was etched onto the American mythos forevermore. Thus we come to it at last.

The final word on the dragon in our tour through the taxonomy of this world, so full of strangeness and things that are not just stuff. What do we make of the dragon? A devil? Some preternatural creature of chaos and power? An angelic rank whose fallen members are especially powerful and especially bad, but whose holy and righteous soldiers maintain their great firiness in a way most befitting the glory of the true God they serve? A purely physical creature, largely extinct, who was simply represented

evil and chaos and sin in the world due to its particularly vicious nature towards man? A figment of man's mind, a legend, and nothing more. Well, who can say with certainty? Certainly not us. But I will say this. I think we can safely rule out the last two options. I do not think the dragon is a figment of some prehistoric shared memory, within man blown out of proportion. I do not think the dragon is just made up. We'd like to end with an exhortation. In Homer's Iliad, we were introduced to the titular hero of the poem, Achilles, very early on. In between the lines of camaraderie amongst his men an honorable soldiery that is attributed to his as-yet- unseen work on the battlefield, we slowly learn of a man whose epithet of godlike

may not be the great compliment we originally took it for. To the Greeks, indeed to every society that has ever existed, accepting the Hebrews and Christians. The gods were a powder keg bunch. They didn't inspire the tender affection that say a son has to his father in their subjects. Part of this is due to the nature of their plurality. They are not a triune godhead, equal in power, glory, honor, and strength. They are not three persons in one essence.

No, there are many different essences, representing many different attributes, all of which are vying for the top position at all times. Pantheism is inherently self-interested. There's no unity in an ancient pantheon. There's no love. Instead, the disjointed strife and tension is the underlying tenor of every story. But apart from this, there is, of course, the matter of their very natures being those of fallen angels. How can they be good when the course of their immortality has turned to darkness?

So when one looks at Mesopotamia, Greece, Persia, India, Rome, or even the Gauls and the Britons, one does not see the benevolent rule of the gods to men. They see tyrannical temper tantrums cloaked behind a thin but effective veil of seemingly limitless power and immortality. They see a god whose behavior is like that of a dragon. As gods go then, these false ones are unreliable. They change. They're not omniscient. They're not omnipresent.

Not omnipotent. oftentimes they're foolish and evil in their deeds. Yet they still demand the worship of men and constantly received it. After all, they were bigger. They took on a specific role or area of oversight and expertise. Within this role, Zeus over the air and his father of the Olympians, Poseidon over the sea, Artemis over fertility of all sorts, etc., etc. They all acted out in that fickle, self-centered,

and mostly wicked and maleficent nature inherent to them. Again, they acted just like the dragons they supposedly saved man from. The only difference was that they were cloaked in apparently beauty and light. So when Homer describes Achilles as godlike over and over again, he's not only attributing to his hero the radiant glory and power these gods exercised, he's also accusing Achilles for the same sins as the gods, infantile self-centeredness, draconian narcissism, and an overwhelming focus on his singular thing to the detriment

of all else. For Achilles, this central thing was violence in war. That's what Achilles was for. It's what he was made by the gods to do. So as long as he operated within that lane without care for any other virtue, he remained godlike. He remained to the Greeks, a hero. In epic Greek poetry, then, a hero is not a protagonist. Indeed, Hector or Ineus are the far more noble and virtuous characters in the Iliad. A hero is instead one who epitomizes. in a way most akin to the gods in their domain, the skills of whatever it is they do. Thus, like I said, for Achilles, it's wartime violence. For Odysseus, it was cunning and trickery.

For Helen, the runaway bride of Menelaus, who started the whole Trojan war, it was beauty and vanity. The poet paints those characters onto the canvas of our psyche in such a way as to make us load them most when they are at their most heroic. Why? Because at their most heroic, at their most godlike, They are hoarders of glory, gluttonous eaters of all that is good

apart from their own opinion of themselves and their own sense of honor, devilish worms feeding off the rich soil of their utter infatuation with themselves. As heroes, they are dragons. And so Achilles is blamed for the rivers of blood that painted the Iliam Hills and filled the EGNC with crimson life

only recently lost. He is blamed for the loss, though he did not shed the lion's share of the blood, but he is blamed right nonetheless. This great and legendary Greek was a dragon, but even to the pagan Homer, there was some hope left in creation. For the dragon eventually died and only a man remained, but I won't spoil that for you. At any rate, Achilles serves to warn us. In thinking of his proclivity to hoard glory and therefore man's collective proclivity to the same, it's no surprise

that our Lord Jesus told us not to hide away the light of the gospel in our lives. It's no surprised that he told us to be a city set on a hill, lit up with good works. To hide a glorious thing so beneficial and lovely is to behave like a dragon. It is to be self-interested. And we're all too familiar with this behavior. These commands from God are not merely phrases that we should paint onto our walls. They're deeply rooted lessons that belong engraved into the tablet of our hearts. We, before God's love worked in us, were alike our previous father of the devil. We were ancient worms, serpents, dragons like him. We coveted and hid. We hoarded honor and goodness like smile over a pile of gold. We all to a man were like used to scrub in the dawn-treader,

who becomes a dragon only to realize he had always been one. How dare we hide the glory of God's spirit within us? How dare we tuck away Christ's victory over the world and over our hearts and deep caverns that hardly see the light of day? How dare we not show the benevolence of Christ's reign on the earth by refusing to actually love our neighbor and actually rejoice in the communion of the saints, however costly that may be in this world. Were we to do these things, we would be no better than Achilles in his wrath or Morgoth and his envy. What's more, were we to do these things, we would be defying our God, and would be shrinking back into the cold and flaking skin of the serpents we used to be. I've said before, and I'll say many times over, that all of history, all of creation is an exposition

of those fateful words from God in the garden to the serpent, I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and her offspring. He shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise his heel. And it's true. All of time is a grand display of this decree. But it's also true in the life of every individual Christian that has ever been. We are a microcosm, each of us, every redeemed microcosmic image of God.

We wrestle with the old flesh, that sinful and draconian nature, that slings its haymakers at our souls, while it dies its death at the hands of the spirit. We, by God's grace and power in us, crush the dragon's heads, and tread upon them with our heroic Messiah of Psalm 91. We in sober living, and in penitent obedience before the Father, must kill the sinful dragon, the worm, that tempts us on our shoulder every day like a whispering shadow from a past that's already slipped into a dark night. So kill the worm. Let war be done always between you and the sin, and your heart. Let the dragon die and let the man remain.

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