Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick: Welcome back to The Lord of Spirits podcast. I am Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick in the borough of Emmaus in the beautiful snow-blanketed commonwealth of Pennsylvania, and with me is my co-host, Fr. Stephen De Young, in Lafayette, Louisiana, where it never gets truly cold. And if you’re listening to us live, you can call in at 855-AF-RADIO; that’s 855-237-2346, and we will get to your calls in the second part of today’s show.

So have you ever noticed that worship is never defined in the Bible? There’s no place where it says, “And this is what worship is.” Now, we do get very detailed instructions for worship, especially in the book of Leviticus, and then there are bits and pieces in the New Testament, but worship happens long before any of those texts are written. In fact, we see it happening in Genesis 4, with the sons of Adam and Eve. Cain and Abel offer sacrifice to God. It’s not explained, not defined, not placed within any existing ritual context. Cain and Abel make sacrifices to God.

If we’re going to understand these sacrifices of Cain and Abel as well as worship in the ancient world in general, indeed, Christian worship up until our own time, we need to understand the ritual context of the ancient world. What did the earliest worship look like? Was there a lot of variation? Did different cultures come up with very different ways of worshiping their gods? So let’s think back, now, as best as we’re able, to thousands of years ago, to the earliest known human settlements. And they happen to be found in what is now modern-day Turkey and the Holy Land. So, Fr. Stephen, take us back.

Fr. Stephen De Young: First I’ll have you know it is a deeply chilly 46 degrees here. The UPS driver brought me a package earlier and was literally wearing a parka and gloves. The cold is just a different standard down here.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] That’s right.

Fr. Stephen: And also, before we get started tonight, we should probably let people know that, like Gaul, our discussion of sacrifice has been divided in three parts.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Indeed, and not just three parts in this episode; this is the first of three episodes about sacrifice. So we can hear there’s a whole bunch of cheering happening all over the world right now, I’m sure, in response to that. So, yes.

Fr. Stephen: Hopefully.

Fr. Andrew: This is part one, where we’re going to be talking about sacrifice in the ancient world.

Fr. Stephen: And as is our wont, we’re going to go back and start at the very beginning, as you mentioned, which is in the Neolithic Period, the Stone Age, and Stone Age religion. So I’ll do our date disclaimer.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] That’s important, right.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, I’m going to give dates, which are the dates established by archaeologists. This isn’t based on carbon-dating or paleontology. We’re talking about human settlements, so this is standard layer archaeology. Some listeners may have a commitment to the idea that the earth is not as old as some of these settlements are purported to be. If so, do not allow this to trouble you; these are circa dates; adjust them accordingly. But however long or short you feel the timeline is, these are the earliest human settlements either way, the oldest ones.

Fr. Andrew: And it ultimately does not matter to what we’re going to be talking about exactly how old they are. Good disclaimer.

Fr. Stephen: Just the oldest ones we’ve found.

Fr. Andrew: Exactly. Yes. So now we get to say some phrases and words that happen to be hard to pronounce unless you happen to be from Turkey.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. Then I don’t know. They may even be tricky to them.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, if we have any actual Turks listening, they’re like: “Oh man, they’re saying that so wrong.”

Fr. Stephen: We’re sorry in advance. So the three earliest sites—and we’re going to discuss two of these in some detail—the oldest continuously inhabited human site that we’ve uncovered is actually Jericho.

Fr. Andrew: Right, in the Holy Land.

Fr. Stephen: In the Holy Land, the Jericho that’s in the Bible, but… although where exactly the settlement is has shifted around a little bit in the area. There’s been human settlement there dated by archaeologists back to circa 10,000 BC. So that’s how far back we’re going. We’re going back at least some millennia before the civilizations of Babylon, before even Sumerian civilization.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and there’s no writing at this point, right? that anyone was aware of.

Fr. Stephen: Right, there’s no writing, so we don’t have written texts. We have sort of the remains of people living and doing things. And these aren’t really cities; that’s why we’re saying “settlements.” Sumeria is where you start getting cities as such. So these are just places where previously nomadic people put down roots, and we’ll be talking more about that in a minute.

So, then, the two that we’re going to discuss in more detail, the first is Göbekli Tepe, which is one of the sites in what’s now Turkey, in Asia.

Fr. Andrew: Southeastern Turkey, right near the Syrian border.

Fr. Stephen: And that site, again, is dated by archaeologists, the beginning of the settlement, to somewhere around 9130 BC, flourishing around 9000 BC. And then the second one is Çatalhöyük, which dates from a little later, from around 7100 BC, as it’s archaeologically dated.

Fr. Andrew: Just a couple thousand years later!

Fr. Stephen: Right, so.

Fr. Andrew: Wow.

Fr. Stephen: So one, Göbekli Tepe, represents one of the first permanent human settlements, and then Çatalhöyük represents a sort of later, a little bit later phase in the development of human settlements and villages.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, based on what we actually find there in the dirt, right?

Fr. Stephen: Right. So Göbekli Tepe, in some sense, I’m about to do TV on the radio, because I’m about to talk about monoliths, which of course I can’t show you pictures of.

Fr. Andrew: But if you happen to go onto our Lord of Spirits Podcast Facebook page, we actually did post some pictures from these sites, so you can see some of this if you go to Facebook and look at this. There are a few things there. But, yes, right now we’re going to play: Imagine, if you will…

Fr. Stephen: The theater of the mind…

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Exactly.

Fr. Stephen: So there are very early monoliths, monolithic structures: stone, standing stone structures, at Göbekli Tepe. They’re arranged… It would be reminiscent to some people probably when you look at pictures of Stonehenge is probably the closest thing. I have wistful feelings about Stonehenge.

Fr. Andrew: Oh! Is this when you finally tell the story?

Fr. Stephen: No, I’m not going to tell the story.

Fr. Andrew: Oh, man!

Fr. Stephen: But I have been banned for life from Stonehenge. The exact circumstances will remain a mystery for now.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] You know that’s going to be a Lord of Spirits t-shirt at some point: “Banned for Life from Stonehenge.”

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, banned from Stonehenge.

But what’s really striking about these particular monoliths at Göbekli Tepe is the carvings, I think, for anybody seeing them.

Fr. Andrew: Right. If you look at our Facebook page, you can see these pictures. And also there’s a Wikipedia page, which has lots and lots of pictures. And there’s animal carvings on these things, on these standing stones.

Fr. Stephen: And it is unclear to archaeologists and anthropologists exactly how to interpret the animal carvings or even if they should be interpreted, because “interpreted” implies that it’s some kind of pictographic language, and it may not have been that. It may have just been representations of animals. But they’re arranged in a way that suggests that they were used for some kind of astrological observation.

Fr. Andrew: Much like Stonehenge.

Fr. Stephen: Much like Stonehenge was, in the ancient world. But what all of this points to is that the remains there are not the remains of a village that was constructed to do commerce or that was pulled together because someone set himself up as a chieftain or a king.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, it’s not set near some natural resource.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and so what it is, it’s the remains of a ritual site. So there had been, in the past, sort of a consensus among scholars that the first human settlements developed for sort of practical, material reasons, and that then once that happened, they started developing religious beliefs and other elements of culture.

Fr. Andrew: Just as happened in the early American West, they built a town and then: “Oh, I guess we should probably build a church or something.”

Fr. Stephen: Right. [Laughter] And what they’re finding with Göbekli Tepe and a few other Chalcolithic sites is that the exact opposite is true, that these first sites were actually ritual sites and began as places of pilgrimage. So nomadic peoples and people groups—tribes, clans—would make some sort of periodic pilgrimage to these sites, and so the need to service those pilgrims and the ritual needs of the site actually then gave birth to the settlement. So what we’re talking about here is not really a single event but a development in history that’s referred to as the Neolithic Revolution. And that’s the move from humans being nomadic and hunting food and gathering food, and if you’re going to hunt and gather food, you sort of have to be nomadic, because you have to move with the seasons in terms of being able to gather food, and you have to move with the migration of animals if you’re going to hunt food.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, right, which… if you think about the ancient world, being nomadic is the smartest way to be, because if you stay in one place then you could get attacked easily by your rivals. Staying in one place also means you’re subject to all the seasons of that place, as I just said, to migratory animals. It doesn’t make sense not to move around. We think that the way human beings now is normally settled. Obviously, most human beings in this world now are settled; they live in places and they don’t move around, so it seems obvious that that is the norm—but it was really not the norm early on, really, really not the norm, and not really a good idea. So it would have to be a really important reason for you to actually build something somewhere and then sort of stick with it.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and so it happens sort of in the reverse of what was previously assumed, that this ritual site has a need for people to dwell there permanently, and it has a need for food to be developed for the pilgrims and for sacrificial rituals, as we’re going to be talking about for most of tonight.

Fr. Andrew: So you’ve got to supply it.

Fr. Stephen: Those things have to be provided, and so that causes the shift, then, to agriculture and to the domestication of animals, because we have to be able to produce food at the site, regardless of the season, regardless of the… And then, after producing food, we have to be able to store it.

Fr. Andrew: Right, there’s going to be guests all the time, so you’ve got to keep the place stocked.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and so these material changes to life are the product of the religious significance of the site, which suggests something further. And this shift that I’m talking about, to seeing the religious and ritual significance of the place first, and then the settlement, is a shift that’s being made by scholars who are atheists. This isn’t a religiously motivated thing; this is where the evidence points. But, as religious people, we can assess something further, that for this site to become a pilgrimage site, for it to become a religious site to which people would travel, from different clans and different groups that are otherwise nomadic, there had to be some kind of actual spiritual or religious experience there.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, there’s a significance to that spot.

Fr. Stephen: That was experienced by people. And it can’t just be like, one person. So if one person comes out of the woods and says, “Hey, I met the great god Pazuzu out in the woods,” that’s not going to cause even the members of his own group to all go out in the woods and try and find it.

Fr. Andrew: Right, it has to be a repeated thing, like when people discovered—on a much lesser sense—when people discovered the Grand Canyon. “Hey, come take a look at this,” and people have the same experience every time they go. But in this case, it’s an experience where people are saying that they encountered a being, a spiritual being.

Fr. Stephen: Right. It’s an experience of spiritual reality in the ancient world, that causes, then, this to become a pilgrimage site, and then leads to the settlement.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and even now… There are parallels to that, for instance, in Orthodox Christian experience where, for example, Trinity-St. Sergius Monastery in Russia. This was founded by St. Sergius of Radonezh who basically went out in the woods to pray by himself. But now if you go there, it is not only a massive monastic complex, but it’s a city. Like, it is literally a city, and the reason why the monastery was formed was because of St. Sergius being there, who, because he’s a saint, he becomes a vessel of grace, so people go there to experience that as well, and then the city grows up around it. I mean, it’s exactly the same pattern. It’s exactly the same pattern, and it makes a lot of sense.

Once again, this kind of just shows that modern people tend to think, even if they are religious, they tend to think of religion as a kind of add-on, even the most important add-on in their life, but a kind of add-on, whereas what makes you in the ancient world, where everybody is mobile, want to actually build something and start to raise crops and that kind of thing? It must be something super important, and all signs point to that super important thing being a spiritual experience.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and you see something similar to this in the Scriptures as well, where, in the patriarchal narratives in Genesis, Jacob has his experience at Bethel, and he builds an altar of twelve stones; or Joshua, setting up the stones in the place where the Jordan River was parted. And then people coming back to see those spots and to see the stones that were erected. And then of course building churches on top of the places where great events in the history of salvation happened, on Mount Tabor, and the Church of the Holy Sepulcher.

So the idea that these spiritual experiences sort of consecrate a place is not just an ancient Stone Age thing. It’s a universal, human thing.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and I think there’s also a problem for modern people trying to apprehend this, especially those who live in the United States, because our population tends to be so mobile and so uncommitted to the places that they’re from. People tend to move, for whatever reason, usually a job or whatever, and the idea that you would… That place actually an important thing is just not—it’s just not a thing. I mean, just for instance right now, you’re in Louisiana, I’m in Pennsylvania, headquarters is in Indiana, and people are listening to us all over the world. I mean, this is a good thing, but it is a fundamentally displaced thing. I think that’s another problem with, like, the modern skeptical mind, where if you say, “Well, this is the place where Jesus was born, so there’s a church here,” the modern skeptical mind would say, “Is that really where he was born?” Because we tend to think that place is actually not that important. Whereas in the ancient world, it was super important. This thing happened here, and it keeps happening here, so we’d better pay attention to this.

Fr. Stephen: Our overall tendency to etherealize religion and make it a mental and intellectual exercise which has nothing to do with place, space, time stuff.

Fr. Andrew: Things.

Fr. Stephen: Objects, reality, yeah.

So, moving on to the next one, Çatalhöyük, that is a couple millennia later site. This we have more permanent structures in the form of domiciles. These aren’t sort of separate houses; these are sort of buildings, broken up into rooms, each of which room was a residence, likely for a family. There’s all kinds of interesting, neat stuff, but of religious significance is there are already burial sites there, where people are burying their dead, and the custom at that time was apparently to bury their deceased family members under the floor—it was of course a dirt flood—but bury them in the floor of the family house, the family abode.

Fr. Andrew: So they’re kind of always with you.

Fr. Stephen: Right. Actually in the floor. But in those burial sites, we find what are called grave goods, meaning “stuff.”

Fr. Andrew: “Look, you’re going to need this in the next world, so here you go.” I mean, most people probably are aware, for instance, that the pharaohs are buried inside the pyramids with all kinds of stuff. It’s the same thing; it’s the exact same thing.

Fr. Stephen: Well…

Fr. Andrew: Of much less stuff.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, a flint knife.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, “don’t forget your sack lunch,” not “here’s your thousand slaves…”

Fr. Stephen: A boat, 20 tons of gold… [Laughter]

But also found with them are animal remains, which suggests that… They’re found with the human remains. It’s not that they had a pet sheep and they really loved it, so they buried it with grandma. These were sacrificial animals that were being sort of sent along with the burial. So we know that sacrifice was taking place at this point already.

And then we also find there sort of our earliest window into what spirits they were worshiping, at Çatalhöyük, at this ancient point.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. It was interesting to me to look at the photos, and the one thing that I noticed most often was the heads of bulls. And it seemed like they weren’t bull skulls; these were like carved bull heads. They were images of bulls.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, with huge horns.

Fr. Andrew: With huge horns, and they collected… For instance, inside one of these dwellings at Çatalhöyük, they have a sort of a recreation of a domicile. And one of the pictures—again, we posted this on our Facebook page—you see a whole sort of vertical row of these bull heads in the corner of the home. This is not someone showing off their hunting trophies, because, again these are images that are made; they’re not actual bull horns.

Fr. Stephen: This is a Chalcolithic icon corner is what this is. [Laughter] And these bull heads are found in almost every domicile, almost every home, usually in a specific area, implying that it’s sort of a home shrine. It has this bull head in it. The depiction of a male god as a bull, while we find it here, is ubiquitous in the ancient world. So you get, in the Epic of Gilgamesh, the bull of heaven.

Fr. Andrew: Or in Greek myth you’ve got Europa, Zeus appearing as a bull, and the Minotaur, one of my favorite stories from when I was a kid.

Fr. Stephen: And the bull Baal. There’s a whole section of Baal worship that surrounded Baal as a bull.

Fr. Andrew: Thus the golden calf, right?

Fr. Stephen: Well, the golden calf may have actually been an Apis bull from Egypt, but, again, that’s another instantiation of this idea.

Another bull god, of this great bull. The form that that bull takes in terms of its name that we find in, for example, the Hebrew Scriptures, is this is where Behemoth comes from, which is actually behemot in Hebrew. Behema is the word for cow or cattle. It’s actually grammatically feminine, and behemot is the feminine plural, but it’s a plural of majesty. Sometimes people will point out that God is referred to as Elohim, which is technically plural, and it’s a way of elevating him. It’s sort of like a way of saying that this is the Bull.

Fr. Andrew: Much like even royalty, our stereotypes of royalty, referring to themselves as “we.” “We are not amused.” The “we” of majesty.

Fr. Stephen: This is the we-bull, behemot. But even though it’s this male figure and it’s this sort of image of male power and strength and rule, it’s grammatically feminine.

And then the other figure that we see already at Çatalhöyük is a number of carved goddess figures. The goddess figures there are related to another figure that’s pretty much ubiquitous, and that’s not a mother-goddess figure, actually. It’s actually a figure related to the sea, to the waters.

Fr. Andrew: The sea. Monster.

Fr. Stephen: And thereby to chaos. So this is a sea-monster.

Fr. Andrew: Yes. Dragons!

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] And this takes the form, in the Hebrew Scriptures, of Leviathan, which is an English transliteration of what’s actually more like Lotan in the Semitic roots. But this figure again appears everywhere. Baal fights it. Tiamat is sort of the Babylonian form. Moloch slays him.

Fr. Andrew: Would the Midgard Serpent be a… in Norse mythology? Sort of?

Fr. Stephen: A little bit, yeah. Gaia, the Titan Gaia, in Greek myth is actually closely related to this. People point out that’s the earth, so people think of her as this earth-mother figure, but if you actually read the stories, she’s all about getting revenge for the Titans, her children, and she does that by bringing monsters out of the sea like Typhon. So you have these sort of two figures, and Leviathan or Lotan is actually grammatically masculine, even though it’s a feminine figure. So both of them have this swap. So you have these two figures, and sort of the denouement of those two figures in our Bible is in the book of Revelation where they turn up as the beast from the earth and the beast from the sea, Behemoth and Leviathan.

Fr. Andrew: Right, and so while Leviathan sort of represents this chaos… which, if you think about this symbolically, if you look at the ocean, that is an image of chaos: constant movement, it’s uncontrollable, it’s destructive; and then Behemoth is this image of tyranny. When we were having the conversation earlier to prepare for this, there was sort of the idea that one is what you might call toxic masculinity, this sort of tyrannist image, and the other is sort of toxic femininity. Again, toxic. Not normal; toxic. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Not good, yeah.

And so, yeah, these become sort of ubiquitous figures in ancient religion. And knowing that’s who they are provides a lot of contour, so not just a golden calf, but Jeroboam’s golden calves at Bethel and Dan, and sort of the undercurrents that are running under the Scriptures of these two sort of spirits being these sort of primary spirits opposed to Yahweh, the God of Israel. And we already see evidence of them being worshiped this far back, at the end of the Neolithic Age, at the beginning of the Chalcolithic.

Fr. Andrew: Right, and it’s an interesting question. We’ll get to this in a second, but I just want to raise this. Why would you want to worship spirits that are so horrifyingly problematic? [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. Well, there wasn’t cancel culture yet, so they couldn’t get rid of them.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Right, exactly.

Fr. Stephen: There was no social media to ban them from.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, how exactly would you cancel… a sea monster?

Fr. Stephen: Leviathan?

But so this is what we see, regardless of what culture we want to talk about, whether we’re talking about early Greek culture, Ancient Near Eastern cultures, early Canaanite culture, Egyptian, Mesopotamian. The earliest shrines are these kind of places. Before there are even temples per se, where they start building a building around it, you have some place, be it a high place, an elevated place, or be it a particular tree or a spring of water, where these encounters with spirits take place, and then a hedge or a fence or some kind of border is constructed around it to designate it as a sacred space.

Fr. Andrew: And this persists throughout the entire history of humanity. I’ve been reading lately both Finnish and Norse mythology, and the Finns had what they called—I’m sure I’m going to mispronounce this; sorry, Finns—Hiisi (H-i-i-s-i) which the most ancient version of that word refers to a place, but then that word came to refer to a spirit that kind of inhabited the place. And sometimes… Most of the time people would avoid them, and sometimes they would go there specifically to kind of encounter them.

I mean, you get the same thing, again, in Norse mythology, where there’s a particular… in northern England somewhere, there’s actually a particular bog or something like this, where there’s indications—it’s either in northern England or maybe Scandinavia—that people were being sacrificed to Thor. But the place was named as a place sacred to Thor, because that’s where you would go to encounter him. It was a specific sacred place. And every religion, every single religion, has stuff like this, whatever permutation you’re talking about.

Fr. Stephen: And this is what then develops into the idea that, again, these are high places and these sort of designated sacred spaces and groves and natural features, to the idea of the gods living in gardens and/or on mountains, because those are the places where they were encountered by people. And this is where the whole idea, the word “paradise” and the whole idea of paradise as this walled garden on top of a mountain, comes from, that imagery develops from this.

So as we prepare to segue into our next bit, our next part, our second half, you asked about why you’d want to worship these.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Yeah, well, right, it’s a good question! Like, why not just avoid? I mean, these are big scary monsters of chaos and tyranny. I mean, why…? Just run away, right?

Fr. Stephen: Right, so if you think about it, if you’re a nomadic tribe or clan or family group or however you want to construct it, part of this group, this social unit that’s nomadic, and you encounter other humans, another group of humans, you have various options. The two most obvious would be, if you think your group is bigger and stronger, you could try to subdue them, conquer them, kill them, take their stuff. But now if you encounter Leviathan, the queen of the Stone Age, proverbially, you can’t kill her and take her stuff. So that option’s right out. So the option that remains to you is the option that would remain to you if you met a bigger group of people or just another group of people whom you didn’t want to attack, and that’s to make peace and make friends and establish a relationship and some kind of fellowship and some kind of communion with these other people you’ve encountered.

Fr. Andrew: Right, because they’re a threat or because you want them… But in the case of, you know, demons, as a Christian would understand these beings to be, you just don’t want them to destroy you.

Fr. Stephen: Right. You want to try to be on their good side and be friends with them, even though we know from a Christian perspective that’s not possible.

Fr. Andrew: And it’s kind of a bad idea. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: So establishing that kind of a relationship and that rapport, especially through the offering of hospitality, becomes the purpose of these rituals that happen at these ritual sites.

Fr. Andrew: Yep, right. It becomes a guest-house for spirits, and for all those who want to eat with them. Well, having said that, then, we’re going to go ahead and go to break, and when we come back, we will start to take your calls. We’ll be right back!

Fr. Andrew: All right. Welcome back. This is the second part of our show, and it’s where we begin to take your calls. We just talked for a little bit about why anyone would want to have a relationship with a demonic chaos-monster. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Or giant bull, as they case may be. Be fair.

Fr. Andrew: Or giant bull. Right. Kind of depends: are you inland or are you near the ocean? [Laughter] And we ended up by saying that it’s because you don’t want to be destroyed by them. So then the proper response to that is hospitality, to offer hospitality. And so that’s what we’re going to be talking about now in this second part of our show. So please do call in. Again, its 855-AF-RADIO, 855-237-2346, and we would love to talk to you.

All right. So, Father, in these ancient, ancient, super-ancient sites that we’ve been talking about, there’s no writing. We just have kind of material stuff to kind of go by, but it gives a pretty clear picture that there is dedication to these beings and so forth. But we don’t know what exactly that looks like. What are the actual actions. I mean, archaeology doesn’t, can’t show you what people do. When’s the earliest that we actually begin to know, have some clue about what this hospitality that was being offered actually looked like?

Fr. Stephen: Right. Well, we have… I mean, we have lots of ancient ritual texts, but the way ancient ritual texts were written, for example, in the Ancient Near East, is interesting because it’s not the way we write liturgical texts today. Liturgical texts today are based around… They’re written sort of like a script where it’s like: this person says this, this person says that. And then they have rubrics which are like the stage directions: okay, now you walk over here.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, as they say: Say the black, do the red.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] Yeah.

Fr. Andrew: It’s because the spoken parts, traditionally, especially for those of you who are not clergy and have never looked at liturgical books that clergy use, the parts that you’re supposed to say are written typically in black ink, and the parts you’re supposed to do are written in red ink, at least in a better service book. So, yeah: Say the black, do the red.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and so it’ll say: Say this prayer, and then swing the censer in this direction three times, and then in that direction three times, and then walk over here.

Fr. Andrew: Exactly.

Fr. Stephen: So Ancient Near Eastern ritual texts sometimes are written as stories. So rather than, for example, being written as instructions, it will tell the story of some event in the life of the gods and/or the people performing the ritual in ancient days, that the ritual is based on re-enacting and participating in. But it’s just telling the story, so we don’t know exactly what they did at various points. [Laughter] Or we’ll have prayers and hymns, but we don’t get… We’ll have like: This is the hymn that they sing when they offer the incense. Okay… when do they do that?

Fr. Andrew: How do they offer the incense?

Fr. Stephen: How often? How much? What kind?

Fr. Andrew: Right. So, before we kind of get into those kinds of interesting details, we actually do have a caller. We have Ryan who is calling from Florida, and, Ryan, are you there? Can you hear me?

Ryan: Yes. Hello, Fathers.

Fr. Andrew: Welcome, Ryan, to The Lord of Spirits. It is good to talk to you. So what is your question or comment for us tonight?

Ryan: Yes, well, it’s tangentially related to the topic, I suppose, but it’s more related to something that Fr. Stephen’s talked about in the Five(ish) Falls of Angels and on his own podcast as well, something that’s puzzled me. And he’s talked about the angels that were assigned to the nations and how there was this, I guess you could call it an angelic apostasy. They began accepting worship and interacting with humans in not-so-kosher ways. I guess my question there is: Was this fall of these angels, was it universal? Did they all experience this fall? And, if so, what made it universal? And, just to follow up, what would it have looked like if that fall had not occurred, if they had done their tasks rightly rather than accepting worship and encouraging this idolatry? What would that have looked like?

Fr. Andrew: Okay. Well, Fr. Stephen, I’m definitely going to let you address the first part, because you were called out specifically. But since there is someone who listens to this show who is convinced that this show and the Amon Sûl podcast are truly the same, I’m going to throw him a bone and say that “What would it have looked like if they hadn’t fallen?” I think that it would like the way the Valar function in The Silmarillion. Now, Ryan, I don’t know if you are a Tolkien fan, but if you are—

Ryan: Actually, I’m a huge Tolkien fan. I came to… basically came to Orthodoxy through Amon Sûl. I’m not Orthodox; I’m not even a catechumen, but I’m prayerfully considering it now.

Fr. Andrew: Yet. [Laughter]

Ryan: Yes, that’s right, Father. Yet.

Fr. Andrew: So there we are. No, I’m serious. Obviously, there’s a lot of non-Tolkien readers out there who are like: “What is he talking about? The Valar or whatever?” But it’s an image of angelic beings. So J.R.R. Tolkien, the author, he writes this—this is in The Silmarillion, so this is not his most well-known work; it’s second-tier in terms of being well-known. But in that work, these angelic beings that are created by the one God, they help to take care of the earth and also human beings and elves, of course, as well, who are sort of kind of two different versions of one species, so to speak. And they help to beautify the earth and to form it and to teach things to mankind, and it’s a good relationship. I mean, it has its problems, but they don’t fundamentally go off the deep end—one of them does. So I think that’s a good image of what it would have looked like.

And maybe we can understand Tolkien’s version of this as what it might have looked like before… After the tower of Babel but before this fall that was being discussed. So that’s my idea for the second part. So, Fr. Stephen, why don’t you address the first?

Fr. Stephen: Well, it seems to have been near-universal. St. Dionysios the Areopagite—and others; you see this in Eusebius of Caesarea’s explanation of the Gospel also, for example—the exception is St. Michael, who was the prince of Israel, as Daniel says. Daniel talks about the prince of Persia; Gabriel talks about the prince of Persia; he talks about the prince of Greece, and then he says, “Michael, your prince.” So the angel assigned to Israel, St. Michael the Archangel, is sort of the one exception to that. So I think, building off of what Fr. Andrew said, I think the best image we can get, biblically, in terms of what that would look like is Israel. That doesn’t mean that, for example, the people didn’t fall into egregious sin; obviously, they did. In terms of their behavior and faithfulness, there was not a lot of difference between most of Israel and the neighboring nations, even though there was supposed to be.

But there was always a sort of different relationship between God and Israel, and I think the intercessions of St. Michael and of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and others were part of that difference in terms of the long-suffering that God shows. Not to say that they influenced God, but that God chose to work through their prayers and intercessions to extend his mercy to Israel in way that… Now, God also showed, according to St. Paul in Romans, he showed a certain amount of mercy to the nations in overlooking their sins for a period of time, until the Gospel came, not immediately punishing them for the wickedness and sin that abounded among the nations. That’s sort of St. Paul’s theme when he speaks to Gentiles in Acts 17: in the past God has overlooked all of this, but now the Gospel is coming to you, now you’re accountable, now you need to hear the call.

I think what’s in the background, what we’ve been talking about already tonight, is the material side of that. So when we talk about: well, these angelic spirits started to appear to and interact with and encounter the peoples of the world and started to influence them, and then we talk about how they started to give them these cultural innovations and these kind of things, what we’ve been talking about anthropologically in the first part of the program is the material side of that, where we see human beings encountering some kind of spiritual reality at these places and then that being the engine that leads to agriculture, the first city—Cain builds the first city—the first kind of permanent settlements, the first domestication of animals, all of these sort of innovations that start—metal-working starts in the Chalcolithic period—that we’re talking about, just like the genealogy of Cain says.

So this is really the flip-side of that. We were talking about the spiritual reality of that in the Five(ish) Falls, and now we’re sort of talking about the historical, human side of that.

Fr. Andrew: Does that make sense to you, Ryan?

Ryan: Definitely. That was an excellent answer. I really appreciate all that you do. This is such an enlightening podcast. Blessings on it, for sure.

Fr. Andrew: Thank you. By your prayers. You said that you thought that your question was tangential, but actually it fed directly into what we’re talking about, because this does connect back to that earlier stuff. Like Fr. Stephen said, what is the human interaction response to when fallen angels do their thing. So, thank you very much, Ryan; thanks for listening.

Ryan: Thank you.

Fr. Andrew: All right, Father. We were just talking rubrics.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] Right. And so, we don’t start getting a more full-orbed picture until we get to Greco-Roman sacrifices, where we can piece together from a number of sources and descriptions sort of the details of how some of these things played out.

Fr. Andrew: Right, because now you’ve got written texts, for instance, where you can get this kind of detail. So now we’re fast-forwarding again, thousands of years to 500 BC to around AD 150, the sort of high Roman period.

Fr. Stephen: Right, Greek and then Roman period. But, I mean, these aren’t things that they made up when they first started writing them down. They were practices in the Indo-European world, and we’ll probably talk about a specific case of this in the third half. But even the terminology that’s used in Greek to describe these things are borrowed Semitic words, so there is this sort of direct continuity in terms of religious ritual at the ur-level, between even the Ancient Near Eastern and Mesopotamian cultures and Egyptian cultures and then what we’re about to talk about now in more detail in the Greco-Roman sort of pattern that emerges.

Fr. Andrew: So now we’re going to talk about: What does an ancient sacrifice look like? It has generally some recognizable parts, pretty universal. How does it actually work? So the first part is a procession. People walk in in a line.

Fr. Stephen: People processing.

Fr. Andrew: Right. Where are they going? They’re going to the place this needs to happen. It could be a temple, it could be a grove, it could be—I mean, there’s all kinds of possibilities—but it’s a designated—

Fr. Stephen: It could be an altar, altar on top of a hill, a high place, a hill or a mountain.

Fr. Andrew: Right, but it’s a designated spot, and it’s, like we said earlier, it’s because this spot has a spiritual significance. There’s been actual experiences there.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and so, of course, the most common form that hospitality takes is the sharing of a meal. We’ve become a little disconnected from this in modern American culture. A lot of times now families don’t even eat meals together, let alone gather with other families or other people to have communal meals.

Fr. Andrew: And now we’ve got even Uber Eats. Food can just show up at your doorstep!

Fr. Stephen: But in… a lot of our Orthodox brothers and sisters from other cultures could actually help us out a lot with this, because in a lot of other cultures—Greek culture, Middle Eastern cultures, and even Slavic cultures—there’s… more of a sense of this has been maintained, of the importance of sharing a meal together and the significance of that.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, it’s the thing a family does, and to get invited into that is huge.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and so this is how community is built. The way that hospitality is going to be offered to a god and some kind of fellowship and communion with that spirit is going to take place is going to be in the form of sharing a meal with it, primarily; amongst other forms of hospitality, but primarily a meal. And so that’s what sacrifice is.

So this procession sort of begins the process—pun semi-intended [Laughter]—of doing this. So in these processions, the practical side of the procession is you have these elements that are going to be sacrificed. That’s not necessarily… We tend to think of animals primarily, and in some more horrible cases, humans, but we tend to think of animals as the primary thing, but there are also plenty of sacrifices—in fact, most sacrifices did not involve killing animals. The majority of sacrifices were, for example, wheat-cakes or rice-cakes if you’re in Asia, depending on where you are: a grain, cakes made with grain. It would also, then, include food animals. These were domesticated food animals, not like wild animals. You wouldn’t go and capture a wild animal to sacrifice.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, I mean, if you’re going to have someone over, you bring out: This is what we’ve been preparing; this is what we’ve been working on. Kill the fatted calf.

Fr. Stephen: You’re offering them something of yours, something of yours that you’re offering to them.

Fr. Andrew: And it’s notable that it’s always food. Sacrifices are always food. It’s not… I think that… You made this point, but I just want to underline this, that a lot of people have this sense that ancient sacrifice was always about killing an animal, putting it on an altar or whatever, but it wasn’t even always an animal! But it was always food. You don’t sacrifice a chair. [Laughter] You sacrifice something that can be eaten, because it’s a communal meal. That’s exactly what’s going on here.

Fr. Stephen: When I read in Wizards of the Coast, in fifth edition Dungeons & Dragons, dwarf-priests sacrifice metal? I was just like: this is so unrealistic; please be pulled. Please.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] So related to— I don’t know if I’ll recover from that one. So related to that is we do have a caller. We have Samuel calling from the God-protected dominion of Virginia, where I happen to have been born. And he has a question specifically about this, so, Samuel, can— Are you there?

Samuel: Yeah, I’m there. Thank you for taking my call, Fathers.

Fr. Andrew: You’re welcome. It’s good to hear from you. So what’s on your mind, Samuel?

Samuel: I’m wondering what… how it changes things—because it obviously does—when God himself is the sacrifice, the sacrificial meal being offered?

Fr. Andrew: That’s a really good question. I’d love to say, “Just tune in next time…” because that’s what we’re going to be talking about, among other things. [Laughter] But we don’t want to leave you with nothing. [Laughter] I’ll just say this. So all of the stuff that we’re talking about with regards to paganism now, which is kind of what this particular episode is about, it becomes fulfilled completely in the Christian context where not only are we having… sacrificing to our God, sharing a meal with our God, but he himself is the one who is sacrificed and shared.

So how does that change? There’s a hundred things we could say about this, but it’s that the life that we receive, for instance—this is the first thing that it occurs to me to say—the life that we receive from this is eternal life; it’s not temporary. And it is deifying; it changes us. So it not only puts us with communion with him, as all sacrifices always did, to whatever god, but makes… and not only makes us like him, as all sacrifices do to whatever god—we’re kind of getting ahead of ourselves a little bit here, but that’s okay—but grants eternal life and elevates us to become, as we’ve said before, the sons of God. So that’s the response I would give initially to that. Fr. Stephen, is there anything you want to add or correct or whatever?

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, to show our cards a little bit for the next couple of episodes, we’re laying some groundwork here in terms of what sacrifice looks like in the world at large, and what we’re going to see next time already in the Old Testament sacrifices is that God is going to take a lot of the spiritual “wisdom and understanding” of the nations and invert it in the sacrificial ritual that’s done in Israel, or that’s prescribed for Israel, at least. And then Christ’s sacrifice that we’re going to be talking about more, two episodes from now, in our third episode, is sort of the fulfillment of that and the ultimate inversion of what pagan sacrifice is. And one of the key elements is exactly what you’re hitting on, that rather than it being a spirit taking something from humans or seeking to be appeased by humans, God meets us in sacrifice with self-offering. He offers himself to us, which is a direct inversion of this pagan idea.

Fr. Andrew: He’s the one giving the hospitality. But, yes, just hang on and keep listening, Samuel, for two weeks from today and then four weeks from today, because this is the first in a series of three. I’m so excited. Does that make sense, Samuel?

Samuel: Yeah, it does, and, Fr. Stephen, when you mentioned Dungeons & Dragons right before taking my call, I’ve actually played as a dwarf character as one of my current characters, and I often get nit-picky about that exact thing in fantasy settings.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, you need to do beer and ale drink-offerings. Keep it real.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] That’s right, exactly! All right, well, thank you very much for calling, Samuel. Good to talk to you.

Samuel: You, too, Fathers.

Fr. Andrew: Thank you. All right. Okay, so we’ve got food being offered. It’s brought in a procession. It’s domesticated animals, it’s wheat-cakes, it’s wine, it’s oil. If you’re a dwarf-cleric, it’s beer. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: It’s all food.

Fr. Andrew: It’s all food, exactly. So what’s the next thing that has to be done with it?

Fr. Stephen: The practical element in the procession is you need to get that stuff to the place where you’re sacrificing it.

Fr. Andrew: The table, exactly.

Fr. Stephen: So there’s that practical element. But so then in the procession, the procession is not just made, like, “Hey, buddy, take all this stuff over to the altar.” It’s done as a festal procession, so there’s incense that’s being offered; there’s music, at least singing, sometimes instrumentation, as the people process to that place. And if there’s animals involved, those animals are still alive at this point and are being brought and transported.

Fr. Andrew: Probably led on leashes or whatever.

Fr. Stephen: One biblical element of this is people may be familiar with the psalms that are labeled the psalms of ascent (a-s-c-e-n-t). Those are the psalms that were sung by people as they made their pilgrimage to Jerusalem with their animals, with their things they were bringing to sacrifice. So that pilgrimage was turned into a grand procession of this type.

So then once they get to the place, the elements that are going to be sacrificed need to be sanctified; they need to be made holy, which means they need to be designated for that purpose.

Fr. Andrew: Right, like this is going to be used for this, and not… and this over here is not going to be used. So it’s not that everything that’s brought is necessarily used. Sometimes it’s just pieces of it, right?

Fr. Stephen: Right. So they have to be designated. That’s usually with the laying-on of hands. There’s also, though, this idea that’s embedded of the animals involved being sort of willing participants.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, that’s kind of an interesting element. As we were talking about this, there’s actually a token of this to sort of prove this. So the idea, of course, is that animals are: “Yes, I’m happy to be sacrificed to Zeus” or whoever.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, “I’m glad I was chosen for this noble purpose.”

Fr. Andrew: Right! Now, obviously the animal is not saying that, but it’s ritually sort of tokenized by a tuft of their hair being cut out, and then that hair that was cut off is then placed in the incense. So it’s that the animal is offering himself now, by this little gift, this offering of hair that has been cut off and is being burned up with the incense. We’re going to talk more about incense later. But, yeah, I thought that was a really interesting thing. Animals are not tortured in the process; it’s really a peaceful sort of slaughtering, frankly. And that the killing itself is not really part of the ritual; it’s just a necessary element; if there is going to be an animal sacrificed, it’s a necessary element for the sacrifice to be possible.

Fr. Stephen: To be eaten.

Fr. Andrew: Right! You don’t eat live—

Fr. Stephen: —animals, right. And that’s important, because Western theology has put into our heads that sacrificing something is killing it.

Fr. Andrew: Killing it, yeah, that the death is the key element.

Fr. Stephen: And that there’s suffering involved somehow. But what we see in ancient sacrifices is the exact opposite. Not only is the killing not ritualized—there’s no instructions, by and large for how to kill things, in the Old Testament or in these ancient rituals. There are ways that they tended to do it with certain animals, for ease of handling, in terms of the procedure, but there was no specific ritualization of the killing. And this little bit of ritualization, with the tuft of hair being cut, but that ritualization of the animal offering itself is signifying the exact opposite of the animal suffering or being afraid or being killed. It’s sort of voluntarily offering itself as well.

Fr. Andrew: And I’m told—I’m not a butcher or a farmer of any kind—I’m told that an animal that’s tortured before it dies, actually that it does bad things to the taste, even. So it would be against your best interests. If you’re offering hospitality to your god, are you going to offer it an animal that’s freaked out and sort of tastes the worst? You wouldn’t want to do that. Again, not a farmer, not a shepherd. I don’t know if we’ve got any cattle ranchers out there who are like: “Oh, no, no, no, that’s completely an urban legend, Father.” I don’t know! But it is something that I have heard; it is something that I have heard.

Fr. Stephen: Something that you have “herd,” pun not intended. [Laughter]

So the other bit that we know a little about in terms of how the animal was killed is based on the fact that the blood was going to be collected. So that means that in a lot of cases the animal’s throat would be slit, because that was the easiest way to drain all the blood out of the animal before it was butchered. The blood would be collected in a bowl. Blood—it’s not just Leviticus that says that blood is life.

Fr. Andrew: Right, the life is in the blood.

Fr. Stephen: That’s a universal, ancient thing. So there were a minority of rituals—this was actually more common in human sacrifice than animal sacrifice—where the blood would be drunk by the participants. But far more commonly, and especially in Greco-Roman practice, at the various shrines, in addition to the shrine to the god or spirit or muse or whoever, the Caesar, whoever, there would also be a grave of a hero. And “hero” was kind of a technical term in Greek. We say, “Someone is my hero,” but heroes were the founders of cities, people like Perseus, Theseus, who did these great deeds in the past. But no matter how great the deeds were that you did, when you died you still went to Hades and became a shade, and you had this sort of shadowy existence as a shadow of your former self that lasted until everyone had forgotten you, and then you just sort of ceased to be.

Fr. Andrew: It’s like Tinkerbell. She disappears if you don’t believe in her. [Laughter] Sorry!

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, so you would have these grave-shrines, in part to keep their memory alive, and then the blood would be taken and would be fed to them by pouring it out into their grave, the blood from these sacrifices.

Fr. Andrew: And this happens in the Odyssey, doesn’t it?

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, in the Odyssey, there’s a point where Odysseus needs to talk to Achilles, who is dead, of course, and so to do this he goes to one of the many places where there’s a gateway to Hades, to the underworld—see our future episode on sacred geography. But he goes to one of these places and sacrifices some black goats and pours their blood out into a pool, and the blood sort of attracts the shades up out of the gateway to come and drink the blood, in the Odyssey, and that ultimately lures out Achilles so that Odysseus can communicate with him. So that is, in story form, what’s going on in the sacrificial ritual with the grave of the hero and the blood.

Fr. Andrew: Wow.

Fr. Stephen: So, blood being drained, you now have an animal, if there’s an animal involved, and the cakes and the wine and the oil that are being sacrificed. Those were then brought to a place called the prothesis. That was the Greek name for it. That’s the place where the elements were further prepared, so the animal would have to be butchered and divided up into the different parts. There would be parts that were going to be offered to the god or gods or spirits. There would be a portion that was going to be eaten by the priests and celebrants, and there was a portion that was going to be eaten by the people who were celebrating the sacrifice.

Fr. Andrew: Right, there’s this cutting up.

Fr. Stephen: So those pieces had to be divided out.

Fr. Andrew: And if it’s an animal, right, you’re basically doing butchering. You’re cutting an animal up. But if it’s cakes or something like that, you’re kind of saying, “Okay, here’s the best cake. Here’s the not-as-good cake,” whatever.

Fr. Stephen: You’re cutting them out and you’re pouring the oil and wine onto the cakes or onto the meat that’s going to be offered. And then the elements that were going to be offered to the god were taken to the altar. And the word, just as a side note, the word ara means both altar and table. These aren’t two different words. There’s not a difference between a sacrifice and a meal, and an altar and a table in the ancient world. I say that, and our Protestant friends will understand why that’s significant, that there’s not a difference between an altar and a table.

So those elements are brought, and the ones… what’s going to be offered to the gods is immolated.

Fr. Andrew: Burnt up, which, if you… I remember—this was a long time ago, actually—I was doing some fiction writing, and I was asking you questions about this. Okay, burning up parts of an animal, fine. I’ve burnt plenty of roasts in my time; I know how you do that. But, like, what about burning a cake or something like that? And that’s the point when you said, “That’s what the oil is for.” [Laughter] So if you’ve got a cake—and this is not cake like birthday cake. These are usually flat, crunchy or whatever, but if you put oil on it there, it’s much more likely to light on fire.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, and the wine is a little higher proof than a lot of our wine, which also causes it to burn.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, it gets poured out, and that’s the idea. That’s the way that the god consumes it, is when it’s lit on fire.

Fr. Stephen: The smoke rises up into the heavens, and it’s an aromatic kind of thing, because even ancient people realized that smell and taste were closely connected as senses.

Fr. Andrew: Right, and there’s this cool element in the midst of this, which I thought was really interesting, which is there’s a specific act when this stuff is brought to the altar, and what is that?

Fr. Stephen: The last thing before the portions for the spirits being offered to is burnt—and the language that’s used is that the gifts that are being given to the god or gods or spirits are “touched and elevated”—

Fr. Andrew: Touched and elevated.

Fr. Stephen: And that’s the final thing before what follows, which is the burning of what goes to the spirits, and then the following feast, which is the elements that go to the priests and the people.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, okay, so before we get to that, I want to go ahead and take another break. When we get back, we actually have someone calling from Indiana who has a question about guardian angels. But first we’re going to go ahead and go to a break, so we’ll be right back.

Fr. Andrew: Welcome to the third half of The Lord of Spirits, and, yes, we’re saying that on purpose, the “third half.” Before we get to the feast that comes as the next part of the sacrificial ritual, we have a call from, I think it’s Christiana from Indiana. Am I saying your name right? Are you there?

Christiana: Yes, I am here, and, yeah, it’s Christiana.

Fr. Andrew: Oh, good! It’s always tough when someone mispronounces your name.

Christiana: Yeah. People call me Christina so often that my aunt, who is actually named Christina, I say, “Yes? What?” when I hear her name at family reunions.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Oh man! Well, it’s lovely to talk to you, Christiana. What is the question that you have for us this evening.

Christiana: Thanks so much for taking my call. So it’s actually three questions, but I promise they’re all great! [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Well, we’ve got the time!

Christiana: Guardian angels: what happens to our guardian angel after we die? Do they get assigned to a new person? Do they cease to exist? Do they go up to heaven and join the heavenly hosts and sing praises? Do they hang out with us on the new earth? Do we have a relationship with them? Do we ever get to meet them face to face in heaven now that we can see angels up there?

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. Okay, well, do you want to give all three of your questions at once? So that’s number one…

Fr. Stephen: I was going to say, I can answer that one real quick. It’s: yes, no, no, yes, no, yes, yes.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] All right, next! No, just kidding.

Fr. Stephen: I’m joking. I’ll give you a pony.

Fr. Andrew: Father, so, okay, because I don’t really know the answer to this one, so, Fr. Stephen, why don’t you take a crack at it?

Fr. Stephen: As we talked a little bit about last time—what is it like to be a bat?—angels don’t experience space the way we do, so it’s not like they’re either here or in heaven or… So Christ says about guardian angels, about the guardian angels of little children, that their angels are always before his Father in heaven. That doesn’t mean they’re not with the children. That’s just saying that they have this prominent place in the divine council, meaning God is very attentive to what’s going on with these children and he’s protective of them, is what that’s indicating.

So we don’t necessarily have an angel who’s only our guardian angel and has never been the guardian angel of any human before or of any human in the future. And that’s okay, just like we have a patron saint of a bunch of other people, and has been the patron saint of a bunch of other people.

So I think the last piece of that that I didn’t answer yet is that, yes, we will be able to get to know them in the world to come.

Fr. Andrew: All right. What else you got, Christiana?

Christiana: That’s so… that’s inspiring. That’s so exciting. Okay, second question: does our guardian angel carry our soul to heaven after we die? I saw this on a page that sold icons, and in the description it was a… I was looking for some pro-life sort of icons, and there was one where it was a guardian angel and a baby, one that had died in the womb, and in the description it said that guardian angels carry your soul to heaven after you die, and I’m like: Wait a second. I’ve never heard that before! I’ve got to ask this!

Fr. Andrew: So it’s certainly the case that we see in saints’ lives that angels come to take the souls of the righteous to paradise. I mean, that’s… now, whether… I don’t know whether you could say, “Oh, here’s the guardian angel and six other friends he’s brought with him.” They’re not usually named in the saints’ lives I’ve read, but the idea that angels do accompany the soul to paradise is pretty well established, I would say. Is there something specific about the guardian angel, Fr. Stephen?

Fr. Stephen: We as Orthodox Christians, we believe that a person’s soul takes a journey after they die, usually corresponding to 40 days, but, yeah, our guardian angel accompanies us on that journey, on the way.

Fr. Andrew: There you go. Better than Beatrice and Dante. Boom. That’s for Richard Rohlin. I know you’re listening.

Fr. Stephen: I think you were thinking of Virgil and Dante.

Fr. Andrew: Oh, excuse me, you’re right. Well, Beatrice is the one who comes to him in the Paradiso, right?

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, but that’s the boring one; nobody reads that far. [Laughter] I’m talking about the Inferno. Come on. And they’re reading about Purgatory? Please.

Fr. Andrew: All right, Christiana, what’s your third and final question?

Christiana: When do we get our guardian angels? Do we get them when we’re born, when we’re baptized, or when we’re chrismated, if that’s different from when we’re baptized?

Fr. Andrew: Well, definitely at baptism, because in the baptismal service, it’s specifically prayed for as part of that, especially the part actually right before the baptism itself, the exorcisms and so forth at the beginning. What else, though? I mean, there certainly are cases where angels are… I mean, I think part of the problem is that God assigns angels to take care of us, to guide us, to pray for us, to defend us, all these kinds of things, and we have this concept of a guardian angel, but I wouldn’t necessarily say it’s like: Okay, this one has this hat on. So certainly angels are involved in people’s lives at every point, but there is definitely this kind of connection that happens with baptism. I don’t know. I don’t know if I’m making any sense here. Fr. Stephen, please help me out.

Fr. Stephen: This is kind of a ¿Por qué no los tres?…

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Yeah: Why not all three?

Fr. Stephen: Because, again, we… I keep coming back to “what it’s like to be a bat.” We experience time as humans as this succession of moments, and we can try to literalize that when we’re talking about God, so we say, “Okay, this is the point where I really came to understand the Gospel of Christ. If I died five minutes before that, what would have happened?” See, we can think that way. But we’re kind of assuming that God and the angels are on this parallel track with us, experiencing time the way we do, or God didn’t know or whatever. So there are events in our lives that we experience in our lives at a particular period of time, at a particular point in time, but their reality isn’t limited to that point in time.

So something changes for me at that moment; something doesn’t change for God, and something doesn’t necessarily change for an angel. So for me at my baptism or chrismation, there’s a guardian angel whom I enter into this relationship with, but that doesn’t mean that the angel was sort of sitting around waiting to be assigned up until that point, like in a waiting room outside when I was being born, pacing with my dad; or that God was getting ready and thinking about which one he would assign. That’s silly. For me, yeah, that’s the point, but the reality of it extends not just forward from there, but also back from there in time.

Fr. Andrew: Does that make sense, Christiana?

Christiana: Yeah, that does. But I’m a little confused. Clarifying question: Do we only have one guardian angel, or do we have many that kind of hang around, also pray for other people?

Fr. Stephen: Well, we have a guardian angel. We have a guardian angel, but we can also have a patron saint, our family can have a patron saint, our church can have a patron saint. If you go to my church, that’s Archangel Gabriel, so he’s sort of the guardian angel of my whole parish.

Fr. Andrew: There’s a lot of overlap.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, there’s a lot of folks praying for us, but our guardian angel is an angel who is connected to our life.

Fr. Andrew: All right. Well, I hope that that helps, and now you got four questions, Christiana. That is literally more than anyone else has ever gotten in the whole history of this podcast.

Christiana: Wow. I’m going to say something biblical about demanding something and then God listens… Oh, yeah, the righteous… the unrighteous judge, something like that, yeah.

Fr. Stephen: The persistent widow.

Christiana: The widow! The widow and the judge.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Well, there you go. Great to talk to you, and I hope that helps. Thank you very much for calling and for listening, Christiana.

Christiana: Thanks for taking my questions!

Fr. Andrew: You’re welcome. Okay.

Fr. Stephen: So we’ve just burnt a calf liver, and now it’s time to party.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Yes. Right.

Fr. Stephen: Because what follows that burning at the altar is the feast, where everyone’s going to eat. And this isn’t just a question of eating the things that were actually sacrificed, like the other pieces of the animal or the other wheat-cakes.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, there’s side dishes, right? at these feasts.

Fr. Stephen: This is the word for today. The word for today is trapezomata.

Fr. Andrew: Trapezomata.

Fr. Stephen: Which literally means table-things. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Table-stuff.

Fr. Stephen: Those are the…

Fr. Andrew: Trapeza is the table, yeah.

Fr. Stephen: So those are the other things that were eaten along with the sacrificial feast. So, for example, the temple of Demeter in Corinth had huge dining halls, banquet halls, and that wasn’t to rent out for wedding receptions. [Laughter] That was part of the sacrificial worship, was everybody going and eating.

Fr. Andrew: And the important thing, at least one of the important things to get from the fact of side-dishes is to emphasize that this really was a meal. It was really a meal that was shared together.

Fr. Stephen: And this created the koinonia in Greek, the fellowship, the communion. It formed the community, and that included the god or gods or spirits and the humans, bound them together. We’ll probably talk about this more in a further episode, but this is in the background of what St. Paul is talking about in Corinthians, to the Christians at Corinth, about not eating in an idol’s temple, not eating food offered to idols, and also about becoming a communicant, having communion with demons by participating in these meals.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, it’s not just about “Don’t eat the bad food.” There’s a ritual event that’s occurring, and it is a religious—quite literally a religious experience. And usually, if I recall correctly, especially once you get to the Greco-Roman period, the next thing that typically happens is a lot of immorality that happens with it as well.

Fr. Stephen: Well, yeah, it’s not just a feast like, hey, let’s sit down and have a potluck. It’s a party.

Fr. Andrew: Yes, in the worst possible way.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, in the full-orbed, 1980s sense.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and all of this, especially the detail of it, just underlines what priests were in the ancient world. Like, nowadays we tend to think of priests largely as pastors, which is why there is this wonderful rumor that went around that as soon as I was no longer a pastor that I was no longer a priest any more. [Laughter] Not true! Still serving!

Fr. Stephen: You are still frocked.

Fr. Andrew: Yes, the frocking continues! Yeah, but that priests in the ancient world were largely not pastors. They weren’t doing pastoral counseling; they weren’t… all that kind of stuff. They weren’t administrators. They were a kind of ritual technicians. They were specialists in exactly how you do all this stuff precisely, exactly how you do it in the way that the god expected, because there was the idea that you could do this wrong. And also there is also divination that went along with it, parts of the animals being cut open and reading what’s in the entrails and using that to predict the future and that kind of thing—and that’s what priests did. That’s what their job was, was all of that.

And I think… And one of the things that’s underlined by that is that you can get it wrong. The god might decide he wasn’t into the sacrifice. He might reject your invitation to dinner or, having tasted of it, say, “No, you did this wrong.”

Fr. Stephen: Right. We’ve all been to a dinner party that went bad. [Laughter] Where things went sideways. And that could happen with the gods, too. Someone could say the wrong thing, do the wrong thing, offer the wrong type of food, make some kind of faux pas in terms of the manners required at such a function.

So, yeah, a big part of the reading of entrails that a priest called a haruspex would do—and we’ve got… one of the things that we find a lot are these hardened fired clay models, like scale models of livers and kidneys from animals, with writing, like cuneiform writing on them, indicating what to look for in the different parts. Part of it was that was his job, to read whether they were doing it right or not, and whether the offering was being accepted or not, because they believed there would be signs. Probably one of the most dramatic of these is once, before the Roman armies went into a really disastrous battle, the priest who was doing the butchering at the prothesis discovered that the animal they’d just killed had no heart.

Fr. Andrew: Oh! [Laughter] That’s a bad sign! Literally.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, that was taken for a really bad sign, and, lo and behold, they lost. So they were looking for those kind of things to indicate…

Fr. Andrew: I was going to say, this makes me think of when you go to the doctor. Now I’m going to have to make haruspex jokes the next time I go to the doctor and they’re looking at an X-ray or something like that. I’m like: “So, what do you read there, doctor?” as he quietly chuckles to himself…

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] Yeah.

Fr. Andrew: All right, so, okay, well, we’ve taken up most of our time, but there’s something that kind of goes along with all of this, and it’s a question that probably a lot of people would have. Okay, the offering of food, whether it’s meat or cakes or wine or oil, puts you in communion with the god. That’s an offering. It’s a shared meal; it’s a communal experience. But what about all this incense that comes along with it? What’s the deal there? Is that a sacrifice, too?

Fr. Stephen: Right, and we’ve already mentioned in the procession and some of the details there that incense was being used there. And incense is offered; that’s the language we use. Incense was offered on altars; there were altars of incense, in all cultures, but also, as we’ll talk about more next time, in the tabernacle, in the Temple, there was an incense altar. And that altar was actually used more than the altar of burnt offerings, because that was—the incense offerings were the basis of the daily cycle, at morning and evening, with prayers. So incense is taken to this altar and it’s offered, and the language that’s used about the aroma and the smell rising up is the same language that’s used about the aroma of the burnt offerings rising up and the smell. So there’s that piece, where it’s being offered as this pleasing aroma; it’s being offered with prayer. Prayers are being attached to it.

Fr. Andrew: So it’s this pleasing that goes—you’re trying to please the god, just as you’re trying to please someone you’re offering hospitality to.

Fr. Stephen: Right. You’re going to ask someone for a favor, you bring them a gift.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, right, that’s normal.

Fr. Stephen: So that’s the one side, and then the other side of incense offering is there were censers, just like we have now in the Orthodox Church, in the ancient world, and they took various forms, but they were basically mobile means of offering incense. An incense altar is a fixed thing, at least relatively, so you could come and you would take some of the coals and some of the incense from the altar and place them in a censer, is how it was done. And then the censer could be used to carry that incense to other places, and that could be used in what was called in Mesopotamian religion “fumigation rituals.” [Laughter] Because the idea was you were sort of smoking out the area in order to render it sacred and pure. The Egyptians are really specific about this. They believe that there were sort of aerial spirits, literally; there were spirits in the air that might be malicious or at least tricksters and had to be driven out of the presence of the god in the temple.

Fr. Andrew: So this is like setting off a bug bomb in your house, and all the cockroaches go scattering, except they’re demonic cockroaches. [Laughter] “Demonic cockroaches”: that’s going to be our new meme, everybody.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] Incense is the demon-cleaner.

Fr. Andrew: Right!

Fr. Stephen: It cleans out the area. So there’s this purification element. And, just to note, if you understand this, you know why: you’ve got to keep scooping that incense during services. If you can still see clearly, it’s not enough. Anyway. [Laughter] You’ve got to get that wavy line at head-height through the building. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: I totally agree.

Fr. Stephen: And this is so embedded—I mentioned earlier that sort of at the ur-level, the Greek words that describe religion are borrowed Semitic words, that ultimately come out of Akkadian roots. So the oldest altar we know of at the Lycaeum in Greece was referred to throughout Greek history as the Bemos, which is from bema, the Semitic root, which is the word for altar. And in Greek it just became the name of that particular one because they lost sight of the etymology. But more pertinent to this is the Greek word, katharo, which is the verb form of to cleanse or to purify; the noun form is “catharsis.”

Fr. Andrew: Catharsis, katharsis.

Fr. Stephen: And that word is derived from the Semitic qatar which is usually transliterated as q-t-r; it’s qatar the verb in Hebrew, and just the root qtr in Ugaritic. And that is the verb that means to offer incense.

Fr. Andrew: So it’s interesting that some of these key sacrificial terms, as you said, come from these Semitic practices of the Ancient Near East and then make their way into Proto-Indo-European languages like Greek, just get borrowed straight in, get Hellenized or Latinized or whatever the case.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and so to cense something is not to metaphorically cleanse it; to cleanse something is to metaphorically cense it, in Greek.

Fr. Andrew: Mic drop. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, it’s exactly inverted.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah! Right. That’s going to go on a t-shirt, too.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, it’s… catchy.

Fr. Andrew: It’s a chiasm! It’s a chiasmus. Sorry, it’s a chiasmus, so it’s got to be catchy.

Fr. Stephen: So that brings us to—and I think this is going to lead into what we’re going to talk about in our next two episodes—that we see this clearly with incense; we’re going to see this with all forms of sacrifice in the Old Testament, the New Testament, atonement—that there are these two elements. The one element that is usually described by the Latin term “propitiation”… To propitiate someone means to make them propitious, and to be propitious means to be happy or well-disposed or pleased towards someone.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, not a word we tend to use in everyday speech. “How are you doing today?” “Oh, I’m very propitious, actually. Thank you.” [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, I actually find the word “propitious” to be quite propinquent to my everyday life.

Fr. Andrew: Boom! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: But so that’s what propitiation means. It just means to please someone, to make them happy. Whether they were angry before or not, you are pleasing them and making them happy.

And then the other element that usually described by the Latin word “expiation,” which is like purification. They are these two elements, and these are present in all sacrifices. We can see them in incense offerings. We’ll see them in the other sacrifices that we’re going to go on to talk about.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. Well, this has been our first episode of three, and so we’re just going to give some closing thoughts here. We appreciate all of those of you who are anticipating our next couple episodes. This is so fun already. So I’m just, I don’t know… I’m just happy to be here!

I just wanted to say, about this context of pagan worship that we’ve been discussing, if you listen closely, if you know anything especially about Orthodox Christian worship, there are probably a whole bunch of times when you thought, “Wait! Wait! I… I know that word!” or “I know that action!” or whatever, and then we didn’t make the connection for you. We’re going to make those connections for you, but we wanted to lay this specific groundwork here initially. And it’s not just about a kind of heuristic progression. It’s really about, again, reorienting the way we understand what it is that we do, and reorienting the way we understand what we ought to be doing, and how we ought to be doing it.

When you understand that sacrifice in the ancient world does what we just described, and when you understand how it’s conducted, then it kind of makes a sort of flat, secular worldview almost impossible. You can’t… Once you know that you can have a meal with your God and be in communion with your God, then that takes what it means to be a religious person, or a Christian in particular, completely out of the realm of “this is what I think and feel and believe”—although those are important things, it’s much more primal and visceral—no pun intended. It gets you down in the stomach, quite frankly.

I think that that’s a really important place to aim when you’re talking about the stuff that is actually the most important. I’m being a little redundant here, but the kind of faithfulness that keeps you returning to God over and over again, the kind of faithfulness that is always making your love for Jesus Christ grow is the kind of faithfulness that even connects to your body, which is very much an element of who you are—and I’m talking about the material body here. And that there is… the whole human person is brought into contact with God, through exactly what we’ve been talking about.

Now, we’ve been talking about it in terms of pagans, but if you listened closely, I’m sure you heard a lot of stuff that has everything to do with also the worship of the one true God, and that continuity should leap right out at you, and we’re going to get to that a lot more in the next couple episodes. But just tonight we wanted to sort of show you: What does worship in the ancient world look like? And you probably notice, it does not look like what a lot of people call worship now, and it universally looks almost the same in every culture, with just some adjustments here and there, but it’s always centered on the offering of food and sharing it with your god, the accompaniment with incense to both please your god and to purify the space and the actions that you’re engaging in. This is really, really important stuff, everybody, and I hope that this has been valuable for you. Father?

Fr. Stephen: This episode, maybe even more than some of the previous ones, especially where we started out, was in kind of some rarefied air: dig sites from the Neolithic and Chalcolithic periods, with names we can barely pronounce in Turkish. This may seem kind of disconnected, and this isn’t just that I should be allowed to shoot my mouth off, and I should have a call-in show, and everyone should listen to my interesting opinions about fascinating old historical stuff, because, frankly, other than the handful of nerds like me, who would be expected to care about what things were like in 10,000 BC?

But the reality is this cuts a big part of our mission in this podcast as a whole, and we’ve talked before about how disconnected modern and post-modern life is, how it’s sort of digitally disconnected, and how disconnected just from reality we’ve become, and how this has affected how we view meaning and our lives and the world, how it’s affected human morality, human sexuality, the human understanding of God and of religion—this sort of disconnection.

There are four main ways that humans interact with reality. The first one’s language, and we’re pretty good at that. We’re very much in our heads; we’re very linguistically oriented. When we go to worship services, in the Orthodox Church or elsewhere, we focus really hard on the words and try to determine what they mean. Then there’s music and art are the next two, and those have been lost to varying degrees, and we try to rediscover them. But the fourth one has almost been completely lost by modern humans, and that’s ritual. Ritual is not just smells and bells—we were talking about incense. It’s not just a performance, a sort of theatrical performance that I enjoy watching. It’s not something that induces an emotional experience in me. It’s a way of connecting with reality, and that’s why we see that worship and especially sacrificial worship, especially sacrifice, this community-building around sacred and shared meals and hospitality, is something that is basically human.

The earliest humans we can find evidence of were practicing it. Humans today can still practice it if we find our way back to it. And this is a way for us to reconnect with the whole element of reality to which we are least now connected, which is the spiritual reality around us.

One of the questions we get asked a lot is: Okay, I believe what you’re saying on the show is true, but how do I really connect with that? Ritual is the way. When we attend Orthodox Church services as they’re conducted, this isn’t just something that’s being presented to us to watch or to hear or to think about; it’s something to participate in, and that participation will produce actual communion. It will make us into a community with one another. It will bind us together with our fellow Christians, and it will bind all of us as Christians and our Christian communities together with our God, with our Lord and God and Savior Jesus Christ.

That’s what this is all aimed at, and so it’s not just about me showing off interesting stuff I learned from books about Neolithic religion and boring lectures I sat through that you don’t want to. It’s about finding our way back into reality and reconnecting with it and reconnecting with God in a real, experiential way, so that all of this becomes real and true to us, and not just something we think or believe.

Fr. Andrew: Well, that is our show for tonight. Thank you for listening, everybody. If you didn’t get a chance to call in during the live broadcast, we would love to hear from you either via email at lordofspirits@ancientfaith.com, or you can message us at our Lord of Spirits podcast Facebook page. We read everything, but cannot respond to everything, and we do save what you send for possible use in future episodes.

Fr. Stephen: Join us for our live broadcasts on the second and fourth Thursdays of the month at 7:00 p.m. Eastern, 4:00 p.m. Pacific, when hopefully in the future I will not be picking up Mexican radio on my microphone. [Laughter] Also, if you’re on Facebook, like our Facebook page and join our Facebook discussion group.

Fr. Andrew: And leave reviews and ratings, but, most importantly, share this show with a friend whom you know is going to love it.

Fr. Stephen: And finally, be sure to go to ancientfaith.com/support and help make sure we and lots of other AFR podcasters stay on the air.

Fr. Andrew: Thank you very much, and may God bless you always.