Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick: Greetings, giant-killers and dragon-slayers! You are listening to The Lord of Spirits podcast. My co-host, Fr. Stephen De Young, is with me from Lafayette, Louisiana, and I am Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick in Emmaus, Pennsylvania. This is a pre-recorded episode, so we’re not taking any calls this time.

Lord of Spirits is brought to you by our listeners with help from the Theoria School of Filmmaking. Theoria School of Filmmaking is the first Orthodox film school. The primary instructor is Jonathan Jackson, a faithful Orthodox Christian speaker, writer, and five-time Emmy Award winner. To learn more about Theoria, please visit theoriafilm.org; that’s t-h-e-o-r-i-a film dot org. And that’s our commercial.

Fr. Stephen De Young: I think you’re doing that backwards.

Fr. Andrew: You think so?

Fr. Stephen: Yes. Like, it needs to be: “—is brought to you with help from Theoria School of Filmmaking—and listeners like you.”

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Hey, I didn’t write the script!

Fr. Stephen: That, to me, is the correct order.

Fr. Andrew: And listeners like you. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Yes!

Fr. Andrew: Well, so, in many of our past episodes, we have brought up various pagan deities, including gods associated with thunder and lightning, Baal and Zeus foremost among them, but with the occasional mention of good old Thor as well. But we’ve never focused directly on them to give a rounded-out overview of who they are and how the people of God have responded to them and even continued to tell their stories. So in this episode we’re actually going to do that. We’re going to move through these three basically chronologically in terms of how biblical and subsequent Christian history treat them: Baal, Zeus, and then Thor.

So, Fr. Stephen, who exactly is this Baal we hear so much about, especially in the Old Testament? What does that name even mean?

Fr. Stephen: He’s this guy.

Fr. Andrew: He’s just this guy, you know. [Laughter] President of the universe…

Fr. Stephen: Hangs out. Sort of Vice President, eventually. Yeah, we’re going to talk about Baal. Insert Baal puns here. Don’t Baal out on our show before we’re done.

Fr. Andrew: Here we go. Strung together with Baaling wire and duct tape.

Fr. Stephen: Mm, yeah, that’s— Even if you get sent to prison, don’t pay Baal.

Fr. Andrew: There you go. Yeah, never pay Baal. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: And of course, technically, it’s pronounced Ba’al, but if I have to pronounce it Ba’al every time all episode, I’m going to feel, like, super pretentious.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] That never stopped you before.

Fr. Stephen: I’ve watched— I don’t know if you’ve watched Sandman on Netflix yet.

Fr. Andrew: No, no.

Fr. Stephen: But every time they say Constantyne, I’m like: Seriously, people? I mean, I know you’re British, but, seriously, people? So we’re just going to say Baal. We’re going to say Baal, Baals plural. People are just going to have to deal with it.

So Baal, we have to differentiate between Baal as title and Baal as proper name, because Baal or Ba’al means—or meant, in its earliest here—just sort of lord or master. Once you get into Imperial Aramaic—and it’s called Imperial Aramaic that was sort of the lingua franca of the first Persian Empire—it starts being used more—it’s still used in that way, but it’s often used for “husband,” like head of the household, paterfamilias.

Fr. Andrew: The master of the house.

Fr. Stephen: And there are still, I guess, some related words in Arabic that are used for “husband” kind of thing. But I’m not qualified to give you the details of that, but I’ve had some conversations recently.

It also came to be used in various forms of late Hebrew and Aramaic to mean “master” in the way that we use “mister.” People may not be aware of that, that “mister” and “missus” come from “master” and “mistress.”

Fr. Andrew: Right, and modern Greek, you still call people Kyrios and Kyria, which is “lord” and “lady.”

Fr. Stephen: And “sir” comes from “sire,” and all that. So it was used kind of that same way. For example, the famous founder of Kabbalism, they call him the Baal Shem Tov, and you’re like: “Wait, Baal? Why are they calling this Jewish guy Baal?” Well, it’s being used as that “master,” in the same way that Syriac “Mar” or “Mor” gets used. Sayidna means “master.”

Fr. Andrew: Right, “our master.”

Fr. Stephen: We call our bishops “Master.” So it’s in that kind of sense. “Baal” can just kind of function in that kind of way. In the Old Testament, it’s usually functioning in that kind of way when it’s used in the plural.

Fr. Andrew: Baals.

Fr. Stephen: Right. So you’ll see: “Israel ran after the baals.” The idea there is it’s just being used to refer to pagan deities in general, who are called various things. But that’s using it more as a title.

But there’s also evidence from very early on—so not only all of our Ugaritic evidence like the Baal cycle—so we’re talking about the second millennium BC—where this starts being used as a personal name. In the same way that we’re going to see “El,” which is just sort of the generic early Semitic word for “God” in general, gets used as a proper name for one particular pagan deity, “Baal” starts to be used as a name for one particular pagan deity. This god is found as having other names in other places. The most closely—“allied” isn’t the right word, but the most closely derivative one is the god Hadad in Syria.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, which— I mean, is that— I know the name “Haddad” means blacksmith in modern Arabic. Is that related at all?

Fr. Stephen: That’s spelled differently. No, it’s spelled differently. And I’m going to pronounce this the Southern way. When you see— You’re reading the Old Testament and you come upon “Ben Hay-dad,” that’s the son of Hadad, the son of this deity who’s the king in Syria. We know this is the one that’s most closely allied because, in the very early period, the very early Canaanite period, where Baal is just starting to become a proper name for this deity, there is Ba’al Hadda: is the way he’s referred to. It’s sort of very early what would be now called Phoenician sources, sources in the Levant. We find this Ba’al Hadda who ends up just being referred to as Baal by the Phoenicians, and just being referred to as Hadad by the Syrians.

Fr. Andrew: Got you. So there was this clear sense that this was one person, one deity, and they’re kind of using two different names for him.

Fr. Stephen: Right, that there was sort of an original name that incorporated both. Baal-Hadda, Ba’al Hadda. This is the Lord Hadad, so one started calling him the Lord, and the other started calling him Hadad, by his proper name. And then within that, we’ve talked about the use of the word “hypostasis” to describe—and we’re not going to go back into the discontinuities with the doctrine of the Trinity now, but the word “hypostasis” is used to describe the way in which sometimes within these pagan sources you have gods in different places that are treated as aspects or versions, hypostases, of the same god; and then there are other gods who are treated as different gods.

Fr. Andrew: And there’s potentially infinite localizations with these pagan peoples.

Fr. Stephen: So the difference would be, for example, you have Artemis the way she’s depicted in Athens, which is as this huntress, and then you have Artemis the way she’s depicted in Ephesus, with all the fruit hanging off of her, Artemis of the Ephesians, the Ephesian Artemis. Those were seen as being the same goddess, but neither of them were seen as being the same goddess as Hera or Athena or any other. So it’s not that sort of all the pagan gods just devolve back into hypostases of one male and one female god; it’s that there’s this variety of spirits and gods, and then they appear in various forms or manifest themselves in various forms in different places in different cultures at different times.

And so what you end up with is they would see, for example, Baal and Hadad, and when we read about Ba’al Peor, often you’ll see a place name attached: the Baal of this place. These are all seen as hypostases of the same god. They didn’t think that the Ba’al of Peor and the Ba’al of Tyre were two different spirits. They said these are two manifestations or local versions of the same kind of spirit from the pagan perspective.

So, that said, Baal is part of a family of gods.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, a super dysfunctional family! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Yes, a very dysfunctional family. And this family tree does not branch a lot. [Laughter] Baal’s father is El, which as we were just mentioning—that’s just the word for god.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, Semitic word for god.

Fr. Stephen: So there’s “god” and “lord” being used as proper names here, essentially: God and his son, Lord. But then Baal also has a sister named Anat, whom we’ve talked about a few times before. Not only his sister, she’s also his wife.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah…

Fr. Stephen: And she’s also kind of crazy, as we’ll see more examples of.

Fr. Andrew: You don’t have to hedge it. She’s super duper crazy! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. She’s out of control. So that’s sort of his immediate family tree, and, as we mentioned: not a lot of branching there. They’re keeping it close together. So the Baal cycle, which is our earliest and really only sort of comprehensive story of Baal, of this god and his antics, comes as we mentioned on the show before from the city of Ugarit, which was destroyed right before the Bronze Age collapse, so probably was an early part of the Bronze Age collapse. So this is the text— This is of course on tablets. Ugaritic, even though it’s a Semitic language and it’s very close to Hebrew, was written in cuneiform. So this was written on tablets in cuneiform, and as we’re going to see in a minute not totally undamaged; it’s not totally intact.

Fr. Andrew: And we should say that Ugarit— I mean, we mentioned this before, but just to remind, especially for those people who don’t listen to every single episode, Ugarit is roughly near the modern city of Latakia in Syria. And the ruins are there; you can go see them.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, Ras Shamra is the name of the place now, where Ugarit was dug up, the city-state. And the Baal cycle is kind of, like one of our episodes, in three parts. [Laughter] There are sort of three halves, three sort of movements. And it’s the middle one that’s got some damage, where everything isn’t totally clear. We’ve talked about all three of these parts at various times on the show before, but just to kind of go through them again to get— because this time we’re focusing in on Baal, and sort of where those different Baal traditions are going to go when we get into Greek and even later European sources.

The first part is sort of about Baal’s insurrection. This is: Baal and his dad are not the bosses; they’re part of this big council of gods. And the people currently in charge are Yam, the sea, as representing sort of chaos, and Nahar, which means river. So there’s King Yam and Prince Nahar. Yam is sort of the most high god who’s in charge, and then Nahar is sort of his son who is the one who presides over the council over the gods.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, the right-hand man.

Fr. Stephen: And Yam also has a couple of, as we’ve talked about before, Lotan and Rahav: he has these sort of sea-beasts: Leviathan-Lotan, water dragons, whom he’s going to end up siccing on Baal during this insurrection and that kind of thing. But so these are sort of not only the previous people in charge, but these are forces of chaos, chaos and destruction.

Baal tries to start this insurrection; he’s trying to fire up all the other gods to go and help him in his revolution. These messengers—the word’s literally the same word as “angel”; it’s malak—are sent from Yam and Nahar, and instantly all the other gods except Baal literally put their heads between their legs: bow down on the ground and are like: “Oh, no, we’re not doing nothing!”

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. “We’re not with them!”

Fr. Stephen: So then Baal calls them all out as wussies and gives them all this rah-rah speech. “No, we can do it!”

Fr. Andrew: Baal the motivational speaker. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, and part of that is him saying repeatedly, “Lift up your heads, O ye gods,” meaning: “Quit bowing down before these lackeys of Yam and Nahar. We need to go and win one for the team so they won’t call us the Bad News Bears any more.” [Laughter] And so of course they ultimately have this insurrection. Baal “totally” wins, “totally” defeats Yam and Nahar, “totally” makes his dad the boss instead of Yam, and he takes Nahar’s place in the council of the gods.

Now what’s interesting here is that, despite El always sort of being there in the background and being the most high god, he doesn’t really do anything.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, he doesn’t show up. I mean, does he show up anywhere in the Baal cycle?

Fr. Stephen: Well, he kind of shows up later, but he’s not the one doing things and motivating things. And he’s not even the one really being worshiped. It’s Baal who’s the focus of the worship in the temples, even though he’s technically in this sort of second position. So this is part of the phenomenon that we talked about way back in the long-ago time, in the early episodes of the show, when we were talking about how— when we were talking about the tower of Babel, and we talked about how, just anthropologically, when you study the origins of religion, you see sort of a primitive monotheism—what we would call primitive monotheism, the idea of there being one kind of major central most high divine figure, in addition to other spirits, but who is over the top, that that most high god figure sort of retreats into the background in favor of the worship of what are considered in the stories to be lesser sort of spirits. And we talked about sort of why that seemed to happen from an anthropological perspective, and then also obviously from the story we’re told in Genesis 10-11. But so that happens with El, too. We can see that here with El.

So this story of Baal’s insurrection gets kind of rewritten a couple of times in the Old Testament. It gets what seems to very clearly be drawing on elements of this story, but flipping them on their heads. So one of them that we’ve talked about relatively recently on the show is in Ezekiel 28 in the prophecy against the king of Tyre. Baal was by that point firmly established as the god of Tyre, this central city in Phoenicia, and center of Phoenician life. And the king is seen as the son of Baal, sometimes literally. We talked about Ben Hadad. He’s seen as sort of the son, and that’s why in the prophecy in Ezekiel 28 it starts out pretty clearly talking about the king of the city and then slides very easily into the spiritual king of the city…

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and then it starts talking about this guardian cherub who was in Eden on the mountain of God, being thrown out.

Fr. Stephen: Right. And so that also describes an insurrection. It’s just that Baal doesn’t seem to have totally won… In fact, quite the opposite: he’s hurled down into the underworld.

Fr. Andrew: Not a great place to be!

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. So the other place that sort of takes some of these themes that we’ve talked about in one of our previous Paschal episodes, is Psalm 24 (or 23 in the Greek numbering), where that phrase, “Lift up your heads, O ye gods,” gets sort of borrowed and inverted to describe Yahweh coming and invading the underworld.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah: “Lift up your heads, O ye gates.”

Fr. Stephen: That Baal was cast down to. So it’s sort of, as he’s kicking in the bronze gates of the underworld, he’s mocking Baal’s rah-rah speech. [Laughter] “Oh, yeah, you totally won down here. Yeah, now you’re going to lose down here, too.” And we talked about how that’s ultimately fulfilled in Christ’s harrowing of Hades, and that’s how it gets into the Paschal ritual and other parts of…

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and Gospel of Nicodemus has Christ— has those words being said during the harrowing of hell.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, and it also gets into our liturgics of the Ascension, but we’ll talk more about that in a minute. So that’s sort of— That insurrection is round one, so then round two is Baal gets into a big fight with Mot, with death, and he has to fight Death because he “totally” won that other fight.

Fr. Andrew: Right, and Death lives down there, so… [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: And so part of what’s going on in a battle between Baal and Mot— So Baal, as a storm god, the primary element of sort of his godhood has to do with fertility.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, which may not occur to us as being a storm thing unless we’re farmers.

Fr. Stephen: Right. You need to get the rains in their season. And that was seen as sort of the masculine aspect, and then you have various goddesses associated with the earth, and that’s sort of the other fertility aspect. So metaphorically the rain comes down and sort of impregnates the earth and it brings forth life is the idea here. That was enacted in very literal sexual ways in the Baal cult. It was sort of enacted with shrine prostitutes.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, because we have to remember that all these religious stories, that there’s a religious participation in them, which often involves, as you said, a reenactment of some element of it.

Fr. Stephen: Right, in order to get the… That act is then the fertility of the land and the rains coming in their season. And Mot, on the other side, is not only death—I mean, that’s literally what he’s named: Death—nowhere near as cute as the one in— I’m just going to reference Sandman over and over again.

Fr. Andrew: I guess I have to watch it now.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] All you Neil Gaiman fans… But he’s not only sort of the god of death but also of sterility. So the idea of death is so closely associated with famine and with the desert and with a lack of… And if you don’t have the next generation of children, then your clan, your tribe, dies. So all of those ideas sort of surround Mot, and so that’s why that sterility element is directly opposed to Baal’s fertility element, in a way that we might not notice at first with a storm god. Why would a storm god and death have an issue? Zeus and Hades are bros, I mean.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] We’re not there yet.

Fr. Stephen: In this fight, as I mentioned, this section is the place where we have some breaks in the tablets.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, so we just don’t know what the text was.

Fr. Stephen: So we don’t have all the details. So we know that in this battle, Mot swallows Baal. It’s not clear if he’s dead. When Death swallows you, that makes it sound like you’re dead, but he could just be inside Mot and still alive or something. Because what happens is Anat, his sister-wife, shows up, and, in this order, cuts Mot in half—presumably to get Baal out—then runs the two halves through a sieve, then takes what she gets out of the sieve and grinds it up with a grindstone, a giant grindstone, and then takes that and throws it out as mulch.

Fr. Andrew: It’s like scattering ashes when someone’s been cremated. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, this is why cremation is pagan.

Fr. Andrew: This is why. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: So that happens, and this is described then in the text as Baal “totally winning” the fight with Mot.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. Now, how do you say, “Totally wins,” in Ugaritic?

Fr. Stephen: He “totally wins.” [Laughter] “Flawless victory.”

Fr. Andrew: Finish him!

Fr. Stephen: And then just decides to stay in the underworld anyway.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, right, like it’s beautiful beachfront property or something.

Fr. Stephen: Right. Now I should say, there are some people who hypothesize that this section—and again, I say “hypothesize” because there’s chunks missing—hypothesize that this has something to do with the transition from fall to winter to spring.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, I mean, you can see in Greek mythology there is this association of the underworld with that, with the kidnapping of Persephone by Hades.

Fr. Stephen: So there are people who want to read it that way. You can certainly see how you can get there with what we have. There’s also some points of discontinuity, like that it’s not that Baal emerges from the underworld and we have spring; it’s Anat comes and, you know, hacks up, mutilates, and mulches Mot after cutting the god into halves.

Fr. Andrew: The mulching of Mot. Yeah, that could be another… in the next year, for our Cherubim Zodiac tour, could be the Mulching Mot tour. Yeah!

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, get your Mot-mulch this spring. [Laughter] Yeah, so, I mean, could be. Kind of hard to tell for sure, though.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, we just don’t know. It makes some sense, but we just don’t know.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. So then the third part is about Baal building a palace. Baal needs a palace, because he’s, like, “totally won” all these fights. [Laughter] And so Anat is, like, on a roll and super mad at her dad/father-in-law, El, that he hasn’t built Baal a palace already, because he totally deserves one. [Laughter] And threatens to crack open his skull and murder her father if he doesn’t.

Fr. Andrew: Father/-in-law! [Laughter] Aaah!

Fr. Stephen: Yes. So Baal gets his palace, and this underworld palace gives us— Again, we’ve talked before about chthonic Baal, bull Baal, and the relationship between that and Behemot, Behemoth, the bull. And I believed we briefly mentioned and will only briefly and euphemistically mention here that the particular stuff about chthonic Baal and the underworld has to do with him romantically coupling with a heifer, and that that was enacted ritually, not with two animals.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah… Parental advisory, everybody.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, in Ugaritic ritual life, because “early paganism was beautiful until Christianity ruined everything.” [Laughter] So this sort of culminates in the enthronement of Baal, in his palace, by El. And so this here, this is how, by the way, the Psalm 24 (23 in Greek) material ends up with our— in our Ascension lyrics.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, because it’s said in a lot of the— I think it’s in the exaposteilarion for the Ascension, it says— It’s calling to the angels: “Lift up the gates, because the King of glory is entering.”

Fr. Stephen: And the idea here is—again, this isn’t contradicting the other—this is also throwing it in Baal’s face.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah.

Fr. Stephen: That it’s not Baal, son of El, who gets enthroned; that it’s Jesus Christ, the Son of God, who gets enthroned—and so maybe he didn’t “totally win” that insurrection after all! [Laughter] This is also rewritten within the Bible in Daniel 7.

Fr. Andrew: Right, the big enthronement scene with the Son of Man and the Ancient of Days.

Fr. Stephen: The whole episode, where the Son of Man comes riding on the clouds, like Baal’s the cloud-rider, and he comes and is enthroned before the Ancient of Days, who is described there using a lot of El language. And so that’s again a correction, a corrective rewriting of the Baal story.

So a few other places where we see our pal, Baal, show up in the Old Testament: we mentioned and we talked not that long ago on the show about Ba’al Peor or Baal Peor, the Baal of Peor, the high place where Balaam helped instigate the “priestesses,” shall we say, of that high place to seduce men of Israel into participating in these fertility rituals related to Baal that resulted in a plague falling on the people, that resulted in Phineas becoming the high priest by putting an end to it.

Probably the most famous place, though, that Baal shows up is in the story of the Prophet Elijah, St. Elias.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Right, when he becomes the patron saint of sarcasm!

Fr. Stephen: Yes. And so Jezebel is the queen at that point. So Omri, as we’ve mentioned before—Omri from the perspective of— If you go by the archaeological record of the Ancient Near East, Omri is the greatest king of Israel, either the northern kingdom or the united kingdom, ever had. He expanded the territory the most, he was the richest, he was the most involved in trade. He established Samaria as the capital of the northern kingdom. And so part of that— They called Israel the House of Omri, all the neighbors. They didn’t call it the House of David; they called it the House of Omri, pretty much until it got wiped out by the Assyrians. So Omri was this very important king. His son was Ahab, and so part of his wheeling and dealing and deal-making and international trade and all that was marrying his son to the daughter of the king of Sidon, Tyre and Sidon being the two most important cities in Phoenicia, who had the trade empire of the Mediterranean at the time. So this was this major strategic alliance that he arranged.

So when we get to the time of Elijah, we have Ahab and Jezebel in charge. The “-bel” in Jezebel is Baal.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, so it’s a theophoric… Yeah.

Fr. Stephen: It’s a theophoric name, but it’s interesting, if you look at the dynamic in this story, because Ahab is technically the king…

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. [Laughter] But is he in charge?

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, it doesn’t seem to be doing a lot. It seems like Jezebel’s kind of the one doing all the stuff. And it’s interesting to notice how that parallels the relationship between Anat and Baal, like in the Baal cycle.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, so Anat isn’t— Some people have this phrase: “a jezebel woman.” It’s more that Jezebel is kind of an Anat woman.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. So Baal has this bloodthirsty sister-wife who seems to be the one doing most of the hacking and killing and threatening and bloodthirsty stuff and all this in the Baal cycle, and he’s a little more of a passive character at points, even though he’s supposed to be, you know, sort of the king of the gods. And we see this kind of enacted with Jezebel and Ahab, where Ahab’s just kind of like: “Uh, okay. All right…” And she’s running around, slaughtering prophets of Yahweh.

So she sees—and this is going to be important later—she sees the cult of Yahweh, shall we say, the worship of Yahweh— I think it’s fair in Israel to call it the cult of Yahweh, because the way Yahweh was being worshiped in the northern kingdom, remember, is based on Jeroboam, son of Nebat, the first king of the northern kingdom, who set up golden calves at Bethel and Dan.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. It was an idolatrous approach to worshiping Yahweh.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, so they are worshiping Yahweh, kind of; they’re just doing it in a very pagan way that he commanded them not to do it. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Over and over. Like, this is job one. Job one!

Fr. Stephen: And so Jezebel’s violently opposed to that, even. But most especially, her target is the prophets, because the prophets of Yahweh stood outside of that sort of official religion. You see some clashes.

Fr. Andrew: They weren’t the priests up at the high places. These were the guys kind of out in the wilderness.

Fr. Stephen: Right. So she wasn’t keen on the worship of Yahweh in general, but at least she could kind of control the official stuff, whereas the prophets were sort of wild cards as her opponents.

Fr. Andrew: As prophets tend to be.

Fr. Stephen: We’ve talked about it. That’s the prophetic role. They stand kind of outside that system. So she is all about promulgating this fertility cult of Baal. So the story of the showdown with Baal starts earlier than most people— Most people go directly to Mount Carmel, but it’s important to the story that that’s not actually where it starts. Where it starts is when the Prophet Elijah comes walking into the throne room and says the equivalent in Hebrew—because it’s really rough Hebrew—of “not gonna rain no mo’.” [Laughter] And then leaves! No more rain. Peace out.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, which— You know, if you’re a Baal-worshiper, you believe that Baal controls the rain.

Fr. Stephen: Right, that’s the whole point of the fertility cult—is you’re going to get the rain to grow your crops with Baal. So then it stops raining. And Jezebel has her Baal priests doing all their Baal-priest stuff, doing all the rituals—doesn’t rain, doesn’t rain, doesn’t rain, doesn’t rain. Meanwhile, St. Elias is hanging out in the Kidron Valley being fed by probably ravens. I don’t know if I’ve mentioned this on the show before. Here’s another “Ruin Your Sunday School!”

Fr. Andrew: Okay! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: It is entirely possible to read the consonants there, if you take out the Masoretic text’s vowels, that he was being fed by Arabs.

Fr. Andrew: Wha— Oh! I’ve heard of this before! Yeah! [Laughter] That’s fun.

Fr. Stephen: But, you know, our iconography depicts ravens, so we’ll go with that.

Fr. Andrew: We’re going to go with that. They’re Arabic-speaking ravens! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Sometimes the Masoretic vowel points are correct.

Fr. Andrew: Right, probably most of the time.

Fr. Stephen: To all you opponents of the Masoretic text. But he’s there being fed; he’s got water: he’s okay. So the final culmination, then, that’s— Really sort of the opening battle is: “Hey, this whole fertility thing he can’t really deliver on,” which is sort of the main thing.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. “Your god is weak!”

Fr. Stephen: But then sort of the final battle is what happens at Mount Carmel. And the final battle is related to who controls the thunderbolt. Thunderbolts and lightning, very, very frightening. So this is sort of the symbol of Baal’s power, and I know I’ve already ruined this Sunday school on the show before, but if you haven’t heard that episode, I’ll ruin it for you now. And that is that the fire from heaven that they’re talking about on Mt. Carmel with Elijah and the prophets of Baal, that’s lightning.

Fr. Andrew: Lightning. It’s not some big fiery spiral like you see in the movies.

Fr. Stephen: There is no word for electricity, because, you know, lightning strikes: it sets things on fire. It comes from the heavens.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, because obviously…

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. So this is about who controls the thunderbolt, the symbol of his power. So he can’t deliver on the fertility thing, so let’s go straight for his manhood, for his power. And this is why then you get the prophets of Baal trying to get him to throw a thunderbolt and light their sacrifice on fire, and you get all the great sarcasm of “maybe he’s going to the bathroom; maybe he’s on vacation.”

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] On a trip!

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] And then you get Prophet Elijah doubling down and soaking everything with water and filling a moat of water around the— and all this. And then still it gets kablooied by the thunderbolt [that] comes. And then—that’s not the end of the story—then it starts raining. Then it starts pouring down rain.

Fr. Andrew: And that’s after all the people all say Yahweh is God.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, so he is the One who has the ability to do that and controls this, not Baal. So doesn’t deny that Baal exists, just denies that he’s worthy of being worshiped, because his track record is a series of losses, a series of stunning losses. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Big humiliation, yeah.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and then the other place where we read him briefly is in a story that’s part of the Daniel traditions. Where exactly it is in the book of Daniel, etc., will vary, depending on your version of the book of Daniel. Even if it’s in Daniel will depend on your version of the book of Daniel. But in the story of Bel and the dragon, the “Bel” there, as with the name “Jezebel” is the Neo-Babylonian incorporation of Baal sort of into their pantheon.

We talked before about how pantheons don’t sort of really exist, like it’s not like, you know, the Greeks were all sitting around and they all believed there were these twelve guys and ladies hanging around on Mount Olympus, like people had been up there and looked around.

Fr. Andrew: You mean it’s not like on Clash of the Titans?

Fr. Stephen: No.

Fr. Andrew: Aw, man!

Fr. Stephen: No, either version. [Laughter] But so what happened was individual places and clans and tribes and cities had their individual gods, and as they form alliances and as these larger units, especially empires, get established, they then incorporate the various deities and spirits. And so you’ll see… For example, just in Mesopotamia, you’ve got southern Mesopotamia is Sumer, northern Mesopotamia is Akkad. For a few millennia BC, which one of those was in power sort of goes back and forth. As it does, you find these stories of their gods, where some of their gods had become the most high god and then aren’t any more and get replaced by somebody else. That’s because different cities come and rise and fall in power in different political realities. So they believed that those political realities reflect these sort of spiritual realities, that there’s a direct relationship.

When Nabopolassar and his son, Nebuchadnezzar (or Nebuchadrezzar is actually more accurate: Nabu-kudurri-usur)...

Fr. Andrew: Nabou-chodo-nosor? [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: ...as they put together what becomes called the Neo-Babylonian Empire— It’s called “Neo-Babylonian” because of course Hammurabi’s Babylonian Empire was more than— well, about a thousand years before that. As that empire gets put together, they not only have the traditional gods of Sumer and Akkad and Babylonia, but they expand to the west, and so they start incorporating these Canaanite traditions and deities into their— And so Bel— Baal gets brought in as Bel, and then there’s a whole… The Neo-Babylonian Empire only lasts about three generations. There isn’t a lot of time for stuff to happen, but there’s very clearly an attempt being made to try to assimilate Bel and Marduk together.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and I recall in the Baal and the dragon text that’s in the Greek Daniel… I can’t remember off the top of my head which king it was—goes to worship Baal, specifically to kind of connect to him as the local god.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, and so Bel and Marduk… Like, Marduk has a very similar succession myth story to Baal is the issue. And so there’s sort of this attempt: “Well, are they the same guy, maybe?” Like “How do we fit this together? How do we assimilate this west Semitic stuff into our east Semitic stuff?” But, again, it doesn’t last long enough for that to fully happen. But the worship of Baal in some of those areas in what’s now Lebanon, Syria, what’s now Iraq, Mesopotamia, continues until the second or third century AD.

Fr. Andrew: Wow! That’s… wow.

Fr. Stephen: And we have classical sources, including priests, who write about it and describe it at that late stage.

Fr. Andrew: Wow. That’s even with Romans present in all those areas.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. And so in that late stage, of course, it’s assimilated with a lot of back and forth. There’s been back and forth assimilation with a lot of Greek stuff—which will lead us into our second half.

Fr. Andrew: Exactly. All right, we’re going to take a short break, and we’ll be back with Zeus! See ya..

Fr. Andrew: Welcome to the second half of our episode on thunder gods. Normally we would start to take your calls, but this is a pre-recorded episode, so no calls for this particular episode. So we just wrapped up talking about Baal and how Baal worship continued on into— a couple of centuries into after Christ. And there were classical commentaries on some of that, connecting to the ancient Greco-Roman world. So now we’re going to talk about Zeus. So what’s the deal with good old Zeus, Fr. Stephen? [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Yes. Well, we have to disambiguate here. Zeus is not to be confused with Dr. Zaius who was an orangutan who bears an uncanny resemblance to the Lawgiver but was never a Greek god.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Wow!

Fr. Stephen: There might be people from the ‘70s listening! Who knows.

Fr. Andrew: Wow.

Fr. Stephen: Not many, but somebody.

Fr. Andrew: Man, I haven’t thought about those movies in a long, long time!

Fr. Stephen: Masterpieces! At least, the first couple. At least the first one.

Fr. Andrew: At least the first 20 minutes—no.

Fr. Stephen: No. No, the first one was pretty much all that. Written by Rod Serling, most people don’t know.

Fr. Andrew: I feel like Charlton Heston is a thread that runs through a lot of our conversations, kind of in the background, you know.

Fr. Stephen: Well, yeah, if I can find a way to work The Omega Man into this… [Laughter] The Omega Man is the worst remake of that story, by the way.

Fr. Andrew: Oh. I haven’t seen that one.

Fr. Stephen: I Am Legend, the story by Richard Matheson, has been adapted into film three times: once as The Last Man on Earth with Vincent Price, which is actually the closest adaptation of the actual story; once as The Omega Man, starring Charlton Heston, which has very little to do with the actual story; and third is I Am Legend with Will Smith, which the alternate ending, if you watch it with the alternate ending, is decently close to the original story—[which] the theatrical ending is not.

Fr. Andrew: I have not seen any of those films, even the Will Smith one.

Fr. Stephen: You are missing out. Richard Matheson is an unsung writing hero.

Fr. Andrew: Okay.

Fr. Stephen: He wrote most of your favorite episodes of Twilight Zone. He wrote Somewhere in Time.

Fr. Andrew: Oh, Somewhere in Time with Christopher Reeve—

Fr. Stephen: Chris Reeve, yeah.

Fr. Andrew: And Jane Seymour!

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, he wrote that.

Fr. Andrew: My mother, God rest her soul, she loved that movie. So I watched it a few times when I was young! [Laughter] Yeah.

Fr. Stephen: Yes.

Fr. Andrew: Wow. That’s a throwback right there.

Fr. Stephen: We’ve gone a bit far afield. Research the works of Richard Matheson, listeners.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Back to Zeus!

Fr. Stephen: You’ve got to do something in between episodes of Lord of Spirits! You could read the works—or watch the film works—of Richard Matheson.

Fr. Andrew: There we go.

Fr. Stephen: But now, to Zeus. He’s loose. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: He is, really, in so many ways! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Yes, on the loose, running amok. As we mentioned before on the show, within this weird construct—that I think is generally bogus—of Western civilization, Greece is often seen as sort of the first Western civilization. It is more accurately seen as the last Ancient Near Eastern civilization.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, you’ve said it before, and it always generates a little round of questions. “Why is he saying that!?” [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: “To stick it to the Greeks!” [Laughter] No.

Fr. Andrew: To classical Greeks.

Fr. Stephen: I don’t know if that’s bad for the Greeks. I don’t think that’s bad.

Fr. Andrew: I don’t think so either.

Fr. Stephen: The pinnacle of an earlier civilization, as opposed to the, you know, initial stage of another one. I’d rather be the pinnacle. But, yeah, here’s sort of some of the nitty-gritty of what that means and how that works. So there is… And a lot of this is tricky, because when we talk about early Indo-European stuff, we don’t have a ton of written sources.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, I mean, a lot of it is philological, which is… they sort of reconstruct Proto-Indo-European linguistic roots by looking at modern languages and kind of working backwards from there, with a whole lot of— If you look at linguistic texts, folks, you’ll see little asterisks sometimes in front of roots and stuff, and that means we don’t actually know that that root existed, but it’s our best guess, based on where those languages went. So, like you said, there’s not a lot of written sources, because writing just isn’t around in that period. A lot of it is pretty good conjecture from working backwards from later instantiations of things. But again, it’s conjecture. We don’t really know. We’re just kind of making a guess based on: “Okay, we see all these civilizations that are kind of outgrowths of Indo-European civilization that seem, for instance, to have the idea that cows are sacred, and so we work back from there. And oh, by the way, here’s an archaeological dig that has a bull’s head in it. So, okay, maybe they worshiped some kind of bull deity.” That’s the idea. That’s how it goes.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. And the stuff we do have tends to be very specific. So we have Sanskrit sources in India, but how close together culturally, really, are the early Minoans and the people of the Indus River valley?

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, we don’t super know.

Fr. Stephen: Because geographically, obviously, a lot has happened in terms of migration and stuff, so a lot may have happened in terms of language, beliefs, culture, all those things.

Fr. Andrew: Just think about the Indo-European language family. It’s the largest in the world. Just think about how different our language and culture as English speakers is from Persian speakers is from Latvian speakers is from… I mean, all of these are Indo-European languages and once represented a single culture probably.

Fr. Stephen: Mandarin Chinese…

Fr. Andrew: Well, Mandarin’s not connected, but, yes, right.

Fr. Stephen: So what we have is there’s an Indo-European layer sort of at the bottom of Greek culture, but everything we find essentially that distinguishes Greek culture from early Indo-European culture in general is all stuff that seems to have come out of Ancient Near Eastern culture, meaning what distinguishes Greek culture from the— I’m talking about from the earliest phases; I’m talking Linear B. Our earliest written Greek sources from the Mycenaeans. What distinguishes that from other Indo-European cultures is all stuff that’s been assimilated from their Ancient Near Eastern neighbors, which were far larger, more established, and more developed cultures at the time that Indo-Europeans migrated into the Hellespont and to western Asia Minor, when they sort of arrived there.

There are two sort of main places where this happens, and it happens in two different directions. At the Bronze Age collapse—so the 11th century BC—civilization collapses, at least in the area around the Mediterranean, but really worldwide.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. And, folks, if you’re interested in a really long exploration of this, we once again recommend the Fall of Civilizations podcast which has a whole episode on the Bronze Age collapse, hours long.

Fr. Stephen: There are a ton of factors, including—all the way back in the Bronze Age—climate change. Climate patterns changed, and it caused certain land that used to be used to grow food to no longer be able to grow food, which caused people to start migrating; and when people start migrating, that causes things like wars, because they usually migrate to some place where there’s already people. And so all kinds of things happen. There’s chain reactions; all kinds of things going on. But the whole thing sort of comes crashing down, and part of that is what’s referred to by historians as the Sea Peoples’ Invasion. They’re called the Sea Peoples not because they’re like—

Fr. Andrew: Mermen? [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: —the Sea Monkeys family in your old comic book.

Fr. Andrew: Oh man! I knew someone who actually bought those, who actually bought some and raised them. I was like: “Is that real?”

Fr. Stephen: He got, like, krill.

Fr. Andrew: Right!

Fr. Stephen: It’s because they came from the Mediterranean. They came from the sea, in boats. We don’t know where all of the Sea Peoples came from, but we know several of the groups were from Crete—which means Philistines are also Cretans—and other Greek islands and other places in that area, and migrated south. They attempted to invade Egypt. That didn’t go so swell, and they ended up settling along the coast of the Levant. And that’s where the Philistines come from; that’s most likely where the tribe of Dan comes from. They get assimilated. But, like the tribe of Dan—that gets partially assimilated, I guess; they stay kind of big. What happens over time—we see this with the Philistines archaeologically—[is] the very first tier of their pottery and their crafts and that kind of thing looks Mycenaean. It’s confirmatory of their origins.

Fr. Andrew: That’s part of how we know where they’re from.

Fr. Stephen: But then over the centuries, as they’re living in the Ancient Near East, their pottery patterns and methods change. These things change and shift to sort of mirror their neighbors. So they kind of assimilate into the Ancient Near Eastern culture, the Canaanite culture, over time. And part of how that happens is that the places where we found their oldest stuff is often in temples to their gods. They will have these Mycenaean pottery pieces and chariot pins made out of bronze, things made out of bronze—they can’t get bronze any more—or knives, household implements and stuff, made out of bronze, because this is this ancient technology that we don’t really have any more. And those things, by virtue of being old and reflecting their past and their heritage, come to be seen as sacred. And the ones that survive they start putting in their temples, as they’re older things.

There the assimilation goes one way, where any Greek aspect of their identity past a certain point disappears. So when you look at the story of Goliath, Goliath’s armor is still described as basically Mycenaean bronze armor. So he sort of has this ancient technology armor. It’s like he’s got a magic item in every slot from their perspective. [Laughter] Because they already couldn’t make any more of that, so it’s just this symbol that he represents, not just as a giant, but as someone with this armor, he represents this ancient, antediluvian civilization.

So that goes the one way. The greater influence on Greek culture goes the other way and primarily happens in Asia Minor.

Fr. Andrew: Modern Turkey, basically.

Fr. Stephen: Right. And so people tend to forget that, from a very early phase— This isn’t something that happened before with Alexander the Great when he came and conquered everything. That the western end of Asia Minor, of what’s now Turkey, were all Greek city-states. Troy—that’s where Troy is. That’s where Midas was king. That’s where Croesus was king.

Fr. Andrew: This is where, when St. Ignatius of Antioch at the beginning of the second century, possibly late first century, when he’s stopping and writing his letters from—and to, occasionally, as well—these are all Greek places.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, but they aren’t places Alexander took over and sort of Hellenized. They were always Greek.

Fr. Andrew: They were independent. Exactly.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. And if you go east in Asia Minor, over land there, you run into the Hittites. You run into Syrians. You run into… So at the border there, and through trade and cultural interaction, Greece sort of assimilates a lot of this from these older cultures.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, just like how in Cyprus you get raised eating kibbeh, pretty much. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, and this isn’t something like: “Oh, we’ve uncovered the truth through archaeology”; you get where Plato thinks Greek culture came from: Plato thinks Greek culture came from Egypt and from Babylon.

Fr. Andrew: Oh, crazy. I didn’t know that.

Fr. Stephen: Like, they were kind of aware of this. [Laughter] So they saw themselves as the successors of these Ancient Near Eastern civilizations, not as doing some new thing. That’s sort of what I’m talking about—this is the nitty-gritty—when I say that it’s the last Ancient Near Eastern civilization. These are sort of the concrete ways that influence takes place.

And the figure of Zeus, finally now, is one place where we see this, because the origin of Zeus’s name is in that Indo-European layer. So in that Indo-European layer, one of the constants you have is you have a divine sky and a divine earth, the sky generally depicted in masculine terms, the earth in feminine terms. This part—you find this piece of that Indo-European layer in later Greek stories in— The form of your first beings in Hesiod are Ouranos, the heavens, the sky; and Gaia, Gaya, the earth. Masculine and feminine; they mate. This takes the form of sort of a bull and a cow in a lot of the Proto-Indo-European stuff.

But so the names for the divine sky in these Indo-European languages, at the very early stage they’re *Dyeus and *Deywos. That becomes Deus in Latin, the word for “god” in general, and Zeus, Ze-us, in Greek.

Fr. Andrew: The Indo-European root—again, this is one of those asterisk roots, everybody—is spelled usually *Dyew—that’s the stem that means “sky”: *Dyew—but then you get *Dyewos is the D’ye-wos. D’ye-wos is sort of the— Again, it’s conjecture, but it’s very, very good conjecture, that that’s the ancient Proto-Indo-European—

Fr. Stephen: Best conjecture money can buy!

Fr. Andrew: Yes, right. [Laughter] That’s the ancient Indo-European root stem for “god” is *dyewos, derived from this word for “sky.” I should mention: modern Lithuanian, dievas. So it’s almost exactly like the Sanskrit and very, very close to the Indo-European.

Fr. Stephen: So, yeah, that’s the Indo-European layer, and that’s where the name gets plucked out of. But then you also have this Semitic tier, where you see, parallel to the El and Baal, where there’s this high god who’s the father of the other but it’s the other, the storm-god, who’s the one who’s really worshiped and is in charge of the council of the gods. And you see that manifest in the form of Kronos and Zeus.

Fr. Andrew: If you think about that in terms of imagery, you’ve got the sky and then storms coming out of the sky. You can see how the idea of storms and thunder and lightning is derived from this larger image of the sky.

Fr. Stephen: And Kronos [Chronos], too, by the way, because you use the constellations—the sun, moon, and stars—to tell time, to measure time. And that, of course, is Saturn and Jupiter if you’re more Latin-focused folks. Of course, that’s very obviously— The whole Roman thing is weird, because— [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Roman paganism, you mean.

Fr. Stephen: Right, yeah. Well, hey, everything about them! [Laughter] Have you watched Italian films? It’s bizarre. [Laughter] Anyway.

Fr. Andrew: All of our Italian film aficionados are unsubscribing from the podcast right now.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, all the Fellini fans have just written me off completely. Actually, Italian zombie movies are really good; I take it all back. Okay.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Previously unsaid sentences in human history! Whoo!

Fr. Stephen: So, because you have the Etruscans, who are the precursors of the Romans— And Etruscan religion is very much in the Indo-European mold, like a very straight Indo-European mold. Then once you get to something that even starts resembling the Romans, it’s just assimilated Greek religion.

Fr. Andrew: Right. They’re probably using these old Etruscan names, and it’s… Yeah.

Fr. Stephen: But in some cases, not even that. For example, “Jupiter.” Zeus and Jupiter are generally considered to be kind of the same person, but the name “Jupiter” is actually derived from the Greek Io-pater.

Fr. Andrew: Which [means] sky-father.

Fr. Stephen: Which means sky-father, but who, within Greek myth, is the ancestor of all humans.

Fr. Andrew: So, sort of like the Adam figure.

Fr. Stephen: Right. And, interestingly, is linguistically identical to Japheth, who, according to the genealogies following the flood of Noah in Genesis, is the father of the Indo-Europeans.

Fr. Andrew: There you go.

Fr. Stephen: So they all point to the same ancestor. It’s just, again, the Greek and then the Roman culture have made that ancestor divine.

So Zeus, then, has a birthplace. He actually has several, but he’s considered to have a birthplace. So this already is a different conception of the divine than what you find with, say, Yahweh.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, who has no beginning.

Fr. Stephen: And who has no birthplace, certainly.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, there’s not a—

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] And so there are several of these. Kronos and Rhea are Zeus’s parents in Hesiod’s Theogony. The first cave that’s identified as the birthplace of Zeus is on Crete. That’s the Dikteon Cave. That goes all the way back to Minoan civilization, and was a shrine, as Zeus’s birthplace. Later on, at different periods in history, Mount Ida and Mount Idaean also claimed to have caves that they claim are the place where Zeus was either born or hidden from his father. We’ll get back to that in a second.

So there are sort of— In what comes to be Zeus, as this spirit is perceived in classical Greek culture, there are actually three elements that get assimilated together. We’ve talked about a couple. One is that sky-god figure, that sort of fatherly sky-god, most high god figure. One of those is the storm-god or the thunder-god, who is the son of Kronos. And then the third part is—and this is what’s reflected in the birthplaces and in the caves and in the particular locations—an actual human king and founder figure within Minoan civilization on Crete. There are a few places here and there that actually refer to this—classical sources—that Zeus at some point had been human, had been a human, this founder figure.

So all three of those get assimilated together, and it’s that human king whom the memory is kind of preserved of that causes Zeus to be depicted in the way that he’s generally depicted, meaning as a human or a humanoid, in sort of human form. He’s sort of an old man’s head on a ripped young man’s body.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Right! That’s Zeus!

Fr. Stephen: That’s sort of how he comes to be depicted later. But that’s as distinct from— So we mentioned, way back in the long-ago time on the show, I know, that originally the Greek gods were originally theriomorph: they also had animal forms.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, like the Egyptian gods.

Fr. Stephen: Right. And so we mentioned then “cow-eyed Hera,” which, I mean… I’ve been corrected on that. I’ve made jokes on cow-eyed Hera not being an attractive image, but a bunch of random animé fans have told me that I’m just dead wrong. But I’ll leave that there.

Fr. Andrew: What!? Wow.

Fr. Stephen: It happened. It’s a thing that happened.

Fr. Andrew: No way.

Fr. Stephen: I was corrected by animé fans. I’m just reporting.

Fr. Andrew: Okay.

Fr. Stephen: But so the idea was that she had some kind of cow form. We talked about the bull-cow imagery. And so it is the assimilation of that human king into Zeus that causes him not to be depicted as a bull, like bull-Baal, for example. Even when Baal is in sort of a humanoid form, he often has bull horns in depictions. So this is what causes him to be depicted in this human way, this human king whom he’s kind of visually pattern after in most of our representations.

Part of the issue with understanding this and sorting out the traditions is that we get most of— When you read a book about Greek mythology—

Fr. Andrew: Yes, like Edith Hamilton, for instance, which is funny because the book is called Mythology, and it’s all Greek mythology, and then there’s, like, a half a chapter at the end about Norse mythology—and nothing else!

Fr. Stephen: Or like Bullfinch.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, Bullfinch’s. I mean, I grew up on this stuff! It’s a good starting point, but should not be an end point.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. Most of what you’re getting is Hesiod.

Fr. Andrew: Yes, Hesiod’s version of all this stuff.

Fr. Stephen: And a lot of it is from his Theogony, the origin of the gods, the birth of the gods. And he’s the one who puts together all these family relationships and relates all this stuff. Again, because people have tended to see Greek religion as if it was this united thing—“Oh yes, we believe in these twelve gods who formed a club and: the Olympians”—they take what Hesiod is writing: they sort of read it as if it were the Greek Bible.

Fr. Andrew: We should mention he’s seventh, eighth century BC, roughly contemporaneous with Homer.

Fr. Stephen: With Homer, so he’s definitely the earliest written source we have on this stuff, in any kind of systematic way. We have plenty of religious tablets in Linear B, but they’re just little ritual tablets, and a lot of times it’s ambiguous exactly what’s going on. Here’s what I mean by that; I’ll give you an example.

One of the ritual tablets from Knossos on Crete in Linear B is describing— It’s a ritual in which this young woman is taken and made basically a bride of Poseidon and is given to him. It’s kind of ambiguous exactly what they’re doing to her. It very much reads like they’re sacrificing her, but even that is kind of ambiguous? I mean, are they throwing her into the ocean and drowning her? [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Is she being used by a priest of the temple? There’s all kinds of possibilities.

Fr. Stephen: Is she being chained to a rock, and the kraken comes and eats her? [Laughter] It’s not totally clear! Or is she just— like, she’s giving up her life to serve as a priestess in the temple? There’s lot of ways you can go with it, and the language— All we have is this tablet.

Fr. Andrew: And everyone at the time sort of just knows what that means, because they’ve seen it.

Fr. Stephen: And we don’t have the stories and that kind of thing connected with it. So that’s what I mean when I say with Hesiod you get a kind of systematic portrayal at least. Most of the English summaries like Bullfinch’s or Edith Hamilton or whatever, they’re basically cribbing from Hesiod. They’re taking Hesiod; they’re putting it into more contemporary English and turning it into a straightforward English narrative. Nothing wrong with that, but what Hesiod is doing is not writing a single story; he’s making this sort of patchwork quilt out of all of the stories and religious forms from a whole bunch of different Greek city-states.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, which are inconsistent with each other.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, and tribes and clans. And he’s got these Indo-European bits and these Semitic assimilated bits that don’t quite match up, and all this. So he’s trying to then construct out of that one overarching story. This is, remember, how history was done in the ancient world.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, we’ve had this conversation before.

Fr. Stephen: We’ve now come and identified ourselves as this people, and so what is the story of all of us together as a people? And that’s got to be sewn together from all our individual stories, now that we’ve come together as this unit. So that’s what he’s doing.

And so how does he, then, for example, pull together this Kronos-Zeus, El-Baal, these two figures, and the Ouranos-Gaia, bull-cow, sky-earth—how does he pull all these things together? He uses the succession myth to kind of turn this into three generations of gods.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, but as far as we know, that wasn’t a thing before he did it.

Fr. Stephen: Right. These were separate traditions before he did it. And so he turns this into three generations of gods, where Kronos castrates Ouranos or Uranus, and then there’s the whole story with Kronos eating his children and gets fed a rock and Zeus gets hidden in the cave. And so that very much depicts it as— In Hesiod it’s very much Kronos versus Zeus. Zeus has to overthrow his father to become king of the gods.

Fr. Andrew: It keeps repeating, the succession myth.

Fr. Stephen: But we find attestations all over the place, including centuries later, like in Plato and in Philo of Byblos, that talk about Kronos and Zeus.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, so Kronos is kind of the chief god and Zeus as his right-hand man.

Fr. Stephen: As the one who presides in the council of the gods.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, exactly, that old Ancient Near Eastern pattern.

Fr. Stephen: That pattern like El and Baal. So that continues to exist. It’s not like everybody just says, “Oh, we’re all just going to go with Hesiod now.” That still exists. So you find Plato, in The Laws and in the Critias, he talks about how there was this Golden Age, when Kronos and Zeus were working together, governing the world. And so that’s a very different picture than what Hesiod gives, because Hesiod is finding ways to incorporate these multiple traditions together. Both of those traditions continue to exist separately, despite that sort of stitching. So we can’t take the English Greek mythology we’ve read and project that into the past as, like: “Oh, this is what the Greeks believed.”

Fr. Andrew: Like this single systematic religion that just—

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, like they read Hesiod— Like they’d have a reading from Hesiod when they got together to worship at the temple. We want to try to Christianize it, and it’s not remotely similar.

Fr. Andrew: I mean, that stuff is useful, but we’ve got to remember that’s just a starting point. Just because you’ve read that doesn’t mean you know that mythology.

Fr. Stephen: Right. Now to talk about some more Zeus traditions where there are parallels in the scriptures. I’ll go ahead and say it. Zeus is portrayed in a lot of the stories as a shape-shifting rapist.

Fr. Andrew: Ah, you know, that’s the thing. I’ll just say this right now. That’s the thing, that when— I mean, I have no problem taking shots at Neo-Paganism the more I study it, but that’s the thing like— There are Neo-Pagans who want to worship Zeus, and I’m like: You want to worship a shape-shifting rapist. You can’t get around that. This is even in the Edith Hamilton stuff.

Fr. Stephen: And you’re doing that to get away from the way Christianity has supposedly oppressed women.

Fr. Andrew: Right. Like, come on!

Fr. Stephen: “So we’re going to go worship Harvey Weinstein!” Like, what!? [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Augh. Sorry. Rant over for the moment. I’m just like: Come on, have you read it? Have you read the stories? Even the dumbed-down version for kids: he does not come off well. I remember hearing, though, when—I know, we’re off on this now—when the Hercules movie came out in Greece, apparently there were riots because of the way they depicted these Greek pagan traditions were so off: Zeus as a loving dad. [Laughter] Like, he is not anybody’s loving dad!

Fr. Stephen: Bogus. Yeah.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Zeus the shape-shifting rapist.

Fr. Stephen: Much more like Hercules: The Legendary Journeys, before Kevin Sorbo went insane. [Laughter] Yes, I just implied that it was only after that that he went insane.

Fr. Andrew: Where is Xena in all of this? Where is Xena: Warrior Princess!? [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Lucy Lawless… What was she in? She was just in something. She just acted in something.

Fr. Andrew: She was in Parks and Recreation.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah.

Fr. Andrew: Sorry, I need a moment here. [Laughter] Okay. All right. Zeus: the worst ever.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. But so those stories are ultimately the late Greek version, assimilation, of the origin of the giants, of the apkallu stories from Babylon. This is sort of the late form they take. Because what do you have? You have Zeus, this divine figure, going to mortal women, whom he gets a hankering for, and impregnating them, and they give birth to these sort of demigods and heroes—“mighty men of renown.”

Fr. Andrew: Genesis 6.

Fr. Stephen: This is the same kind of story. And one of the evidences, one of the connecting tissues here, is that the apkallu, for example, are all theriomorph.

Fr. Andrew: Meaning beast-form.

Fr. Stephen: Starting with the very first one, who is half fish. And you notice in these stories, when Zeus does this, for no apparent reason, with no apparent logic in the story, he transforms into some kind of animal.

Fr. Andrew: Right, yeah, it’s weird. There’s the swan… So Zeus is like a were-swan, a were-bull, and a were-snake. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: But yeah. I mean, it’s kind of counter-intuitive. If you’re a guy, yes, your head looks like an old dude, but you’ve got the ripped young body. And you’re going to go try and seduce a woman—you turn into a swan!? This is somewhat counter-intuitive.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. Leda’s the woman— Sorry, go ahead there.

Fr. Stephen: But it’s maintaining the same sort of theriomorph status of those divine beings in those older stories and retaining the fact that this is kind of a cross-species thing happening; that this is a mixture, an unclean mixture of things. So it’s a way— That shape-shifting element is a way of maintaining those stories, the older version of the story.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. It’s so weird, though. Don’t worship Zeus, people! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Yes. Worshiping Zeus is bad, m’kay? So, more giant stuff. You have not just through Hesiod, but you have this idea— And this seems to be common— I mean, you always have the— The succession myth sort of always has this. You find this also sometimes in other Indo-European later developments, too, where you have sort of two tiers of divine beings. But when you put that together with the succession myth, you end up with something like the Titans. You’ve got the Titans; you’ve got the gods. And the Titans are sort of this earlier tier of gods that sort of went awry. Of course, they get imprisoned in Tartarus. The one place in the New Testament where the term “Tartarus” shows up, it’s where St. Peter is referring to the place where the Watchers, the angels who sinned in Genesis 6, are imprisoned. That’s where he drops Tartarus. So St. Peter makes that direct connection.

So you have this earlier tier that’s imprisoned, but they were seen as the children of Gaia, the Earth. And so she is angry about it. There’s a lot of angry, violent women in ancient paganism. It’s not just Anat. Gaia sort of loses it. Hera’s always going around trying to kill of Zeus’s illegitimate progeny.

Fr. Andrew: And their moms. [Laughter] Or turn them into spiders or something—no, that’s not Hera.

Fr. Stephen: Their totally innocent mothers. And Gaia sort of becomes the mother of monsters in order to avenge the Titans, take vengeance for the Titans. So she brings forth the giants, which leads to the gigantomachy, and then finally she brings forth Typhon, who is sort of this giant beast that rises out of the sea and is made up of all these horrible animals parts, kind of like the— not the demogorgon on Stranger Things, like the actual one, the real one from Dungeons & Dragons. [Laughter] That’s the real one.

Fr. Andrew: That’s the real one. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: And Typhon is this beast from the sea that’s wreaking destruction on behalf of these fallen angelic beings, [which] shows up both in Daniel and Revelation in the form of the beasts; the theriomorph beasts that come up out of the sea are referencing this. And in the case of Daniel, it’s talking about the Seleucids, the Greeks; in the case of Revelation, it’s talking about Rome. And there again, subverting the story, where, in the mind of the Romans, for example, Rome, civilization, the greatness of Rome, reflects the divine, reflects their gods, who defeated Typhon, who defeated the giants. That’s sort of there, and so when St. John flips that around and says, “No, you guys are the chaos monster. Rome is the beast from the sea; Rome is the chaos monster; Rome is Leviathan. That’s whose power you represent. That’s the spirit you’re enacting in the world,” that’s a flip, and Daniel is doing the same thing with the Greeks and the other empires, other world empires whom he depicts. So there’s another place where Zeus stories hook up.

Another one that we’ve mentioned before on the show when we were talking about the apkallu and we were talking about Genesis 6 and sort of the revelation of this divine knowledge to humans is the Prometheus story. Now, notice, though, in the Prometheus story, who’s the good guy and who’s the bad guy kind of gets flipped. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Right. Prometheus is like an apkallu, giving that “secret knowledge” to human beings, fire or whatever. And humans love him for that! Thank you, Prometheus! But it makes the gods mad.

Fr. Stephen: So you have this divine being who reveals the gods’ knowledge to humanity. He here is the good guy, and the mean old god comes and imprisons him and punishes him for it eternally.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. It’s almost a Christian narrative.

Fr. Stephen: Except flipped.

Fr. Andrew: Except the good guys and bad guys are flipped, but yeah.

Fr. Stephen: Making a good example of pro-devil propaganda.

Fr. Andrew: Pro-devil propaganda, exactly. “No, this is good! This was good when he did this.” [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: And so, relatedly, another connection here is in— At the beginning of the book of Revelation, in the letters to the seven churches, there’s a letter to Pergamos or Pergamum, depending on whether you’re using the Greek or the Latin name, where St. John refers to them “living in the shadow of the throne of Satan.” And so if you’re ever in Berlin, you can go to the museum and see the throne of Satan, because it’s there.

Fr. Andrew: Right, they’ve got it.

Fr. Stephen: And that is the great altar to Zeus that was there that depicts in its carvings the defeat of the giants by Zeus, winning the gigantomachy. So again, this is how the Romans saw themselves. Their civilization had conquered the earth, the monsters that come out of the earth, and established order, civilization. And that was the place where, in that city— That was a famous altar, and any time the emperor or any of his generals were passing through, they stopped there, especially when they were on their way to the eastern campaigns, to offer sacrifices there. It’s belching forth smoke all the time.

St. John can very easily call it the throne of Satan even though it’s an altar to Zeus. We know the connection between altar, footstool, of the throne. We’ve talked about that before. And the reason he can do that is that by the time St. John is writing at the end of the first century—sorry, Preterists; St. Irenaeus tells us when it was written [Laughter]—we know that by that time the idea that Baal equals Zeus and therefore, for a Jewish person who had read the Hebrew Bible and knew that Baal equals the devil, the transitive property gives us Zeus equals the devil, and so these are all seen to be the same figure.

The reason that’s firmly established by the time we get to St. John at the end of the first century is that, way back in the fourth century BC, Alexander the Great had already kind of established it. So when Alexander the Great, in his push eastward, when he came into Syria, he came into one of the ancient shrines of Baal, and he publicly reconsecrated it and offered sacrifices there to Zeus Boanerges, which is roughly Zeus the Thunderer. In doing that, he was declaring that the spirit worshiped there who had been worshiped there as Baal was actually a hypostasis of Zeus.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, so they’re not really two different gods; they’re the same one and this is just the local instantiation.

Fr. Stephen: Right, this is the ancient localization of whom Alexander worshiped as Zeus and considered to be his dad in snake form.

Fr. Andrew: I was going to say, related to that, we got a question about that term, “Boanerges.” So David Thompson, who is just beginning as a seminarian at St. Tikhon’s Seminary—good luck to you, David—

Fr. Stephen: We hope you survive the experience!

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] That’s right. He sent in this question. He said:

Is the naming of James and John in Mark 3 to be Boanerges, sons of thunder, also a reference to the twin sons of Zeus, Castor and Pollux? Was there likely a temple nearby that Jesus was using for a pun? Do we have any hagiography to show James and John to be replacements, divine council-wise, for those gods?

That’s his question.

Fr. Stephen: The answer is: Yes.

Fr. Andrew: Yes, right! [Laughter] Yes to some of it but not to all of it, right?

Fr. Stephen: Well, yeah, yeah, yeah. That was a broad “yes.” [Laughter] This is said— If you look where it was said in Galilee, this was said in one of those areas where Zeus Boanerges had essentially become the name for Baal, where that sort of assimilation started by Alexander the Great had taken root. So Christ is kind of doing a pun. It’s not directly referring to Castor and Pollux, I don’t think. There are people who will try and go that far. I mean, you’ve got to write journal articles.

Fr. Andrew: Dissertations have to be—

Fr. Stephen: But I think that’s taking it too far because I think what Christ is doing is he’s actually chastising them with that title, because when you look at what instigates that, it’s that they want to call down fire from heaven, i.e., lightning, as we already said—they want to throw thunderbolts and blow up these cities for not having accepted Jesus and his message. So they’re like, “We want to wipe them out!” [Laughter] And I think we’ve mentioned on the show before the episode in Acts in Lystra where Ss. Paul and Barnabas get worshiped as Zeus and Hermes, that part of what’s going on in the background there is there’s a story that’s recorded in Ovid from that region where they believed that at some point in ancient times—it’s sort of, again, a late version of Sodom and Gomorrah—that Zeus and Hermes had come to that region and looked for a place to spend the night, and everybody told them to go pound sand except for this one elderly couple who welcomed them in. So the next day they rewarded the elderly couple by turning them into a tree—gratis—but everybody else, they destroyed.

Fr. Andrew: Right. “Yeah, let’s not have that happen again! Quick, here’s the gods!” [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Right. So what Christ is kind of doing here is pointing out that they’re imitating the wrong god in their attitude, because, remember, to be the son of something means to manifest those characteristics. You don’t want to be the son of Boanerges! [Laughter] That’s not who you want to be.

Fr. Andrew: Don’t act like Zeus, guys.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, he’s trying to move them away from the vengeance and more toward the mercy and the compassion.

Fr. Andrew: Exactly. All right, and with that we are going to take a quick break, and we’ll be back with Thor!

Fr. Andrew: All right, welcome back. It’s the third half of Lord of Spirits. We’re going to be talking about Thor now! This actually follows on really well, because everything we really think we know about Thor comes from the Christian era.

Fr. Stephen: From Stan Lee and Jack Kirby.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Yeah, from Stan Lee and Jack Kirby who— I think they’re both Jewish, aren’t they?

Fr. Stephen: Yes.

Fr. Andrew: Jack Kirby definitely.

Fr. Stephen: Yes. Everything after Kirby went to DC is apocryphal, however.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] It’s true.

Fr. Stephen: So, like, Mike Deodato’s leather Thor outfit: apocryphal.

Fr. Andrew: It’s like his Tertullian moment. He became a Montanist and just everything after that…

Fr. Stephen: Well, no, his DC work was good; but it’s just he left Thor. So Thor then drifted off into strange lands and places. He got new secret identities like Eric Masteron. It never made sense again.

Fr. Andrew: That said, everybody, I need you to— Whatever you’re thinking about Thor that has to do with Chris Hemsworth or the Marvel Cinematic Universe or even the old comics, you just need to set all that aside, because very little of it has actually to do with Thor in Norse mythology.

Fr. Stephen: I say thee: Nay!

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Right, exactly! Thor talks that way, but if you actually read the way he talks in the mythological sources, he’s kind of… not particularly a Shakespearean orator, sounds like something out of the King James Bible.

Fr. Stephen: Or faux Shakespearean orator.

Fr. Andrew: Right. And it’s almost like what we were talking about with those Roman gods earlier, which are basically the Greek gods with different names, mostly, although occasionally the same name—isn’t Athena “Athena” on both sides?

Fr. Stephen: Well, because Athens is Athens.

Fr. Andrew: Right, exactly. You can’t… Yeah. That the Marvel comics, Asgardians, the Aesir, as they are called in the actual sources, are very different characters, but they’re kind of using the Norse names. One of my little rants—I’ll just throw this out here right now—in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, you see Sif, the goddess, who—I don’t think she’s actually Thor’s wife in the movies, right? She’s Thor’s wife in the sources, and she’s a brunette in the films, but it’s like— We’ll get into this. I’ll get into this. I won’t go into—

Fr. Stephen: Well, Thor’s a blond.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, well, right! That’s also inaccurate! Well, anyway, I don’t want to get too ahead of myself about hair color. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Well, so Sif… There was a period of time where Sif was joined to Jane Foster the way Thor was joined to Donald Blake.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] So is that where she got her brunette hair?

Fr. Stephen: So Sif has been a romantic figure in terms of Thor in the comics.

Fr. Andrew: Okay, in the comics, yes. Anyways, just set most of that stuff aside. It’s not really super relevant, but it’s important to say that, not just because why would anyone take this stuff seriously anyway when it comes to mythological studies—

Fr. Stephen: How dare you.

Fr. Andrew: Right? [Laughter] I mean, I like them as stories. They’re fun!

Fr. Stephen: The Marvel version is the only one that’s still alive.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, okay. That’s true, actually, in a big way.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, take that.

Fr. Andrew: Well, yes, there is this Ásatrú thing which I’m not even going to go into right now, but I will get to that. But because you can sometimes see, for instance, on the internet— I just ran across a meme the other day which shows this picture of a Thor-figure: he’s got a hammer over his shoulder, and it says, “Your God was crucified on a cross, but mine has a hammer.” And so that’s the image that people have, and I think that’s largely derived from seeing Thor as a kind of superhero in the comics especially, but especially the movies is where a lot of people are encountering a character named Thor. So we should set that stuff aside.

As I said, almost everything that we “know” about Thor and the Norse gods is from Christians. Now, before I get into that, someone probably in the back of their head is saying, “Well, what about Tacitus? What about Tacitus with Germania!?” which is like first century. So Tacitus, who is this Roman historian, he wrote this text called Germania. And most of it is actually not about the gods; most of it’s about… It’s things that he has heard about the way the Germans live. Now, Germans for him is not like the modern nation of Germany; it’s those barbarians living up somewhere aways north of Italy and such. That’s what Germania is for him; it’s that area. Now, he never went there. He never went there. He is compiling sources. He’s apparently talked to some people who went there. So we should not consider him to be a reliable source.

The other thing is that he interprets a lot of it in terms of Roman language and culture, which, I mean, is totally understandable. That’s his perspective. But also the purpose of his text is actually to kind of critique Roman culture that was current to him at the time by depicting this sort of noble savage that was the Germans, the Germanic tribes, and how sort of pure and primitive they were, and look at how corrupt and decadent we are—which, I mean, he was certainly right about that part. [Laughter] The idea was: “They’re like we used to be, back during the Roman Republic days!” That’s what he was trying to do with that text. Anyway, if you’re going to read—

Fr. Stephen: It took 18 centuries for them to become that way.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] And the thing is that between that and the sources that are normally pointed to as the Norse mythological sources, there are 13 centuries. That is a long, long time. So we shouldn’t look at that text as being an accurate depiction of Norse religion. He, for instance, says that they worship Hercules, who might be a Thor figure at that point in Germanic history, Germanic pagan history? We really do not know. But he says it’s said that Hercules visited them and they have this altar to Hercules. Actually, he even mentions that they worship Ulysses, so it’s interesting that he shows them as worshiping as gods people that Romans and Greeks would have regarded as superhuman heroes—human heroes, but superhuman heroes, maybe semi-divine.

I just wanted to get that whole Tacitus and Germania stuff out of the way, and the other thing I’ll say about that is a lot of… like, frankly, the Nazis and people who were into that kind of thing have read Tacitus’ Germania as sort of proof of the glory and the ancient purity of that people have used it to very nefarious means. Tacitus would have had no idea that was going to happen with his text. I’m not saying you people shouldn’t read it. Just be aware if you do decide you want to read it, that that’s being used for that, too. But anyway, I would not take it as a good source for Germanic religion or mythology or something like that. There’s some interesting stuff in there for sure, but it’s not really where you’re going to go if you want to understand the sources of Greek mythology.

Okay, all that said, all the actually written sources that we have about Norse mythology are from Christians. Most of them are Icelandic. We’re talking 13th, 14th century, a lot of it, mostly 13th century. Why is that the case? Why is it so late? Certainly weren’t there people worshiping Odin and Thor and so on before all that? Yes. So, for instance, we’ve got St. Boniface in the eighth century [who] goes up there, chops down a sacred oak. There’s references to him in his Life confronting Germanic pagans. But we have nothing from that period from pagans. If you read saints’ Lives, they’re not going to tell you a lot of details about pagan mythology and religion. [Laughter] They’re just not there, because it’s not from that point of view. So that information is not there.

Why don’t we have that kind of information? Well, the reason is that, unlike the classical Greco-Roman world, northwestern Europe, which is where this stuff is happening, doesn’t really write very much at all. We have a few inscriptions on things, some bits scratched into rocks. We have helmets with people’s names, stuff like this, but the combined amount of texts that we know that were written by Germanic/Norse pagans is really— It probably could not even make up a paragraph or two, total! Like, that’s the actual amount of writing we have from them. So that’s why we don’t have it. Reading and writing and real literacy and manuscript production and all this kind of stuff comes into northwestern Europe with Christianity, so we simply do not have sources.

We do have some archaeological stuff, which, again— You find something that’s buried down in a bog or whatever, it’s not going to tell you much of a story. It’s not going to really tell you much about religious practices. Imagine a church that’s been buried for centuries and you dig it up: Are you going to be able to know how to celebrate the Divine Liturgy by doing that? No, you’re not. Even if you know that the Divine Liturgy was celebrated there. You’re just not— It’s not going to be there. You’re not going to have that information.

So what do they dig up in archaeology? Well, they dig up sacrifices sometimes, so they find armor and weapons and stuff like that, shoved down into bogs a lot of times. Occasionally they find sacrificial animals, but also sacrificial people, often with their throats cut. So there was animal sacrifice going on.

And the reason we know that some of these places were sacrificial sites to gods like Thor is because of place-names. So that’s one of the ways that ancient ways of thinking about a place are preserved over time are place-names. So you get— We’ve talked about theophoric people names, people [who] have names that are connected to the names of gods or include the name of the god; you have theophoric place-names. as well. Often a theophoric place-name means that that deity was worshiped in that place, that there was a sacrificial cult going on there. You mentioned, Father, Athens: that’s the place where Athena was worshiped, and so the city became named after her. So you’ve got a number of place—

Fr. Stephen: Thorville.

Fr. Andrew: What’s that?

Fr. Stephen: Thorville.

Fr. Andrew: That’s right! That’s exactly what you’re talking about. So there’s a number of places in Scandinavia that have names that include “Thor” in the name, or some variant thereof. Interestingly, though—

Fr. Stephen: Like “Thursday.” [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, although that’s more— Thorrithr is more of a— It’s actually a feminine name.

Fr. Stephen: Thursday, the day of the week.

Fr. Andrew: Thor’s day, right, sorry. I’m just going off so I’m not even hearing you. [Laughter] Interestingly, even though Odin is depicted as a king of the gods in the sources that we have, we don’t find too many theophoric place-names. with Odin’s name in them. So all indication that we do have is that Thor is the god who is worshiped the most from what we can tell. It’s possible that the idea of Odin being above all, above everybody else and worshiped the most is a later invention.

Fr. Stephen: Well, as we’ve talked about, being above everybody else doesn’t necessarily mean worshiped the most. It could mean the opposite.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah! In the background… We’re not talking about Odin so much today, but Odin shows up in a lot of sagas, which again are later Christian stories. He shows up as a god who likes to kind of meddle and poke things in the background.

Fr. Stephen: Wander around.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, he’s a wanderer—

Fr. Stephen: Sort of like Odysseus…

Fr. Andrew: Right, exactly. He’s associated with prophecy and aristocracy, with cross-dressing magic. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: We talked about that in the prophecy episode.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Exactly. Yes, this is totally a thing.

Fr. Stephen: Callback.

Fr. Andrew: So anyways, where do we actually get what we have? I say all that to say that there’s no sort of pure pagan source. We don’t have Norse pagans talking about their religion, not even talking about their stories. We simply don’t have that. Everything that we do have is written down by Christians. I mentioned earlier about Ásatrú and heathenry, this kind of modern Norse Neo-Paganism. It may be that someone is successfully worshiping Thor—they’re offering sacrifices to him and they’re eating it; that is worshiping Thor—but if they’re saying, “I’m doing what my ancient Danish ancestors did”: false. We do not know what your ancient Danish ancestors did. We just don’t know. So it might be they’re creating a new religion of Thor, but the old religion of Thor is gone. The last thing that the Norse pagans did? They became Christians. They did that. So, you know, Norse Neo-Paganism is a new religion, a modern religion; it’s not an ancient religion. Just wanted to mention that, get that all out there.

Fr. Stephen: I’m kind of glad they’re not killing people and shoving them in peat bogs.

Fr. Andrew: Right!? [Laughter] Like, the little bit that we do know about their religious practices… Maybe no.

Fr. Stephen: General improvement.

Fr. Andrew: Exactly.

Fr. Stephen: Just forming metal bands. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Not my favorite kind of music. Not even my second or third or tenth favorite kind of music, but definitely better than cutting people’s throats and shoving them down in bogs.

Fr. Stephen: And then you’ve got to make an album cover where you’re wearing a lot of make-up and you look like you’re lost in the woods somewhere in Sweden.

Fr. Andrew: Right, isn’t that what Vikings were?

Fr. Stephen: Yes, lost in the woods somewhere in Sweden.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. The fun thing is that most Vikings we know about were Christians.

Fr. Stephen: But were they good Christians?

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Ah, that’s another question, you know. It depends on what that means.

Fr. Stephen: Ehh…

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, they’re at least formally Christians. Vikings that like to raid the coastlines of Great Britain, probably not great Christians. And a lot of them were—

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, rob monasteries, you know.

Fr. Andrew: A lot of those guys were actual pagans. They actually were real pagans, as the local Christians attested. And they used the word hǣthnu to refer to them, so that’s “heathen” in Old English.

Okay, so what do we have in terms of actual sources? The biggest source that you’re going to want to look at if you want to look at the most authentic—again, not authentic, but the most authentic—representation of this mythology is written by a guy named Snorri Sturluson. Snorri Sturluson is a 13th-century Icelandic politician, actually. He’s the lawspeaker at one point, which is like the head of the parliament, but also— And he gets involved in a lot of politics, and he gets assassinated as a result of that. So he’s a Christian. He does not seem to know Latin, but he knows people who knew Latin, and he has some idea about classical pagan sources, because he references them in what he writes.

The major book you’re going to want to look at if you’re going to look at sources of Norse mythology is something called the Prose Edda—E-d-d-a. Sometimes it’s just simply called Edda. In Icelandic they call it Snorra Edda, Snorri’s Edda. And this book was written around the early 13th century, and it is not the equivalent of Edith Hamilton’s Mythology. He’s not trying to put together a book of Norse myths. So that’s disappointing to begin with.

Fr. Stephen: Not Hesiod, not even Ovid.

Fr. Andrew: No! Yeah, he’s not doing that. That’s not his agenda. He’s trying to put together a textbook, and it’s not a mythology textbook; it’s a poetry textbook. So Snorri was, it seems, a pretty good poet, and so he was really dedicated to a type of poetry called skaldic poetry—s-k-a-l-d-i-c, skaldic poetry. “Skald” is an old word for a Norse poet. And apparently it was falling out of fashion in his day, and so he wanted to revive it. Other kinds of poetry had become hip and cool at the courts of the Scandinavians, and he was trying to bring it back. He realized that a lot of people couldn’t even write skaldic poetry because they just didn’t have the capability. So he puts together a textbook, and the purpose of this textbook is to give you the vocabulary that you need to write skaldic poetry.

Well, why does he tell mythological stories in service to that purpose? It’s because skaldic poetry includes lots and lots of allusions to Norse myths in order for it to actually just work. I’ll give you an example. We talked about Sif. What is the color of Sif’s hair? It is golden. It is always golden; it is nothing but golden. And that’s because the phrase “Sif’s hair” is used in skaldic poetry as a reference to gold. So it might say, “And his hands flowed with Sif’s hair”: it doesn’t mean that he got up next to the goddess and was grabbing her hair; it means that he had a lot of gold, that he was a wealthy guy. Skaldic poetry is full of that kind of stuff. It’s everywhere.

Fr. Stephen: It’s like reading 18th- and 19th-century poetry. If you don’t know the classics, you won’t know what’s going on.

Fr. Andrew: Right. You won’t get it. So for him, these stories are the classics, but they’re kind of starting to get forgotten. Now it should be said that at this point we are about 200 years after Christianization in Scandinavia and in Iceland. None of these people who wrote this stuff down had ever met a Norse pagan, because there simply weren’t any left. They were gone. Christianization had taken full hold. So the two main parts of Snorri’s Edda are the Gylfaginning, which is the beginning, and then the Skáldskaparmál.

So the Gylfaginning is a kind of Q&A between Odin in disguise as a king named Gylfi who goes up to these three, I don’t know, spiritual sages of a sort, and asks them a series of questions about the gods, the beginning of the world, the end of the world, stuff like this. So it’s a kind of cosmology is what comes out of it, and from this you get a lot of the stories about Ragnarok and all this kind of stuff.

The Skáldskaparmál includes— There is a prose portion at the beginning, and then a lot of it is quoting some lines of poetry and then just explaining what specific references mean, so it’s almost like a kind of thick glossary. You can see how this book would not be great for just deriving a bunch of Norse mythology from, because it’s not made for that.

At the beginning of it, he’s got an introduction in which he depicts the origin of the Norse gods, and he says that they’re heroes from the battle of Troy that had come north, and they’re, like, great sorcerers or something, and they become worshiped as gods by the locals. So this is called euhemerization, which is interpreting divine beings as actually being humans, who then later get worshiped as their sort of legend grows. And you can see how that connects with what Tacitus does, where he says that in Germania they worship Ulysses and Hercules. So he says that that’s the origin of things, but a lot of the things that we know of as Norse myths are found in the Gylfaginning, at the beginning. So you get Ragnarok, you get Odin with his brothers Vili and Vé, killing Ymir, the primeval giant whose blood then fills the world and causes the flood—that stuff is all there.

And then he’s got another significant worked called the Heimskringla, which is a history of the kings of Norway. At the beginning of it is something called the Ynglinga saga, and in that he very explicitly makes the Aesir ancestors of the kings of Norway and Sweden. So he’s claiming that they have this sort of almost-divine origin, but he says that the Aesir, the Norse gods, are humans. That’s what he’s—

Fr. Stephen: My wife recently had this experience on Ancestry.com. It was crowd-sourced. [Laughter] She was going back in some Swedish ancestors and discovered she was related to Ymir, the frost-giant!

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] The frost-giant!

Fr. Stephen: So there you have it.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Exactly. So the other thing I’ll say about that is that Snorri is unique amongst Norse authors in describing the flood, like I mentioned the thing with Ymir, whom apparently your wife is descended from? [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Yes.

Fr. Andrew: By Ancestry.com! If anybody out there has descent from Anglo-Saxon kings, you are also considered a descendant of Odin, so congratulations: you’re a Wodenson. Wodensonsen—I don’t know how you’d pluralize that.

Fr. Stephen: Is that something good, though, really?

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Right, Odin’s not great.

Another major source is the Poetic Edda. It is a 13th-century collection from a manuscript called the Codex Regius which—don’t get confused; there’s more than one codex with that name. It means the codex of the king, because it was presented to one of the kings as a gift. It’s a collection of songs and poems. It’s generally thought that some of these might actually be authentically pagan texts, so maybe closer to the pagan sources—we don’t know, though, because, once again, this collection was put together entirely by Christians.

When it was found it was called the elder Edda because it was assumed that it was a lot older, but actually it’s later than Snorri’s Edda, but Snorri’s Edda still gets called the young Edda in some sources. But it’s just this collection of poems, and interpolated within it you actually have— I shouldn’t say interpolated: we don’t know—we don’t know!—you have Christian comments every so often. For instance, there’s one that says, “This story comes from a time when ignorant people used to believe in reincarnation.” So that’s something that’s in there. So you get Christian commentary.

It is much harder to read unless you know the stories that are behind the poems. I recommend that you read—if you’re going to read this stuff, read Snorri’s work first, which tends to present the stories a little bit more coherently as narratives, because they’re highly allusive. A lot of these might be hymns or folk-songs that often assume you know the story. I mean, we encounter that kind of stuff in texts we talk about all the time. We don’t know the rest because whoever heard this at the beginning knew the story, but no one bothered to write the whole thing down. Thanks, ancient people. Or if they did, we lost it. [Laughter] We just lost it.

I will also give an honorable mention to a text called the Gesta Danorum. It’s the history of the Danes by a guy named Saxo Grammaticus. “Grammaticus” is a nickname that basically meant he was really good with Latin. His Latin is really, really good. It was written in Latin, comes from the late 12th, early 13th century; it’s basically a history of the Danes from ancient pre-history up to the 12th century. It includes a very little amount of references to Norse mythology. Again, Saxo Grammaticus is a Christian, so he’s not trying to represent Norse mythology, but he does engage in this euhemerization, basically says that the Norse gods are people: they’re humans that got worshiped later. And he says that they’re the ancestors of the Danish kings.

Another thing you’ll see that’s really interesting, and this kind of connects back to some of the themes that we talked about earlier, especially when we talked about Zeus, is there is this connection back by a number of these Christian authors with classical mythology. Right when we talked about Tacitus earlier—who was not a Christian, but Tacitus says, “They’re worshiping Hercules up there!” If you went to a local Germanic tribesman and said, “So do you worship Hercules?” I’m sure he would have no idea what you were talking about. [Laughter]

These authors connect some of the stories and certainly the gods back to classical gods. Snorri at one point says that Thor equals Jupiter. He doesn’t use the name Jupiter, but he kind of makes this reference. He’s not consistent with himself, by the way, everybody. At another point he says that Thor is Hector, and the way he gives it is like Hec-tor, like this “-tor” part, that’s “Thor.” It’s really bad etymology, but there you are. He lived long before the invention of modern philology.

Saxo Grammaticus says that Thor is equal to Jove, although he doesn’t— He says “some say” that he’s equal to Jove; he’s not actually taking this position himself. So there is this connect— There’s this attempt to connect them back, and again, like I said, Snorri at the beginning says that the Aesir, the Norse gods, are heroes from Troy who come north and settle and rule and are worshiped later. So there’s this.

Fr. Stephen: I really feel like we should have said that today’s word was “euhemerization.”

Fr. Andrew: Euhemerization?

Fr. Stephen: Every time we say it, that the kids should scream real loud. [Laughter] I feel like we should have said that back at the beginning.

Fr. Andrew: Wow, is this our first Pee-Wee’s Playhouse reference?

Fr. Stephen: Missed opportunity. Possibly.

Fr. Andrew: I think so! [Laughter] Yeah, “euhemerization.” Isn’t it right that the Church Fathers do this in some places?

Fr. Stephen: There are a few places, yeah, where they talk about— Particularly when they talk about the visual representations, like who the statues are of.

Fr. Andrew: And we should say that this doesn’t necessarily contradict with the idea that the gods are actual spirits, because think about all the relationships we’ve talked about in terms of humans and these gods.

Fr. Stephen: Giants and demons, yeah.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah! You’ve got god-kings, you’ve got humans who can become demonized and function as demons, who jump in and engage in idolatry just as much as fallen angels do. It’s pretty slippery. None of these authors are saying that evil spirits and evil gods do not exist; none of them are saying that. It’s just a question of who they decide actually is some kind of fallen angel or is a human or used to be a human.

All right, so Thor himself, he’s the thunder-god from Norse mythology, and you can see thunder-gods that resemble him in places especially in northern European literature. You’ve got Perkunas amongst the Balts, a very similar figure. Actually, there’s a whole— The hammer thing is related in there. You’ve got Perun amongst the Slavs: again, a very, very similar figure. It seems like almost every mythology has a thunder-god in there somewhere.

Fr. Stephen: Perun is also very similar to Thor in Marvel Comics. People may forget that he was a member of the Soviet version of the Avengers.

Fr. Andrew: That’s right! Oh, man!

Fr. Stephen: Along with the Crimson Avenger, yeah.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. Wow. Man, that’s digging out old, old memories for me. I was much more into X-Men, which— Isn’t that a euhemerization? [Laughter] Humans with superpowers…

Fr. Stephen: I think, if I remember correctly, in Avengers vs. the X-Men, the Soviet group appeared.

Fr. Andrew: Mmm. That’s maybe why I know about them, because I wasn’t a super big Avengers guy.

Fr. Stephen: Because the Avengers had to bring in Magneto after he destroyed that submarine.

Fr. Andrew: You’ve always got to bring in Magneto. You regret it, but… [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Because he’s kind of a sympathetic villain, nonetheless. He killed 150 people in that submarine and had to go on trial before the World Court.

Fr. Andrew: And he also plays Gandalf, whom Tolkien describes as an “Odinic wanderer.” So there you go. That brings us all back. So Thor— Okay, the name “Thor”—we talked about names a lot—in a lot of early sources, he’s Thunarr, often spelled T-h-u-n-a-r-r. In Old English, it’s Thunur. This is just literally the word for thunder. His name is Thunder; that’s what his name is: it’s Thunder. As we’ve seen a lot—

Fr. Stephen: Not to be confused with Thundarr the Barbarian.

Fr. Andrew: No, definitely not.

Fr. Stephen: Who was also created by Jack Kirby from Hanna-Barbera

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] I know! Then the ThunderCats.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, although there is nothing really thunderous about them.

Fr. Andrew: No, not really. I don’t know what the deal is there.

Fr. Stephen: It sounds better than just calling it Cats.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Right! They are chasing around, as you— The laser pointer…

Fr. Stephen: The big red laser pointer in the sky: they all come running.

Fr. Andrew: So Thunar: again, the word just means thunder; that’s all it means. When Norse people heard these stories, they would not have heard them as “Oh, this is someone who has this name and it’s a different—” it would just be thunder. So for them the thunder and what Thunar is doing—not a lot of space between those. This is the thunder.

Thor is also generally depicted as the son of Odin, who’s actually Othin in Norse sources: Othin. And—here’s where it starts to get weird—his mother is a goddess named Jorth, and she’s actually a giantess. So Thor is half-giant, half-Aesir. You’ll notice if you read Norse sources that giants are a pretty complicated set of beings, whatever they are. They’re probably not really tall. Some are depicted as hugely tall. I mean, Ymir, this giant that you construct the universe out of by killing him, he must be pretty big, but a lot of them are basically the same size as the Aesir, because they intermarry. So that’s going on. And then some of them give birth to monsters and stuff, so what exactly are giants?

It’s not clear, but the giants of folklore that we often think about, the really tall giants— Everyone always asks us, “Aren’t giants really tall?” That depiction of giants always being tall is a later kind of folklore thing. It does exist in legendary and mythological material, but it’s not what it’s about. That’s not what makes them giants.

Fr. Stephen: And size is a way of conveying power and strength.

Fr. Andrew: Exactly.

Fr. Stephen: In portrayals, that’s a way of communicating power and strength.

Fr. Andrew: I mentioned earlier, Thor is married to Sif the golden-haired. Again, Sif’s hair is never any color except golden. Snorri says that Sif is Sibyl, so he’s again classicizing, bringing this back.

Fr. Stephen: Close enough.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] As I mentioned, he seems to be the most worshiped god in Norway and Iceland based on archaeological stuff. He’s depicted as red-bearded. That’s a major thing, his great big red beard. His hair is red. Another thing—and, see, this is something I don’t think—maybe you tell me if this ever shows up in the comics—in the mythological sources, [Thor] has a whetstone sticking out of his skull that he got— he entered into a battle with the giant Hrungnir. So Hrungnir, his preferred weapon was this whetstone, and he would throw it at people, and when it hit Thor in the skull, a fragment of it lodged in there, and Thor tried to do something about it but the seeress he was working with got distracted and so it is stuck in his head kind of permanently. Does that ever show up in the comics?

Fr. Stephen: Not in the comics yet.

Fr. Andrew: Not in the comics, yeah. And not in the movies! Hello? He should have a big rock sticking out of his head! Again, very disappointing. He’s depicted as sort of the big brute of the gods. He’s super strong. He’s not noble; he’s not smart—none of these things you see in the modern Marvel depictions, although lately they’ve kind of depicted him as a little bit dumber, but he’s not… He’s pretty dumb in the Norse sources, which may be a function of Christians writing about them, right? You’re not going to depict pagan gods as being these very wise, very admirable beings. They’re going to be depicted as, you know, not admirable. But he defends the gods against the giants, against the monsters. He’s generally a big foe of the giants, kills them almost any time he sees them.

He’s the patron deity of farmers and sailors. Why would that be? Because he does the weather thing! And the weather is super important to both farmers and sailors. He’s the thunder-god; he’s the storm-god. So, yeah. Also very known for the hammer, Mjolnir. Also got a pair of iron gloves, a big belt of divine power makes him strong. Here’s one of my favorite things about him. He owns a pair of goats: two goats, one named Tanngnjostr and another named Tanngrisnir, and these names mean Tooth-gnasher and Tooth-grinder, and here’s what’s great about them: if he gets hungry, which—Thor often is hungry—he can kill them and eat them, and if he lays the bones on their skins, when he wakes up in the morning they’re back! So he’s got these magical reviving goats! Reincarnated goats! Or whatever they are.

Fr. Stephen: Goats have been in the movies now.

Fr. Andrew: Really?

Fr. Stephen: Yeah.

Fr. Andrew: Oh, I haven’t seen the latest film. Okay. Spoiler alert, everybody. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: They’re in the trailers.

Fr. Andrew: Oh, yeah. Do they come back when he kills them?

Fr. Stephen: I don’t think they get eaten in the movie.

Fr. Andrew: Oh, yeah. What are goats for if not to eat?

Fr. Stephen: To pull your chariot in this case.

Fr. Andrew: Oh, I guess there’s that, too. I guess. Yeah. So there’s lots of stories about Thor in the sources. A lot of them are about him going on various adventures and killing giants. A lot of them. And a lot of those are pretty funny, actually. I’m going to mention one of those, and then I’m going to tell you kind of the two big stories that are where Thor is involved. So here’s the fun one.

His hammer, Mjolnir, which is really important, obviously, for the defense of the Aesir, gets stolen by a giant named Thrymr, and Thrymr steals the hammer and says, “I’ll give it back if you guys send me Freyja so that I can marry her.” She’s one of the Aesir; she’s one of the goddesses. And so there’s a whole conversation amongst them about what they’re going to do about this, and Freyja, of course, hates the idea of having to go and be married to this giant. [Laughter] So what they do is they decide—I’m still laughing about this. They decide to dress up Thor in Freyja’s clothing, because that’s going to be convincing, right? So he goes in drag, and they’re like: “Here is your bride.”

When they sit down at the wedding-feast, Thrymr notices that Thor is really putting it away. He has this divine level of appetite. And he’s like: “What’s the deal?” And Thor, as Freyja, says—or it might have been Loki, now that I think about it, who was nearby—anyway, they communicate: “Well, she’s been fasting all this time to prepare for the wedding, you know, for you.” And he’s like: “Uh, really?” and sort of pulls back the veil a little bit and sees these fiery eyes and is like: “What’s the deal with that?” “Oh, well, you know, she’s been suffering so much from all the fasting so she’s not feeling well.” Then finally they said, “Okay, where’s the dowry? Where’s the bride-price?” So they bring out Mjolnir and they hand the hammer to Thor. As soon as Thor gets his hammer back, he pulls off the women’s clothing and proceeds to kill just about everybody present and walks away.

Everybody’s depicted as pretty ridiculous in this story, including Thor—especially Thor—which some scholars will say that this is an indication that this was written really late and definitely under— maybe entirely composed by Christians. Again, we don’t know which of these mythological stories were written by Christians whole-cloth, adapted by Christians, or maybe possibly represented fairly authentically from the pagan period by Christians. We simply do not know. We don’t know. This is what we’ve got. We can’t say this is the original: we have no idea.

Okay, so here’s the two kind of big stories about Thor that I think are especially important for us, but are the ones usually— If you’re going to remember any, there’s two. So one is the fishing expedition, and then the other is Thor at Ragnarok.

If you look at the Poetic Edda—and this is referenced in Snorri’s Edda, too, but if you look at the Poetic Edda, there is a poem called Hymiskvitha, which means Hymir’s poem. So Hymir is a giant. He’s kind of a frost-giant, a wintry giant. He’s been staying with him and kind of eating him out of house and home, as Thor is wont to do. But the giant can’t kill him, because there’s this whole hospitality thing: You don’t kill people who are staying under your roof, Even if you hate them and they are your mortal enemy, this is not a thing you do, that even the gods and giants are bound by this rule.

So they decide to go fishing, because Hymir is losing all of his food. While they’re out there, Thor decides to rip off the head of one of Hymir’s oxen, and he lowers his line down in the water with the ox head as bait. And what should try to get hold of it but the Midgard Serpent itself, Jormungandr, the serpent that encircles the world, and if he starts moving his coils there’s earthquakes and it might be the end of the world kind of thing. So he drags the Midgard Serpent up out of the water, and as he’s got hold of it, he takes his hammer and he bashes it in the head. In some version of the story, that’s the end of the Midgard Serpent, but in the main versions it doesn’t actually kill him, but when it happens, Hymir, realizing what’s going on and that actually Thor is threatening to cause the end of the world, he goes and cuts the line that Thor has the Midgard Serpent on, and then the serpent falls back into the water. And then Thor is so mad that he goes and punches Hymir about the head, and in some sources Hymir falls overboard and drowns. So that’s the fishing expedition.

This should probably remind us of references in the Scripture to Leviathan—this is in Job, for instance—Leviathan being drawn up out of the water by a hook and tamed. But this is the Norse version, so it’s not about taming the serpent; it’s about smashing him in the head. That’s how it goes.

So the other big thing that we should point out, the other big story, is Thor at Ragnarok. And it’s interesting. If you look at the actual sources about this, there’s not a lot. In almost every one of the sources you look at, Ragnarok is not this drawn-out battle that you read about. It takes up maybe a paragraph or two or a few stanzas of poetry. It’s the end of the world. The gods get killed. In some versions, a handful of them comes back, like Baldr comes back, although he had already been dead by this point. Odin gets killed, because he gets eaten by the Fenris wolf, aka Fenrir, who is an offspring of Loki. And the Midgard Serpent, by the way, is also an offspring of Loki. And Hel, the goddess of the underworld—because in Norse mythology the devil is a woman—she’s an offspring of Loki as well. Not to mention that Odin’s horse, Sleipnir, is also Loki’s offspring, because Loki can be both male and female and also does the shapeshifting thing, and weirdly has children when he goes and shapeshifts. So this is sort of like Zeus: you’ve got the shapeshifting, philandering/raping going on.

So Thor faces off against the Midgard Serpent at Ragnarok, does successfully kill him, but a lot of the dragon’s poison gets on Thor, and in the sources it says he staggers back nine paces. The serpent dies, but so does Thor, who was poisoned.

Fr. Stephen: Failed his saving throw.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] He failed his saving throw versus poison, that’s right! So that’s the end of Thor in the actual Norse sources. As you can see, he’s not depicted as being this uber-powerful being that humans must contend with to— the way, for instance, Baal and Zeus are, within the actual pagan contexts that we know a lot more about. What we have is a depiction written by Christians, again, centuries after Christianization took hold.

You might ask the question: Why would Christians even tell these stories? I mean, they’re about pagan gods and all this kind of stuff. Well, number one, they don’t actually preserve pagan religion in terms of practices, so you’re not going to learn how to worship these gods from these stories. It’s just not there. Christians have every reason not to preserve that kind of information. [Laughter]

Why would they tell these stories? Well, number one, from the point of view of Snorri and these other Christian writers— We don’t know who put together the Poetic Edda, by the way; we don’t know. It is possible that Snorri had a kind of committee that helped him do what he did; we don’t know. But from their point of view, these gods are actual human beings. They’re legendary humans, so these are legendary stories for them. Remember, Snorri is trying to put together a skaldic poetry textbook—that’s his purpose—but even he didn’t regard telling these stories as being inherently sinful from a Christian point of view. Occasionally, he’d say things like, “Now, you shouldn’t believe that all this actually happened.” He’ll say that. For him they’re just stories, largely speaking, mostly. He does believe that the Aesir existed, that they were humans.

These Christians have no problem elaborating on these stories. They have no problem altering these stories as far as we know—again, we don’t have “originals” to compare them against. Why do they do that? Because that is how legends and their transmission work. That’s just how they work. They’re just re-telling stories. We should point out, of course, that even though we do actually have a lot of pagan texts from classical paganism and some of these other things, Semitic paganism, the reason that those texts are preserved over the years, largely speaking, is because Christians felt that it was useful to copy them and use them. So even though we don’t have much in the way of Christian “tampering” with the stories, altering, elaborating on them, they’re copying them. They’re interpreting them; they’re using them. So this is a thing. This is absolutely a thing. So this is how Christianity has kind of digested the mythology, the leftover stories from paganism.

Fr. Stephen: The difference being that with the classical world—and even the Second Temple Jewish world—you have texts that exist as texts, and so the relationship is a little different than when you don’t have a text. And it’s: How are you going to record this story that’s been passed down orally to this point? So, as we’ve said before, once you put something in text, it becomes this sort of literary monument. This is why you don’t get Christians going into Hesiod and Homer and these other texts and changing details and lampooning them the way you sort of see with some of these Norse stories. It’s because the texts already existed, and so that monumentalized it. So they would write a commentary on the Iliad that would be correcting things and inverting things and doing things from a Christian perspective, but they kept the text of the Iliad intact.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, because remember for Norsemen writing and manuscripts is basically Christian technology. That’s just the reality. I mean, you might wish—someone might wish—that it was different, but that is the historical reality. We just don’t— It’s not that Christians destroyed a bunch of stuff that came there before them; it simply wasn’t there. We know the religion was being practiced. Like, we found a whole bunch of probably Mjolnir pendants, for instance, archaeologically, from the few centuries right around Christianization and earlier. We don’t know what they were used for. Interestingly, from what I understand, about 10% of the pendants that they found that are hammer-shaped were found in graves. I don’t know why this is the case and I don’t think anybody knows: the majority of them were women’s graves. What’s going on with that? We just don’t know.

You can’t extract a religion from finding a hammer pendant that someone wore around their neck. And then also some people look at that as being an alternative answer to the Christian cross or whatever, like they’ll adopt that now. Well, we don’t know what these were used for back in the day! They might be some kind of amulet, they might be who knows, but we don’t know. We just don’t know. Just don’t know. There’s just big blank spots.

The last thing I wanted to kind of mention about Christian digestion of this stuff is the elements of these depictions, especially of Thor, were retained and, in some cases, baptized. Now, by that I don’t mean that people started worshiping Thor or anything like that. I just mean that the imagery connected with Thor got recycled. A good example of this is St. Olaf. So St. Olaf is the patron saint of Norway. He lives right around the time that Christianization is taking hold. So he would’ve been familiar, directly familiar, with Norse paganism. He’s one of the latest saints right before the period of the Great Schism between East and West in the Church, early 11th century if I recall. He’s regarded as a saint within a generation, if I recall.

Earliest depictions of him show him clean-shaven, which is probably how he looked. We don’t know, but that was probably how he looked, was clean-shaven. As time goes by, eventually, especially after the early 13th century—so we’re talking a couple hundred years—he starts getting depicted with a big red beard. That is a Thor image! Along with that, he’s also depicted in some legendary texts as a killer of giants. That is a Thor image! And is generally a protector against evil forces and demonic monsters and stuff. Again, that’s Thor stuff. But, remember, we talked about Christ and so forth, that he’s described as the rider of the clouds. It’s not saying that Christ is like Baal; it’s saying that actually that belongs to Christ. That title belongs to Christ. So you get this beginning of saints using this imagery from pagan mythology, but now it’s been so many centuries since that was even believed in and practiced that they have no problem appropriating the imagery for this new patron of the place, St. Olaf.

Before we go to break, I just want to give a quick recommendation. If someone’s actually interested in really learning Norse mythology from the sources we have and not simply from the kind of collections and stuff of fairy tales and legends—which can be interesting, but are largely aimed at children and so forth—there is a book called The Norse Myths: A Guide to the Gods and Heroes by Carolyne Larrington. Her work is very good. It’s kind of a summary and it’s all entirely based on these traditional sources.

All right, well, this is going to be different from other episodes in that we have three breaks and thus four halves to this episode! So we’re going to go ahead and take—

Fr. Stephen: Unprecedented!

Fr. Andrew: Unprecedented! —our third and final break, and we’ll be right back!

Fr. Andrew: Welcome back. It is the unprecedented fourth half of this episode of The Lord of Spirits.

Fr. Stephen: This is the 100-page super spectacular of Lord of Spirits episodes.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Exactly. This is the last episode of our second year of production, so the next episode is going to be our anniversary episode.

Fr. Stephen: Unlike other 100-page super spectaculars, we have no reprint material.

Fr. Andrew: That’s right. That’s it! You’re not going to be able to buy another version that costs 50 cents some time in the future. This is it! [Laughter]

All right, so we’ve talked about storm-gods. What about the fact that, you know, the true God, Yahweh, is associated with the weather? Is he just some storm-god who made it big, God of the Bible, big religion based on him?

Fr. Stephen: No.

Fr. Andrew: No. All right!

Fr. Stephen: And the reason we have to say that is that probably the current consensus among Old Testament scholars is that Yahweh is a storm-god, or started out as a storm-god as part of a pantheon somewhere, and then sort of, over time, you know, sort of became the God of the Bible.

Fr. Andrew: Which… Like, I know we’ve said this before, that— Why would you— Why would any human being take a pagan god that you can kind of make deals with and manipulate and get to do things for you because he needs something from you, wants something from you, can take a bribe—why would anyone ever make that kind of god into one that needs nothing from you and commands you? [Laughter] Like, why would you do that? It doesn’t make any sense at all.

Fr. Stephen: That’s just how it works. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: I mean, that’s just not a God that any human being would ever invent.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. And that scholarly consensus is based on nothing.

Fr. Andrew: Nothing, like there’s no actual basis for it?

Fr. Stephen: There is no actual basis for it. There is no real basis for it.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Okay!

Fr. Stephen: So if you try to push, or when they’re trying to— I’m not going to say argue for it, because, again, that implies that they have a consistent chain of arguments that produces this result, which they do not; they simply do not. And, I mean, I’ve criticized this to people with PhDs in Old Testament and had them— Literally, their response was: “Well, that’s the scholarly consensus!” [Laughter] Like that’s the argument: “No, everyone believes this!” “Oh, well, it must be true, then!”

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Right! “Everybody’s saying it!”

Fr. Stephen: Like, you know: “Hey! If the rest of Old Testament scholarship’s going to jump off a cliff… here I go!” [Laughter] But when they’re presenting it, when they’re saying, “Here is our presentation of this position, that Yahweh was a storm-god,” here’s how they try to present it. So they’ve got a basic problem, which is that, if you’re going to say, “Well, Yahweh was a storm-god who was part of one of these Canaanite pantheons,” first of all, they’re shooting this pantheon idea way back into history, beyond where it really belongs. But anyway, if they’re going to say this kind of thing, then you would expect that we would have some kind of written or other source that includes Yahweh as part of a pantheon—and there is no such thing.

There literally is no such thing. He is not listed in any of the Ugaritic material. The name doesn’t appear. The name doesn’t appear in any of these lists of deities, doesn’t appear in place-names outside of Israel, once Israel is a thing. None of that. In fact, the way I’ve mentioned before, I think on the show, my Old Testament professor, my undergrad, Lawson Younger, the way he tracked what happened to the ten northern tribes when the Assyrians deported them is by looking for people with theophoric names with Yahweh in them, because there’s no one who’s not an Israelite who had one in the ancient world. So not only is there no evidence that Yahweh was part of a pantheon at some point in the past, there’s no evidence that he ever was assimilated into a pantheon when Israel and Judah were conquered. There’s just no evidence for any of this.

So what do you go with? Well, there’s only one place, and we’ve mentioned it on the show before; there’s only one place outside of literature directly connected to Israel where you see the name Yahweh, and that’s a couple of Egyptian inscriptions from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.

Fr. Andrew: Right. We’ve mentioned this before. Refresh everybody.

Fr. Stephen: Where it refers to Yahu, which is a shortened form of the name Yahweh, of the Shasu Bedouins. Shasu Bedouins were a way in which the Egyptians referred to the Edomites, the Midianites, the Ishmaelites, these sort of southern desert, Abrahamic nomadic groups. They refer to Yahweh as being the God of these people. And we’ve talked about this before on the show in connection to what are sometimes called the “Yahweh from the south” traditions in the Old Testament that talk about Mount Seir, which was the center of Edomite territory, as being the mountain of God, the mountain of Yahweh; of Yahweh having sort of come from there, north, to aid the Israelites in conquering Israel, conquering the Canaanites. That language is there. Of course, Moses goes and encounters Jethro, the Midianite priest who becomes his father-in-law. So those groups were still worshiping Yahweh. They had received it from Abraham, from their ancestors, while Israel was in Egypt.

So they point at that. You say, “Well, how does that help them?” Well, it doesn’t really, but here’s what they try to do. They try to use the Edomite dialect of Old Canaanite and suggest an alternative etymology for the name “Yahweh” and say, “Oh, well, see, ‘Yahweh’ in that dialect, this could be the third[-person] masculine singular verb, ‘he blows.’ ”

Fr. Andrew: So, like: [Raspberry]?

Fr. Stephen: Yes, “he blows.”

Fr. Andrew: And… And based on that… [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: “And that means, see, he’s a storm-god.”

Fr. Andrew: That’s not a lot to go on. I mean, we looked at these various storm-gods and there’s way more going on there that has to do with weather.

Fr. Stephen: So you were being kind of mean to old Snorri about his etymologies. [Laughter] But, I mean, he’s doing just as well as modern Old Testament scholars, really, when you think about it! Maybe even better in a couple of examples.

Fr. Andrew: Hec-tor. [Laughter] Right.

Fr. Stephen: That’s it. That’s what they’ve got.

Fr. Andrew: Wow.

Fr. Stephen: That’s the “evidence” for this, and that’s all the evidence for this.

So what is it actually built on if it’s not built on evidence? Well, it’s built on a bunch of presuppositions, undefended presuppositions. Basically, those amount to an evolutionary view of ancient religion.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and that’s this idea that you’ve got ancient polytheism—

Fr. Stephen: Which is primitive.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, primitive polytheism, worshiping a whole group of gods, and, over time, they kind of reduce the number. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Right, well, first you get henotheism. First one of them is kind of the boss of the other ones. And then, theoretically, you just keep exalting that one higher and higher and demoting the other ones. And then eventually you become a “monotheist” if you just forget about all the other ones, and the boss one is the only one left.

Fr. Andrew: Which again posits human beings that go from a god they can manipulate, who needs something from them, to a god they cannot manipulate, needs nothing from them, and to whom they owe total obedience. It’s just not a human thing to do! We don’t come up with that.

Fr. Stephen: So the presupposition is that this is just how things work. So this evolution is how things work, presupposition one. Presupposition two: polytheism is more primitive than “monotheism,” which is also a presupposition, because you could equally argue, as anthropologists, etc., have, that there is actually a primitive monotheism that got complexified into polytheism, that it went the exact opposite way, also with evolutionary presuppositions. They agree with the first presupposition; they disagree with the second one. So you don’t even have to disagree with all of these—I disagree with all of these, but even scholars are not united into agreeing with all of these; and that polytheism is more primitive than monotheism. And, third, monotheism is a thing. And that monotheism—modern monotheism, the belief that only one god exists, only one divine being exists—is a viewpoint that was held by anyone in the ancient world, even in late antiquity. All of these three things are presuppositions that are either based on nothing or, in the case of the third one, demonstrably false.

So that’s what this is based on. This isn’t— Anyone who comes to you and says this… Like I said, even people who are educated, people with PhDs, their defense of this is: “It is the scholarly consensus.”

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, but… The emperor has no clothes, people!

Fr. Stephen: Yes, there is no argument for it. And so what’s the alternative? Well, we can see the alternative by actually reading all the sources we have. [Laughter] Which point to, for example, that Yahweh, as we’ve said before on the show, is actually a hiphil third[-person] masculine singular of the verb “to be.”

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, so the One who causes things to be, who causes to be.

Fr. Stephen: He who causes to be, he who causes things to be.

Fr. Andrew: The Creator. Basically, the Creator.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, you don’t have to look very far in the Hebrew Bible to see that the preeminent attribute that is ascribed to Yahweh the God of Israel is creator, not fertility. [Laughter] That it is the creator, he who causes things to be. And over and over again we get this phrase, starting in the Torah, starting with the exodus and the creation of Israel, where, before— when God describes one of his mighty actions—this goes all the way through to Ezekiel in the exile, in the valley of the dry bones—“Then they will know that I am Yahweh.” And this gets obscured in the English, because they don’t put— We’ve talked before on the show about why we go ahead and say “Yahweh” when we’re translating these passages, because if you say, “Then they will know that I am the Lord,” that means something different. “Then they will know that I am the Lord” is: “Then they will know that I am the one in charge. Then they will know that I am the one who rules.” “Then they will know that I am Yahweh” means “Then they will know that I am the one who causes things to be, that were not.”

Fr. Andrew: “That I am the Creator.”

Fr. Stephen: “I am the Creator.” Israel was not a nation, not a people; now they are a people, and so they know that he’s Yahweh. Or with the dry bones: “When I call your dead out of their graves, then you will know that I am Yahweh. I am the One who causes things to be, who causes things to live.” Not: “Then they will know that I am he who blows.” [Laughter] “Then they will know that I am the storm-god who brings fertility.” That doesn’t even make sense! They’re related to creation; they do not have to do with a storm- and fertility-god.

And not only that, one might notice that El, even though it’s just— “El” is just the word for “God,” like “Allah” in Arabic.

Fr. Andrew: Allah, yeah. It’s just the word for “God.”

Fr. Stephen: It’s the word for “God.” Or the word “God” in English. It’s the word for “God.” It’s very rarely used to refer to Yahweh in the Hebrew Bible. And if it is used, it’s used with a suffix, like El Elyon, God Most High, or El Shaddai, or fill-in-the-blank: there’s some suffix. What you get instead is Elohim in the plural. Why? Well, because the Hebrew Bible is everywhere disambiguating that they’re not talking about Baal’s dad.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Right, because Baal’s not a going concern right nearby!

Fr. Stephen: They’re not using El as a proper name; they’re not talking about the same— And so, I know we’ve said this before on the show but it was a long time ago, you’ll often hear that “Elohim” is this plural of “majesty”; it’s compared to Queen Victoria: “We are not amused.” And so that’s what “Elohim” is, that’s why it’s in the plural—that’s not exactly right, because people who know their Hebrew will immediately throw back at you that there’s no plural of “majesty” in Hebrew, and they’re right; there isn’t. But what there is is, in Hebrew, the plural used as an intensifier. Elohim is like “God of gods” or “the great God” or “the capital-G god” or the God,” with the definite article.

Fr. Andrew: Right. I mean, English does this, too. We mentioned capital letters, definite article. But, for instance, there is a repetition that exists in spoken English; you almost never see this in written English. I don’t recall ever seeing it because it would be hard to convey, because it requires inflection. We will sometimes repeat a word if we want to indicate that what we’re talking about is the most authentic, the most real. So, for instance, let’s say someone has a biological father and a step-father. Someone might say, “I’m talking about your dad dad.” And by that, by repeating the word and inflecting it that way, they mean your biological father; that’s what they mean.

Fr. Stephen: Or: “It’s not just like a YouTube video; it’s like a movie movie.”

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Right, “a movie movie.” Exactly.

Fr. Stephen: “Like a movie movie, like in theaters.”

Fr. Andrew: Right, exactly.

Fr. Stephen: So it’s that kind of idea.

Fr. Andrew: And Behemoth is the same kind of word: Behemot, the beast of beasts.

Fr. Stephen: Right, the super beast, the one that you wanted. And so that’s what’s going on with the name and with Elohim that’s used to refer to the same God. And that’s really clear in the Hebrew. This isn’t something that— This isn’t like: “Oh, well, only a Christian would say—” You don’t have to be a Christian, you don’t have to be Jewish, you don’t have to believe that any of this is real and true. That’s like… linguistic data from Hebrew.

Fr. Andrew: It’s just language.

Fr. Stephen: You can agree or disagree with what the Hebrew Bible is saying, but that’s what it’s saying. We should all be able to agree on that. We may disagree on whether it’s true, but we can at least agree on what it is saying. New Testament scholars do this all the time; I don’t know why Old Testament scholars can’t do this. But New Testament scholars, we agree all the time: “Hey, this is what St. Paul is saying,” and people who think he’s making it all up and people who believe every word of it agree: This is what he is saying. It’s not that hard.

So, then, what do we do with— There are all these times, some of which we’ve already mentioned tonight, where language about Baal in particular—so storm-god language from the Ancient Near East about Baal or Hadad or whomever—gets sort of attached to Yahweh. For example, one of Baal’s titles, as we already mentioned, is the cloud-rider. You see the Son of Man on the clouds in Daniel 7. We already talked about Daniel 7, how this is like an inversion or flipping of the enthronement of Baal story. But Psalm 104 (or 103 in the Greek), verses three and four—this is the vespers psalm in the Orthodox Church—it talks about God walking upon the wings of the wind. That’s Baal language. Isaiah 19:1 this happens again. Or Baal’s defeat of Leviathan, of Yam, of Nahar—that language is applied to Yahweh the God of Israel, like in Psalm 74 (73 Greek), 89 (88 Greek), 93 (92 Greek), Job 26:12-13. I feel like Jack Van Impe, just rattling these off. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: And he does them from memory!

Fr. Stephen: Isaiah 51:9-10, Isaiah 40:26; Isaiah 45:12. Right? These are all passages—you can look them up, or you can just believe me—that talk about Yahweh defeating Leviathan or the sea or the rivers, dominating them, commanding them, ruling over them, that are things that the Baal cycle attributes to Baal.

You say, “Okay, well, that could be more evidence for that other theory, just Yahweh and Baal are, like, the same guy, or parallel guys.”

Fr. Andrew: Or, like Thor, who fights against the Midgard Serpent.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. “See, these are all just the same guy.” So here’s the problem with that. Because the other view assumes that Yahweh was at some point in a pantheon with Baal and with these other gods. So it doesn’t make a whole heck of a lot of sense for the same attributes, the same deeds, the same titles to be ascribed to multiple gods within the same “pantheon,” because that’s not how pantheons work. Pantheons are built by assimilation.

Fr. Andrew: The most you get is where you get a kind of greater and lesser version of a thing, like, for instance, Apollo is a sun-god, and he’s got all these other things, but then he has Helios, his son, who kind of drives the thing. But you don’t have equal deities that are the same kind of deity within a pantheon.

Fr. Stephen: Right, because that’s what happens. We have practical examples of assimilation, including the assimilation of Baal.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, which we talked about.

Fr. Stephen: That we talked about tonight. So when some new territory gets conquered or a new trade deal gets made or enters into the consciousness of this larger unit that already has this group of gods and goddesses, the attempt is made to fold this in. So if there’s a god in the— We’ll say the major culture and the minor culture. If there’s a god in the major culture that has these attributes and these titles and these deeds, and this new deity that’s become aware of seems to have the same ones, they just get assimilated. So Baal becomes Zeus Boanerges. They say, “Okay, this is just a hypostasis of Zeus.”

So we do not have any ancient evidence of that kind of assimilation with Yahweh and Baal, because if you say that’s what we’re looking at with those passages I just referenced—“Oh, see, Baal has been assimilated into Yahweh”—then I say, “Okay, where’s the rest of the pantheon in the Israelite literature we’re reading?”

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, exactly. In fact, the only times you ever get Israel worshiping other gods, it’s explicitly foreign gods, and the whole thing is condemned.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and people like our friend Jezebel, Israel’s neighbors, do not seem to recognize Yahweh as a hypostasis of Baal. So that’s going the other way.

Fr. Andrew: So even the pagans aren’t into it. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: So the pagans aren’t trying to assimilate Yahweh into their local storm-god.

Fr. Andrew: They recognize him as different.

Fr. Stephen: They recognize him as different, and there’s antipathy. Pagans are kind of famous for not really having antipathy toward each other’s religions.

Fr. Andrew: But they have antipathy toward Israel and their religion.

Fr. Stephen: Right, which shows us that at the stage of these contacts, which go back far before the exile, centuries before the exile, by the way, there is seen to be something incompatible about at least a particular version of the worship of Yahweh and these other gods. But even in a place like the northern kingdom of Israel, where they’re worshiping Yahweh with golden calves, Jezebel doesn’t seem to think that Baal and Yahweh can be assimilated to each other.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, even with that common calf or bull thing going on.

Fr. Stephen: So the attributes and the deeds and the titles that were ascribed to Yahweh, even when the northern kingdom, post-Jeroboam, son of Nebad, were not seen by ancient people who worshiped Baal to be a version of Baal.

Fr. Andrew: The guy whose name gets— who’s emblematic: “the sin of Jeroboam.” [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Right, so for modern scholars to do this, they have to be really sloppy and they have to ignore the people who actually practiced these religions and all the evidence we have about it. There’s also no evidence of disassimilation.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, which is one god sort of splitting out into multiple images.

Fr. Stephen: Right. So we have that evidence, and we talked about Baal and Hadad. We have this Ba’al Hadda in the very earliest sources, and we see that this same, then, sort of spirit, this same sort of being, is referred to as Baal in one place and Hadda in the neighboring place. But we not only have evidence of that split, but, following the split in name, the Syrians and the Phoenicians don’t— They acknowledge: yes, this is the same guy. So even though they may not know the history that at one point the two names were directly ascribed to one being, they still have the idea—which, again, nobody in the ancient world had about Yahweh the God of Israel. Now, this is storm-god in particular, but we don’t have to be; we can say the same thing— The only thing we’re treating with storm-god is that’s the current scholarly consensus based on nothing.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and it’s kind of a fun theme. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: There’s just as much borrowed language like this about other gods in other nations. We’ve mentioned before on the show, every time Egypt comes up in the Old Testament, there’s all these references to the right arm, starting with the Song of the Sea, after the passage through the Red Sea, but going all the way through into the latter prophets. When they talk about Egypt, they talk about Yahweh breaking the right arm of Egypt, because the right arm of Re was one of the titles given to, at different points, the war-god of Egypt and the pharaoh. And there’s this language of Yahweh doing mighty acts with his right arm.

Now, current scholarly consensus isn’t: “Oh, see, look: Yahweh evolved from the Egyptian war-god,” because to do that, they’d have to argue the exodus was true or something, so they’re not inclined in that way. [Laughter] But that’s just to show you this language, this phenomenon in the Old Testament, of taking the language used about the gods of the other nations and applying it to Yahweh as a way of saying that Yahweh is the true Most High God—he’s the One who brings the rains, he’s the One who controls the thunderbolt, he’s the One who gives victory in war, etc., etc., etc.—and, by the way, he’s the creator-god, who created everything and caused things to be that before were not.

That practice is all through the Old Testament, and Israel’s neighbors understood what Israel was doing when they did it; that’s why there was this antipathy. They understood that Israel was taking shots at Baal. They understood that the Prophet Elijah was mocking Baal! They understood that Israel was saying, “Your religion is bogus and ours is the truth.” Their neighbors fully understood that.

Fr. Andrew: Right, and it probably pissed them off, because they’re like: “Hello? Our other neighboring religions don’t do that to us. We’re fine. They want to worship their gods; we worship our gods. Whatever.”

Fr. Stephen: Yes, you see this when Sennacherib shows up to lay siege to Jerusalem for the Assyrians. And he says to them, “I know, I know, you’ve got your god whom you think is going to protect you, but lots of cities I’ve destroyed had gods.” And then, you know, things don’t go so well for old Sennacherib. But Israel’s neighbors understood what was going on.

Fr. Andrew: And then there’s this constant refrain—it’s over and over, especially in the Old Testament, but then you get echoes of it and repackaging of it in the New Testament—“Who among the gods is like unto thou, O Lord?” Like there’s this constant rhetorical question being asked, or occasionally the statement being made, that God is different from all the rest—all the rest; none of them are like him.

Fr. Stephen: Because there’s no modern monotheism going on.

Fr. Andrew: Right, and then you especially get— And you get this in the Old Testament, too, but especially in the New Testament. I think of St. Paul’s comments on the Areopagus where he says, “This is the God who made all things. He’s the Creator.” Which—pagan gods don’t make that claim. They kind of reside within the world. There sometimes are—they were involved in creation, but not that there’s one who made everything.

Fr. Stephen: Well… He does more than that in Athens.

Fr. Andrew: Oh, yeah, sure!

Fr. Stephen: St. Paul continues this trend. He quotes a hymn to Zeus and applies it to Yahweh the God of Israel, and says, “This is the One who actually made all men from one man and in whom actually we live and move and have our being, not your boy Zeus.” Yeah, and this is totally clear.

What I just did, in not even that long a time, especially for this show, is lay out a bunch of evidence and an argument, which the other side on this—that Yahweh was a storm-god—fundamentally doesn’t have. They just have: “Well, this is the scholarly consensus.”

Fr. Andrew: Yep. All right. Well, to wrap up this thunderous episode of The Lord of Spirits podcast, I just wanted to make a few observations to summarize. I think the first thing that we should point out is that—you see this in internet religion memeology, this idea that: “Look at these pagan gods that have these aspects or these stories or whatever, and then look at the God of Christianity. Look, there’s some similarities. That therefore must mean that the God of Christianity is derived from, as we were saying, in this case, that he was a storm-god. Because, look, they were the same image or the same title or the same story,” often leaving aside whatever the actual discontinuities are, which, as we like to point out on this podcast, are super important, as much as the continuities. To note that things are the same or similar is a correlation. Okay, that doesn’t mean that there is a causative relationship between those things or that they’re the same thing. Just because there’s a correlation does not mean that there’s a causation: this is a basic logical fallacy, making them the same thing. They’re not. Correlation does not equal causation.

Often, as we mentioned, a lot of what’s going on in the Scripture and subsequent Christian history is a correction of pagan stories; it’s a polemic against them. The true rider of the clouds is the Son of Man who is Christ. The true commander of the weather, who controls the thunderbolt, is God, is Yahweh, not Baal, not Zeus, not Thor. That’s what’s going on, too.

And there’s also—and we saw this especially with the Norse material, but, as Fr. Stephen just pointed out, with St. Paul in the Areopagus—there is an assimilation of the pagan stories as pagan stories. “We’ll take that, and we’re going to use it to our purposes.” St. Paul is just quoting a little verse, and he’s saying, “This actually applies to Yahweh the God of Israel, but you get Norse Christians telling pagan stories sometimes for the purpose of poetry, but he didn’t see a problem with it; he didn’t see it as a sinful thing to do as a Christian, surrounded by Christians. He wasn’t trying to make nice with any pagans. There weren’t any around! It wasn’t a kind of ecumenical gesture. They felt that these stories were helpful within their Christian context.

Many of the stories are told, sometimes as an example of what not to do, sometimes saying, “Look, you can emulate and admire this heroism, this virtue, this perseverance,” whatever it is, and they were just doing—and we didn’t mention this yet in this episode, but they were just doing what St. Basil in his very famous address to young men on the right use of Greek literature—by that he means Homer and Hesiod and so on—that there is a right use of these things. “If there’s any virtue, if there’s any praise, think on these things.” And critique the things that are not virtuous and praiseworthy. That’s what’s going on as well.

So Christianity has always made use of these stories. That’s how it’s always been, whether it’s to completely co-opt pieces of them or to tell the story and offer commentary on it. These are things that Christians have always done. We do not have to be scared of that at all.

I saw someone actually commenting on this show and saying, “These guys are using pagan mythology to try and ‘re-enchant’ the world!” with this sort of implication of: “They’re encouraging people to become interested in paganism!” By no means! By no means. What I encourage people to do is to become interested in stories and to become interested in the way that Christianity has used paganism, which always includes this polemic against the gods. It’s not about smuggling anything in or making nice or any of that stuff. It always includes that: “Who among the gods is like unto thou, O Lord?” No one. No one at all.

So, understanding all that, then, we can make an application of this thing ourselves, as we interpret this world and its stories, and use them for preaching the Gospel. We mentioned a bunch of times Marvel comics and the Marvel Cinematic Universe, especially as we were talking about Norse stuff. You can tell that my opinion of that is lower than the Norse mythologies, mythological stories, but I like watching those movies; I’ve read those comic books. And I find them useful. It is a place that we can have conversations that can lead to a conversation about the Gospel or lead to discussions of virtue or whatever it might be, and critique the characters and say, “This one is good. This one did something that was not so good.”

We can subvert even stories that maybe, by their creators, intended to be subversive. We can subvert the subversion, because Christianity has always done that. It’s okay to continue doing it, especially because we know that we have the great hope of the resurrection, that we know that Christ has won the victory, that he is the one that has defeated the serpent—he actually did do that. And that his enemy, our enemy, death, its power has been broken forever. Since we know that, none of the rest of this has to threaten us, and indeed we can make use of it, because, again, that is what Christianity has always done. Fr. Stephen?

Fr. Stephen: So, yeah, there at the end in the unprecedented fourth half of this evening’s show, I took some shots at a scholarly consensus. We’ve talked before about how, thanks to our 19th-century German friends, pretty much all of academic scholarship has been transformed into sort of a Wissenschaft, a scientific mode, a mode of aping the procedures of science. That’s had a lot of really bad results in a lot of ways because a lot of fields have been turned into pseudoscience, essentially, by trying to use a methodology that isn’t really compatible with the field of inquiry.

But one positive effect that it could have had, which unfortunately in a lot of cases it doesn’t, would be that the term “scholarly consensus” would be interpreted as a bullseye. Something being the scholarly consensus would make it a target. And this is true in science. Everybody wants to be Einstein and come along and overturn the consensus of Newtonian physics. And you can prove that everyone wants to be that guy, because what did Stephen Hawking do? He started going after the consensus around Einstein on several topics. That’s how it works in science.

But most of the time, when you get into any liberal arts or “social science” field, all of a sudden we de-science, and whatever the scholarly consensus is is just true now. It’s not something we attack; it’s not something we try to disassemble and take apart; it’s not now “we need to find out why we’re wrong, maybe completely wrong.” And this boils down outside of scholarship. What you find in a lot of academia at the graduate-school level is that graduate students tend to break down into factions of students who spend most of their time simping for one of their professors. They will sit in classes and argue with other students, who are simping for different professors, about which of their professors are right.

I’ve got bad news for those of you who aren’t clergy out there, but this is what seminary is like, including Orthodox seminaries. You have seminary students break off into factions and simp for one of their professors, and in some cases they spend the rest of their lives in ministries simping for that professor and what a genius they were and whatever their unique views are, trying to promote them in the Church. And for clergy listening, embrace your secret shame of past simping. We’ve all fallen into it at one time or another; it happens.

But how does this affect the average listener to this who isn’t clergy? If you’re clergy, stop simping. If you’re not, how does this affect you? Especially in our modern, unfortunately internet-based, world, this has gone way outside academia and just graduate students. It’s not really anything new. St. Paul told us about how one claims they’re of Paul and one claims they’re of Apollos and one claims they’re of Peter and one claims they’re of Christ. But seemingly everyone out there now is part of some fandom, is part of some camp, is simping for some public figure; they’ve developed some para-social relationship with that public figure, where they feel like they know them and are known by them. And they’re out there having fights on the internet about “No, my guy, whom I like, is better than your guy whom you like. And your guy isn’t really Orthodox and my guy is really Orthodox, and he’s a better Christian and his books are better.”

And all of this is a monumental distraction from what our Christian life is supposed to be about, which is not dividing into factions, which is not finding somebody to follow, which is not finding some father-figure on the internet who is going to guide us into all truth and whom we must now defend. And I’m including myself in this, and Fr. Andrew, whether he wants me to or not. I hope things I’ve written and things in this show and things in The Whole Counsel of God podcast—I hope they’ve been helpful to you. That’s why I do them is because I’m hoping they’ll be helpful to people. Otherwise I wouldn’t do them. If people stop listening to this show, I’ll stop doing it; if people stop buying my books, I’ll stop writing them. Won’t bother me. I have hobbies, other things I can do. It’s not to get people to become DeYoungites or to follow me or to create a fandom or any of that. Not what I’m about. I can’t be your dad; I can’t be the spiritual father of everyone who listens to this show and everyone who buys one of my books. I can’t. It’s not going to happen.

But every one of us who are Orthodox Christians or Christians today are in a unique position in the history of the world, because that same internet that’s led us down this distracted path of dividing into factions and following people and becoming fans—that same internet has also given us, at least hypothetically, access to an unprecedented amount of information, an unprecedented amount of material about the faith, about the world, about history, about Orthodoxy, about theology, about Christianity, about the Bible. And I hope the stuff I do, including this podcast, is a small part of that that’s helpful to people. All of that is available to us, and that makes every one of us responsible for it.

So not only do we not need to get distracted by fannishness or simping or anything related to that, but we have a positive responsibility now. We are not living in a village in Greece before the revolution under the Turks where we can’t get printed Christian books, let alone have an internet; and where we have to just, you know, do the best we can to maintain our faith in the face of oppression, in the face of being second-class citizens, and just continue to attend the services as much as we can, even if we don’t really understand what’s going on because they’re in a Greek that we don’t understand any more, but we need to keep that alive.

We’re in a position where every single one of us has the ability to really appropriate Christianity, to really understand at a level that our forefathers and -mothers in the faith would’ve been desperate to have. Most of our ancestors in the faith would be desperate to own a Bible in a language they could read, let alone have a hundred translations at their fingertips, let alone have all the instruction and all the teaching that we have available through Ancient Faith and other outlets. And we’re going to be held accountable one day with what we did with it, but with all of this available to us, it’s not just a question about this threatening kind of thing about the last judgment, though that’s there and that’s real, that we will be held accountable for what we did with what we had.

But with all of this available to us, the Church today should be the strongest it’s ever been. The people in our churches should have the deepest understanding of the faith, should be living the Christian life with a nuance and depth that was never before possible. I don’t feel like I’m doing that. I don’t know if anyone listening feels like they’re doing that. But if there’s anything unprecedented about our current Church life, I think it’s in the opposite direction, and we don’t have an excuse.

So my final thought today is that we’re not just working on doing the best we can, like Snorri, old Snorri, to understand our newfound Christian faith in the light of the cultural traditions of our people and how those fit together. We have this wealth available to us, and if we take advantage of it, if we stop getting distracted by all the stupidities that come along with the internet giving us access to it, if we commit to it, then this is going to benefit us, this is going to transform our generation, this is going to transform the world into the future. This can be the time where Christianity, real Christianity, historic Christianity, blossoms and comes forth and becomes a force in the world as it never has before—or it can just get turned into another fandom on the internet of: Oh yeah, the Orthodox folks; they’re over there in between the Bronies and the Furries, and in terms of the real world they’ve accomplished nothing.

And it’s up to each of us, because each one of us— If you’re able to listen to this show and get things out of it, then you have what it takes to take advantage of the resources available to you and become the kind of Christian in this historical and cultural moment that God is calling each of us to be.

Fr. Andrew: Amen. Well, that is our show for today. Thank you very much, everyone, for listening to this pre-recorded episode. You couldn’t get through to us live this time, but we still want to hear from you. You can email us at lordofspirits@ancientfaith.com; you can message us at our Facebook page; or you can leave us a voicemail at speakpipe.com/lordofspirits.

Fr. Stephen: And even if you’re stuck in the middle of a railroad track, you should 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.

Fr. Andrew: And if you are on Facebook, you can like our page, [or] join our discussion group. You can leave reviews and ratings everywhere, but, please, most importantly, share this show with a friend [who] you know is going to love it and benefit from it.

Fr. Stephen: And when you look around and realize that there’s no turning back, 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. Good night, all, and God bless you.