The Jonathan Pageau Interview | Monsters, Hidden Symbols, and Jordan Peterson's Church Experience
On The Babylon Bee Interview Show, Kyle and Ethan talk to Jonathan Pageau about making Christian carvings, monsters, and the breakdown of identity in our culture. Jonathan carves Eastern Orthodox images and other traditional images. He has been appearing on many podcasts, including one on Jordan Peterson's podcast. Jonathan has a knack for discovering the hidden meaning behind things. Kyle and Ethan delve in deep on why we need symbolism and how the Bee is making the world turn right side up again. Check out BetterHelp.com/BabylonBee for 10% off Kyle and Ethan first find out what informs Jonathan's art and why he can make images of Christ and other Eastern Orthodox figures. Jonathan tells us how it was to be with Jordan Peterson in church. Ethan discovers the hidden meaning behind his love for monsters and the grotesque. Jonathan gives his criticism of our culture that is losing the idea of identity. In the Subscriber Portion, Kyle and Ethan find out what Target's logo means, along with a few others. Jonathan tells all about what is the biggest misuse of symbolism in churches in our current culture. He also gives us what he terms as the upside down hierarchy with The Babylon Bee as the hope to help turn things right side up again. As always Kyle and Ethan finish the interview with the ever great 10 questions.
I just have to say that I object strenuously to your use of the word hilarious.
Hard-hitting questions.
What do you think about feminism?
Do you like it?
Taking you to the cutting edge of truth.
Yeah, well, Last Jedi is one of the worst movies ever made, and it was very clear that Ryan Johnson doesn't like Star Wars.
Kyle pulls no punches.
I want to ask how you're able to sleep at night.
Ethan brings bone-shattering common sense from the top rope.
If I may, how double dare you?
This is the Babylon Bee interview show.
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Symbols.
What are they?
What do they mean?
Does this mean something?
Is it important?
We're going to find out today because we're talking to Jonathan Padgo, who is like super duper smart.
He's very smart and he sees little symbols in everything.
He's like the sane version of Mel Gibson in that.
Well, no, conspiracy theory, he was sane.
He's like the sane version of a crazy guy.
Aren't all sane people just sane versions of crazy games?
Yeah, I guess so.
I don't know.
Anyway, that's how it's prepared.
Super interesting.
We grilled him on all kinds of things.
Like, what does the FedEx logo mean?
What does the Target logo mean?
What does the Babylon B logo mean?
And then he just like, we would return.
We would make a joke or we would just like mention something in passing.
And then he would give us a 20-minute response, very in-depth.
One of these guys gives him, he gave very long responses, but it was like, I felt like I was being given a free college course.
I didn't, often I try to like, with our guests, I'll try to interject jokes and things.
I feel like, oh, they're giving a long, boring answer.
I want to like break this off.
But I just sat back and let this guy go.
Yeah.
I really wanted this to be like much longer.
It was just, it felt like we were scratching the surface.
It felt like we could just keep going.
Sometimes we'll hit the subscriber portion 40 minutes in, and I'm like, okay, it's time to move on.
Let's get to the subscriber.
And I felt bad cutting it off into the subscriber portion because I'm like, we could just keep going.
So let's do it.
Let's talk to Jonathan.
Yeah, dive in.
And if you're a Jordan Peterson fan, Jonathan is a good friend of Jordan Peterson, and they talk on very similar levels.
So in fact, if you haven't seen his conversation with Jordan Peterson, I highly recommend checking that out.
Watch that.
Don't watch this.
Watch that first.
Just watch that.
This is a good chaser.
And then this, yeah.
Chase it down like lemon after tequila or whatever you do.
Yeah.
Salt.
Or salt.
I don't know what you do.
Whatever.
Hey, Jonathan.
All right.
Well, what's going on, Jonathan?
Thanks for coming on.
Yeah, it's great to meet you guys.
I've been a big fan for several years.
And so I was really, really excited when I was invited to come on.
So I'm happy about this.
Yeah, it's exciting to have you on.
So you make any good icons lately or?
A little bit, yeah.
I've been making, I've mostly been doing this video and public speaking stuff, but I still, in theory, have an icon carving practice that I that I keep up.
Gotcha.
I didn't realize till now that I didn't have a mic by me.
I just got it.
So I've been talking to him and I don't think you can hear me.
There's something deep and symbolic about that.
Maybe.
Yeah.
You want to analyze, maybe?
I don't know.
Yeah.
Have you ever noticed how in the FedEx logo there's an arrow?
Yes.
I think it's because they go places and they deliver things.
What do you think?
You probably saw that ahead of most people.
Yes, I did.
I think I also noticed you have a bee in your logo because you called it Babylon B. How did you analyze on that name, by the way?
Babylon B.
So, yeah, Babylon is kind of like just the biblical reference of Israel being in exile.
Heard of it?
Yeah.
And then yeah, the Bible, he might have heard of it.
It's the thing that, you know, Protestants reading stuff.
No, tell me more about this Bible thing.
I'd like to know.
Yeah, did you notice the two bees?
Nice.
Yeah.
Analysis.
And like a Twinkie that's been cut in four pieces.
So is it the idea?
Because it could go both ways.
Is it the idea of getting honey from Babylon or is it the idea of being really annoying and stinging the Babylonians while you're in exile?
I think I have to ask Adam, who's the actual founder of the site, but I think Babylon was the key and then he wanted B to just kind of, you know, sacramental B or whatever, but it works great because it's like the stinger.
You know, we like the sting satire.
That's, I think that's kind of all it was.
So sounds good.
It's cool.
Yeah.
Yeah, it's hard.
It's hard to worship idols when you have a bee buzzing around your head.
It's true.
So sting them.
I don't know.
So speaking of idols, you're Eastern Orthodox.
That's right.
And you also do like graven images.
That's like your whole job.
Yes.
Grave images.
Yeah.
I'm a man of graven images.
Explain.
So are you curious about why I make grave images?
Yeah, yeah.
I'm just like, how do you get to that?
I mean, yeah, that seems like a very specific, interesting.
I don't, yeah, I don't think we've ever had an Eastern Orthodox guy on hand.
That's true.
I don't think people ask us to, and we just never really connect with anyone.
So we're interested.
Yeah.
All right.
So, I mean, it starts with the idea that everything in scripture points to Christ, basically.
And so even all the commandments, the reason for the commandments ultimately is to is a kind of slow revelation towards the Messiah.
And so some of them, for example, the idea of celebrating the Sabbath is one which in Christ kind of gets flipped where we actually don't celebrate the Sabbath anymore.
We celebrate on the first day.
So Christ revealed to us kind of the secret of the Sabbath in his death on dying on, you know, being in the tomb on the Saturday.
And then now we celebrate the resurrection.
And so it's something similar, you could say, with the images, where one of the reasons, well, the reasons why we don't have images in, they didn't have images in the Old Testament was one, because we don't have an image of God.
We can't make images of God because God is invisible.
And the second is, of course, you don't want to make images of false gods because then you're worshiping false things.
And so in the church, there was a big conflict about this in the seventh century, like this just big fight about images.
Because the problem that was being tried to dealt with is, you know, how would we do with this, this idea that now Christ, God does have an image, right?
And this, the image that God has given us is Christ.
And what the church fathers, the conclusion they came to is that we actually have to represent the image of Jesus, because if we don't, we're denying some aspect of the incarnation.
We are actually denying the visibility of God in Christ.
And so, what happens is we have these images which remind us of the incarnation or also help us understand the reality of the incarnation.
And we don't worship them, obviously.
We only worship God, but we do reverence them because it has become a tool for God to manifest Himself in the world.
So, just like in the Old Testament, you know, they would, let's say, reverence the altar or the temple or even each other, you know, they would bow down before each other.
And so, now we have this reverence towards the images because God has restored the image of God in us as well and in the saints, and especially in Christ as the you know, the head of this whole process.
That's maybe a simple way to explain it.
Okay, not sure.
I think I lied.
I think John Gabriel is Eastern Orthodox.
Yes, John Gabriel is so you are the second.
Oh, yeah, sorry.
So, yeah, as I've heard, I've heard that there's some people that react very negatively if an image of Jesus is used.
And so, obviously, you carve images of Jesus, right?
So, you wouldn't agree with those guys.
Yeah.
Where do you stand on that?
It's really the image of Jesus is really the central image.
It's really the central icon.
And it's, and for the Orthodox, at least, there's almost something kind of Muslim about not wanting images of Jesus.
Because, like, let's say you have an image of like a child's book with the image of Jesus in it, and that usually for most Protestants is okay.
And then your child asks you, Who's that?
So, what are you going to answer?
Are you going to answer, well, that's Jesus, right?
And that's the whole crux of the matter.
It's that you can do that, right?
In Jerusalem, you know, in Galilee 2,000 years ago, people could have asked you even a harder question, like, who's that?
And your answer would have been God.
Where?
Oh, over there.
There's God.
So, it's that, it's the intensity of the incarnations, the scandal of the incarnation, uh, which is so which it makes it difficult to deal with, obviously, because there was a conflict in the church about this, because it's like, okay, how do we, how do we do this?
There's this commandment in the, in the scripture not to make these images, but how do we deal with the fact that God walked in you know on the earth that you could have pointed at him, you could have said this is it, you could touch him, you could, you know.
Um, and so that's really how you that's kind of how you deal with that.
Is there like temptation when you're carving a picture of Jesus to like make him like look a little more like you or something, or like something you like, just add your own little touch?
That's like that's like the reason to be careful about grave images because you're yeah, you're definitely injecting your own ideas onto a thing.
That's why making whatever image you make for God, you're just saying more about yourself than you are, God, right?
Exactly.
Well, that's why there's a tradition, right?
We follow the tradition of the church, and so there's a way to represent Christ, which has been kind of handed down and accepted, you know, as a Nazarene with long hair, uh, with a beard, um, like you, and usually wearing uh, like a Roman, a Roman vestment, let's say, to show that he's a kind of a glorious figure.
Um, so we have this tradition, but it is true that there is a there actually is a kind of trope among iconographers that unconsciously people will make not just not just the image of Christ, but like the images of different icons of different saints will end up making them look a little bit like them, and that this is this is an unconscious thing people don't do on purpose.
And so, we actually we actually came up with a rule, which is that only good-looking people are allowed to make icons, really.
Okay, I'm out.
Um, you have a question, Kyle?
I want to take all the questions in.
No, I don't, I don't really even know where to start.
I mean, you're such an interesting guy.
You know, we're starting with your faith, obviously, you know, Eastern Orthodox faith and icons and the importance of that.
And, you know, but you kind of expand beyond that and talk about symbols and icons and patterns and beauty in the real world.
So maybe we just make that jump and that transition.
How does your faith and your understanding of the way God uses symbols and patterns, how does that inform the way that you look at the world?
Well, the first thing I would say it does is that it makes your approach to scripture a little different in the sense that the way that we've approached scripture, I would say, for the past 200 years is something like, you know, I'm a rational being.
You know, I had God has given me a reason.
God has given me the capacity to understand.
And so now I stand here and now I read scripture and I interpret scripture with different hermeneutical strategies.
Whereas in this kind of symbolic way of thinking, what happens is that scripture actually becomes the lens through which you look at the world.
And so the way to kind of understand that would be that the first chapters in Genesis are actually like a kind of like a kind of pattern.
They're a pattern which describes reality.
And then all of scripture is an unfolding of that pattern.
And it culminates, of course, into Christ, who kind of reveals the totality of this whole structure and then points to the eschaton, which is, let's say, the final totality of all this whole pattern.
And so you start with like a little example.
It's like you start with a mountain.
It's harder for people to remember that the Garden of Eden is a mountain because it doesn't say that in Genesis.
It says it in Ezekiel.
But that you have this mountain with a tree at the top and you have these people up there.
And then they fall, they go down the mountain and they end up in a world of hostility of thorns.
And then they have to wear garments of skin.
They kind of cover themselves with different garments.
Then they build cities.
This whole process of accumulation of technology of layers and layers and layers, put over this seed that's like, let's say, pure soul that has fallen, it has started to become tainted.
And then that ultimately leads to the flood.
And now you have, then everything breaks down and the water comes in and the whole world is kind of destroyed and has to start over.
And the fall happens through pride, right?
It happens through self-sufficiency.
It's like you think you've got it all.
You don't need anything above you.
It's like, I've got this.
You know, I take, I try to take that which is above me for myself.
And so obviously in that case, it's to want to reach up to God.
So once you realize that, let's say that's the pattern, this basic pattern of a story, then you start to look at the other stories and you see that it's the pattern of the Tower of Babel is the same story as the fall, right?
Like you go up, you want to reach God, you want to take the name of God for yourself.
And in doing that, what happens is fragmentation and tumbling and falling down.
You know, the tower falls and everybody gets spread out into the world and into confusion.
You'll start looking at stories.
You'll start to see that this type of story just repeats itself over and over, this pattern of a mountain, of moving up towards unity, towards one, towards communion with God, and then moving away from communion and communion with God into multiplicity and fragmentation and breakdown and chaos, all of that.
But it's not just the pattern of a story in scripture.
It's just the pattern of everything.
And so, you know, let's say your organization, you have an organization with a goal, with a purpose, and that purpose is above you.
It's invisible.
It's not, you can't completely contain it into the things you do, right?
All the things you do point towards that invisible point.
And if you forget that, forget that point, that reason why you do things, then obviously now all of your little idiosyncrasies among the employees are going to start to manifest themselves.
You're going to start to fight.
You're going to start to, everybody's going to want to be the leader.
Everybody's going to want to pull it in every direction.
And you rip the organization apart.
And the only way to kind of come back together is to remember the garden or to remember God or to remember the purpose.
And so, of course, the purpose is lower than God, but it's the idea that this pattern kind of fractally manifests itself in all the different aspects of reality.
And then you end in the very, very end with the image of the New Jerusalem where you have the mountain with the tree and the source of life.
And then around it now is all the all that the fall, all that the fall kind of manifested, the city of Cain, you know, all the technology gets glorified and transformed into this kind of total space of everything participating in the glory of God, let's say.
And so that's just a basic idea.
But the idea is that once you start to kind of see that there's this basic structure in scripture, not only do you, are you able to just see it repeated everywhere, you know, a very simple example that you can find in scripture, let's say when Christ walks on water, he sends his disciple on a boat.
He goes up a mountain to pray.
And while he's up on the mountain, then the disciples are in the boat.
They imagine the ark on the flood.
They're forgetting.
They're forgetting Christ.
And so they get worried because things are getting choppy out there.
You know, there's starting to be waves.
And Christ comes down.
And when he enters into the boat, they worship him.
And then the storm stops and everything becomes calm.
So you can see that as, once again, from Genesis to the flood, it's the same structure.
It's just totally condensed in that little story of Christ going down the mountain and going out onto the waters into the boat.
And so, like I said, and then you can apply, you can watch a movie and see that it's all, it's always the same patterns.
You know, you watch a movie, it's usually some aspect of the story of Jesus, which is being represented, sometimes deformed, sometimes inverted, but nonetheless, it's kind of pointing towards these images, especially now in a post-Christian world, all these Marvel movies and all these big budget movies.
It's always a messianic figure with a death and a resurrection.
It's non-stop, just this, this we are, we are attracted to the story without even knowing it.
We're attracted to the story that scripture gives us.
It's only that, let's say in the past few hundred years, people have been hacking at it, trying to destroy it for us so that we don't even see it anymore, right?
Instead of talking about the stories in scripture, all they talk about is, you know, this source and this source and this source and conflict between the Yahooist and the Eloist and all this nonsense so that we don't even see the stories anymore.
And so if we can just focus on the actual stories that are there and the actual patterns that, you know, no matter what, who cares about all that other stuff, it's useless to the person trying to live a spiritual life.
Then all of a sudden we can kind of enter into these stories again and start to see the world through them, you know, instead of just seeing them as these facts that we accumulate.
So that's basically the work that I'm doing on the symbolic world is trying to help people resee the world with all its fullness, let's say, all the magic, all the spirit that God has put into it.
And the surprise that I've had is I would say at least half of my public are atheists.
And they're just people looking for meaning, people who are tired of the nihilism, people who are sick of being told that the world is meaningless and can't, they just, they're not just sick of it.
They are existentially in danger and they feel they need to connect to something more.
And so they find that the beauty that we see in scripture and not just in scripture, but in the Christian liturgies and the music and the songs in the icons and all of this kind of grand language is a language which actually kind of holds the world together.
So it gives you a little idea of what I'm doing, let's say.
Can you answer your question, Kyle?
Do you talk the whole time during movies?
Oh, man.
No, I don't.
I actually try to shut off my symbolic thinking while I'm watching the movie because it's annoying if you do that.
You're like analyzing while you're watching it and you're not enjoying it.
I usually try to shut my brain off and then I watch it.
And then when I sit down later, I remember the story and then I kind of analyze it.
Yeah.
You're sitting there watching Smokey and the Bandit and you're going, the bandit is Christ.
Six pack of Christ.
Six pack of beer is the communion.
The Trans Am is the incarnation.
I don't know something.
Transam is the donkey.
Boom.
That was better.
You ever notice how on the Amazon logo, it's not just a smile.
It's an arrow pointing from A to Z.
Yes.
I had noticed that.
Dang it.
Because they're trying to take over.
They're trying to take over everything.
Everything, yes.
That's pretty much what they're doing.
With a smile on, they will rule the world.
Yes, exactly.
They will rule the world with a smile.
A robot smile is what we're going to get.
Freaky Android smile.
That's right.
So you are one of the few people, according to you, that has been in church with Jordan Peterson.
I want to know what that experience is like.
He hated it.
He was bored to death.
He really, really did not like it.
He wanted to like.
It was also like one of those worst things where it was a Vespers liturgy.
So it's like a Vespers service with liturgy.
So it was like two and a half hours long.
And yeah, he did not enjoy it.
So not a fan.
You got to get him to like a Protestant service.
Yeah, like a kind of charismatic force.
I'm not sure he'd like that either.
I think he probably wants something kind of in between.
I don't see him like, you know, falling over in the spirit and stuff like that.
Maybe.
I mean, who knows?
But, you know.
I mean, really, we'll take anything.
If he converted and started a church, he could immediately create a whole new denomination.
That would probably be huge.
Yeah, that's actually the scariest thing about Jordan.
You would start a church and start like a psychedelics church, which would not be good.
It would be very bad.
Meet communion, you know, meat, dibbed in meat.
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So, okay, so here's a question I'm always interested in.
And, you know, I'm fascinated by Gothic art and these old cathedrals, and they have these monsters and gargoyles.
And I, as an I draw comics, I'm an illustrator.
I like doing concept art.
I love monsters.
I see beauty in the grotesque, but I don't know how to explain it.
But like, I see amazing beauty in just like creating something hideous.
All right.
But I'm borrowing everything I draw, I'm borrowing from the nature God created: octopuses and crabs and all the weird fish.
So, number one, like, why did the church have that?
Should we still have it?
And is our idea of beauty too simple that we don't include, we only let butterflies and bunnies in, but not, you know, tarantula water.
Not the monsters.
Right.
Yes.
Well, you've got the right guy because I can definitely explain that.
It's actually one of the main things that I talk about because we live in a world of monsters right now.
We live on the edge of the world, let's say.
So, the way to understand it is: you've probably seen these old maps, you know, Pliny's maps, the ancient maps of the world, the way they were set up, was that you, whatever you were, like your identity, if you're Greek or if you were Egyptian or whatever, whatever it is that you were, you had your center.
You had the umphalos, you had the belly button of the world, let's say.
You know, it was like a central space, could be a temple, not necessarily, but it could be just an object which would be kind of like the center of the universe for you.
In Israel, of course, that was the temple and especially the Ark of the Covenant.
And so, then that's you, like that's the thing that joins you together, right?
Everything kind of points towards that and becomes the invisible place, the invisible point where heaven and earth meet, and that you find your highest form of your identity in that place.
And so, then as you move out, let's say from the temple, at first in the temple, there's just one guy, right?
There's just the priest, the high priest is allowed to go into the Holy of Holies.
And as you move out, then you've got the priestly caste is allowed to go into the holy place, and then Israelites are allowed to go into the court.
And if you move further into like the, let's say, the later temples, then strangers were allowed to move into, let's say, the outer outer courts were allowed to kind of circulate in this outer court.
And so, that was the image of the world.
So, you, like, let's say you were Greek and you move out from Greece and you start to move away from, at first, you're going to start to see things that you recognize.
People like you.
First, people that speak Greek, then maybe people that aren't you, but yet you know, like the Persians, right?
You've been around them for a long time, you know them.
They're strangers, but they're not that strange.
And the further you go, the stranger things become, the less you can recognize them.
And then you reach to a place where you don't understand what people are saying.
It sounds like noise to you.
Bar, right?
That's where barbarian comes from.
It's like the sound of a dog barking.
It's language that you don't understand.
And then as you move further and further away, you start to see things that you don't recognize.
And you start to not be able to recognize the difference between that which is essential and that which is a detail.
So you look at someone, and for example, you encounter a person where you can't tell the difference between ornamentation and their actual face.
So imagine now, like the, let's say, the natives in South America, the first time they saw someone come down from a boat on a horse, what do you, they saw like an eight-legged god, you know, shining with like, you know, all this shiny stuff on it.
And they couldn't understand what they were looking at.
So what they were looking at was a monster.
They're looking at something which doesn't have an identity yet or has a confused identity because it's not part of your identification system.
And so that's the experience of monstrosity, which is the experience of something which doesn't have a clear identity to you.
And so the way it usually presents itself to you is as mixture.
Because you have categories.
So you go to Africa and you see this huge thing that's swimming in the water and you think, oh, it's a river horse, right?
It's a hippopotamus because you don't have an actual category for it.
You have to join it to categories that you already have.
And so if you look at dragon, for example, ancient dragons, the way they were represented in ancient texts, they're always hybrids.
They're always like a lizard with wings and with hairy feet, let's say.
So it's like a mammal, it's a lizard, it's a bird, it's like a it's a monster.
It's an impossible joining of different categories together because it's something that you don't recognize.
So in the ancient, the way the ancient world represented that was that on the edge of the world, there were monsters.
You've probably seen these images, right, of like these men with one foot or like men with heads in their chests or, you know, the dog-headed men, all of these monsters that exist on the edge of the world because they are basically all the categories or and also the inversion.
So Amazons are on the edge of the world because they're upside down from us.
Women are the warriors.
Men barely exist.
And so all the masculine qualities are now taken up by women in that world.
So the upside down, the hybrid, the mixture, the excesses, too big, too little, you know, leprechauns, giants, all of this stuff, right?
It's all about the edge of categories.
Okay.
So now think about this image that I gave you about from Genesis to the flood.
Okay.
Now from Genesis to the flood, you have the same structure that I just described.
Starts in the garden.
You move out of the garden.
And as you're moving out of the garden, you start to add these layers and you start to be in a world that's hostile to you, the world of thorns.
And then what happens?
Mixture between the sons of God and the daughters of men.
And you get monsters, you get giants.
And the giants appear on the edge of the world in time in this story.
So it's like as you move further and further in time from the place where you were in communion with God, then you start to encounter these hybrids, this mixture, these categories that don't fit, that are excessive.
And then you reach the giants.
And the giants bring on the edge, bring about the end of the world.
They bring about the flood, right?
They're the cause of the flood, you could say.
Okay.
So that's the cosmic image.
So it's like from the center to the periphery.
And as you get to the periphery, that's where you have all the monsters.
Now, the monster, as a marker of the limit, you could say, as an in-between character, something which marks the difference between two worlds is also like a bridge.
So imagine the two empires, like Roman Empire, Persian Empire.
And you know that on the border of those two empires, there's going to be mixture, obviously.
They're going to be people that marry Persians, Persians that marry Romans, people that don't even remember whether they're Persians or Romans.
They're going to be this hybrid buffer between two identities, this place where two categories are kind of mixed together and aren't clear.
And this is just an inevitable part of reality, right?
So you have to leave a fringe on the edge of the world, something which is not identifiable.
It's not clear, right?
So you leave a fringe on your vestment.
That's what they say in scripture.
You leave the corners of the field until the strangers.
So the strangers come to the corners and they are allowed in the corners and they're allowed to take some part of your world, but only the corners because they're not part of you.
They're not one of you.
They're strange.
They're not your identity.
So it's just a basic pattern of reality.
Now, this plays out fractally.
Like it actually happens at different levels.
So if you're going to separate two things, you're actually going to put a monster on the separation.
And that's called a cherub.
A cherub doesn't look like the cherubs you see in Indiana Jones.
They didn't look like that at all.
They were bulls with wings, you know, with human heads, or they had heads of different animals, you know, like how Ezekiel sees the cherub as four heads with all these wings.
And so they are hybrid creatures because they mark the limit between the transcendent holy and the mundane world, let's say.
So if you build a church and you want the church to be in the same pattern as scripture, you want the church to look like scripture, not just in terms of what you say there, what you sing there, but actually the actual architecture of the church.
You want it to look like the pattern of scripture, then that's how you're going to make it.
You're going to have a holy of holy place where very few people are allowed to go.
And on the point of that is going to be the invisible point in communion where heaven and earth meet.
And then you're going to have a nave where people can congregate.
And that is, now it's the people from the church.
And in the narthex, which is the entry of the church, that's where you actually had the catechumen before.
So during liturgy, even now in the Orthodox liturgy, during the liturgy, at some point, all the people that aren't baptized, they get chased out of the church.
They're told to leave the church and they go into the narthex.
They don't do it anymore.
Nobody does it.
They still say it sometimes, but they don't actually do it.
But in the ancient days, let's say in the first centuries, they would chase all the catechumens out into the narthex.
So now you have this image, right, of the priest, of the people, of the strangers that are on the buffer.
They're almost inside.
They're not totally inside.
And then on the edge of the church, that's where you put the monsters.
That's where you have the gargoyles because that's the actual, that's actually the cosmic image.
And the gargoyle acts both as an image of the limit and also as a guardian for that which is even more dangerous from the outside.
Right.
So it's like there are monsters are in layers.
You have layers of monsters.
You have, let's say, a monster like Cerberus in the Greek tradition, where Cerberus, this three-headed dog, was a guardian because he was there to stop all the crazier stuff in hell to come into the normal world.
And so he is a monster, but he's also, he's also a guardian, which protects you from the bigger monsters, let's say.
So you can imagine like layers of monsters where you have superheroes who are basically monsters.
They're all hybrid.
They're all Batman and bird this and whatever.
Like they're all hybrid kind of monstrous freaks and mutants and all of these freaks that act as guardians.
And the first thing they usually guard you from is other superheroes, right?
So the X-Men story is a great version of that.
You have these mutants on the edge of the world that are protecting you from what?
They're protecting you from mutants.
They're protecting you from other mutants because the mutants are super dangerous.
So you need a bunch on your side to protect you from the bad ones that are coming in.
But behind those mutants, then there are all these galactic monsters, whatever, all these cosmic monsters that are so big that You want to have these kind of buffers to stop the bigger monsters and the demons and the really bad stuff from coming in.
And so in the Orthodox church, we actually have a saint, Saint Christopher, who is a giant or a dog-headed man.
And there are these traditions that he's a monstrous saint.
And they would put him on the door of the church, like going outside towards the outside as a kind of limit, let's say.
So that's what monsters are for.
My church has a coffee bar.
Is there any symbolism there?
Or is that a monster?
I don't know.
I'm just.
Coffee is a monster for sure.
I don't know.
I feel like you're playing 17-dimensional chess and we're playing tiddlywinks over here.
But coffee is not a monster, but it has to do with that.
It's like a garment of skin.
Think of it that way.
Coffee is like when Adam and Eve fell, they were going into a world of thorns.
And so God gave them a layer of death, like a layer of garment to protect them from the thorns outside.
And that's what coffee's for, man.
Coffee's there to give you an extra something to be able to face thorns of the world.
So it's like a medicine of some kind.
I feel like we should just say random words.
Yeah.
Prompt him, and then you can tell us the symbolism.
The symbolism of the random words.
But hopefully the monster one will kind of sink in because that's a really important one.
Because right now, we live in a world of monsters.
The monsters are out.
The monsters are everywhere, right?
They used to be hide.
They used to hide, but now all the hybrids, all the mixtures, all the fluid identities, they're everywhere.
And that's what it is: a breakdown of identity.
The breakdown of identity has become the reference point.
So we could say we are now in a world where monsters are the reference, where we celebrate monstrosity, we celebrate fluidity, we celebrate lack of identity, we celebrate breakdown of identity.
And it's actually the only thing we're allowed to celebrate is a breakdown of identity.
And it used to be like in ancient worlds, you had those.
You had, they're called carnivals.
You had moments in the year where you would celebrate the upside down, right?
You'd have like a crazy moment where everybody's on stilts and wearing costumes and everything's turning and you have all these spinning things.
You know, Purim, for example, in the Jewish tradition is still alive today, where one day a year, the Jews will dress up into crazy costumes and they're supposed to get drunk and spin until they fall down on the day of Purim.
Like it's like a day where you're supposed to do the opposite of what is normal and kind of get it out of your system, you could say, so that then the world can start again.
Like you basically start the world again.
So we have Tuesday here at the end.
Tuesday.
You call it Tuesday?
Was it Friday though?
Like, wow, Tuesday.
I thought Friday TGIF is about is usually about that.
Like they kind of get all that stuff out of your system and then start the day again.
But that's like the basic, that's the basic idea.
But now we're basically a carnival.
Like our whole world is a carnival.
And the only thing we're allowed to do is carnival.
We have a whole month of carnival and it's non-stop, right?
So it's important to kind of understand where we are, let's say, in that big pattern.
I can see like the highly awoke intellectual hearing everything you're saying and just their head exploding.
Yes.
That's what we hope.
We need more of those heads exploding.
You're calling all the fringe people monsters and you don't want them to find their identity, their own identity.
You think like having like our own guru, our own group identity is a good thing?
Like it's good for us Christians to be like, yeah, there's an inner circle.
Yeah.
That's right.
Hierarchies.
Yeah, it is very good.
It is very good.
And, but the thing that's interesting is that even in the kind of fluid woke world, they actually take that up, that identity.
It's not like, I mean, obviously, if you say they're monsters, they're going to get annoyed a little bit, but they say they're monsters.
They actually take up that vision, like dress up as dogs and dress up as, you know, the whole fetish culture is all about monstrosity, excess, you know, and the imagery, all the imagery of that world, like wearing leather, you know, using tropes of violence.
Like, what do you think all that stuff is?
It's all about this edge.
It's all about this, you know, coming into this breakdown.
So, so it's not, it's not a secret, right?
And you drew a cartoon where you had the SJW monsters, the social justice people actually being monsters.
So you hit upon the symbolism, didn't you?
Yeah, no, it's pretty deep.
It's pretty deep.
It's pretty deep.
But the rainbow is all about that.
The rainbow is all about multiplicity.
It's all about the absence of pure light.
It's the breakdown.
It's the breakdown into fluidity because a rainbow is actually fluid.
It doesn't actually have just the colors in a rainbow are actually fluid.
They just kind of meld into each other.
And so it's a perfect symbol.
It's a perfect image for what it is that the idea of multiplying genders indefinitely and having 100 million genders.
That's what it is.
It's a breakdown of the world into idiosyncrasy, just kind of scattering, fragmentation.
The Eastern Orthodox Church has pretty good beards, usually?
Yes, we are all about the beards.
Yours isn't that long, but I did.
We have two things.
We have the desire to be an Eastern Orthodox man and have a beard.
We also have wives that have opinions.
And so I grew my beard in 20, during COVID, I actually grew my beard pretty long.
I was kind of Castro-like for some reason.
I was rocking this Castro image, not on purpose, but my wife made it very clear that this had to be a temporary thing.
So I got it out of my system.
Okay.
You can only blame COVID so long for the beard.
Hey, you, are you enjoying this interview?
Oh, I know I am.
Oh, I sure am.
I'm actually probably sweating trying to think up new questions at this very moment.
But if you're enjoying it, you should become a Babylon B subscriber because the interviews are much longer.
Yes.
And we also have the most fun because the portion of the interview that does not go up here on YouTube publicly can be Googled.
So our guests kind of kick back a little bit and get a little looser.
They tell us what they really think.
And we always do our 10 questions, which for everybody tends to be the funnest part of the show.
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What's the deal with the way that the EO churches dunk babies?
Like there's this whole crazy thing.
Yeah, usually the crazy ones you see, they're not the normal ones.
Like those crazy videos where you see the priest like basically like.
Like the baby do backflips and stuff.
Yeah, exactly.
Like tumble him in the water.
I mean, it's the symbolism of baptism in the Orthodox Church is actually more similar to Protestant baptism because it has to do with death.
You know, it's about dying.
So it's a, that's why you have to dunk, like you have to go underwater because it's all about this dying.
And, you know, it's obviously in the Orthodox church, it's also related to circumcision, you know, this idea of removing washing, right?
You go down and you remove the excess and then you come back up as a purified, you know, rectified being.
So that's why they, that's why they dunk the babies.
You're supposed to do it gently, not supposed to do it like some of these crazy Greek priests that you've seen on YouTube or whatever.
I don't know.
I'm a fan.
You like that?
That's cool.
That's cool.
So what is like, you know, there's like kind of the, I feel like I'm getting into the same area here.
Maybe it's because I'm just having tonight processing, but also just like I'm fascinated by the idea that, you know, kind of the way that Christians make art, we tend to go, we take that scripture, focus on the good, true, beautiful.
That's not even the scripture.
Whatever is pure or whatever.
We take that and we tend to think that means make, you know, fireproof.
We're like these very kind of happy-go-lucky Christian beings.
Make God's not dead is what that means.
And is there a like, how do you make the Christian case from scripture?
Or do you for making something that has that has the full spectrum of things that are in the world as far as like violence, evil, ugliness, grotesque?
I mean, you know, people freak out at the side of a skeleton.
God designed it.
That's one of those things that I find fascinating too.
GK Chesterton.
GK Chesterton.
Yeah, I think it's all about it's all about hierarchy.
That's the way you have to kind of understand things is that once you kind of see this basic hierarchy that I talked about, this basic hierarchy of the garden or the mountain or whatever, then all of a sudden everything has its place.
It just has to be in the proper place.
And so, you know, I think that the fact that you're, let's say, attracted to kind of monstrosity or to these types of images, it makes sense also with what you're doing as the Babylon bee, right?
You're acting like, you're acting like a graffiti artist.
You're acting like the king's fool, right?
The king's fool that yes.
The king's fool is super important in the pattern of everything because pride is a serious sin.
Like pride is a real sin for authority, especially.
Authority has the tendency to think that they're self-sufficient, to think that they've got it.
And they basically they're God.
They're not going to say it, but they think that way.
They think as if like, we've got this, we're in charge, we're God.
So we need foolish characters to be able to point out that they don't, like, to look under the, to look under the robe, right?
To show the, to show the idiosyncrasies, to show the underside of the system in order to show how it's not complete.
It's not total.
And so I think that monsters are part of that because that's their role too.
The monster is to show you that identities are relative as you move towards God.
Like the only identity which is completely sure and completely certain is the identity we have in God and in Christ.
But all the other ones are secondary.
And so if you think that even, for example, like even, you know, the idea that like being a father is a total identity.
Well, it's not because fathers are jerks and fathers do all bad things.
They do a bunch of stupid stuff.
So you also need places to be able to expose that so that people don't think that they're that they're that they've got it.
So so the king's fool, that's what, that's the role that they played.
And I think that the funny thing that I've noticed, like for like what you guys are doing, especially, this is something that I've been thinking about a lot in the past few years, which is that usually the fool is usually the fool is not the conservative guy, right?
Usually the fool is actually more of a, you could say more of a liberal type in the sense that the order itself is conservative.
And so the kind of liberal type wants to show, poke at the order and show that it's not like it's not what it says, that there's hypocrisy, that there's that there's underside to it and everything.
But the problem is that what happens when the structure itself is completely upside down?
Like what happens when the order itself is liberal?
Like the order itself is completely about breakdown of family structure, breakdown of traditional society, breakdown of community.
So then the fool becomes a conservative guy.
It's really fascinating because that's what you guys are basically pointing back to reality.
Like a lot of your jokes are about pointing back to something completely normal.
And all of a sudden, why is that funny?
I don't know.
It is funny because the whole world is upside down.
So it's like, you know, here's the freaky family of five, you know, who go to church on Sundays and, you know, they need to be arrested by, you know, they need to be arrested because they're completely against the grain.
And it's like, you know, that's the strange position we're in right now.
Yeah, we found a lot of humor just in that the progressives and the radicals have, you know, have seized complete control of the culture and yet still think that they're on the fringe radicals and the oppressed still see themselves as oppressed.
That's where we find a lot of comedy, I think.
I think so.
And I think it's awesome because that's actually how that's, I think that that's how the world flips back.
You know, I always say the fool is always turning the world upside down.
Like he's turning, turning the world upside down.
That's his role.
So he, he's always showing the upside down of things.
And so, but when the whole world is upside down, the only thing left to do is to show the right side up.
So it's actually flipping, it's like using humor and using irony and using all these tools that are usually subversive to bring back a normal world.
It's a wild time to see that it's that not only it's necessary, but that it's actually working.
Because you guys are getting attention from all kinds of secular, like kind of just basic conservatives that aren't at all Christian, that are just even atheists and, you know, and everybody is enamored by the way you're able to kind of turn things back on their head.
Actually, turn them back on their feet is actually the way to say it.
Well, I feel like we haven't said much.
I know.
Sorry.
No, it's great.
We talk a lot.
It's great.
We're scratching the surface, but we are going to move into our subscriber exclusive portion.
We've got some, we had our subscribers submit a bunch of questions.
Oh, yeah.
We have those too.
We're going to dive into those and let's just keep talking.
This is great.
Do it.
Dive in.
All right.
Here we go.
Coming up next for Babylon B subscribers.
Your study of symbolism, can you explain what Target's logo is supposed to represent?
It represents a target.
Yes.
What symbols has the modern church twisted from their origin?
I'm going to give you the hardest one.
This is going to be a hard field to swallow, but.
What are some of the ones that really annoy you that you see either in film or even in Christianity?
Like misused symbols or icons?
Well, to me, the biggest gaffe has been enjoying this hard-hitting interview.
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