B (16:36)
So the Pearl Song, what I call the Pearl Song, and I hope it's a name that sticks, is what often is called the Hymn of the Pearl or the Hymn of the Soul. And so I'll say just a second about the title and then go into what the content of the thing is. So in the Syriac text, it is referred to as a madrasa, which is a word that is often translated as him. It has other meanings too, both in Syriac and in other Aramaic languages. And there's cognate. I mean, midrash even is the cognate in Hebrew, which is a term some people will know. But all that to say it doesn't necessarily always mean hymn. And in particular, on the English side of things, a hymn is definitely sung. First of all, you know, there's music and there's or at least not always sung. But there's that. That's the the idea that's there. And the Pear Song, according to the text, was more recited than sung or chanted. Maybe so. And I know I call it a song still, so that's kind of cheating. But Walt Whitman had the Song of Myself, which also doesn't have music. So the but anyway, so why call it not a hymn? It's not in praise of anything. If you read the hymn, it's not praising the pearl, it's not praising the soul, it's not praising anything. You know, so the home, you know The Homeric hymns, you know, are praising, you know, certain gods. Nothing's being praised here. And so I thought for that reason it's maybe good to move away from this language because again, the Hymn of the Pearl is not a title that's ancient at all. This is made up by, I don't know, somebody in the 1900s, probably, but. And so why is it sometimes called Hymn of the Soul? Well, so the, The Pearl song itself is a story, it's a narrative. Now, it's got some miraculous and crazy stuff going on in it, but it's. It is at as it is just a story. There's nobody there interpreting things or saying this means this or this should be that. That said, many people have interpreted it, interpreted it as some kind of allegory, whether it's of the soul, you know, going from Earth to some other place or, you know, leaving, you know, leaving material world for spiritual or something else. It certainly can be an allegory. It certainly can mean many of those things. But I'll. To me, it. I don't feel that there is such an absolute kind of allegorical equation, you know, which clearly some people seem to find. You know, they say, oh, well, the dragon equals. Or the snake equals chaos. And well, sure, maybe it does. But reading the story or reading the poem more as a story and appreciate appreciating it as a story, as a narrative, you know, that you can kind of, after you've read it and, you know, then you reflect on the events and think about them. You know, maybe that has some kind of application to your life in an allegory in a, you know, a typological sort of way. But, you know, that's. That's not something. There's not something built in, I don't feel in the text about that. I feel that all. There's a lot more possibility of meaning in the story if we treat it as a story and just a story and, and don't say no, well, it has to be this Gnostic myth or blah, blah, or it has to be, you know, something else. Again, I'm not against any of those kind of meanings. I would say it doesn't mean any of those. But it's not patently Manichean. It's not patently Christian, it's not. Not patently Jewish. So it's. Again, there's no. It's not even really patently religious in any way on the surface. It's a story. So what is the story? The story is of a child. We don't really know how young? But he's definitely pretty young. So he leaves what we learn to be the East. He calls it this a number of times, but the east presumably means Parthia here because his parents or his father is the king, a Parthian king. And so again, the Parthians, this is in Iran, broadly speaking, and further north as well. And up until 224C, I think that's right. And then the Sasanians are. I'm not a historian, but so that's about what time we're talking, you know, first century, second century, something like this, very early third century. And so he, this child is sent away. He doesn't just leave, he leaves his royal, you know, abode, but he's sent away by his parents. Why do they send him? Well, they say that he needs to go all the way to Egypt, which is a really long trip. But he's just a kid. Exactly right. So they have a lot of trust in him. But it's not just the kid. They do send a couple of, you know, people to go along with him, you know, some kind of tutor, pay to go kind of people, but they end up leaving eventually. So, thanks. But anyway, he goes on, gets to Egypt, however old he is. But interestingly, he leaves behind, he's got this very fancy shiny garment, and that's what it's called, it's basically called shiny thing, but it's clearly some kind of garment. Now whether this is like, you know, mystically shiny or if it's like sequiny or gold, you know, got sparkles in it, I. Who knows. But it is shining in some, in, in some way or other. So he leaves this at home. Okay, and this, and this will become important later, but. So he leaves, but he goes to Egypt because his parents say that there, in Egypt there's a pearl that he needs to get. No explanation. No. And it doesn't say like, you know, anything more really about the pearl, just that, you know, kind of it's there, but it's obviously not. Pearls don't tend to just be in easy to grab places. And this one happens to be under the watchful gaze of a, of a. In the Greek text, he's called a dragon, a drakon, and in Syriac he's called a hevya. This is drakon in Greek, dragon. And it means some kind of super, super, super gigantic snake. Okay, now whether or not they have some arms or maybe wings later, that's less certain really, but at minimum, it's a giant snake. Now, in the Syriac word or Syriac text, heavy eye just means snake. This is the normal word for snake. You go outside, you see a snake that's, you know, half a meter long, that's still a heavy. Or if it's three meters long, that's a giant snake. This meter, this snake was presumably bigger than that because it's called. Also scary fearsome. So if you. I mean, most people find snakes scary automatically, but the narrator decides to tell us that they're. That it's scary, too. So anyway, this snake is around it, and he's got to find some way to get it. So anyway, so that's his plan. He gets to Egypt. But while he's there, he kind of is, for whatever reason, sort of interested in everything that's going on in Egypt. He's sort, as he puts it, a little bit led astray by the Egyptians. And he in some way, kind of gets drunk, in a way on their food. And. Yeah, actually, narcotic is better a word to think of than drunk because he gets sleepy. There's a line, it says something like, way down by the heaviness of their food, I went into a deep sleep or fell into a deep sleep. And this deep sleep, I don't know, it's. It seems like not just a. Like a hardcore nap, but more like a Rip Van Winkle situation where, you know, who knows what he saw and all this, but he basically was asleep and he was out down to the Count. Now, again, it's a story. And is he asleep or is it just me? And he's like, sort of so Egyptianized that he's completely forgotten his mission, which is to get this pearl. And it's something along the. You know, with both of those kind of connected together. But what eventually wakes him up from his sleep? His parents, even though they're all the way back in Parthia, they have some kind of a telepathic knowledge about what's going on with their kid, that he's, you know, in trouble in terms of the. Getting the mission done. And so they're like, okay, we got to do something. We got to write a letter. And so they write a short letter, the text of which is included or a version of which is included in the poem. And basically it says, hey, wake up. And it gives two main imperatives. A few times in the letter, it's wake up and remember. So obviously, wake up, get out of your sleep. But also remember what you're there for. Remember the pearl. Remember your folks back home. Remember you're not actually Egyptian, even though you're In Egypt. And so all this serves to actually wake the. Wake the guy up, the. The boy really up. And it's. The letter itself speaks. It. I mean, the text is very clear about this. It like makes noise and kind of talk, recites itself in a way to. To the. To the person. And it's. It's. I don't know, this sort of concern and sending a. Let the concern of the telepathic knowledge and then their response being the concern to send this letter, you know, is just a. I don't know. It's. It's a really cool image to me of, you know, their care has this physical manifestation, the letter which actually flies and speaks. You know, it's not carried by a messenger or anything like that. The letter flies and then talks and does. It does the trick. It wakes. Wakes him up in Egypt. And he goes to the pearl to get the pearl. But of course, there's the issue of snake and what. There's two things you can do, at least two things you can do when you need to deal with a snake guarding a pearl. One, of course, is to kill the snake if you can. The other is to distract it in some way. You know, whether that's by drugs or a spell or music or something like this. In this case, it is a spell. It's not exactly clear what the spell is, but he says, I recited a spell over the snake, over the dragon. Use something like using or based on the names of my family. Okay, so it's something like, you know, instead of saying, you know, in the name of Angel Gabriel or in the name of God or, you know, in this case, it's in the name, excuse me, in the name of my father and my mother and my brother, my second, who is kind of this interesting double who's still back home, but he's not. Doesn't seem quite identical, but clearly very closely related. And so anyway, he's got the sort of the power of his family's names, and he uses this not to kill the snake, but to put the snake to sleep. And so this spell, whatever it is, whatever language it's in, even it works, puts the snake to sleep and he grabs the pearl out from under the snake and goes home. He's no more interested in Egypt after this. And on the way back home, he gets sent his. The shiny garment, you know, that we talked about before that he left his parents, I guess, realize sort of now's the time that he needs this. And who knows, maybe it was too big. I don't know. It's not. It was. It can't be that it was too big, actually, because it says that it was fitted to my size or something. Who knows? It's kind of a question what this thing does. But anyway, they send this shiny garment to him as he's headed back and he meets it and, you know, it's kind of like a very welcome, happy, you know, reunion back sort of with a part of his self, really, it seems. And then basically he comes back home with the pearl. But nothing else is really said about the pearl. I mean, you can just as well call it the. The Letter Song or something because, like, to me, the letter is as important as the pearl or more important in some ways, the shining garment is clearly important in the poem. I mean, it's mentioned several times, but kind of what it does is not exactly clear, at least to me. But anyway, that's a very long statement of what the Pearl Song is, I should say, just because I haven't made it clear yet. The text exists in Syriac in one manuscript only, and it exists in the Acts of Thomas, which is very, very, very, very famous. Sanct. Life. Of course, that text is known in Greek and in Syriac and in some other languages. It's thought to probably have been written in Syriac. Some people think Greek, but it's probably Syriac. And in. There's a number of manuscripts of this text in both Greek and in Syriac, but only in one case for each language. So only one manuscript in Greek, one manuscript in Syriac is there a Pearl Song. All the other manuscripts completely skip over it.
