Eating with the Gods

Summary

The Lord of Spirits Podcast: “Eating with the Gods”

Hosts: Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick & Fr. Stephen De Young
Date: February 13, 2021
Theme: The Seen and Unseen World in Orthodox Christian Tradition – Sacrifice and Sacred Meals in the Ancient World

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Episode Overview

This episode kicks off a three-part exploration of sacrifice in the ancient and Christian worlds. Fr. Andrew and Fr. Stephen dive into humanity's oldest ritual practices—especially the act of sharing a meal with the gods. They explore how early settlements were shaped around places of pilgrimage and spiritual experience, not merely material needs, and how sacrificial rites created real communion between the physical and spiritual realms. The discussion interweaves archaeological, mythological, and theological insights, setting the stage for future episodes on Israelite and Christian sacrifice.

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Key Sections and Insights

1. What is Worship? (01:38)

• Worship is Undefinable in Scripture: The Bible never clearly defines “worship”; it simply presents humans (like Cain and Abel) offering sacrifice to God without context or explanation.
• Ancient Context is Essential: To understand early worship practices, especially sacrifice, it’s necessary to view them within the broader ritual context of the ancient world.

“Worship happens long before any of those texts are written… If we're going to understand the sacrifices of Cain and Abel as well as worship in the ancient world in general… we need to understand the ritual context of the ancient world.” — Fr. Andrew (01:38)

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2. Revisiting the Earliest Sacred Sites (03:53–19:16)

a. Dates and Archaeological Context (04:05)

• Archaeological dates for early settlements are approximate and serve as framework, not dogma.
• Oldest sites discussed: Jericho (10,000 BC), Göbekli Tepe (9,000 BC), and Çatalhöyük (7,100 BC).

b. Ritual Before Settlement (10:10)

• Göbekli Tepe was not a city or village, but a ritual site full of monolithic structures and animal carvings, likely serving as a pilgrimage center.
• Earlier scholarly consensus held that settlements arose for material needs, with religion coming later. Now, evidence shows the reverse: ritual and spiritual experience prompted settlement.

“What they're finding with Göbekli Tepe... is that the exact opposite is true. These first sites were actually ritual sites and began as places of pilgrimage. … The need to service those pilgrims... gave birth to settlement.” — Fr. Stephen (11:47)

c. Sacred Place as Foundation (15:18)

• The location’s spiritual significance—often rooted in repeated divine encounters—drew people to settle.
• Modern mobility and skepticism make it hard to appreciate how central “place” was in ancient religious life.

“Modern people... tend to think of religion as a kind of add-on... Whereas what makes you, in the ancient world... want to actually build something and... start to raise crops... it must be something super important, you know, and all signs point to that super important thing being spiritual experience.” — Fr. Andrew (17:21)

d. Parallels to Modern Practice (17:35)

• The pattern of sacred places—monasteries turning into cities, altars marking miraculous events—continues in Orthodox Christian history.

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3. Gods, Bulls, and Behemoth (21:00–29:49)

a. Çatalhöyük and Home Shrines (21:07)

• Burials under house floors and inclusion of grave goods (tools, animal remains) signal a belief in the afterlife and ritual sacrifice.
• Most homes featured bull idols (‘icon corners’), showing early, universal veneration of powerful animal spirits.

“This is a chalcolithic icon corner... these bull heads are found in almost every domicile, almost every home...” — Fr. Stephen (24:46)

b. The Universal Divine Bull and the Serpent/Sea Monster (25:06)

• The male bull god archetype is widespread (e.g., Baal, Gilgamesh’s Bull of Heaven, Greek myths). The bull, called “Behemoth,” often symbolizes might and tyranny.
• Divine feminine—Leviathan or sea monster (chaos/chaos-feminine archetype): Symbolizes dangerous, unrestrained power (e.g., Tiamat, Greek Gaia as a primordial force linked to monsters and revenge).

“Leviathan kind of represents this chaos... then Behemoth is this image of tyranny… one is kind of toxic masculinity, the other toxic femininity.” — Fr. Andrew (29:49)

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4. Why Eat with Monsters? (34:04–36:26)

• Purpose of Worship: To establish peace/relationship with powerful spiritual forces (whom Christians identify as demons), as outright confrontation is impossible.
• Sacrifice is hospitality, a means to avoid destruction by hostile or capricious spirits.

“Establishing that relationship and that rapport, especially through the offering of hospitality, becomes the purpose of rituals at these sites.” — Fr. Stephen (35:54)

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5. From Hospitality to Sacrifice: What Did They Actually Do? (38:02–58:01)

a. Processions and Rituals (51:03)

• Procession: Worshipers bring food—especially domesticated animals, breads, oil, wine—to the sacred site (not always an animal!).
• Hospitality and Meal-Sharing: Main focus is sharing a meal; most ancient sacrifices are food offerings.

“Most sacrifices did not involve killing animals. The majority... were of grain cakes.” — Fr. Stephen (54:03)

b. Designating the Offering (61:30+)

• Sanctification of elements: Items chosen for sacrifice set apart (often by laying on hands or symbolic acts).
• ‘Voluntary’ animal sacrifice: Ritualized by cutting hair from the animal, burning it with incense as a token of willing participation.

c. Blood and the Dead (65:36)

• Animal blood drained, collected; often offered to heroes/shades (Ancient Greeks, Odyssey parallel) to sustain memory and aid communication with the dead.

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6. Sacrifice Structure: Preparation and Division (68:43–70:02)

• Prothesis: The place to prepare offerings—meat/cakes divided among god(s), priests, and people. Oil and wine poured to aid burning/burning as “consumption” by deity.

“The ones… being offered to gods are immolated, burnt up... The smoke rises up into the heavens.” — Fr. Stephen (71:39)

• Touch and Elevate: Final ritual preparatory act (touching/elevating the gifts) before burning the offering.

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7. The Sacred Feast: Communion and Community (85:09–87:15)

• The burnt offering is followed by a feast—not just eating the sacrifice, but a large communal meal with side dishes (trapezomata, “table things”).
• This creates real communion (koinonia)—binding participants and spirits into fellowship.

“This created... the fellowship, the communion. It formed the community... bound them together.” — Fr. Stephen (86:30)

• Priests as Ritual Technicians: In ancient religions, priests were not pastors but experts in correct ritual performance, ensuring the sacrifice was properly accepted.

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8. Incense and Purification (92:09–97:18)

• Incense played a major role—offered both as “pleasing aroma” and as purification (fumigation), driving out “aerial spirits” and creating a fit space for divine presence.
• Etymological insight: Many Greek terms for ritual purity (catharsis, kathiro) derive from Semitic words for offering incense.

“To sense something is not to metaphorically cleanse it. To cleanse something is to metaphorically sense it.” — Fr. Stephen (97:18)

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9. Propitiation and Expiation—Two Faces of Sacrifice (97:47–99:05)

• Propitiation: Pleasing or appeasing the deity, making them “well-disposed.”
• Expiation: Purification, cleansing from impurity or danger.

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Notable Quotes & Moments

• On Spiritual Experience Creating Settlements:
  “There had to be some kind of actual spiritual or religious experience there... for this site to become a pilgrimage site.”
  — Fr. Stephen (15:34)

• On Ancient Worship vs. Modern Mindset:
  “It kind of makes a sort of flat, secular worldview almost impossible... Once you know you can have a meal with your God... that takes what it means to be religious... completely out of the realm of ‘this is what I think and feel and believe’.”
  — Fr. Andrew (100:31)

• On Ritual’s Power:
  "Ritual is a way of connecting with reality... Sacrificial worship is basically human. The earliest humans we can find evidence of were practicing it."
  — Fr. Stephen (105:13)

• On the Centrality of Hospitality in Sacrifice:
  “The need to service those pilgrims and the ritual needs of the site actually then gave birth to the settlement.”
  — Fr. Stephen (11:47)

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• 01:38 – Theme introduction & “worship” in the Bible
• 03:53 – Archaeology: Jericho, Göbekli Tepe, Çatalhöyük
• 11:47 – Settlements founded around ritual, not resources
• 21:07 – Çatalhöyük: home shrines & burial customs
• 25:06 – Universal bull/Behemoth & Levithean motifs
• 35:54 – Why “eat” with the gods (hospitality to spirits)
• 51:03 – Greco-Roman sacrifice: processions, food
• 54:03 – Most sacrifices are food, not animals
• 61:30 – Sanctifying and offering the sacrifice
• 65:36 – Blood as life & offerings to the dead
• 68:43 – Prothesis: preparing and dividing the offering
• 85:09 – The feast as communal and religious experience
• 92:09 – Incense: aroma, purification, etymology
• 97:47 – Propitiation versus expiation
• 100:31 – How ancient ritual challenges secularism

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Memorable Moments

• Stonehenge Banter:
  Fr. Stephen jokes about being banned for life from Stonehenge (09:17), spawning running T-shirt jokes.

• Why Moderns Miss Sacred Place:
  “It is a fundamentally displaced thing…”
  — Fr. Andrew (19:29)

• Fantasy Gaming Sidelight:
  Discussion about Dungeons & Dragons' unrealistic idea of dwarves sacrificing metal (55:19), leading to “beer and ale drink offerings” jokes.

• Ritual and Reality:
  “Ritual is the way... that participation will produce actual communion...”
  — Fr. Stephen (106:34)

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Listener Q&A Highlights

• The fate of guardian angels after death.
  (74:29–84:51): Multiple questions about angels—assignment, interaction, and eschatological fate—answered with theological nuance and playful banter.

• Why sacrifice if God is the offering?
  (56:01–57:55): Preview of future episodes—Christ's self-offering is the ultimate inversion of pagan sacrifice: God offers Himself as hospitality.

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Closing Reflections

Ancient rituals—far from primitive superstition—were about reaching out in hospitality to the unseen world, connecting divinity and humanity through tangible acts, not simply inner beliefs or feelings. Orthodox Christian practice does not oppose but fulfills these patterns, inverting their dangers by making God the host and the gift, offering not preservation from destruction but transformation into eternal sonship.

The rest of this trilogy will trace how Old Testament sacrifices invert the expectations of pagan rite and how Christ’s Pascha brings the true communion that ancient humanity sought around every altar and sacred meal.

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Next Episode:
Exploring the distinctives of Israelite sacrifice—how Yahweh’s worship in ancient Israel subverts and fulfills the old patterns.

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For Further Engagement

• Join the Lord of Spirits Facebook Group
• Send listener questions & feedback to: [e-mail]

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Memorable Closing Quote:
“Ritual is the way... that participation will produce actual communion. It will make us into a community with one another... and with our Lord and God and Savior, Jesus Christ... It's about finding our way back into reality and reconnecting with it and reconnecting with God in a real experiential way.”
— Fr. Stephen DeYoung (106:34)

Transcript

[Narrator]

He will be a staff for the righteous with which for them to stand and not to fall. And he will be the light of the nations and the hope of those whose hearts are troubled. All who dwell on the earth will fall down and worship him. And they will praise and bless and celebrate with song the Lord of spirits.

The modern world doesn't acknowledge, but is nevertheless haunted by spirits, angels, demons and saints. In our time, many yearn to break free of the prison of a flat secular materialism, to see and to know reality as it truly is. What is this spiritual reality like? How do we engage with it? Well, how do we permeate everyday life with spiritual presence? Orthodox Christian priests, Father Andrew Stephen Damick and Fr. Stephen DeYoung host this live call in show focused on enchantment in creation, the union of the seen and unseen as made by God and experienced by mankind throughout history. Welcome to the Lord of Spirits.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

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

So have you ever noticed that worship is never defined in the Bible? There's no place in which it says, and this is what worship is. Now we do get very detailed instructions for worship, especially in the book of Leviticus. And then there are bits and pieces in the New Testament, but worship happens long before any of those texts are written. In fact, we see it happening in Genesis chapter four with the sons of Adam and Eve. Cain and Abel offer sacrifice to God. It's not explained, not defined, not placed within any existing religious ritual context. Cain and Abel make sacrifices to God. If we're going to understand the sacrifices of Cain and Abel as well as worship in the ancient world in general, and indeed Christian worship up until our own time, we need to understand the ritual context of the ancient world. What did the earliest worship look like? Was there a lot of variation? Did different cultures come up with very different ways of worshiping their gods? So let's think back now as best as we're able to, thousands of years ago to the earliest known human settlements and they happen to be found in what is now modern day Turkey and the Holy Land. So Father Stephen, take us back.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

So first, I'll have you know it is a deeply chilly 46 degrees here.

And the UPS driver brought me a package earlier and was literally wearing a parka and gloves. So the cold is just a different standard down here.

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

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Indeed. Right. And not just three parts in this episode. This is the first of three episodes about sacrifice. So we can hear there's a whole bunch of cheering happening all over the. All over the world right now, I'm sure, in response to that. So. Yes. So this is part one where we're going to be talking about sacrifice in the ancient world.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yeah. And as is our want, we're going to go back and start at the very beginning, as you mentioned, which is in the Neolithic period, the Stone Age.

And Stone Age religion. So I'll do our date disclaimer.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

That's important.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yeah, right, yeah. I'm going to give dates, which are the dates established by archaeologists. This isn't based on carbon dating or paleontology. This is. We're talking about human settlements. So this is standard layer archaeology.

Some listeners may have a commitment to. To the idea that the earth is not as old as some of these settlements are purported to be.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

If so, do not allow this to trouble you. These are circa dates. Adjust them accordingly. But however you. However long or short you feel the timeline is.

These are the earliest human settlements either way. Right?

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. And it ultimately doesn't.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Right.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

It ultimately does not matter to what we're going to be talking about exactly how old they are, you know, so anyway.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yeah, just the oldest ones we found.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Exactly. Yes. Right. So now we get to say some. Some phrases and words that are very hard to pronounce unless you happen to be from Turkey.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yeah, yeah. That. I don't know. They may even be.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. If we have any actual Turks listening and be like, oh, man, they're saying that so wrong.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

We're sorry. In insurance. Yep.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

So the. The three.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Three earliest sites, and we're going to discuss two of these in some detail. The oldest continually continuously inhabited human site that we've uncovered is actually Jericho.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right. In the Holy Land.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Which is in the Holy Land. The Jericho that's in the Bible. But although it's where exactly the settlement is, has shifted around a little bit in the area. Right. There's been human settlement there dated by archaeologists back to circa 10,000 BC.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

So that's. That's how far back we're Going. So we're going back.

At least some millennia before the civilizations of Babylon, before even Sumerian civilization.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

And there's. There's no. There's no writing at this point. Right. That anyone is aware of.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Right.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

There's.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

There's no writing. So we don't have written texts. We have sort of the remains of people living and doing things. And these aren't really cities. That's why we're saying settlements.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Sumeria is where you start getting cities, as such.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

So these are just places where previously nomadic people put down roots. And we'll be talking about that more in a minute.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah, yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

So then the two that we're going to discuss in more detail, the first is Gobekli Tepe, which is.

One of the sites in what's now Turkey.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Southeast. Yeah, southeastern Turkey, right near the Syrian border.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

And. And that site, again, is dated by archaeologists the beginning of the settlement to somewhere around 9,130 BC flourishing around 9,000 BC and then the second one is Catalhoyuk, which dates from a little later, from around 7100 BC as it's just.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

A couple thousand years later.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Right, so. So.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Wow.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yeah. So one, Gobekli Tepe represents one of the first.

Permanent human settlements. And then Catalhoyuk represents a sort of later, a little bit later phase in the development of human settlements and villages.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. Based on what we actually find there in the dirt.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Right, right.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

So Gobekli Tepe.

In some sense, I'm about to try and do TV on the radio, because I'm about to talk about.

Monoliths, which, of course, I can't show you pictures of.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. But. But if you. If you happen to go on to our. Our faith, our Lord of Spirits podcast, Facebook page, we actually did post some pictures from these sites. So you can see some of this if you go to Facebook and. And look at this. There are a few things there. So. But yes, right now we're going to play Imagine, if you will.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yes, the theater of the mind.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Exactly.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

So there are very early monoliths, monolithic structures, stone, standing stone structures at Gobekli Tepe. They're arranged.

It will be reminiscent to some people, probably, when you look at pictures of Stonehenge is probably the. The closest thing.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

And I have wistful feelings about Stonehenge.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Oh, is this where we get where you finally tell the story?

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

I'm not gonna tell the story, but I have been banned for life from Stonehenge. The exact circumstances will remain a mystery for now.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

But you know, that's gonna be a Lord of Spirits T shirt at some point. Banned for life from Stonehenge.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yeah, banned from Stonehenge.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

So.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

But what's really striking about these particular monolithic Gobekli Tepe is the carvings, I think.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

For anybody seeing them.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

If you.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

If you look at our Facebook page and see these pictures, and also there's a Wikipedia page which is, you know, has lots and lots of pictures, and there's. There's animal carvings on these things, on these standing stones.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yeah. And it is unclear to archaeologists and anthropologists exactly how to interpret the animal carvings or even if they should be interpreted. Right. Because interpreted implies that it's some kind of pictographic language, and it may not have been that. It may have just been representations of animals, but they're arranged in a way that suggests that they were used for some kind of astrological observation.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. Much like Stonehenge.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

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

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. It's not set near some natural resource. Right, right. Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Right. And so what it is, it's the remains of a ritual site.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

And so there had been in the past, sort of a consensus among scholars that the first human settlements developed for sort of practical, material reasons. Right. And that then once that happened, they started developing religious beliefs and other elements of culture.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. Just like, you know, it happened in the early American West. They built a town, and then, oh, I guess we should probably build a church or something.

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

And what they're finding with Gobekli Tepe and a few other Chalcolithic sites is that the exact opposite is true.

That these. These first sites were actually ritual sites and began as places of pilgrimage. So nomadic peoples and people, groups, tribes, clans, would make some sort of periodic pilgrimage to these sites. And.

And so the need to service those pilgrims and the ritual needs of the site actually then gave birth to the settlement.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

So what we're talking about here is it's not really a single event, but a development in history that's referred to as the Neolithic Revolution. And that's the move from humans being nomadic and hunting food and gathering food. And if you're going to hunt and gather food, you sort of have to be nomadic because you have to move with the seasons in terms of being able to gather food, and you have to move with the migration of animals if you're going to hunt food.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah, Right. Which. Which, you know.

If you think about the ancient world, being nomadic is the smartest way to be. Right. Because if you stay in one place, then, you know, you could get attacked easily by your rivals. You know, staying in one place also means you're subject to all the seasons of that place. Right. You know, as I think you just said to migratory animals, you know, it doesn't make sense not to move around. So.

We think that the way human beings live now is normally. I mean, obviously, most human beings in this world right now are settled. You know, they live in places and they don't move around. So it seems obvious that that's the norm, but it was really not the norm early on. Really, really not the norm and not really a very good idea. So it would have to be a really important reason for you to actually build something somewhere and then sort of stick with it.

Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Right. And so it happens sort of in the. The reverse of what was previously assumed, that this ritual site has a need for people to dwell there permanently, and it has a need.

For.

For food.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

So you got to supply it developed.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

For the pilgrims and for sacrificial rituals, as we're going to be talking about for most of tonight, those things have to be.

Have to be provided. And so that causes the shift then to agriculture and to the domestication of animals because we have to be able to produce food at the site.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Regardless of the season, regardless of the. We have to be able to. And then after producing food, we have to be able to store it.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right. There's gonna be guests all the time, so you got to keep the place stocked.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Right. And so these material changes to life are the product of the religious significance of the site.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Which suggests something further.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

And. And this, this shift that I'm talking about to seeing the. The religious and ritual significance of the place first and then the settlement is a shift that's being made by.

Scholars who are atheists. Right. This isn't. This isn't a religiously motivated thing. This is where the evidence points. But as religious people. Right, right. We. We could assess something further, that for this site to become a pilgrimage site, for it to become a religious site to which people would travel from different clans and different groups that are otherwise nomadic, there had to be some kind of actual spiritual or religious experience there.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. There's a significance to that spot.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yeah. That. That, that was experienced by people, and it can't just be like one person. Right, right. So I mean, if one person comes out of the woods and says, hey, I met the great God, you know, Pazuzu, out in the. Out in the woods, right. That's not going to cause even the members of his own group to all go out in the woods and try and find it.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right, right. It has to be a repeated thing, you know, like, like, you know, when people discovered. On a much lesser sense, when people discover the Grand Canyon, hey, come take a look at this. And people have the same experience every time they go. But in this case, it's an experience where people are saying that they encountered a being, a spiritual being.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Right. It's an experience of spiritual reality.

In the ancient world that causes then this to become a pilgrimage site and then leads to the settlement.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I mean, even now, Right. So, I mean, there are parallels to that, for instance, in Orthodox Christian experience where, like, for example, Trinity Saint Sergius Monastery in Russia. Right. This is. This was founded by St. Sergius of Radonesh, who basically went out of the woods to pray by himself.

But now if you go there, it is not only a massive monastic complex, but it's a city. Like it is literally a city. And the reason why the monastery was formed was because of St. Sergius being there, who, you know, because he's a saint, he becomes a vessel of grace. Right. And so people go there to experience that as well, and then the city grows up around it. So it's. I mean, it's exactly the same pattern. It's exactly the same pattern and it makes a lot of sense. I mean, and once again, this kind of just shows that modern people tend to think, even if they are religious, they tend to think of religion as a kind of add on, even of maybe the most important add on in their life, but a kind of add on. Whereas what makes you. In the ancient world where everybody is mobile, wants to actually build something and start to raise crops and that kind of thing, it must be something super important, you know, and all signs point to that super important thing being spiritual experience.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Right. And you see something similar to this in, in the scriptures as well, where the patriarchal narratives in Genesis. Right. You know, Jacob has his experience at Bethel and he builds an altar of 12 stones or.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Joshua setting up the stones at the place where the Jordan river was parted. And then people coming back to see those spots and see the stones that are erected. Yeah. And then of course, the church building churches on top of all the places where great Events in the history of salvation happened. Right, right. Mount Tabor and on.

The Church of the Holy Sepulcher.

So.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

The idea that these. These spiritual experiences sort of consecrate a place is not just an ancient Stone Age thing.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

It's a. It's a universal human thing.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

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

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Right, yeah. Our tendency. Our overall tendency to etherealize religion and make it a mental and intellectual exercise.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right, right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Which has nothing to do with place, space, time.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah, stuff.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Right.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Things.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Reality. Yeah.

So moving on to the next one. Right. Shadow Hoyac, which, as we said, is. Is.

A couple millennia later, site.

This, we have more permanent structures in the form of domiciles. These aren't sort of separate houses. These are sort of buildings broken up into rooms, each of which room was a residence, likely for a family.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

And.

There'S all kinds of interesting, neat stuff, but of religious significance.

Is there are already burial sites there where people are burying their dead.

And the custom at that time was apparently to bury their deceased family members under the floor. It was, of course, a dirt floor, but bury them in the floor of the family house. The family.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

So they're kind of always with you.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Right. Actually in the. In the floor. But in those burial sites, we find what are called grave goods. Meaning stuff.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah, look, you're gonna need this in the next world. So here you go. I mean, most people probably are aware, for instance, that the pharaohs are buried inside the pyramids with all kinds of stuff. It's the same thing. It's the exact same thing.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

This is. Well. Well, this is much less stuff. Yeah. A flint knife.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah, right. Yeah, yeah. Yes. Yeah. Don't forget your sack lunch. You know, and here's your thousand sl.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yeah. About 20,000, 20 tons of gold. Yeah.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right. Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

But. But also found with them are animal remains.

Which suggests that.

They'Re found with. With the human remains. Right. So it's not that they had a pet sheep and they really loved it, so they buried it with grandma.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah, It's.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

It's. These were sacrificial animals.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

That were being sort of sent along with the burial.

So we know that sacrifice was taking place at this. At this point already.

And then we also find there our sort of earliest window into.

What spirits they were worshiping at Chattel Hoyac.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

At this ancient point.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. It was interesting to me to look at the photos and, like, the. The one thing that I noticed the most often was the heads of bulls, you know, like, and. And it seemed like they weren't. They weren't bull skulls. These were like carved bull heads, you know, they were images of bulls.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yeah. With huge horns.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

With huge horns. Right. And they collected, for instance, inside one of these dwellings they have. At that Chedalhoyuk, they have.

A sort of a recreation of a domicile. And one of the pictures. And again, we posted this on our Facebook page. One of the pictures, you see a whole sort of vertical row of these bullheads in the corner of the home, you know, and. And this is not, you know, this is not someone showing off their hunting trophies because, again, these are. These are images that are made. They're not actual bullhorns. Right, right. Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

This is a. This is a chalcolithic icon corner.

Is what this is the. The. And these bullheads are found in almost every domicile, almost every home.

Usually in a specific area.

So implying that it's sort of a home shrine that has this bullhead in it. And so.

The depiction of a male God as a bull, while we find it here, is ubiquitous in the ancient world. So you get in the Epic of Gilgamesh, the Bull of Heaven.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. Or in Greek myth, you've got the Europa, you know, Zeus appearing as a bull, and the Minotaur. One of my favorite stories from when I was a kid. Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

And the bull baal. There's a whole segment of BAAL worship that surrounded BAAL as a bull, thus the golden calf. Right, right. The golden. Well, the golden calf may have actually been an APIs bull from Egypt. But again, that's another instance of this idea. Right, yeah.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Of.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Of this great bull.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

The.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

The form that that bull takes in terms of its name that we find in, for example, the Hebrew scriptures is this is where behemoth comes from, which is actually Bahemot. In Hebrew, behemoth is the word for, like, cow or cattle. It's actually grammatically feminine. And behemoth is the feminine plural, but it's a plural of majesty. Like, sometimes people will point out that God is referred to as Elohim, which is technically plural, and it's a way of elevating him. This is. It's sort of like a way of saying, this is the bull.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yes, yeah. Or. Yeah. I mean, much like even royalty, you know, our sort of stereotypes of royalty referring to themselves as we, you know, we are not amused, you know. Yes, right, Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

So this is the bull behemoth, but even though it's this male figure and it's this sort of image of sort of male power and strength and. And rule, it's grammatically feminine. Right. And then the other figure that we see already at Catalhoyuk is a number of carved.

Goddess figures.

And.

The goddess figures there are related to another figure that's pretty much ubiquitous, and that's not a mother goddess figure, actually.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

It's actually a figure related to the sea.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yes.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

To the waters and. And thereby to chaos. So this is a sea monster and dragons. And this takes the form in the Hebrew scriptures of Leviathan, which is an English.

Transliteration of what's actually more like Lotan.

In. In the Semitic roots. Right. But this, this. This figure, again, appears everywhere. BAAL fights it.

Tiamat is sort of the Babylonian form.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. I mean, Or. Or with the. With the. Would the Midgard serpent be a, you know, in Norse mythology?

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Sort of a little bit. Yeah. Yeah. Gaia in. In the Titan. Gaia in. In Greek myth is actually closely related to this. People point out, well, that's. That's the earth. And so people think of her as this earth mother figure, but if you actually read the stories.

She'S all about getting revenge for the Titans, her children, and she does that by bringing monsters up out of the sea, like Typhon.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. Right. And.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

So you have these sort of two figures, and Leviathan or Lotan is actually grammatically masculine, even though it's a feminine figure.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah, yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

So both of them have this swap and so you have these two figures and those. The sort of the denouement of those two figures in our Bible is in the book of Revelation, where they turn up as the beast from the earth and the beast from the sea.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. Behemoth and Leviathan. Right. And, you know, so while Leviathan kind of represents this chaos, which, I mean, which, if you think about this symbolically, right, you look at the ocean, that is an image of chaos, constant movement, it's uncontrollable, it's destructive, you know, and then Behemoth is this image of tyranny. And when we were having the conversation earlier to prepare for this, you know, there's sort of the idea that one is what you might describe as kind of toxic masculinity, the sort of tyrannous image, and then the other sort of toxic femininity, you know, that. And, and, and again, toxic.

Not normal, toxic. Yeah, yeah, right, good. Yeah, yeah, yeah, right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

And so, yeah, these become sort of ubiquitous figures.

In ancient religion. And knowing that that's who they are provides a lot of contour. Right. So the gold, not just the golden calf, but Jeroboam's golden calves at Bethel and Dan.

And sort of all the undercurrents that are running all through the scriptures of these two sort of spirits being.

These sort of primary spirits opposed to Yahweh, the God of Israel. And we already see evidence of them being worshiped this far back at the end of the Neolithic age or the beginning of the Chalcolithic.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right, yeah. And it's an interesting question, and we'll get to this in a second, but I just want to raise this. Why would you want to worship spirits that are so horrifyingly problematic?

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yeah, right, yeah, right, yeah. Well, there wasn't cancel culture yet, so they couldn't get rid of them.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

That's right, exactly.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

There was no social media to ban them.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah, yeah. How do. Yeah, yes. How exactly would you cancel.

Sea monster? Yeah, right, exactly.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

But so this is.

What we see regardless of what culture we want to talk about, whether we're talking about early Greek culture, ancient Near Eastern cultures, early Canaanite culture, Egyptian, Mesopotamian, the earliest shrines are these kind of places before they're even temples per se, where they start building a building around it. You have some place, be at a high place, an elevated place, or be at a particular tree or spring of water where these encounters with spirits take place, and then a hedge or a fence or some kind of border is constructed around it.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

To designate it as a sacred space.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. And this, this persists throughout the entire history of humanity. Right. Like I've. I've been reading lately both Finnish and Norse mythology. And you know, the Finns had what they called. I'm sure I'm going to mispronounce this, sorry, Finns, HESI H I I S I, which the most ancient version of that word refers to a place, but then eventually the word came to refer to a spirit that kind of inhabited the place. And sometimes, you know, most of the time people would avoid them and sometimes they would go there specifically to kind of encounter them, and you get the same thing. And again, in Norse mythology, where, like, there's a particular. I think in northern England somewhere, there's actually a particular bog or something like this where there's indications. It's either in northern England or maybe in Scandinavia, there's indications that people are being sacrificed to Thor. And. But, but the place was named as a place sacred to Thor because that's where you would go to encounter him. It was a specific sacred place, you know. Yeah. And every, every religion, every single religion has stuff like this, whatever permutation you're talking about.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Right. And this is what then develops into the idea that, again, these are high places and, and these sort of designated sacred spaces and groves and natural features to the idea of the gods living in gardens and, or on mountains.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Because those are the places where they were encountered by people. And this is where the whole idea, the whole word paradise and the whole idea of paradise as this walled garden.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

On top of a mountain comes from. That imagery.

Develops from this.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

So.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

As we prepare to segue into our next bit, our next part, our second half.

You asked about why you'd want to worship these. Well, yeah, right.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

It's a good question. Like, why not just avoid. I mean, these are big scary, you know, monsters of chaos and tyranny. I mean, why, you know, just run away.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Right, right. So if you think about, if you're a nomadic tribe or clan or family group or however you want to construct it, part of this, this group, this social unit that's nomadic, and you encounter other humans. Right. Another group of humans, you have various options, right? The two most obvious would be if you think your group is bigger and stronger, you could try to subdue them, conquer them, kill them, take their stuff.

Right. But now if you encounter, you know, Leviathan, the queen of the Stone Age, proverbially. Right. Like, you can't kill her and take her stuff. Right, right. So that options right out. So the option that remains to you is the option that would remain to you if you met a bigger group of people or just another group of people who you didn't want to attack, and that's to make peace and make friends and establish a relationship and some kind of fellowship and some kind of communion with these other people you've encountered.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right. Because they're a threat or because you want them, you know, but in the case of demons.

As a Christian would understand these beings to be.

You just don't want them to destroy you.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

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

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Kind of a bad idea.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

And so establishing that relationship and that rapport, especially through the offering of hospitality, becomes the purpose of the rituals that happen at these ritual sites.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

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

[Narrator]

Father Andrew, Stephen Damick and father Stephen DeYoung will be back in a moment to take your calls on the next part of the Lord of Spirits. Give them a call at 855-237-2346. That's 855-AF-RADIO.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

So here's a question for you.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

What does it mean to think Orthodox?

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

What are the unspoken and unexplored prem and presumptions underlying what Christians believe? Orthodox Christianity is based on preserving the.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Mind of the early church.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Its Phronima. Dr. Jeanne Constantinou brings her more than.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

40 years experience as a professor, Bible.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Teacher and speaker to bear in explaining.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

What the Orthodox phronema is, how it.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Can be acquired and how that phronema is expressed in true Orthodox theology as practiced by those who are properly qualified by both training and a deep relationship with Christ.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Thinking Orthodox now [e-mail] that's store.ancientfaith.com.

[Narrator]

We'Re back now with the Lord of Spirits with Father Andrew Stephen Damick and Father Stephen DeYoung. If you have a question, call now at 855-237-2346. That's 855-AF-RADIO.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

All right. Well, welcome back. This is the second part of our show and it's where we begin to take your calls. So we just talked for a little bit about why anyone would want to have a relationship with a demonic chaos monster.

Or giant bull or Giant bull. Right, right. Kind of depends. Are you inland or are you near the ocean? You know, and we, we ended up by saying that it's because you don't want to be destroyed by them. And so then the proper response to that is hospitality, to offer hospitality. And so that's what we're going to be talking about now in this second part of our show. So please do call in again. It's 855-AF-Radio-855-237-2346, and we would love to talk to you. So. All right. So, Father, I mean, in these ancient, ancient super ancient sites that we've just been talking about, there's no writing. We just have kind of material stuff to kind of go by. But it gives a pretty clear picture that there is dedication to these, these beings and so forth.

But we don't know what exactly that looks like. What are the actual actions? I mean, archeology doesn't, can't show you what people do. When's the earliest that we actually begin to know, have some clue about what this hospitality that was being offered actually looked like?

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Right, right. Well.

We have, I mean, we have lots of ancient ritual texts, but the way ancient ritual texts were written, for example, in the ancient near east is interesting because it's not the way we write liturgical texts today.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Liturgical texts today are based around. They're written sort of like a script.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Where it's like this person says this, this person says that, and then they have rubrics, which are like the stage directions. Okay. Now you walk over here.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. As they say, say the black, do the red.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yeah, right, yeah.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

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

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Right. And so it'll say, you know, say this prayer and then, you know, swing the sensor in this direction three times and then that direction three times and then. Right, yeah, exactly. Over here. Right. And so ancient Near Eastern ritual texts sometimes are written as stories.

So rather than, for example, being written as instructions, it will tell the story.

Of some event in the life of the gods and, or the people performing the ritual in ancient days that the ritual is based on reenacting and participating in, but it's just telling the story.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

So we don't know exactly what they did.

[Caller Ryan]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

At various points. Or we'll have prayers and hymns, but we don't get, you know, we'll have, like, this is the hymn that they sing when they offer the incense. Okay. When do they do that? How much? What kind? Right.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

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

[Caller Ryan]

Yes. Hello, Father.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Welcome, Ryan, to the Lord of Spirits. It is good to talk to you. So what's your question or comment for us tonight?

[Caller Ryan]

Yes, well, it's tangentially related to the topic, I suppose, but it's more related to something that Father Stevens Talked about in the 5ish fall of angels and on his own podcast as well, something that's puzzled me. And he's talked about the angels that were assigned to the nations and how there was this, I guess you could call it an angelic apostasy. They began accepting worship and interacting with humans in not so kosher ways. I guess my question there is, was this fall of these angels, was it universal? Did they all experience this fall? And. And if so, what made it so universal? And then just to follow up, what would it have looked like had that fall not occurred? If they had done their task rightly, rather than accepting worship and encouraging this idolatry, what would that have looked like?

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Okay, well, Father Stephen, I'm definitely going to let you address the first part because you were called out specifically, but since there is someone who listens to this show, is convinced that this show and the Aman Sul podcast are truly the same, I'm going to throw him a bone and say that what would it have looked like if they hadn't fallen? I think that it would look like the way that the Valar function in the Silmarillion. Now, Ryan, I don't know if you're a Tolkien fan, but if you are.

[Caller Ryan]

I'm a huge Tolkien fan. I came to. Basically came to orthodoxy through Aman Sul. I'm not. I'm not orthodox. I'm not even a catechumen. But I'm prayerfully considering it now, so. Yes, that's right, Father.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah, so there we are. No, I mean, I'm serious. Like, obviously there's a lot of non Tolkien readers out there who are like, what is he talking about? The Valar or whatever. But it' it's an image of angelic beings. So J.R.R. tolkien, the author, he writes this this is in the Silmarillion. So this is not his most well known work. It's. It's second tier in terms of being well known.

But in that work, these angelic beings that are created by the one God, they help to take care of the earth and also human beings and, and elves, of course, as well, who are sort of kind of two different versions of one species, so to speak.

And they help to beautify the earth and to form it and to teach things to mankind. And it's a good relationship. I mean, it has its problems, but they don't fundamentally go off the deep end. I mean, one of them does. So I think that that's a good image of what it would have looked like. Right. And maybe we can understand Tolkien's version of this as what it might have looked like before, you know, after the Tower of Babel, but before this fall, that was being discussed. So that's my idea for the second part. So, Father Stephen.

Why don't you address the first?

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yeah, well, it seems to have been near universal. Saint Dionysus the Areopagite and others. You see this in, in Eusebius's, Eusebius of Caesarea's explanation of the Gospel. Also, for example, the exception is St. Michael.

Who was.

The prince of Israel, as Daniel says, right? Daniel talks, he talks about the prince of Persia, Gabriel talks about the prince of Persia, he talks about the prince of Greece and that he says, michael, your prince. Right. So the angel assigned to Israel, St. Michael the Archangel, is sort of the.

One exception to that.

And so I think, you know, building off of what Father Andrew said, I think the best image we can get biblically in terms of what that would look like is Israel. That doesn't mean that.

For example, the people didn't fall into egregious sin. Obviously they did, right? In terms of their, their behavior and faithfulness, there was not a lot of difference between most of Israel and the neighboring nations, even though there was supposed to be.

But.

There was always a sort of a different relationship between God and Israel. And I think the Intercessions of St. Michael and of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob and others were part of that difference.

In terms of the long suffering that God showed. Not to say that they influenced God, right, But that God chose to work through their prayers and intercessions to extend his mercy to Israel in a way that now God also showed, according to St. Paul, in Romans, he showed a certain amount of mercy to the nations in overlooking their sins for a period of time, right until the Gospel came Not immediately punishing them for the wickedness and sin that abounded among the nations. And that's sort of St. Paul's theme when he speaks to Gentiles in Acts 17. You know, in the past, God has overlooked all of this, but now the gospel is coming to you. Now you're accountable right now. You need to hear the call. And I think what's in the background, what we've been talking about already tonight, is the material side of that, right? So when we talk about, well, these, these angelic spirits started to appear to and interact with and encounter the peoples of the world and started to influence them, and then we talk about how they started to give them these cultural innovations and these kind of things, right? What we've been talking about anthropologically in the first part of the program is the material side of that, where we see human beings encountering some kind of spiritual reality at these places. And then that being the engine that leads to agriculture. The first city, right. Kane builds the first city. Right. The first kind of permanent settlements, the first domestication of animals. All these sort of innovations that start metalworking starts in the Chalcolithic period that we're talking about.

Just like the genealogy of Cain says.

So this is really the flip side of that, right? We were talking about the spiritual reality of that in the 5ish falls, and now we're sort of talking about the historical human side of that.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Does that make sense to you, Ryan?

[Caller Ryan]

Yes, definitely. That was an excellent answer. I really appreciate all that you do. This is such an enlightening podcast and blessings on it, for sure.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Thank you. By your prayers. Yeah, you said you thought that your question was tangential, but actually it fed directly, directly into what we're talking about. Because, you know, this does connect back to that earlier stuff. And like Father Stephen said, now we're looking at what is the human sort of interaction response to, to, you know, when fallen angels do their thing. So thank you very much, Ryan. Thanks for listening.

[Caller Ryan]

Thank you.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

All right, Father. So we were just talking rubrics, right?

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

And so we don't start getting sort of a more full orbed picture until we get to Greco Roman sacrifices, where we could piece together from a number of sources and descriptions, sort of the details of how some of these things played out, right?

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Because now you've got written texts, for instance, where you can get this kind of detail. And so now we're fast forwarding again thousands of years to, you know, 500 BC to around AD 150, right? The sort of High Roman period, you Know.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Right, Greek and then Romans.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah, yeah, exactly, exactly.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

And, but, but I mean, these, these aren't things that they made up when they first started writing them down.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

No, right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

They were practices in the Indo European world. And we'll probably talk about a specific case of this in the third half. But even the terminology that's used in Greek to describe these things is. Are borrowed Semitic words.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

There is this sort of direct continuity in terms of religious ritual at the Ur level.

Between even the ancient Near Eastern and Mesopotamian cultures and Egyptian cultures. And then what we're about to talk about now in more detail in the Greco Roman sort of pattern.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah, yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

That emerges.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

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

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

People processing.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah, right. Where are they going? They're going to the place where this needs to happen. It could be a temple, it could be a grove, it could be. I mean, there's all kinds of possibilities.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

But it's a altar on top of a hill. Right. A high place hill or a mountain.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right, right. But it's a designated spot. And it's like we said earlier, it's because this spot has a spiritual significance. There's been actual experiences there.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Right, right. And so of course, the most, the most common form that hospitality takes is the sharing of a meal.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Exactly.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Right. And we've, we've become a little disconnected from this. In modern American culture a lot of times now, families don't even eat meals together, let alone, you know, gather with other families or other people to have communal meals.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

And now you've got even uber eats. You know, food can just show up at your doorstep.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

But, but in, in a lot, a lot of our orthodox brothers and sisters from other cultures could actually help us out a lot with this, because in a lot of other cultures, Greek culture, Middle Eastern cultures.

And, and even Slavic cultures, that there's more of a sense of this has been maintained, of the importance of sharing a meal together. And, and the significance of that.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

It's the thing a family does and to get invited into that is huge. Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

And, and so this is how, like, community is built. And so the way that a, that hospitality is going to be offered to a God and some kind of fellowship and communion with that spirit is going to take place is going to be in the form of sharing a meal with it, primarily amongst other forms of hospitality, but primary a meal. And so that's what sacrifice is.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

And so this procession sort of begins the process, pun semi intended.

Of doing this. And so in these processions that the practical side of the procession is you have these elements that are going to be sacrificed. That's not necessarily. We tend to think of animals primarily and in some more horrible cases humans, but we tend to think of animals as the primary thing. But there are also plenty of sacrifices. In fact, most sacrifices did not involve killing animals.

The majority of sacrifices were of, for example, wheat cakes.

Or rice cakes if you're in Asia, depending on where you are. Grain. Right. Cakes made with grain. It would also then include food animals. These were domesticated food animals, not like wild animals. You wouldn't capture a wild animal to sacrifice.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah, I mean if you're going to have someone over, you know.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yeah.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

You bring out. This is what we've been preparing. This is what we've been working on, you know.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Right. Kill the fatted calf. You're offering them something of yours.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right?

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Right. Something that of yours that you're offering to them.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

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

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

So yeah, when I, when I read in Wizards of the coast that in 5th edition Dungeons and Dragons dwarf priests sacrifice metal, I was just like, this is so unrealistic. Please.

Please.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

I don't know if I'll recover from that one. So related to that is we do have a caller. We have Samuel calling from.

The God protected dominion of Virginia where I happen to have been born. And he has a question specifically about this. So Samuel, can. Are you there? Yeah, I'm there.

[Caller Ryan]

Thank you for taking my call, Fathers.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

You're welcome. It's, it's good to hear from you. So, so what's on your mind, Samuel?

[Caller Ryan]

I'm wondering what it, how, how it changes things because obviously does when God himself is the sacrifice sacrificial meal being offered.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

That's a, that's a really good question. I'd love to say. Well, just tune in next time because that's what we talking about, among other things. But. But I mean, just to just, you know, we don't want to leave you with nothing.

I'll just say this. So all of the stuff that we're talking about with regards to paganism now, which is kind of what this particular episode is about, it, it becomes fulfilled completely in the Christian context where not only are we having, you know, sacrificing to our God, sharing a meal with our God, but that he himself is the one who is sacrificed and shared. Right. So how does that change? There's a hundred things we could say about this, but.

It'S that the life that we receive, for instance, this is the first thing that occurs to me to say the life that we receive from this is eternal life. It's not temporary. Right. And it is, and it is deifying. It changes us. So it not only puts us in communion with him, as all sacrifices always did to whatever God, but makes, you know, and not only makes us like him, as all sacrifices do to whatever God. We're kind of getting ahead of ourselves here a little bit, but that's okay.

But grants eternal life and elevates us to become, as we've said before, the sons of God. So that's the response I would give initially to that. Father Stephen, is there anything you want to add or correct or whatever?

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Well, yeah, to show our cards a little bit for the next couple of episodes.

We'Re laying some groundwork here in terms of what sacrifice looks like in the world at large. And what we're going to see next time already in the Old Testament sacrifices is that God is going to take a lot of the spiritual quote unquote, wisdom and understanding of the nations and invert it in the sacrificial ritual that's done in Israel or that's prescribed for Israel at least.

And then Christ's sacrifice that we're going to be talking about more two episodes from now, in our third episode, is sort of the fulfillment of that and the ultimate inversion of. Of what pagan sacrifice is. And one of the key elements is, is exactly what you're hitting on, that rather than it being a spirit taking something from humans or seeking to be appeased by humans, God meets us in sacrifice with self offering.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

He offers himself to us, which is a direct inversion of. Of this pagan idea.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

He's the one giving the hospitality.

But yeah, so just hang on and keep listening, Samuel, for two weeks from today and then four weeks from today, because this is a first in a series of three. I'm so excited does that make sense, Samuel?

[Caller Ryan]

Yeah, it does. And Father Stephen, when you mentioned Dungeons and Dragons right before taking my call, I. I'm actually playing as a dwarf cleric, as one of my current characters, and I often get nitpicky about that sort of. That exact thing in fantasy settings.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yeah. You need to do beer and ale, drink offerings, and keep it real. Keep it real.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Exactly. All right, well, thank you very much for calling, Samuel. Good to talk to you.

[Caller Ryan]

Yeah, you too, fathers.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Thank you. All right. Okay. So we've got food being offered. It's brought in a procession. It's domesticated animals. It's wheat cakes, it's wine, it's oil. You know, if you're a dwarf cleric, it's beer.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

It's all. It's all food.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

It's all food. Exactly, exactly. So what's the next thing that has to be done with it?

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

The practical element of the procession is you need to get that stuff to place where you're sacrificing it.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right, right, exactly.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

So. Right. So there's that practical element. But so then in the procession, the procession is not just made like, okay, well, hey, take all. Hey, buddy, take all this stuff over to the altar. Right. It's done as a. As a festival procession. So there's incense that's being offered. There's music, at least, singing, sometimes instrumentation as the people process to that. To that place and that.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

The.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

If there's animals involved, those animals are still alive at this point.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right. And are.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

And are being brought and transported.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah, probably lead. Lead on leashes or whatever.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yeah.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

One.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

One biblical element of this is people may be familiar with the psalms that are labeled as the Psalms of Ascent. A, S C E N T. Those are the psalms that were sung by people as they made their pilgrimage to Jerusalem with their animals, with their things that they were bringing to sacrifice. So that pilgrimage was turned into a grand procession of this type.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

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

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right. Like this is going to be used for this and. And not. And this over here is not going to be used. Right. So it's not. It's not that everything that's broad is necessarily used. Sometimes it's just pieces of it. Right, right. Sometimes.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yeah.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah, exactly. Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

So they have to be designated. That's usually with the laying on of hands.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

There's also, though.

This idea that's embedded of the. The animals Involved being sort of willing participants.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah, that's kind of an interesting element. And, and I, you know, as we were talking about this, there's actually a token of this to sort of prove this. And I, and, you know, so the idea, of course, is that animals are like, yes, I'm happy to be sacrificed to Zeus or whoever.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yes, I'm glad I was chosen for this noble purpose.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right, right, right. Now, obviously, the animal is not saying that, but it's, it's, it's ritually sort of tokenized by a tuft of their hair being cut out. And then that hair that was cut off is then placed in the incense. So it's, it's that the animal is offering himself now by this little gift of. This offering of hair that has been cut off and is being burned up with. With the incense. We're going to talk about incense more later. But, but yeah, I thought that was a really interesting thing. And like, animals are not tortured in the process.

It's, it's, it's really a peaceful sort of slaughtering, frankly, you know, and, and that the, the killing itself is not really part of the ritual. It's just a necessary element if it is going to be an animal sacrificed. It's a necessary element in order for the sacrifice to be possible. Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

To be eaten. Yeah, yeah, right, yeah.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

You know, eat live animals.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yeah. So. Right. So. And that's important because Western theology has put into our heads that sacrificing something is killing it.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Killing it. Yeah, that the death. That the death is the key element.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

And that there's suffering involved somehow. But what we see in ancient sacrifices is the exact opposite.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Not only is the killing not ritualized, there's no instructions, by and large, for how to kill things.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

In the Old Testament or in these ancient rituals, there are ways that they tended to do it with certain animals just for ease of handling in terms of the procedure. Right. But. But there was no specific ritualization of the killing. And this little bit of ritualization with the, the tuft of hair being grabbed and cut. But that, that ritualization of the animal offering itself is signifying the exact opposite of the animal suffering or being afraid or being killed. It's. It's sort of voluntarily offering itself as well.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

And I'm told, and I'm, I'm not a butcher or a farmer of any kind, you know, I'm told that an animal that's tortured before it dies actually that it does bad things to the taste, even. So, like, it would be. Not. It would be against Your best interests. Right. You know, if you're offering hospitality to your God, you're going to offer it an animal that's freaked out and sort of tastes the worst, you know, so you wouldn't. You wouldn't want to do that again. Not a farmer, not a shepherd. So I don't know if we've got any cattle ranchers out there. You'd be like, oh, no, no, no. That's completely an urban legend. Father rancher. I don't know. But it is something that I have heard. It is something that I have heard.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Something you've heard. Pun not intended.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

So the. The other bit that we know a little about in terms of how the animal was killed is based on the fact that the blood was going to be collected.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

And so that means that in a lot of cases, the animal's throat would be slit because that was the easiest way to drain all the blood out of the animal before it was butchered.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

And the blood would be collected in a bowl.

Blood. It's not just Leviticus that says that blood is life.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah, right. That's life is in the blood.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Universal, ancient, ancient things. So there were. There were a minority of rituals. This was actually more common in human sacrifice than animal sacrifice, where the blood would be drunk by.

The participants. But far more commonly and especially in Greco Roman practice, at the various shrines, in addition to the shrine to the God or spirit or muse or whoever. Right. The Caesar, whoever, there would also be a grave of a hero. And hero was kind of a technical term in Greek. Right. It's not just we say someone is my hero, but heroes were the founders of cities, people like Perseus, Theseus, who did these great deeds in the past. But no matter how great the deeds were that you did, when you died, you still went to Hades and became a shade. And you had this sort of shadowy existence as a shadow of your former self that lasted until everyone had forgotten you and then you just sort of ceased to be.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

It's like Tinkerbell. She disappears if you don't believe in her.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yeah, sorry. So you would have these. These grave shrines in part to keep their memory alive.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

And then the blood would be taken and would be fed to them by pouring it out into their grave. Yeah, the blood from these sacrifices.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

And this happens in the Odyssey, doesn't it?

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

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

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

So blood being drained. Right. You now have an animal, if there's an animal involved.

And the cakes and the wine and the oil that are being sacrificed, those were then brought to a place called the prothesis. That was the Greek name for it. And that's the place where the elements were further prepared. So the animal would have to be butchered and divided up into the different parts. There would be parts that were going to be offered to the God or gods or spirits. There would be a portion that was going to be eaten by the priests and celebrants, and then there was a portion that was going to be eaten by the people.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right, right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

There's celebrating the sacrifice. And so those pieces had to be divided out.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

And if it's, and if it's an animal. Right. You're basically doing, butchering, you're cutting, cutting an animal up. But if it's, you know, cakes or something like that, you're kind of saying, okay, here's the best cake, here's the not as good cake. You know, you're cutting them out and.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

You'Re pouring the oil and wine onto the cakes or onto the, the meat that's going to be offered.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yep, yep.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

And then the.

The elements that were going to be offered to the God were taken to the altar.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

And the word.

Just as a side note, in Latin, the word ara means both altar and table.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

These are, these aren't two different words. There's not a difference between a sacrifice and a meal and an altar and a table in the ancient world. I say that and our Protestant friends will understand why that's significant, that there's not a difference between an altar and a table. But so those elements are brought and the ones, what's going to be offered to the gods is immolated, burnt up.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right. And, and, yeah, yeah. Which, like, if you, you know, I, I remember this was a long time ago, actually. I was doing some, some fiction writing and I was asking you questions about this because, like, okay, I, I You know, burning up parts of an animal. Fine. I've burned plenty of roasts in my time. I know how you do that. But like, what about burning a cake or something like that, you know? And, and, and then that's when the point. When you said that's what the oil is for. Yeah. So if you've got a cake and these are not cake, this is not cake, like birthday cake. Okay. These are just like, flat. Yeah. Flat, you know, crunchy or whatever.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Right.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

But if you put oil on it there, it's much more likely to light on fire.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

And the wine is a little higher proof than a lot of our wine.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Which also causes it to burn. Yeah. It gets poured out. And that's the idea is that's the way that the God consumes it is when it's lit on fire.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Right. The smoke rises up into the, into the heavens. Right. And it's. It's an aromatic kind of thing because.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Even ancient people realized that smell and taste were closely connected.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

As senses.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right, right. And there's this cool element in the midst of this, which I thought was really interesting. Right. Which is there's a specific act when this stuff is brought to the altar. Right. And what is that?

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Right. The last thing before the portions for the spirits being offered to is burnt is. And the language that's used is that the gifts that are being given to the God or gods or spirits are touched and elevated.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Touched and elevated.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

And that's the final thing before.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

What.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Follows, which is the burning of what goes to the spirits and then the following feast, which is the elements that go to the priests and the people.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. Okay. So before we get to that, I want to go ahead and take another break. And when we get back, we actually have someone calling from Indiana who has a question about guardian angels. But first we're going to go ahead and go to a break. So we'll be right back.

[Narrator]

Father Andrew Stephen Damick and father Stephen DeYoung will be back in a moment to take your calls on the next part of the Lord of Spirits. Give them a call at 855-23-7-2346. That's 855-AF-ADIO.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

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[Narrator]

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[Father Stephen DeYoung]

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[Narrator]

For you.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

To purchase this book, please go to store.ancientfaith.com that's store.ancientfaith.com.

[Narrator]

We're back now with the Lord of Spirits with Father Andrew, Stephen Damick and Father Stephen DeYoung. If you have a question, call now at 855-237-2346. That's 8-55-AF-RADIO.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

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

[Caller Christiana]

Yes, I'm here. And yeah, it's Christiana.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Oh, good. It's always tough when someone mispronounces your name.

[Caller Christiana]

Oh, yeah. People call me Christina so often that my aunt, who is actually named Christina. I say yes.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

What?

[Caller Christiana]

When I hear her name at family reunion.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Oh, man. Well, it's lovely to talk to you, Christiana. And what is the question that you have for us this evening?

[Caller Christiana]

Yeah, thanks so much for taking my call. So it's actually three questions, but I promise they're all great.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Well, we've got the time.

[Caller Christiana]

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

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah.

Okay. Well, do you want to give all three of us at once and all three your questions at once or.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Okay, yeah.

I can answer that one real quick. It's yes. No, no. Yes. No. Yes.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

All right, Next.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

No, I'm joking.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Just kidding.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Just kidding.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. Okay. Well. All right. Well, Father, so. Okay, yeah, because I don't really. I don't really know the answer to this one. So, Father Stephen, why don't you take a crack at it?

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Right. Well, yeah. So.

As we talked about a little bit last time, what is it like to be a bat? Right. Angels don't experience sort of space the way we do. Right. So it's. It's not like they're either here or in heaven. Right. Or right.

So, you know, Christ says about guardian angels, about the guardian angels of little children, that their angels are always before his, His Father in heaven. But that doesn't mean they're like, not with the children. That's just saying that. That they have this prominent place.

In the divine council, meaning God is very attentive to what's going on with these children. He's protective of them.

Is what that's indicating. So.

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

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

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

All right. Okay. What else you got, Christiana?

[Caller Christiana]

That's so. That's. That's inspiring. That's so exciting.

Yeah. Okay, so second question. Does our guardian angel carry our soul to heaven after we die? I saw this on an. On. On a page that sold icons. And in the description, it was a. It was a. I was looking for some pro life sort of icons, and there was one where it's a guardian angel and a baby, you know, one that, you know, the one that had died in the womb. And, and in the description, it said that guardian. Just carry your. Your soul to heaven after you die. And I'm like, wait a second. I've never heard that before.

I gotta ask this.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. So I mean, it's certainly the case that we see in saints lives that angels come to take the souls of the righteous to paradise. I mean, that's. Now whether. I don't know whether you could say, oh, oh, here's the guardian angel. And then six other friends he's brought with him. You know, they're not usually named in the saint slides I've. I've read. But the idea that angels do accompany the soul to paradise is pretty well established, I would say. I don't know. Is there something specific about the guardian angel, Father Stephen? Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Well, that's. Yeah. I mean, we, as Orthodox Christians, we believe that a person's soul takes a journey after they die, usually corresponding to 40 days. But that. Yeah, our guardian angel accompanies us on that journey.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

There you go.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

On the way.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. Yeah. Better than Beatrice and Dante. Boom. That's. That's for Richard Roland I know you're listening.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

I think you were. I think you were thinking of Virgil and Dante.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Oh, excuse me. You're right. Well, Beatrice is. Is the one who. Who comes to him, I think, in the Paradiso, Right?

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yeah, but that's a boring one. Nobody reads that far. It's about the Inferno. Come on. They're reading about Purgatory. Please.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

That's right. All right, Cristiana, what's your third and final question?

[Caller Christiana]

Yeah. When do we get our guardian angels? Do we get them when we're born, when we're baptized, or when we're Chrismated? If that's different from when we're baptized?

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Well, definitely at baptism. Right. Because in the baptismal service, it's specifically prayed for as part of that, especially the part actually right before the baptism itself. You know, the exorcisms and so forth at the beginning. What else, though? I mean. I mean, there certainly are cases where angels are. I mean, I think part of the problem, right, is that God assigns angels to take care of us, to guide us, to pray for us, to defend us, all these kinds of things.

And we have this concept of a guardian angel. But I wouldn't necessarily say it's like, okay, this one has this hat on, right?

So certainly angels are involved in people's lives at every point, but there is definitely this kind of connection that happens with baptism. I don't know. I don't know if I'm making any sense here. Father Stephen, please help me out.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

This is kind of a. Porque no los tres.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah, yeah, right. Why not all three? Yeah, yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Because again, we. I keep coming back to what it's like to be a bat.

We experience time as humans, right? As this. This succession of moments, Right? And we could try to literalize that when we're talking about God, right? So we say, well, okay, this is. This is the point where I really came to understand the Gospel of Christ. If I died five minutes before that, what would have happened? Right. See, we can think that way, right? But we're kind of assuming that, like, God and the angels are on this parallel track with us. It's experiencing time the way we do. Right. Or like God didn't know or whatever. So.

There are events in our lives that we experience in our lives at a particular period of time. Right. At a particular point in time.

But their reality isn't limited to that point in time. So something changes for me at that moment. Something doesn't change for God.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

And something doesn't necessarily change for an angel. So for Me at my baptism or charismation. Right. There's a guardian angel who I enter into this relationship with, but that doesn't mean that the angel was sort of sitting around waiting to be assigned up until that point. Right. Like in a waiting room, like, outside, you know, when I was being born, you know, pacing with my dad. Right. Or that. That God was, you know, getting ready and thinking about which one he would write. Like, that's silly for me. Yeah, that's the point. But the reality of it extends not just forward from there, but also back.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

From. Does that make sense, Christiana?

[Caller Christiana]

Yeah, that does. But I'm a little confused. Clarifying question.

Do we only have one guardian angel, or do we have many that kind of, like, hang around, also pray for other people?

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Like, we have. We have a guardian angel.

Yeah, we have. We have a guardian angel, but we also can have a patron saint. Our family can have a patron saint. Our church can have a patron saint. If you go to my church, that's Archangel Gabriel. Right. So he's sort of the guardian angel of my whole parish.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

So there's a lot of overlap.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yes, there. There. There's lots of folks praying for us.

But there. Our guardian angel is an angel. Right. Who is. Who is connected to our life.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. All right, well, I hope that that helps. And now you got four questions, Christiana. So that is literally more than anyone else has ever gotten in the whole history of this podcast.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Well.

[Caller Christiana]

I'm gonna say something biblical about demanding something, and then God listens. Oh, yeah. The righteous, the unrighteous judge. Something like that.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

The persistent widow.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

There you go.

Well, there you go. All right, well, great to talk to you. And I. And I hope that helps. Thank you very much for calling and for listening, Cristiano.

[Caller Christiana]

All right, thanks for taking questions.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

You're welcome. You're welcome.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Okay, so we've just.

Burnt a calf liver, and now it's time to party.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yes. Right, right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Because what follows that burning at the altar is the feast.

Where everyone's going to eat. And this isn't just a question of eating the things that were actually sacrificed. Right. Like the other pieces of the animal right there.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. There's side dishes. Right. At these feasts.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

And this is the word for today, Right? The word for today is trapezomata. Trapezomata, which literally means table things.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah, yeah. Trop is the table. Yeah, yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

And so those are the other things that were eaten along with the sacrificial feast. And so, for example, the temple of Demeter in Corinth.

Had Huge dining halls, banquet halls. And that wasn't to rent out for, like, wedding receptions. That was part of the sacrificial worship. Was everybody going and eating.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. And the important. At least one of the important things to get from the fact of side dishes is to emphasize that this really was a meal, you know, it was really a meal that was shared together.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Right. And this created.

The kinonia in Greek, the fellowship, the communion. It formed the community.

And that included the God or gods or spirits, and the humans bound them together.

And we'll probably talk about this more in a further episode, but this is in the background of what St. Paul is talking about in Corinthians to the Christians at Corinth, about not eating at an idol's temple, not eating food offers idol, and also about.

Becoming a communicant, having communion with demons by participating in these meals. Right.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. It's not just a. It's not just about don't eat the bad food. There's a ritual event that's occurring.

And.

It is a religious. It is quite literally a religious experience.

Yeah. Yeah. And usually, if I recall correctly, especially once you get to the Greco Roman period, the next thing that typically happens is a lot of immorality along with it as well.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Well, right. Because. Yeah. It's not just a feast like, hey, let's sit down and have a potluck. It's a party.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. In the worst possible way.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yes. The full orbed 1980s sense. Yeah.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. And all of this especially, like, the detail of it, kind of just underlines what priests were in the ancient world. Right. Like nowadays we tend to think of priests largely as pastors, which is why there was this wonderful rumor that went around as soon, as long as I was no longer a pastor, that I was no longer a priest anymore.

Not true.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Still, you are still frocked.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yes, the frocking continues. Yeah. But that priests in the ancient world were largely not pastors. They weren't doing pastoral counseling. They weren't, you know, all that kind of stuff. They weren't administrators. They were kind of ritual technicians. They were specialists in exactly how you do all this stuff. Precisely. Exactly how you do it in the way.

That the God expected and. Right. Because, like, there was the idea that you could do this wrong. And also there is often divination that went along with it. Right. Like, you know, parts of the animals being cut open and. And reading what's in the entrails and using that to predict the future and that kind of thing. And that's what priests did. That's what their job was, was all of that. And. And I think, you know, and then one of the things that's underlined by that is.

You can get it wrong. Like, the God might decide he wasn't into the sacrifice. He might reject your invitation to dinner or having tasted of it, you know, say, no, you did this wrong. Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Right. We've all been to a dinner party that went bad.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Where things went. Went sideways. And that could happen with the gods too. Right. Someone could say the wrong thing, do the wrong thing, offer the wrong type of food.

Make some kind of faux pas.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

In terms of the.

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

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Oh, it's a bad sign.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yeah, that was literally a really bad sign. And lo and behold, they lost. Right.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

So.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

So they were looking for those kind of things.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

I was gonna say this makes me think of, like, when you go to the doctor, right. And, like, now I'm gonna have to make Haruspex jokes the next time I go to the doctor and they're looking at a. An X ray or something like that. I'm like, so, you know, what do you read there, Doctor? You know, as he quietly chuckles to himself.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yeah, yeah.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

All right, all right. So, okay, well, where we've. We've taken up most of our time, but there's something that kind of goes along with all of this. Right? And that's. And that's a question that probably a lot of people would have like, okay, well, okay. The offering of food, whether it's meat or, you know, cakes or wine or oil, puts you in communion with the God. That's an offering. It's a. It's a. It's a shared meal. It's a communal experience, you know, so. But what about all these incense that comes along with it. What's the deal there? Is that a sacrifice too?

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Right, right. And we've already mentioned in the procession and some of the details there that incense was being used there and incense is offered. That's the language we use.

Incense was offered on altars. There were altars of incense.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

In all cultures. Right. But also, as we'll talk about more next time, in the tabernacle, in the temple, there was an incense altar. And that altar was actually used more than the altar of burnt offerings, because that was. The incense offerings were the basis of the daily cycle, Right. At morning and evening with. With prayers.

And so.

Incense is taken to this altar and is offered. And the language that's used about the aroma and the smell rising up is the same language that's used about the aroma of the burnt offerings rising up and. And the smell.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

So there's that peace where it's being offered as this pleasing aroma. It's being offered with prayer. Prayers are being attached to it.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

So it's just pleasing that you're trying to please the God, just as you're trying to please someone you're offering hospitality to.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Right. You're going to ask someone for a favor, you bring them a gift. Right?

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah, right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

That's right.

And so that's the one side, and then the other side of incense offering is there were censors, just like we have now in the Orthodox church in the ancient world, that were. They took various forms, but they were basically mobile means of offering incense. Right. Incense altar is a fixed thing, at least relatively. So. You would come and you would take some of the coals and some of the incense from the altar and place them in a sensor.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Is how it was done. And then the sensor could be used to carry that incense to other places. And that could be used in what was called in Mesopotamian religion, fumigation rituals. Right. Because the idea was you were sort of smoking out.

The area in order to render it sacred and pure. And the Egyptians are really specific about this. They believed that there were sort of aerial spirits, literally, there were spirits in the air that might be malicious or at least tricksters, and had to be sort of driven out of the presence of the God of the temple.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right. So this is like setting off a bug bomb in your house and all the cockroaches go scattering. Right. Except they're demonic cockroaches.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Incense, demonic cockroaches.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

That's going to be our new meme, everybody. Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Incense is the demon cleaner. Right. So.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

It's that cleans up the area. So there's this purification element. And just a note, if you understand this, you know why you got to keep scooping that incense during services. If you could still see clearly. It's not enough anyway.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

There you go.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

You got to get that wavy line at head height right. Right through the building.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

But I totally agree. And.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

And this is. This is so embedded. I mentioned earlier that the sort of the. At the ur level, the. The Greek words that describe religion are borrowed Semitic words that ultimately come out of Akkadian roots. So the oldest altar we know of at the Lycaon in Greece is. Was referred to throughout Greek history as the bemos, which is from bima, the Semitic root, which is the word for altar. And in Greek, it just became the name of that particular one because they lost sight of the etymology.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

But more pertinent to this is the Greek word kathiro, which is the verb for to cleanse or to purify.

Catharsis.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah, right. Catharsis. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

And so. And that word is derived from the. The Semitic Qatar, which is usually transliterated as qtr. It's Qatar, the verb in Hebrew.

And just the root cutter in. In ugaritic. And that is the verb that means to offer incense.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. So it's interesting that some of these key sacrificial terms, as you said, come from these Semitic practices of the ancient near east and then make their way even into Indo European languages like Greek get borrowed straight in and sort of Hellenized or Latinized or whatever the case.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Right. And so to sense something is not to metaphorically cleanse it. To cleanse something is to metaphorically sense it.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Mic drop.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yeah, yeah, it's exactly inverted.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. Right, right. That's gonna go on a T shirt too.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yeah, yeah. It's catchy.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

It's a chiasm. It's a chiasmus. Sorry, It's a chiasmus. So it's got to be catchy.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

So that brings us to too. And I think this is going to lead into what we're going to talk about in our next two episodes. That. Yeah, you see this clearly with incense. We're going to see this with all forms of sacrifice in the Old Testament, the New Testament atonement, that there are these two elements. The one element that is usually described by the Latin term propitiation. Propitiate. To propitiate someone means to make them propitious. And to be propitious means to be happy or well disposed or pleased towards someone.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah, not a word. We tend to Use in everyday speech, you know. How are you doing today? I'm very propitious, actually. Thank you.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yeah. I actually find the word propitious to be quite propinquent to my everyday life.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

But.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

But so. So that's what propitiation means. Just means to please someone to make them happy. Right, right, right. Whether. Whether they were angry before or not, you're pleasing them and making them happy. And then the other element that's usually described by the Latin word expiation, which is like purification.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah, right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

There are these two elements, and these are present in all sacrifices. We can see them in incense offerings. We'll see them in the other sacrifices that we're going to go on to talk about.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah, yeah. Well, this has been our first episode of three, and so we're just going to give some closing thoughts here, and we appreciate all of those of you who are anticipating our next couple episodes. This is. This is so fun already. So I'm just. I don't know, I'm just happy to be here. But I just wanted to say, you know, about this context of pagan worship that we've been discussing.

You know, if you listen closely, if you know anything, especially about orthodox Christian worship, there are probably a whole bunch of times during this episode where you thought, wait, wait, I know that word, or I know that action, or whatever. And then we didn't make the connection for you. We're going to make those connections for you. But we wanted to lay this specific groundwork here initially. And it's not just about a kind of heuristic progression. Right. It's really about, again, reorienting the way that we understand what it is that we do, and reorienting the way that we understand what we ought to be doing. Right. And how we ought to be doing it. When you understand that sacrifice in the ancient world does what we just described, and when you understand how it's conducted, then.

It kind of makes a sort of flat, secular worldview almost impossible. Right. You can't.

Once you know that you can have a meal with your God and be in communion with your God, then that takes what it means to be a religious person, or Christian in particular, completely out of the realm of this is what I think and feel and believe. Right. Although those are important things, it's much more primal and visceral, no pun intended.

It gets you down in the stomach, quite frankly.

I think that that's a really important place to aim when you're talking about the stuff that actually is the most important. I mean, I'm being a little redundant here. But.

The kind of faithfulness that keeps you returning to God over and over again, the kind of faithfulness that is always making your love for Jesus Christ grow is the kind of faithfulness that even connects to your body, which is very much an element of who you are. And I'm talking about the material body here. Right. And that there is the whole human person is brought into contact with God through exactly what we've been talking about. Now, we've been talking about it in terms of pagans, but if you listened closely, I'm sure you heard a lot of stuff that has everything to do with also the worship of the one true God. And that continuity should leap right out at you. And we're going to get to that a lot more in the next couple episodes. But just tonight, we want to just sort of show you what does worship in the ancient world look like. And you probably notice it does not look like what a lot of people call worship now. And it universally looks almost the same in every culture with just some adjustments here and there. But it's always centered on the offering of food and sharing it with your God, the accompaniment with incense to both please your God and to purify the space and the actions that you're engaging in. So this is really, really important stuff, everybody. And I.

I hope that this has been valuable for you, Father.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yeah. So this was this episode, maybe even more than some of the previous ones. Especially where we started out was in some kind of rarefied air, right?

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Dig sites from the Neolithic and Calcolithic periods with.

Names we could barely pronounce in Turkish.

And.

This may seem kind of disconnected. Right. This isn't just, you know.

That I should be allowed to shoot my mouth off and I should have a call in show, and everyone should listen to my interesting opinions about fascinating old historical stuff.

Because, frankly, other than, you know, the handful of nerds like me who would be expected to care about what things were like in. In 10,000 BC.

But the reality is this. This cuts to a big part of our mission in this podcast as a whole. And we've talked before about how disconnected modern and postmodern life is.

Now sort of digitally disconnected, and how disconnected from just reality we've become and how this has affected how we view meaning and our lives and the world, how it's affected human morality, human sexuality, you know, the human understanding of God and of religion, this sort of disconnection there. There are four main ways that humans interact with religion.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Reality.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

The first one's Language, and we're pretty good at that. We're very much in our heads. We're very linguistically oriented. When we go to worship services in the Orthodox Church or elsewhere, we focus really hard on the words and try to determine what they mean.

Then there's music and art are the next two. And those have been lost to varying degrees, and we try to rediscover them.

But the fourth one has almost been completely lost by modern humans. And that's ritual.

Ritual is not just, you know, smells and bells. We were talking about incense. It's not just.

A performance, a sort of theatrical performance that I enjoy watching. It's not something that induces an emotional experience in me. It's a way of connecting with reality. And that's why we see that worship, and especially sacrificial worship, especially sacrifice, this community building around sacred and shared meals and hospitality is something that is basically human. The earliest humans we can find evidence of were practicing it. Humans today can still practice it if we find our way back to it. And this is a way for us to reconnect with the whole element of reality to which we are least now connected, which is the spiritual reality around us. One of the questions we get asked a lot is, okay, I believe what you're saying on the show is true, but how do I really connect with that? Ritual is way. Yeah, right. Ritual is the way when we. When we attend Orthodox church services.

As they're conducted. This isn't just something that's being presented to us to watch or to hear or to think about. It's something to participate in. And that participation will produce actual communion. It will make us into a community with one another. It will bind us together with our fellow Christians and will bind all of us as Christians and our Christian communities together with our God, with our Lord and God and Savior, Jesus Christ. That's what this is all aimed at. And so it's not just about me showing off interesting stuff I learned from books about Neolithic religion and boring lectures. I sat through that you don't want to. It's about finding our way back into reality and reconnecting with it and reconnecting with God in a real experiential way so that all of this becomes real and true to us and not just something we think or believe.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Well, that is our show for tonight. Thank you for listening, everybody. If you didn't get a chance to call in during the live broadcast, we would love to hear from you either via [e-mail] or you can message us at our Lord of Spirits Podcast Facebook page. We read everything but cannot respond to everything and we do save what you send for possible use in future episodes.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

And join us for our live broadcasts on the second and fourth Thursdays of the month at 7pm Eastern, 4pm Pacific when hopefully in the future I will not be picking up Mexican radio on my microphone. Also, if you're on Facebook, like our Facebook page and join our Facebook discussion.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Group and leave reviews and ratings. But most importantly, share this show with a friend whom you know is going to love it.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

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

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Thank you very much and may God bless. Bless you always.

[Narrator]

You've been listening to the Lord of Spirits with Orthodox Christian priests, Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick and Fr. Stephen DeYoung, a listener supported presentation of Ancient Folk Faith Radio and I beheld and I heard the voice of many angels round about the throne, and the beasts and the elders, and the number of them was 10,000 times 10,000 and thousands of thousands, saying with a loud voice, worthy is the Lamb that was slain to receive power and riches and wisdom and strength and honor and glory and Blessing. Revelation chapter 5, verses 11 through 12.