Magical Mystery Tour

Summary

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The Lord of Spirits Podcast

Episode: Magical Mystery Tour

Date: December 2, 2025

Hosts: Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick & Fr. Stephen DeYoung

Produced by: Ancient Faith Ministries

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Episode Overview

Main Theme:
This episode delves into the world of ancient "mystery cults"—private, often secretive religious rites focused on individual transformation, intense emotional experiences, and chthonic (underworld) themes. The hosts contrast these pagan mysteries with historic Christianity, addressing the recurrent claim that Christian ritual is derived from or analogous to these ancient cults. The discussion is candid (parental advisory!), unmasking the disturbing, lurid realities of the ancient world and drawing out profound spiritual and cultural implications for today.

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

Setting the Stage: What Are Mystery Cults?

[01:06–14:16]

• Definition of "Cult":
  • Modern usage connotes a "weird," controlling, exclusive group, often with a charismatic leader (e.g., Branch Davidians, Heaven's Gate).
  • Scholarly/historical usage is neutral: any worshipping community, or sometimes the veneration of a specific saint or figure.
  • Notable Quote:
    • Fr. Andrew:
      "In many cases, cult is essentially a synonym for a religion, but also can be used...to refer to the veneration of a saint." [08:07]
• What Makes a "Mystery" Cult:
  • Involves reserved, secretive rites distinct from public, communal religious observances.
  • Key Differences:
    • Standard pagan worship: Public, calendar-based, strengthens community ties.
    • Mystery cult: Private, one-time initiation, focused on individual transformative experience—not usually about forming a new, lasting community.
    • Analogy: Not joining a new club or sect, more like seeking a personal spiritual breakthrough or thrill—“I’m doing something for me.” [13:14]
• Ritual Inversion:
  • Ordinary religious or cultural ritual shapes community perception and bonds people; mystery cults upend this, isolating the individual and focusing everything on a heightened personal ordeal.

The Lurid Reality: What Actually Happened in Mystery Cults?

[39:27–115:22]
(Trigger/parental warning: explicit descriptions of sexuality, drug use, violence, and abuse follow.)

Mystery Cult Practice: Case Studies

1. The Mysteries of Isis and Osiris

• Source: Apuleius' The Golden Ass (Metamorphoses), [43:59–48:44]
  • Only detailed first-person description of a mystery cult initiation; corroborated by scattered ancient evidence.
  • These are not native Egyptian rituals, but Greco-Roman reinterpretations.
• Josephus tells of a Roman who, using mystery rites, tricks a woman into sexual intercourse, believing she is uniting with a god. Emperor Tiberius punishes all involved (crucifixion, temple razed) as a violation of Roman mores.
• Notable Quote:
  • Fr. Andrew:
    “She believes she is having sexual relations with the God Anubis...but it's just this guy, tricking her.” [53:08]
• Priestly cultic corruption and gross abuses—ancient world not as idyllic as imagined.

2. Eleusinian Mysteries (Demeter and Persephone)

• The most famous mystery cult—annual rites at Eleusis, near Athens.
• Two-stage Initiation:
  • First, piglet sacrifice in winter (entry).
  • Second, late-summer rites with drugged wine, total darkness, fear/manipulation (caves, precipices, torchbearers), culminating in tactile rituals with phalluses and sheaves of grain in pitch blackness:
    • Notable Quote:
      • Fr. Stephen:
        “[Participants are] not sober…you feel like you’re about to fall into the abyss, then you put your hands in a basket with a sheaf of wheat…and an assortment of phalluses of various shapes and sizes.” [77:59–80:02]
  • Profound psycho-sexual symbolism; initiates emerge “transformed,” but there is no ongoing community.
• Parallels in scripture:
  • Story of Jephthah’s daughter in Judges echoes search/lost maiden ritual of the earliest Eleusinian mysteries. [60:39–66:42]

3. Dionysian (Bacchic) Mysteries—The Bacchanalia

• Roots in Greek worship of Dionysus, but mysteries are a secret, amped-up subversion.
• What Happened?
  • Drug use (opium/poppies), alcohol, self-flagellation, droning music driving into frenzy;
  • Group sex/orgy;
  • Culmination: the homophagy—tearing apart and eating a live animal (usually a rabbit) in a drug-induced frenzy.
  • Intention: Induce possession/ecstasy; experience the “suffering, death, and return” of Dionysus. [91:02–98:29]
• Notable Quote:
  • Fr. Andrew:
    “You go to the freak tent—there’s something going on there that’s way beyond what everyone else is doing.” [92:26]
• Temporary reversal of social order (“carnival”)—embodied in later masquerade traditions.

4. "Worst of the Worst": Hadrian and the Cult of Antinous

• Hadrian's teenage male lover, Antinous, dies; Hadrian founds an empire-wide cult worshipping him as a god (or “hero” in Greek regions), building temples, founding Antinopolis in Egypt, fusing Antinous’ image with Osiris, Hermes, Dionysus.
• Participatory rites modeled after Eleusinian/Dionysian pattern but centered around emperor’s own pederasty.
• Notable Quote:
  • Fr. Stephen:
    “Hadrian starts building temples to have him worshipped as a god. This is a mystery cult founded on pederasty.” [103:13]
• Becomes associated with darkest “black magic” of late paganism. Pagan writers and early Christians alike denounce the cult as unspeakably corrupt.

Mystery Language in Christianity?

[118:02–152:42]

• Some claim Christian sacraments, secrecy (early Eucharist for “members only”), and talk of “mysteries” mirror pagan cults.
• Closest Parallels?
  • Baptism as “initiation,” Eucharist as “hidden”/private, language of death and rebirth, ritual darkness/light, shared in New Testament (esp. Pauline letters) and early Church.
• Key Differences:
  • Christianity’s rites always collective, never private self-exaltation; they create, not sever community.
  • Christian initiation is open—the community wants everyone to join, including babies (who cannot “experience” in this sense).
  • Experience is “epiphenomenal”—not the purpose or test of ritual.
  • Mystery in Christianity is “that which was hidden but has now been revealed.” (e.g., Eph. 3:3–6)
• Notable Quote:
  • Fr. Stephen:
    “Spiritual experience is epiphenomenal…something that often happens, but is not the thing itself.” [126:07]
• Apostolic Christianity subverts and critiques both the substance and the intent of pagan mysteries.

Gnosticism and Modern Parallels

[152:32–176:42]

• Gnosticism: Christian-ish movements that reproduce the elitism, stratification, and secret-knowledge dynamics of mystery cults.
• Spicy Take – Modern Evangelicalism as Mystery Cult Redux:
  • Focus on individual emotional experience as central and validating.
  • Experiential "revival techniques" (music, lights, emotional preaching) as deliberate manipulation for ecstatic effect.
  • No ongoing communal focus; instead, serial “transformational” moments and personal breakthroughs.
  • Hierarchy of “elites” (charismatic leaders, intellectual doctors)—mirrors initiatory tiers.
  • Transient, consumeristic—church membership is fluid (“chasing the experience”).
  • Notable Quote:
    • Fr. Stephen:
      “You go to church in order to have the experience…if not, the church is now dead. You're chasing the experience.” [163:27]
  • [See also: Mainline “true believers,” Orthodox “rigorists,” and Gnostic-like subcultures.]

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “All cults, as we've said before, inevitably become sex cults in [the] popular usage of the word cult. True.”
  — Fr. Stephen [07:31]

• “The mystery cults are fundamentally about inducing [a] kind of [near-death] experience in a person...the experience itself is the thing.”
  — Fr. Stephen [28:40]

• “This is not just being gross for the sake of it. It’s about showing the radical disconnect—really, the antithesis—between Christianity and pagan religion.”
  — Fr. Stephen [119:26]

• “Christianity, echoing the words of her Lord, says, ‘In this world you will have trouble.’ There is no shortcut to knowledge, no shortcut to exaltation. There is no shortcut to salvation.”
  — Fr. Andrew [177:17]

• “Women are charged with finding, nurturing, and bringing forth what is good, beautiful, and pure in the world and others...while men are minding the borders, defending the good.”
  — Fr. Stephen [190:32]

• “If you read in the Hebrew, the Samson story (and Jephthah)—it’s loaded with puns. It’s deliberately parodying the Hellenic hero myth in the same Book of Judges that denounces paganism.”
  — Fr. Stephen [65:26]

• “Why are we talking about all this? Because you need to know what Christianity isn’t—and what Christ saves us from.”
  — Fr. Andrew [117:00]

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• Mystery Cult Definition & Ancient Context: 05:01–14:30
• Ritual & Individual Experience: 18:02–26:58
• Mystery Cults vs. Public Religions: 31:49–37:22
• Case Study – The Golden Ass & Isis/Osiris: 43:59–48:44
• Josephus' Tale of Cult Abuse: 51:14–54:02
• Eleusinian Mysteries – Process & Symbolism: 55:59–83:14
• Dionysian Mysteries – Drugs, Orgies, Ecstasy: 86:24–98:29
• Hadrian/Antinous Cult – Darkest Mystery: 100:15–115:22
• Christian “Mystery” & Sacred Language: 118:02–152:42
• Gnosticism/Evangelicalism as Modern Echoes: 152:44–176:42
• Concluding Reflections – Antithesis and the Christian Way: 176:42–194:42

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Reflections & Closing Thoughts

• Christianity is not a mystery cult—it offers no shortcut, no one-time transformation, no hidden knowledge reserved for a few.
• The ancient world was unimaginably disturbing by modern standards; Christianity, whether accepted or not, fundamentally changed the landscape of human dignity, sexuality, and public morality.
• Attempts today to “recover” ancient paganism, pursue spiritual highs, or reinvent religious secrecy (whether in Neopagan or Christian subcultures) echo the mystery cult mentality and miss the Christian claim: the “mystery” is now revealed, the invitation is for all, and salvation is the slow, communal, often-unsensational path of faithfulness.

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Final Note for Newcomers

This episode is rich in both ancient history and contemporary spiritual insight, unafraid to confront uncomfortable truths for the sake of clarity. It is an invaluable exploration for anyone confused or intrigued by the links (real or specious) between Christian ritual, enchantment, and the darker side of religious history.

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To learn more or ask questions, visit:

• Lord of Spirits on Ancient Faith
• orthodoxintro.org for basics and parish help

Contact:
Email: [e-mail]
Voicemail: speakpipe.com/lordofspirits

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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. First Enoch, chapter 48, verses 4 through 5. 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]

Greetings giant killers, dragon slayers. You are listening to the 128th episode of the Lord of Spirits podcast. Some say it's gone on too long. Nevertheless, I'm Father Andrew Stephen Damick and with me is the only ancient faith radio podcaster and ever to have been featured as a photograph on the wall of multiple restaurants in northeastern Pennsylvania, Father Steven DeYoung. And we're not live. This is our annual.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

You can still call in though. You just see, see what happens.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

You always invite people to do that, but I'm not sure that anyone has bothered.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yeah, well, how would we know?

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

How would we know? That's right. The phones just ring and ring and nothing happens.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yeah, especially this is going to be Thanksgiving. I don't think anybody's going to be sitting around.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Are you going to do that to somebody as one of the higher ups of ancient faith? Are you going to make some poor SAP like sit in the studio?

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

I mean, there is some. There is someone. We could do that too. None other than the great Mike Turducken Degan, who's not going to be taking your calls probably unless I send him off to do that. I bet he obediently would do it too. Maybe I should try.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

That's just. That's just sad.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

But this is our annual Thanksgiving pre record, following in the footsteps of the great giants episode in 2020. Last time we talked about Mithraism and it turns out that there is a hunger among our listeners for the lurid details. Lurid details.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

We do be lurid. Yeah.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

That's not a joke this time. Lurid Details of ancient mystery cults. So during this pre recorded episode, we're going to be ruining everyone's Thanksgiving dinner by talking about mystery cults in general, along with some specifics. And to strike a very serious note, this is a parental advisory, everybody. So we recommend listening to this one yourself before you let any minors listen to this, because it turns out that ancient mystery cults are gross in a lot of really disturbing ways.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

But also you also could just man up and just straight up be like, hey, relatives, who I never see who are here for Thanksgiving. I listen to this great podcast, I love and play them this as their introduction.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

And the great thing is it'll be airing at 7pm Eastern, 4pm Pacific. So like it could just ripple across the country depending on when you guys eat Thanksgiving dinner.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Well, it wouldn't actually ripple across the country, Father Andrew, because the way time zones work is that 4pm Pacific and 7pm Eastern are the same time.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

That's what I'm saying. Is it?

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

So it won't ripple. It's going to be playing simultaneously across all four time zones.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

That's true, I guess. But there is a slight. I think there's a three second delay. So.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

So for all of them?

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

I think so, yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

So it's time. So that. That isn't affected either.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

You're not having a good day so far.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

I know. I mean, the truth is is the people in California do hear it actually slightly later than those who are in Ohio because it does take longer to get through the wires, but not a lot longer.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Tubes.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

There you go, the tubes. So yeah, we are talking about mystery cults. There are some lurid details, but we're not, we're not talking about them for the lurid details. We're talking about them because this is actually a significant piece of the context of the ancient religious world. And also it turns out that there are some specific tie ins with the Bible, with Christianity, as always with this show. But you know, typically you're going to have to wait to get those until the very, very end. But we are unlike, as is our normal want, we're actually going to start by talking about mystery cults in the first half.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Right? Yes, we are actually going to be talking about mystery cults, not their relationship to Christianity, but mystery cults as such in right here at the beginning.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right, so. So the question.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

I begin at the beginning. A very good place to start.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

That's right. So this question we should begin with though is so what exactly is a cult? I think that when we talk about Mystery cults, probably people, they just immediately kind of impose the modern idea of that word cult. Yes.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Well, even modern idea and popular idea are not identical.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. It turns out, like, I think that when most people say the word cult, what they mean is a religion that I think is weird and maybe especially has some kind of character, maybe is weird leader. Yeah. Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Well, I mean, Marshall Applewhite was a little bit of a weird dude. Yeah.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Just objectively, I mean, people call us a cult and what they mean by that is I find orthodox Christianity weird, but they're wrong.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

It's not weird, it's that I'm right about Marshall Apple.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Deeply normal. I think it's probably useful to note that if you've ever studied and most people haven't, because why would you. If you've ever studied sociology of religion, they have four words that they use to define religious groups. Church, denomination, sect and cult. And there's two criteria by which they judge this. There's the criterion of what is the relationship of the group to the wider society. Is it good or bad? Does the group see itself as exclusively true or not? And sociology of religion defines a cult as a group that has a bad relationship with a wider society but doesn't see itself as exclusively true. So that might be useful to you in some contexts. But again, it's not what we're talking about here.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

But that deviates from sort of the common usage in that a lot of things like Heaven's Gate cult that I was just bringing up or the Branch Davidians or whomever would make claims of exclusivity.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yes, yes. In the sociological context they would use the word sect to refer to those exclusive groups.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

But we commonly. Yeah. Beyond just weird. Right. There are certain. Again, non professional in the sense that cult is in cult of personality, like Mussolini or Gandhi. Anyway, where the.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

I didn't think we'd have a living reference right here this early in the.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Episode, but here we are. Or was it a CM Punk reference? See, people don't even know. Now the idea that you have some leader. Right. A cult leader. And that's often a huge factor. The popular usage is that there is some guy who everybody's following.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. And there's part of what makes the cult controlling aspect often, you know.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yes. Like cutting people off from the outside world, being insulated.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

So, okay, now if you and all.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Cults, as we've said before, inevitably become sex cults in that usage of the word cult. True.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

And it turns out that that's also true about a lot of what we're going to be discussing, hence the parental advisory, everybody. If you come across the word cult in a book, you know, like in a scholarly book or a religious book, a theological book, a history book, it's not going to be used that way. So it's actually much more kind of neutral, without the sort of judgy judginess that comes with the popular usage. And it just generally means a worshiping community. So in many cases, cult is essentially a synonym for a religion, but also can be used, particularly in the Christian context, Christian scholarly context, to refer to the veneration of a saint. So they could say, well, the cult of St. Paul was very popular in this region.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

The cult of the martyrs.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah, exactly. And all they mean by that is veneration, religious veneration. It's a very, very different sense of it.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

It's also sometimes used to refer to, somewhat anachronistically, as we've said before on the show, refer to the religious aspects. So to see somebody talking about the Roman cult and what they mean is like religion in the Roman Empire.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

To distinguish that, or people who want to talk about the cult, culture distinction or relationship or that kind of thing, they're using cult to refer to elements of a society or culture that are quote, unquote, religious, which, as we've pointed out, is a very modern thing to try to separate those out. But people do it and they use the word cult to refer to it.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Or they might refer to cultic practices, which again, just means the stuff having to do with what we would call religion or a cultic center that would be like a temple or a sacred grove, you know, again, all that sort of stuff. This is all related to what mystery cult is, but it doesn't exhaust that. So, like, what exactly is a mystery cult when we're talking about the ancient world?

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

It's when you drive around with your dog and like four of your friends in a van solving mysteries.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Man, you didn't warn me of that joke during our briefing earlier.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

I save all my best material for live those meddling kids. No, the purpose of having the phrase mystery cult is to the. The mystery cults, for example, that we're going to talk about tonight involve pagan gods that are also worshiped outside of the mystery cult. So if you think about one of them, one of the major ones is going to involve the Greek goddess Demeter. And Demeter goes way back in certain regions of basically originally Asia Minor mostly, but other parts of the Greek world as well as a harvest goddess. Right. An earth goddess, this kind of thing. Very sort of standard goddess worship kind of tropes that you find way back.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah, you got sacrifices, the community coming together around a temple. Like this is what the community harvest festivals, normal pagans.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

And then in one particular place, and we'll be talking about this more in the second half in detail, but in one particular place, this particular type of ritual observance surrounding the worship of Demeter springs up. And so that particular form of worship in that particular place, which goes on for centuries, is referred to as a mystery cult, to distinguish it from that sort of broader standard pagan worship. And we'll see the same thing with gods like Dionysus and some other gods.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

There's sort of the standard regular pagan worship. But then in particular places there come to be these particular types of observance that are categorized together as mystery cults. And then you will refer to the mysteries of a particular God or a particular place to distinguish that from just the standard worship of that God or goddess. And so what are some factors that differentiate those two? Well, the broad standard pagan worship of, say, Demeter is going to involve like a big harvest festival in a city that has a temple to the goddess Demeter and people from the surrounding villages, people who live in the city, people who have moved to the city, people visiting the city at the time, will all gather and offer sacrifices to Demeter and have a big feast and eat together and do your sort of standard pagan, communal public worship. And this is part of the life of the city.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah, and it's. It's calendrical, like it happens every year or, you know, every few months or something like this. It's part of the normal rhythms of life and people all experience this together.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Right. So it's public in the very original sense. Right. It's of the people. Whereas the mystery cults, those observances, are private in the sense that they are limited to certain people who meet certain requirements, certain prerequisites, have gone through particular processes. They're not open to the general public. They're subject of a few individuals. Now, sometimes they're sort of housed within. So, for example, again, we'll go into more detail in the second half, the mysteries related to Demeter, there was also, at the same time that those private rites were being done in that area, there would be a big public feast that the general hoi polloi could, all pun intended, could. I'll go participate in. But the mysteries were then this other aspect, this other private aspect, and then relatedly of Course, the sort of public worship of the general cult as opposed to the mystery cult was collective. It was based around the group doing it together, the city celebrating it together, the region celebrating it together, communal meals at the idols temple, broad based. And a big part of the purpose of it was forming and strengthening community bonds with each other and with the demon they were worshiping. Right. That was the goal. Whereas the mystery cults are oriented toward the individual, as you'd expect, related to them being private. There are select individuals who have this personal experience. The rituals are aimed at the person having that personal experience.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

And becoming an initiate is like a personal achievement. It's something you have accomplished, something that you have achieved, you've received that the vast majority of other people have not.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. And it's. And because it's not part of the sort of the cyclic public life, it's also something that you just go through once. Something that might be immediately analogous for some people would be maybe, you know, if someone goes and it's not perfectly analogous, but like they go on some kind of like a spiritual retreat, like someone invites you, you know, to go to the desert to go, you know, do a peyote thing with them. Right. It's this private thing that people go to experience this one time and, and you know, it sort of changes you. But no one there like maintains. It's not a community thing after. Like, it's not like you might have your peyote buddies or whatever, but it's not, it's not really like that. It's not a community living together and doing these things and being bound together. It's something that you went and did.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

For you as a white tourist.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah, right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yeah. Or I mean, you can think there are, we do have rights of initiation now in the civic life. Right. For example, going and getting your driver's license.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, sure. Of course.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

I mean my, my whole driver's ed thing was a wild experience because our driver's ed instructor was an elderly chain smoking woman who let us play the radio, the car as long as she could roll the window down and smoke.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

I feel like this is the beginning of some kind of late 80s high school film or whatever.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yeah. Oh yeah. She'd like me cussing out all the other drivers, like when they cut us off and stuff was kind of amazing. But anyway, I won't go further down that rabbit trail. Yeah, but, but also. Yeah.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

There are, I was just say people.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

One time rites of initiation like that.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. And the other thing is that people who go through these mysteries do not in any way see themselves as now belonging to a different religion than the rest of their community. In as much as that is a thing. It's either an element of or kind of related to or just a thing that you did. It's not like, oh, I joined this. You're not joining anything actually by going through a mystery. A mystery cult.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Right. Like the initiates didn't get together and do a secret handshake to identify each other and yeah, talk about some secret knowledge they'd received. Because the knowledge, as we, when we go to detail, you'll see this. The knowledge they receive is like an experience. So you could call it knowledge, but it's like an experiential kind of knowledge. It's not like, oh, we revealed some secret truth to you. You know, the Earth was colonized by aliens thousands of years ago and Adam and Eve escaped from an alien ship and brought with them this apple of Eden that you can use to take free will away from humanity or something. Right. Just to spin an example off the top of my head, there was no, like, oh, here's the secret history of the world that no one knows and only the few of us initiated know it.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

No, it was kind of propositional truth kind of idea. It was you'd all shared an experience, but not together. It's not that you all went through this shared experience together and now that is bonded you together. It's quite the opposite of that. Yeah, you were isolated and had this experience by yourself. And so people in the mysteries who had been initiated could come back to, like, assistance, and I mean assist in a very pragmatic way. The functions for the next initiate, the next initiates. But they didn't undergo it again.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah, because the idea is they didn't.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Try to have the experience again.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah, you already got it. You know, you have. You have ascended on some level. Right. You're exalted already. You know, you wouldn't do it again.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

And so this is in some ways. And what we're going to talk about now is review, but it's review of something we haven't talked about on the show for a while. But if you go a few years back at the show, you'll find us talking about it. Talking about it in more detail than we're going to talk about it now. But in certain ways, because of these differences, what's going on in a mystery cult is kind of an inversion of the way ritual normally works in human society. So we've talked about before the way Ritual primarily works is that through ritual, which is repeated, ordered activity. And we usually use it in some kind of religious sense, but it doesn't have to be right.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

There's a lot of other rituals.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yeah. And it can run amok, Right. So sort of the principle in human nature that causes ritual to work this way can run amok. And then you end up with, for example, a lot of people who suffer from obsessive compulsive disorder compose elaborate rituals over small things like hand washing and locking doors and all kinds of things like that in order to maintain their lives in their minds, for example. So that could run amok. But the basic principle in human nature is that this kind of repeated order activity shapes the way we see the world. And what we mean by that shapes the way you see the world is every experience we have is filtered through a grid. We do not have any bare objective experiences. As we've said before. There's no view from nowhere. Everything you see, you see from some particular perspective. Just a very basic level. Things don't look the same from above and from below, they look different. Right? And so everything we see, everything we read, definitely not going to go down this rabbit trail for a longer. But this is the fatal flaw of the whole idea of sola scriptura, the idea that you could come to the Bible and just read what's objectively in the Bible without it being colored by your past experience, by your life so far, by the things you've learned, by the way you've learned to define words that you read, obviously, all of that. So we can argue about when you're born, but for from not long after you're born, you are not a blank slate anymore, even if you want to say you're born that way. John Locke by the time you remember anything, you're not that way anymore. You have a set of experiences and you have a language that you're learning to think in. And all of those are going to shape this, right? And so we've talked before, like, the main categories of things that help shape that grid are language, the way you name things, and the way names of things are related to each other conceptually, that covers how you perceive those things. And then music and art, which both shape the way you see and interpret things. And by see, I mean sense. So I mean see, hear, taste, touch. You start to associate particular smells and tastes and sounds with certain things. And then finally, the fourth one is ritual. And ritual is an overarching one because ritual can include language, music, and art. So just to Use one example of a ritual, the Orthodox Divine Liturgy. It takes place in a setting where there is iconography and certain types of architecture, and there is obviously music of a certain type, and there is particular liturgical language, not meaning what language liturgy is done in, but there are words that mean something within that context. There are technical terms, Divine Liturgy words. Sometimes they're words that are not commonly used outside of that setting by many people. I don't hear people use the word remission very often if they're not talking about sins at a liturgical service.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Or sometimes they're just words that have a different meaning in that context. Right. Where there's some subtle shift in meaning. Where. Okay, yeah. The way you normally use that word, it's X. But here we're using it to refer to this other thing that might be, like spirit, which means something very different at a pep rally or the Divine Liturgy.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right, right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

But the other thing about ritual is that ritual can be used deliberately to reshape perceptions.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

And this is part of how, for example, cults, in the contemporary sense of the word, work. The cult leader constructs a kind of communal life for the people that is aimed at whatever his goals are, which, as we said, inevitably becomes sexual. But he structures the communal life of the people and isolates them from outside influences. It's almost always a he, so that they can. Right. He can control their very perception of reality.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Now, music and art and language by themselves do this, but it's often less deliberate in the sense that, ostensibly, at least, unless you're, you know, trapped in an elevator, we choose what music we're going to listen to. Right. We may not be aware of the effects that music is having on us. We choose what kind of images to look at. We may not be aware of how that's affecting us, but it is. But that's still a consequence of our choice. But ritual can very deliberately reframe the very way we experience things. And that's, frankly, the goal of, for example, Orthodox services.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Ritual. Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Orthodox services are aimed at changing the way we perceive and interact with the world. This is going to become important later. And so one of the most important parts of joining the Orthodox Church is submitting yourself to Christ Church to be.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Reformed, which is the way when we say things like, you can't just read it all in books. This is part of what we mean by that. That unless you go through the rituals and experience the ritual life of the church, your point of view, at the very least your point of view is not the point of view of the church.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Right. The way I read things, the way I see things, the way I hear things, the way I interpret things, the way I assess the meaning of things is wrong. And I have to therefore submit to that being corrected. And that's not just a question of logical propositions, of I think A is true, but actually B is true. So someone needs to correct me and I need to believe that B is true. No, I believe that A is true, but the way I understand A or B or anything else. Right. My way of understanding it is wrong.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. Not just the data.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

So even if B is absolutely true, if you just tell me B, I won't understand B correctly. You ultimately have to enter in into a community. It's within the ritual life of a community that all these things make sense and they can't totally be understood from outside. But you may have noticed I've just said community a whole bunch of times and collective and group and shared life. And that's the way pagan religion works too. It's just conforming you to something other than Christ.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

It's conforming you to the spirits that those religions are worshiping. But as we said, mystery. A mystery cult by definition is not doing that collective thing.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

It's for you, it's you being set apart as an individual in part by having this experience that others have not had. That's part of the whole idea, is that this is going to make you different than other people. Not this is going to bond you together with other people and shape how all of you live together and think together and see things together. Right. And so it is about, as we said, inducing a particular experience. And then rather than participating in a way of life that reaffranges how you experience the world. You have an experience that is supposed to reframe the way you think about your life. So it's almost a direct inversion. And to get to the heart of the matter, pretty much all of the mystery cults are chthonic.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. Meaning there's an underground element, so to speak, there's an underworld element.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Right. That this is stuff involving death, not a near death experience, the way we talk about it now. But not totally dissimilar to that. Right. When we talk about near death experiences currently, we talk about, oh, somebody was, you know, medically dead for two minutes and they come out of it. And during that time when they flatlined and things said they were technically dead, they come back reporting having had some experience. And often that's an experience of a spiritual nature that's not what we're talking about. Although it's not, like I said, not totally dissimilar from that. This is more about inducing a near death experience in the sense of someone's in a horrible car wreck and emerges alive, someone in war or in some other context is getting shot at and almost dies. But doesn't someone survives a plane crash that most of the other people don't? That kind of near death experience. And so you can understand how if you think about people who have had those experiences I just listed, that kind of reframes how they think about their life, right?

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Oh, sure. I mean, they, they say almost died, your life flashes before your eyes. I've talked to multiple people. I mean, one gets this in pastoral ministry where if they almost die, you know, maybe they have a disease, maybe they have, you know, whatever, I almost died on the operating table or this kind of thing. They often rethink how the way that they live and they live in a different way. They see life differently after that.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Right. And so the mystery cults fundamentally are about inducing that kind of experience in a person.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Giving a person that kind of experience. And so the experience itself is the thing is what they're after and what they're about. So it's not about just objectively having participated in the ritual.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right. This is definitely a I'm doing something for me kind of thing.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Right. Like you think about pledging a fraternity, you go through some series of ordeals. Right. And now you're a member. But the experience of the ordeals is not really ultimately what it's about.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

It's about you becoming a member. Right. And you go through those ordeals with a group of people and it bonds you together with those people.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. I mean, I think in some ways a certain parallel would be, for instance, people who do hallucinogenic drugs to, you know, achieve a higher state of consciousness or something like that.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

That's not a parallel. That's kind of on the nose.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yes, yes, that's true, as we'll discover, of course. But, but most people aren't, you know, most people these days are not doing that. There's no conception for that of a mystery call. Yeah, but, but I don't want to quite say it's respectable, but there's some people that are presenting themselves as respectable who will say things like, like for instance, Alex o', Connor, the guy, what does he call himself? Cosmic skeptic. I think he did mushrooms or something like that and said that he, he understood things better. You know, he Understood some things, you know, he achieved something in doing that, you know.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yeah. I don't know, I. With him, I interpret that a little bit differently, but I don't know his work well.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

But I was. Interviewer said that.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Well, so there are some folks out there, especially now, I'm talking about younger people now. Right. Because it had been a while before. Well, it had been a while. It had been ever since anybody was really raised without religion. You know what I mean?

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Like, yeah, this is a new.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

That's a rare occur, that's been a rare occurrence in human history. Right. People like rebel against the religion they were raised in. So you can think about somebody like Voltaire who hated Christianity, who still raised Roman Catholic.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Like he just hated it, rejected it, or Thomas Jefferson with, you know, Protestantism or whatever. They were raised with some religion, just didn't like it. I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about someone who was raised without any religion, which we now have increasingly in the world, especially in the United States and Europe. And those folks mostly have no religious sensibility. And what I mean by that is they don't think in those categories at all.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah, yeah. I think they might think about consciousness and the mind and this kind of thing. And I think for those people, if they decide to do some kind of drugs as part of that, they think of it as tinkering with. With that.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yeah. So they just, they don't have a religious sensibility. Like, they don't. If you see them trying to talk about religion in the world, they always turn it into politics or they turn it into something that they do have more of a sense of. And it's not that they're like horrible people with no soul, unless they're gingers, it's that they, they just don't have that sensibility. So think about something that just doesn't appeal to you. Like ballet just does not appeal to me. I have no sense of ballet, despite me. If you made me go to a ballet and I sat there, I would not be able to tell you whether it was a good one or a bad one.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Despite being award winning ballroom dancer. Father Steven.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

I can't believe it. Yes, Strictly ballroom. No, no. That is no. Right. Doesn't mean there's something wrong with ballet dancing. Just means I have no sense of it. Like unless somebody just, you know, trips and falls. Right. Like I'm not going to be able to know, like, oh, that was an exquisite whatever maneuver. Right. Or figure skating. My sister's watch figure skating. I don't know what a quadruple Lutz looks like even, right? Like, I. No clue. So I just. I have no sensibility for it, right? So, like, me watching it is a waste of my time, because I don't. I have no sense of it. These folks are that way with religion. And I think some of those folks, when they do psychedelics, that's the first time they've had anything even approximating in any even rough way, a religious experience. And so it sort of opens up this category. Like, if somehow I did get roped into going to a ballet, and for some reason, on that particular night, something I saw, and it was just the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. Right? Like, maybe I'm developing a sense for ballet, but in this case, it's the inklings of developing some kind of religious sensibility to someone who previously didn't have one. That's part of what I think is. Is going on there. All that is to say, I think that's a little different than what's going on here, because maybe in most cases, I think these people had, since they were in the broad run of paganisms, that. Paganism. They had some kind of religious.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah, yeah. That's what I'm saying. I mean, it's not analog. It's not a. Yeah, yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

But again, this isn't about being able to just point at. Objectively. Objectively, I took driver's ed. I took the written test. Now I have my driver's license. Or objectively, I went through the process. I joined this fraternity. I'm a frat brother or a sorority sister, where there's this objective thing. I did these steps. Now this is the thing. And there was an experience involved there. And that experience did certain things like bond me together with my frat brothers or sorority sisters. We got to be even handed here, right? Diversity, equity, inclusion, or, you know, now I am one of the people who has a driver's license so I can get on a plane.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

That's what they're for, as you know.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yes. Start racking up those frequent flyer miles. Right? But the experience, me going through driver's ed with my friend Dave may have helped strengthen the friendship between me and Dave as a teenager. Right? But that was not the purpose. The purpose of me going through driver's ed was to get a driver's license, not to hang out with Dave. Dave's not here, man. And the purpose of entering the fraternity of sorority, right? And the initiation is not just to have an experience. It's to bond you together with your rat Brothers and sisters, that's the goal is to make you part of this group. So with the mystery cult, the purpose of being initiated the mysteries is just to have the experience of being initiated in the, in the mysteries. It's the difference between having a few drinks at a party to lubricate your socializing versus having a few drinks at home by yourself just to get bombed.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

What other great family oriented analogies can I draw? But we give parental advisory, so your kids shouldn't be listening to this anyway. Especially when we get in the next half.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

As I say, this half hasn't been. Hasn't been bad at all in comparison to where we're.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yeah, no, you're being lulled into a false sense of security. When we start the second half, you better not bring your kids. That's. I'm just.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Hide your.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Hide your wife. So this. And the way this experience, this sort of, as we said, near death, this experience of almost dying, of coming to the cusp of death and then pulling away, was not just a spiritual encounter in the sense that in broader paganism, the ritual life of broader paganism, you're having an encounter with the spirit in the woods or in the spring or in the fountain, or you're having an encounter with the God or the goddess of some sort, but not just the spirits themselves, but you're having an encounter with the whole spiritual world, particularly the underworld. So it's not just, oh, I almost died, like in a biological sense, my life has a terminus, I need to rethink things. But also you're sort of coming right up to the gate of the underworld and then turning back and you get sort of a glimpse of it is the idea.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

And so it's. I have seen now the fate that awaits me in all flesh beyond just our sort of modern biological sense of death.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. And you have to imagine that there's probably certain level of thrill seeking that kind of goes into some of this. Oh, yeah, yeah. I've never seen flatliners, but that's what I imagine the movie is about. Is that what it's about? Have you seen it? I assume you've seen it.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

It's kind of. Well, okay, so there's the original. There's a remake of. The remake is terrible.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Okay. I've never seen either, but the, the.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Original is kind of a classic. Yes. Except. Yeah, the. The original actually would kind of pair a little well with this in that they're kind of thrill seeking and they end up encountering things in the spiritual world. Yeah. Maybe that they didn't want to.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Little did they know.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

But there is the whole Julia Roberts issue.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Well, just.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

I don't like looking at Julia Roberts. Oh, I was gonna say.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

I. I was gonna leave that as a cliffhanger.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Oh, no. Yeah.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

I mean, our disturbs me. Our mutual friend Deacon Sarah from Rowland believes that Julia Roberts can unhinge her jaw and swallow humans like a. Like an anaconda.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

See, now this is what the only thing we've ever had in common because I used to say that Julia Roberts looks like she could eat a whole apple.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Well, there you are.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

So see, apparently we share one insight.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

There is something. Yes. You can come together on this Julia Roberts. That's right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

And you know, what about Breakfast at Tiffany's? As I recall, I think we both kind of liked it.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

That song has a very specific reference in my head because of. I was going through some stuff. Man, when that came out, that horrible.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Summer when that was played continuously. I know. It's everywhere.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Everywhere, Everywhere. All right, well, on that cliffhanger, then.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

We'Re not gonna reveal any details about.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

That from my life.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Life.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

We're going to take our first break and we'll be right back on this it's getting weirder episode of the Lord of Spirits podcast.

[Genevieve (Director of Development at Ancient Faith Ministries)]

Hi, this is Genevieve, the director of development at Ancient Faith Ministries. I want to wish you all a warm and spiritually nourishing Christmas season as we journey through the sacred nativity fast towards the birth of Christ. I pray you are filled with hope, awaiting the light of the world. Throughout history, Christians have have understood that the light we receive is meant to be shared with others as a gift. St. Nicholas secretly brought hope to families in need. And St. Lucia demonstrated how we can be light bearers in a world of darkness. Here at Ancient Faith, we are honored to edify, evangelize, educate, and engage countless seekers, believers, and those hungry for spiritual nourishment. Every donation, no matter how modest, becomes a light that we pass forward to our listeners. As you prepare for the Nativity make would you consider giving the gift of light to ancient faith? Your gift, whether 25, 50 or 100, joins with the offerings of countless others to ensure that Christ's light continues to be lit and shared. Please visit ancientfaith.com and click Support on the top menu. Together we are light bearers. Together we prepare the way of the Lord. Blessed nativity to you and yours, and thank you so much for your generosity.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Hey, welcome back. It's the second half of this pre recorded episode of the Lord of Spirits podcast. We're talking about mystery cults in the ancient world. And this is the half where the parental advisory we delivered in the first half is really going to kick in. So full effect. Yeah. So again, please, parents, must be this.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Tall to ride this ride.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. Parents, please review this before you listen to it with your kids.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Because while we're bringing on your Thanksgiving guests.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah, yeah, exactly. We're not going to be explicit, but we are going to be straightforward.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

So. Because here's the thing, you're sitting there right now, especially if you're on the west coast, as you're hearing this premiere and you're thinking to yourself, man, we're going to sit down for dinner. Crazy uncle's going to bring up politics. This is all going to go south. Listen, play this in the background. Stunned silence. Much better. Thanksgiving.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

That's right. Exactly. Wait, what? Wait, what? What?

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yes, yes. Just people awkwardly looking at one another.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

I do kind of love it when that happens again, not because it's lurid, but because I think what it does is it makes people realize that a lot of our assumptions about the ancient world are all wrong or significantly wrong.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yes. Or at least significantly bized.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah, yeah. We have this idea, these beautiful white columns and all this kind of stuff.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Which weren't white, they were painted garish colors.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

But it turns out that it was exhibit A. Right, right, exactly. I mean, it turns out that it was a pretty nightmarish world, in fact, for most people.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

So this doesn't play into your nice rhetoric about the world. Was this. This beautiful paradise of pagan nature lovers and then these horrible Christians came in and started oppressing all the women's getting rid of slavery. Oh, no, wait, that doesn't work either.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right. Yeah. I guess we should just make our semi annual nod towards Dominion by Tom Holland if you want to get the overarching sweep about what the ancient world was actually like and how Christianity completely change the whole world, whether you're Christian or not. All right, well, let's get into some details about mystery cults.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

So what?

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

I mean, if they're so mysterious, they're so secret and stuff, how do we know anything about them other than what people?

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

They're terribly mysterious, like the Sphinx. Yeah, so? Well, we mentioned last time when we were talking about Mithras, that part of the reason we don't have any texts for Mithraism, because they were either passively not copied and maintained, or more antagonistically destroyed. A mixture of both. Right. I'm not saying one or those two is what happened. I'm Saying both probably happened at different places over time. And we didn't have anybody really rat out what was going on. There's no rat, no stoolie, no narc, no tattletale, no snitch. Right. Who came and told everybody what was going on. Not so with some of the other mystery cults. And so the biggest rat of the ancient world was a fellow named Apuleius.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yes. Who wrote a book with. And we're not kidding about this, a title. The Golden Ass.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yes, The Golden Ass. I have so many jokes that I can't tell live on the air because I know it's pre recorded. They'll get edited out, so I'm not even gonna bother.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

But I think it should be mentioned, though, that actually Apuleius's name for his book is the Metamorphoses.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

But Ovid.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Right, Right, right, right, right.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

But I guess. I guess, I guess the Golden Ass title we get from St. Augustine, he's the one who refers to it as the Golden Ass. And it's kind of a novel.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Well, it is the story of a guy who gets turned into a donkey.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yes. Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Magically.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

So, I mean, that's. It's the biblical use of the word ass.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Correct. Exactly.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

As it were. Which still made me snicker.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yes.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Every time the Ten Commandments were read. But.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah, I mean, it's funny. I mean, almost every culture has this sense that donkeys are kind of goofy and low and ridiculous and stupid and stubborn. Call someone that, it's an insult. It seems to be almost universal throughout time and space, which, of course, are both illusions of, as we've covered in the past, but. Yes. By Appalachian trans.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Historical reality of donkeys. Yes. Yeah. The Platonic form. Eternal Platonic form of the donkey. Yeah. So this works for a couple of things. For those of you who are CS Lewis fans, which, I don't know, statistically is at least the majority, if not the super majority of you.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. A certain Venn diagram.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yes. Like, I am not counted among you, unfortunately. But I know you're there. The reason you love this is because this is where the story of Cupid and psyche is, which C.S. lewis wouldn't have had access to otherwise. And so.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yep.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

You wouldn't have your favorite book.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yep. It is his best book until we.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Have seen his best book. The only books of his I really love are the Space Trilogy.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Oh, really?

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Which are the ones that no one else likes.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

People like him. Although I liked the first two better than the third. The third. There was a lot about it. That I appreciated. Like, I'm like, okay, I see what you're doing here, but I just, I don't know, I didn't like it. What can I say?

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Well, the third one, he gets political and then I feel betrayed.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

That's ironic coming from you.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yes. Irony is so ironic sometimes. It really is.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Okay. But yes. Why are we looking at this book? What does it have to do with.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

So anyway, the story of Cupid and Psyche is in there as a story within the story. The broader story being this guy who ends up becoming a donkey and then gets changed back. But he, over the course of the story, is initiated first into the Mysteries of Isis and then he goes to Rome and is initiated into the mysteries of Osiris and becomes sort of a priest within the mystery cult. And in the context of narrating that, Apus goes into full detail about all the things that happen in these initiation rites. So he doesn't just say it happens. Like he describes the whole thing in detail.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

And thereby is a stool pigeon, sort of leaks everything.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Now, how do we know? How would he know? He's not making it up.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Well, part of how we know it's not making it. So this is the only description this detailed that we have.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Okay.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

For any mystery cult.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

So we don't have anything. But compare it. Compare completely against.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

But there are bits and pieces of information and details that we have about various mystery cults. Little bits and pieces of different sources here and there. And all of those little bits and pieces from all over the place all check out with this detailed description.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Okay. So they're basically mutually compatible. This is the data we have. If there's anything that we know, broadly accepted. Yeah. If there's anything we know about mystery cults, this is where we know it from.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Right. It's broadly accepted that at least in the broad strokes, this is what's going on. Versions of this, variations on these themes are what is going on in mystery cults.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Okay, Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

And so the rest of this half, we're going to be talking about some of those variations in different mystery cults. Right. But the broad strokes. Right, and so a lot of the broad strokes we were talking about in the first half, like about the near death experience part and that kind of thing we're getting from primarily the golden ass as reinforced by other sources.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Okay, Right. All right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Now, and another part of this is of course that, you know, these are the Mysteries of Isis and the mysteries of Osiris. These are not native Egyptian religious forms.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. In religious terms, it's almost like Greek fan fiction of Egyptian religion. Sort of. Right?

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Sort of.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah, yeah. Like. Like, sort of Greeks who find Egyptian religion super cool, and so they kind of come up with this stuff to participate.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Kind of appropriate it.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Like Richard Gere in Buddhism.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Wow. Is that. That's continuing what we just. Where we just ended the first half, Right?

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Or like. Or like when. When Madonna got into Kabbalah.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Oh, yeah. That was so hilarious.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Like that kind of thing, right?

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. But then it becomes established.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yeah.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

You know, or who.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Who did the Beatles meet with? Did they meet with a yogi at one point? Anyway. That kind of thing.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

There's got to be a Scientology joke in here somewhere. But I'm. It's just not coming to me. But I feel like that's parallel in some ways.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

I think. I think we already covered Scientology with the whole all cults become sex cults.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Then that is. Yes.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

But moving. I'm gonna get sued now. That's awesome.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

By the Scientologists.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

I mean. Yes.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

That's what we do on the Internet since the 90s.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Then I'll know I have finally arrived.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

All hail Operation Clambake. That's what I have to say about all of that. So.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

So. But yeah, so this isn't a native Egyptian thing. This is a product of under the Ptolemies, Hellenic culture sort of interfacing with and having some fun with native Egyptian religious traditions.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

And a reminder, everybody, the Ptolemies are a Greek dynasty ruling Egypt. Like Cleopatra.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Cleopatra was Greek.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

One of those. Yes, she was a Greek.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

And if you've seen her silhouette on coins, which you can see, we have the coins. She was definitely Greek.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Oh, yes.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

She had a Greek profile.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

That's right. Which one of my favorite issues of the Asterix and Obelix comics makes much of the shape of the nose of Cleopatra? Yes, It's. It's. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

So not that anyone who works for the BBC listens to this, but stop it with the stunt casting. So the other interesting source, interesting to listeners of this podcast regarding the mysteries of Isis and Osiris, and this was.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

A huge, wonderful surprise to me.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yes. I couldn't believe it. A little story told by Josephus in Antiquities.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

I know. Which is. My grandmother had Josephus on her bookshelf.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yes.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

My late grandmother.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

She never told me about this. And in terms of the parental advisory, this is going to be a good test case, because if this one causes you an issue, it's all downhill from here, people. For the rest of this half just telling you now.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

So what is it Josephus says about.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Josephus tells a story about this certain fellow, this certain Roman who live, meaning living in Rome itself, named mundus, translatable as Mr. World. Yes. So he is infatuated with a young lady in Rome.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Okay.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

And said object of his affections had no interest in him.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right?

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

None.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Unrequited love, as it were.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

And so he concocted a scheme for himself and got her to decide to participate in the mysteries of Osiris.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

I mean, most guys would just still go down and buy a love potion from the local Aphrodite.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yes, but not Mundus. Not our boy Mundus. He gets her. Oh, you need to go and be initiated into the mysteries of Osiris at this temple for the mysteries of Osiris in Rome. So she decides to do this. And in the context of this mystery initiation, Mundus has sexual intercourse with her under the guise of. She believes she is having sexual relations with the God Anubis.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

See, this is a good tie in with our giant episode from five years ago.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yes. So she thinks she's just making nephilim.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Whereas he, you know, is using subterfuge. Right. As a nerd. To get with the girl, to get with his crush. So that happened. And then apparently the Emperor Tiberius found out about it.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yes. The morals of Rome have been affronted by this terrible act.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yes, yes. And Tiberius decides, this is terrible. We could not have such things going on. The Roman people must show more stoic self restraint than this on both sides. And so had the temple leveled where it happened. And all of the people involved, Mundus, the woman, the priests and priestesses of the temple who were involved, had all of them crucified.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

That'll show them.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yes. Now you may be wondering, why would Josephus, our friend, the Pharisee. Right, right. Whom our Protestant friends treat as infallible on the biblical canon.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

I know, more important than Church fathers.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

I mean, why would he relate such a tale?

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. I mean, it's because it makes the emperor look great. And that's what this guy is.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Well, it makes pagans look bad as compared to Jews. But without blaming the pagan emperor. Yeah, so he can say as a Jewish person, look, we Jews, we don't do stuff like that. Yeah.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

And you know, the emperor and you.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Oh, great wise Emperor, you know this. That's why. See, that's how this kind of thing gets punished. But the pagans get up to that kind of stuff. So he continues his Roman Bootlicking or sandal licking in this case.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

This is not a passage from Josephus that your Baptist preacher is probably going to mention on Sunday morning when he's.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

No, in fact, probably no passage from Josephus other than his canon list.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

And his claim that every Jew knows that that is the canon of scripture from their birth.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

That's Platonic knowledge right there.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yes. Other than that, he never gets quoted by both Protestants.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. Because there's giants in that, too, by the way, everybody.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

No, there's all kinds. Yeah, well, as we just saw, there's all kinds of things. He writes a lot about the history of the Herodian dynasty. So there's plenty of. There's stuff.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. All right, so. So what, what else we got? What other kinds of shenanigans are they up to there in the ancient Greco Ormon rules? Yeah, what else you got?

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Oh, but wait, it gets worse. Right? So the Mysteries of Isis and Osiris, although we have this from Apus. That's not the sort of biggest and most famous mystery cult. The biggest and most famous mystery cult that goes on for the longest period of time or the Eleusinian Mysteries.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah, this is the big one.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yes. And the Eleusinian Mysteries are. This is what we were referring to right at the beginning of the show in terms of Demeter. So this is the Elu City Mysteries revolve around the story, in particular of Demeter and Persephone.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. And just for those of you who haven't read that stuff recently, the basic outline of the story.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

How dare you.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

For sure. I know what's wrong with you. You guys need to be current with all these things. I mean, you've had thousands of years to read these texts, so. Yes, yes.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

These are the classics.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

That's right. So the basic story of Demeter and Persephone is that Persephone is her daughter. So Demeter is this fertility and harvest goddess. Right. And her daughter is Persephone. And Persephone is abducted by Hades, the God of the underworld, who thinks that Persephone is all that. And while Persephone is in the underworld, Hades gets her to eat some man. I can see it in my head. But now it's pomegranate seeds. Pomegranate. Excuse me. Yeah, some pomegranate seeds. It sticks, right? I think. And. Yeah, and so as a result of her eating stuff in the underworld, which, I mean, you want to read this in ritual terms. Right. She's in communion with the God. Okay. As a result of her eating stuff in the underworld, Then she's bound to him and she is his wife. But then Demeter basically threatens to kind of destroy the world with endless winter as a result of this. And the gods kind of say, look, Demeter, you can't do that. This is bad. And so a deal is worked out. Sort of a timeshare custody deal. Yes, yes, A custody deal over Persephone, where Persephone will live in the underworld for a number of months with Hades and then, you know, with her mom, Demeter, and the other months. And this kind of expl. The way that often people talk about this is this explains the seasons. So that's an element of the story. But the part of this that's really interesting in terms of mystery cult stuff is that Persephone takes this journey into the underworld and has experiences there. And that's the thing that they're really kind of interested in for this. Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

And then emerges Right. In the spring. Right. Yeah. We have to remember, people read this story now mythologically, so they do the largely dumb, dumb. Well, they know, have science, so they think fall and winter are goddess crying.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. And like.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Okay, but that's the dumb, dumb version. Yeah, that's not what it's about.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

The reason why the story has power for people is because they participate in it ritually. And of course, on some level, everyone's participating in this with, you know, the cycle of regular feasts and stuff, but.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

You also harvest festivals for them, this.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Particular participation is about this element of it. This. This underworld journey element.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

It's about sharing the experience of Persephone.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Journeying into the underworld, not just celebrating the harvest with Demeter and giving her credit for it. Right. Which is the more broad concept. Right. And so this is. This is much deeper than just, oh, they don't have science. This is linking together the cycle cycles of human life, birth and death with the cycles of nature. There's a lot more going on here. And again, we're talking about a mystery cult that participates in that, particularly through the vehicle of the person of Persephone and being sort of united or having that experience. Now, the Greeks themselves, and still some historians think this goes all the way back to, like, Bronze Age, Minoan civilization.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

That would be super duper early.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yes. That's not most people, though. And you can understand why the Greeks would think everything's older than it is. Right, sure. If you don't understand that, then you haven't spent a lot of time in an Orthodox church. Because in an Orthodox church, if you do something three times in A row. Your church now has a hundred year tradition of doing that thing.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Like that's how it works. That's the way it's always been. Like since the founding of the church, it has always been that way in Mykonos.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

And sometimes that's true and often it's not. Right.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Sure.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

So the Greeks thought everything stretched, but we've always done this. Right. And sometimes it went way back and sometimes not so far back. Most people think now it started somewhere in the Mycenaean period. Some version of this, not the full orbed thing, but some version of it and something that might actually be evidence of that.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. This is wild too.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Is in the book of Judges, certain fella named Jephthah.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Not a saint.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Not a saint.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Not even a little bit.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Although I've said every time I say this about Jephthah and Samson, people go crazy about Samson. This is part of my proof that this is just me ruining their Sunday school. That's all they're mad about. I never hear anything back about Jephthah.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. Who's literally in the same list and used in the same way.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Like they could make almost all the same arguments. They could make a better case because there are fewer church fathers who just directly say that Jeff, that isn't a saint than there are who say directly that Samson is not. But at any rate now we've just ginned that up again because anytime I say the name Samson, like there's another round of it online. Like, man, I'm living rent free in so many places I get more houses than Donald Trump.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yes.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

So the story of Jeff, the judges, first of all, people only are familiar even with half of it.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yes.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

The whole story about war with Moab that nobody remembers.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. The part that people remember is of course that Jeff, that makes this oath that the first, the first person that comes to him when he gets back from winning the battle, he didn't think.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

A cow or a sheep was going to come trotting out.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

And it turns out it's his daughter. And so he's, you know, she says, you know, let me take some time to lament my virginity. Basically, you know, I'm not going to have gotten to live a normal married life like everybody else. So he gives her some time and then it's not explicit in the text, but it's heavily implied that he sacrifices her, you know. But then it also says that there is a feast day that's appointed, that's connected with this. There's this commemoration that occurs There at the end.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

This is the other part that gets left off. Right. So just to do a couple of quick troubleshooting things. Don't come at me with that. He didn't sacrifice her. She became a virgin at the temple. There was no temple.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Are you telling me she became a pagan shrine prostitute? That's better. Anyway, like what? So, right. And what you find, actually, if you read both the church fathers and rabbinic interpretations of Jephthah is they all talk about the virtue of his daughter. They don't talk about him.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. She's the hero in this story.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Right. She is presented as sort of parallel to Isaac. The story of Abraham sacrificing his son, where she is sort of quiet and obedient, even to the point of death. That's who they talk about Jephthah's daughter as being a type of Christ, not Jephthah killing his daughter as being a type of Christ, somehow. Weirdo. That may be why I don't get as much pushback. But anyway, that's. But yeah, that it says at the end that there is this feast in the northern kingdom of Israel that comes from this. That they say comes from Jephthah having done a human sacrifice with his daughter. This horrible evil act. Right. Which. And yes, read the Torah. If you made a hasty or rash oath, you could repent of it.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

And offer animal sacrifices instead. But he didn't know that because Jeff the was basically an unreconstructed pagan. If you read Judges. So he commits this horrible act and there's this festival where people go out looking for his daughter. Looking for the missing maiden. The missing daughter. Okay. And they go out with torches doing this. And this is exactly the thing you find at our reports of the earliest stages of the Eleusinian Mysteries. The torchbearers are sort of an office within the enactment of the mysteries throughout its history. And they go out looking for, in that case, Persephone. Okay, so now, controversial part, in the same way, and this is especially obvious if you read it in Hebrew, in the same way that the story of Samson. I'm not saying it's not a true story. Story of Samson is a true story. Okay. But the way it's presented, right. The way the story is told is as a parody of early stories of Heracles or Hercules.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

In the same way, in the same book, Judges. Right. The. The story of Jephthah is presented as an alternate origin, an alternate horrible origin for this Hellenic pagan festival that eventually becomes the Eleusinian Mysteries. Why would. Why would anybody in Israel, especially the Northern Kingdom, be concerned with either of those things? Because, remember, Samson's from the tribe of Dan.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. Which is the, you know, the. The basically pagan tribe.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yes.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

You know, the origin of the Antichrist. I mean, read the Book of Revelation. It's. It's the tribe that doesn't get to go into the kingdom, but it's also the farthest north. Yeah, that's.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

That's right. It's the northernmost of the northern tribes.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Right. So why? Well, because the Danites, the Philistines, are descended from the sea peoples. They're. They're Mycenaeans. So the pagan religion being practiced by the Philistines and the Danites and Judges is very clear that the Danites are practicing pagan religion.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Like, it is abundantly clear. It talks about them getting the Ephod and hiring the priest to come and, like, sacrifice to it. Hiring a Levite. Right. And all that. That's all on the page in Judges. Right. Their form of paganism is this early form of Hellenic paganism. Early Hellenic paganism derived from what? From Syrian paganism. So there are cross currents and assimilation in Phoenicia. Right. As you get up into the Syrian and Hittite regions. Right. Where. Where this stuff is all mixed. The reason I say Samson being a parody, by the way, is obvious, especially original Hebrew, is that the original Hebrew is full of puns, like deliberate puns and jokes in the Samson story. Right. That if you know Hebrew, it's telegraphing to you what this story is doing. Right. But yeah, if you're mad about that, about me saying that, send your angry emails to father [e-mail]. so back to the Eleusinian mysteries proper.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

They're called the Eleusinian Mysteries, not because, you may have noticed neither Demeter nor Persephone are named Eleusis.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah, it's. It's the name of a place.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yes. I'll use this as the city. Yeah. Where. Where these mysteries took place.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Okay.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

And there were sort of. There were sort of two steps. Right. So if we continue my not great driver's license analogy, you get your learner's permit in mid winter, the end of January, beginning of February, you would go there if you wanted to be among the initiates that year. Right. At the festival proper, you'd go there at the end of January, beginning of February, in mid winter and offer pig sacrifices. They're actually piglet sacrifices. They're baby pigs. You offer baby pigs to Demeter.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

And this is by the way, in case anyone is wondering where this is, this is in. This is in the Athens area. It's actually a suburb now of. Of Athens. So, yeah, probably, you know, Athens was.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Smaller then, so it was a city outside of Athens.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Athenian urban sprawl. So you go there, you make these midwinter baby pig sacrifices to Demeter. Right. You're making these offerings to her during her period of mourning. Right. Because that's what the winter is supposed to be. And then you come back at harvest time the next autumn. And that's when the mysteries proper, the initiations proper were held. And so, as we mentioned, the end of the first half, this is about producing this ritual experience of death and rebirth. So one of the reasons why most of these were performed underground in caverns and tunnels and things is not just the connection with Hades in the underworld. That's part of it. But also because that was the place where you could get absolute darkness. So I don't know if you've ever. If you ever go and take any of these cave tours, any of these famous cave systems in, like, Kentucky or Carlsbad Caverns.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

I did one on Guam.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Okay. Normally, you know, you get down into the cave system and there'll be a boat where they. They warn you, and then for, like, a few seconds, they turn the lights off.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yes. And when I took. And this. I'm not kidding about this. When I took this tour on Guam and they turned everything off, someone said, and this is what it's like in a sinner's heart. Evangelical underground boat tours on Guam.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yes. And then you all shoved youth Pastor Bob off of the. Off of the boat.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

I still want to.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

It's a core childhood memory.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

But mysteries that I experienced.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

This is a kind of darkness you don't get outdoors at night.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. I mean, it's truly, truly dark. No matter which way you look, you don't see anything.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

That's the idea like that you cannot see your hand in front of your face, literally. Right. And so that's a lot of what they're going through. So these. These rights were performed in that kind of absolute darkness.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

And that's why you have torchbearers. Right. As this office. You have to lead people to the place and then put the torches out. Right. Like you have to. And then relight them to get them out. Right. So. And so that darkness is part. Is. Is again related to the underworld and death, interestingly. So Plato, when he talks about the Eleusinian Mysteries, he says, oh, this is synciation is experience that brings about enlightenment and opens the noose to the perception of the eternal and the higher things. Right. And so most, like modern scholars will be like, oh, well, see, Plato reinterpreted the mysteries, Right. He gives them this new higher philosophical interpretation.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Blah, blah, blah. Right. And this is, this is one of these fundamental errors in how we read today, especially in academia, in that people aren't read as holes anymore. W H O L E S yeah, that's right. Like, you know, in the past, when you read Plato, you read like all of Plato, and you read all of Plato in a particular order, right? Now, no one does that. Right. You get these bits and pieces on particular topics that usually that relate to whatever your particular discipline is that you're studying. So if you're doing philosophy, if you're in a political science program, you know, you got these scraps of the Republican stuff and you know, like. And on laws. Right. But there's. You don't read the whole thing. Right. And so let me suggest that that is not a different interpretation at all of what's going on in the mysteries. Because if you read some more Plato, you find out what Plato thinks happens when you die.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

And what, what Plato thinks happens when you die is that your soul ascends to the realm of forms, the realm of ideas. Right. To the realm of the eternal. And you behold these things and then you get reincarnated. Right. Your memories are washed away and you're reincarnated, but there are these latent memories of those eternal realities in your head. So that learning is really a kind of remembering. Plato.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah, Right, Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

And he, he demonstrates this at one point. This is his demonstration. He says, I can get some slave boy and I can teach him geometry by drawing with a stick of the sand. Clearly, a kid, especially a slave kid, can't understand geometry. Ah, but see, because he could understand it, he's really remembering it from when his soul, before he was reborn, beheld the perfect sphere. Said, stared at the orb briefly. But so, yes. So Plato agrees. Plato was saying, yes, this is experience of death and rebirth, which is what everyone else said it was too. He just looks at death and rebirth a little differently than a lot of people, but so in absolute darkness, the people were conducted to the edge of various. And I don't know if it's precipices or precipices.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

You got it right the first time. Precipices, precipices.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Led up to the edges of, like, cliffs and drops and pits and this kind of thing.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Again. To give you this experience of unsteady. You're in absolute darkness, unsteadiness, about to fall. And it should be noted you are not sober.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. You have to. You have to imagine that some people did fall over. There must have an accident that happened.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

There must have been.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yes, A lot.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

There probably were people who did not survive their initiation.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah, yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

And that would just enhance the. Yeah, yeah.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

It was dangerous. That's right, Ice Man. These mysteries are dangerous.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Before they led you down into the darkness, you were given a drink called cacayan, which technically just means a kind of like mold or spiced wine.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Uh huh.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

But this was drugs.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yes.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

This was spice, like dune spice. This was.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Here, drink this. When you get that in the mysteries, it's not just. You're gonna need to be hydrated before your big experience.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

So person is put into this altered state of consciousness. Right. Already by that then led in total abject darkness to points where they feel like they're about to fall, they're about to die. They're told they're being led into the underworld. Right. Okay. And now the denouement of the mystery initiation. I think this is Father Andrew's favorite part.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Don't say that.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

I didn't say why it's your favorite part.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

It's not my favorite part. It's not my favorite part.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

I'm not implying that you were initiated and this was your favorite part. It's not what I'm saying. Not even a little bit. But so we're told.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

We're.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

We're told by Athenagoras of Athens, who is a late second, early third century Christian apologist who writes against various heresies and pagan religions. The way it's. This is generally translated into English. We had this issue with Mithras too last time. The way it's translated in English is at the end of this ritual, after having all of these experiences in the darkness, in an altered state of consciousness, on the precipice of the abyss, they would display an ear of corn.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

It's very exciting.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yes, yes. This sounds like a fantastically anticlimactic look. Corn.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. But I mean, it should be noted, like this is not corn like Americans think of corn. This is corn like the British think of corn, which just means grain.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yeah. So it's a sheaf of wheat or something.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Or barley or something. Right. But it's also not displayed because they're in darkness. Right?

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah, it's not displayed. It's. There's a sort of a grass egg, as it were.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yes. So what they did, they'd have a basket.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

A basket.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

And the basket contained said ear of corn, slash sheaf of wheat.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

I mean, do you like. If you pick that out of the basket, considering, as we're about to mention the other options, do you win a prize or.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Oh, no, you were supposed to feel the many things in the basket.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Oh, to get to.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

You were not selecting one.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. Okay. Okay.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yes. All right. No, so at the end of it, you're. You're in this state. You feel like you're about to fall into the abyss.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

They.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

They put your hand into this basket which contains this. This grain sheaf. Right.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

And also.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

And an assortment of phalluses of various shapes and sizes.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Not my favorite part should be said.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

And so this is to make a connection. Right. The symbolic connection here is between sex and reproduction and death.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Fertility, harvest and fertility.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. All of this.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Right.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Which for an ancient pagan, like, so for us, we hear that and it's like, okay, that is deeply weird. Disturbing.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Gross.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Thank you for the parental advisory.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yes.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

But for an ancient pagan.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

I'm never trick or treating at that house again.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right. But for an ancient pagan, this all makes sense. Like, these things are all absolutely linked. They don't think about these images the way that we do. We think about the way we do for two big reasons. Number one, biggest version, Christianity changed the world.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Right.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Number two, also, you know, our sort of inherited Victorian feelings about these things. Remember, everybody, that ancient Rome is a place you'd walk through the streets and there is very explicit pornography drawn on many, many, many of the walls. Like it is everywhere, all the time. All the time. It is absolutely visible everywhere. It is. It is soaked in this stuff. And this is one of the reasons why, by the way, we say that the ancient world is deeply, deeply misogynistic. You know, like, I'm not saying that people aren't sinners in this particular way now, but. But by comparison, it's very, very tame. Obviously, it's still a sin to treat women in this bad way. Obviously, it's still a sin. But. But the ancient world, it was horrible. Horrible, you know, and like, this thing we just mentioned shows, you know, it's just. It's a symbol of the way that all of this works. You know, it's just that. There it is. There it is.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yes, yes. So moving on from that. And again with the printer advisory, it's going to get worse before it gets better. I know. Hard to imagine, but it is.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

So the. We talked a little bit about some of the function areas involved in this, in the sense of the torchbearers. Right. But most of the functionaries. So there was a person who's kind of the high priest, the hierophant. Right. And. And the high priestess. Those were inherited offices which within a particular Athenian family who held those priesthoods and the younger people, those families would make up the rest of the torchbearers and functionaries. Right. In the sort of retinue beyond anybody who was already initiated, who came back to help. Right. But also there was a group that was sort of permanently attached to the shrine in Eleusis who are called the Panais.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. Which by the way is the plural of Panagia. Yes.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

And they were women who were completely separated from men.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

So so similar to the Vestal virgins in Rome.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. I mean the word itself, it means the. The all holy ones, but it can also. But literally what it means is the completely separated one ones, because that's what holy means. Separated, distinct set apart.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yes, yes.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

And so part of. But an interesting to note to take from this. Right. We are not in any way relating the Theotokos to.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

No.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

The pagan priestesses.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

No, no, no, no.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

But just to say that that word.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Is also a reference to her ever virginity.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. Cuz she's completely set apart.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

That title Pana is. Is a part of that. Completely set apart. Not just at one point in her life or up to one point in her life, but for her entire life. Yeah. So we move on.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

All right. Downward it gets.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yes to the Dionysian mysteries.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

I mean, you know, this is going to be like the worst frat party ever.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yes. Depending on how you grade best and worst frat party.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

I was never a member of a fraternity, so there you are.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yeah. I mean, I don't know how that works. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We had an entire fraternity expelled from my college and the fraternity shutdown after a party. Sort of like this. But not a joke.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

No, I was like. I was the guy.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Absolutely true.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

I was the guy that when. When certain fraternities, including like honor fraternities, would come and do events at the theater where I worked, I was the guy who would walk up to them and say, you know, I think you're mistranslating your Greek motto here. And they're always like, what? And I would tell them, you know, and they're like, they just had no. I mean, God bless them. No, you know, theoretically it's Greek life. But they do not read any Greek at all.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yes, yes.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

That was my interaction with fraternities.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

The wildest thing about that, for a whole fraternity getting kicked out of my college all at once after throwing a rager, was that there was one guy who took that semester off from the fraternity. So he came back the next semester, and he was, like, the last man standing. Like, he was the only.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

He was the last of his kind.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yes. He was the only one left. Just because he was not in the state, like, at the time that it all went down, so. And through him, reborn. No. Yes. Do I try to rebuild? What do I do?

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right. So, all right, so the Dionysian mysteries.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yes. So there. There was this old theory. So. And this is part of the. Again, kind of dumb, dumb Justice League view of the Greek gods. They're the 12 Olympians, right? And at a certain point, Dionysus shows up and replaces one of them, Right. Like, Green Arrow just got too busy in his own comic, and so he had to bring in Elongated man, right. Like, to take his spot on the Justice League. Right. That's not how Greek religion ever worked at all. Right. And so we now know, actually, quite to the contrary, that Dionysus, in terms of the broad pagan worship of Dionysus as a God, goes way back in Greek history because we've found his name in a linear B inscription.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. And linear B is like proto Greek, the Earth Greek.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yeah. Linear B is. So the spoken language was very clearly an early form of the same spoken language. But linear B was written in a phonetic Alphabet. It's not cuneiform because it has a different symbolic system than cuneiform. But it's like cuneiform in that each.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Symbol represents a syllable, like in Japanese.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Right. So to give you an example, right. The. The word for fruit is carpos.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

In Greek. In linear B, it's two symbols, Ka and Pa. Gotcha. Right. So you could trace roots and names of this guy. You could trace things back into linear B that way.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

And when you do Greek etymologies, we have a limited amount. We have a sort of a library of tablets with linear B inscriptions from nosos, mainly. That's pretty much all we have. So there's a lot. Plenty of Greek words that aren't that aren't on any of those tablets.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah, yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Right. As far as we know. So it's limitedly useful in etymology, but having studied a little. Linear B is how I disproved the whole. The word for mercy in Greek has anything to do with the word for oil.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

That's right. It doesn't. It's a good pun.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

So if you have. If you have shared that meme, shame on you. Go delete it right now and slap yourself.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

I mean, it makes a good pun, but the one word is not derived from the other. It's.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

And talking about how mercy is like oil might be a nice. But there's literally no etymological relationship. So both of those words, the word for olive oil, I mean, go figure, they're Greeks. Right. The word for olive oil and the word for mercy both occur on Linear B tablets that we have.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Each of them is made up of two symbols.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

It's not the same.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

They have zero symbols in common.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah, yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

They are not related words in any fashion.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Okay, so stop that.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

And now back to your regularly scheduled mystery call.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yes, but so Dionysus, Dionysus, his name is on later retail as listed as the name of a God. Right. And so the broad pagan worship in places where they had vineyards to make wine. Right. To press wine, which is a lot of places in the Greek world, they were worshiping Dionysus, Bacchus. Right. In. In your Latin speaking regions. Right. That were growing vineyards for wine. Right. This was the pagan God associated with that. And so you have festivals for the grape harvest and the making of new wine and all this kind of thing related to the worship of Dionysus in a standard sense, that's sort of the standard Dionysus cult. So when we're talking about the Dionysian Mysteries, though, you take the booze and the sex and the death and you turn it up to 11, essentially in the case of the Dionysian Mysteries. So with the Eleusinian Mysteries, we know they were put in drugs, they were putting dope in the wine. But scholars argue over exactly what. Yeah, yeah. What exactly were they putting in there?

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Whereas with Dionysus, we know because particularly in sites associated with the Dionysian Mysteries, Dionysus is depicted wearing wreaths of poppies.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Oh, well, there you go. So opium, the real opium of the masses.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yes. So essentially the purpose of the Dionysian Mysteries were to induce an altered state of consciousness. And this was. I mean, this was true for everybody. So there's the broader festival like the Bacchanalia, Right. That's going on where this is going on low grade for everybody because everybody's getting drunk. Probably a lot of the people are using drugs, but the, the opium in particular. But the, the initiates are doing this on sort of this hardcore level. So we've got the alcohol, we've got the opium, we have flagella, meaning Whips and scourges that the people would whip and beat themselves.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Wow. So this is like.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Right.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Like if you're a burning man, like, this is you. You go to the freak tent, you know, like. Yeah, there's some. Something going on over in that tent, you know, that's way beyond what everybody else is doing.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

So they're. And I mean, this isn't like, you know, slap at yourself with your belt. These are like scourges and stuff. So they're tearing up their backs. They're drawing blood.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Right. This is pain to release endorphins.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. This is really, really tough.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

We have these things like bull roarers that they used to make this sort of droning noise, this ongoing droning noise in the background. Right. While these people are working themselves up into this frenzy, this drug and alcohol induced endorphin frenzy, at which point leaders would engage in group sex.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yep.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

So giant orgies happening. But that wasn't the climax. The climax of the initiation was they would seize upon mostly rabbits and engage in homophagy. That's the secret word for today, kids. Which means eating a live animal.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. So like. Well, the thing about rabbits, Right, is they're. They're big enough to kind of tear into, but they're small enough. You can really easily get hold of them. Like, you wouldn't want to do this with like a bull or a goat or something like that. They'd be very, very inconvenient.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

But this is literally tear into. It's a live animal. They're tearing it apart with their hands, their teeth.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

I'm sure it seems much more reasonable after you've gone through all that other stuff.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yes. Once you're in that kind of bizarre frenzy. Right. It culminates in this. Okay. And so there is. And you'll see this in the. Both the iconographic depictions and the idols of Dionysus and Bacchus is that there's. Right. The God and then there are the Bacchae. Right. These other spirits, these sort of little mini mes.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Of Dionysus and Bacchus. Right. And so the idea was sort of the general participants in the festival were deliberately trying to, through the ultra state of consciousness, be possessed by these spirits.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

This wasn't seen as just a frenzy, as in, like, oh, I'm all wound up. This was seen as you're being possessed by this spiritual being and driven to this kind of what they considered divine frenzy, the initiates. It was sort of Bacchus or Dionysus himself, Sort of the presider at the feast and. And connected to the feast where the initiation took place, you had the temporary overturning of the social order.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. Which.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Right. Slaves being crowned and. Yeah, right.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Like, like this is a thing. And it's interesting that this kind of even survives, this idea, this particular piece of it. Not all of it survives into like medieval Europe where you get the practice known as Twelfth Night, which of course.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Is some carnival practices.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah, carnival practices. Again, you know, of course there's the very famous Shakespeare play Twelfth Night. And part of what's Twelfth Night is the night before Epiphany. So it's. It's January 5th and often you would have, as you said, the upending of the social order. So the servants would be made, you know, the lords of the castle and then the lords would be. Would act like slaves and you know, and there would often be this figure called the Lord of Misrule, who's kind of put in charge for the night, you know. But yeah, it's this, it's this kind of upside down world sort of thing that they're doing.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Of course, this would also. You've got the whole group sex element. You've got.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Swapping genders, people.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah, yeah. Well, the gender swapping is sort of done in 12th. In 12th, yeah. You know, not exactly. It's just disguise. It's just. See, this is what happens with Christmas.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

A lot of that is just that.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

As I say, that's what happened. When Christianity gets a hold of some of this stuff, it just, it wipes out all of the super problematic stuff and just kind of keeps a very. I don't know, as we've, we've. As we've said, as we've said on the great Tales, like fairy tales are kind of what's left over when Christians really work over mythology, you know.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yeah.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

What you get is fairy tales. Right. So this is, you know, like Twelfth Night is kind of the fairy tale version of this horrifying thing that we're talking about, you know.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yes, of Devil's Night. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And also part of that you have to remember is that to the English psyche, there is nothing funnier than a man performatively dressed as a woman.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

I mean, witness Benny Hill and Monty Python.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right. I mean, this, this. Yeah, exactly. It. It meant something very different in like the medieval Renaissance period than how it would be received.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

So in this case, right, we talked about how in the Eleusinian Mysteries, right, there's this experience you're sort of sharing in the experience of Persephone in the underworld and all this. Right. Anyway, was saying, so when you do all that to yourself and go into this crazed frenzy and you're, you know.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. What's the story that you're participating in?

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Just had sex with three people and now you're tearing into a live rabbit after beating yourself bloody and doing drugs and booze, what experience is that participating in of this. Well, diet, I was going to say.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Of these nature loving, kind pagans that we've heard so much about since the 1970s.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yes. You are participating in Dionysus own experience of having been torn into pieces, boiled in milk and eaten.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

There we go.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

So there you go. Yeah, Yeah. Possible similar ritual behind do not eat a kid boiled in its mother's milk.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, of course the thing that like, that's similar here to other stuff that we've looked at is like there's this element of dying, going to the underworld, sort of coming back. You know, all of this because again, this is one of these common things is there's this chthonic element.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Right.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

To all this.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Right. It's just the Dionysian version is particularly violent.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Now, on top of everything else, now.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Let'S talk about what I think is the worst of the examples of this.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Oh, is this your favorite part?

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

No, this is my. I do not cast favor upon this part. Father Stephen.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Asperger. Nothing but disfavor. Nothing but disfavor.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Nothing but disfavor. Fully merited disfavor.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

So we've talked about kind of the big ones.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Right. In terms of mystery cults. Right. The big famous ones. Right. But there are also lots of little local variations and smaller mystery cults. And some of them even get deliberately created at certain periods in time. Like some of them pretend that they're completely ancient. Right. But others don't. Right. And so we're going to talk about one of the more interesting ones. We got to warn the Brits here. You're going to have far less appreciation for a certain wall after hearing about this.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

This. Yeah, this might be a little triggering, might be a little triggering.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Whereas a lot of Jewish people who, who hear this will be like, we were right all along. Right.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Indeed.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

It's about this guy. And we're going to talk about the emperor Hadrian.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yes.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Roman Emperor Hadrian.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

The. The wall guy again, if you're.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yes, the guy who built the wall.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Which I've been to. Just recently I went to Hadrian's Wall. I did not go Underground.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

The guy who was responsible for a lot of the rebuilding of what had been Jerusalem is Ilia Capitolina, featuring a big statue of himself on a pillar, as one does.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

One is Roman emperor.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yes. So he's the one who put down the Bar Kokva rebellion in. Palestine at the time the Roman province of Palestine. But we're particularly talking about him here in this mystery cult context in terms of his favorite speaking of favor for a period of his life, Antinous. So the Emperor Hadrian was a pederast.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

I mean, as a lot of elite Romans at the time were.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yes, frankly. And Greeks.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yes.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

But so he. And favorite is the word that Roman writers use to refer to the teenage boy who was Hadrian's sexual partner at any given point in time. That was his favorite. Yeah, I told you it was going to go downhill more than it already had.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yep.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

So you're warned, parental advisory is very much still in effect. So Antonus was from. Was. Was a guy from Bithynia. When he was about 13, he was sent to Rome to study. And that's where the emperor took a shine to him, I guess, and made him his new favorite around the time he was 14 or 15. Then when he was 19, shortly before his 20th birthday, Antidous died. And Hadrian, being the Roman Emperor as one does, decided that his dead lover and lover is being polite about it. His dead victim had become a God.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. It doesn't usually go that way.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yeah.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Even in this messed up situation that happened over and over.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

So this is a. Yes. This is a mystery cult founded on pederasty.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

And so Hadrian starts building temples to have him worshiped as a God. In some of the Greek places where we found worship of. It was. He was considered a hero, not a God per se.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. So a sort of a semi divine figure like.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yes. Greeks tried to split the difference.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah, yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

But so Hadrian. And we know this was all over the place because we have 20 some odd temples to Antinous.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

In wildly different parts of the Roman Empire that Hadrian built. So this is a thing that he was serious about and that kind of took off. And part of this was he also established a mystery cult. Hadrian himself had taken Antinous with him to go and be initiated in the Eleusinian Mysteries that we talked about earlier. And he basically modeled the Antonian mysteries after that. It was sort of a ripoff. Right. Part of this was he built a cultic center for the worship of his dead victim. Had named it Antidopolis, the city of. In A bit of creativity.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yes. Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Which. Which was. There's. It wasn't really a border at this time in history, but the transitional region between Upper and Lower Egypt along the Nile. He built this city. Not on rock and roll, he just built the city. And there he built the central temple in the city, was the temple to Antinous Osiris.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Which means that he's kind of assimilating them to each other.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yeah.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

And of course, Osiris, if you know anything about Egyptian mythology, you might know that Osiris, part of his story is that he's. He dies, gets dismembered and then comes back sort of. Kind of. Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

You know, there's a whole issue with his phallus.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right, right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Just to tie all the themes together. Yeah, yeah. And so, yes, he's. He's saying by this that Antidous, his dead victim, was an embodiment of the Egyptian God Osiris.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. Sort of a hypostasis, basically.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yes. Now, even though that's what he did in Egypt, most of what we have, he was actually trying to assimilate and say that his dead victim was an embodiment of Hermes. That's mostly in the west, the east, more commonly, he gets assimilated with Dionysus. And what we mean by assimilated here, when we say this, what we really mean is sometimes this is done verbally, like the temple of Antonus Osiris. But a lot of what we're talking about is in iconography, is in religious iconography. So it's Antinous being portrayed as Hermes or as Dionysus or as Osiris in terms of how he's dressed, how he's portrayed, the other symbolism in the imagery. Right. And you can see how all these other mystery cults. Right. Are touching on this. And we have. When I say iconography, I mean we have bas reliefs, we have a bunch of statuary.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Oh, yeah. And by the way, there's a bunch.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Of surviving statues of.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Antidous.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

And you can look, by the way, I mean, there is a lengthy Wikipedia article about this young man and you can see the statues in the article. And. And there's even, you know, a medallion and all. I mean, there's all kinds of stuff connected with. With this. I mean, it goes on and on and on.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yeah. And so one of these, there's a bust of Antinous Hermes that's in a museum now in Russia because it came from the private collection of one Catherine the Great.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yep, yep.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

So see, this even ties into holy Russia there.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

You Go.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

We're talking about Catherine the Great. Holy is in quotation mark.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

She wasn't that great. It's kind of the, it's kind of the rule of Russian imperial history, you know that, that the rulers that are styled the great were not so great and the ones that are the terrible were actually not that terrible.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yes. So Antoniopolis was famous for one other thing and that is that not long after that city was founded and probably relatedly to why it was founded in the central temple and everything, it became a hub of Egyptian magic, of sort of assimilated Egyptian and Hellenistic magic. And when I say magic, obviously I'm talking about, we've talked about it before magic in the ancient pagan context.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

We did, we did a whole episode on this called swords and sorcery. Mostly sorcery. So.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yeah. So on what? You know how magic was worked at the, in the ancient world, but this was considered to be a particularly dark and rotten type of magic, even by pagans.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah, like, like black magic. Black magic, yes.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yes. This was like the bad stuff.

[Narrator]

This is.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Don't mess with the voodoo. This was. Right. All the work, like the worst forms of hermeticism, which by the way gets its name from Hermes.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Hermes, yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

So as I just said, what's interesting is we, we have, as you might expect, given when this happens in the second century and we have a lot of Christian apologists and anti heretical writers writing in the second and third centuries or a fair number at least, there are a lot of Christian denunciations of this. Yeah, I mean, right, yeah.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Like, yeah, as one might imagine, like this stuff is going on. It's. This is terrible. Don't go there. This is awful.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

This is the worst. And so there's, there's three main counts on which this gets denounced and this is probably intuitive, you could probably guess these. One is obviously the anti pagan level of like Hermes and everything.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

What is the anti pederasty.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Level. And then one is the anti evil magic level.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. And remember, this is not, this is not like satanic panic. You know, Christians going around looking for stuff to get really unhappy about. This is, this is the norm throughout culture. Yes, right. These are Christians responding pastorally to what's actually going on in the culture.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yes. Right. This is like the book of Acts. Right. They come, they bring the gospel, the tattoos, bringing out their magic books and burning them.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah, yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Right. This is. Right. So there it has it now that you would probably expect. What you might not expect is that we also have tons of pagan Denunciations of.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah, I mean I'm always interested kind of in, in, in pagan denunciations of other paganism. Like when pagans are like, no, this, this just goes too far.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yes, this is just way too far. So. And a lot of it was like, you know, the Romans had a real issue. We're really sensitive to emperors going insane.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

It's kind of a problem.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yes. It's a thing that happened. Right. Not infrequently.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right. With singularity.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yes. And it had very bad consequences even for your run of the mill pagan Roman. Right. So this was a bad. The mad emperor was a bad thing all around. And so I think a lot of the pagan associations are. This is exhibit A considered by them. You know, you're dead. Erastes being proclaimed a God and you're building temples over the empire to him. This was considered sort of exhibit A of Hadrian done lost his mind. Right. Like, but so they talk about the whole black magic element, which is interesting.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

And they're opposed to black magic, of course, because they believe it works.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right, right. I mean they're not, they're not anti magic. Exactly. It's like. No, no, this is just too dark and too weird and too whatever.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yes, yes. This, this is like your local witch and. Or local psychic or local palm reader telling you not to mess with Ouija boards. Right, right. Like, you know, the Christians and the pagans are telling you the same thing. Probably good advice, but to give you an idea of how widespread this was, even our old friend Kelsis or Celsus. Yeah, right. The, the guy who, the, the critic of Christianity, the pagan who attacked Christianity, wrote this was considered the greatest attack on Christianity that Origen responded to.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Second century even.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

He went after them.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah, right. What's wild is the basis on which he did that.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yes, yes. So what's amazing is Celsus hates this form of paganism, hates Christianity. So how does he denounce this form of paganism? Taking a dead man and making him out to be a God is. Is Christian garbage. This is Christian mumbo jumbo.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

So the pagans he doesn't like as a pagan are the pagans who are. Look a little too much like Christianity to.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

I'm just shaking my head. I can't put that on the air, but I'm shaking my head.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yeah. It's just kind of amazing. And what's crazy, I mean, like Christianity derangement syndrome.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah, like. Right, right. He's so, he's so, he's so flummoxed by Christianity that he starts calling this stuff Christian. Ish. Whatever. And what's amazing. One of the things that's amazing. I mean, this is all amazing and not in a good way to me, is that there are actually people here in 2025.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

I can't believe this isn't amazing. To me, this is expected to be.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah, it is. It is. It is. I guess I just live in a perpetually amazed state. Is that there are people here in 2025 who are trying in some way to bring back the Antoninian or whatever you call and Tusinian mysteries because they think that. That this in some way represents consensual homosexuality or something like this.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yes. This is somehow spiritualized or divine or sacred homosexuality.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

It's just whatever you think of homosexuality, it's just not. This is an emperor. An emperor taking a teenage boy. Okay. And that's the basis of this religious practice? Like.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yes, yes.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

All right. Well, now that we.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

I would think were you a homosexual person, you would want to denounce this and associate yourself with it.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right, Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

But for some. Not.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

I guess not for some.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Lots of people want a larp, apparently, if you're gay and you want to do the Neopagan LARP thing.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

I mean, for some of the.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

This is it.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

There it is. So. So now that we've descended down into these chthonic depths, we're going.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

And grotesqueries.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yes, yes. The. You know, Father Stephen and Father Andrew's cabaret of horrors.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

We're going to take our Thanksgiving appropriate.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Second and final print break. We're gonna take our second file break for this episode, and. And we'll be right back with, God willing, something a little bit better. How did the Sun Cross, once carried by the pagans of the Baltic north, become the cross of Jesus? How did the last pagan nation of medieval Europe first encounter Christ in the Orthodox Church?

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Church?

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Herodotus said these people were known as werewolves.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Come with us on a pilgrimage through.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

The sometimes strange, sometimes surprising history of Lithuania.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

The green northern land poised between east and West.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Hey, welcome back, everybody. It's the third half of this truly astonishing episode of the Lord of Spirits.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Podcast, Tales to Astonish.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. Why?

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Why are.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Okay, why are we talking about all this? Well, number one, of course this is the kind of thing we talk about on this wacky podcast of ours. See, you guys thought we didn't have anything interesting left in us. After five plus years, here we are throwing this at you. But, but more importantly than that, there are people who argue that Christianity is derived from this. Which of Course. Is what we were talking about to some extent last time. You know, people say that Christianity is derived from Mithraism, and we showed how that is just utter bunk. But there are people who say that Christianity is a kind of mystery cult and that it, you know, it has, has, has its basis in all of this stuff. And so, like, okay, well, let's look at what the actual content of all of those things is. So now, having heard all that, is it the case? Like, is, is there any basis for this? Like, why do people say that Christianity is in some way derived from these mystery cults from the ancient world?

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

What's the best we could do with that argument? Yeah.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

What's the steel man of that argument, so to speak?

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Right. If there could be one, it's more like a tin man in this case, but aluminum man, at least not straw. Yeah, well, yeah. And this is so, by the way. Right. Just to, you know, let you a little bit into the, the, the madness in my method. Right. This is sort of the negative argument to the positive argument of religion of the apostles. Yeah, right. When I make arguments that Christianity is, right, the fulfillment of Judaism, that Christianity comes out of Second Temple Jewish traditions, it's as opposed to the folks out there who ought to argue that it comes from pagan traditions. So part of how I make that overall argument, part of how we make that argument on this show is to show how Christianity flows from Jewish traditions. The other half is on the negative side, showing the radical disconnect and discontinuity because between Christianity and pagan religions.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah, yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Which is what we're seeing tonight.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

That's the purpose of all this grossness.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yep.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

It's not just the giddy delight I get in being transgressive. It is that. But it's not only that. Right. It's also right to show this stark contrast between what's going on in a mystery cult and what's going on in Christianity. Right. But so what's, what's the best we could say if you want to try and find connections and you're going to find. Just like with Mithraism, we have to get kind of vague. Right?

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. So probably an obvious place to start is that like early, for instance, we know that in early Christian practice that the Eucharist was private, you know, people would not sent out. Like, we still have this liturgically. Right. We dismiss catechumens, at least it's the prayers are said even if catechumens are not actually sent from the room.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yeah.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

So there's that sense of like, okay, only certain people can participate in this part, you know.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Right. And in the prayer before receiving the Eucharist. Right. I will not speak of thy mysteries, thine enemies. Right. So. Right. You could point at that. You could point at that. Say, see, only the initiated were allowed into the. Not really a parallel, but, you know, vagary. Right.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Okay.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Point at that. You could, you could point at baptism as an initiation ritual. Right. It's not just that. There's lots of initiation rituals.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. It's got, it's got death and rebirth in it. So. Hey.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Right. But there. Death and resurrection. Right?

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

So there's kind of something boring. You have this initiation ritual vaguely kind of something. There's this idea of participation in like, the elements of the life of Christ.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Right. You're baptized into his death. Right. You're right. You're sharing this experience. Christ is a divine figure. Right. Like we're being vague, but, you know, our paschal liturgics are very much, you know, darkness and light passing from death to resurrection, death to life. Right.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

There's.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

There's some of that ritually going on.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

If we're vague. Right.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

But there's the big but.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

So there's the best kind of, the best we could do in terms of continuities now, some discontinuities, aside from all the obvious ones with sex and eating live animals and all that drugs, but possibly an even more core level. Right. At a more core level in, in Christian liturgics and any of the specific examples we gave included.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Experience, the experience is not the thing.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. I think it's really important to underline this, that historic Christianity is not about having a spiritual experience. Like, no one cares, ritually speaking, which is good, because no one cares what you feel, if you feel anything at all.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

It's good news for me because I have no feelings.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

There we go.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

But I too, could be a Christian. Even the Dutch could be saying yes.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right. It doesn't matter.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Dutch Gen Xer even.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

It doesn't matter if you feel it. I, I mean, if you have feelings. We're not saying it's bad to have feelings. If you have feelings. If, if you're having some kind of spiritual experience, whatever that might be, That's. That's nice. That could, that can be nice. But it's. Is not critical. It's not the goal, it's not required. And, and I think one of the things that, one of the practices that really underlines this for Christianity and just shows how the idea that that spiritual experience Is not the goal. How that's really important here is that we have babies participating in core rituals of our faith. We baptize them, we commune them. You know, before any of that happens, we bring them in, we church them, and, you know, what are they experiencing? Like, there's no point where they're going to go, oh, yes, I had this big initiation experience.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Nothing they consciously remember.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right, right. There's nothing. Whereas if, if experience was the goal, then we would make them wait. We would make them wait for baptism, we would make them wait for communion.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

You had to be. One of the prerequisites to be initiated into these mysteries is you had to be a person who was seen culturally and everything as being capable of having that experience.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah, there's no.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Slaves were not initiated because they were seen as being like children.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah, yeah. So there's no minimum age in Chris, in historic Christianity to experience the core rituals.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

It was like adult free men considered capable of this.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Whereas in Christianity, slaves are welcome in, babies are welcome in, women are welcome in even. Even low class women. Like everybody's welcome in, in Christianity.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

You don't have to put it that way.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

I mean, I'm just saying.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Low class women. Wow.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

I mean, I'm just saying, like, it probably. Some of these mysteries, it would be only women of the upper classes. The upper classes.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

No, I know.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah, yeah. You know what I meant.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Say like working class.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Working class, working class. But you know what I mean? Like, like you don't have to be some kind of. You don't have to be some kind of cultural elite to participate in Christianity.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

I think Christian women are very classy. That's all.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

I. Absolutely, of course they are.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

That's.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah, the.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yeah, yeah. And people. This is a term that people should learn, if you don't already know it. And that's epiphenomena.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Okay, so you have a phenomena. You have a thing.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right, sorry, I have to, I have to use. Every time you say phenomenon, I have to. In my head.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Okay, okay, yeah. And. And you have a thing. And then there are other things which often accompany it. And the things which often accompany it are epiphenomenal.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Okay. So for us and for historic Christianity, spiritual experience is epiphenomenal.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

It's something that often happens, but is not the thing itself.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

So if you are baptized, let's say you're baptized as an adult, you're baptized as adult, you may have some kind of profound spiritual experience. When that happens, or when you're charismated, received however you received into the Church, you may have some profound. And often people do have a profound kind of spiritual experience in that, but if you don't, that doesn't mean it didn't happen, which I think. Or didn't work.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

I think it's really important to point this out, because every so often you will see photographs that get circulated on the Internet where someone is getting baptized or Chrismated or something is happening, and you'll see, you know, lights or whatever. And now I'm not saying that that stuff is not real, although sometimes it is lens flare, boys and girls, sometimes it is orbs.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

We saw orbs on the video. It's ghosts, you know.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

But let's say. Let's say that that flashing lights really did happen. Let's say there is some kind of whatever that is epiphenomenal, like if you open up the liturgical books that the priests have, there is nowhere in there it says, and if this is real, then you will see lights. It never, ever, ever says that, never says that. And so to use that as some kind of proof of your position on this or that controversy within the Church is very dangerous. Very, very dangerous. Not only because of the whole lens flare thing, although, I mean, we have to accept that that's an entirely. That's entirely possible. But let's say it really is truly a miraculous thing that you're seeing. Interpreting it to fit your particular ideology about a controversial issue suggests that there needs to be some kind of spectacular experience going on in order for something to be real.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

And.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

And that is not Christianity. It's not.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yes. That's an easy way to fall into spiritual delusion.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Absolutely.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Because that's what demons can do. They can cause you to see lights.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah, yeah. I'm not saying that those lights in the photos are demon, you know, have demon origins, but. Stop it, people. Stop it. Again. What does it say in the book? What does it say in the canons? What does it say in the Scriptures? What does it say in the traditional sources? Stop adding these things on top of it. As your authenticators. Yes, Sorry.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Also, Tom Hanks opinion on this does not matter.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Have you heard that he's Orthodox? I heard that he's Orthodox. Did you know that?

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yeah, I heard that, too. Did I tell you about my last profound spiritual experience? Did it involve Tom Hanks? No.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Oh, okay.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

No. So this is a rare window into the fevered processes of my mind.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Let's hope they cut this one. I want them to cut this one for a short on the YouTubes.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yeah, yeah. So this is during the bad times of 2020.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Oh, yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

And I was, I was serving matins by myself.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yep, we all did that.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

And I just finished the beginning part and I had made the sign of the cross with the sensor over the gospel book. Right. And I put the sensor back and I'm standing there and I'm doing the, doing the prayers. And I see in my vision, I see, you know, like a, like a ripple, like there's still incense smoke rising from the altar. I said, wow, this is profound.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

And I started to smell something and.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

It kind of got acrid. Then I looked down and I had set the sleeve of my jibby on with the sensor while I was blessing the gospel before.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Worst nightmare right there.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

So don't jump to the conclusion that it's necessarily a spiritual experience.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

I mean, that's. And that's worse than just getting kidby on your jibi.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yes.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

You know, which is a professional hazard for us in the Antioch in Archdiocese.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

It was, it was actually the lining. And so like the lining, there's like a burning ring expanding outward. Right. Like the orange, like a burning ring of fire across the lining. Yes. I went down, down, down, and the flames went higher.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

So take it for me, kids, prelist is easy. The.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

So.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yeah, so that, that's a big issue. That's a major issue. That the experience is not the thing in anything we do. Right. When you receive the Eucharist, whether you have some kind of feeling or experience or not, you have still received Christ, period, full stop. It happened Right. When you received into the church, whether you feel something or not, or what you feel you've been received into the church, it's done. It's happened also. Right. So yeah, the Eucharist is members only. Right. But this is not an individual. None of these, even baptism or charismation, reception of the church, none of these things are individual rights.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. Even if it's as often happens these days, it's just like just the family attending or whatever, which it really, really, it should be the community doing this together.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

I try desperately to avoid doing that. Yeah, sometimes it happens, but.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah, yeah, but, but even then, like, it's still a community thing. It's still the, you know, the church is doing this and you know, and ideally, actually groups of people are being baptized all at, you know, together. That's what the rubrics, the liturgics, you know, really are kind of assuming in many cases is that you've got a number of people being baptized.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

But even if for some reason, like it was during the dark times of 2020 and you got baptized or charismated and you were the only person there. Right. What you were initiated into was a persistent community.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

That's right. Not.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

You are now a member of a community. The mystery cults did not do that.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

It's not a higher state of consciousness or knowledge or any of that individual basis.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yeah.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Which I mean, honestly, sometimes people act like orthodox Christianity is that like, you can see this, especially on the interwebs, you know, this sense of like, well, you just haven't read the blah, blah, blah, or you know, all this kind of stuff and. Yeah, no, nope, nope. It's a worshiping community.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

That's the dangerous secrets contained in the philokalia. Yes.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. I mean, and this is why we call. This is why we from the beginning call each other brother and sister. Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

You know, there's this familial language, by the way, the whole Philoclea thing. Right. I know this is a meme in some circles to talk. Oh, there are things in there that are dangerous. You should not read it without consulting your spiritual life.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Okay.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

The problem is not that there's something you're going to read in there that's going to make your brain explode or something.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

No, I've, I've read it.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

All Right. Or hidden knowledge. The problem is some of us are dumb enough to try and take that stuff and apply it to ourselves.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right, right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

In inappropriate ways and at inappropriate times. That's why you have to talk to your spiritual father about it.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

It's not that it's something that's dangerous to be read. It's what you're liable to do with it. That's potentially the problem. And that's not just a problem with the Philokalea. That's a problem with the rudder. That's a problem with a lot of the church fathers writings.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Like, it's a problem with scripture, frankly. You could read scripture and apply it to yourself in dumb ways. Right. Like you could set yourself on fire and think you're having a spiritual experience. Right. This stuff happens. So there's also a big problem when we talk about. Right. Yeah. The Eucharist is celebrated in private and it's members only. But Christians go out and try to get other people to, to become members.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. We, we like, for us, the idea that some people can't commune is, you know, a problem to be solved. Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

It's not. We want to bring you into communion.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. It's not a feature. You know, we want everybody being Communion. We want the whole world in the church. Every single human person is invited into the church. It is, it is openly proclaimed. This is, this is the essence of the gospel, that it's an open proclamation. There's nothing kind of esoteric about it. Yeah. This, this is for absolutely everyone. Again, we let babies in. This is for everyone. Everyone.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

And there's not two different Christianities. There's not like Christianity for the hoi polloi and Christianity for the elite.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Oh, yeah, right. Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

And part of that is because there's not an elite.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. Contra what some people seem to think.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Right. There's just Christians. Right. And I know you may be thinking of Gnosticism. We're going to get there. Right. But it's important to note here, this is something I've said before, probably on the air before, that people don't like, and that's that when, when you go into some kind of quasi orthodox fundamentalist situation or rigorous situation, you basically end up verging into Gnosticism on a whole bunch of counts. And one of those is this. And you tend to see this among that unbalanced quasi orthodox group. Some of them are members of quasi orthodox groups that make, make a big deal about insisting to you how true and genuine they are. For example. Yes. If you have to say that it's probably not true.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yep.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

That's sort of the equivalent of. I don't want to be blank, but. Yeah, that means you're blank. Right. So if you're saying true or genuine, you're not. But anyway, who have some individual or small group of contemporary elders who are basically treated as this kind of spiritual elite who understand all these things better than any of us mere mortals could possibly fathom. Right. And that's, you know, that's Gnosticism. But we'll talk more about that in here in a. Yep. In a couple of minutes. So what then? If it's so clear, and I think it is pretty clear, hopefully it's pretty clear to you by this point that there's no real connection other than antithesis between Christianity and pagan mystery cults. What do we do with the Greek terminology, the Greek language of mystery and mystery cultic language that shows up, for example, in the New Testament, which is a thing. It's true. Or that language. Is there.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. Or the fact that, for instance, our, our sacraments, we call them holy mysteries.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yes.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. I mean, it's. We, we often want to kind of inflate stuff, especially spiritual stuff. But I think a good place to begin is what does the Word itself mean the basic sense of the word mystery, Mysterion. It just means a thing that's hidden. A thing that's hidden.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yes.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

And usually in the context of that thing having been hidden being later revealed. Right.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Especially in Christianity, you know, and that's not.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Well, but that's not. I mean, that's not just a core element back in ancient Greek usage. Like think about a mystery novel.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah, yeah, it's. It's about, you know, revealing there, there.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Is some secret, something that is unknown and then at. By the end of the novel is revealed.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah, it wouldn't be a very good mystery novel if it never revealed like.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Oh, I never found out who killed the guy. We'll just never know. Never know.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

That would be kind of a lame, lame novel.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Right, right. So that, that, that idea that eventually it is revealed to someone somehow. Right. Is. Is kind of also there. Right? That's true with the mystery cults too. Right. Like, yes, there's the secret stuff, but there are initiates who have experienced the secret stuff. Right. Like it's not still mysterious to them. Right. So. Yeah. And so this is one of, probably the most common usage of the language of mystery in the New Testament. Right. So you have the mystery and various mysteries, right. That were mysterious in the Old Testament in previous times, and then in the person of Christ, they are now revealed. They are revealed first by him to his disciples and then through his disciples to the world.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah, mystery solved.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Right. And so that's the most common thing going on with the mystery language. Okay, Not. And again, we're going to talk about Gnosticism, right? Not Christ had these secrets. You know, he had the stuff he told everybody, but then he had these other secrets that he only told his inner circle. And we're the guys who still have those.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right, Sorry, Gospel of Thomas.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yeah, that's not historical Christianity.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

That's something else that is more like the mystery cults, but that's something else. And we also have initiation and initiation rituals and baptism in particular in the New Testament talked about, again, not in terms of, oh, now you have personally had this experience, but in terms of you are now a part of this living community, ongoing community. Right. You have now entered into the church. The New Testament talks about the church a lot. A lot. So if you see somebody from a Christian tradition online who talks a lot about the Bible and you never hear them really talking about the church, this should cause you to think it cause you to wonder the. And also we have to take into account that the New Testament and some of the early fathers. Right. Are directly addressing a pagan audience or a formerly pagan audience. They're addressing a pagan audience with the gospel or they're trying to teach and explain the Christian faith, the Christian way of life to former pagans.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

And so when you're doing that, you're going to use their language sometimes to try to communicate with them.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah, I mean this is like when St. Paul's on the Areopagus and he says, you know, I saw you guys had this altar to this unknown God and I proclaim him to you. Now if you take that in the most absolute literal way possible, then, then, then you have to read St. Paul as saying this demon that you are worshiping is the demon that I'm proclaiming to you. Because there's no way the sacrifices you've.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Been offering you are really offering to the Jewish God.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah, or, yeah, that.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Or, or like all the pigs you are offering.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. You know that the, that the, the religious practices surrounding that altar to an unknown God were Greek pagan practices. Yes. You know, so if you read him absolutely, literally and absolutely, then he's endorsing that on some level. But that is not what he means. He's using the religious language and imagery that they know in order to launch into, if you read in there in acts, was it 17 to launch into a point by point takedown of all the basic metaphysics of all of paganism, actually. But he's using that language in order to, to communicate with them.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Right, right. And Clement of Alexandria does the same thing. Right. It is addressed to the Greeks. Greeks doesn't mean ethnically Greek people. Greeks when used by early church fathers means pagans. Yes, There were still pagans around. They just called them the Greeks.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right, that's.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

And so he uses all kinds of mystery, cult and other pagan terms in that to try to explain Christianity to them. And this is one of the great problems in bad hermeneutics all over the place in our modern day discourse.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah, yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Because what do people say about Clement of Alexandria when they talk about him at all? Often he's used to kind of semi rehabilitate origin because they're sort of like, you think Origen was bad with the pagan philosophy stuff? Read Clement of Alexandria.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right, right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

So it is blanket assumed that because he uses these terms, what he means by those terms is the pagan concepts.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah, yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

And Right, yeah. Another example, our Protestant friends, a lot of the way they go wrong in reading the New Testament is because they're using what they call grammatical, historical exegesis majoring in the grammatical part, which means they're reading each Greek word in the New Testament and wanting to interpret it according to its pagan Roman usage. That's how you end up with all this quote unquote forensic or penal language supposedly in the New Testament is because you're reading in terms of the pagan meaning. Right. What's the alternative? The alternative is St. Paul is expressing Hebraic, Hebrew and Aramaic concepts, Jewish concepts, in the Greek language. So what you would want to do is, for example, hey, this Greek word that St. Paul uses, what Hebrew word is that used to translate in the Old Testament? If I go and look at the Greek translation of the Old Testament. Oh, so when St. Paul uses this Greek word, he means this Hebrew concept.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. It turns out that to put it in a brief way, he's speaking Septuagint, so to speak.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yes. Right.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

He's.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

He's speaking Hebrew and Aramaic in Greek, as are the other New Testament writers.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Right. Saint Clement of Alexandria. If he is, it goes back and forth whether he's a saint or not.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Okay. I'm not ruling on this. I'm just saying I've seen sources, some of which say he is an orthodox state and some of which say he technically isn't. So half the time I call him Saint Clement of Alexandria and half the time I don't. I am, thereby reflecting the tradition accurately. Right. He's not using these pagan words and concepts with their pagan meaning. He is expressing Christian concepts using that language. And so you need to get to the Christian concept.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah, yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

St. Augustine is read incorrectly by almost everyone because they assume he's writing in Latin because he only knew Latin. Right. But what he's doing is he's. He is, for the first major time, I might add, this is part of why St. Augustine was a genius. Right. Despite whatever quibbles you may have with his theology, most of which are fake because it's not an accurate representation of his theology, but. Right. He's for the first time, expressing these. For serious time, expressing these concepts that had previously been discussed and hammered out in Greek. Right. He's expressing those Christian ideas in Latin, meaning he's taking Latin words and turning them into technical terms all over the place.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Okay. And so you can't read St. Augustine and assume that by a given Latin word he means it's general Latin usage at the time.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah, Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

I mean, I think he's expressing a Christian concept. Yeah. A great.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

I mean, I think we've. I'm pretty sure we've Endorsed the book on this show before, but just in case, because it's really relevant at this moment, if you're really interested in the way that Christianity takes classical culture and language and so forth and repurposes it for its own purposes. Yaroslav Pelikan's book, Christianity and Classical Culture is the sort of magisterial work on this. Like, it is the one that really goes into all of the detail. But I mean, you know, like this kind of thing happens even now with stuff from much later. Right. For instance, in the, you know, 16th, 17th, 18th, 19th century, particularly, you get.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

All centuries I do my best to ignore.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah, right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

You know, in the history of the.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

World, in, in this period, in the early modern period, Right. You get, you get a number of Orthodox saints who, especially if you look at where they are geographically, Right. They are speaking to Latinate cultures, cultures that are. The culture is formed by Roman Catholicism, some cases the culture is formed by Protestantism, but mostly Roman Catholicism, based on.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Where they are and the education they receive.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

And the education they received. Absolutely. And they're using that terminology in order to express the Orthodox faith. And there are people who are misreading them, using that terminology and importing, frankly, the non orthodox meanings of those words and reading the church fathers as teaching, frankly, either Roman Catholicism or Protestantism in one way or another. The early modern Orthodox Church fathers, rather than looking at how they are embedded within the Orthodox tradition. And you can always tell when people do this because when they're giving their big, you know, their big meme quotes, like, look at my meme I made, look at this meme I made, look at this meme I made. And they just dump these quotes from. From these church fathers.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

It's a wall of text in a picture or.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah, it's a massive wall of text in a picture. And then if you look at the dates and the locations, they're all kind of clustered together in time and space. That's not how the Orthodox tradition works. Right. So if you isolate that stuff and then say, well, this is this, and often again, interpret it in ways that the early church would never have heard of, then you're. Let's be honest, you're getting it wrong.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Some of these dunces, when they post that wall of text, if you actually read it, it says the opposite of what they claim.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yes, right. That is often the case, even on the surface.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

In English.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yes. Right. Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Like so, you know, I don't want to give too much credit to these folks, but even the more astute of them Right. Even the more astute of them. And this is more. Some, some more rent free living for me. But are just assuming that if an 18th century Russian saint uses a Latin theological term, they mean by it what the Latins mean by it.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Which is a fundamental misunderstanding of linguistics, of how language works.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. To say nothing of theology and history and so forth.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yes. That's not how language works. Okay. You have to determine how a particular author is using a word. Yep. Right. And that's what makes it even more stupid, is that all of these are English translations of these quotes.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. With.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

It's not even the original words.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

With people who probably. Yeah, exactly. And often in many cases translated by Protestants and Catholics.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yes.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

You know, who are naturally going to use the terminology they're used to in their version of English.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Right. Because this is, this is assuming that words. A word just means something.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. This sort of.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

No matter who uses it when and where, and that there is another word in another language that is identical and interchangeable with it.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

That's why I say this is a fundamental lack of comprehension of the most basic aspects of how language works. Right. Yeah. Send your hate mail to Father Andrew.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Send it on.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

But because we point that out, we're modernists.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yes. Right. You're a magisterial modernist, Father.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yeah.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

So, okay.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

I do host the magisterial live stream for modernists.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

That's true. That's true. Okay, so you mentioned, you mentioned Gnosticism earlier as something that needs to be brought up in the midst of all this. So what do you mean by that? What's going on?

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Right. Because if you're looking for something Christian. Ish. That also looks like a mystery cult. Gnosticism is where you want to go. Right. In that you clearly, you have an elite class of initiates who have a kind of different religion based on religious experience than the broad range of people. Right. You also have them perceiving there to be classes of people who are just incapable of religion or at least of their religion. You have a whole series of cults with parallel mystery practices. The Valentithian Valentinians, the Sethians that, you know, whoever else. And you know, there's. There's no sort of. Like I said, you've got the, the levels of initiates and then you know, a whole bunch of people who are just cut out.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

In the same way with the mystery cults. Like slaves. Not invited people. Right. Not invited. So Gnosticism is closer. And now for this evening's spicy take. Not a lot of spice in The Thanksgiving food, usually. Some, Some people get a little creative down here with the turkey. Get some seasoning on that turkey.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

But.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

And my wife makes these amazing yams with Kraken spiced rum. Just marinates the yams in it, cooks them in it. But here's your flavor. Let's talk about evangelicalism.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

This is my tribe.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

You know, we've been talking about. Not anymore.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah, yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Don't go ecumenist on me here. The. So we've been talking about historic Christianity. Let's clarify. When I say evangelicalism, I do not mean all Protestantism. Right. So evangelicalism is not what we might call classical Protestantism. Right. Your Lutherans, your Calvinists.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Evangelicalism is not liberal Protestantism, like mainline liberal, you know, your United Methodists, your PC usa, your Mike Landsman.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

My. Like Mike Landsman?

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yes. Yes. You're Mike Landsman.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. No, it's.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

I most often encounter him in conjunction with you.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

That is true. Yeah. I mean, it's. And it's. It's. It's this movement that came out of the second Great Awakening holiness movement, revivalism.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

And also, we're not even talking about British evangelicalism. We're talking about American.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah, yeah. And, and, and, and just to further disambiguate, evangelicalism as a religious movement and as the way that it works should be distinguished from particular evangelicals who may have their own sets of behavior, their own way of doing things. That. That's not just simply exactly whatever it is the rest of this movement is doing.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yes, we can hate the sin and love the sinner.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

There we go. There we go. All right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

This is more hate the institution, but love the people who are suffering from it.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. I have never doubted. I mean, I grew up evangelical. Okay. So I never ever doubted the sincerity of the people that I was with and their love for Jesus Christ. Never, ever. It was very clear to me how much they love Jesus Christ and are trying to be faithful to him in the very, very best way that they know how. You know, And I think that. That, that. And I believe. I personally believe. I'm not going to dogmatically state, but I personally believe that God will have mercy on people and, and honor the love that they have for him in whatever context that happens to be. That doesn't validate the context. It doesn't make anything automatic or whatever, but that God will judge people based on his knowledge of everything about them.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Right. And this is. This is not a compromise. Right. This is not a sort of guard, like. So, like I said, I just. I Just drew a contrast between Christianity and evangelicalism. I did.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Okay, okay.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

I did that. Right. So that does not mean. Right. So that means. I mean according. According to. Therefore, a certain definition, as somebody's uncle may already be screaming, if you did actually take my advice and play this during your Thanksgiving meal on the west coast, it's your own fault.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

We told you not.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

It does be. From a certain perspective, you could say, well, Father Stephen, you're saying that evangelicals aren't Christians. Well, according to what definition? They're not. According to the definition of members of Christ Church, which is the Holy Orthodox Church. They're not. If your definition of Christian is person participating in historic Christianity, honestly, they're not. Right. Now, if your definition is like the definition that Father Andrew just gave, if what you mean by Christian is a person who loves Jesus as who they understand him to be and is. Spends their life doing their best to follow Christ to the best of their ability and the best of their knowledge, then yes, a lot of evangelicals are Christians by that definition.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Okay.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

And none of those categorizations I just made have anything to do with who goes to hell.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Zero. That's zero relevance. That's, frankly, none of the statements I made say that. That's frankly, that anybody is or isn't going to hell.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

That's, frankly, an evangelical assumption.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yes, yes, but that gets read in. Right? Yeah, that gets read in. So I have made zero statements thus far about anyone going to hell. Okay. It's just, how do you define this term? And then does person X fit that definition or not? So according to some definitions of Christian. Yes. Other definitions of Christian, No. Right. And none of those definitions had anything to do with who goes to heaven and who goes to hell, Especially not who goes to heaven because, you know, the resurrection of the body and all that. Right. But so what we're going to be talking about here is we've been talking about Christianity. Right. Not about a group of Christians who are Christians according to a certain definition. And we're going to be talking about that versus evangelicalism as a set of practices. Right. And a certain type of ritual life. Evangelicals have rituals, whether they want to call them that or not. Right. They go to the same building at the same time at time, the same every Sunday. Right. And do roughly the same things. Guess what? That's a ritual. Right. And that has nothing to do with whether the people there who are Christians under a certain definition. We're not talking about them. We're talking about the system of practices. Right. The. The Practice praxis of this religious group versus the practice of this other religious group.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

I'm labeling one as historic Christianity because if we're honest, that's just what it is. Right. I accepted other groups. Right. So classical Protestants would say that what I'm calling historical Christianity at some point historically departed from. Right. Sub key principles of Christianity. Okay. So. And that's an argument we could have. Okay. That doesn't. Isn't germane here either. So I'm not saying anything about any person listening to this is eternal destiny or any of their family or friends. Eternal destiny. I'm saying nothing about that. I am not even really saying who is and isn't a Christian because that just depends on how you define Christian. I am kind of saying that a lot of these things that people call churches aren't really churches. So just to cop to what I'm actually saying, be mad about what I'm actually saying, not what I'm not saying. So evangelicalism and mystery cults, as Father Andrew mentioned, when we're talking about American evangelicals and really talking about the movements that come out of the Second Great Awakening and the revival movements of the mid 19th century. Charles Finney. At all.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Now if we look at those and the practices and everything, are they oriented toward the individual or toward the collective? We kind of have to say individual not just because of some kind of objective analysis forces us, but because evangelicals insist upon it.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah, absolutely, absolutely.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Evangelicals insist upon it. I can show, I can give you quotes, video and audio of evangelical leaders saying that any group that teaches any form of collective salvation rather than individual salvation is not Christian.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. I mean, this is, this is the idea that I was raised with. Absolutely, yes, absolutely. I can confirm, you know, so it is about you and God.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

I'm not a Christian.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah, yeah. It is your relationship with God. That is the thing that really, really matters is you and Jesus.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Right? Yeah, right. And that is an individual thing. Right. We would have to say looking at evangelicalism, because this is what evangelicalism itself says, that experience, religious experience is central.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

To religious identity. Right. And the praxis, we can see in the praxis that the praxis is aimed toward experience. Right. But think about the whole. It's not a religion, it's a relationship thing. Right. Experience is treated in evangelicalism as both the purpose of the ritual. Right. So you're going and participating in it in order to have the experience, to engender the experience. And having the experience is what gives the ritual, what gives the Practice its validity. Meaning you go to church in order to have the experience. If you go to church and you don't have the experience, you don't feel the spirit moving. Right. Then that invalidates the church, the church experience. You're either going to start looking for another church if that keeps happening. Right. Or you're going to change the practice of the church because the church is now dead. Right. Or if it's spiritual practice in your personal life. Right. Your whatever your prayer and devotional practice is just. You have a dry spell where it's not producing any kind of spiritual experience, you're going to change that practice up. Right. To try to make that happen. You get a lot of moving around from church to church because of that in the evangelical world.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. I'm not being fed.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yeah. Right. You get jumping from church to church and you go to the new place. In the new place you start having the experiences again, but then it wears off. So you move to the next. Next one. This is one of the reasons why I'm so glad we have a one year waiting period on joining the Orthodox Church because we would have a lot more people hopping their way through otherwise.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

We just signed up everybody who walked through the door. The average stay would be about six months, three to six months, and they'd be gone. The. Right. Because you're sort of chasing the experience. The average Southern Baptist is baptized 2.7 times in their lifetime and they don't practice infant baptism. So that's not one of them. Because you don't have the experience or you continue to experience a struggle with sin in your life. So maybe it didn't take. Right. That's the validation.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

The.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

You have this sort of broad evangelicalism. Right. Where you could basically be an evangelical Christian by just identifying as an evangelical Christian. Right. Any politician could get up and say that. Right?

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Even if they were a Hindu last week. We've seen this recently. Like they don't have to do anything. They don't have to. Right. So there's this very broad thing. But then almost every evangelical group has a class of elites. It depends. Right. Where you're located in this sort of evangelical sphere of who those elites are. So if you're more on the stodgy old Baptist side. Right. Then your elites are people with Dr. Before their name.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Seminary professors, guys who have published books, guys who are Dr. So and so. Right. If you're on the other end of evangelicalism, the like charismatic Pentecostal and then it's the charismatic spirit filled. Right. Leadership who may be doing miracles and stuff. Right. That class of people. Right. Who everyone goes to to receive prophecies and blessings and advice and. And all of this sort of thing that they have some kind of access to the Holy Spirit that the hoi polloi don't have. Same thing on the other side. But intellectually. Right. But in both of those cases, and critically, those elites. Right. Are sort of the means through which the spiritual experience that the general run of people can have is mediated. Right. Having the spirit filled guy show up at your revival is how your revival gets the spirit moving. And everybody has the experiences. Right?

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yep.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Or having the guy who spent his life studying the Bible and preaching it verse by verse. I really be more appreciated as a Baptist. I think you would. Showing up just by J. Vernon McGee. Approach.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

That's right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

To quote one of the spiritual elites, there are the reference ones. Spiritual. That guy comes and really brings the word to you.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah, he really brought it.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Goes in deep. Right. And produces. Right. This experience in people with. If you're. If you're really the stodgy Baptist camp, no outward manifestation whatsoever. That may be the occasional.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

During the sermon.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

I mean, depending on region, they're permitted some amens. Yes, amens.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

But reservedly. You don't go crazy with that.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

So. And of course, there's everybody in between. Right. Between those two extremes. But the dynamics are the same. Right. You definitely get. And I'm sorry for anyone this sorry. Not sorry for anyone's bubble. This is bursting. But you definitely get techniques used to produce altered states of consciousness. I mean, long, repetitive praise chord is long periods of time standing on your feet.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. I mean, literally now, moving lights and fog machines. I mean, this is droning. Yeah. Like this. Honestly, like this part of this is why I left. That. Because, like, when I left, I was. I was working as a stagehand at the time, and I knew very, very well, through the use of technique, that I could make people feel certain things.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Let's just tell them about Dave, Father Andrew.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Oh, you want me to tell everybody about Dave Matthews?

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Tell everybody about Dave.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. Okay. So. So I've told this story before. I don't know if it's been on this podcast. There was a summer where I saw Dave Matthews, man, three times. And it's not because, you know, I. I just wanted to let her in or get. Have her hold my hand. But no, no, it was because I.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Was working and hold my hand is Hootie, dude.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Alex. Right? That's true. That's true, man.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

I'm Just merging to be a Hootie Free Zone. This is the last time I tell you to tell a story.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Free Zone. Can I have that as a bumper sticker?

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Well, it's funny, you know, as I've aged, I've gotten a little bit more.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Hootie friendly, which I don't know what's happening to me, but.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

But anyway, even though one jam band from another.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

I know. I remember when Hooting the Blowfish was just, like, playing frat parties in South Carolina before they were a big deal.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

So anyway, hipster.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

It's true. So anyway, yes. Dave Matthews Band. And so they always played Ants Marching. That's one, of course, one of their big hits. And there is, at the same moment in the song, there was always a point where a big bank of lights that was facing the house, that is to say the people rather than the stage, at that point in the song, those lights would all come on and illuminate the house. And at that point, every single time I saw this three times in one year, everybody out there goes crazy. Like they had. They have big excited feeling and. And you know. You know, every time. And I mean, what's inducing that? Literally, a guy like me was sitting in front of a lighting control console and he pressed a button. And when he pressed that button, those people had that experience. Now, they probably wouldn't have identified it as a spiritual experience, but it was clearly an emotional experience at the very least. And let's face it, again, I'm speaking to someone who came from this group. Emotional experience in many cases equals spiritual experience for a lot of people there. Like when someone says, I really feel the spirit in the room tonight, what do they mean by that? What is. How do they know that whatever feeling they're having is the Holy Spirit? Like, where in the scripture does it say, and you will feel the following, and that should be identified as the presence of the Holy Spirit. Never says that. Never says that. So, yeah, for me, this is part of why I left all that. Because. Not because I doubted the sincerity of the people involved. Not in the least. Not for a minute.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

But I knew the orchestrators.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. But. But that I knew that I could. I could make it happen by. With the professional skills that I had learned working in theater.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Theater.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

You know.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yeah. And this is. This is not something that started out totally sincere and now has become jaded. Okay, if you go and read Finney's on Revival, his magnum opus to end all Opus's Magnum, he says in there. So this is at the beginning of the evangelical Revivalist movement. He says in there that there is nothing supernatural about conversion.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. It can be achieved through technique.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yes. It can be achieved through the application, consistent application of techniques.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

People converting to Christ.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

There's nothing supernatural about it.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

There's that whole anxious bench, you know, like it's a technique. Now, now, you know, I. I don't think that. I mean, I don't know Charles Finney's heart. The man's been dead for a long.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Time, but he was a rank heretic.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

But, you know. Yeah, I mean, sure, absolutely. Right. But, but. But at the same time, like, I mean, even a modern, you know, a modern evangelical worship team would say, no, this is. When we play the music this way, that. That makes it possible for people to experience the spirit or something like that.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

And they're have. They're doing it because they have that experience performing.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right, right, exactly. Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

So there's a lot of that. It's the guys way at the top who are the jaded ones. Yeah, the guys. You've heard of, the big name guys. Yeah, the guys who want your money. So. And of course, you know, especially when. When we get into the charismatic end of evangelicals, there's a lot of ecstatic behavior. Yeah, right. Where people sort of get riled up in the experience, frenzied in the experience, to the point that, you know, things get a little nuts.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

And so got to kind of conclude there are some real problematic correspondences between evangelicalism and mystery cults. And that is primarily aim. This aim of experience, making experience the end in itself, And the type of experience it is, is always an experience that is ecstatic, stands outside an escape from reality, an escape from the material and created world. Right. And so we come back to an idea we first floated in the first half, which is that ritual normally is about shaping how we experience and interact with real life. Right. With the created physical world which we inhabit and the spiritual world which we also inhabit. Right. So it's shaping that. Whereas the pursuit of experience is pretty much always rooted in running away from that. Yeah. Right. No one going to be initiated in the Dionysian mysteries. Right. Thought that had some application to their job as a Roman senator when they went back to Rome. Right. It was this extreme spiritual experience away from all that. Right. Abstracted from all that.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yep. Well, this has been one of our wilder episodes, I think, especially in terms of the specific content we've discussed. But I. I think that, you know, you mentioned a number of times, Christianity as an antithesis to these. These mystery Cults. And there's two things I want to say about that. I mean, number one, I think the more clearly you see the ancient world for what it really was, the more clearly we can see the love of God for us in coming here as one of us, to rescue us from that. From that. Yeah, that's my first thought about that. And then the second thought is that the motivation for mystery cults still exists. It still exists. We're always looking for some other form of salvation or exaltation or enlightenment or whatever it might be. And some people think that you can get that through education. Some think that you can get that, whether that's, you know, formal or, you know, self taught. Some people think you can get that through using a particular drug, you know, or a particular practice. You know, there's always some kind of silver bullet, something that you do or that you go through or that you achieve. And then, and then, then you will arrive, then you'll get there, then you'll be what it is you want to be. And of course, a lot of this is being done as alternatives to Christianity. People want to go through this other thing and that's going to be the thing that will get them there. But there are people who treat Christianity this way, or what they think Christianity is, and I see this even within the Orthodox Church, sometimes people will pinpoint a particular thing. You need to do this, this, or you need to say this, or you, you know, whatever shibboleth they have in mind or whatever, whatever thing that is the switch that needs to be flipped. And then on the other side of that, you're higher, you're better, you're, you've arrived, you know, whatever it might be. But that's not the way that Christianity works, works. The Lord told us that in this world we would have trouble, trouble. And you know, it's easy to take pot shots at like word faith Pentecostals who say, you know, do the following thing and you will have health, you will have wealth, you will have, you know, whatever it is. God wants to be good to you all the time. And you're, you're just blocking it because you're not saying the right things. You're not affirming the right things. Right. This is clearly another technique like this, you know, That's easy to kind of point at and say how wrong that is. What, what's the, why do people want that? I think they want it because they're trying to escape the suffering of this world. They're trying to escape whether it's Physical suffering, you know, financial suffering, psychological suffering. Dealing with the ambiguity of this world. Dealing with the fact that other people sin. Dealing with the fact that I sin. If only I did this. If only, whatever, right? If. It's always the, if only some solution. The evil of this world does not have a solution. Christ, of course, came to destroy evil, but he didn't come to give us a fix. He came to give us a way of faithfulness that if we walk it, if we stay faithful to it, if we are loyal to him, if we get up every time that we fall and maintain that, then that way will gradually transform us to be the people that he created us to be. There is no shortcut to knowledge. There is no shortcut to exaltation. There is no shortcut to salvation. There is no shortcut to enlightenment. There is no experience that you can go through that is going to turn you into a saint. There's no experience you can go through that's going to transform your family around you. No, it's faithfulness. It's gradual. It's work. It's work. It's day in, day out. This, I, you know, I think it's this, this desire for fixes that is the reason why so many people, even sometimes entering to the Orthodox church, they can come in and then they flare up, they blaze so bright, so glorious, and then they burn out. It's because they're not actually doing the day in, day out faithfulness in community with the church. Mystery cults promised an underground passage that you could go through, do weird, deeply disturbing stuff down there in the dark, and you would come out a different person. That's not Christianity. Christianity, echoing the words of her Lord, says, in this world you will have trouble. In this world you're going to be persecuted. In this world, it's going to be difficult. And most of the trouble, at least for those of us in the comfortable west, the most of the trouble that we experience is not other people doing it to us. It's the experience that we have of being sinners. It's something that in many cases we're doing to ourselves. I'm not saying other people are not harming you, they certainly are. But most of the struggle that we have is a struggle against our own sins. So, yeah, I mean, I, I get the appeal of escape. I've tried a lot of things. I figured if I just, if I, if I go through this, if I, if I flip this switch, if I do that, then, then, then, you know, but there's no shortcuts and the reason why we experience the suffering of this life that we do is, is because God knows that this is what we need to be saved. And to be saved means to become sons of the resurrection, sons of God, equal to the angels. As Jesus said, that's what it means. It's through this faithfulness that we are saved. It is through this faithfulness that we receive the gift of God that transforms us into being the saints that he created us to be. And so I, I think that this, this exploration of this weird, dark, messed up subject and looking at its echoes in the modern world, as uncomfortable as that might be, I think that it helps us to see what it means to be Christian, helps us to understand better the way that we should go, and I hope gives us some encouragement for the way as we take this pilgrimage through life. So those are my thoughts about all this.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

So, yeah, I always assume that pretty much everybody listening to this podcast is not a monastic, that they're living in the world. If you are a monastic listening to.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

This podcast, why, that's what I think.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Why are you on the Internet for three hours at a time? And why this episode of all episodes? Exactly.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

We do, I will say we. I, I am aware of at least a couple that listen. So. Hello. Hello.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Just pray for us. So, yeah, if you've made it this far, but that's not most of our audience. Very safely. That's not most of our audience. And one of the problems, I think that that still lingers around, at least in American Orthodoxy a lot. Is again, we talked about that tendency, that fundamentalist tendency, and I don't think it goes quite that far, but there's a little flavor of, well, the monastics are sort of the real Orthodox Christians, right? They're, they're the spiritual elite class and we're, you know, the hoi polloi. As if monasticism is a calling and if you're not called to that, you're not called to anything in particular, you're just sort of right, oh, I'm, I'm just a layperson in the world. Right. Rather than understanding that we're called precisely to the world, that that is an actual positive calling to live your life in the world. And it is the most common calling. It is far more common than the calling to monasticism. That's a good thing. It is the calling that Adam and Eve received who were not called to monasticism, or there would be no people they were called to. What? We've talked about this on the show before. Fill the earth and subdue it Go out into the world, fill the world with life and put it in order.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

And.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

One bit of feedback that I've actually read and spent a lot of time thinking about is the fact that when we've talked about this before on the show and what it means to be active in the world as Christians and talking about this calling, fill the world of life and put it in order. We've talked about how men really major in the putting in order side and participate in the filling with life, and women sort of major in the filling with life and participate in the putting in order is that a lot of our women listeners feel that that's kind of vague on their side, that we have a lot more clarity about the male side than the female side. Part of that is because Father Andrew and I are men and not women, so we don't know what it's like to be a woman. And so being men, right? We're just sort of naturally more intuitively familiar with that side. Right? So we understand that masculine side of engagement with the world, with the actual real material world we live in on a day to day basis, right? We understand those aspects. The idea that you put up fences, the idea that you defend. Right? Part of putting it right, you defend what is holy, what is good, what is pure from what isn't. Right? You separate those, you defend it. Sometimes you even have to attack a little and drive off potential threats and invaders. Right? That whole aspect, that whole masculine aspect of priesthood and stuff, we're men, we're priests, we get that, we understand that. So the rest of this, and particularly because of our topic tonight, ironically, since I don't know how many of our female listeners made it this far, but this one's for the ladies because I've been thinking more and more about this. What does it mean beyond the obvious of biological reproduction that women major in and their role is filling the world with life. And the reason I think about it in this context of our episode tonight, with all of its grossness, is because what we've been talking about tonight in this way of antithesis with the mystery cult, is a flight from reality and a flight from the world and seeking an escape from the world. And this is opposed to engagement with the world. So let me be very concrete. What I think it means for women, as women to fill their world with life means that while men are protecting the fences and creating this space within that space, women are finding what is good, what is beautiful, what is pure, and what is wonderful about the world we live in and the people in.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

It.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

All of the people in it, every person in it, and every created thing has something about it that is beautiful and that is pure and that is noble. When St. Paul says, Whatever is good and pure and noble, think on these things. He's not talking about the Platonic forms and contemplation. He's talking about the actual world that God created and called good. And he's talking about every person in it, no matter how far they've fallen into sin, whatever is good and noble and pure and beautiful about them. I think this is the concreteness of how a woman nurtures and fills the world with life, is looking at everything and every person, finding those things, that goodness, that purity, that beauty, and nurturing it and cultivating it and helping bring it forth.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right?

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

While men are minding the borders, right. And the fences and keeping the threats out, that then makes women free to do that and safe to do that. And that is in our modern world, which is very ugly in a lot of ways. We all see the ugliness all the time. We all see what is dishonorable. We all see what is impure. We all see what is ignoble in our present world. And in which, frankly, a lot of we've talked before. Men abandoning their jobs. A lot of women have abandoned their jobs, too, because a lot of them have decided they like the man's job better and they want to do that. Right? It is vitally important for people to be able to live Christian lives or any kind of life in the world, that there is someone who is finding the good and the pure and the beautiful and bringing it forth and nurturing it and flaming, fanning the sparks and the flames, right? To bring that out and help it grow and help each of us grow, right? Not just within the church community, but within the broader culture, within the broader society.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right?

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Because, you know, men may be great at fighting off the ugly and defeating the evil and putting these things down, but things also need to get built up and grow, and these things need to be brought out. So I hope in terms of some past episodes, that gives a little more clarity. I'm actually hoping next time we do a Q and A, and I don't know when that'll be, but the next time we do one, maybe some of our female callers will call and interact with us about that. But I also think that in the face of various forms which, you know, hey, I argue even evangelicalism is basically one of the. Of the reemergence of this ecstatic mystery cult idea of spiritual experience removing us from this world. This world is so ugly and terrible I must escape it. I must get away from it, to some other place that in the face of that we bring forth, we bring forth the opposite. And in this case, I think women have a critically important role to play that can't be neglected and can't be over appreciated when it happens.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Amen. Well, that's our show for tonight. Thank you very much for listening this pre recorded Thanksgiving episode. We didn't take calls this time, but you can still email [e-mail] you can message us at our Facebook page. You can also leave us a [e-mail] LordOfSpirits and if you have basic questions about Orthodox Christianity or you need help to find a parish, go to orthodoxintro.org.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

And join us for our live broadcast on the second four Thursdays of the month at 7:00pm Eastern, 4:00pm Pacific. You come out at night. That's when the energy comes and the dark side's light and the vampire.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

If you're on Facebook, you can follow our page, join our discussion group there. Leave reviews ratings everywhere because that builds a mystery. Most importantly though, share this show with a friend who is going to benefit from it.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

And finally, be sure to go to ancientfaith.com stroke support and help make sure we and lots of other AFR podcasters stay on the air. You live in a church where you sleep with voodoo dolls. You won't give up the stage search for the ghosts in the halls.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Thank you, good night and God bless you.

[Narrator]

You've been listening to the Lord of Spirits with Orthodox Christian priests, Father Andrew Stephen Damick and Father Stephen DeYoung. A listener supported presentation of Ancient Faith Radio and I beheld and I heard the voice of many angels round about the throne, and the beautiful 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.