Latest / Random Heathen Ramblings / From Ba'al To Odin... A Chat With A Canaanite Kohan [RHR S7, EP05]

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From Ba'al To Odin... A Chat With A Canaanite Kohan [RHR S7, EP05] · Random Heathen Ramblings

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  So now that we've got all that repeated housekeeping stuff out
• 2:48
  of the way, I'd like to welcome to the show a brand new guest.
• 2:52
  I'm getting to know a little bit about him.
• 2:55
  He's got a really interesting background and he follows an
• 2:58
  old, I guess it's a minute religion, but it's a he's a
• 3:02
  Canaanite, what's called a kohan or priest.
• 3:06
  So welcome to the show. This is Colette's and it's great
• 3:09
  to have him, man. Thank you for being here.
• 3:11
  Shara Mordiko. OK.
• 3:13
  Thank you. Thank you for having me.
• 3:16
  What was that like? What was What did you?
• 3:17
  What did you? What did you say it means?
• 3:19
  Like peace unto you. It's just the standard Semitic
• 3:23
  greeting. OK.
• 3:26
  And was it? And how do you say it again?
• 3:27
  Shalam Alaikum. Shalam alaikum.
• 3:30
  OK, Yeah. Shalam Alaikum, This is our
• 3:33
  version. There's lots of different
• 3:34
  versions. Yeah, I've I used to have a
• 3:37
  friend and he he just, he just passed away actually a week
• 3:42
  before his birthday back in December.
• 3:44
  He was a practicing Muslim. And it sounds like what they
• 3:48
  say, I don't know Assalamu alaikum, but that's it's not.
• 3:52
  Right, actually the same thing. OK, OK.
• 3:58
  Gotcha. Gotcha.
• 3:58
  OK. I thought it sounded somewhat
• 4:00
  familiar but you just had like different accent or inflection
• 4:03
  upon. It exactly.
• 4:05
  There's different relations, and of course Arabic and Qamahite
• 4:07
  are both Semitic languages. Yeah, gotcha.
• 4:11
  Very cool. So yeah, man, just to give
• 4:14
  people a little bit of a background.
• 4:16
  So how I got in touch with with you, you had, I forget, I think
• 4:20
  you may have commented on a YouTube video or something that
• 4:26
  that came across on your feed and you reached out to me over
• 4:31
  e-mail, got you booked on to come in here.
• 4:34
  And, and when I saw your e-mail and saw that, you know, you're
• 4:36
  like, yeah, I'm a Canaanite kohan or a Canaanite polytheist
• 4:42
  and, and serve as a kohan or a priest, I'm like, well, this is
• 4:46
  going to be new because as many pagans as I've talked to, I
• 4:49
  can't say that I've ever spoken to anybody like this.
• 4:52
  So I'm excited to get to learn more about this and, and my
• 4:55
  listeners in the audience in general to, to learn a thing or
• 4:59
  two. I hope so now that we know a
• 5:03
  little bit about that, you know, Canaanite that doesn't, that
• 5:06
  doesn't ring a bell for a lot of my audience.
• 5:08
  I don't think they some, some of them might know.
• 5:11
  But for those that don't know or or aren't familiar, can you give
• 5:16
  us some, some geographic history, you know, some some
• 5:20
  context to what we're talking about with the Canaanite people?
• 5:24
  OK, so the Canaanite people is a collective term referring to the
• 5:29
  native Semitic speaking peoples of the northwest Middle East.
• 5:34
  Basically Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, Jordan, that kind of
• 5:40
  area, the indigenous people of that region that weathered so
• 5:47
  many chaotic events in history. I think the big theme that
• 5:50
  unifies Canaanite people is the weathering of persecution and
• 5:56
  suffering. So many empires come through and
• 5:58
  yet there's this enduring Canaanite legacy, which to my I
• 6:04
  don't know if you have any Moroccans watching, but the word
• 6:07
  for Canaanite in Canaanite is Canani, which actually means I
• 6:11
  am suffering in Moroccan Dereja. So when I say I'm Kanani in in
• 6:16
  Morocco, everyone's like you're suffering, are you OK?
• 6:20
  What's wrong with you, man? Yeah.
• 6:21
  What's wrong with you? It's, I guess, a little bit
• 6:24
  Freudian. Yeah, well, it's like an
• 6:26
  identity then. It's not.
• 6:27
  It's not so much like a nationality.
• 6:29
  It's it's their whole identity. Yeah, it's it's an identity and
• 6:32
  it covers a lot of different groups that you you can say
• 6:36
  about the Levant. You have the Arameans, you have
• 6:40
  the Phoenicians, you have the Israelites, the Edomites,
• 6:44
  Moabites, Ammonites, and the Carthaginians.
• 6:46
  All of these people groups were derived from a Canaanite origin
• 6:51
  or were strongly influenced and founded on the principles of a
• 6:55
  Canaanite civilization. OK, you know, it's really
• 7:00
  interesting hearing this term because I'm, I was familiar with
• 7:03
  the term, at least from the angle that I was taught growing
• 7:08
  up in non denominational Christianity.
• 7:11
  You know, you in the Old Testament of the Bible, you
• 7:13
  hear, you know, the land of Canaan, and this is where they
• 7:17
  were the, you know, supposed to be going, you know, God's chosen
• 7:21
  people and all this. So like hearing the word or
• 7:23
  hearing the, the, the name. Like I didn't do much research
• 7:26
  as a kid growing up because that's was that wasn't the, the
• 7:29
  environment that I grew up in. That wasn't our that wasn't the
• 7:32
  angle that I was being raised to, to follow is, is to do any
• 7:35
  sort of like academic research or or geographic studies on, on
• 7:40
  these, on these areas. But as I've grown older and, and
• 7:43
  learn more and now talking to somebody who's who's made it
• 7:46
  their life practice, from the sounds of you, how long have
• 7:50
  you, how long have you been following this, this Poly?
• 7:54
  And it is a polytheistic path, right?
• 7:56
  It is very much a polytheistic path.
• 7:58
  There are, you know, monist elements.
• 8:00
  I think like many polytheistic religions, there are the belief
• 8:05
  is not as important as the practices, what you're doing.
• 8:09
  And obviously when you have multiple different gods, there
• 8:12
  are many different ways to approach it even from that
• 8:14
  angle. I'm principally a worshiper of
• 8:17
  Baal, or as many Christians love to mispronounce it, Baal, but
• 8:22
  specifically was kind of like our version of Thor, but he
• 8:27
  wears a skirt instead of, you know, slightly more masculine
• 8:31
  clothing. Yeah, interesting.
• 8:34
  You're still bashing people's heads in.
• 8:36
  OK, OK. I've heard, I've heard the name
• 8:40
  obviously, you know, from my past.
• 8:42
  They were Baal doesn't get talked about in the Christian
• 8:46
  Bible with much favor because it was a Pagan God, of course, of
• 8:50
  those of those people. And that was, you know, destroy
• 8:53
  his temples and, you know, destroy the idols and all the
• 8:57
  other things that they were told to do.
• 8:59
  It's one of the first really focused form of character
• 9:04
  assassination and character assassination against an entire
• 9:08
  culture, against an entire people, The demonization of an
• 9:11
  entire people used to justify genocide.
• 9:14
  And the legacy of the Canaanites in many ways is their name.
• 9:19
  The name Canaanite comes up again and again and again by
• 9:23
  very, let's say, genocidal institutions like the State of
• 9:27
  Israel or certain forms of evangelical Christianity that
• 9:31
  want a Christian nationalist state to decry and dehumanize
• 9:37
  their contemporary scapegoats. Wow, I didn't know that they
• 9:45
  were still like that, that that was still part of the the angle
• 9:48
  that they take on that is is is bringing it up.
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  Those old indigenous beliefs. I guess right would be a good
• 9:55
  you. Could say that indigenous
• 9:57
  beliefs, and they're some of the oldest religious texts in the
• 10:00
  world, are related to Canaanite deities.
• 10:03
  OK, so how long have you been in, you know, identifying in
• 10:09
  this way or practicing in this way?
• 10:10
  And what does being a Canaanite Kohan mean in practice nowadays?
• 10:17
  I would say, OK, well, I'll answer the first question first
• 10:20
  about 15 years, give or take. Since I was a teenager, I kind
• 10:24
  of had my calling and then I did the required study to, to become
• 10:29
  one. I would say I, I think you
• 10:31
  shouldn't try to do something unless you know basically what
• 10:34
  you're doing. But learning is once you're a
• 10:38
  teacher, you're actually learning more than when you're a
• 10:39
  student. So I'm I'm learning more
• 10:41
  everyday about the religion. I can't have came into it not
• 10:44
  knowing much about it at all. I'd never heard the name ball.
• 10:48
  So I had my my vision. As as many Canaanites do, I have
• 10:53
  to say that we have a next in community.
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  We have a number of members around the world, including in
• 10:58
  many Middle Eastern and North African countries, but not
• 11:01
  limited to their and they have their vision and they're like,
• 11:05
  what, I've never heard of this thing.
• 11:06
  And then they look into it and they're like, this is a
• 11:08
  religious tradition that exists. These are gods that are attested
• 11:11
  in historical records as far back as the Bronze Age.
• 11:16
  As for my day-to-day practice, a priest functionally does not
• 11:21
  serve as much as tell the people what to do.
• 11:25
  This is how you live a good life.
• 11:27
  That's that's, I think that's more of a philosophical kind of
• 11:30
  business. The function of a priest or a
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  kohan is much more of an advocate or an intermediary in
• 11:38
  the Canaanite religion who acts as sort of like the messenger,
• 11:44
  not as much the messenger like the interpreter and communicator
• 11:49
  and negotiator between the gods and humankind.
• 11:54
  They interpret divine signs. They interpret the ramblings of
• 11:59
  crazy people and the movement of sheep and the stars and the
• 12:02
  heavens and all that, or or whatever, or just, you know,
• 12:07
  from the gods. And they come to an
• 12:09
  understanding between the gods of the people of how that each
• 12:14
  can work together. Not favoring the gods over the
• 12:18
  people or the people over the gods, but as intermediaries or
• 12:22
  more even in service of the people than in service of the
• 12:24
  gods, arguably. Yeah, kind of like being the,
• 12:30
  yeah, you say intermediary or or.
• 12:32
  Yeah, they do the way. Yeah, like a, like a, like a.
• 12:35
  Spokesperson and go on attorneys at Ball.
• 12:41
  Right, right, Esquire or something?
• 12:45
  Yeah, exactly. Yeah.
• 12:48
  Did you come into this? You said, you know, it's been
• 12:50
  about 15 years. So you know, a good portion of
• 12:53
  1's life when you start, when you start calculating your
• 12:55
  anybody when they start calculating the study of
• 12:58
  something by, you know, how many decades they've been doing it.
• 13:01
  I feel like they've got the they've got the the time at
• 13:05
  least, you know, the miles under the tires to be able to speak
• 13:07
  with some conviction about things.
• 13:10
  Now, when you when you originally discovered this, you
• 13:14
  know, what was that like? Did you, did you come into this,
• 13:18
  you know, Canaanite polytheism as you know, like from a
• 13:21
  scholarly angle? Was it more of it like
• 13:24
  devotional because you saw some imagery or, or was it completely
• 13:28
  experiential? What was it like for you to 1st
• 13:31
  come into this? It it it.
• 13:33
  Began experiential and it was very scary.
• 13:35
  Like I actually thought that I was mentally ill at first, but
• 13:40
  as all the ways I was rationalizing it, it, it just
• 13:43
  didn't, didn't hold up. I, I, I eventually came to the
• 13:46
  conclusion that, yeah, these are some things called the gods and
• 13:49
  they exist. And after I accepted that and
• 13:54
  did much more research, because I am also fundamentally an
• 13:58
  academic, I'm really interested in history and the scholarly
• 14:02
  study of religion and philosophy and all these esoteric things.
• 14:06
  Not as much like esoteric things, but like the human
• 14:09
  experience. I'm passionate about the human
• 14:11
  experience, yeah. And that's, that's what kind of
• 14:16
  convinced me ultimately that no, I'm not crazy and I have a
• 14:19
  calling to. I have work to do, yeah.
• 14:25
  What's interesting to hear you talk about that is, you know,
• 14:28
  I've talked to a lot of, of, of people, some of whom I'm friends
• 14:31
  with that have similar origin stories wherein they describe
• 14:37
  this, you know, kind of like awakening as it were, to, to the
• 14:44
  path that they're on now. But a lot of what I've
• 14:48
  experienced and a lot of with the people who I've experienced
• 14:50
  it have something that they can kind of connect the dots with
• 14:56
  meaning they have ancestry from the part of the world that the
• 15:02
  pot that the Pagan path that they're on called them to.
• 15:05
  Is there anything like that with you in, in this Canaanite?
• 15:09
  Cause it's, you know, obviously a very specific region of
• 15:11
  northern AP N northwestern Middle East, you know, Africa
• 15:15
  and all that. Is there anything like that
• 15:17
  with, with this path? If if there's like a, you know,
• 15:20
  an ancestral calling or or connection to to being pulled in
• 15:24
  this direction. Well, my father's family is I, I
• 15:30
  wouldn't want to say Ashkenazi Jewish, but ambiguously
• 15:33
  Ashkenazi Jewish. My, my dad's dad was from
• 15:37
  Romania, which is a weird case in Jewish history because you
• 15:41
  don't know where the hell they're from.
• 15:43
  They can be Jews from the Middle East, from Spain, from eastern,
• 15:47
  northern central Europe, that kind of vicinity.
• 15:50
  Because the, the nature of Romania is that there were no
• 15:53
  records of Jewish people. They were, they were so
• 15:55
  persecuted in Romania and so subject to censure from the
• 15:59
  state and from imperial apparatuses that it's almost
• 16:04
  impossible to trace real ancestry.
• 16:07
  But we've always assumed based on our physical appearance I
• 16:11
  guess, that we're from the Middle East originally even.
• 16:15
  Well, I mean, all, all Ashkenazi, Sephardic and Misrati
• 16:18
  Jews have ancestry in the Middle East and to the Levant
• 16:21
  specifically, but more so, I think for us than usual, because
• 16:26
  like my grandfather, he was, he was basically physically,
• 16:28
  identically looking to Saddam Hussein and his best friend
• 16:33
  looked just like bin Laden. It was really funny.
• 16:37
  But they, they weren't Arabs, you know, they're Jews from New
• 16:39
  York. They looked like any other, you
• 16:41
  know, mid like Levantine Arab. It's it's, it's really funky
• 16:47
  because no, no one believes that my, my family is from Europe
• 16:51
  actually. And they asked me where am I
• 16:53
  from? I said, oh, I'm from Tucson
• 16:54
  like, but where are you from originally?
• 16:56
  I'm from. Tucson, right?
• 16:58
  Yeah. Where are your people from?
• 17:01
  You know, like, that's a funny way of getting it, trying to get
• 17:03
  the answer out, but yeah. Well, the Lower East Side of
• 17:05
  Brooklyn. Right.
• 17:07
  That yeah, you ever want, you know, the movie Short Circuit.
• 17:10
  Yeah. I don't know how old you are,
• 17:12
  but you know that I might be gay myself, but there's like that
• 17:15
  one, there's that one scene where I forget his name now, but
• 17:18
  he's, he's Indian And and, and dude's like, where are you?
• 17:22
  Where are your, where are you from?
• 17:23
  And he goes into this like, really like, weird answer.
• 17:29
  He's like, no, no, no. I mean, like, where where like
• 17:31
  where are you like your parents from?
• 17:32
  He's like, oh, damn. Pittsburgh, you know, like it's
• 17:36
  just he's like, I, no, that's not what I meant further than
• 17:40
  that kind of thing. But yeah, so.
• 17:42
  OK, so there is there there's there's you might say that
• 17:45
  there's an ancestral connection to you discovering a path that
• 17:50
  you're now on. Yeah.
• 17:52
  OK, so and obviously being an academic, you know, has has the
• 17:58
  linguistic side of of that academia have been been a part
• 18:03
  of your path to like learning the native language or or
• 18:06
  something close to it. I, I was, I was learning the
• 18:09
  Canaanite language. Over time, although I kind of
• 18:13
  lost motivation. I, I learned what I needed for
• 18:15
  what I needed to do as a liturgical language.
• 18:18
  But actually moving to Morocco and living in North Africa, I, I
• 18:24
  became decently conversant in Arabic, particularly the form of
• 18:27
  Arabic that they speak in Morocco, which is called
• 18:29
  Derisha, which is a very weird form of Arabic.
• 18:32
  Like every Arabic is kind of splitting up into different
• 18:34
  languages right now, kind of like Latin did ages ago.
• 18:38
  And Derisha is the weirdest form of Arabic.
• 18:41
  That's the one that no other Arabs understand.
• 18:44
  Really. And it was when I was in
• 18:46
  Palestine actually in August 2023, so like 2-2 months before
• 18:54
  that they they thought it was really amusing that I spoke
• 18:58
  Arabic with at once both an American accent and with a
• 19:01
  Moroccan accent. What if I could ask, like what
• 19:07
  what brought you to that part of the world?
• 19:10
  Was it a family move or, or was it academic, you know, studying
• 19:14
  abroad? What, what, What brought you
• 19:16
  over there? Marish marriage and romance.
• 19:22
  Yeah, man, that's. I don't need to.
• 19:23
  Maybe this is not the topic of of this conversation, but.
• 19:27
  No, that's cool. No worries at all.
• 19:30
  I just, I'm curious because I mean, I obviously I'm never
• 19:33
  lived outside of the country, but I did relocate from, I'm
• 19:37
  originally from New York State and you know, I live in
• 19:40
  Tennessee now and I've lived here for over 20 years.
• 19:43
  And yeah, you know, you, you places take, you know, different
• 19:48
  things for different reasons. And but yeah, so when you did
• 19:52
  move though, like were you already into the, oh, I guess I
• 19:56
  have to assume like you're already down the path of this
• 20:00
  religion. So you, you, you located to this
• 20:02
  place, which kind of is a, you know, going back home, as it
• 20:06
  were, to, you know, or closer to the, the, the homeland of this,
• 20:11
  of this religion. So how did that move?
• 20:14
  Shape or deepen the like your religious life or your practices
• 20:18
  in in this way. Well, one of the things is it
• 20:21
  made me identify more with my religion because I was
• 20:25
  confronted with the coercion of having to fit into another
• 20:28
  religion and another religious paradigm.
• 20:31
  When I was getting married, I was marrying into a Muslim
• 20:33
  family, and my wife's not Muslim, but her family was.
• 20:38
  And I had to, you know, learn how to do all the Salah and all
• 20:42
  that. And.
• 20:44
  You know, acts like a Muslim. My joke is I'm like a reverse
• 20:47
  Obama. I'm secretly not a Muslim.
• 20:52
  But yeah, it was, it was interesting.
• 20:53
  Like I had, I, I started thinking about the ways that the
• 20:58
  ritual practice relates between Canaanite religion and other
• 21:03
  like the Abrahamic religions that are now prevalent.
• 21:06
  Like in Islam, they have a way of praying and it caused me to
• 21:11
  look into how how did the Canaanites pray?
• 21:13
  What sort of liturgy did they have?
• 21:16
  How how did they organize public worship?
• 21:18
  And it, it made me refocus less on the esoteric details of what,
• 21:25
  what God did what when you know and, and more about living
• 21:30
  Canaanite and, and, and being proud to be a Canaanite rather
• 21:34
  than living in the shadows. Because when you're forced to
• 21:38
  conform to some other paradigm, you you'll appreciate your own
• 21:41
  paradigm a little bit more and you define your own paradigm.
• 21:45
  Yeah. Would you would you would you
• 21:47
  say that that you would would you say that that you know this
• 21:52
  to be Canaanite or to to be, you know, a polytheistic in in the
• 21:56
  Canaanite way is more about orthopraxy instead of orthodoxy
• 22:00
  like doing it instead of reading about like.
• 22:04
  It's it's exactly that the Canaanite religion starts with
• 22:09
  the fundamental assumption that the gods are real.
• 22:11
  It doesn't care. It doesn't care if you believe
• 22:14
  or not. You assume that they are real
• 22:16
  because it's apparent. It's not a matter of faith.
• 22:19
  It's just the gods are there and what are you going to do about
• 22:21
  it? You know, you want something OK
• 22:24
  here, here, make a deal you know, But you have to keep your
• 22:27
  word or else your your shit gets wrecked, you know?
• 22:30
  Right. Exactly.
• 22:32
  So, so it is orthopraxic then you would say very.
• 22:34
  Orthopraxic, but there is an ortho.
• 22:37
  Obviously there is some degree of beliefs that go into it.
• 22:40
  There's different interpretations of cosmology,
• 22:45
  cosmogony and all these kind of things.
• 22:47
  Yeah, and I get that's interesting too 'cause I mean,
• 22:52
  I've I've I've Germanic paganism is is much the same way.
• 22:58
  It's, it's more about doing it, the doing it the right way, you
• 23:02
  know, and doing it in a certain way.
• 23:04
  Because I don't know if, if, if you've experienced this in, in
• 23:07
  this in, in your path or not. But one of the struggles or I
• 23:12
  think maybe one of the, the areas that we see conflict in
• 23:15
  within the communities that I'm associated with is when people
• 23:22
  assert themselves as some sort of an authority and try to say,
• 23:25
  well, this is the way that it has to be done.
• 23:27
  I'll give an example. We have a thing called bloat
• 23:32
  BLOT and there's been a long running almost like argument to
• 23:40
  say that you know, bloat is, you know, it's an offering to the
• 23:44
  gods. And then the counter argument is
• 23:47
  that no, bloat is a sacrifice, which requires blood because all
• 23:52
  of the sources talk about bloat, however many dozens or hundreds
• 23:56
  of times that it's mentioned in the sources and it it's always
• 23:59
  blood is is is the sacrifice to the gods.
• 24:02
  It's not, you know, if you're going to give an offering,
• 24:05
  that's one thing and that's its own thing.
• 24:07
  You have this other side of the group.
• 24:09
  There are these other groups of people that want to try to just
• 24:12
  lump an offering to the gods as it could be blow, it could not
• 24:17
  be whatever. And then you have these others
• 24:18
  that say no, if you're going to do it, if you're going to call
• 24:20
  it that, then it has to be this way.
• 24:23
  So I don't know if you have like experienced anything like that
• 24:26
  with, you know, within your wheelhouse where people try to
• 24:32
  make it more casual than it really should be.
• 24:34
  And then, you know, no, it has to be this way because that's
• 24:37
  the orthopraxic nature of it. It has to be done a certain way
• 24:40
  and. That's human nature.
• 24:42
  There are people who are loosey goosey about things and then
• 24:45
  there's going to be people who are like very strict and and
• 24:48
  very almost dogmatic about everything has to be this
• 24:52
  certain way. And the thing that I noticed
• 24:56
  about the people who are the most certain that they're right
• 24:59
  are usually the people who have the least knowledge about the
• 25:01
  subjects. The same in in I think in most
• 25:06
  areas of study, the fact that sources are so ambiguous and so
• 25:11
  metaphorical, particularly in Canaanite culture, that it's
• 25:15
  explicitly metaphorical. Like you talked about bloats or
• 25:18
  blood in Canaanite, we have Dom we, we talk about the blood of
• 25:24
  the vine. This is obviously in Jewish
• 25:26
  religion as well, where we talk about wine can symbolically
• 25:31
  stand in for blood. That's also in Christian
• 25:34
  religion. So we have this metaphorical
• 25:38
  blood of the vine that that that we can argue is a substitute for
• 25:44
  the blood of the blood sacrifice.
• 25:45
  Of course, they they did have bloody sacrifices in the ancient
• 25:49
  Near East. Yeah, it was an important part
• 25:51
  of the religion, and it's like one of the most important parts.
• 25:55
  But then it stopped being the most important part at a certain
• 25:59
  discrete port of history. It started transitioning into a
• 26:02
  more philosophical concept of sacrifice.
• 26:10
  So more like, you know, why are we doing this?
• 26:13
  What's the purpose behind this? Not so much it has to be a goat
• 26:18
  or sheep or a horse or whatever. Like it's what's the purpose
• 26:23
  behind this? What's the spirit of it?
• 26:24
  Maybe is is another way to say it Perhaps.
• 26:26
  Yes, and of course the traditions that existed had to
• 26:30
  come from somewhere. And while we we like to imagine
• 26:34
  that all of them were handed down from the gods directly, we
• 26:37
  also have a lot of archaeological evidence in the
• 26:39
  ancient Near East of a proto scientific method being used for
• 26:44
  divining the will of the gods through the movement of animals.
• 26:48
  And they would just record what happened.
• 26:51
  I guess it's nice to say correlation is not causation,
• 26:54
  but in Babylonian science, correlation is causation.
• 26:58
  And if you have 2000 years of of patterns that they've noticed,
• 27:03
  they start taking it like it's science.
• 27:05
  I think that's that's an element of dogmatism that entered the
• 27:08
  religion from that particular impetus.
• 27:15
  Is there is there a degree of animism present in Canaanite
• 27:20
  religion? For certain, actually the
• 27:23
  assumption is I'm in in many perspectives is that there is a
• 27:29
  ball or a Lord or a spirit in many different natural
• 27:35
  phenomenon in rivers, in mountains, in trees, that there
• 27:40
  is something that you can compare to like a spirit or even
• 27:44
  a form. Platonism was in many ways
• 27:49
  influenced by a Canaanite philosophy as well, like many of
• 27:52
  the early Stoics and Platonists were Canaanites by birth and you
• 28:00
  know, by religion and culture. But yeah, there's, there's this
• 28:04
  belief that there's an essence of something that you can
• 28:07
  ascribe either some sort of cognition or sentience too, and
• 28:14
  that that leads to a larger concept as well of the divine as
• 28:20
  relates to the natural processes and cycles of the earth.
• 28:24
  It's very, it's very often taken that the, the chief myth of the,
• 28:29
  the Canaanite religion, which is the ball cycle, is a cycle.
• 28:33
  It's a seasonal cycle built around the agricultural life of
• 28:37
  the Canaanites, when storms, when there would be drought,
• 28:42
  etcetera. Yeah, I mean that, that, that
• 28:47
  that is, you know, there, there's, there's nuanced with
• 28:51
  that across many cultures, ancient cultures too.
• 28:54
  I mean, I was just, you know, recently watching something
• 28:57
  about Irish old ways, you know, like how the the local Celts and
• 29:03
  Gaelic speaking people and would would practice before
• 29:06
  Christianity imposed itself on them and they converted.
• 29:10
  It was it made sense to these people.
• 29:12
  And I think this is a general consensus for all cultures is
• 29:16
  that the reason it made sense to them is because it's based
• 29:20
  around the natural cycles of nature itself.
• 29:24
  And and like you say, you know, when crops could be planted,
• 29:28
  when times are going to be lean in that area of the world,
• 29:31
  winter maybe wasn't so much of a problem in the sense that it was
• 29:34
  cold, but I'm sure you had rainy seasons.
• 29:37
  You have drought seasons, you have times of leanness that you
• 29:41
  know, you need to be prepared for or you'll die, you know, and
• 29:45
  all these other things. And it so much of their of these
• 29:47
  ancient civilizations were and their beliefs and what they
• 29:51
  believed in and how they identified it was simply framed
• 29:54
  around the the natural order of their environment.
• 29:59
  And I like how you're framed rather than, you know, because
• 30:03
  it's it's describing the natural environment rather than assuming
• 30:07
  you know, that they're observing the way that the seasons work.
• 30:11
  And they're also observing like, what's going wrong?
• 30:15
  You want to have your rain, you want to have your storms.
• 30:17
  You want Bald to rain, but you want him when he's supposed to.
• 30:21
  If he doesn't rain when he's supposed to, you have drought.
• 30:24
  If he rains too early or too late, it can ruin the crop in
• 30:29
  that way. And depending on how volatile an
• 30:34
  environment was, they were able to infer a lot about the
• 30:39
  personality of the gods over time.
• 30:41
  In Mesopotamia, they had very petty and kind of, let's say,
• 30:49
  controlling gods, and that led to a very specific sort of
• 30:52
  society there. And in Egypt, they had a very
• 30:55
  much more regular flood cycle that they could more or less
• 30:59
  rely on compared to Mesopotamia. So they had a more calm and more
• 31:05
  comforting kind of religion, and the Canaanites relying on
• 31:09
  rainfall rather than on a riverine system, the same as
• 31:14
  Mesopotamia or Egypt but more similar to maybe Anatolia or
• 31:18
  Greece, placed their the Thunder God as the most significant God
• 31:24
  in the pantheon. Yeah, same.
• 31:28
  It's, you know, it's interesting to hear that the, these, these
• 31:31
  various cultures, whether they're a, you know, you know,
• 31:35
  whether it's, you know, Mesopotamia and whether, whether
• 31:37
  it's, you know, Asiatic, whether it's Germanic, Celtic, wherever.
• 31:42
  Like the, the, the, the archetype of a Thunder God or,
• 31:46
  or the archetype of a Thunder deity as being this protector,
• 31:50
  but this also a life bringer, fertility, all these things
• 31:55
  being connected with that archetype.
• 31:58
  Even in Proto Indo European texts, you know, like you, I
• 32:03
  don't know if you're, if you've ever looked into like, you know,
• 32:06
  the Vedic texts, the Rig Vedas and, and stuff, but there's a
• 32:09
  lot of similarities in the later European and Germanic and, and
• 32:14
  Nordic lores, you know what I mean?
• 32:16
  Like you go back far enough and you start seeing all this
• 32:20
  syncretism or this, you know what I mean?
• 32:23
  And that Thunder God deity, that Thunder God archetype is, is
• 32:26
  prevalent in a lot of ways. And, and that that's, you know,
• 32:29
  'cause the people had to live and, and, and they relied on the
• 32:32
  land to, to live, you know, it was, we want to make sure that
• 32:36
  we're keeping whoever they are, whoever that figure is, you
• 32:40
  know, that we're in their good graces.
• 32:43
  And the Gulf were very seen as being, are still seen as being
• 32:47
  very tied to the land. And when the Hebrew writers were
• 32:51
  talking about the people in the land of Canaan, when they came
• 32:55
  back from the Babylonian exile, they were talking about the
• 32:57
  Amaha arets, the people of the land who held to the traditional
• 33:00
  ways. Also like the term Pagan.
• 33:03
  The Pagan literally means bumpkin Hick farmers, you know,
• 33:09
  and even into like the medieval ages, the people who continued
• 33:13
  to practice the polytheistic religions were always associated
• 33:18
  with obviously magic, but also agriculture in like the 10th
• 33:22
  century CE. So like the the medieval age,
• 33:27
  the same age as the Vikings in Iraq and Syria, Like in in
• 33:31
  Hachra, which is in kind of the border of Iraq and Syria, there
• 33:34
  was still this group of people who identified as Sabians, but
• 33:38
  we're still practicing A synchronized version of
• 33:41
  Mesopotamian or Canaanite polytheism, a Semitic
• 33:44
  polytheism. And their book was called the
• 33:48
  Nabatean Agriculture. So their religion was deeply
• 33:54
  rooted in agricultural practices of that region, which continues
• 33:59
  to, to this day in all over the Middle East and North Africa.
• 34:03
  And I imagine also in Europe. We're talking about in in the
• 34:08
  current land of Canada, in Palestine, villagers still call
• 34:13
  for Haddad Bal Haddad to bring rain, the ones who are relying
• 34:17
  on rain rather than irrigation. And in North Africa and more
• 34:22
  specifically in Morocco in the Amasig religion, which is
• 34:25
  Afroasiatic but not Semitic, but related, very closely related
• 34:29
  and had a lot of contact with the Canaanites.
• 34:31
  The Canaanites actually settled and founded the famous city of
• 34:34
  Tangier. Actually most of the main cities
• 34:37
  on the north northern coast of Morocco actually founded by the
• 34:40
  Canaanites or the Phoenicians by other names, but they have this
• 34:46
  tradition that still exists called the Bride of Grazil.
• 34:50
  Excuse me, shit, the bride of Anzar, where they used to take a
• 34:56
  virgin woman and present her to the the God of rain and she
• 35:02
  would symbolically become impregnated.
• 35:05
  And this would symbolically involve, like, the fertility of
• 35:08
  the land. And this survived until quite
• 35:10
  recently. And later they replaced it with
• 35:12
  a new system where rather than dressing up a woman in beautiful
• 35:15
  clothes, they dress up spoons. So the bride of Anzar is now,
• 35:20
  you know, spoons with like a Moroccan kaftan on it.
• 35:25
  Interesting. Yeah, interesting that they go
• 35:27
  that route with the imagery. And this was, this was still
• 35:31
  done. You know, it's, I'm sure it's
• 35:33
  still done in remote regions of Morocco today.
• 35:36
  But my, my mother-in-law, who is Amaziq from the South of
• 35:39
  Morocco, still, you know, if she remembers doing this as a kid,
• 35:44
  although she had long since gone heavily in the Islamist root and
• 35:49
  kind of forgotten that side of her heritage.
• 35:55
  But it's, it's an extant tradition.
• 35:56
  It's a tradition that survived for thousands of years.
• 36:00
  Yeah. Even though it's given an
• 36:02
  Islamic veneer, you can easily see that it comes from earlier
• 36:06
  polytheistic religions related to fertility and agricultural
• 36:10
  cycles. Yeah, yeah, it's, and I know I
• 36:14
  can't say for sure that this is the reason why, but you know,
• 36:17
  I've, I was, I mentioned before at the beginning of the show, my
• 36:21
  friend who was recently passed and he was the practicing
• 36:25
  Muslim. We got along swimmingly, like we
• 36:28
  were great friends. You know, we, our religions were
• 36:32
  not as a, as a devout Muslim as he was and as and as a devoted
• 36:36
  Pagan as I am. None of those things drove a
• 36:41
  wedge between our friendship. If anything, you know, I was,
• 36:45
  you know, he was keen to to hear things that I had to say about
• 36:47
  my ways and, and, and my ancestral ways.
• 36:50
  And I was keen to learn more things about, you know, what he
• 36:53
  found meaningful to him. And it enriched our friendship.
• 36:58
  If anything, it didn't hurt it. And, you know, I, I can't say
• 37:01
  for sure that it was because of the moralities, you know what I
• 37:06
  mean? Like the ethics and stuff that
• 37:07
  kind of go around our respective beliefs.
• 37:10
  But you know, it's, it's hard to say that, that for a lot of
• 37:16
  Christians. And I grew up as one, you know
• 37:19
  what I mean? And I, it was a wedge, me
• 37:21
  becoming Pagan and finding this way, you know, that was a huge
• 37:23
  wedge between me and and my immediate family.
• 37:28
  I think it's often based on social dynamics.
• 37:31
  I'm assuming your friend and you met in the United States where
• 37:35
  Muslims and polytheists are are equally minorities in a Muslim
• 37:41
  majority country. The Muslims are the Christians
• 37:45
  essentially. They are not usually very
• 37:48
  sympathetic to other religions. They're curious.
• 37:50
  I mean, like being a Westerner, being of a Western origin in a
• 37:55
  Muslim country, they're, they are more accepting than if I
• 37:59
  were, for example, an African bringing in African indigenous
• 38:02
  religion or being a Christian. I also think that Muslims kind
• 38:06
  of appreciate that I'm honest about being a polytheist rather
• 38:09
  than the Christians who are all hypocritical about it.
• 38:11
  They're like, Oh no, our three gods are actually one God.
• 38:15
  You're right, yeah. I I'm I'm curious how they work
• 38:18
  that out with their algebra. The math ain't math.
• 38:22
  Invented algebra. The Europeans invented
• 38:26
  demiglaze, right? Meat sauce.
• 38:30
  Yeah, yeah. And bacon.
• 38:31
  What bacon? That's actually kind of one of
• 38:35
  the like you're going in this direction.
• 38:36
  It was one of the questions that I was hoping to ask you was
• 38:38
  like, from your experience, like what, what misconceptions do?
• 38:43
  What do you think? Like what misconceptions do you
• 38:45
  think Western polytheists tend to have about Middle Eastern or
• 38:49
  North African? You know the, the, the
• 38:52
  polytheism over there, you know that religious landscape since
• 38:57
  you've lived over there and you've shared in that culture
• 39:00
  and, and, and stuff. I feel like every European
• 39:05
  polytheist I've met is absolutely unconcerned with what
• 39:09
  we're doing, or they know about as much about it as we do that
• 39:12
  they're interested in it. Because a lot of people become
• 39:16
  polytheists, European or otherwise, out of a rejection of
• 39:21
  the traditional Abrahamic faiths, Judaism, Christianity,
• 39:24
  and Islam. And for them, it's interesting
• 39:26
  to look into how Judaism as the initial Abrahamic faith
• 39:32
  separated itself from its Canaanite origins and the
• 39:37
  polytheist context at the root of the the, let's say the
• 39:42
  Abrahamic religions, Judaism, Christianity and Islam, and how
• 39:48
  Canaanites are presented as the the quintessential, you know,
• 39:52
  demonic polytheists, the demon worshipping polytheists, Christ
• 39:57
  their children to bail all. Yeah, we get that, Yeah.
• 40:05
  I I will note that in Canaanite religious texts, human sacrifice
• 40:14
  figures may be ambiguously once or twice, whereas the Bible
• 40:22
  actually provides the demand for human sacrifice frequently, like
• 40:29
  the command that you must commit a human sacrifice against your
• 40:33
  first born child. And there can be no substitutes
• 40:36
  in the book of Leviticus and Exodus.
• 40:39
  But they have their justifications.
• 40:41
  If it was, if there was something as unambiguous as that
• 40:45
  in a Canaanite text, I I would I would guarantee that they would
• 40:52
  not be calling ambiguity on it. Yeah, yeah.
• 40:56
  And what little we have from the on the European side, you know,
• 40:59
  they're definitely, I think, you know, you go back far enough in
• 41:02
  any ancient civilization or any ancient culture, people were
• 41:05
  doing those types of things at some degree or in some, you
• 41:08
  know, you know, at some amount even the dramatic peoples.
• 41:14
  Did you know there's there's some sources that do granted it
• 41:18
  was, you know, the source was you have Adam of Bremen, who
• 41:23
  was, you know, an Anglo-Saxon, I believe, or he was.
• 41:27
  Yeah. And then, you know, Tacitus was
• 41:29
  a Roman that talk about. But they were like very they
• 41:36
  weren't like all the time. It was, you know, Adam Bremen
• 41:39
  talks about it like every eight or nine years.
• 41:42
  You know what I mean? There was, but it, it doesn't
• 41:46
  justify it in any sort of sense now, especially 'cause, you
• 41:49
  know, we're not, we're not, we're not pagans in that time.
• 41:52
  We're pagans in the modern time. And it's interesting that it's
• 41:56
  such a significant thing for them that they have to prove
• 42:02
  that Canaanites were sacrificing children or else they'd be the
• 42:07
  villains for committing a genocide in the Book of Joshua.
• 42:12
  You know, genocide's totally OK if you're the people you're
• 42:17
  committing genocide occasionally kill their kids.
• 42:19
  It's OK to kill all their kids if they're occasionally killing
• 42:22
  their kids. Yeah, it's OK if this you know
• 42:25
  it's OK to do it when the one true God quote, UN quote tells
• 42:29
  you to do it. Yep, and that's a kind of
• 42:32
  rhetorical argument that sadly keeps coming back when there is
• 42:37
  usually more of an economic or social reason or political
• 42:41
  reason why one group is invading another group.
• 42:45
  Just as with the Americans making retroactive
• 42:49
  justifications for their illegal invasions of Iraq or an aside
• 42:54
  currently occurring in Palestine on, you know, by the Israeli
• 42:58
  colonists. Yeah, it is, you know, and, and
• 43:02
  this is somewhat like you, you, you're definitely in the, the,
• 43:05
  the, the, this is kind of your wheelhouse as I feel 'cause you
• 43:08
  know, you're, you're, you're devoted to a religion that is
• 43:11
  native to a certain part of the world that has seen conflict for
• 43:15
  millennia. You know what I mean?
• 43:16
  Like it's, it's nothing but conflict for the last, you know,
• 43:20
  however many thousands of years. So and and you've lived over
• 43:25
  there, you know, you've lived in that region of the world and
• 43:27
  you've had real like boot on the ground experiences with the
• 43:31
  locals, you know, so you're not just some Westerner who's
• 43:35
  devoted to something because your great, great great
• 43:37
  grandmother or whoever was from there.
• 43:39
  Like you've been there and you've been around.
• 43:42
  So where do you feel that in the modern landscape?
• 43:46
  Well, so you know, you mentioned, you know, the
• 43:48
  political turmoil and how it impacts things like so where do
• 43:52
  you feel like or how rather do you feel like that modern
• 43:55
  politics in the Middle East affect the religious plurality,
• 43:59
  especially for, you know, non Abrahamic paths?
• 44:03
  Because you all you like a lot of what you hear about is, you
• 44:06
  know, Israel and Palestine and and it's you know, I don't know,
• 44:09
  I don't see so much of it. I don't hear so much of the real
• 44:12
  like non Abrahamic religious aspects being talked about.
• 44:15
  Maybe you do, but I wanted to put that on the table and hear
• 44:20
  what your thoughts were about that.
• 44:22
  The role of non Abrahamic religions in the Israel
• 44:26
  Palestine conflict. I think it's a very interesting
• 44:29
  one because there is this awakening among both, I would
• 44:34
  say parties involved among, you know, Jews and among
• 44:38
  Palestinians. And it plays a lot into the
• 44:41
  rhetoric of of both sides. Of course, the rhetoric of
• 44:48
  Israel being they are promised this land, so we have a right to
• 44:51
  kill and kick out whoever's on the land, which is fully
• 44:56
  biblical. And the Palestinians of course
• 44:59
  have the reality that they are descended from the indigenous
• 45:03
  people of the land, the Canaanites.
• 45:06
  But of course Jews are a little bit as well.
• 45:08
  And the Zionists, on one hand, they're trying to discredit the
• 45:12
  indigeneity of the Palestinians by denying their indigeneity, by
• 45:16
  saying that they're invaders from Arab, they're Arab
• 45:18
  invaders. And it's a rhetorical thing that
• 45:22
  many Palestinian people don't want to identify as Arab.
• 45:25
  There's a growing national and ethnic awakening within
• 45:29
  Levantine countries, as with other Arab countries, but
• 45:33
  especially in the Levant, to re awaken a pre Islamic and a pre
• 45:38
  Arab identity. In Lebanon you have a
• 45:40
  Phoenicianist movement and which is far right and actually kind
• 45:45
  of like the Lebanese version of Zionism.
• 45:47
  They're really nasty, actually. That's why I don't identify with
• 45:50
  them. But the Palestinian, you know,
• 45:53
  liberation movement is becoming imbued with a sense of Canaanite
• 45:58
  indigeneity. That's how Canaanites are
• 46:00
  becoming, you know, a political topic.
• 46:04
  And there is a Canaanite religious reawakening in
• 46:07
  Palestine. I've met a lot of people who are
• 46:10
  involved in that and are taking the religion as symbolic of the
• 46:18
  national struggle of Palestinian people against genocide, against
• 46:22
  colonization, as a way of saying, well, we've we've been
• 46:27
  through this before. And I also think that the
• 46:30
  Canaanite religion in particular has a very political and well
• 46:34
  thought out message around conflict, but also around peace.
• 46:38
  The resolution of the Ball epic is not of Ball conquering and
• 46:45
  defeating his adversaries, but of making peace with them and
• 46:51
  recognizing different spheres. There are some enemies that Ball
• 46:56
  cannot stomach and he thoroughly defeats them, but others that he
• 46:59
  can reach a sort of compact with that he he reaches a
• 47:04
  specifically with the God of Death.
• 47:08
  Neither can the God of death fully defeat life, but neither
• 47:11
  can life fully defeat death. It's cosmic acceptance of
• 47:19
  basically mortality, but continuity.
• 47:23
  The celebration of continuity is celebration of creation.
• 47:27
  It's not good versus evil. It's the cycle of life, death
• 47:31
  and rebirth. Yeah, yeah, I get that.
• 47:34
  It's, you know, death is not the end.
• 47:35
  It's just just the next level. It's the next stage of
• 47:38
  existence. It's a different form of
• 47:40
  existence. But we've become so, especially
• 47:42
  in the West, you know, we've, we've become so programmed to
• 47:46
  think of death as the end of things, you know, and you know,
• 47:50
  the, or the existence thereafter as being some sort of ethereal
• 47:55
  other place or whatever. It's it's, it's just the, it's
• 47:58
  just the recycling of existence. We look at ourselves as
• 48:02
  Canaanites, less as individuals, but more about our place in
• 48:07
  continuity, our place in time that we are passing on
• 48:12
  something, that we have a limited time on this earth.
• 48:16
  And not so much that we are chasing the afterlife, but we're
• 48:18
  chasing posterity. We're chasing a legacy for our
• 48:22
  children and our grandchildren, not merely chasing heaven and
• 48:27
  hell. Yeah.
• 48:29
  Not actually a figure very significantly into our religion,
• 48:31
  although it exists. There's a dirty, stinky place
• 48:35
  called Sheol where you do nothing but drink muddy puddles
• 48:38
  and snort dust all day. They're, you know, it's, yeah,
• 48:43
  it's, it's so interesting to hear this coming, you know,
• 48:47
  from, from a different part of the world that I've never spoken
• 48:49
  to people that have any, you know, religious or ethnic
• 48:53
  background too. But the similarities that I'm
• 48:57
  hearing, right, Because for the dramatic people, it was similar.
• 49:00
  They didn't care. And it really wasn't woven into
• 49:02
  their worldview so much about doing things during their life
• 49:06
  that would secure or guarantee them a good afterlife.
• 49:11
  They did what they did to secure a good future for their
• 49:16
  descendants and to live thereafter after their physical
• 49:20
  selves would die to be remembered, and in that way
• 49:24
  never truly die. Their their memory was recalled.
• 49:28
  They had songs sung about them, stories told about them.
• 49:31
  Their deeds made them known long after their bodies had expired.
• 49:36
  So they they were. They became a moral, they
• 49:38
  became, you know, in some cases like deified or, you know, that
• 49:43
  turned into heroes for these people.
• 49:46
  And and it was about that it was about not so much what they got
• 49:50
  after they physically died. It was what was given to their
• 49:53
  descendants, how when they became an ancestor, you know,
• 49:56
  how they were known among their their their descendants, because
• 50:01
  the ancestors were more important to those people that
• 50:04
  on the day-to-day life than the gods were.
• 50:06
  Yes, the gods had an important role in their life, and they
• 50:08
  would do things and they would give sacrifices and they would
• 50:11
  interact with the gods in a very specific way.
• 50:15
  But the gods had their own agency and they were not
• 50:17
  omnipotent. They were not omnipresent.
• 50:19
  They had fit to do themselves, and they couldn't be bothered
• 50:22
  with what the modern or the common people had.
• 50:25
  That's what the ancestors were there for.
• 50:26
  That's what you're, you know, connection.
• 50:28
  It's not Paul's job to find my keys.
• 50:31
  There you go. Yeah, exactly.
• 50:33
  So no. Wonder, you know, the Abrahamic
• 50:38
  God is too busy to solve famines and prevent diseases and natural
• 50:44
  disasters. He's finding Pastor Tim Allen's
• 50:46
  keys. Now that's an interesting point.
• 50:52
  You know, because or, or in a, in a sort of side or roundabout
• 50:56
  way is that, you know, we're talking about the the Canaanite
• 51:00
  religion. This is a polytheistic religion
• 51:01
  and you know, that way those those indigenous beliefs of
• 51:08
  those people was, you know, eradicated with Judaism
• 51:14
  initially. The idea conceptually is that
• 51:19
  there was a conquest, and by and large Israelite monotheism
• 51:24
  replaced Canaanite polytheism. But we know from archaeology and
• 51:29
  we know from textual sources that polytheism persisted as as
• 51:33
  a norm in the land of Canaan in Palestine pretty much until
• 51:38
  Christianity took over. The the Jews were not like the
• 51:45
  Jewish religion arose out of a late Iron Age context when
• 51:50
  Israel had already fallen basically to the Assyrians and
• 51:54
  the Judaites had received these refugees.
• 51:57
  They created a cult around Jerusalem which wanted to be the
• 52:02
  supreme cult. They didn't disagree with the
• 52:04
  existence of other gods. They just wanted to be the
• 52:06
  strongest cult. And they carried out
• 52:08
  persecutions of other cults in the Kingdom of Judah, which is a
• 52:11
  small Kingdom in the South. Like there's Israel up here and
• 52:16
  Judah. Israel's squished by the
• 52:18
  Assyrians. Judah's holding out the the
• 52:22
  Israelites who worship the God Yahweh are kind of mushing
• 52:26
  together their Yahweh with the Judahite Elian or El and kind of
• 52:35
  like chocolate and peanut butter.
• 52:38
  And they, they create the Reese's peanut butter cup of
• 52:41
  gods and they want their God to dominate over the other gods.
• 52:45
  So either by direct violence against other cults or by
• 52:50
  letting the Assyrians do their dirty work for them because
• 52:53
  there's the siege of Lakish. Lakish is the biggest cult
• 52:57
  center in Judah outside of Jerusalem, and the king of Judah
• 53:01
  is like, I know, I just let let's let's let the Syrians have
• 53:03
  their way with this one. He was actually a kid.
• 53:09
  All it's funny, all the biblical kings that are praised in the
• 53:12
  book of Kings are kids when they're being praised because
• 53:15
  they're under the control of the priests when they're growing up,
• 53:18
  they want to exercise authority on their own.
• 53:20
  They suddenly become worldly and one God fearing by actually
• 53:26
  representing all the gods of their community and actually
• 53:30
  having diplomacy with other kingdoms instead of just saying
• 53:32
  all their kings are stinky, all their kingdoms are stinky.
• 53:37
  But yeah, they they get kicked out of Jerusalem as well and
• 53:39
  they wind up in Babylon and many ideological currents are
• 53:44
  mingling. Zoroastrianism, many other
• 53:47
  henotheistic traditions. Like the king of Babylon at that
• 53:49
  time was the guy who just didn't really want to be king.
• 53:52
  He kind of just wanted to sit out in the desert and watch the
• 53:54
  moon all day as his one God was the moon.
• 53:58
  Nabenitis and all these different things are mingling in
• 54:03
  Babylon, which is like the New York of the day.
• 54:05
  That's kind of like the tri-state area of the day.
• 54:08
  As I like to joke about later, there was 3 cities, Babylon,
• 54:11
  Thesophon and a Seleukia which would actually be the tri-state
• 54:16
  area of Mesopotamia, which is when actually Judaism reached
• 54:20
  its its formal form after the development of the Babylonian
• 54:23
  Talmud. But Babylon is more significant
• 54:26
  than the development of Judaism than quote UN quote Israel,
• 54:30
  Judah, Palestine would have used.
• 54:32
  Because this is when they realize we are going to have to
• 54:35
  have a God that is not tied to our land, that is tied to us
• 54:41
  because we're the best people. And when they came home, they
• 54:44
  seemed to have forgotten that there was a religion that was
• 54:48
  already there. When they left, they assumed
• 54:51
  that their religion was the one that was always there.
• 54:54
  Because I guess history really wasn't their strong suit.
• 54:57
  I guess Herodotus was only just born then or a little bit after
• 55:01
  then. So they didn't have history.
• 55:03
  They just had traditions that were constantly being rewritten
• 55:07
  in terms of their evolving ideologies.
• 55:10
  And that's what the Bible is. It's stories that are evolving
• 55:15
  and being re edited and reimagined in the terms of
• 55:20
  evolving circumstances. Yeah, well, one of the things I
• 55:24
  remember reading and growing like growing up as a kid in, in,
• 55:29
  in the way that I was raised in Christianity was, you know, the
• 55:35
  Israelites, didn't you know, they, they were first of all,
• 55:39
  they, you know, tribes, you know, the 12 tribes of Israel
• 55:42
  and, you know, every tribe had a different reputation or, or
• 55:47
  thing that they were, you know, 'cause their names meant
• 55:50
  something, you know? Like, you know, the tribe of
• 55:53
  Joseph based on Joseph, the tribe of Levi was the priest
• 55:56
  tribe, the tribe of Benjamin, which was the rape tribe.
• 55:59
  Right. And then, you know, Judah was,
• 56:01
  you know, the biggest and baddest or whatever.
• 56:04
  But anyways, like my point being is that, you know, they, they,
• 56:08
  they had that way, but then they start wishing or wanting to be
• 56:12
  more like everybody else. That was not Israel.
• 56:15
  They wanted a king like, you know, Assyria or they wanted a
• 56:20
  king like, you know, this person or that person or whatever.
• 56:22
  And then, you know, when that, when that finally, when they,
• 56:25
  when they started doing that 'cause they went from having,
• 56:28
  you know, not being really governed to being governed by,
• 56:32
  you know, judges, I guess, you know, or, or, you know, whether
• 56:37
  it was a priest class or whatever, you know, they, they
• 56:39
  were, they weren't kings. They were they were seers or
• 56:42
  prophets I guess. Maybe.
• 56:43
  Yes, prophets. And then they had judges, which
• 56:46
  is actually a concept not just in the Israelite religion and
• 56:51
  statecraft, but actually the broader Canaanite world as well.
• 56:57
  Time was going off. I have sweet potatoes in the
• 57:00
  oven. Oh no.
• 57:01
  Is it dinner time? Where?
• 57:02
  Yeah. Am I interrupting your dinner?
• 57:04
  Oh no, no, it's the wonderful thing about sweet potatoes is
• 57:08
  they are low and slow, so they can go for a while.
• 57:12
  Yeah, for sure. So.
• 57:19
  The the Canaanite people had the same thing originally, right?
• 57:22
  They had that, that, you know, they weren't dictated or, or
• 57:25
  controlled rather by a, you know, ordained king.
• 57:30
  Yeah, There wasn't a centralized Canaanite state in the same way
• 57:34
  you have the pharaoh of Egypt or even a king of Babylon.
• 57:38
  Much like in ancient Greece, you had city States and they would
• 57:43
  exercise control over the hinterland area to various
• 57:47
  degrees, or sometimes even other other kings.
• 57:50
  They had sort of a paternalistic system.
• 57:52
  This king was this King's father, wasn't actually his
• 57:55
  father, but you said you, you addressed him as father because
• 57:59
  he was higher up in the pecking order than you.
• 58:02
  And then the equals would call themselves brothers, everyone,
• 58:05
  and they were the great kings. Egypt, the Hittites, the
• 58:09
  Babylonians, the Assyrians, these were the great kings.
• 58:13
  And everyone wanted to be a great king and increase their
• 58:16
  standing relative to others. Almost like feudalism, I guess.
• 58:20
  You have the barons and the Lords, different types of kings
• 58:25
  in the little pecking order. And also besides the city states
• 58:30
  which ruled over agriculture areas, there were also always
• 58:35
  nomadic Canaanites who reared sheep, reared goats and bovines.
• 58:41
  And like cows, cows figure very significantly in Canaanite
• 58:45
  mythology as well. I'll leave the R rated stuff to
• 58:51
  my my other friend's podcast, Asherah's Orchard.
• 58:55
  We we get into the nitty gritty of cow stuff.
• 58:59
  Oh, nice. Yeah, it'll be the after hours
• 59:02
  version, after the kids go to bed and all that.
• 59:06
  Yeah. The thing that Bob gets up to in
• 59:09
  his spare time when he's running away from the God of death.
• 59:12
  Yeah, after. After or extracurricular?
• 59:17
  Yeah. Exactly.
• 59:18
  So, so they have this settled society near the coast, which is
• 59:22
  reliant on agriculture, and you had the rural interior which was
• 59:26
  reliant on herding and farming, right.
• 59:29
  Herding. And yeah, it's herding like
• 59:32
  bovines and uvuids, I guess is the technical term.
• 59:36
  You got to use your Latin anyway.
• 59:42
  So there is this conflict and you, you, it's, it's so
• 59:44
  beautifully put in the Bible, the story of Cain versus Abel,
• 59:48
  these two ways of life, the people who farmed and the people
• 59:52
  who reared cattle. And which one does God prefer?
• 59:56
  It prefers the guy who brings the barbecued meats.
• 59:59
  He doesn't like bread. God hates vegans, apparently.
• 1:00:04
  Well, everyone else does too, but I'm just kidding.
• 1:00:07
  But. But the Canaanites were the were
• 1:00:10
  associated with farmers and the Israelites associated with
• 1:00:13
  herders. Although by the time that the
• 1:00:17
  Bible is being written, everyone's farm, that everyone
• 1:00:19
  is kind of like mixed together. It's it's not.
• 1:00:21
  But there's an ideological association with class that the
• 1:00:27
  guys who have cattle, the guys who have sheep, have goats, are
• 1:00:31
  better and higher class people than the people who farm.
• 1:00:35
  Yeah. Came out of historical
• 1:00:37
  circumstances. Also one of the reasons why pigs
• 1:00:40
  are seen as unclean in many religions.
• 1:00:45
  Cause pigs are an urban farm animal.
• 1:00:48
  They're an animal that you can feed with kitchen scraps.
• 1:00:52
  Whereas they're not as prestigious as the sheep and
• 1:00:54
  goats which need a wide-ranging territory.
• 1:00:58
  Earliest economic divide. Conflicts going on between
• 1:01:01
  herders and sedentary farmers into the 19th century, you know,
• 1:01:06
  with conflicts between the Native Americans and, you know,
• 1:01:09
  the colonists and also between the Bakhtiari nomads in Iran and
• 1:01:14
  settled Iranians who lived in cities in the 19th century that
• 1:01:18
  you had, like, nomads coming down on their horses and raiding
• 1:01:22
  the cities of essentially a modern nation state of Iran,
• 1:01:28
  causing chaos like the Mongols. Yeah, that's interesting to hear
• 1:01:35
  too, that because I can, I can relate with like when you say,
• 1:01:38
  you know, the people that had livestock, sheep, goats or
• 1:01:42
  cattle especially were a bit of a higher class or seen as a
• 1:01:48
  higher class. What's interesting about that to
• 1:01:51
  me in, in my path is, is that there's the runic system that
• 1:01:56
  the dramatic people had to write their, their, their language in.
• 1:02:02
  There's a rune that represents this the, the F phenom.
• 1:02:06
  So like Frank or, you know, Foote, but the name of the rune
• 1:02:12
  is Feihu and it comes from a proto Germanic word, which is
• 1:02:16
  Fei or Feihu is the, is the proto Germanic word.
• 1:02:20
  But the word translates to cattle and it means wealth
• 1:02:26
  because the people that had cattle were that was, that was a
• 1:02:29
  form of currency. You know, you could, yeah, if
• 1:02:31
  you had a lot of cattle or you had any cattle, you were more
• 1:02:35
  well to do in society because you had, you know, you could
• 1:02:38
  sell it. You could, you know what I mean?
• 1:02:40
  It was agriculture, working the land, eating it and all that.
• 1:02:44
  So it's interesting to hear like the the the similarities in
• 1:02:47
  that, in that way that cattle meant wealth, it meant higher
• 1:02:51
  status. And favor of the gods because
• 1:02:56
  cattle get sick, cattle can, you know, fall off a Cliff.
• 1:03:00
  You know, any sort of bad misfortune can happen.
• 1:03:03
  And you're going to assume the gods are pissed if that happens.
• 1:03:07
  And the person whose stocks increases, you see this all
• 1:03:10
  throughout the Bible, but also in many Near Eastern texts, in
• 1:03:14
  Egypt, in Mesopotamia and in Canaan, the increase of
• 1:03:18
  livestock has seen is divine favor and the land.
• 1:03:23
  We're talking like about kingship.
• 1:03:26
  Yeah. You want to talk about kingship,
• 1:03:27
  but that that's not a historical topic.
• 1:03:29
  We're talking about religion here.
• 1:03:31
  Yeah. Well, I mean deal with the
• 1:03:33
  development of religion. They're they totally didn't make
• 1:03:36
  it up just so they'd have a cushy job.
• 1:03:40
  No, and that's, you know, I think that when you get into
• 1:03:43
  monotheism, right and and the relationship between state power
• 1:03:47
  and, and, and a monotheistic system of, of belief.
• 1:03:53
  Cause once once that happened, it was believed that the king
• 1:03:57
  was ordained or, or chosen, you know, by, by God or whatever.
• 1:04:02
  It wasn't so much that you just were like, yeah, OK, Like, you
• 1:04:06
  know, the, the, the son gets born and, you know, inherits the
• 1:04:08
  Kingdom of his father as, as since he was his father was a
• 1:04:12
  king. And, you know, read Kings and
• 1:04:14
  read Chronicles in the Bible and it's just just genealogical.
• 1:04:18
  The interesting. Mush the the son of the so and
• 1:04:21
  so who was the son of so and so the blah blah, blah, blah, blah,
• 1:04:24
  blah blah. But I think, you know, when you
• 1:04:27
  think of like monotheistic relationships to state power, it
• 1:04:30
  would you say that it's historical, theological, both,
• 1:04:33
  none. So I, I would say that that
• 1:04:36
  there is a very strong connection between theological
• 1:04:39
  conceptions of the world and you know, political conception of
• 1:04:44
  the world. The monotheistic religion says
• 1:04:46
  there's one God in heaven and it's a natural take to say there
• 1:04:51
  should be 1 king on earth, which is why it leads into a form of
• 1:04:56
  absolute monarchy. That's never really was
• 1:04:58
  practiced among polytheists. We think of like the pharaoh as
• 1:05:02
  being all powerful, but the reality of Egyptian life was
• 1:05:06
  power was diffused. There were viziers, there was a
• 1:05:08
  nobility. It was almost futile actually,
• 1:05:10
  in many ways that how how decentralized Egypt was the same
• 1:05:15
  thing in Canaan as well. And there were many other more
• 1:05:18
  egalitarian forms of social organization in the Near East
• 1:05:21
  that are given less attention. But among the most polytheistic
• 1:05:25
  peoples, monotheism arises out of a a process of political
• 1:05:32
  centralization. There's one God there therefore
• 1:05:36
  must be 1 king who's a representative of this king.
• 1:05:40
  One of the interesting things I think about Canaanite religion
• 1:05:43
  is it directly attacks the idea of the divine right of kings and
• 1:05:48
  the divine succession, the secession you said from father
• 1:05:52
  to son. Because in the succession in the
• 1:05:56
  ball epic L, whose name literally this means God is
• 1:05:59
  basically a retiring. He doesn't want to be God
• 1:06:02
  anymore or doesn't want to be king of the gods anymore.
• 1:06:05
  So he has to decide who's going to be a successor.
• 1:06:07
  So naturally he chooses his son, but his son rules the gods with
• 1:06:12
  an iron fist and causes them to labor and toil under his reign.
• 1:06:16
  It's an it's strictly in economic terms.
• 1:06:19
  He's forcing them to do work and not paying them for it's slavery
• 1:06:22
  it's it's exploitation. It's.
• 1:06:26
  And Baal intervenes. Baal deposes the natural order
• 1:06:33
  of father to son by killing Yom, the God of the sea, the tyrant
• 1:06:38
  God, and installing a new order. He has to then beg El and El's
• 1:06:45
  wife Athirat or Ashura to let him build a palace.
• 1:06:49
  Because he kind of didn't do it the right way.
• 1:06:52
  So he didn't do it in a traditionally legitimate way.
• 1:06:57
  And he's very obsequious even after he's won his his little
• 1:07:00
  battle. And he actually feels guilt over
• 1:07:04
  killing his enemy. It's, you know, it's interesting
• 1:07:05
  that he feels ashamed over killing his enemy.
• 1:07:08
  And he feels and he acts, you know, bringing gifts to El and
• 1:07:13
  to Asura to sort of placate them.
• 1:07:17
  So the king of the gods is giving gifts.
• 1:07:19
  And then after he gets his palace, what does he do?
• 1:07:22
  It's another economic activity. He gives every single God wine
• 1:07:28
  and and food. It's a redistribution.
• 1:07:32
  So the previous God takes the illegitimate he's developed,
• 1:07:36
  driving his legitimacy through redistribution, through economic
• 1:07:39
  redistribution. The other God takes takes labor,
• 1:07:43
  demands tribute. Bring me gold, deliver ball in
• 1:07:49
  his partisans to me so I may inherit their gold.
• 1:07:51
  He wants to take Ball is legitimatized through his
• 1:07:55
  actions by distributing wealth. He makes the all the different
• 1:07:59
  gods are like the chair gods and the the cow goddesses, and they
• 1:08:04
  just list and goes on and on and on.
• 1:08:06
  It's a very boring or otherwise maybe humorous part of it
• 1:08:10
  because it just goes on and on and on.
• 1:08:12
  But that's the important thing is that no one is neglected.
• 1:08:15
  Even the lowest strata of gods are fed by Ball, just as the
• 1:08:19
  lowest strata of living beings are fed by Ball's reigns.
• 1:08:24
  It's a more egalitarian divine system than you know, this, you
• 1:08:29
  gave me that. That's one of the things that I
• 1:08:33
  think I really connected to because I, I believe in a very
• 1:08:37
  inherent nature of generosity and fairness and hospitality.
• 1:08:43
  That's, that's, that's very core to probably the ancient
• 1:08:46
  Mediterranean, ancient Near East, and probably also ancient
• 1:08:50
  Europe. I'm sure.
• 1:08:51
  I'm sure this is familiar. Yeah, I mean, Germanic culture
• 1:08:54
  is central around reciprocity and hospitality as well.
• 1:08:59
  I mean, it was, it's kind of there's a, you know, there's a
• 1:09:03
  there's a series of texts. There's really nothing that one
• 1:09:05
  could deduce as being sacred texts.
• 1:09:07
  Like we don't have the equivalent of a Bible or, or
• 1:09:10
  Torah or a Quran or anything like that.
• 1:09:12
  There's no, there's, but there's, there's texts from the
• 1:09:16
  late medieval period and even a little bit earlier that are
• 1:09:21
  considered primary sources. And in one of those sources we
• 1:09:24
  have the Eddas. Yeah.
• 1:09:25
  The Pros, The Eddas. Yeah.
• 1:09:28
  In the Eddas, there's a poem called Hove Them All and the
• 1:09:32
  Hove Them All, it means words of the High 1.
• 1:09:35
  So it's Odin's advice or Odin's, you know, recommendations on how
• 1:09:41
  to be a functioning member of society at the time, right, how
• 1:09:46
  to be a good guest, how to be a good host.
• 1:09:49
  What, what things to watch out for, practical knowledge to
• 1:09:53
  day-to-day life. A little bit of advice about,
• 1:09:56
  you know, marriage, not marriage, but like relationships
• 1:09:58
  between men and women. And then there's all there's the
• 1:10:01
  rune poems throughout it or the OR the discovery of the of the
• 1:10:04
  runic mysteries. But reciprocity is a central
• 1:10:08
  theme is, you know, a gift always seeks a gift in return.
• 1:10:13
  Exactly, and this is wisdom literature, this wisdom
• 1:10:17
  literature acting as the formal, as a like morality.
• 1:10:21
  It's it's fairly described as morality.
• 1:10:24
  And this has its roots. It has, you know, manifestations
• 1:10:28
  in the Near East as well. The Canaanites almost certainly
• 1:10:31
  had it. But we have more examples from
• 1:10:32
  like Mesopotamia with the Acadian father's advice to his
• 1:10:35
  son. Don't start any disputes.
• 1:10:37
  You don't know how things are going to go or the maxims of
• 1:10:41
  Tahoe Tep. You know a person who's serious
• 1:10:43
  all the time isn't going to have a good time, but the person
• 1:10:47
  who's frivolous all the time won't establish a household
• 1:10:50
  about balance and just good advice.
• 1:10:52
  And that, that's the foundation of morality.
• 1:10:54
  Morality is founded on wisdom. What is it going to bring this
• 1:10:59
  and that cause and effect? Yeah.
• 1:11:01
  Observation. Yeah.
• 1:11:05
  The role of observation is very significant in Canaanite
• 1:11:07
  religion as well, along with the political messaging of, you
• 1:11:13
  know, peace and new established orders of legitimacy.
• 1:11:18
  But Ball specifically gives people the instruction to listen
• 1:11:22
  to the whisper of stone, the speech of trees, the converse of
• 1:11:26
  heavens with the deeps. He's saying wisdom does not come
• 1:11:32
  from the gods directly. I can't teach you wisdom, but I
• 1:11:37
  can teach you how to learn wisdom by observing nature,
• 1:11:41
  observing the cycles of nature, observing the things in in this
• 1:11:46
  world in a more tangible way. Yeah.
• 1:11:51
  Almost like proto scientific one would say.
• 1:11:53
  Yeah, right. Yeah, because it it, it all
• 1:11:56
  makes sense no matter where you go like that, that, you know,
• 1:11:59
  that observance, that venerance, even I think there comes a point
• 1:12:03
  when you are more than just an observer.
• 1:12:06
  You become woven into the fabric of that reality.
• 1:12:09
  It becomes your life because that life is you and you are it.
• 1:12:12
  And it's a syncretism that takes place.
• 1:12:14
  Everything becomes kind of, you know, it's a symbiotic
• 1:12:17
  relationship. Not just I'm not just taking,
• 1:12:20
  I'm giving in return and I'm exchanging in this this cycle
• 1:12:25
  every day, as you know, as as a living entity myself and with
• 1:12:30
  all these seen and unseen forces, right.
• 1:12:37
  No, we were talking a lot about politics or, or, or political,
• 1:12:43
  you know, ideologies or movements and things that have
• 1:12:45
  definitely been a long time presence in the Middle East.
• 1:12:51
  Like I said before, I mean, they've these these lands have
• 1:12:54
  been in conflict for thousands and thousands of years.
• 1:12:57
  And we're seeing a lot more political turbulence here in the
• 1:13:03
  United States. But the world in general is just
• 1:13:06
  a mess. And what I've been noticing
• 1:13:10
  within like some of the, the the Pagan communities that I have
• 1:13:15
  oversight with, you know, or oversight to is, is that some
• 1:13:18
  you have these, you have these groups of people that are
• 1:13:21
  against political angles or are being political in your paganism
• 1:13:28
  sort of thing. And then you have these others
• 1:13:30
  that like, you can't not be political if you're, if you're
• 1:13:34
  really into your, you know, what, what you believe in.
• 1:13:36
  So I was going to ask, you know, do you think that polytheism is,
• 1:13:40
  is inherently political? Or is it something that modern
• 1:13:44
  systems are trying to force into political roles and and and
• 1:13:49
  further creating this divide that that seems to exist?
• 1:13:53
  I think polytheism by its nature is inherently political and has
• 1:13:59
  always been incorporated into systems of government.
• 1:14:02
  All polytheists like. Historically speaking,
• 1:14:06
  polytheists priests are integrated into the state.
• 1:14:09
  They perform a function for the state and are provided with
• 1:14:12
  means by the state. Julius Caesar famously being
• 1:14:16
  Pontifex Maximus, the biggest priest in Rome.
• 1:14:20
  That it was a function of the state because you wanted to have
• 1:14:23
  peace between the gods and the states, just diplomacy between
• 1:14:30
  human States and each other. And the gods were seen as
• 1:14:33
  higher. So you have to be kind of
• 1:14:34
  obsequious to them, even though it's kind of often were so proud
• 1:14:39
  of themselves that they could often be cheekily disrespectful
• 1:14:43
  to the gods. Not in that they didn't believe
• 1:14:45
  in them or they didn't perform the right sacrifices or worship,
• 1:14:49
  but sometimes they would kind of brush all up against the the
• 1:14:52
  idea that there was someone above them, even if it was the
• 1:14:57
  gods. Funny thing.
• 1:14:59
  Like for example with Publius Claudius, Claudius Poker
• 1:15:03
  throwing the sacred chickens overboard the ship in the first
• 1:15:07
  Punic War, and then that leading to a storm that wrecked the
• 1:15:11
  entire Roman fleet. And he was put on trial for it.
• 1:15:13
  And because he was rich and he bribed all the judges, he got
• 1:15:16
  off of it. But everybody was guilty, which
• 1:15:19
  is the funniest thing. That sounds that sounds eerily
• 1:15:23
  familiar to things happening now.
• 1:15:25
  Is very eerily familiar. Yeah, that's that is, you know,
• 1:15:30
  but people tacitly accepted that, understood that the gods
• 1:15:34
  were real. And how people reacted to the
• 1:15:36
  fact that the gods were real in polytheism is just fundamentally
• 1:15:39
  different from how people do in monotheism.
• 1:15:42
  In monotheism, you assume that you have to that the morally
• 1:15:46
  right thing to do is to serve the gods, whereas polytheism is
• 1:15:51
  a little bit more ambiguous than that.
• 1:15:53
  But there is right and wrong in in polytheism, and right and
• 1:15:57
  wrong is manifested through divine judgement in polytheism
• 1:16:02
  and falters if the actions of the king are bad.
• 1:16:06
  If the actions of the king are good with regards to the gods
• 1:16:08
  and with regards to his rule, the land prospers.
• 1:16:12
  So in that regard, it's it's fundamentally political that
• 1:16:16
  there is this moral demand for good government that I think has
• 1:16:22
  many parallels that is rooted in the gods, that they derive their
• 1:16:26
  legitimacy from the gods and they lose their legitimacy from
• 1:16:29
  the gods no matter what form of government that they had.
• 1:16:36
  I would also argue that of of polyseistic religions, Canaanite
• 1:16:39
  polytheism is one of the ones where the extant texts seem the
• 1:16:43
  most anti authority in a way against the the traditional
• 1:16:49
  power structures and more in favor of egalitarianism and
• 1:16:52
  fairness. Although you can get a lot of
• 1:16:55
  that in, in like the Hurrian religion as well, which is very
• 1:16:57
  interesting because it had a lot of influence on the candidate
• 1:16:59
  religion, which is not Semitic or Indo European.
• 1:17:02
  It's, it's it's own thing with their, their gods and monsters
• 1:17:07
  like their big God, you know, you know, and he got a lot of
• 1:17:12
  monsters born out of like mountains and the sea, like
• 1:17:17
  their God. He create, he's just kind of
• 1:17:19
  like intemperate, I guess. Polytheism.
• 1:17:23
  It accepts the, the fundamental reality that morality and
• 1:17:27
  reality is not black and white. It's filled with all shades, all
• 1:17:31
  different colours. Yeah, and there's no absolutes.
• 1:17:36
  There's no absolutes in in polytheism and that we are
• 1:17:40
  fundamentally bound by our reason to distinguish.
• 1:17:44
  It's an it's an anti faith tradition in and of that you
• 1:17:48
  have to use your reason to decide right and wrong.
• 1:17:53
  You can't refer to the book to say you should do this.
• 1:17:55
  Then you refer to the book in that you will respect the
• 1:17:59
  received wisdom of an elder, but not in such that you have to
• 1:18:03
  obey it or else you're a piece of shit.
• 1:18:07
  Well, yeah, I mean, if you don't, you know, you do or
• 1:18:09
  don't. It's the results are going to be
• 1:18:11
  what they're going to be based upon what was done or not done.
• 1:18:15
  So, you know, reap the reap the rewards or suffer the
• 1:18:17
  consequences of our actions. You know, it's, it's, that's
• 1:18:22
  really what it boils down to. You know, and you talked
• 1:18:27
  earlier, I think about, you know, being the, the term Kohan,
• 1:18:33
  you know, or, or priest, and then and that they are more of a
• 1:18:35
  servant to the people or, or serving the people as as
• 1:18:39
  intermediary or as, you know, the, the bridge between the, the
• 1:18:43
  holy and, and the mundane or the divine and the, and the profane.
• 1:18:46
  However you want to define those, those separations and how
• 1:18:50
  much that really works, right? How much that, you know, you
• 1:18:53
  have those in leadership positions, whether it's, you
• 1:18:57
  know, the priest class or, you know, the nobility that they're,
• 1:19:04
  they're not, they're not in that position to be above the people.
• 1:19:08
  They're in that position to serve the people.
• 1:19:10
  And we've lost that so much, especially in the West, in the
• 1:19:14
  Western world, you know, it's, it's, it's everybody's, you
• 1:19:16
  know, these politicians, they don't realize it.
• 1:19:21
  It's their job to serve us, not the other way around, you know?
• 1:19:25
  Very much so. Like the original Kings are just
• 1:19:30
  regular dudes. And the idea is that the gods
• 1:19:33
  lift them up. That's the rhetorical idea of
• 1:19:35
  why someone should be a king, you know, That's why someone
• 1:19:40
  should be. So legitimacy is, is derived
• 1:19:43
  from from their actions, from wisdom, from morality, from from
• 1:19:48
  deeds, rather than from just this naked idea of superficial
• 1:19:55
  legitimacy, let's say. Yeah, America, we have a
• 1:19:59
  Republican system. You pick two puppets of the
• 1:20:03
  elites and one of the top 2 gets to be president in numbers of
• 1:20:08
  votes. Right.
• 1:20:11
  Most votes. You had talked earlier about
• 1:20:16
  Ball and how you know the what got him to the position that he
• 1:20:22
  became as as this as this figure is, is his distribution of
• 1:20:29
  wealth and the generosity. He's a revolutionary who rebels
• 1:20:34
  against exploitation and oppression and it's a new system
• 1:20:39
  of redistribution and fairness. And there is no mention made
• 1:20:43
  actually of his redistribution being specifically playing
• 1:20:48
  favourites in this circumstance. It's it's a.
• 1:20:52
  One might argue it's an almost communistic equal distribution
• 1:20:57
  of gifts. Yeah, he's like Oprah.
• 1:21:01
  That's. It everybody gets a this, this
• 1:21:05
  'cause you did, you mentioned like you know, it, it goes down
• 1:21:08
  to even the the seemingly minorist of of the tears of
• 1:21:12
  Gods, right, 'cause you have different levels or different,
• 1:21:16
  you know, so, but everybody gets something.
• 1:21:19
  You just got, you know, wine and a slice of fat Ling.
• 1:21:26
  Yeah. And I think I don't know, do you
• 1:21:28
  all the the in the Canaanite, in this Canaanite polytheism, is
• 1:21:33
  there a sense of looking to ball at or, or looking to any of
• 1:21:37
  these divine figures as you know, examples of how to be or
• 1:21:41
  how to aspire or what to aspire towards?
• 1:21:43
  Is there any of that sense of their qualities that you look to
• 1:21:47
  emulate as people? I can't speak as to the
• 1:21:51
  experiences of other people, but to me I put a lot of emphasis on
• 1:21:56
  the Ball spirit, The spirit of active good.
• 1:22:02
  I would say it's, it's hard to quantify, but the spirit of
• 1:22:07
  doing good, taking action rather than being passive and of
• 1:22:12
  positive change, you can adapt. Ball is not constant.
• 1:22:16
  He is not flawless. He makes mistakes.
• 1:22:19
  He feels ashamed of killing Yom when Young could have just as
• 1:22:24
  easily been a captive. It's actually pointed out to him
• 1:22:26
  that he made this mistake and he feels bad.
• 1:22:30
  He's not he's not, he's not God. It's like everything he does is
• 1:22:34
  perfect. But he can learn from his
• 1:22:36
  mistakes and adapt and change his his ways to be a better
• 1:22:40
  person. Which is a wonderful lesson to
• 1:22:43
  learn that you don't have to be perfect.
• 1:22:46
  You don't have to, but you do have to make a conscious effort
• 1:22:50
  in this life to be better. I you don't, it's not about
• 1:22:53
  accepting Ball as your Christ and Lord and Savior and then
• 1:22:58
  everything's good. You go to heaven.
• 1:23:00
  You get to play the harp and eat Ding dongs.
• 1:23:03
  But no, it's it's action. Yeah.
• 1:23:07
  The Christians talk about faith versus works.
• 1:23:09
  It's all works all the way down for Canaanites.
• 1:23:13
  Yeah, see, that was such a big part of like when I, when I
• 1:23:18
  found Heathenry to and, and started moving in that way and I
• 1:23:23
  didn't, it wasn't like I've I discovered it and I started, you
• 1:23:27
  know, researching and, and believing and, and acting in
• 1:23:30
  ways that were reflective of that belief.
• 1:23:32
  And then when I did, I said, hey, mom, dad, I'm this now.
• 1:23:37
  I, I was quiet about it because I didn't want to stir the waters
• 1:23:41
  up, you know what I mean? Like I didn't want to cause them
• 1:23:43
  because I knew, like they weren't a proof, but I didn't, I
• 1:23:47
  didn't do what I was doing because of their approval or
• 1:23:50
  not. I was following what felt right
• 1:23:53
  for me and what, what, what my heart and what my spirit was
• 1:23:56
  calling me to do. But when, when they did find
• 1:24:00
  out, 'cause, you know, I'm not gonna lie to him.
• 1:24:02
  And they just asked me flat out, what do you, you know, what,
• 1:24:04
  what are you about now? Like, what is this?
• 1:24:06
  And I'm like, well, it's, you know, and I try to explain it to
• 1:24:08
  him. And that was that was the
• 1:24:11
  benchmark for them to determine who I was as a person.
• 1:24:17
  It's like, forget about the fact of what I'm doing.
• 1:24:20
  My works really didn't seem to matter to them.
• 1:24:23
  It was my faith. And I'm like, well, hold on.
• 1:24:26
  Doesn't doesn't the religion doesn't the doesn't what you
• 1:24:28
  brought me up in the doctrine that you teach and the doctrine
• 1:24:31
  that you so vehemently defend, Doesn't your doctrine tell you
• 1:24:34
  that faith without works is dead and that the works are what's
• 1:24:38
  going to get you to where you want to be?
• 1:24:40
  It's not what you believe in. It's what you do.
• 1:24:43
  You're like, yeah, I'm like, well, then we'll look at my
• 1:24:45
  works and don't, don't look at the label that I've assigned
• 1:24:49
  myself or that's been assigned to me or whatever.
• 1:24:51
  Look at my deeds. What do my deeds tell you that I
• 1:24:53
  am? And I think the biggest pitfall
• 1:24:57
  that many polytheists come into is they are so tied to this
• 1:25:02
  monotheistic conception of faith versus rather than than worrying
• 1:25:06
  about your actions, you, you worry about your identity, you
• 1:25:09
  worry about your confession, you worry about your race.
• 1:25:12
  So one of the biggest issues I've noticed, and I, I noticed
• 1:25:16
  you talking about what actually brought me to your channel was
• 1:25:19
  you're talking about racist undercurrents in Heathenry and
• 1:25:22
  in Ossitru and talking about how you should only be in this if
• 1:25:26
  you're a certain race. And of course I can't, it's
• 1:25:30
  impossible to deny that there are racist undertones.
• 1:25:36
  And well, I mean, they're racist undercurrents in Germanic
• 1:25:41
  poison, Germanic neopaganism that have been that, that have
• 1:25:45
  manifested out of a more conventional, more open kind of
• 1:25:50
  polytheism as as a more traditional form.
• 1:25:54
  You know, people living in Germania and like, you know, the
• 1:25:59
  1st century AD did not, I mean, they were, they could perceive
• 1:26:03
  differences in appearance, but they didn't have a racial
• 1:26:05
  ideology. Like groups that have Co opted
• 1:26:09
  your ruins, Co opted your symbols, Mule Nair and all that.
• 1:26:13
  Yeah. There are people like that in
• 1:26:16
  our tradition, but I really want to expressly state that the gods
• 1:26:24
  belong to everyone. The wisdom of the gods and the
• 1:26:29
  wisdom of all religions belong to everyone.
• 1:26:32
  I practice what I do because this was my calling, but I can't
• 1:26:36
  invalidate what's, you know, the Aztecs were, you know, I, I
• 1:26:41
  can't invalidate what another tradition is teaching I because
• 1:26:46
  it's, it's intuition and it's, it's personal.
• 1:26:49
  It's so personal. I'm, I'm doing not because you
• 1:26:54
  know, of anything other than my own experience and my own
• 1:26:57
  perception. And I have to respect, in my
• 1:27:01
  opinion, the the perspective and experiences of others and the
• 1:27:07
  wisdom that comes from other places putting that together
• 1:27:11
  into something that's meaningful for for me as an individual.
• 1:27:14
  But more importantly, what's good for society.
• 1:27:17
  Looking past yourself and viewing the world kind of like
• 1:27:22
  as one big family with all the the chaos and war we should look
• 1:27:28
  at. Like history is so fixated on
• 1:27:31
  war, but who has ever researched peace?
• 1:27:34
  Who has made a concerted effort to see how long lasting
• 1:27:39
  consistent peace has been brought about and maintained?
• 1:27:44
  One of I think the greatest achievement of ball worshippers
• 1:27:48
  in history. But not victory in some battles
• 1:27:51
  that not Hannibal defeating the Romans and canny.
• 1:27:53
  That was super counterintuitive and counter kind of
• 1:27:56
  counterproductive to what we we stand for.
• 1:27:59
  But was the negotiation and being the intermediaries and the
• 1:28:04
  conversation starters. That brought 100 years of peace
• 1:28:07
  in the Middle East in one of the most chaotic times in human
• 1:28:10
  history, bringing peace between the Hittites and the Egyptians,
• 1:28:14
  which was forged out of a mutual bond, a round ball, and which
• 1:28:19
  had then become this international symbol.
• 1:28:22
  And the Hittites of course had their own version of a Thunder
• 1:28:25
  God with, you know, with Tarhun's or Teshu did this, the
• 1:28:30
  Hurrian version which popular the Hittite empire.
• 1:28:32
  But they were aware of Baal as as a Syrian conception.
• 1:28:35
  And the Egyptians of course were settled in the Delta with
• 1:28:38
  Canaanites, The delta Canaanites who almost certainly if there
• 1:28:41
  was a historical Moses came from this group, they were perfectly
• 1:28:45
  aware of Baal and worshipped him as well.
• 1:28:47
  So you found this intermediate cultural glue that could bring
• 1:28:54
  peace after the first really truly traumatic and devastating
• 1:29:00
  war in human history with the first real strong great power
• 1:29:09
  peace treaty that turned the most vilest and hidden enemies
• 1:29:13
  into friends and family for 100 years until the Assyrians messed
• 1:29:21
  it up. But Syrians?
• 1:29:25
  Those darn Assyrians, boy, I don't know.
• 1:29:28
  No, it is, it's no to, to, to, to have, you know, that's,
• 1:29:31
  that's the real goal, I think is, you know, how, how long can
• 1:29:34
  we go? How can we reach a point of, of
• 1:29:36
  peace? And it's not to say that, you
• 1:29:38
  know, peace takes work. You know, there's a, there's a
• 1:29:40
  term in, in heathenry that gets used a lot.
• 1:29:46
  Newer, newer pagans that come into Heathenry tend to misuse
• 1:29:49
  it. But the word is Frith.
• 1:29:52
  And Frith is a word that means there's, there's, there's
• 1:29:58
  undertones of peace involved with Frith.
• 1:30:00
  But Frith means that, you know, I am obligated to you.
• 1:30:04
  You are obligated to me. We are obligated to one another.
• 1:30:06
  And the peace that we have as a result of our Frith is that we
• 1:30:12
  work towards that. It's it's, it's, it's reciprocal
• 1:30:16
  and viability. You know, I'm, I'm going to be
• 1:30:19
  there for you. You're going to be there for me.
• 1:30:20
  We're going to help each other out.
• 1:30:22
  And as a result, we're going to be peaceful.
• 1:30:24
  We're not going to always agree on things, but we're going to be
• 1:30:27
  able to work through those things.
• 1:30:28
  We can have a of, of, you know, a fervent spirit that might
• 1:30:32
  cause disagreement, but it's not going to put us at war against
• 1:30:38
  each other. We're going to be able to work
• 1:30:39
  it out. We're going to be able to, you
• 1:30:40
  know, find that ground and still have and maintain that Frith
• 1:30:45
  between us. It takes work.
• 1:30:48
  It's not just, you know, being passive and, and laying down and
• 1:30:52
  taking, accepting whatever just to come.
• 1:30:54
  It's, it's, it takes strength. It takes, you know, obligating a
• 1:30:58
  sense of obligation to, to your, you know, to your group, to your
• 1:31:02
  people, to your family, especially.
• 1:31:06
  It's a very familial, you know, the, the, the, the, the
• 1:31:11
  connection, the, the obligation of this very familial.
• 1:31:14
  But family goes beyond blood, Ken, you know what I mean?
• 1:31:18
  It, it becomes something that you've shared that, that
• 1:31:21
  connection with people who aren't necessarily related to
• 1:31:24
  you by blood, but who you shared, you know, moments of
• 1:31:27
  reality with that secure those bonds.
• 1:31:31
  And I think that's the real that I think that that's the real,
• 1:31:35
  that's the real flex, as the, as the kids nowadays say is, is, is
• 1:31:38
  to see how long you can go without killing one another, you
• 1:31:41
  know, or for, or I mean. Like we'll see how long, you
• 1:31:46
  know, because there are plenty of examples in history of
• 1:31:50
  sustained pieces as you never think about it.
• 1:31:54
  You only think about how they end rather than how they begin
• 1:31:57
  and how they're maintained. And that's, I think that's a
• 1:32:04
  question for historians, but also a question for priests.
• 1:32:07
  It's a question for each of us to say how can we contribute to
• 1:32:12
  peace? It doesn't necessarily mean
• 1:32:13
  being nonviolent. Sometimes to preserve peace, you
• 1:32:17
  need to stand up to the monsters that are troubling your society
• 1:32:22
  makes peace at the end, but only after like, you know, 2 wars and
• 1:32:27
  a bunch of bribes to his boss. But.
• 1:32:31
  There's a there's a comparison in like Old English miss.
• 1:32:35
  Like sometimes you've got to kill Grendel the, the old the
• 1:32:38
  wolf saga. Like sometimes Grendel comes and
• 1:32:40
  disturbs the hall and sometimes you got to kill Grendel.
• 1:32:43
  You got to confront that monster.
• 1:32:44
  You got to, you got to, you got to be capable of great violence,
• 1:32:48
  you know. It's it's exactly saying you
• 1:32:51
  there's no absolutes. It's about circumstance.
• 1:32:54
  It's about wisdom, cause and effect, observation and deep,
• 1:33:00
  deep study or or at least a lot of mistakes until you know well,
• 1:33:03
  I won't try this again. It didn't work last time.
• 1:33:07
  Yeah, yeah. I mean, you're not going to know
• 1:33:09
  unless you, you know, get your hands in the in the mix and and
• 1:33:13
  actually start messing around and then figuring it out.
• 1:33:17
  The experience? The bitterest teacher.
• 1:33:19
  I don't know if it was Seneca who said it or Confucius, but
• 1:33:23
  they could just as well boast that is.
• 1:33:26
  Yeah, I love Seneca stuff, man. A lot of those philosophers have
• 1:33:30
  It's it's timeless wisdom and it and it transcends cultures.
• 1:33:35
  It transcends, you know. We have more in common than we
• 1:33:40
  have difference. That's the facts.
• 1:33:44
  And the more I learn about different cultures and I learn
• 1:33:46
  about what separates us, the more I look about what, what,
• 1:33:49
  what, what is the same, you know, and our shared humanity
• 1:33:52
  and our shared values, our shared intuition.
• 1:33:58
  I think this episode has been a, a, a huge testament to that
• 1:34:01
  because I went into this knowing nothing or, or sorry, I went
• 1:34:05
  into this interview knowing what I thought was absolutely nothing
• 1:34:10
  about Canaanite religion. And as you start talking about
• 1:34:13
  things, I'm finding parallels and similarities to my own fate.
• 1:34:16
  And I'm going, we're really not that different.
• 1:34:19
  You know what I mean? You call them something
• 1:34:20
  different. You have maybe different
• 1:34:22
  ideologies that are, that are unique to the culture or
• 1:34:24
  whatever. But ultimately I'm gelling with
• 1:34:27
  a lot of what you're saying you're gelling, you know what I
• 1:34:29
  mean? It's it's there's there's more
• 1:34:30
  similar than there is different and we.
• 1:34:33
  Even have like cats, we even have our own horn helmets.
• 1:34:38
  So that's that's in common. Yeah.
• 1:34:41
  Now do you guys do, do you guys have like a a auger?
• 1:34:46
  Trip with the the Vikings. Yeah, yeah.
• 1:34:50
  What about like holidays, holy tides?
• 1:34:53
  How like is it? Is your, do you, do you observe
• 1:34:56
  like Luna solar time reckoning or is it fixed calendar dates?
• 1:35:00
  Like how how was, how was that ancient civilization?
• 1:35:03
  How did they keep track of things?
• 1:35:06
  They they used lunar, a lunar cycle, and it was all built
• 1:35:10
  around agriculture. So the earliest Canaanite
• 1:35:13
  calendar comes from the Canaanite city of Gazer and it
• 1:35:16
  was about like the 11th century BC.
• 1:35:19
  I visited Geser actually almost dyed of dehydration there and
• 1:35:23
  sun stroke, but that's another story.
• 1:35:26
  You have a famous Geser calendar.
• 1:35:28
  And I was like, these two months are of planting olives.
• 1:35:32
  These are of grain harvest, these are fresh in the wheat.
• 1:35:35
  And that's that's how the calendar was literally laid out
• 1:35:40
  of lunar months. But these months were
• 1:35:44
  specifically tied to the agricultural cycle.
• 1:35:49
  Literally. Yeah.
• 1:35:52
  And holidays were usually built around that were a mythological
• 1:35:56
  connection and Ugaritz, they have for example the feast of
• 1:36:00
  the gracious gods, which I don't know how racy this this video
• 1:36:05
  can get, but. Oh, you're fine.
• 1:36:07
  Go for it. Yeah.
• 1:36:09
  It's it's, it's a myth. L, who's the father of the gods.
• 1:36:13
  He's he's actually rebelling against his father.
• 1:36:15
  It's kind of cyclical, I guess, like that he's rebelling against
• 1:36:18
  his father and his father makes, he has his two daughters, Rahmai
• 1:36:22
  and Aftirat, and gives them weapons to kill his son.
• 1:36:26
  But he's cooking this bird on the fire, you know, smells
• 1:36:29
  really nice. And he's also kind of handsome.
• 1:36:32
  So these two women were also sisters.
• 1:36:35
  You know, you get a scent of that roasting bird and the
• 1:36:39
  dripping juice of the meat and like, and you know, they say the
• 1:36:44
  fastest way to a woman's heart is through her stomach.
• 1:36:48
  Well, at least into her if you want to get into her stomach.
• 1:36:52
  So the Greece's gods commemorates how he seduced
• 1:36:55
  these two women who were to be two goddesses who were to be as
• 1:36:58
  assassins who became his wives and impregnated them with the
• 1:37:01
  two next of the next generation of gods, Shaharwah and Shalim.
• 1:37:05
  The God of the Dawn and the God of the dusk.
• 1:37:08
  Twins. Not twins in that they're
• 1:37:09
  literally twins, but twins in that they were both conceived in
• 1:37:14
  the same BBQ Bender. A BBQ Bender?
• 1:37:19
  Wow, that's quite that's quite a story, man.
• 1:37:23
  And it's interesting because like a lot of the what?
• 1:37:26
  And they would actually reenact this.
• 1:37:28
  The king would do this thing called a hiros gamos or a a holy
• 1:37:32
  marriage where they would take two young beautiful virgins and
• 1:37:35
  the king would impregnate them or at least sleep with them.
• 1:37:40
  OK. So that that was something that
• 1:37:43
  alleged. It's ambiguous because, like
• 1:37:45
  the, the language is not 100% fully understood.
• 1:37:49
  And there's. Like kunai?
• 1:37:50
  Like you have these clay tablets and if you get a dink in them in
• 1:37:55
  the wrong place, you can make it really confusing what the thing
• 1:37:57
  says. Some of those things have a lot
• 1:37:59
  of dinks. I don't know why they use a
• 1:38:01
  lacuna instead of dink dink it. It makes more sense to me.
• 1:38:03
  Just say dink. People understand what a dink is
• 1:38:07
  that is. Yeah, that's what I think
• 1:38:10
  happened too with, with a lot of the translations in languages is
• 1:38:13
  'cause you know, when, when you know, you have, when you don't
• 1:38:17
  have paper and you're having to chisel it into stone or, you
• 1:38:22
  know, scribe it into wood. You're going to make mistakes,
• 1:38:26
  I'm sure. And, and you know, it's, it
• 1:38:28
  doesn't, you know, the longer it's, it's there, the, the war,
• 1:38:32
  the more worn out it becomes. So you start looking at, you
• 1:38:34
  know, 23000 year old tablets of something like what it is that
• 1:38:39
  an E or an or is it an X? You know what I mean?
• 1:38:42
  Like, well, ironically, these, these clay tablets survived much
• 1:38:46
  better than the the writing. Basically papyrus or an early
• 1:38:50
  form of paper was invented because the, the papyrus rotted
• 1:38:53
  very quickly. The Levant is actually quite
• 1:38:55
  humid compared to let's say the deserts outside of Egypt.
• 1:38:59
  So we didn't get a lot of all our literary sources are from
• 1:39:01
  the Bronze Age. This is actually before the Iron
• 1:39:04
  Age practically. So we know more about what's
• 1:39:06
  earlier rather than what's later.
• 1:39:09
  When the city of Ugar, it was destroyed when the cities in
• 1:39:12
  northwestern Syria was burned, which would burn books.
• 1:39:17
  But you know what? It also kind of acts like a kiln
• 1:39:19
  for all those clay tablets in their archive.
• 1:39:22
  Oh yeah, true this. Section of the city preserved
• 1:39:24
  its history, its literature of the great ironies.
• 1:39:28
  We know about the city's history so well because strictly because
• 1:39:32
  it was destroyed. Yeah.
• 1:39:35
  Is that survived the Bronze Age collapse we know less about,
• 1:39:38
  ironically because more cities were built on top of them like a
• 1:39:42
  birthday cake of garbage. Right.
• 1:39:46
  That's what archaeologists call a tell.
• 1:39:48
  It's a hill, but it's not really a hill.
• 1:39:50
  It's a birthday cake of garbage. Birthday cake of garbage.
• 1:39:53
  That's funny. Yeah.
• 1:39:55
  It's interesting how you talk about, you know, the with like
• 1:39:57
  the, the natural cycles of things and and watching and and
• 1:40:00
  observing. You know, seasons and, and what
• 1:40:03
  was happening at a certain period of time.
• 1:40:05
  It's, you know, nowadays in modern times, like you, you
• 1:40:07
  know, I, I mentioned at the very beginning of the show that for
• 1:40:10
  the dramatic people that you know, you'll or midwinter, you
• 1:40:15
  know, they observed it. They deserved time or they,
• 1:40:17
  they, they reckon time and it was a Luna solar, Luna solar
• 1:40:22
  calendar. But they calculated when they
• 1:40:25
  would do things based on when the moon, like the full or new
• 1:40:29
  moon, but seasonally as well, 'cause like, for example, you
• 1:40:32
  know, midwinter in Northern Europe was brutal.
• 1:40:37
  It, you know, it was, it was the, the halfway point before,
• 1:40:40
  you know, you, you made it through the, the, the darkest
• 1:40:44
  and coldest times of the year. And then things are starting to
• 1:40:46
  thaw out and you're getting closer to your summer and
• 1:40:49
  planting months. But then you go over here to
• 1:40:52
  like, you know, the United States and people are doing Yule
• 1:40:56
  closer to when Christmas is happening.
• 1:40:58
  I'm like, well, that's that. They move that.
• 1:41:01
  When Scandinavia became Christian, they moved it for the
• 1:41:06
  Christian king Hawking the good to still kind of be in the good
• 1:41:11
  graces of the people without being Pagan.
• 1:41:13
  He was a Christian king, a good king.
• 1:41:15
  Also is on late December because that was also the time the
• 1:41:20
  Romans had their Saturnalia. And Invictus, Exactly.
• 1:41:26
  Sol Invictus. It was, you know, and, and back
• 1:41:28
  then it was the Julian calendar. Anyway, they hadn't, they hadn't
• 1:41:33
  switched to the Gregorian calendar.
• 1:41:35
  So, yeah, the solstice was at the same time Sol Invictus.
• 1:41:38
  And so you're, you know, again, it was a, it was a political
• 1:41:44
  move for the king to move their, in their, their native practice
• 1:41:48
  from middle of the winter back closer to when, you know, the,
• 1:41:54
  the, the, the Saturnali, the, the, the, the, the soul
• 1:41:58
  Invictus, the, the return of the sun, the solstice, you know,
• 1:42:01
  wow, let's just do that and we'll call it, you know, we'll
• 1:42:04
  call it Eul now. And, and, but it's also when the
• 1:42:06
  Christians were are going to celebrate their Christmas.
• 1:42:10
  It's all that you know, it was a political move.
• 1:42:13
  Question about Canaanite holidays.
• 1:42:15
  Yeah. So I, I do 2 holidays a year.
• 1:42:17
  I I commit to doing two of them. One of them is Marzihu, which is
• 1:42:21
  our our festival honoring the dead, our ancestors.
• 1:42:25
  We get together in societies and we have a feast and we have
• 1:42:28
  drinks and we reminisce about the people who were in our lives
• 1:42:32
  who passed away. That's one of them.
• 1:42:33
  It's kind of like Canonite Day of the Dead, basically.
• 1:42:36
  OK. The other one I do is a key to
• 1:42:38
  because that's a lot of fun as well.
• 1:42:40
  It's technically Babylonian, but in antiquity, canonites always
• 1:42:44
  did it and it happens to be always on April 1st.
• 1:42:49
  But it was, it was like a whole week actually in in ancient
• 1:42:52
  Babylon and a little bit longer than a week.
• 1:42:55
  I think it was like 12 days. And it always started with the
• 1:42:58
  king. He, he paid his respects to the
• 1:43:00
  high priest And the priest would start making really, really rude
• 1:43:05
  accusations against the king and castigating everything.
• 1:43:08
  Oh, you, you did this wrong. You did that wrong.
• 1:43:10
  And it would end with the priest giving the king a big slap in
• 1:43:13
  the face. Wow.
• 1:43:17
  My family does. It is.
• 1:43:19
  I play the role of the king. Actually.
• 1:43:21
  I get to be the king. I'm not the priest.
• 1:43:22
  My brother gets to be the priest because he gets to slap me.
• 1:43:25
  Oh wow, so you get to act it out.
• 1:43:28
  Yeah, we do it and I put it like a crown.
• 1:43:29
  He has to slap me so hard that the crown falls off.
• 1:43:33
  OK. And he looks scrawny and that's
• 1:43:36
  the reason I have him do it instead of someone else who
• 1:43:39
  would actually knock my head off.
• 1:43:40
  But he could really throw it. And there's a few videos of me
• 1:43:44
  getting a slap in the face. That's a lot of fun.
• 1:43:47
  I love that. I love that part of it.
• 1:43:51
  I think it's really cool that you have these celebrations that
• 1:43:54
  involve like a, a, like a theatrical, you know, there's
• 1:43:58
  ritual theater, very. Much like that.
• 1:44:01
  And it's, it's not taken way too seriously.
• 1:44:03
  Like, you know, growing up, my, my dad's family was Jewish and
• 1:44:07
  my grandmother was kind of in charge of running the things.
• 1:44:10
  But she's the only one who kind of really took it seriously
• 1:44:12
  because almost all my dad's family were really secular.
• 1:44:15
  Yeah, but it's more about, like, the little rituals of family
• 1:44:19
  rather, and how the family did things rather than what's the
• 1:44:22
  right way to do things. We would skip parts that we
• 1:44:24
  thought were boring, for example.
• 1:44:27
  And for me, it's more about the family and the community and
• 1:44:31
  getting friends together for a good meal.
• 1:44:33
  Honoring the gods was important, too.
• 1:44:35
  And I always make sure to honor the gods in our festivals and
• 1:44:38
  tell people what it's about. But it's also super important to
• 1:44:42
  get people together, have the wine and the the meats and
• 1:44:46
  different foods, you know, vegetarian foods because so many
• 1:44:49
  vegetarians and nowadays, but you know, get people in the mood
• 1:44:53
  to celebrate because that's what this together makes us reminded
• 1:44:57
  that we are not just islands. We are not just because if
• 1:45:01
  you're just by yourself, it's very easy to think that there's
• 1:45:03
  one God because it's your internal monologue.
• 1:45:06
  Talk to different people. It's much easier to accept
• 1:45:09
  polytheism. I'd argue it's more social.
• 1:45:12
  Yeah, it's, that's the beauty of of, I think a lot of Pagan
• 1:45:16
  practices and or polytheistic beliefs, but especially it, it
• 1:45:20
  relates to me where, you know, with, with Heathenry is that,
• 1:45:24
  you know, what documented sources tell us about the way
• 1:45:28
  the Germanic people's observed their holy tides is minimal
• 1:45:32
  because the first of all, they were a largely illiterate
• 1:45:35
  civilization. They didn't really know how to
• 1:45:37
  read or write. It wasn't until the Christians
• 1:45:40
  came in and monks started writing things down about their
• 1:45:43
  ways and maybe, you know, inserted their own Christian
• 1:45:46
  bias into it that we know anything about anything.
• 1:45:49
  But what we do know repeatedly is that when they would gather
• 1:45:53
  for bloat for, for their seasonal sacrifices, whether it
• 1:45:57
  was a midwinter at Yule or whether it was the victory blow
• 1:46:01
  in in summer or whether it was for their new year in it to to
• 1:46:05
  start their winter. Because the Germanic people
• 1:46:08
  believe that their their year started at the onset of winter.
• 1:46:12
  So that first moon of winter nights was one of the three
• 1:46:16
  major holy tides that they'd observed.
• 1:46:18
  And it's repeatedly seen that they would gather whether it was
• 1:46:26
  at the family level or whether it was a communal, sometimes
• 1:46:30
  different parts of the country would or different parts of the
• 1:46:33
  regions would have, you know, we'll say maybe, you know, the
• 1:46:36
  Norwegians might have done it where it was a private affair,
• 1:46:38
  whereas the Swedes had it at, you know, old Uppsala in at the
• 1:46:42
  temple in Sweden or whatever. But anyway, the point being is
• 1:46:45
  that it was a communal thing. It was gathering together with
• 1:46:48
  everybody to celebrate this thing.
• 1:46:51
  It wasn't, you know, a private affair wasn't a solitary sort of
• 1:46:55
  thing. I'm sure whether it was
• 1:46:57
  documented or not, you know, I'm sure that they had their own
• 1:47:01
  solitary practices and observances.
• 1:47:03
  I'm sure they did their own things that didn't get ever
• 1:47:06
  written down. But it got passed down.
• 1:47:09
  It got it got passed down orally.
• 1:47:10
  It got shared with the family or the people that they were close
• 1:47:13
  to. And it was those traditions were
• 1:47:15
  carried on in that way, at least for some time.
• 1:47:18
  But again, the point being is that you, you, you have more,
• 1:47:23
  you know, it means more when you get to celebrate it with, with,
• 1:47:26
  with people around you, you know, and people that share in
• 1:47:29
  that, in that belief, you know, common ground.
• 1:47:33
  It's it means something more than to just, you know, do it by
• 1:47:37
  yourself for. Me, I don't even care if the
• 1:47:40
  people share my belief, I just care if they do the meat dance.
• 1:47:44
  The meat dance. Yeah, I don't.
• 1:47:46
  It's my little joke. It's a it's a running joke in my
• 1:47:49
  family 'cause sometimes we would have Mead and whenever we have
• 1:47:52
  Mead, I would do the Mead dance. Oh, the Mead dance.
• 1:47:56
  OK, For some reason I thought you meant meat dance.
• 1:47:58
  I'm like, that's like my kind of party, I guess, like.
• 1:48:02
  I have to have a dance for a Mead, but is an important part
• 1:48:06
  of polytheistic traditions. Yeah.
• 1:48:09
  Dance music, that expression, that play that.
• 1:48:15
  Yeah. Throwing your slippers at
• 1:48:17
  people, That's more of a modern interpretation.
• 1:48:20
  I thought that was just AI thought that was just a a a a an
• 1:48:25
  abuela thing like a an angry Latin grandma thing or.
• 1:48:29
  Or no, I don't know. It's but Moroccans do it too, so
• 1:48:32
  I think everyone does it. Anyone who has to wear shoes in
• 1:48:35
  their house, they can't go barefoot, but they can't bring
• 1:48:37
  their shoes in if they have slippers.
• 1:48:39
  And like now I need to get it. We'll be right back.
• 1:48:50
  Yeah, Man, this has been really fun.
• 1:48:52
  I just was checking our time. We're almost, we're getting
• 1:48:54
  close to two hours now. So that was more than I was
• 1:48:57
  expecting we'd get into. But I feel like we really, you
• 1:49:00
  know, I definitely learned a lot.
• 1:49:01
  I I, I don't mean to, to downplay it at all.
• 1:49:03
  I may not have known the specifics of the religious
• 1:49:06
  aspects of, of the Canaanite polytheism, but the spirit
• 1:49:10
  behind it is so much of what I can relate to.
• 1:49:14
  It's, it's really interesting to, to see, you know, to talk to
• 1:49:18
  somebody for the first time and, and learn about those ways and
• 1:49:22
  find some, so many similarities. So I do really appreciate you
• 1:49:25
  taking time out of your schedule to, to come on the show and, and
• 1:49:29
  share this with us. I feel like a lot of people are
• 1:49:32
  going to get the same thing out of it that I did or, or, you
• 1:49:36
  know, get some, get some good, get some good medicine from it
• 1:49:40
  all. Do you have any before we get
• 1:49:45
  into some of like the, the closing up of things like do you
• 1:49:47
  have 'cause I'm, you know, my audience is, is pretty, you
• 1:49:52
  know, heathen or Pagan centric. But do you have like any, like
• 1:49:59
  you talked earlier about being on, on a podcast or, or a
• 1:50:02
  channel, like do you have a, a source on or anything?
• 1:50:04
  Like do you present yourself on social media anywhere that if
• 1:50:07
  people want to learn more about this Canaanite polytheism that
• 1:50:11
  they could connect with you in any sort of way or, or are you
• 1:50:15
  accessible like that at all or? Yes, of course.
• 1:50:17
  So I have a YouTube channel which I don't know see under
• 1:50:24
  under here my name. This makes the Kohan that should
• 1:50:28
  be easy to remember. We'll link it down here too.
• 1:50:30
  We'll link it in the description for everybody the.
• 1:50:33
  Kohan and I also write books. I used to do it on Amazon but
• 1:50:39
  nowadays I just give people the book for free and then I guess I
• 1:50:46
  could put a link to my Instagram.
• 1:50:48
  Just DM me and I'll send the books.
• 1:50:51
  They're mostly historical fiction actually, because it
• 1:50:54
  puts you in the mind space of this.
• 1:50:57
  I'm going to write a more thorough book of Canaanite
• 1:51:01
  mythology and eventually of liturgy as well.
• 1:51:04
  That would be Colette Siegel. That's on Instagram and people
• 1:51:10
  can get in touch with me. I'll answer any question for any
• 1:51:12
  reason or get involved and do anything.
• 1:51:15
  And I always tell people there's an optional donation and people
• 1:51:19
  are probably way more generous, generous than they should be.
• 1:51:22
  I actually the first guy I, I gave a copy of my book through
• 1:51:26
  Instagram instead of Amazon. He, he gave me like 200 Swiss
• 1:51:30
  francs for it. I'm like, what do you think this
• 1:51:32
  is? And gold leaf, it's just the PDF
• 1:51:34
  file, but a lot of PDF files print on gold leaf.
• 1:51:38
  You know, the current events going on.
• 1:51:41
  Oh, I'm being topical. I see, I see.
• 1:51:46
  That's awesome, man. So yeah, we'll definitely link
• 1:51:48
  all this stuff in the podcast show notes and the description.
• 1:51:51
  Cause again, for the video experience and folks on Patreon,
• 1:51:55
  check out the description for all the stuff that Coletz has
• 1:51:58
  already talked about. And then everywhere on the audio
• 1:52:01
  platforms, just check the show notes because that'll be linked
• 1:52:04
  so you know where you can get in touch with him and YouTube and
• 1:52:09
  all that fun stuff. Religion, but also about a lot
• 1:52:11
  of political stuff. I've been much more leaning into
• 1:52:14
  the political side of things now because just how things are.
• 1:52:18
  And I couldn't, you know, remain silent with, with how things
• 1:52:21
  are. Yeah, now, I mean, I, I
• 1:52:24
  appreciate the, the transparency, the honesty, the
• 1:52:28
  conviction again, it's you know, I don't, I've never, I've never
• 1:52:31
  stood, I've never used my platform or my voice as a, you
• 1:52:35
  know, doing this stuff to push one way or the other.
• 1:52:38
  But I do want to give people the place to talk and and share
• 1:52:42
  their what's on their mind. It's you know, I'm and and I
• 1:52:46
  learned things too throughout it.
• 1:52:48
  So it's it's, it's, it's been an edifying to say the least, and I
• 1:52:53
  appreciate you wanting to come on here and, and share your
• 1:52:56
  thoughts with with my audience as well.
• 1:53:00
  It's been a lot of fun. So before we get wrapped up
• 1:53:03
  here, this is the time of the show where I go into, let's just
• 1:53:05
  kind of these random questions, rapid fire style, right?
• 1:53:09
  Whatever first comes to your mind.
• 1:53:11
  So it's nothing too serious, just instinctive responses.
• 1:53:17
  But who's your favorite deity? In in in Canaanite polytheism?
• 1:53:23
  Then you can't say ball, really. A ball Haddad, but I also really
• 1:53:29
  like Kothar Wahasis because I really relate to him as like a
• 1:53:32
  Craftsman, a Smith, and a person who works with his hands.
• 1:53:36
  That he's the most underrated God for sure.
• 1:53:40
  OK, right, that's a great one. What book would you recommend or
• 1:53:45
  sorry, what book do you think that people would get wrong
• 1:53:47
  about ancient polytheism? Like is there a publication that
• 1:53:50
  you've read and you're like, ah, no, this is this is just who
• 1:53:52
  hockey that you. Would I think it's written by
• 1:53:57
  you Google canonite religion you're going to be confronted
• 1:54:01
  with The Who hockey front and center because the Christians
• 1:54:04
  love to have a go at us. I think you'll know when you see
• 1:54:08
  it. I can't even pick a one in
• 1:54:10
  particular, but it's. Overwhelming, man.
• 1:54:14
  So, conversely, what would you recommend for people that want
• 1:54:18
  to get to know about it? Seriously, Is there a book that
• 1:54:21
  first comes to your mind that that's a good place to go?
• 1:54:25
  I'll say in general, look at the primary sources first.
• 1:54:29
  Look at the the mythic text from Oogaritz, the Ball cycle.
• 1:54:36
  You can often find translations of it available at PDF online.
• 1:54:41
  Nowadays we have AI, so it's, it's kind of like you can even
• 1:54:45
  just type, Hey, find me a good scholarly translation of the
• 1:54:49
  ball cycle on PDF available for free and they'll link you.
• 1:54:55
  I, I, I want people to kind of figure it out on their own.
• 1:54:57
  I don't want to tell people read this, do that.
• 1:55:00
  That's bore. Do your own.
• 1:55:02
  Don't be lazy if you're interested.
• 1:55:05
  I I activate some. Journey, you know.
• 1:55:08
  Yeah, you know, and there was a point in time I'm so take a
• 1:55:10
  like, I'll divert a little bit. But there was a point in time
• 1:55:13
  especially where, you know, I would either recommend or not
• 1:55:17
  recommend certain authors. And then and then I reached a
• 1:55:20
  point in my path and I'm like, what is that even doing for
• 1:55:23
  people? You know, 'cause then, then,
• 1:55:25
  then you're getting people to think the way I think or they
• 1:55:27
  think. And it's like, no man, look.
• 1:55:29
  And if you want to read, you know something from an author
• 1:55:33
  that is a known racist that just has terrible ideas, who am I to
• 1:55:37
  stop you? Read it, learn something from
• 1:55:39
  it, move on. Right?
• 1:55:41
  Whatever, just it's. Just just remember that books
• 1:55:44
  are not like the literal source of truth.
• 1:55:47
  They were written by someone with a bias with their own
• 1:55:49
  ideas. And that goes for our books.
• 1:55:51
  The same. I don't want to say you have to
• 1:55:53
  believe like I believe. Look into it on your own style.
• 1:55:57
  Use your own intuition, your own your own thoughts, your own
• 1:56:00
  rationality, you know? Absolutely.
• 1:56:06
  So what is in your in your opinion, what's the most
• 1:56:09
  misunderstood God of the Canaanite religion world?
• 1:56:14
  Whatever. Yahweh.
• 1:56:17
  Probably because, you know, because Yahweh is a Canaanite
• 1:56:22
  God fundamentally and he's just a very evil one, but somehow the
• 1:56:27
  vast majority of people in the world thought he was the one God
• 1:56:32
  that is all powerful, all knowing, all good.
• 1:56:34
  You know, that's so contradictory.
• 1:56:37
  And with Epicurus, all that, obviously Ball, all of them are
• 1:56:41
  misunderstood, but especially Ball.
• 1:56:44
  Ball is good, Yahweh bad. That's my Animal Farm version
• 1:56:50
  because I, I'm going to be straightforward.
• 1:56:52
  I, I think Ball is pretty good. He does good things generally.
• 1:56:56
  And if you read the Bible, you always a piece of shit.
• 1:57:00
  That's what I've. He has a He definitely has a
• 1:57:02
  twisted approach to things. That's a that's a great twist of
• 1:57:06
  the Bible is that the Bible is fundamentally A Canaanite work
• 1:57:10
  of literature. But yeah, that Yahweh is the
• 1:57:15
  villain. That's the great twist.
• 1:57:17
  That's why it's the greatest work of literature in all time,
• 1:57:19
  in my opinion. The And I'm saying that as a
• 1:57:21
  Canaanite, the Bible is the greatest work of literature of
• 1:57:23
  all time because of the unreliable narrator it has like
• 1:57:28
  Lolita and somehow even more immoral in terms of its
• 1:57:34
  narrating character, more molestations.
• 1:57:39
  Yeah, more genocide. More genocide, more molestation.
• 1:57:44
  Yeah, for sure. Like, you know, part of darkness
• 1:57:47
  meets Lolita. OK, now this this kind of this
• 1:57:53
  is more or less a a this or that kind of question.
• 1:57:55
  But if when it comes to like, you know, veneration locations,
• 1:58:00
  are you more of a in the shrine at the temple type?
• 1:58:04
  Or is it like the outdoors in the wilderness, at a Grove, by a
• 1:58:08
  river, like out in nature or in a temple or, you know, sort of
• 1:58:14
  thing, like what's what? Where do you find yourself most
• 1:58:17
  attracted to? Well, to be honest, I'm a little
• 1:58:21
  bit of column, a little bit of column BI can't really be either
• 1:58:24
  or. The reality is most of our
• 1:58:28
  temples, most of our shrines have kind of been turned into
• 1:58:32
  the state of nature as it were, into kind of like piles of
• 1:58:37
  rocks, much the same as the sacred Groves.
• 1:58:41
  So there's really no contradiction in there if you'll
• 1:58:45
  accept that non answer. Yeah, I get it.
• 1:58:49
  That's that's that's the most instinctive one.
• 1:58:51
  And I'll I'll take it. What would you what was if you
• 1:58:56
  could give me one word that best describes the Canaanite gods?
• 1:59:01
  What word comes to mind? Horny, the horns, just, I don't
• 1:59:12
  know, it's pretty fair if I had to give it one word to describe
• 1:59:17
  all of them. Now, OK, if I don't know if this
• 1:59:24
  is like if, if you have this like to go back off of, but I'm
• 1:59:28
  thinking you know, you, I've identified or have been you
• 1:59:31
  know, you've you've entered into the the the priesthood role, the
• 1:59:34
  Kohan figurehead. Is there any one particular
• 1:59:40
  priest from Canaanite text or ancient sources that you would
• 1:59:45
  like to have a conversation with, and if so, who?
• 1:59:49
  I would Well, the two main ones that we have in our tradition
• 1:59:53
  are Sankuniathan and Ili Milku. And we have Ili Milku in his own
• 1:59:58
  words, so we don't really need to ask too many questions of
• 2:00:01
  him. But if Sankuniathan is a real
• 2:00:03
  person, I would really love to question him and see if his.
• 2:00:06
  The version of his account that survived in like this, Copy,
• 2:00:09
  copy, copy, you know, to fellow babbles, to fucking Eusebius of
• 2:00:14
  Caesarea, a Christian who's rallying against everything
• 2:00:17
  that's I want to see. What is his original work?
• 2:00:20
  So yes, including a phone for sure.
• 2:00:23
  OK. Now this one, this is the last
• 2:00:27
  one that I've got. It's a bit more focused of a
• 2:00:31
  question, somewhat reflective. So if if Canaanite polytheism
• 2:00:38
  has a future in the modern world, what do you think that it
• 2:00:41
  demands from its followers, personally and collectively?
• 2:00:47
  Engagement, action, observation, and intuition.
• 2:00:58
  Simple answers, but those are really purposely like stated.
• 2:01:02
  I think you know that, that there's there's no bullshit
• 2:01:05
  there detected, right? You know the greatest
• 2:01:08
  bullshitters are the ones who are mistaken for honest men.
• 2:01:14
  And I love how you know it comes so it comes from AI feel like it
• 2:01:18
  comes from, you know, when you respond in this way, when you
• 2:01:21
  say what you what you said, there's there's very little
• 2:01:24
  thought that had to go into it because it's it's within.
• 2:01:27
  You know what I mean? You're just speaking from the
• 2:01:29
  heart. Before I speak, I'm kind of a
• 2:01:31
  goofball. It's.
• 2:01:35
  Like, don't take me too seriously, guys, you know I'm.
• 2:01:38
  Just a goof. Don't.
• 2:01:38
  Don't take anything I say seriously.
• 2:01:41
  But that's, you know, that's, that's reality.
• 2:01:43
  That's that's who we are. I think as as as a as a
• 2:01:45
  creation, as a species, as humanity, You know, it's a lot
• 2:01:48
  of people that take themselves too seriously.
• 2:01:51
  They don't have enough fun in life.
• 2:01:52
  And like I think you said something earlier about like you
• 2:01:55
  don't have too much, you don't you don't have enough fun.
• 2:01:59
  What was it? You said something right if.
• 2:02:01
  You don't. If you don't do anything
• 2:02:03
  frivolous, you know, you're going to live a really boring
• 2:02:06
  life. You're never going to really
• 2:02:08
  live. But if you are, you know,
• 2:02:10
  frivolous all the time, you're never going to establish a.
• 2:02:12
  Family. Yeah, yeah.
• 2:02:14
  Don't be too serious, but don't be too silly.
• 2:02:16
  Like bear that balance right? That that happy medium, more or
• 2:02:19
  less, that it's fluid too. It comes kind of ebbs and flows
• 2:02:23
  like the tides. Yeah.
• 2:02:27
  OK, last man, this has been a very edifying, like I said, an
• 2:02:30
  educational podcast for me and for hopefully my listeners.
• 2:02:33
  I'm excited for them to get through this.
• 2:02:36
  Almost two hours. Well, yeah, we just broke over 2
• 2:02:39
  hours after the the last rapid fire question there.
• 2:02:41
  So I do appreciate your time. And is there anything that
• 2:02:46
  before I wrap this up that you would like to say to the
• 2:02:49
  audience before, before we wrap it up?
• 2:02:52
  If you watch this video all the way through to the end, leave
• 2:02:55
  the word beans in the comments. Even if you're writing a comment
• 2:02:59
  about something else bring make sure you include beans.
• 2:03:02
  It has to be beans. It has to be beans.
• 2:03:05
  They're magical fruits. The more you eat, you know, and
• 2:03:09
  you know the rest. If you bring beans, you don't
• 2:03:11
  need to hire musicians. That's it.
• 2:03:14
  Bring you. Bring it all, you know, or bring
• 2:03:17
  it all. All right, so let's, well, I'm
• 2:03:19
  going to stick around for just a couple minutes here.
• 2:03:22
  I'm going to wrap this up. It's been wonderful to have you
• 2:03:24
  here and I appreciate you reaching out and sharing with us
• 2:03:28
  a bit about Canaanite polytheism and what it's been like for you
• 2:03:33
  over the last, you know, decade and 1/2 or more.
• 2:03:35
  So it's wonderful to have you. Thank you again for your time
• 2:03:39
  and for everybody else here that's tuned in.
• 2:03:41
  Thank you for your time. And until we talk to each other
• 2:03:45
  again, may the gods continue to notice you, and may your
• 2:03:49
  ancestors smile upon you. See you in the next one.