The following is a transcript excerpt from episode 2 of Jonathan Pageau’s new series “End of the World.“ Now available on DailyWire+.
The ancient Greeks had an interesting understanding of their world and it is an understanding which actually reflects itself in every culture. It’s not unique to the Greeks. It is the image of the center moving to the periphery.
In the city of Delphi, the Greeks had something they called the “Omphalos,” a holy stone considered to be the “belly button of the world.” That’s actually what it means. To them, this was the center of the world, or better yet, the center of their world. It bound them together as Hellenes, having the same language, worshiping the same gods, and even though they had conflict amongst themselves, there was something transcendent which bound them together nonetheless.
As the Greeks would move away from their city, however, they would encounter people who were strangers, but were recognizable. They would form some kind of relationship with them. Because they shared a border, they could even understand them a little bit and they would trade with one another.
But as they moved further out, they would encounter new groups of people and they really struggled to understand their language. That’s where the word “Barbarian” comes from. It’s the idea of hearing someone bark like a dog — not because they actually barked like a dog, but because they’re language was so far removed from the Greek language that they couldn’t understand what they were saying. “Bar, bar, bar, bar, bar,” is what the Greeks would hear when they encountered the Scythians or other strangers further off.
WATCH: Episode 2 of “End of the World” with Jonathan Pageau
So, in the Greek vision of the world, as you move further and further away, then you start to encounter even stranger things. You would start to encounter humans who were not like us: humans who had the heads of dogs, humans who had no heads or a head in their chest or maybe humans with one large foot. They had this weird movement towards something like idiosyncrasy.
At the end of the world, there were the Amazons, which were an upside down version of Greek culture, where the women were the warriors. The men didn’t have much of a place in their society, so it was an upside down reflection of their world.
There are legends about Alexander the Great who, as he invaded the world and took more and more space, came to a place in the north called the Caspian Gates where he built a giant wall. That wall was meant to hold back all the monsters of the world on the other side.
If you look at the descriptions of those monsters, you’ll see why they’re put behind the gate. Many of them were animal-human hybrids, they ate bugs, and were known to do very disturbing things. They broke all of the taboos. Because of that, they had to be fully excluded from the world.
Now, the legend is that when we come to the end of this world, that’s when the Gates of Alexander, the Caspian Gates, will be broken and the hordes of Gog and Magog will flood into the world, playing a part in the destruction of the world.
That image is a little story to help you understand what the “shape of a world” is. It’s very dramatic, of course, but there are many other smaller versions of this story.
You can even see it in the Bible.
For those of you who know your Bible, you’ll notice that the first chapters in Genesis are actually quite similar to Alexander’s story. In the beginning, God puts Adam and Eve in a garden in a place of balance between nature and culture. Usually, this garden is actually seen as a mountain, a high place up above. Think of the mountain as something like a pyramid with a point at the top, which joins us all together. When Adam and Eve transgressed, they were chased down the mountain, out of the garden of paradise, and into the world.
As you follow the story in Genesis you discover an increase in faults. When Cain kills his brother, he is chased even further down the mountain or further into the valley. Then, as Cain’s descendants develop, we get two things: On the one hand, we get an increase in civilization or power. The descendants of Cain founded the first city and all the things which represent civilization up to metallurgy, weapons, and the arts. So there is this increase in power, this increase in the setting of inside and outside, because that’s what a city is. Before that, there were no cities. So when Cain built the first city, he created this inside-outside identity. Some things were ejected and some things were on the inside.
There’s also something else which happens during that time. Cain’s descendants start to mingle with the sons of God.
Now, without getting into what exactly that means, it is important to understand that it is seen as a type of mixture, two things which don’t belong together start to mix together and become confused. These giants, these monsters that came about from the relationship between the sons of God and the daughters of men, brought about things like hybrid animals, that mixture of different identities of animals.
As the civilization increased, confusion increased at the same time, and at some point, everything broke apart. You could say the walls crumbled and up came the waters. The waters of the flood invaded the world and that was the end of that world.
Looking at the relationship between the Greek stories and the stories of the Bible, we can see how these types of descriptions can help us understand the shape of the world and how there is this relationship between power, civilization, control, and chaos.
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Jonathan Pageau is a French Canadian icon carver, public speaker and YouTuber exploring the symbolic patterns that underlie our experience of the world, how these patterns emerge and come together, manifesting in religion, art and in popular culture. He’s also the editor of the Orthodox Arts Journal and host of the Symbolic World blog and podcast.