 Dr. Bracky, welcome back to the show. Thank you for having me back. So just to set the scene, we are entering a landscape of change when we pick up our story in the fourth and fifth centuries. Christianity is coming out of time of being persecuted. Now they're into a period of being tolerated and becoming more important in the Roman Empire with the rise of emperors like Constantine and then his sons after him. So we have a period as Edward Watts puts it, the final pagan generation. He puts it as a generation that had ideals and concerns increasingly at odds with younger counterparts. The often younger Christians rejecting the prestige of offices or philosophy, you know, like being a platonic philosopher orator and turning to things like monasticism as a viable option. It's milieu and flux or Hellenic and Christian influences sit in a sometimes uncomfortable but mostly semiotic relationship. Can you discuss what the world among inherits looks like for a little bit? One way to enter it is to think about some stories that monks tell and a lot of the stories that they tell are about them being young men and having to choose between following, say, a career in the military or government or following their father into some sort of business venture or working in a temple to the pagan gods or whatever and following a new kind of father, which is a more advanced monk. So sometimes you get these monastic stories where a young man is having to choose between these alternatives. And one of the ways to think about it is that a whole new career path has opened up for some young people, but it's still not one that is well-defined, right? If you were to decide to become a monk today, you would go to a well-established monastery and order and they would have whole procedures for dealing with you and thinking about what to do and they have handbooks and rules and all that kind of thing. But this was, of course, a time of great experimentation. I mean, sometimes think of them as dropping out of society, but they're really not, right? They're just taking a different role in society. And it's also a world compared to ours where the gods of the Roman Empire are not quiet and withdrawn and limited to people like you and me who are really like nerds about this stuff. They're all around still. It's just a world of new opportunities, but also one in which the future of religion and philosophy and so on is quite uncertain and people are having to kind of make decisions. These new avenues that monasticism and the clergy present were normally somebody from a middle class for lack of a better term would go into a civil service position or something in the government. These constantly going towards the monk and it's part of this dynamic negotiation going on between the different cultures. Yes. Not all monks were of the social level and so on where they're making these kinds of decisions. In fact, some of the early monks were also clearly young men who were just looking for something to do. And if you joined a monastery, an organized monastery, you were joining something that would make you work and give you a regime that you had to follow, what you could dress, what you could wear, when you would eat and so forth. But you would have a pretty stable and secure, if not luxurious lifestyle guaranteed for you for pretty much the rest of your life. There's also a kind of attractiveness in its stability in some forms of monasticism. People obviously did this for a lot of different reasons. Monks, they're very important. They're transitional ritual specialists and still sitting hand in hand with the dudes who are making your incantation bowls. These are the new kids on the block in terms of where people go for their holy guidance and their miracles and their prophecies where normally they would go to like a temple of misclop use. Now they can just go to, shouldn't you be the great, right? That's right. Obviously the church, the organized church with clergy, would like to be the organization that now provides access to, if you want to put it this way, spiritual power, to healing and exorcism and general well-being in one's life. But they can't control everything. And so, yes, these new kind of people emerge. Monks who, based on the fact that they live these extraordinary lives, which people find really impressive, means that they have now some access to divine power, to the spiritual world that most ordinary people do not. Or most ordinary people experience that spiritual world as just kind of active force upon them, something that they experience rather than as something that they can access and engage with. It's very fascinating in this period of time, and you do mention in another book, you paraphrase Jay-Z Smith, the whole concept of things are changing from, you have a centralized locus of sacred spaces to, these are more mobile, maybe in anachronistic sense, but more democratic ways of having access to the divine and their powers. What Smith points out, and other scholars in my world like David Frankfurter have built on, is this idea that as the traditional temple network in Egypt declines, so that there just aren't as many, the need that those temples and so on met is still there. But now what kind of happens is that these ritual specialists, we might call them enemies, might call them magicians, whatever you want to call, start to emerge as people who offer these kind of services in a mobile transferable way, right? So now you can do a certain ritual to accomplish X, Y, or Z, wherever you are, and the specialist can come to you. You don't have to go to a temple to have this done. Instead, you can go to a person and the person could come to you. And monks participate in this clearly. Church leaders don't necessarily like this. They would prefer to, for the churches, to be the headquarters now for this kind of thing. But just as we find, you know, things like DoorDash and Grebb Hub very helpful if people will bring the stuff from the restaurant to us. So too, I think people in Etiquity found the idea that someone was wandering around and helpful and so on. I love it. It's finding a way to mobilize salvation. Yes. Heck of a deal, right? That's right. Yeah, I was talking to an archaeologist, specialist on ancient magic and the Greek magical papyri, Dr. Kirsten Switzer. She was mentioning how, yeah, it's just this incredible time of flux and their closing Egyptian temples and these rituals, these people who would otherwise be priests, right? They're very well-versed in the Lord. They're very well-versed in the Paideia, right? And they have to go out and compete with these dream interpreters, like say, oh, what's his name? Who wrote the Onirocritica? Artemidorus. Artemidorus, right? He's there out there rubbing shoulders and then all of a sudden you have, you know, down comes St. Anthony. So, yeah. Yes. We have plenty of the Greek magical papyri, of course, that you can get in the volume that Hans Dieter Betts led when you can read these things. There are Christian and Jewish elements in those, but we, of course, also have a whole set of spells, as they are normally called, many surviving and Coptic that are clearly just Christian. I mean, they are calling on angels and Christ himself, on Mary, the mother of Jesus, and so on. And they also will have elements that, you know, to use bad language, we would call pagan in them, but they are clearly Christian. And so the question becomes, who makes those? Who is qualified in late antiquity? We're talking from 4th to 8th centuries. Who's qualified to make those things? Because you have to be literate. You have to have knowledge of liturgical language and biblical lore and stuff like that. And there aren't many good candidates other than monks to have been the people who did this. Now, this is not the only... Obviously, we're kind of zeroing in on this because we find it fascinating. So they must have been doing stuff like this. I wrote an article recently on monks and cursing. Interestingly enough, I could find only a single curse where the cursor explicitly identified himself as a monk. But then the question becomes, who prepared these things for other people? And you still kind of think monks are good candidates. That brings up another point. He's not exactly the same. I think of somebody like the Nassian preacher who's very well-versed in cosmopolitan. This guy is very well-versed in the stoic, allegorical method. And he knows Christianity. He knows Judaism. He knows all the Hellenistic religions. I just imagine it's that type of person making them. And just because we're in Egypt, by the way, so this is Egypt, so a lot of it's going to be Alexandrian and Egyptian-centered. Just by virtue of the fact that these people are so well-versed in this lore, both demonic and cosmopolitan, I think that when they become monks, they're still a certain ambivalence. They, you convert when you're like 35 or 48. What happens to the last 25 years of your life? Do you forget about Homer? And do you forget about reading Plato? No, you still do the things that you did before, but you have to kind of reorient that. Becoming a monk meant not saying all the gods you used to worship and so on, and the literature you used to read, isn't real. Those gods are real. They just happen to be demons now. We've decided. You don't just cast aside your knowledge of that world because you've learned useful information about spiritual forces in the universe that are real. The conversion we tend to think of is, I leave the old behind and completely embrace the new. More usually when we study conversion as a phenomenon, it kind of means instead the old is reorganized and rethought of in light of the new. It's not left behind. It's thought of in a new way. Monks remain convinced that there are divine beings who hover around the Nile River, right? But, you know, we just think about those beings in a different way. We don't like have decided that they don't exist anymore. We're not going to worry about them. We're not going to think about them. We just have a new perspective on their significance and how to interact with them. Conversion is not leaving behind the old. It's really rethinking the old in light of a new commitment that you have made, I'd say. This really was an unprecedented time in history, right? This is a time when you have a completely new religion tolerated and eventually becoming an official religion of the empire. But you have thousands of years of Hellenic religion and these images and the divine as Edward Watts would put it, everywhere. You have a generation of people who just could not consider that the pagan gods would just go. When the self-definition that Christians used when they weren't the majority was that of a martyr, that of the athlete in the arena, the gladiator, right? As Christianity becomes accepted, they have to define themselves in different ways. This monk who is using asceticism and cultivating virtue, but also still like an athlete for gods. I didn't know if you could touch upon that a little bit. Who is the monk? I mean, what is he? What is his religious and spiritual identity? They couldn't just invent things out of whole cloth, right? Just think and say, monk. We all know what that is, which they didn't. So they kind of have to adapt older traditional roles and show how they fit into them. And certainly a major one that not all monks embraced, but some, and especially more educated churchy writers tended to embrace, was the idea that the monk is a kind of martyr in the sense that he is a combatant, someone who fights with Satan and spiritual powers, just like the martyrs used to fight with Satan and the spiritual powers in the arena when they were put up against beasts and so forth. And by far the best early example of this is the life of Antony, the always reputed earliest hermit. This life was written by a bishop named Athanasius who wrote it in the 350s. So the days of Christian martyrs at the hands of a non-Christian state is well past, right? But he kind of presents Antony in that way. He, Antony fights with beasts who are demons, of course. And he incorporates a lot of kind of traditional motifs and tropes from martyr literature to present the monk as such. Now, we should say that at the same time, this is very important, Christians really are, after Constantine, after it's legal and all this stuff, really appropriating martyrdom as a thing. This is when most martyr acts are written, most accounts of martyrs are written in the fourth century and later, not when there actually were martyrs. It's a kind of way to invoke an identity of vulnerability and the need to fight back even in a position where one is, in fact, ascendant and not needing to do so. You always ask, who's the super-Christian at any given time in history? For a while it was the martyr. Then it kind of becomes the monk. The monk is the one who best lives out this life. But he has to kind of take that martyr identity onto himself in some ways. There's a very important aspect to the self-definition through this concept of demonology, right? Especially with somebody like Athanasius and then later Evagrius and then Shnudi. They seem to draw from a myriad of sources, just the ones I can think of the top of my head are like Stoicism, Middle Platonism. Of course, Christian writers like Clement, Origen, very big in Alexandria, right? And Kiru, Bible figures, especially Joe. But then I found very interesting that I wasn't really aware of. As you mentioned that there are some Valentinian fragments possibly in there. And if you could just touch upon that. Most Christians had to think about the Christian's ethical life and his or her just being in the world in terms of cosmological forces and demons from the get-go. And part of this, you know, the most is the pseudo-Paul's letter to the Ephesians in the New Testament, which says our combat is with spiritual forces, the enemies in the air who are fighting with us and so forth. And these are demons and demonic forces. And what the author of Ephesians argues is that the Christians just spiritual life and their ethical life when they're deciding how to behave and so on. That's all part of this kind of cosmic struggle with forces of evil, right? Pretty much all early Christian authors who were at all thoughtful or philosophically inclined to had to think about what that means. And before the era of monks, it was origin of Alexandria who most thought about this, right? But the Valentinians did too, right? They too thought about how the negative spiritual forces in this universe try to prevent the Christian from achieving virtue. And it's definitely clear in some monastic literature, especially the letters of Saint Antony, this Antony that Athanasius wrote about also wrote some things himself, some letters. He uses some of these same ideas and concepts and terminology and so on that you find in some Valentinian literature for thinking about demons. Now, does this mean Antony was reading Valentinian literature? I have no idea, but it's there. And I think Valentinians contributed in some way to the way early monks thought about demons. The main idea that Valentinians contributed to this. For Valentinians, one of the big problems with our current situation is that we have lost a state of unity in which all human spirits and God are one. Demons exploit that loss of unity. They try to draw us apart from one another and increase division to lead us away from oneness and unity towards diversity and difference and separation. That's something we have to resist. That's demons want. The great Valentinian story is a kind of return to oneness, right? And this is the same kind of vision that we see in someone like Antony in his letters. He talks about originally we were one and we have lost that. We need to get back and the demons are still pulling us separately. That kind of way of thinking about demons and what they're doing and about what we're trying to reach, a kind of state of spiritual unity with other spirit beings and with God is a line one can trace from Valentinian literature into some early monastic literature. I don't think Antony or any other person would have seen that theme and gone, oh, I need to avoid that because it's Valentinian. They would have just seen it as something that makes sense, right? We know Valentinian literature was circulating in Coptic in the 4th century because there was Valentinian literature and the Nagamadi codices. The presence of those codices in 4th century Egypt tells us that these ideas and texts were known and there's no reason why monks could not have known them. So, yeah. Yes, the texts in the Nagamadi codices do not come with the danger titles that say beware. This is Valentinian literature. Not only is it possible that the people commissioned it knew and didn't care, but it's also possible they just didn't know. They're just reading this and it sounds good to them, you know. I kind of like that idea they were just like taking what was useful and it goes back to the whole formation of a person. Do you just forget the past 20 years or 30 years of your life because you're now a monk? Those codices are a really great example of just that kind of world. You have so many things that you have platonic treatises. You have so-called heretical nostics. It's all something of value to somebody. There are other aspects of the demonology that are very interesting. They saw Job as a paradigmatic example for the monk. We see this nowhere better than obviously Athanasius' life, Anthony. And like many figures who get put up on that pedestal and created as an example, like you point out in the book, Anthony and his letters is not the fame Anthony refined in the way. This is something that scholars talk about a lot. And when you read the life of Anthony and you see how it talks about demons and then you read the letters of St. Anthony and how they talk about demons, which they do, they're quite different. In the life of Anthony, demons are definitely external forces that attack Anthony physically. I mean, he's left beaten and bruised and unconscious. He suffers terribly and he sees them and they're just scary external beings that visually appear and physically torture him, right? When you read the letters of St. Anthony, he's very clear that they are not physical external things. They are more subtle beings that are more internal and do not attack us. That is fellow monks externally. It's more about a division within the self that they're exploiting. People simply rejected the letters of Anthony as authentic and said, oh, no, they can't be by Anthony because one, Athanasius tells us in the life of Anthony that he was illiterate. Therefore, he could not have written letters and be there, kind of don't sound like Anthony in the light, but a very pioneering scholar named Samuel Rubinson back in the 80s really made a very compelling case that, no, we should accept these as authentic. Then the question becomes, what do we do with this difference? I don't spend much time worrying about the difference, but it does raise questions about the historicity of the life of Anthony. Why did Athanasius portray him in this way? And some people have said, well, then Athanasius probably didn't write it or whatever, but that's a whole different story. But I think the gist is, is that probably the Athanasius who wrote the life of Anthony didn't know about these letters. He hadn't read them, I would guess. But he knew that Anthony fought demons and so forth and that that was an important part of Anthony's spiritual formation. I think he, Athanasius, that is, created a kind of picture of Anthony that fit the biblical and martyrological and philosophical models that made sense to him, that is, to Athanasius. Biblical, that was primarily Job who is one of the few characters in the Bible who's really physically tortured by Satan, right? And then the martyr literature and philosophical, which is mostly for Athanasius' stoicism in this case. But of course, they're fine being stoic and blatantist at the same time and, you know, for different reasons. So he kind of really conformed Anthony to that model. Whether Anthony would recognize himself and his demonological views in the biography that was written about him is an interesting question. Definitely Anthony's view is simply in the letters more internal. His model tends to be more like Jacob who fights and then becomes Israel. So it's kind of more transformative. It's a different way of thinking about demons, and we find them both in literature associated with Anthony, either his letters or the life. Athanasius is also following kind of like a bi-way type way of talking about somebody. I forget who says this, but a person is more revealed and the things actually do, but in the little examples of how the actor... Like a lot of biographies in antiquity, you know, lives of virtuous exemplary people, Anthony doesn't change. He doesn't get better. This is not a center to saint story, right? Anthony from his childhood is virtuous and wonderful, right? And he has the same wonderful virtuous character at the beginning of his life that he has at the end. And so as you put it, the stories that are told are not about how, look at how he gets better and grows up and becomes more mature. They're all about exemplifying the perfect character that he has. One reason Job is a great model for Athanasius in writing the life of Anthony is that he's already virtuous and righteous when the story opens. That's the whole point because Satan is like, I've been running around the earth and no one's very good. And God is like, well, Job is, you know, he's already very righteous. And that's when Satan says, well, I can turn him, right? You know, give me a chance and blah, blah, blah. And Satan fails. He causes Job to call upon God and say, what's going on? But Job remains virtuous. And that's the story of Anthony as well. I'm not sure that Anthony or any human who's honest with themselves would recognize themselves in such a portrait, but that was not the point of ancient biographies. This is the time where by virtue of the fact that Christianity is so new in the empire, they have to compete with other games in town. So you have something similar going on in Unapius and his lives at the Sophists with the Neoplatonic philosophers. So these people are all in competition. Something you think of something like porphyries, life of Pythagoras, right? These Neoplatonists have their own holy men traditions and then monks have to compete with that. I was not aware of this, but like when I was going through your book, it gets really wild. By virtue of the fact that this is in Egypt, it's very strange to have these serious stories. But at the same time, they're fighting the actual Egyptian deities sometimes. It's almost like a Monty Python schedule. You have like these little humorous moments in these lives of the desert fathers like you talk about Macarius or you talk about Pombo where the demon is like trying to make him laugh. I was actually reminded of that really wonderful story I'm telling you at the Junker, I believe. He has an epistle where he talks about a haunted house and talks about the philosopher who lives in the haunted house and the ghost is trying to like scare him and the ghost is like saying, come here. And then the guy's like, he's reading this book. He's like, just one second. It reminds me of like in 1980s, like Hong Kong fantasy movie. They really need to make like a Wusha version of these neoplatonic and plastic stories. There's also that wonderful story where the satyr is just an Anthony and there's this satyr and he's like just scrolling Anthony. Well, you just have stories where demons indeed are kind of playing with and trying to be fun. I think actually a really good one is the example of Macarius who uses a mummy as a kind of pillow, right? Because he's like hanging out at night and he's in a temple or something and he needs something to put his head on and he finds a mummy case. And so the demon makes the mummy start to talk, right? So that he'll scare them. These are the kinds of things that they do. Anthony is confronted by a half man, half beast kind of thing. Anthony is trying to like make something and it keeps unraveling, right? He's trying to weave some map and it turns out this demon is pulling the stuff away. They just live in a world where all these like annoying beings are and they range in their issues with the monks from being really terrifying and horrible to being just irritating and often amusing in their attempts to bother the monks. They just live in this world just like people who spend time living in the forest or who live in rural locations. If I see a snake, I'm just kind of like, oh, you know, you know, so forth. They're just like, oh, yeah, that's a snake. He comes around here. I think the same was true and at monks, they went out and lived in the desert, quote, unquote. That's where the demons were and it's, you know, that's what you got out there. The concept of the city versus the desert divide the concept of the desert, the air, because the monk is the spiritual warrior that goes in and she invades the world of the demons and the home of the demons and pushes their lords of the air still. And you were talking about the Macarius story just there. And that's what he's doing is in the temple and just like hanging out, sleeping. Mosquitoes are everywhere this time of year in Ohio, but they also hang out in certain places. They hang out near still water. They hang out in your bushes. They, you know, and so, you know, they're just places where they're more plentiful. Right. And they like to congregate. Right. And this is the same case with demons in late antiquity. There are places they liked to hang out and certainly old temples. Well, certainly any operating pagan temple was just like, you know, demon hotel. Right. But like an old temple that's, you know, they would hang out there. They like to hang out near formerly sacred places like the Nile itself, of course, but also there might be a sacred intersection. Demons like to hang out there. They tend to much more active in the airspace kind of immediately above us because although they are spirit beings, this does not mean that they are immaterial. They are definitely made of very refined material, which means that they can be higher than us and they're not necessarily on the ground unlike us. In Egypt, it was felt like the desert was a big place for them to hang out. It's important to remember that for Egyptians, the desert is not way out there. I mean, it's visible, right? It's always the Egyptian strip of arable land along the Nile. The real desert begins with a very sharp cliff-like increase in elevation. And that's pretty much always visible. Most Egyptians aren't hanging out there, right? But they know it's there and it's a scary place and filled with animals you don't want to hang out with but also with demons. I think at one point there's a story where one of the Egyptian gods themselves just kind of and the monk has as like a usurp the power of the Egyptian god to take that place as a healer, as a ritual specialist. By far, the most important thinker about demons among early monks was this guy of Vagrius. He's by far the most important thinker about demons. Vagrius is extremely well-read and philosophical and definitely belongs with people like Yomblacus and Unapius. He's a big-time thinker, right? Very, very smart. And you read him and it's mostly demons mostly attack you through thoughts and he says there are eight primary evil thoughts that demons come after you with gluttony, fornication, blah, blah, blah. But then he tells a story where two demons toss a monk back and forth between them like he's a ball. So you're reading this guy who's extremely educated and normally thinks in very neoplatonic and very abstract and difficult ways and yet he tells a story where demons throw a monk back and forth. Yes, they all think that these things are real, not in the sense that like thoughts are real, but real in the sense that they have material existence and that they have power to affect the physical world. Just talking about Vagrius, I found it very interesting that she wrote an entire handbook. Like I'm adding demons. The main way that demons attack you is not by throwing you back and forth between them. I mean, most monks will not experience that kind of interaction with demons. The way demons come after you, according to Vagrius, is by suggesting thoughts to you. And so, you know, if you have a thought like I really hate my brother monk over there, according to Vagrius, that's really a demon suggesting that to you. So what are you going to do about it? And you could just say, oh, I'm just not going to listen. But far better is to refute the bad thought that comes from the demon with a good thought. And where are the best good thoughts to be found? In the Bible. So what he created was a book that's called Talking Back in English, but in Greek anti-Rutikos. So opposing speech was kind of what it means. And it is a list of almost 500 evil thoughts that the demons will suggest to you with the biblical passage that you can use to refute the evil thought. So if a demon suggests to you, you should stop being a monk because you're going to be old and no one will care for you. Well, there's a biblical passage to refute that thought. And famously, he organized this book and therefore the thoughts it contains into eight books corresponding to these eight primary thoughts that demons can present to you. And they are gluttony, fornication, love of money, sadness, anger. They are the basis for what eventually become in the West the seven deadly sins. But they get transmitted by one of a vagrius's disciples who's a Latin speaker. He goes and spends time with the vagrius, learns about these eight primary thoughts, and he moves to Gaul, modern day France, and turns them into eight spirits of evil and eventually they collapse them into seven. It was basically a manual for spiritual advising monks so a young monk comes to you and says to you, I keep having this thought that I should acquire as much money as I can because you never know when I will need it. It's a very typical kind of thought to be presented with. And what do you tell? So you look up in a vagrius's book, you find that thought, you tell the young monk a biblical verse and the young monk every time this thought occurs to him, he's to say that biblical verse. This sounds very like, ooh, what an innovative, interesting idea. It's basically stoicism. The Stoics believed, right, as opposed to the Platonists, that our bad emotions, the passions in a bad way, anger, lust, and so forth, are really not natural to us. They don't arise naturally within our soul. Instead, the external world sends in all these sensory impressions towards us, to which we must respond. For example, the image of a very delicious piece of cake. And we can respond to that by saying, you know, yum, I wish to eat that. And in fact, I wish to have 50 pieces of that cake. Or we can say, no, no, no, it is filled with sugar and fat and I should not eat that cake. So it's all how we respond to these incoming stimuli, if you want to call it that. So these stimuli can be visual, like the piece of cake, or they can be an idea. Like that guy is bad. I should go hit him. They can be a concept. They can be whatever. In the Stoic world, these things just come to us, right? And we have to evaluate and decide what to do. But if we have kind of a bad feeling like that for the Stoics, the thing we need to do immediately is to counter it with a rational kind of thought or judgment, right? Like, yes, that guy over there is a bad person, but it would be better if I call the police and have legitimate authorities deal with him rather than that I should go and hit him myself. So you don't become angry. So it's easy for Christians to do, and this happens very early with like Clement of Alexandria, is to say these bad ideas that come after us are offered to us by demons, right? They are the source of these. Ephesians had said, Satan comes after you with arrows. What are these arrows? These arrows are bad thoughts. So it's kind of Stoicism put together with the Biblical imagery. So it can all be put into one package. They also liked to build on this Stoic notion of incoming negativity that you need to refute, was the language of the New Testament uses for Judas. I believe it's in the Gospel of John where the author says something like Satan cast into Judas's heart the idea of betraying the Lord, right? So you have this idea that the out there is Satan rowing into Judas, this bad idea. And what Judas needed to have done is come up with the opposing good idea immediately and just snuffed this whole thing out. But he did not. He let that bad idea linger in himself. And once he does that, that allows the kind of negative passion and sinful emotion of betrayal grow in him. It's a little bit Stoic, a little bit Biblical, a little bit kind of folkloric. Even something like the native Egyptian traditions and what we call for lack of a better term, magic of time. That's what I love about this topic because at first glance, it's just like, oh, it's a monk. It's a completely new thing. But no, they're really picking up from a lot of different disparate elements. I thought it was a great subject because it's really signifies what my show is about. Just to show that everything is not vacuum sealed in this period of time from each other. Christianity, Judaism, Hellenism, Roman gods, all this stuff, all these thoughts, low magic, high religion or whatever it's all, or high literature and low culture, it's all together, right? The pagan order and philosopher Libanias mentions monks. And for him, they are new. I mean, this is the important thing, right? The monk is a new thing, right? But nothing new is just new. Everything has to be built from other materials and other stuff, right? That's what's so interesting about studying religion in this period, right? Well, any period because it never stops, right? It's always the transformation that you're talking about is always happening. This period, it's just so dramatic because we see paganism and Christianity, but it's always happening. And so the monk is indeed a new religious figure that emerges in this time period, but he is not, we generous, made out of nothing. He comes from a bunch of different long traditions that are all kind of woven together to create something new. That's what makes it also interesting and fascinating, at least to me. I wanted to end this on something a little bit fun. So my favorite part of the monk as a pastiche of his time is this concept that I actually talked to Dr. Christen at Switza about yesterday with the PGM, the concept of the helper. They have like an assistant or something, right? In Christianity, of course, there's this long tradition that we all have either a special angel assigned to us, which later Christians will call the guardian angel, right? We have an angel assigned to us. Other Christians said, yeah, we have an angel assigned to us, but we also have a demon assigned to us. So there we get that kind of thing you see in modern cartoons where you have a little angel on one shoulder and a little devil on the other. That comes from paganism, right? Middle-claimedism. That's the Daimonians, right? Yes, exactly. Socrates had his own Daimon, right? But he had happened to be a god. He had a really, really good one, right? So there's this idea that we all have this kind of kindred spirit. One Latin term for this is genius, right? So people would worship the genius of the emperor, right? Because his genius must be really great because he's an emperor after all. And so you have this long tradition of us having a kindred demon and in Christian possibility, both good demon and bad demon, plus the idea that magicians, if we want to call them that, ritual specialists, often, in order to get things done, had to have a kind of demonic helper. Oftentimes, these demonic helpers were unwilling helpers, right? So you had to have a spell that would make them be your helper, right? Because they weren't necessarily interested in doing it. You had to make it happen. There are monks who, oddly enough, seem to have kind of what we would call long-term relationships with demons, right? They have demons who hang out with them and live with them. There's a kind of amusing story of one demon who kind of decided to hang out with this monk, but the monk's diet was so uninteresting that the demon decided eventually to leave, right? Which I don't really understand because I don't think these demons really eat much, but there you go. They did have a sense that sometimes monks had long-term relationships with demons that were kind of, they're like a frenemy. They kind of hang with you and you know who they are, but their job is to kind of contest you so that you stay in shape. It's kind of like your devil's advocate, right? Your person who's always there. And you also have stories of clearly monks who also have their angel with them. And you can tell whether a monk is good or bad about whether their angel is happy with them. Some monks have the gift of seeing the angels. If I'm a very special monk, I'm at the gift or charisma of seeing your angel visual being able to see. And I can see whether he's happy or sad with you. The story actually reminds me now that you're talking about that in terms of like the demon just trolling a monk. He's like, oh, you're so boring and you're not, he's not, he's trying to troll him. He's not getting any reaction. It reminds me of this Clive Barker short story and books of blood willing one, but it's another podcast again. Dr. Bracky, I know we got to let you go. If you want to plug anything, feel free to use this time. Oh no, I have nothing interesting to plug, but I will say that on this topic, if you're into it, that book on talking back by Vagrius, yes, I did translate it and it's kind of one of my cheaper books and paperback. So if you're really worried about what to say when a demon comes and says something to you. Vagrius has your back. Exactly so. So there you go. Dr. Bracky, this has been fantastic. Thank you for coming on.