 Welcome everyone to another episode of We Were Being Transformed. We are joined tonight by the amazing illustrious, the esoteric Justin Sledge. How are you? Doing great Jason. Thank you for having me back on man. Welcome. Always appreciate you having you on. You are one of the foundation stones of this channel. You are my Randy Macho Man savage. So let's go. So tonight we are going to touch upon something I'm very interested in. And I know you know a thing or two about this. So I wanted to talk about animating statues specifically within the Latinus Clepius, which is translated in Brian Copenhaver's Corpus Hermeticum. So a major aspect of the creation and animating of statues involves infusing Hewley or matter with penuma, breath, fiery wind. The Latinus Clepius makes a big deal of this. In 38, Hermes says that the quality of these gods comes from a mixture of plants, stones, and spices. Due to this, the deities in these lower atmospheres are more intemperate, prone to more mutability than gods in higher realms. They need to be appeased by constant sacrifices. So what are your thoughts on this about these gods in the lower realms having to be appeased as statues? Yeah, I guess what I would say is that we don't typically, we typically imagine because we're modern people living in a relatively empty universe that's just kind of us and animals and things, but in the ancient world, in the medieval world, the sky was positively populated with with with gods, with beings. And these beings had, they were bound to matter, at some level, by relationships of Tsumpatea and Antisumpatea, sympathy and antipathy. These are ideas coming in from Stoicism, actually. And what's interesting, and this is where the Latinus Clepius very much overlaps with the Greek magical papyri, where we have the idea that certain kinds of terrestrial objects can have some kind of relationship of power over those quasi-astral beings. And therefore, pulling them down is one of the things that one can do and binding them into these statues and then making them do things for you, like telling the future or telling you about what's going on in the upper realms or whatever. But also, insofar as you're made of Hulae too, you can also be elevated. And so you can be bound up at some level to these, to the astral realm as well. So in many ways, the Latinus Clepius, like I said, to me is always read as the most Egyptian of the of the Corpus in Medica in a lot of ways. Because we get the animating statues stuff, which we see in the Greek magical papyri, it's connected to classical Egyptian funerary practices. And we also have the the escalatius apocalypses, as one might call it there, about the ruin of Egypt and how these evil Greeks are going to destroy everything, the Romans. But also, again, the connection I think with the the magical technology we find in the Greek magical papyri. And so in that ways, in those ways, I think that the the Latin escalatius and specifically the whole business of of animating statues connects it most solidly back to its Egyptian native Egyptian soil, which of course is also the reason why it was universal that section was universally hated. Even people who really didn't like the Corpus in Medica, like August Augustine. He really hated it for that reason, really narrowed in on that and said, No, this is just actually magic. But it's amazing that people like like Tantris, who had a pretty positive view of of herby's Chris Magistus. It's amazing that those sections survived survived at all because they were so blatantly magical, magical. And they're they're late classical reception. Yeah, I find it very interesting you even find figures like Yamblichus weighing in on this controversy of the how shall we say the whether it's good or bad to animate statues and and these things. So yeah, it's interesting dialogue going on there. I wanted to touch upon something that you mentioned just now, just about the concept of an apocalypse within this hermetic literature. We've discussed this before in a previous podcast about apocalyptic concepts in hermetic literature in regards to Poimandres. But Latin esclepius really seems similar in a way to the little apocalypse and Mark chapter 13 both deal with persecution, sacrilege, destruction, shutting down of temples. You can see a lot of the similarities with Egyptian apocalypses from before then, like at the Potters Oracle and even the Jewish Sibylian oracles. So I was wondering if you could give your further thoughts on that. Yeah, and here we're using the term apocalypse in the more loose sense, right, not necessarily as a as a revealing which that text is a kind of that section is a kind of revealed about but really talking about eschatological right that that sort of image of the way we use the word apocalypse now, which is not strictly speaking what the word literally means, although they overlap to some significant degree. Yeah, that text is really interesting because of the fact that it's, you know, self consciously Egyptian at some level. And now, again, it's odd that we have it originally and and and we have it in Latin, but it was probably originally written in Greek, which it bemoans the fact that Greek isn't doesn't have the I think the text uses inner Gaia the Greek letters lack the inner Gaia of Egyptian hieroglyphs. So the kind of auto bar bar barbarization that's going on in that text, which I find that process to be interesting considering how again, what the notion of locating wisdom in the among the barbaric Eastern peoples is a fascinating thing. And the idea that one would auto barbaricize oneself to identify with the Egyptians in a way that I think many Latin into the Greek intellectuals of the time would have found outrageous. Someone like like platinus self consciously distancing himself from from that kind of thing, or the Gnostics who we also thought of as barbaric in that way. But yeah, it's a fascinating glimpse into the kind of idea that you see where we're like you said temples get destroyed. The Romans are going to come, you know, destroy everything. The language will be lost, which that was not I think at that time of an ill conceived idea. I do think that the fact the text is written originally in Greek and not written in Demotics and probably couldn't have been written in Demotics the person writing it maybe may have not even had the ability to do it. There's a genuine lament. They're lamenting the days where we could have written this and energetic characters the way that they would have put it. And so I think that's really fascinating that it's a we think of the apocalypse genre as a very Jewish Christian genre. And I think that it is a very Jewish genre. In fact, I think I've said this at the most Jewish book of the Testament is always to me, been the apocalypse of John. That is the overwhelmingly most Jewish book. I think you're going to have any, any Jew in the first or second century, a copy of any book of the New Testament, the apocalypse of John would have been like the most instantaneously recognized as a Jewish book. The Gospels would have seemed very weird, I think to them they do seem very Hellenistic in many ways. But I think that the inclusion of the apocalypse, the little apocalypse and in the escalapius just shows us how pervasive that idea was not just among the Jews and the Christians. Of which the Hermeticists did know something about Judaism, but I think even among the Hermeticists, they also see their will coming to an end. And I think that's an interesting kind of shared glimpse. And it did. I mean, the Hermeticists did not survive antiquity. You know, their communities don't survive really, assuming they had broad communities. But in that way, I think they're, they're, they share a lot of the same zeitgeist of the Jewish communities who have just watched their temple be destroyed, the Christians who are actively undergoing persecution. And the Hermeticists who are also seeing their cultural heritage being replaced by the power of Roman imperialism. Well said, well said. Thank you for that answer, Dr. Sledge. So this has been an absolute pleasure, Dr. Sledge, in addition to your channel esoterica, you have a Patreon channel and some merchandise. Tell us a little bit more about those. Yeah, folks want to support the work of me producing content around esotericism that's accessible and not esoteric, ironically named. Yeah, folks can do that by supporting me over at Patreon or picking up a t-shirt or whatever. I also don't like it to be financially incentivized. You know, lots of people in the world don't have that financial ability to do that. And that's the reason why I think that the work that we're doing, Jason, and you're doing it too, of making a scholarship accessible to anyone with the basically a smartphone is just so important so that so we can get this stuff out there. And you know, I think up raise the bar in terms of academic discourse and intellectual discourse here on YouTube. So I appreciate the work you're doing and I always appreciate the invitation to come on and chat with you. Well, I highly appreciate it. And thank you so much for your kind words. A very humble project here that is just standing on the shoulders of giants like yourself and Dr. Henry, Dr. Litwa. You know, people who came before us. So we're just trying to pay that forward, right? Absolutely, absolutely. I think of Andrew, right? I was happy to praise Andrew. You know, he's so the OG religious studies guy and I'm like, oh, man, if you hadn't blazed the trail, I don't know that I'd have done it either. So again, we're all, yeah, I think it's all, yeah, we're all trying to push the conversation forward and raise the bar and I appreciate the work you're doing here. Awesome. And we certainly appreciate your work here. And we hope you have a pleasant evening and hope you had an amazing alchemy day the other day and happy belated birthday, by the way. Thank you. Yeah, yeah, it's, you know, it's completely an accident that I that alchemy day and my birthday happened to be just a day apart. Right. But yeah, it was, I hope it catches on. I do think alchemy does need to stay in the sun. I do think that we should we should appreciate it more than when we do. So I hope that that hope it does catch on. I hope that it does raise at least the ability to have conversations around alchemy from a scholarly perspective. Hope that does eventually happen. Yeah, I'm thinking of starting a yamblichus day or something. Maybe something similar through fear G day or whatever fear. But Dr. Sledge, this is as always been an absolute pleasure. Thank you for letting your time and your expertise. You have a wonderful evening. Cool. Thank you. Thank you very much.