This is Jonathan Peugeot. Welcome to the symbolic world. All right.

Well, maybe the best way to start would be,

since I'm sure many people watching this won't know who you are,

if not most of them,

just kind of introduce yourself to give everyone an idea of who you are and what you do.

So my name is Jonathan Pejoot and I am mostly an artist.

I'm an icon carver, which means that I make images based in the tradition of the church

for churches, for individuals, following really kind of the canons, we would call it the the standards of iconography

and you know respecting the way that saints or that Christ or that stories have been represented

in the past and trying to see in that a wisdom that's been passed down and so and so one of the

things that I'm doing as an icon carver is I also study traditional symbolism

and try to see, you know, try to understand it, try to see what it means for us today,

and also try to apply it to the world today so that we can understand these stories as being,

as giving us patterns which explain reality and explain our interactions with the world

rather than just these arbitrary kind of strange, fanciful stories that are from the past.

Right. And that's, it's really kind of great that with, you know, looking at pre-modern literature

particularly, but especially things, you know, involving saints and these other kind of mythological

characters, to kind of be able to approach it from that kind of symbolic and artistic standpoint so that it doesn't, you know,

we just gloss over and say, oh, that's really weird.

I understand what's going on.

But actually try to work out, you know, what's happening and like what's, you know,

because literally these stories have meaning beyond just, you know, people believe, you know, really weird things back.

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