So hello, everybody. I'm really excited to be back here with Richard Rowland to continue the

universal history. If you have not seen our first video, it has really taken off and also

just sparked so much discussion. He's now flooded with emails. He tells me of all these people

who want to ask about everything from universal history to psychedelics, and so I'm really happy

that that's happening because Richard is a very interesting person.

And I'm looking forward to kind of continuing this conversation as we move forward.

This is Jonathan Peugeot. Welcome to the symbolic world. So Richard, what is it that you wanted us to talk about today?

So now that we've laid out the idea of universal history and tried to establish the idea that

the way that they thought about history in the ancient and the medieval mind,

that that way of thinking about history and of reading history still has value and meaning to us.

What I thought that we could do would be to take a closer look at one of the main patterns that I see

within Western history, within the whole medieval project.

And by Western, I mean the whole medieval Christian world, you know, so including Byzantium in that.

And so what I thought we could do is take a closer look at this, one of the main patterns that manifest itself kind of over and over again.

And that really helps us to navigate the moment that we're in right now. And that's the pattern

of Christ and Antichrist. So this actually starts. I want to start with kind of a deep

pull here that maybe a lot of our listeners won't be familiar with.

And that is a guy named Mithridates the 6th of Pontus.

So Mithridates is a super interesting guy.

He ruled over the kingdom of Pontus and over much of Anatolia.

Again, so this is a guy.

He's from the east.

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