So in light of my brother and I's new graphic novel, God's Dog, which is crowdfunding right now in Indiegogo,

I want to look a little bit at some of the symbolism of St. Christopher, especially the aspect of his later legend,

which has him crossing a river, carrying the young Christ child. But we'll see that this pattern of crossing rivers

and the relationship with monsters,

and also even the notion of a trick being played.

And let's say being both playing tricks

and being the subject of tricks

will be an interesting way to understand

what happens at the end of a world,

what happens, you know,

in a similar way as when we talk about how the fool turns things upside down and turns things

right side up that Mathieu has hinted at in his book. We're going to look at how that relates

to St. Christopher, the dog, the dog-faced giant monster that carries Christ across the river.

This is Jonathan Peugeot. Welcome to the symbolic world. Now the relationship between monsters and crossing rivers is one which might not appear super obvious to everybody right at the outset, but it's because

we have to see it, first of all, in the right categories. We have to understand the monster

as representing the edge, but that edge has many forms. It can be straightforwardly a monster,

but it can just be the idea of animality itself. I've often talked about

these garments of skin, which are given to Adam and Eve as this cover, which covers their

outside, this periphery on their edges. Well, we have to understand that on the edge of our humanity

is animality. We have something in common with animals, which is our body. And so as we explore

the body, and as we look at the aspect of us which dies, then we will encounter

animality, things in common with them, in terms of our desires, in terms of our fleshiness.

...