I'd like to welcome you to episode 22 of the Symbolic World podcast. On this episode, I'm going to

play for you a video that I put up last year on the symbolism of the ass and the ox in the

Christian tradition and how something which might seem at the first hand on firsthand as being

rather unimportant and a detail

can in fact show us a very deep pattern and can also show us the manner in which extra-biblical

content in the Christian tradition how it functions and how it serves to help us see things

which are already there in the tradition but might be a bit obscured

by our own incapacity to see them. And so this is a short episode. The video is only about 12 minutes,

but I think you'll enjoy it anyway. So enjoy. This is Jonathan Peugeot I wanted to use this time to explain how tradition works

and how it can help us understand symbolism.

What I want to do is look at the traditional icon of the nativity of Christ

and focus on a few elements there, especially the elements which are not present in scripture.

I want to look at the ass and the ox, as well as the idea of the cave in which Christ was born.

The details of the birth of Christ and the Gospels are actually pretty sparse.

And so many of the details of how we perceive the Christian story actually come from tradition.

For example, the Bible doesn't say that they were three magi.

It just says that they were magi.

Even though many modern Protestants have been hostile to a non-biblical tradition, these

traditions persist nonetheless, and we'll look at why they do and maybe how that works.

One of the traditions that has persisted since the beginning

of Christianity has been the notion that there is an ass and an ox present when Christ was born.

At first, this might seem like a nice sentimental addition to the story, let's say, of how cute it is,

...