392 - Richard Rohlin - Universal History: Symbols From the Edge of the World

The Symbolic World

Jonathan Pageau

Religion & Spirituality, Society & Culture, Education

4.8 • 824 Ratings

🗓️ 6 May 2025

⏱️ 96 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In this episode, Richard Rohlin and I continue our discussion of The Voyage of St. Brendan, focusing on some of the stranger episodes in the story. We look at encounters with sea creatures, a sea giantess, and the figure of a Hermit in paradise. Along the way, we reflect on what these images might reveal about death, resurrection, the role of the saints, and how the spiritual world connects to our own. It's a conversation that opens up layers of meaning in a text that’s easy to overlook.
Original YouTube version: https://youtu.be/2vxMu-NU6Rw
Part 1, The Voyage of St. Brendan: https://youtu.be/nlzEUV5sV2o?si=lsPwB1EmXLBIfs0w

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While Richard's course on Tolkien and Universal History is over, you can still buy the course and get access to all the lecture recordings and resources here: https://www.thesymbolicworld.com/courses/tolkien-and-universal-history

Timestamps:
00:00 - Coming up
01:06 - Intro music
01:37 - Introduction
03:41 - Pascha on the back of a monster
06:29 - A whale
14:06 - The giant mermaid
22:10 - The sequence of events
26:48 - Until the Last Judgement
33:00 - Don't worry about it
40:49 - Baptism
43:42 - Garments of skin
51:34 - Confronting demonic forces
58:08 - Brendan in paradise
01:09:00 - Brendan comes to Britain
01:26:49 - The death of St Brendan

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Transcript

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0:00.0	that St. Brendan gave communion to a mermaid.
0:04.6	That's actually the really tame later version of the story.
0:09.6	It's actually much, much stranger than that.
0:12.2	I mean, commuting a mermaid, that's pretty believable.
0:15.4	The thing, the thing, but the thing that happens in this version of the story this is really something
0:23.4	else so they had not gone far from there when they found a fair young maiden with golden tresses
0:30.2	as wide as snow or the foam of the wave lying dead from the thrust of a spear which had entered
0:37.3	between her shoulders and come out between her two breasts.
0:40.4	So this young, beautiful woman stabbed in the back, killed lying there dead on the ocean.
0:50.2	Vast was the size of the maiden.
0:52.9	She was four, she was a hundred feet high.
0:55.6	What?
0:56.7	Wait.
0:57.0	Nine feet between her breasts.
0:58.7	The nose was four feet long and her middle finger seven feet long.
1:04.8	Brendan restored her to life and baptizes her at once.
1:24.0	This is Jonathan Peugeot. Welcome to the symbolic world.
1:38.8	Hello, everyone. We are back here with Richard Rowland. You all of you know him really well. We are going to do our second
1:46.8	pass at the voyage of St. Brendan, that amazing, weird and disturbing tale. And so Richard's going to
1:53.3	take us along. Well, you know, and it took us a little bit of time to get around to this
1:58.1	because I had a baby and then a flood. But it took St. Brendan
2:03.2	seven years to get back home. So I feel like we're actually pretty ahead of schedule.
	...

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