On this episode of the Symbolic World podcast, I'm playing for you a talk I gave at St. John's Catholic Church in Montessano near Seattle, Washington, in which I discuss feminine symbolism in Christian art, looking mostly at images of the mother of God, of Mary, the development of her typology, the different types of images that are used to represent

her and her relationship to Christ, and especially showing how those iconic relationships

manifest symbolism of the feminine in general and its relationship to masculine symbolism.

As you know, these audio representations are taken mostly from my YouTube channel,

and so if you want to get a visual representation of these images, I would encourage you to

check out the videos on that channel. As you know, this podcast, the videos, all the things that

I'm doing are due to your generous contributions, to your generous help.

And so please go ahead and check out The Symbolicworld.com for ways that you can support this podcast.

And so enjoy.

Music. This is Jonathan Peugeot. Welcome to the symbolic world. I'm also very happy to be with you on this feast today, and I thought it would be a good idea because it's the feast of the Assumption.

In the Orthodox Church, we call it the Feast of the Dormition of the Mother of God, and so we'll

go through that as I'm talking.

But because it's such an important feast,

and because also I think that, especially in North America,

you know, with so much Protestant tradition in North America,

the place of our lady, the place of the Mother of God of Mary in our tradition

is sometimes difficult for people to understand.

And so hopefully what I'll be doing with you is going through the visual imagery

of how her image began to take form in the Christian tradition.

And by doing that, hopefully it will also help us to understand her role in the church

and her role in the universal story.

To begin, right away when the church started to take form, you know, when the persecutions

...