You're listening to the ancient tradition. A Wonk Media production. Music provided by Joseph McDade. Here's your host, Dr. Jack Logan.

Welcome to today's edition of the ancient tradition.

I'm your host, Jack Logan.

Welcome to all of you.

Welcome back. If you're a new listener, we welcome

you to the program. We're so glad to have you join us. We've got a great program today. It's titled

The Council of the Gods. And for you new listeners, on this program, we've been digging deep into

the written records of the ancient world to see if we can't

reconstruct the original religious tradition that the ancients tell us was given to human

beings by God or a supreme being from the very beginning, from the dawn of time.

Now, you might be asking yourself, how could we possibly do this?

Well, the ancient world is brimming with ancient texts.

And on this program, we dive into those texts and we search for themes.

We're looking for the themes or the motifs that we can find that show up time and time again in the ancient record.

And then when we find one that we can trace all the way back to the dawn of

time, then we know we have something special, something that tells us what was taught to human

beings in this original religious tradition. And I call those particular themes the stubborn

bits, the bits that persist in the human record,

despite centuries of alterations, variations, innovations, and even deterioration.

For example, for the past couple of episodes, we've been discussing the creation.

The ancients placed in an extraordinary amount of importance

on the creation, so we decided to start there. And so far, we've identified three stubborn bits

...