401 - Robin Hood: The Original Green Man (Nottingham talk) - The Symbolic World

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
As robin Hood kind of develops, you know, into the
Tudor period, you really get the sense that one of
the things that motivates robin Hood two things. One is
his love for a virtuous maiden, which at the time
would have been seen as very much an honorable pursuit.
His love of maid Marian becomes something that is beyond
his thuggery, you could say. But then the more interesting

(00:22):
part is the idea that he is. He's an aristocrat, right,
He's a he's a lord that has lost his he
has lost his place because now Prince John or the
Sheriff of Nottingham, or whoever's an authority is corrupt and
has taken from him that place. But he also knows
that he is not the king, that he can't take

(00:44):
that role, and so he remains faithful to the true king, right,
he remains faithful to King Richard, who is away, and
he just finds a way to exist in that in
that inverted world where the authority has become a legitimate
it pokes at it, plays with it, and tries to
survive until the king returns and restores order. And so

(01:09):
what happens in that place is that robin Hood becomes
a image of everything that opposes authority. But does it
we'll see as we look at the story, does it
in a very fascinating way, which is different from simple
rebellion and simple revolution. This is Jonathan Pego. Welcome to

(01:45):
the symbolic world. What you're about to see is a
talk gave in Nottingham, England, on Robin Hood. As some
of you know, I've been traveling quite a bit in

(02:06):
the past few weeks. I was in England and France.
Also went to Istanbul to film a documentary with John Raveaki.
But this little part was something that I couldn't refuse.
I was invited to come speak about Robin Hood in
his area near Sherwood Forest, obviously in Nottingham. It was
at the Southwell Cathedral there and so it was really

(02:27):
quite a joy. What's funny is that the person who
organized the event gave the talk a title, because I
was just not giving her a title, and the title
was something like Robinhood, the original green Man. And so
this title forced me to think about Robinhood in a
very different way and ended up with me making a
relationship between Robinhood, a very strange character in the Quran,

(02:51):
and Merlin, and so I think you will definitely enjoy this,
and don't forget if you love what we're doing, don't
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(03:12):
also get extra videos, all kinds of other little perks.
But it's also the way that I support my family
doing this, and so I hope you enjoyed this conversation.
I certainly had a great time. They're looking at that cathedral.
It's also amazing with all the little monsters and gargoyles
all over the all over the cathedral, and so please enjoy.

(03:34):
It's really a joy to be here. I was coming
to the UK to do a few things and just
completely out of the blue, I get a message from
Allison's husband, John Millbank on Twitter you know something about
robin Hood, and I gave a little quip about what
I think robin Hood is about, and then he said,
do you want to come to Nottingham to talk about Robinhood. Well,

(03:56):
how could I say no to that? So it's really
a joy to be and so I am very much
the opposite of those historians, you know. I care about
the manner in which we remember stories, the manner in
which we celebrate them. And so for me, the entire
story of Robinhood, from the origins in terms of the

(04:17):
first ballads all the way to the Disney movie and
to the way that it's been transmitted and remembered is
part of the legend. There's something at the core of
that that in some ways you could say that people
are asking what are the questions that people are asking?
Stories are not just for our entertainment. They have a
function in society, like working out things you could say,

(04:40):
in images, to try to understand certain aspects of the world.
And one of the things I think that Robinhood is doing,
you could say, for us, is he's trying to help
us understand what do you do when authority becomes illegitimate?
How do you deal with that? How can you be

(05:01):
a virtuous rebel? Is there such a thing as a
virtuous rebel? What's the difference between a virtuous rebel, common thug,
a revolutionary? What is the difference between all those types
of characters. And I think that the Robinhood's story as
it develops, starts to refine and to ask questions about that.

(05:23):
There are, of course all kinds of historical contingencies which
bring the story to where it is. You could say,
necessarily the Reformation has an effect on the character. Now
thinking about rebellions somewhat differently, thinking about the relationship to
authority differently, the Tudor period also, so all of this

(05:44):
we can say, yes, there are definitely historical contingencies which
bring us that bring the character along and skew or
start to twist the way that he's told. But we
can mostly and more interestingly, just look at the stories
selves and what it is that the stories are doing,
and how it is that we receive them and interact

(06:06):
with them. And so another thing that I started to
ask myself is I was looking at the question of
Robin Hood, is does he resemble other characters one of
the stories I always I'm a Christian, I always look
back to scripture, and I ask myself, when any for

(06:27):
fairy tale, for any kind of story, I asked myself,
is there a version of his story in the Bible,
and it turns out, actually there's quite a bit of
robin Hood in the scripture. Took me a while to
kind of get of it. When I found the line,
I realized that it actually follows quite powerfully, and you

(06:50):
see it in the story of King David. There's actually
quite a relationship between the story of King David and
the story of robin Hood, because the story of King
day David is also at least the first part, the
part before David becomes king. It's about how to be honorable,

(07:10):
how to be a heroic figure, and how to live
in a world where authority has become illegitimate, not only illegitimate,
but hostile to you right, how to act when the
king is trying to kill you. But you also know
that killing the king is wrong. If I kill the king,

(07:32):
or if I try to put myself in the place
of the king, that revolutionary act will bring about a breakdown,
will bring about chaos. And so the parallels become very
very interesting. The as Robinhood kind of develops, you know,
into the Tudor period, you really get the sense that
one of the things that motivates robin Hood to things

(07:55):
one is his love for a virtuous maiden, which at
the time would have been seen as very much an
honorable pursuit. His love made Marian becomes something that is
beyond his thuggery, you could say. But then the more
interesting part is the idea that he is. He's an aristocrat, right,
He's a lord that has lost his He has lost

(08:16):
his place because now Prince John or the Sheriff of Nottingham,
or whoever's an authority is corrupt and has taken from
him that place. But he also knows that he is
not the king, that he can't take that role, and
so he remains faithful to the true king, right, he
remains faithful to King Richard, who is away, and he

(08:39):
just finds a way to exist in that, let's say,
in that inverted world where the authority has become legitimate,
pokes at it, plays with it, and tries to survive
until the king returns and restores order. And so what
happens in that place is that Robin Hood becomes a

(09:06):
image of everything that opposes authority. But does it, we'll
see as we look at the story, does it in
a very fascinating way, which is different from simple rebellion
and simple revolution. When I proposed this talk to to
to Alison. I was very busy and I was moving around,

(09:26):
and I never gave a title to the talk. To
Alison just made up a title. She said, I have
to put a title on the poster, and so she said,
I don't even remember Robin Hood, the original green Man,
you know. And when I finally saw the title, I thought, oh,
that's not really what I wanted to talk about. But

(09:51):
then I thought, how is it that I can How
can I connect all of these things together? What's the
connection between the Green Man? I've had a lot of joy.
You come here and visit the cathedral and go through
the church and see all of the little funny figures
and all the little monsters and gargoyles, you know, on
these architectural these architectural transition spaces, either on the outside

(10:13):
or on the screen, that is this kind of transition
between these holy spaces. And of course many of those
are these kind of green Men. And then I started
to think and to wonder, like where have I seen this?
You know, today is the day of Pentecost. It's very
fascinating that I'm giving the talk today. I'm from an

(10:34):
Orthodox tradition. I follow Eastern Orthodoxy. On the day of Pentecosts,
you know what we do in the church, We actually
decorate the entire church with greenery, no flowers, just green.
We bring in boughs of different different plants that are
that are that have just come out for May. We
put them up on the icon screen. So the icon
screen just covered with this greenery. It looks like you're

(10:56):
in like you're in this wild uh, this wild place this.
And I also remember in the story of the Green
Knight that he poses his challenge on Pentecost. Right in
the story of Gawayne and the Green Knight, he comes
in to King Arthur's court and he proposes this challenge,
who would be willing to cut his head off on

(11:19):
the day of Pentecost and to what is happening very odd,
very odd relationships. And you know, Robinhood is the green
Man for all intents and purposes. That's how we represent
him in popular culture. We try to get an image
of Robinhood in your mind. He's wearing green, he's got
that hat. And so we have this connection with Robin

(11:41):
Hood and the notion of the green And in the
earlier stories of Robinhood, we know that at the end
of the story, even though he becomes reconciled with the king,
he has this desire to return back to the forest,
to go back into the woods. You know, he is
in some ways an image of what the forest represents
for us. That you could call the forest. In this sense,

(12:03):
it's like a It's the border of that which is ordered, right,
It's the place where the city stops, and now you
go into the mysterious liminal spaces of the outside. And
that's what robin Hood comes to represent. He seems to
be gathering all of these images of liminality into himself,

(12:24):
but interestingly enough, he takes them in and finally puts
them into the service of the king, which is not ridiculous,
you know, it makes sense. We do have these monsters
on our churches, and so in a church, the gargoyles
are all of that. There. They are the merry men
for all intents and purposes, right, they are these funny

(12:45):
creatures that make us laugh, that break protocol, that break
the rules, that present us hybridity and strangeness and all
kinds of twisty things. But ultimately they are there in
a greater story kind of serve to serve God ultimately,
which which many Protestants. I remember, I grew up. I

(13:06):
grew up in a very kind of very fundamentalist Protestant world,
and it was very difficult for people to understand gargoyles.
It's like, why do they have these little devils on
the churches? What is the role of that? And it's, honestly,
it's not that hard to understand if we get into it.
It has to do with humor, it has to do

(13:26):
with jest, right, it has to do with the secular
in general, which is where the robin Hood tradition kind
of comes up. But it doesn't Robinhood doesn't come out
of a religious tradition. It comes out of the secular world.
The early stories really are in some ways a way
for the folk to poke at the hierarchy away, for
the folk to make fun of the clergy, to make

(13:48):
fun of the authorities. And this is a you know,
it's the it's a carnival of some sort. It's a
kind of carnival esthetic where there's a moment in the
year there's a place in society for poking at the king. Right,
we have that gesture character that is in the court
of the king and is in some ways there to

(14:08):
show the insufficiencies and takes on all the roles that
when you look at them on the face value, they're
actually subversive. Right. It's a subversive gesture, but ultimately it's
a subversive gesture that acts to show you the limit
of the authority that is there in place. Right, because

(14:31):
one of the problems with any authority, even legitimate authority,
is that sometimes it can start to take itself for
God's right. It can start to think that it's that
it is so divinely ordered that it cannot go wrong,
that it cannot make mistakes. So we need a little
bit of humiliation for those people on the edges. It's

(14:51):
almost necessary to kind of make the system, that make
the system function properly. So that's why I Robin Hood
has all of these cars. He's a trickster, you know.
He dresses up, he goes out, he pretends to be
something else. He steals from the rich. Ultimately we say

(15:13):
that then he gives to the poor. And so again,
even in that gesture, he's different from a common thug,
because a common thug steals from the rich for himself,
and so he would become just a mirror of the
sheriff who steals from the poor for himself. So we

(15:34):
we often we have tropes in our culture which are
in some ways revenge tropes, you know, we have a
kind of come up in tropes, and those are those
are interesting and they're fine, But ultimately, if you want
to have a full story, the idea that you know,
a poor person steals from a rich person just to
fill their pockets, Moraley is not. He doesn't seem that

(15:58):
better than the other way around. And so this funny
little aspect of the Robinhood story, which is that he
steals for a higher purpose. It's very odd. It's not
a normal morality. It's a strange morality of the edge,
you could call it. But it does participate in the
way that Robinhood is in some ways a trickster for

(16:21):
trickster for the true purpose, a trickster for the King,
you could maybe even say a trickster kind a trickster
for God, you know, in the way that King David becomes.
So let's look at King David, because that's what I
started you off with. And some people, a lot of
have that many people know the story of King David

(16:41):
that much but King David is anointed king in a
time when there's already a king. So the prophet anoints him,
and so he's hidden. He's a secret king, and there's
already a king in power, and that king is becoming tyrannical,
is becoming authoritarian, and David in some ways now becomes
a slippery snake that tries to avoid getting caught by

(17:07):
the by King Saul. There's a little story that exemplifies
all of that, a very small story where David is
a musician and he the music. The musical part is
importantly part of this story. You know, if you think
of the merry men, you obviously they're singing necessarily in
your imagination, you know. And and also all of these

(17:29):
are secular ballads that would have been in the folk
and people would have heard these ballads in the very
secular spaces. So this aspect of music and ballads is
there already in the story of King David, where he's
sitting and playing music for the king to rest the
King Saul, and the king loses his temper and tries

(17:50):
to pin down David with his lance, tries to to
pin him to the wall, to to fix him. You
could say, ah, and David has to escape that tyranny,
has to escape the power that tries to fix something right,
to hold it in place. And it's funny because even
in scripture, where we have another version of that story,

(18:12):
a story of an authority figure that pierces something with
the lance who can remember it. I don't know if
you have images of it here, right that even in
England we see it often that image of Saint Michael, right,
or the image of Saint George, of this kingly figure,
this nightly figure that pins down the snake. But in

(18:36):
this case, the whole thing is upside down, the whole
thing is reversed. Now it's the snake who's the hero
in this story. The snake is the one who's trying
to avoid authority, who's trying to avoid being pinned down,
struck down, held down by the authority figure. So you realize, oh, way,
there's stories like that in scripture. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's
very interesting. Scripture is really a great story once you

(18:59):
start to see what it is that's going on. Then
after that, King David now has to escape King Saul,
and what does he do. He joins with the group
of thieves and of debtors, of discontented men, and he
lives in the wilderness, and he lives in a cave

(19:20):
in order to hide from King Saul. Right, interesting, sounds
a lot like our friend Robin Hood, who lives out
in the forest with his band of merry men and
his band of discontents, of people that don't have a
place in society, you know, somewhat raucous clergy, you know,

(19:41):
giants and all of these rather odd figures that don't
seem to fit in society. Those are the figures that
Robinhood allies with in the forest. And already in the
story of King David, you see that that relationship is
already there. One time, David finds himself in a bind

(20:04):
and he has to pretend that he's crazy, and he
makes himself look like a madman, and he drools, and
I think he comes up to the door and he
drools on the door of the city. And he's able
to escape because he pretends, and he hides and he
wears costumes, and all of that is dutifully again, is
in the story of Robinhood, where Robinhood has to pretend

(20:27):
to be something he is not. Now that think about
that pretending to be something or not. You could say
that that is on technical terms, that's what we called
sinning right, doing something, thinking something, and doing the opposite, right,
the idea of the trickery, that is, in some ways,

(20:47):
technically it's something like a sin missing the mark. It's
pretending to be something and then doing something secretly at
the same time. But in this case, all of a sudden,
that type of behavior, because it's secretly for a higher good,
becomes part of the story. So now the trickery is
almost like a you could say it's not usual trickery,

(21:10):
but you couldn't tell if you saw it from the outside. Right,
if you just saw Robin Hood and his men in
the woods ambushing a nobleman and taking their money, there'd
be no way to know that in their heart, right,
in the secret of their heart, they're actually doing this
to help the people the need. They're actually doing this

(21:30):
to help the poor. And so this is what's interesting
about this place in the story, the place of the character.
This is the carnival place, or this kind of upside
down place and stories where things are not what they
seem and the trickster is acting in all kinds of
ways in this version, everything kind of turns back ultimately

(21:51):
in the end. Another aspect of the story of King
David that is definitely related to this is actually the
story of killing Goliath. And this is where in the
Robinhood story. I think this is weird to say this,
but I think that Robinhood outdoes David as a trickster

(22:14):
to some extent. And I'll tell you why. When David
comes and kills Goliath. There's a little part of the
story that often we ignore that can help you understand
what it is that's going on. There's a type of story.
It's really universal. You could call it a river crossing story.

(22:35):
It's a water crossing story. So you come to the
end of something like an end of a world or
the end of a land, and now there's a river,
and the river presents itself as a test right, and
the test can be all kinds of things. It could
be the Billy goats gruff, where you have an ogre
under the bridge and the ogre comes up and wants

(22:56):
to eat you to prevent you from crossing over. You know,
the story of the gin bread Man. Same story, digitbread
man gets tricked by the fox, gets on its back,
so he doesn't make it across. He goes across, the
fox eats him. Many many there's so many stories. Actually,
one of the greatest ones is the one in Genesis.

(23:17):
The whole world falls into corruption, corruption, corruption, and now
we have this problem. We have giants that are roaming
the land, these horrible monsters that are roaming the land,
and so God destroys the world, but gives one man
a boat so that he can cross the waters right
and start the world again right another version. Sorry, just
listing them off here, but it's interesting. When the Israelites

(23:40):
go back to the Promised Land, they repeat that story
backwards the story of Genesis. Interestingly enough, they get to
the Jordan River and then they cross the Jordan River
with a different kind of arc, and now they have
to fight the giants in the land of Canaan in
order to reclaim their land. So this interesting connection of
the giant, the river, the crossing, the monster, all of

(24:02):
this is there. And one of the things that happens
in the story of King David is we forget that
when King David comes to fight Goliath, it says that
before he fights him, he takes five stones from the river.
So it's there to remind you can see it in
your mind. So it's he's walking towards the Giant on
the other side of some kind of brook, and then

(24:25):
he takes the stones and then he fights the giant.
So you think, oh, that's super interesting. But he David
kills the giant. Maybe the reason why David kills the
giant is because he's secretly the king. That's what I
think is going on. But robin Hood is much more
of a trickster. Everything about Robinhood is much more topsy

(24:45):
turvy because robin Hood also encounters the Giant at a river, right,
you know the story, he meets Little John on a
log bridge, and so robin Hood wants to cross the bridge.
It's it's it's it's such a it's such a mythical theme.
You know, this monster in the liminal space and now

(25:07):
you have to cross the bridge, but the monster won't
let you cross. So Little John won't let you cross,
and he says, well, fight me and if you beat me,
I'll let you cross. But Robinhood loses. That's very interesting.
Robin Hood actually loses to Little John falls in the river,

(25:28):
and it's by losing to Little John that he gained
that he wins him. Right, it's by losing to the
giant that he brings the giant into his band of merryman.
I think it's very unique. I tried to find other
versions of this, and they're very I couldn't really find one.
The only thing that kind of looks like that story

(25:49):
that I could think of is actually the story of Jacob,
and the story of Jacob you have a little bit
of that because you know that Jacob fights the angel
and he to the angel, right, and in losing to
the angel, he receives a blessing. What people usually forget
again in that story, for a reason that I don't understand,
is that it also says that it's next to a river. Right,

(26:11):
he fights this angel right next to a river, and
in losing, he joins. But it's not exactly the same
because an angel sometimes it can be a bit of
a monster, but it's not quite a monster. But in
this case he loses. And then when you look at
Robin Hood's story, you'll see that, oh, there are several
versions as iterations of this game that Robinhood is playing

(26:32):
about how on the edge of the river he actually loses,
right if you know the story of Friar Tuck. There's
one version of his meeting with Friar Tuck that has
to do with this Robin Hood discovers that Friar Tuck
that there's this wiley you know, Friar that supposedly can
handle a bow staff, that can fight. So Robin Hood

(26:52):
goes to see him next to a river, of course,
and he demands of Friar Tuck. He says, cross me
over the road. I'm gonna get on your back, and
you're gonna cross me over the river. And so Friar
Tuck agrees, puts Robin Hood on his back, crosses him
over the river. But the joke on the other side
is Friar Tuck says, okay, well, now it's your turn.

(27:14):
You have to cross me back over the river, and
Robin Hood is saying, no, I'm not gonna do that,
so okay, So that means that we have to fight,
and so they fight, they do get out, and again
Robin Hood loses the fight. He loses the fight, and
then he does carry Friar Tuck back over the river

(27:34):
to the other side. And so this funny, interesting situation
where this trickster lets himself be tricked or becomes tricked,
and in that ends up serving you know, ends up
bringing these people into his band, and so he actually
then becomes their leader, which is weird, right, Usually think

(27:55):
of just any mythological story to think of a Gilgamashan
is a great example of this usual trope, where Gilgamesh
is this image of the king of authority, of power,
and Ank you Do is a wild man who lives
in the forest and is half animal half man, his
representation of all the greenery, all of that kind of

(28:16):
all of that forest figure. But Gilgamesh beats nk you Do,
and in beating him becomes his friend and joins him
into his you know, into his service. But now again
Robinhood flips that upside down. And that is what is
to me interesting about the Robinhood story, that there is

(28:37):
a sense in which in the story there is a
there is a very Christian element there. There's something about
the idea that it is possible to how can you
say this, that it is possible to submit or to lose,
or to to give up, but then ultimately to win.

(28:58):
That It's not that they the image power, right, the
image of subjecting, the subjecting the snake to you know,
all of that is fine, doesn't mean that we get
rid of that story. But in the Robin Hood story
and in these kinds of story, you can see this
trick that's happening, this surprise that's happening, you know of
in some ways giving in and then ultimate but ultimately

(29:19):
serving doing that to serve a higher purpose or to
kind of join someone to a higher purpose. And that's
what's amazing about the Robinhood story is because all of
these elements kind of come together in his story to
show that that's what that's what it is that he
seems to be representing. In some ways, he is this

(29:41):
upside down world, right, this kind of carnival jesting world
of laughter and of merry men, and of transgression and
of thievery. All of these things are part of his world.
But ultimately they are not revolutionary, right, They are not
there to re we move the power that's in place,

(30:01):
but ultimately actually to serve the highest power.

Speaker 2 (30:06):
Hi, this is Sarah from Hamilton, and I'm very happy
to announce my first course with Symbolic World Scripture, The
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(30:26):
the eternal Word of God, and archetype of the world.
And we will see how that Christological vision firmly Earth's
in place the concrete details of Israel's Torah and story.
Through that lens, you will come to see how meaning
and matter intersect and intertwine, not only in the text
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(30:47):
by the Bible.

Speaker 1 (30:52):
It's good to think about that for us, because you know,
there might come a time, and there has been times
in the world where that has happened, right where even
though maybe we're Christians, I don't know if everyone here
is I know I am, And you find you come
in a position where all of a sudden authority becomes
to act in an illegitimate way, or that authority becomes illegitimate,

(31:16):
or that it becomes corrupt. And so how do we
act facing a corrupt authority and resisting that authority while
also understanding that if I replace it, If I imagine
if Robin Hood had said, you know, little King John

(31:39):
Sheriff of Nottingham. Obviously these are corrupt officials. So what
am I going to do? I'm going to take their power.
I'm going to declare myself the king, or declare myself
the sheriff. But we know what that looks like. We
know what happens when something like that happens. We've seen

(32:00):
too many stories of revolution in the twentieth century, and
we know that it always leads to tyranny. Right, it
always leads to a form of tyranny because the person
that takes the power for themselves has no way of
justifying it except for force. Right, they have no legitimacy
in their power except for force. So the problem is

(32:21):
how do we act? How do we play the trickster?
How do we evade the corruption? How do we evade
the authority while serving a higher good? And they're really
there's some interesting examples in our own tradition, in the
Christian tradition, where people have done exactly that in a

(32:41):
beautiful way. One of the versions that I that I
love to I want to make sure I don't forget
some things here. One of the versions that I love
the most is Saint Francis of ASSISI there are some
beautiful stories about Saint Francis. Where he comes, you'd say,
and someone presents to him a corrupt priest and says,

(33:02):
look at this one, you know, look at him. I
don't know. He has a mistress or he's doing. He's
a corrupt priest. What about him? What do we do
about him? And Saint Francis, in this particular story, he says,
oh no, He says, I am not worthy of being
in this of this priest's presence. And he bows down
to the ground and he kisses this priest's feet, you know,

(33:27):
And in lowering himself before the priest, he shames the
priest in a way that any other behavior would would
not have done. And he shames them so much that,
you know, the priest changes his ways. And there are
many interesting versions of that. The most powerful version is
the is of course the ultimate trick that Christians believe in,

(33:49):
which is the trick of the crucifixion, or that is
the ultimate trick, the biggest trick ever played in the
history of the world. There's a there's an apocryphal text
called the Gospel of Nicodemus, in which it describes Christ's
going down into death and said. The way the story
goes in this version is that Christ is being crucified

(34:13):
and in Hell, the Devil and Hades are talking to
each other and they're celebrating, finally we did it. Finally
we killed the great King, Finally we killed the great One.
Are we've now won? And then suddenly they hear a
noise and they hear this explosion, and there what is
happening And they realize that in having killed the incarnate One,

(34:36):
all of a sudden, that means that now he's coming
down into death, that he's breaking down the doors of
death and he's coming down, and all of a sudden,
what they thought was a victory was actually a loss,
and the Devil and Hades start to panic because now
Hell is being taken by Christ, who's coming down and
gathering all the people in order to bring them out

(34:58):
of Hades. That is the ultimate version of how this
trickery can kind of turn on itself. Another version that's
interesting too is the story of Saint Christopher. If you
know this story, it's one of my favorite stories, and
you also see this trickery kind of turn on itself
in a way that serves a higher good. So Saint Christi.

(35:20):
In this version of the story, which you get is
you get a little bit of this story from the
perspective of the monster, from the perspective of the giant.
Saint Christopher is a giant. In some versions, he's a giant,
dog headed, you know, kind of monstrous thing, and he
wants to serve the strongest man. He realizes hees just
this beast. He wants to serve the king, or serve

(35:42):
a strong king. He finds this king, starts to serve
the king, and then he realizes that the king is
afraid of the devil, and so he tells the king.
He says, who's this devil figure? Because Christopher wants to
his name is Repritus. At the beginning, he wants to
serve the strongest man. So the king doesn't want to
tell him, and so Christopher tricks the king. He says, well,

(36:05):
if you don't tell me who the devil is, then
I will leave your service. So the king is forced
to reveal who the devil is to Repribus, and of
course it's a trick because then Repribus leaves the king
to go serve the devil, and so Repribust goes finds
the devil starts to serve the devil, and then one
day he realizes that the devil is afraid of the cross,

(36:28):
so he asked the devil. He says, what is this cross?
What is this? What is this figure about? And of
course the same thing happens. The Devil's is, I won't
tell you, because if I tell you, you'll leave my service.
Repertus plays the same trick, says, if you don't tell me,
I will leave your service. So the devil tells him
about Christ, and Reprobus leaves. The devil's service has tricked

(36:49):
the devil, which is not bad. Tricking the Devil's pretty good.
And then he goes to look for Christ. He can't
find him, can't find Christ, can't find the strongest, can't
find the greatest, the strongest emperor that has ever existed.
And he meets a monk on his ways, and the
monk says, well, I can help you find Christ if
you want to find him. And he says, well, the

(37:09):
way that you can find Christ is you should pray.
And you know, Repribus is just a giant, dog headed monster.
I said, I can't pray. I'm sorry, that's not going
to happen, So okay. The monk says, well, maybe you
could fast. If you fasted, maybe that would help you
find christ So Repribus says, no, I can't fast, that's

(37:30):
not possible. And so the monk tells him to stand
next to a river, so now we have the river
reappearing in the story. He says, stand next to the river,
and you can carry people across. So Christopher stands by
the river, carries people across, and one day a little baby,
little child, little infant, comes up to him and asks

(37:51):
him to cross him over the river. And Christopher grees
starts to cross him, and as he's crossing him, of course,
the baby becomes heavier and heavier and heavier, and Christopher
is thing is, how is this possible? How can you
be so heavy? And the child says, well, it's because
I'm carrying the sins of the world. And so Christopher
crosses him over the river, and in different virgins, sometimes

(38:14):
that's where he baptized, is Christopher. Sometimes he is changed
back into a normal person. But what's interesting is that
you know, it's a trick. The whole thing is a trick.
The whole story is a trick. Right again, in serving
the weakest, he finds that he's actually serving the strongest
in the story, right, he's looking to serve strong people,

(38:36):
but then finally when he serves the weakest thing that
you can imagine this little baby, this little child, that
he is being tricked into serving the strongest. And so
this idea of in the robin Hood story, in some ways,
of him losing to King John and losing to Friar Tuck,
and in some ways being this marginal figure that is

(38:57):
engaged in all this trickery and all of this it's
related to It's related to these other stories. It's kind
of playing amongst these other stories to help us understand
what is the role of these what is the role
of these marginal figures, What is the role of Carnival,
what is the role of trickery? And then ultimately what
is the role of even these gargoyles that we see

(39:21):
on the on the churches. I want to make sure
I don't go too long. What time is it? Five
more minutes? All right? Okay? And so I wanted to
bring it back to the idea of the green man
and this idea of the of this greenery in the

(39:44):
story of the greenery there is. There are all these
interesting characters that appear, and one of the most interesting
ones is actually from from actually from Islamic tradition. There's
a character in the Quran. He's not named in the
but he's known in the Islamic tradition as the green Man.

(40:04):
His name is al Kadir, and in that story you
see this trickery playing out as well. In the story
of al Kadir, what happens is Moses finds out that
this character who doesn't have a name in the Quran
is the wisest character, and he wants to follow. He
wants to receive teaching from this character, so he goes

(40:25):
and finds him, and the character al Kadir says, yes,
you can study with me, but never question. Never question
my teaching. If you question my teaching, you know I'm
gonna cast you out. So Moses agrees to do this
kind of starts to follow al Kadir. Then al Kadir

(40:45):
does horrible things. There's things that are completely nonsensical. One
of the things he does is he goes into a city,
finds a boat for a poor fisherman, and he rips
a board off the boat and walks away. There are
different versions of what it is he does these things
that look one of them is actually kills a young man,
which that's pushing us, you know, a little far. It's

(41:08):
not how can I say, this's like it is a
Muslim story. It doesn't have exactly the same morality as ours.
But he does these kind of horrible things, and every
time most it's like, what are you doing? Why are
you ripping a piece off this boat? Why are you
doing this? And every time, you know, Kadir says, you're
not supposed to ask, You're not supposed to ask questions.
And then at the end, finally Kadir reveals all the secrets.

(41:29):
He says, the reason why I took the piece off
that boat is because there's the king who's coming to
claim all the boats that are functional in the land,
and so by removing a piece of the boat, the
king won't take it from this poor man. And so
a gesture that looked like it was nefarious was secretly
hiding a positive gesture. And what's interesting about the al

(41:53):
Kadir story is that there's a version of that story
that for so I don't know how it happened, but
it seems it's way into Christianity, it seeks its way
into our legends, and it becomes a Merlin legend. So
there's a legend of Merlin in a romance called the
Romance of Silence, where Merlin is a wild man. He

(42:13):
lives naked like an animal in the forest. And there's
a character in the story who pretends to be a
man because in order to inherit money from her father,
so she's raised as a man and she pretends to
be a man, but nobody knows, and for complicated reason,
the king sends her out to find Merlin and to

(42:36):
tame Merlin to bring him back to the court. And
so she goes out and she finds Merlin. She tames
him with like milk and meat. It's like this really
interesting scene. And then Merlin coming back, sees all of
these scandals too. He sees a woman who is mourning
her husband, and a priest that's sensing the tomb, and
Merlin's laughing. He just laughs. He sees these poor children

(42:59):
that are on the side of the road, and Merlin
laughs and he laughs and he laughs, and all through
this he's just laughing. Then he gets to the king
to Arthur's court, and he sees Arthur come out with
his wife, and he laughs and he laughs and he laughs,
and he's just laughing at everyone, mocking everyone, and finally
the King says, you have to tell us what you're doing,

(43:19):
or else, you know, you're in trouble. So finally Merlin
reveals all the secrets. And the same way he says,
you know, he was laughing when the man that was
dead and the wife and the wife was mourning him.
She says, actually the wife, her lover is the priest,
and the man that is dead is better off dead
at this point, and then he says that for all,

(43:42):
He says, the children that were crying in front of
the in front of this wall, what they don't know
is that there's a treasure hidden right under the wall
where they're begging, and that, in fact, the biggest riches
are there, just hidden beneath them. So he reveals all
the secret and he reveals that this lady is actually
a lady, and everything is return to order, and that's
how the story of robin Hood ends, you know, in

(44:04):
this final version, really it ends that all of the trickery,
all of the slipperiness, all of the taking from the
rich and giving to the poor. When the King returned,
the carnival ends and everything gets put black, gets put
back into its proper order, right, and robin Hood enters
the service of the king, and everything kind of returns

(44:25):
into the normal order. And that's really the way to
understand this story. But if you you know, you're from
around here, that's the way to understand all the carnival
things that we do, right, all the all of these
jesting feasts that exist in the in the in the
Christian Church, some of them you have here now right

(44:46):
on May Day, during during the Pentecost season. There are
some of these kind of carnival uh traditions. And so
hopefully this has helped you kind of understand a little
bit how Robinhood is one element meant of this way
in which it is possible sometimes and in a certain way,
for upside down behavior and trickery to serve a higher good.

(45:10):
So thank you. That was so rich.

Speaker 3 (45:26):
I'm sure it's going to have sent our minds in
all interesting directions. Does anybody want to start us off
on the first trail? I can see a hand, Yes,
is there is there a little John?

Speaker 4 (45:46):
But Saint John.

Speaker 1 (45:53):
I've never Yeah, he said, is there a relationship between
Little John and Saint John? I don't. I never thought
about it. It could be a just a lot of
the things in the robin Hood stories, you always have
to see them as kind of reversal. So it could
be seen as a kind of as as a way
of joking in which an accidental baptism happens. Right, It's

(46:14):
like it becomes a baptism story because a lot of
a lot of the river crossing stories are actually baptism stories,
like the story of Saint Christopher.

Speaker 5 (46:23):
Right you.

Speaker 1 (46:23):
I hope you got the sense that christ was baptist,
baptizing Saint Christopher as he's carrying him across the river. So, yes,
probably that's an interesting idea. It might be. It might
be right, yeah, good, good insight.

Speaker 3 (46:37):
The pack.

Speaker 5 (46:40):
Yes, you mentioned going in grade nine at the beginning,
you know, I was kind of trick and then ultimately
that does work, how well, But then it strikes into
something different going on it it's not ultimately for the

(47:01):
initiated thought for the Hends.

Speaker 3 (47:02):
Good.

Speaker 5 (47:02):
Yeah, So I want to provide to say.

Speaker 1 (47:05):
That, Yeah, so this is the story, I mean, the
story of Gawayne in The Green Knight is so subtle.
It's a very very subtle story. But I think the
way of understanding that aspect right, because Gawayne transgresses, right,
he actually sins in this case, it's an actual sin,
and it's really considered to be a sin in this case.

(47:28):
But I think that what the story is trying to
kind of help us understand is more like the story
of Jacob, that we that in our Christians actually our
humility and our recognition of our sinfulness is secretly to
our glory. Right, and Sowain GWayne beats his chest. Gawayne

(47:50):
sees himself as someone who missed and marked, and then
everyone around him is saying no, no, no, you did
the best thing you could. You know, Arthur saying you
did the best thing you could. The I forget the
name of the Green Night character like he he's saying, no,
you did the best you could. But GWayne is not prideful, right,
He actually moves in humility, And I think that's the

(48:11):
that is in some ways the the right way to
see that that that trick, particular trick. Of course, the
whole story of Gawayne is about trickery. You know, he's
being tricked in the castle. He's being tricked all the
way through. Uh, and then finally that little part. But
I think that's you know, if you load a little
bit around the story of Sir Gawayne and the uh,
the story of the Order of the Garter. Uh, there's

(48:32):
something of that going on where in some ways there's
something embarrassing that happens, and instead of pretending and hiding it,
you actually just call it out. You just say, yes,
this happened, like this embarrassing thing happened, and you know,
and then it becomes a it becomes to your glory.

(48:52):
The US talks to Visionaire, Well, what I would say
to that is, I think you need to come to
Allison's talk, because that is what her talk is going
to be about. But everything that I think of that
I've actually gotten from her, and I think that, yes,

(49:14):
but to come to the talk.

Speaker 3 (49:16):
Yeah, and then.

Speaker 1 (49:24):
Said the forest, and yeah, there are different I think
the early in the early stories, I think he goes
back to the forest. But I think in the early
stories it's also that he's not necessarily seen as a
noble that has lost He's just a He's more like
a rebellious figure who will who allies with the king.
But in the stories where he is in some ways

(49:45):
a noble that has lost his title, then I think, yeah,
he does then is restored. Everything is is kind of restored.
So yeah, there's something right to the back. Yes, yeah,
they're I mean they different monsters have different characteristics, but

(50:07):
ultimately in terms of their meaning, usually they they play
the same kind of roles. You can think of a
monster as something that doesn't fit. That's really the best
way to think of a monster is that it's either
so it could be a very little man or a
very big man, or it can be a mixture of things.
It's all. It's basically things that don't fit, that don't

(50:28):
that are that that present to us as hybridity or
excess or or abnormality, right in that way, So a
giant plays that role. The giant per se, what it
usually ends up representing in most of the tradition is
something like a body without a head, something like that.
It's too much body, right, So that's why giants, you know,

(50:49):
they they they're appetites. They eat, they want to eat you,
that's part of that. They they're very strong, you know,
they hold up the sky. They all of these these
old stories about these these these kind of giant figures
that are in some ways power without authority. Right, So
you know these stories about you know, the cliche of
the dwarf on the giant, Right, that's in some way

(51:11):
like a kind of joke about about something that's that's more.
It's like, let's say it's something more like a seed
and then the body that's joined together in that kind
of a weird way, you know.

Speaker 4 (51:27):
More say the references you made. It's kind of confusion
and trickery and so on. But it seems to me
that at the bottom of it all, it's intentionality is intended,
and it sometimes it's it's obscured by some of the

(51:48):
man but Spa, this is surely it isn't there.

Speaker 1 (51:56):
It's intention Now. The thing, the thing that's interest thing
about intentionality is that, in some ways, the when there's
a separation between the outward appearance and the intentionality from
the when you just look at what's happening, you can't
tell the difference. It's a secret, right, The difference is

(52:18):
a secret. And that's what a lot of these stories
are representing. Right. It's to kind of show that when
things are going wrong when things are falling apart and
the relationship between intentionality and outer gestures becomes impossible to discern,
Like the intentionality appears as a as a secret, and
that's what you know, I mean, in some ways, that's
what the story of Jesus. A lot of the story

(52:39):
of Jesus has that in its story, where you know,
he's he's ends up being treated as a criminal. Anybody
would walk by and seen, you know, seeing this character
being crucified, would would have said, well, yeah, here's a
common criminical being crucified like all the other common criminals,
and that there was no way to discern from just
outward appearances what it is that was truly happening secret

(53:00):
behind it. Yeah, and you've temporary.

Speaker 6 (53:09):
Politically, Robin Hood I mean, I think that it's Robin
Hood can't really I don't think Robin.

Speaker 1 (53:21):
Hood can really be a political leader. You know. I
think that he has to be on the on the edges, right,
he also has to he has to be playing on
the edges. And so you know, it's hard because this
is is high these things are highly political. But let's
say there are characters that are contenders for that, people

(53:44):
that are persecuted by the state very much. And then
you find out that actually that we got the story wrong,
that in fact, that person was in the right, and
that the state has you know, kind of gathered this
gathered all his energy to to lie and to persecute
and to slander and to do all that. And so

(54:04):
you can think of your own version, but there's there
has been several you know, I think, yeah.

Speaker 3 (54:12):
And one of the fact to let it back.

Speaker 5 (54:14):
So I just asked about the marksmanship element of hood.

Speaker 1 (54:19):
About that, Yeah, that's what I mean. I think that
that's actually to show this exactly what what what the
lady there was saying, is that is that he has aim.
He has he has true aim, and that you know
that that true aim appears even though he's in costume,
even though he's tricking, though he's stealing and he's jesting,
that all of a sudden, you know, all of a sudden,

(54:41):
if you're if you're paying attention, you'll see that his
arrow is absolutely true. And therefore it's kind of showing
what he really is, is that someone that has true aim? Yeah, yeah, exactly, Yeah,
that he's not because the thing this is actually just
to add a little bit this because they're just unders
that it's not arbitrary. Is that jesting is distraction, right,

(55:04):
that's what jesting is. Jesting is his playfulness. Its distraction.
It's drinking, it's it's merrymaking, you know, and shooting an
arrow is the very opposite of that. Shooting an arrow
is absolute attention, absolute vision, absolute directionality. And so that's
the play I think that's happening in the and just aesthetically,
if you think of the character and the situation where

(55:24):
you know, he's acting a little silly and ridiculous and
he's wearing a costume, and all of a sudden, the
arrow goes straight to the point, and then you think, oh,
this is not I'm not in the situation. I'm not
where I thought I was. You know, he is actually
and you there are a lot of stories there in fiction.
You'll find these stories of someone who who looks like
he's drinking, that he's getting drunk, but then all of
a sudden, like you know, you realize that he's completely sober,

(55:46):
completely attentive. So these are these are narrative tropes that
are also fun because kind of it's a it's a
little flip in the story that you can do.

Speaker 3 (55:55):
It was he's talking about and.

Speaker 1 (56:06):
Means no. So I think no. But I think that
in the case of Robin Hood, you know, how can
I say this? At least what I understand is that
he doesn't. He plays in that world, but he always
careful to remain honorable in his actions, right, So he

(56:31):
he takes from the rich and he gives get to
the poor, but he his ultimate aim is, hopefully is
the restoration of the king. And so then even his
means end up actually secretly being fine, Like even his
means are not complete, they're not completely out of bounds,
Like he remains honorable and he'll show that honor. I mean,
I don't know if there are stories of him just

(56:52):
killing the people he steals from. I don't think so,
at least if there were. In the older stories, those
have been kind of eliminated, where it's usually some kind
of some kind of humiliation, you know, and then uh
then leaving the character there. And so yeah, I would say,
and especially like a story where the idea of the
end justifies the means, would probably end up looking more

(57:12):
like a revolutionary story, right, because what's interesting about Robin
Hood too is that he accepts to be humiliated himself.
You see that happened. That's why the Little John story
so funny. That's why the for our Tuck story is
so funny is that he's actually humble, right, He's not
he he he he. He gets he gets taken down
and he laughs about it, and that creates this kind

(57:33):
of a makeabill like he's very People appreciate him for that.
So yeah, So obviously I don't believe that the that
the end just by the means that if Robin Hood
was religious, like the actual Robin Hood, the one, the

(57:57):
historical one, I think in I think in the stories,
I mean, all I have is the story is that
I think in the stories, I think that it is
a secular manner, a way to be in the secular
sphere and to have everything that's secular. So it's it's
important to write to see that. So it's like he's drinking,
he's merrymaking, he's with a kind of rebellious friar. So

(58:19):
there's he's in. He really is in that secular world.
But that underneath that there's a way to kind of
bring that together towards something which is attuned to to
to God. But it's it's very it's not explicit because
it because it's not a religious story. It is a
second it's a second story through and through I think so.
But it ultimately, well maybe you'll you'll you'll have another

(58:40):
opinion about to go to pray to pray. Okay, so
there you go, so he is there you go, so
he is a Christian? Then yeah, well you said that
because this is I don't want impede on your talk.
He said that in the early versions he had a
great dedication to the to the our lady. Yes, yes, no,

(59:03):
leave that as a yeah, just hold that space.

Speaker 7 (59:07):
And there's a lot of different locations of the area,
like have these locations played stories.

Speaker 1 (59:21):
Of I mean, I don't. I'm not a historian, but
one thing I can maybe say about that, uh, just
to it's something that Allison mentioned at the beginning, which
is that you what I understand, he's had historians coming
here and debunking all of these things, you know, debunking
that he was here and there and was born there.
There's a whole other way to get to this, and

(59:41):
it has to do with celebration and memory, which is
more important, honestly than just finding some birth certificate. You know,
the fact that some people remember something celebrate it, and
even interestingly enough, even the fact that legends prop up
pop up around character. You know, the modern historian might

(01:00:02):
tell you, oh, this is a deformation, right, it's a
deformation of memory. It's kind of memory going off, it
off its rails. But I think it's the opposite. I
think that it's actually when legends pop up around a character,
it's so that we remember him, right. It's not that
we're forgetting. It's that it's actually an effort to remember
and to kind of add a little bit so that

(01:00:22):
that story doesn't go away. And I think that in
terms of places that's also true. The value of the
memory that people have of Robinhood hiding in this cave
or going through this part of the forest or everything,
it has a value in its own And in the end,
the historians they can't historians can't know this. They have

(01:00:43):
no absolutely no way of knowing these things. How are
they How are they going to prove or disprove that
a bandit living outlaw like lived in this or that
place or this is that cave? They have no way
of doing that. Where they're going to find a paper
trail for Robin. It's ridiculous. So the celebration and the
memory and and our participation in that story is far

(01:01:05):
more actually I think dependable in understanding what the story is.
Then then you know, finding some I'm being a little yeah,
a little cheesy, but yeah, they're a little cheeky.

Speaker 3 (01:01:17):
So yes, it's just interesting that this neighborhood, this area
has found these stories generated. Yeah, that they live and
so there's having us something about ourselves.

Speaker 5 (01:01:39):
I'm just say something about the role of humor in
Christianity because I'm really a New Testament.

Speaker 3 (01:01:46):
At the moment and.

Speaker 5 (01:01:47):
I'm just not seeing humor in there, and I think
it should be have an important place.

Speaker 1 (01:01:53):
Yeah, there are there are jokes in the Bible. You
just have to you have to know where they are.

Speaker 5 (01:02:02):
They they.

Speaker 1 (01:02:05):
There is a joke in the New Testament that there's
at least one and it's it's actually it's in the
darkest place ever. It's actually one of the darkest place
is that when the disciples run away. You know that story,
and it's in the Gospel same Mark where it says
that one of the Roman soldiers grabs onto his coat
and he runs away naked, that's a joke. It's a

(01:02:28):
joke because they're in a garden, right, They're in the
garden of Eden. And then this character ends up naked,
but in a completely upside down way, like in a
completely ridiculous manner, in which it's he's actually kind of
fleeing the garden naked and his clothing is being taken
away from him. So it's like the opposite of the
Genesis story. So the Book of Jonah is a entire

(01:02:52):
The whole book is a joke. The whole Book of
Jonah is that is that you read it with a
bit of humor, and you will. You will laugh out loud.
It's quite funny. Yeah, it's all twisty and turning and
upside down. It's really funny.

Speaker 3 (01:03:08):
I think Jesus tells a few little jokes. I think
he's telling them to the woman at the well, for example.
M I wanted to ask him a bit about the
trickery because it's a very traditional way to think about
the death of Christ and its meaning for Christians. And
sometimes Christ is called the cheese in the mouse trap

(01:03:32):
in the early Church. But then when you get to
the time of into the later period, they begin to
think it's not fair to trick the devil, and therefore
you can't have it anymore because you're tricking him. But
are you really tricking him? That's the point. You gave
a lovely example from the Gospel of Nicodemus. Well, did

(01:03:56):
Jesus set out to trick the devil?

Speaker 1 (01:04:00):
Mh is?

Speaker 3 (01:04:02):
I mean mobi twitch is obviously setting out to trick people?

Speaker 1 (01:04:05):
Because really, yeah, so the best I think if we
take the story of the gospel, it's what's important to
see is what a trick like, what a trick is,
and also what it means to kind of turn something
upside down. Right, it's like to to do something, and
then the opposite is what your true intention is. Okay,

(01:04:26):
so that's kind of what a trick is. Right, You're
doing something here and I'm actually doing something there, right, uh. Now,
the nature of reality itself, so it means that that
at some point will be turned back. It's gonna it's
gonna turn back. It's gonna be revealed to be false,
to be an illusion, to be to be a lie.

(01:04:47):
And so it is very important to understand the crucifixion
and resurrection of Christ as a trick because the story
starts as a trick in the garden, right, the devil
the snake tricks Eve into taking the fruit, and so
that trick has to undo itself. And the trick that

(01:05:09):
we say that Christ plays on the devil is bigger
than you think. It's bigger. It's cosmic. Christ is saying,
you know that thing you did at the beginning, it
led to this. Right, you thought that you were you
had it all. You thought that you had done this
thing at the beginning, and that this was going to
lead to a world of death. But actually it's leading

(01:05:30):
to something which is greater than what was at the beginning.
And so the resurrection of Christ becomes the final trick
in the sense that it turns what happened in the
garden back up on its feet, but even in a
way that's even greater than what was there at the beginning.
This image of the incarnation as being in some ways
more than what Adam was in the garden. And so
I think it's important to see that as the story

(01:05:54):
and to understand that that's how trickery always kind of
kind of functions, and you can actually recognize a holy fool,
you could say, from a regular fool is that the
holy fool wants the trick to come back on him.
Usually that's the sort of same Francis is a good
one where he ultimately he humiliates himself. That's how the

(01:06:19):
clown story is supposed to end, right. The clown comes
out and he puts a banana peel on the ground,
and he gets everybody to trip on the banana peel
and everybody's laughing. The only way to end that sketch
is for the clown to finally get distracted and then
slip on the banana peel himself. That's how you end
that story, right, because that's what tricks are, and that's
how tricks function, and that's why the carnival, you know,

(01:06:40):
ultimately leads to the restoration in the end. So what
comes you just may.

Speaker 8 (01:06:54):
Degree multification.

Speaker 9 (01:06:59):
Turns the same double triple.

Speaker 1 (01:07:02):
Yeah, that.

Speaker 7 (01:07:08):
What comes back is great?

Speaker 1 (01:07:11):
The wall Yeah maybe yeah in some ways because I
don't I don't, I never thought about it that way.
But for sure, this whole you know, what goes around
comes around idea that's captured in the idea of karma
or whatever. We have these instant karma reels that you
can see online, you know, and so I think that
that's right. I mean, what's interesting about about that? You could?

(01:07:32):
I could. I've never thought about it, but one of
the things you can think of is that what happens
when in a trick, when you kind of try to
falsify reality, right, is that there are fruits. It has fruits.
It actually brings about certain consequences, and by the time
that those consequences have become ripe, when they come back
to haunt you, they're actually much bigger. They've gathered a

(01:07:53):
lot of body, right, And you know that every time,
you know, it's like anybody here who's lied knows that
it's like you lie. You know, you try to dissimulate
what's real, and you lie, and then you let that fester,
and then the consequences of it they begin to grow,
and all the the things you hadn't planned that were
part of the lies start to start to kind of gather.
And then finally when it comes to catch you, it's

(01:08:15):
pretty it's a dragon that's swallowing you up. You know.
So that's a good I think that's good insight.

Speaker 3 (01:08:25):
Gosh, well, okay, one more, just if you push.

Speaker 9 (01:08:33):
Jesus and roll the club mad nature Man who keep
it through Beef and Maris Kane fun And that's a
seconate story. Why do we need that in parallel gospel stories?

Speaker 1 (01:08:50):
What do you mean.

Speaker 9 (01:08:52):
When we have perhaps the stories?

Speaker 1 (01:08:57):
Well, because because all the good stories are are downstream
from the gospel story, we would have no stories. You know,
Rocky Balboa is downstream from the gospel story. Like any
story that that attracts your attention and kind of points
you towards something that's good and true ends up being

(01:09:17):
downstream from that story. The resurrection story, the sort of
Christ contains all the stories. I can't I don't want
to go into detail now, but it's actually it's not
just something that you say that sounds mystical, but like
Christ actually is. If you look at it on face value,
it could be like very contradictory because there are narrative

(01:09:37):
tropes in ancient myth and in ancient stories. In Christ,
for some reason, he just kind of has them all.
And so he's like he's a king. He's also a shepherd,
and he's also an agriculturist. He's a technician, you know,
he's he's an artisan. He's a criminal, he's he's a

(01:09:57):
he's a teacher. He's like, I could keep going. He
just weirdly accumulates all of these story tropes and characters
in his story, and somehow it works and then you
end up with this very, very very unique story. So
I think that you know what you asked about Robin
Hood is true about the entirety of the Arthurian Corpus.

(01:10:20):
It's true of Dante, it's true of all of the legends,
all the fairy tales, all of that that they contain
a sliver of Christ. But so in terms of what
we're saying now, let's say this idea of the trickery
that Christ plays is one aspect that's not what Christ is.

(01:10:40):
Christ is not a trickster. There's an aspect of the
trickster in Christ, but he's not a trickster. I mean,
he's the King for goodness sake. So Christ is the
King and the trickster, right, He's all of the character.
He's just all of the characters at the same time.
So he becomes the source of our storytelling. That's really

(01:11:01):
probably the best way of understanding it.

Speaker 3 (01:11:03):
And this is the Feast of Pentecost, when the disciples
received the Holy Spirit and immediately they stop telling.

Speaker 1 (01:11:09):
Stories, right. But not only that, but then they also
tell the story in a way that everybody can understand
in their specific context. And that's a good example. It's
like robin Hood or these different types of legends. They
can be a sliver of the story of Christ which
is accessible to regular guy who goes to the pub.

(01:11:31):
You know, doesn't necessarily go to church very often a
few times a year, but he still is without even knowing,
participating on the margins in that story. You know, it's
still part of his life. The scriptures, both of them

(01:12:00):
are stories.

Speaker 8 (01:12:03):
HM told, I say that Bob was exploration.

Speaker 1 (01:12:23):
Jesus well part of the story. So this, yeah, so
the story of Jesus is clearly his story, right. And
in the Gospel of Saint John, not only that, but
it says that if he had written down all the
things that Christ had done, it would feel there would
be a lot of books in the world to contain them.
So we basically picked elements in the story of Christ

(01:12:45):
which can would contract his story in a way that
reveals who he is. Right. And so it's told as
a story necessarily because because nobody's telling me about like
you know what, what color where his toenails, or like, no,
we're not we're not telling No one's telling me about
what he ate on a Tuesday, Like there are a
bunch of things that Jesus did that we don't tell.

(01:13:07):
We contract that into a story form. But part of
the story of Jesus for it to be what it is,
is that Jesus had to be a man that lived
in the first century, and he had to die and
be crucified. Without that, it's the story would be a
self contradiction because it's actually part of what the story

(01:13:27):
is is that in the case of robin Hood, that
it's not as important, right because Robinhood. I think robin
Hood is based on true memories of someone who existed,
but to the extent that legends accumulated around him, and
the fact that some of these things might not have happened,
it's not a big deal because in the story, we

(01:13:47):
don't depend our life doesn't depend on robin Hood, like
and our you know, our salvation doesn't depend on Robinhood,
as it does on Christ. But in the case of Christ,
it's important that the events that happened in his life
are describing a man that lived in the first century
and died and the tomb was empty, all of these things,
but it still is a story. It has to be.

Speaker 3 (01:14:07):
I don't think we have time to explore all these
questions now, because you said you know the gospel is
a true story. Yeah, and I think you can all relax.
So I just want to thank Jonathan so much. I mean,
it's been unbelievably rich. I'm pleased to say. Have you recorded?

Speaker 1 (01:14:26):
I hope, so we'll see if it works.

Speaker 3 (01:14:28):
Would it be going out?

Speaker 1 (01:14:30):
Yes, I'll put it on my own YouTube channel.

Speaker 3 (01:14:32):
What we visit this? Go to his YouTube channel and watch.
And we're just so grateful to you to come in
to us. And I don't think I shall ever think
about Clean David or Robin Hood ever the same again,
completely blow, Thank you, thank you.

Speaker 1 (01:14:53):
If you enjoy these videos and podcasts, please go to
the Symbolic World dot com website and see how you
can support what we're doing. There are multiple subscriber tiers
with perks. There are apparel and books to purchase, So
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401 - Robin Hood: The Original Green Man (Nottingham talk)

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}401 - Robin Hood: The Original Green Man (Nottingham talk)