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Hello all. And today we are going to be talking about the power of ideas and how they shift and go backwards and forwards and that's going to relate to it the previous episode and hopefully launch us into some more interesting ideas for discussion. So Thomas Kuhn, who was a philosopher and a physicist, wrote the book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, where he coined the phrase paradigm shift. And I'm sure that you've heard this phrase over and over. It's quite popular to discuss. In fact to some have said it's been entirely overused, but the idea of it is extremely powerful.
Kuhn mainly focused his work upon the scientific realm, but what he said was if you're dealing with a concept that completely revolutionizes an idea, then that is a paradigm shift, especially one where people are going to have to inhabit this new reality and adjust to it. So for example, thinking that the Earth was the center of the galaxy, and then through scientific evidence, coming to understand that the sun is really the center and the planets revolve around it was a major paradigm shift. Same thing from going from Newtonian physics over to general relativity, that was a paradigm shift.
Same thing for recognizing the truth behind evolution. That was a big deal. And even a more modern example would be the general acceptance that the visible matter that makes up the entire universe is only a very small portion of everything. And now you have theories of dark matter and dark energy. That is a paradigm shift. It changes everything. And now of course people have, you know, as I said, applied it to many other topics. So for example, you could say I guess at the most grossest of levels that the internet has changed business. That's a paradigm shift.
You could go on and on, but the one thing I wanted to point out is you know we recognize a lot of these paradigm shifts. These fundamental you know rethinking based upon evidence that things don't operate the way that we thought that they did. And you have to adjust to that. You know, some people point to climate change as a possible paradigm shift, especially in our current political atmosphere. But I'm not here to talk about politics. I like to stay far, far away from that topic.
I don't want to piss people off and also don't want to, you know, interject my my own opinions, because that's exactly what they are. They are opinions. But regardless, the point I'm trying to make is that there's one paradigm shift that was extremely radical that most people don't know about. Or at least I could be the ignorant one and everyone knows about it and just never talks about it. But that's usually not the case, at least as far as I'm aware. You know people understand that, you know, the concept of gods has existed probably for as long as humanity.
Whenever, you know, a person encountered something they could not understand, they probably attributed that to a force that was outside of their perception, but still had a direct impact upon their lives. You know, whether that was ill fortune or you know natural phenomena, what have you. You know, if you see lightning and you have no idea what lightning is, you see fire and you don't know what fire is, those things could be considered to be much more powerful and thus worthy of attention, whether that be through prayer or worship or whatever it may be.
So whenever we think about anything involving divinity, we simply assume that those ideas are kind of flash frozen in time, that people believe in gods. It's always been that way, and there's never really been any evolution to those concepts, besides like between cultures or outside of, you know, divine revelations, whatever it may be. But that's not really quite true. There was one par a paradigm shift that has really shaken humanity and has, at least for the Judeo Christian traditions, has really defined how we think and feel today. And that is the idea of dualism.
Now many, many religious traditions believe that there are good forces and evil forces. But when it came to ancient Judaism, that was not the case. There really wasn't dualism involved. There was simply a concept of this is how the world works. So for example, in ancient Judaism, when people died, it wasn't that they went to heaven, nor was there really a hell. It was just kind of an underground place that people went to and that's where they stayed. Wasn't really a happy place, wasn't really a place of punishment, it was just a place. Same thing about you know forces.
Yes, people have considered um, you know, there to be extremely negative forces, but yet it wasn't that good and evil constantly vide with each other, it was just there is one overriding sense of order and something either overtakes that or operates within it. And it's not until much later do you have this contest of wills between something that is inherently good and something that's not. And there are copious pieces of evidence of this. For example, if we look at first Kings, we see that the Lord sent a lying spirit into the mouth of the king.
And this lying spirit was not working against God, that spirit was a member of God's own high court. But let's even go to the most famous example, which is the book of Job. Now, if a person happens to read the King James Version of the of the Holy Scriptures, then they may be under the mistaken interpretation that God is having a debate with Satan, where God insists that Job is a pious man and the arguer is uh uh presuming that Job is not pious and is only acting like that because he's wealthy, has his health, has a family, and is happy. However, God is not having a debate with the devil.
Instead, God is having a conversation with ha satan. Ha is the article the so he's arguing with the satan. And I guess one could make an argument that oh it's the Satan that he's arguing against, but that doesn't even make entirely too much sense in English. Instead, Satan is a highly technical judicial term which means advocate or chief prosecutor. So God is not arguing against an entity that is working against God, whether God is having a discussion with his chief prosecutor who is working with God.
So you're not dealing with dualism in these cases, you're dealing with forces that are still underneath one dominion, namely God's. And it's the same even for Exodus, when the ten plagues happen and God sends down the destroyer to kill the firstborn. Is the destroyer a demon? No. But it's been it evolved past that since that time, but that energy whatever you may want to call it, was firmly under the dominion of God. So we can see that, you know, there's no inherent dualism in any of these examples. Oh, you can even go back further.
Like if you want to go to, you know, Mesopotamia, then you have the the evil entity uh Peshitu, who is a baby snatcher, was sent among the generations of men uh in order to cull the size of humanity. But Peshito was still created by the gods. So what changed? What introduced this sense of dualism? Where suddenly we went from thinking yeah, there are bad things in the world, but they're still within the dominion of God to no there are bad things in the world and they are actively working against God.
If you want to talk about a paradigm shift, that is probably one of the most powerful ones that I could conceive of. That is dealing in a world that is entirely different from knowing that you live in a reality where, yes, there are things out there, and those things, as I've said before, typically live in the desert that could actively hurt and kill or corrupt.
But you know that there's still essentially one world order in which everything resides under, to living in the worldview of the Essenes, those who wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls, where you would believe that you're on the side of God, that the angels are physically going to come down and fight with you.
Against the enemy, who they named the Kateem. Most scholars, in fact, I don't know of any scholar that would say that the Katim is really a euphemism for the Romans. But to have that shift happen is pretty radical. Now I mean we see hints of dualism even in the creation myths. I mean, I'm I'm not saying that there's nothing there, you know, when God separated the you know the the firmament, in fact that was kind of seeds that caused dualism to kind of erupt in Second Temple Judaism. But what caused it?
I can't really say that there is one event, but I mean the I would say the the impetus for that would be the destruction of the first temple. To have the Kerosh Kadoshin, the holy of holies be eradicated by Israel's enemies would be a pretty radical thing to happen. I mean, to talk about an entire faith being shook into its core would be unfathomable, but yet that happened. The temple was destroyed. Exile once again happened to the Jewish people and their faith was strained. And it wasn't a temporary thing. That damage was carried forward.
And yes, it has been explained by, you know, numerous, you know, books and concepts to be, oh, you know, Israel had lost its way and this was a course correction. But still that is not going to entirely soothe the soul. And so if you're you know so th the overriding concept is this you know, there were there's God and then there were the seventy two angels, and each was appointed over each one of the nations. Well, if all of the other nations are attacking God's chosen people, then it's not a gigantic shift to say that those other angels at some point must not be working for God.
They instead must be working against God. And that is the birth of the entire dualistic concept which Christianity then took and ran with. You know, we had the e even the root word for demon, which is daemon from Greek or the adjective daemonium that described divinities, spirits that came from the classical gods that would then interact or speak to humans. And usually in usually it was either in a very neutral or positive sense. You know, muses would speak to people and inspire them, etcetera. But those demons came to be not from gods, but rather things that would work against God or people.
In fact, I mean one of the def one of the the root words that classical scholars took the word demon from the definition of that is to divide. And I can't think of a more perfect description of what a demon truly is. It is there to divide humanity from God. It is there to divide righteousness from those who seek it. Christ early Christianity took this idea and ran rampant with it. Those that were demonically possessed were corrupted. They were agents of Bedlam, and these creatures were Bedlam personified. So this dualism it didn't just kind of stay small.
It went to the same level as the divine, but the mirror opposite of it. And other religions kind of followed in that same exact kind of um standard that were derived from the Judeo Christian traditions. Even ancient scholars didn't know where this concept of demons came from or how they morphed from divinity to absolute evil. Um, you know, one theory by ancient scholars is that they were vengeful spirits. Um Josephus thought that they were the wicked dead who had come back to kill and to maim.
Origen thought um that uh the devil uh after becoming apostate uh had you know lured angels to his side, and that's where demons came from. And that's the view that we in the modern day hold as well. But the most popular theory in ancient times was that the they actually Actually came it from the giants. And that's why the giants are so important and why I thought this was like a great interim episode, especially going off from uh the last episode that we had that was all about them.
But since the giants were not only were they just evil in their own right, but because they were the product of flesh and divine, when they were killed, when God sent them against each other in battle, so that you know, long life they would not have, they were trapped in the air, and those things became demons. Now more than likely that's what the Essenes thought.
More than likely that was kind of the predominant theory about where demons originated from when you're looking at Second Temple Judaism, and so we see that the giants are not just a useful literary device that someone came up with to explain a mysterious passage in Genesis. Rather, the giants were hugely important because of their hybrid nature, and Origen and others firmly believed that they could actually be the entire root of where the demonic came from. In short, they're the source of probably one of the biggest paradigm shifts in religious thinking that we've had in thousands of years.
So I hope you forgive me for going on a a bit of a tangent. I really did intend this entire episode to be about Lilith, but uh after thinking about it and doing some research, I had to tag on to the last episode. Um so I hope you forgive me for that. We are going to talk about Lilith in this upcoming uh um episode that we're going to have because it's gonna be fun to trace her origins and to see how she evolved, where her place was, all that kind of fun stuff. So I hope you look for it, look forward to it, and join us when we do talk about that. Uh I am going to get that out this weekend.
I know this episode was delayed by your day or two this week was kind of crazy. But the other reason why it was delayed, the vast majority of the reasons, was because I have completely revamped the Southern Demonology website. So uh I know uh I've said this before, but I was looking for new hosting options.
I found uh a fantastic um underlying platform to host a site at, and I also have had ideas about how I can take uh an express middleware and use it with um serverless uh functionality and Netlify, which is the platform that is now hosting things, uh it offered that, and so I spent a long time revamping the back end and I just kind of shoved the current front end on top of it and that was it.
But then I noticed that for first the oatsight was not mobile optimized by any stretch of the imagination, and the navigation drawer was bort, and when I started digging into the front end code, I realized that the framework I had used for all of the styles, uh it was called view materials, is completely defunct now. In fact, I had to open up the Wayback Machine um and to in order to view the old documentation, and there was simply no cure for this thing, unless I wanted to break open the source code and try to redo this entirely defunct library now, and I'm like, no, we're not gonna do that.
So I instead switched it out to Viewtify, which is another material design framework that's really popular amongst the the Vue.js uh community, and I had to redo the entire thing, because it, you know, it uses all brand new um uh HTML elements and all this kind of fun stuff. And then while I was doing that, I'm like, well, you know, I really should just completely redesign it because the old design was not great. I'm not saying that the new design is the best thing ever. I am not a a UX person by any stretch of the imagination. I'm not a designer.
Um, I like to do the back end work, but I like dabbling in everything. So spent the time, actually got the site to look really good, eliminated a lot of redundant DB calls, and so I was able to launch it, uh, and it is functioning extremely well. And it actually has links to all the YouTube videos for the episodes that have those, uh, in addition to the SoundCloud uh links, and then uh our Facebook page as well. So it's much more representative of all of the social world, and also uh it just looks uh infinitely better and is gonna make it much easier for me to communicate out.
Um so I hope you go and visit it. It's at Southern Demonology.com. If you want to write to me to ask questions, to uh suggest upcoming topics for shows, uh, you can contact me there, um, or you can just send me an email at southerndemonology at gmail.com if you so desire. Um or you can go to our f uh Facebook page which is just you know f fb.me slash southern demonology, uh and there's a button right there in the front, which is uh a direct email link uh to our to me. So I hope you you know interact with uh with me um trying to build a good community.
Uh if you are interested in even having more of a community with uh you know Discord or other vehicles of communication, uh I do hope you let me know. I'm more than happy to do anything. Uh but I'm entirely enthused uh by being able to interact with people. I had a uh a viewer uh write me just the other day and uh you know immediately responded back. So I I try to be quick with all of the responses. But anyway, thank you for joining me one more time.
I'm sure that you have much more valuable things that you you could be doing with the 30 minutes that you waste listening to me, but I can't tell you how much I appreciate that you've joined us and will continue to do so in the future. So stay safe. Thanks for joining, and I will see you next time.