484 - The Saint Who Killed an Emperor

0:00So according to Christian tradition, there is a saint who killed an emperor. This is a very particular and strange story. It is the story of St. Mercurius, a little known saint, but a one that is very important to me, because he is one of the main characters in our graphic novel series, God's Dog. So we want to look at how it is that this is possible, how could a saint kill an emperor and how it is that this wonderful and strange story came together. And also, what does it have to do with Dog-headed men? This is Jonathan Peugeot. Welcome to the symbolic world. So I thought that this would be an important story to talk about right now,

1:02especially because God's Dog 3 is coming out very, very soon. You can go on our website and you can already order it. If you get the bundle of the books, you also get discounts and free shipping and everything. We're trying to celebrate the coming of the most recent graphic novel in which the character Mercurius will take on more and more space and also as the series progresses, he's going to become a more and more important character. And so the story of St. Mercurius is a story that is celebrated both in the east and in the west. Here for example, you can see an image of St. Mercurius in a Byzantine church. And he is of course a warrior saint. His story is that he was an extremely proficient warrior, one that was very good at fighting and that he fought with the Emperor. Ultimately after fighting with the Emperor, he was asked to sacrifice the pagan gods, refused, and then he was decapitated. And so this is the basic tradition of St. Mercurius.

2:04But what's interesting about the story of St. Mercurius is how the story starts to grow and all these aspects start to appear in the story of St. Mercurius a little later in his tradition and reveal some very interesting aspects about who he is and what it is that he is doing. In our last video, which I talked about the sword of St. Michael, I talked about the tradition according to which one day when he was fighting, the archangel Michael came and gave St. Mercurius his sword in which he was able to fight both with his regular sword and with of course fighting with the power of heaven using the sword of St. Michael. And this is of course what made him such a prominent fighter. But in the icons of St. Mercurius, as you can see here, there's this very strange detail, which is that on the bottom of the image, you see him like St. George slaying the dragon, what you find is you find St. Mercurius slaying a king.

3:08And that king is the emperor Julian the apostate. Now, fascinatingly, St. Mercurius was not alive at the time of Julian the apostate. But the tradition starts to appear because Julian the apostate, as you know, he was the emperor that started to return to paganism and emphasize paganism once again in his rule in the very early centuries and then caused trouble, even kind of came close, started to persecute the church, started to persecute Christians, wanted to rebuild the temple in Jerusalem as a kind of gesture against Christianity, and then tried to kind of return to the pagan sources of the empire. And what the tradition and the tradition is of course that someone killed Julian, Julian died on the battlefield and we don't know who it is that killed him. He died in a retreat from Persia. Now, even the pagans accused possibly a Christian soldier of killing Julian.

4:11We don't know what is exactly that happened, but that is one of the stories that starts to appear, that the idea that it is in fact a Christian soldier that in the retreat from Persia, you know, took the opportunity to kill this pagan emperor. And so this is a tradition that started to appear around it, and then that in some ways starts to increase, starts to get joined, strange enough with the legend of Saint Mercurius. So you can imagine that Saint Mercurius, because he was seen in that tradition about him fighting with the sword of Saint Michael and kind of fighting with the power of heaven, what happens is that there is this image that Saint Basil the Great, and the people around Saint Basil in Caesarea, and start to pray about Julian the Apostate, and interestingly enough, in Saint Basil wasn't actually also a bishop in the time of Julian, but you can see how these are kind of later traditions that kind of accumulate around the saint. And so Saint Basil prays to God so that they can be delivered from Julian the Apostate, and then in some virgins, the Saint Basil, someone else has a vision and kind of sees the heavenly council,

5:17sees the council of the Apostle and sees the Holy Virgin, and the Holy Virgin tells Mercurius to go and to take care of Julian. And then in that tradition cycle, you see that Saint Basil, and you can see him in the icon, right? So you can see that Saint Basil is here, you know, kind of noticing what it is that's going on, as he is killing Julian. According to tradition, they went to see Saint Mercurius' tomb, and Mercurius' tomb, in which his body and his weapons were laid, and they saw that the weapons were gone, and that the body was gone. And later, after the news of the death of Julian the Apostle appeared, then they saw that the weapons and the body had returned, and that the weapon was stained with blood. And so this tradition is very fascinating, which is that, you know, of course, it looks unwieldy to us, you know, and this tradition gets taken up and carried over, and you find it not just in the East, but then ultimately, you see it in the gold and legend,

6:19where Saint Mercurius is also, instead of the Saint Mercurius himself, is the one that killed Julian the Apostate. But a way of understanding it, you could see, is that this idea, in some ways, of the divine council, and how, in fact, Saint Mercurius, like Saint George, is a reflection of that martial ethic, that in some ways participates, you could say, in the role of Saint Michael, and becomes an extension of martial ethics in the world, as someone who has now moved into heaven, and now has become like an angel, has become one of the divine council. And so you can see that the layers in the images of Saint Mercurius is that he receives the sort of Saint Michael. So in receiving the sort of Saint Michael, he in some ways becomes an extension of God's judgment on the world, and then participates in the killing of Julian the Apostate. No matter how you see it, the Christians, that's how they saw it. When Julian died in his escape from Persia, they saw it as divine justice that was being accomplished.

7:21So here you can see how the layering of the symbolism between Saint Mercurius participating in these different stories, is a way to represent that in the world, that is the holy saints, that are soldier saints, are an extension of Saint Michael's role in the world, which is to exemplify and to manifest God's judgment and God's retribution on the world. And you can see that, of course, in the imagery, Saint Mercurius is shown on a horse with the lance, sometimes with the swords, with the two swords, and he is terracing the emperor in a way that is extremely similar, of course, to the way that we show Saint George terracing the dragon. And so the evil emperor, the apostate, the one who tried to bring back the pagan chaos, the pagan world, is seen as an element of chaos that is trying to return into the world, and has to be subjugated and terraced by God's divine judgment, ultimately through the hand of Saint Mercurius.

8:26Hello everyone, we are excited to announce that God's dog three, that is God's dog monk, is currently being shipped to the United States. It is set to ship to all of you in October, and so we are offering it in presale, and to celebrate, we are also offering up to $25 off if you get the bundle of the books together. We are also offering free shipping in the United States, and so now the time to get God's dog, the new book will really explode the story. If in the past two books, we've stayed close to the main characters, now we're going to bring it close to its cosmic place. We're going to see more about the giants, more about the biblical themes of the garments of skin. We're going to see the Amazon, the Centaurs, and that even will take a little trip into hell. I'm definitely looking forward to seeing what all of you think of this recent book, and so get your books today. But there's more to the story of Saint Mercurius. If that isn't enough, there's more to the story of Saint Mercurius.

9:26In the Coptic and Ethiopian legends of Saint Mercurius, Saint Mercurius is seen as him and his grandfather and his father, they were hunters, and they were out in the forest hunting. And as they hunted, they encountered, guess what? They encountered dog-headed men in the forest, and the dog-headed men ate the grandfather of Mercurius. But as they ate the father of the grandfather Mercurius, and were going to eat his father, and ultimately I imagine him as well, then an angel appears to the dog-headed men, and converts them to the flesh of the flesh. And that's the story of Saint Mercurius. Then those dog-headed men become warriors in Saint Mercurius' faction, that is they become warriors that fight with Saint Mercurius in his battles.

10:26If you look at this image, which is an Ethiopian image, and here you can see it all coming together, right? Which is that on the one hand you have Saint Mercurius, who is there on his horse, he has the spear, he is terracing the Emperor Julian, you see that here as well, quite explicit here with the actual disembowling of the Emperor. Then next to him is, of course, an image of Saint Basel, you see, I don't know who the other person is, but there's definitely Saint Basel is there, who is in someone's praying for the deliverance of Christians, and now the dog-headed men have been kind of brought into it, and it's all kind of coming together, where Saint Mercurius is using the dog-headed men in battle, and ultimately in a kind of battle against the evils of the Emperor Julian. In this version, of course, you also see the image of the angel that is above here in the corner of the image.

11:31And so this image, I think this is the image, I'm not 100% sure, but I'm pretty sure that this image is the one that is represented in the Church of Saint Mercurius, which is in La Libela. And so La Libela is, of course, the great Ethiopian city, where the carved churches are, and there's this network of churches in the ground that are all linked together, and one of those cave churches is the Church of Saint Mercurius. And I remember when I was in Ethiopia, we were visiting these different churches, and I told my guide, it said, I have to go to the Church of Saint Mercurius. This was a long time ago. This was like in 2010, but we had already written God's dog. And so we come into the Church, and there it is, the fresco that I was kind of hoping to see, which is this, it's not a fresco, it was like a big painting that was framed, but it was in the Church. And there he was, Saint Mercurius on his horse, spearing the Emperor with the dog-headed men in the background, the angel above, and of course Saint Basel.

12:33And for me, it was a great moment. It felt like these amazing stories coming together for me in the moment. So if you look into it, you'll see the Saint Mercurius is an extremely fascinating saint, one that is definitely worth looking into to understand the relationship between heaven and earth, and to understand how, as saints, the saints participate in the heavenly council, even in the more martial aspect of the heavenly council, which is the role of Saint Michael. Another very interesting detail about Saint Mercurius that starts to appear in the tradition of Saint Mercurius is that he is in fact the cousin of Saint George. And so this appears, especially in Coptic, a hagiography, and you can see, of course, as well in this desire to make Mercurius a cousin of Saint George, it's related to this idea of the divine council. And in some ways, this notion of the extension of the martial ethic into the world, the divine martial ethic.

13:35And so by connecting Saint Mercurius by making a cousin of Saint George, it is telling us narratively that these two are similar, right? They're functioning in a similar way. They're playing a similar role in the way that they are connected and are extensions of Saint Michael. Saint George, of course, kills a dragon like Saint Michael kills a dragon. And Saint Mercurius ends up actually wielding the sword of Saint Michael himself. And so this can also help you see in some ways how these stories get connected and how they help us understand who these characters are and what role they play. And if you're interested in that, you can also get Goss Dog because the story we play with this, obviously we don't tell the exact same version as the one of the hagiography, but we play in the romance tradition with this image, all these images and stories about Saint Mercurius and how it all comes together in this version, not in the dog headed men, in the same dog headed men that are in the story of Saint Mercurius, but with Saint Christopher himself, who is also a dog headed man that gets trained by Saint George and Saint Mercurius.

14:38And so this is just a little tidbit to show you all the kind of symbolism that we're pulling into our graphic novel series based on some of the wilder traditions of the Christian history. And so I hope this was interesting. As interesting to you as it is to me and I'll talk to you very soon. Bye bye. Thank you for your support.