Five years ago, I did a podcast with Andrew Gould where at the end of the podcast he dropped a bomb on the conversation and suggested that there is a deep connection between Orthodoxy and pirates.

I have to admit that I was very offended by that that remark.

Not only do pirates and monks both live in a certain asthetical isolation from the ways of the world, from the laws of the world.

They they both seek their adventure on a ship.

They both accumulate treasure.

Of course, does the monks seeking their spiritual treasure.

But even in a purely material parallel, the monks accumulate actual treasure.

These two little micronations, the monks and the pirates, existing in the middle of the world, in the Mediterranean, and you've got the whole sort of boring, modernizing world, the world of you know, bankers and merchants circulating all around them.

So I mean, I, yes, now I understand.

So what do you actually mean is that this is Jonathan Peshew Welcome to the symbolic world.

So hello everyone, we are here at the Art of Tamada in Florida, Keys.

I'm here with a lot of my great friends.

Deacon Seraphim is running the camera.

Neil the Gray just walked by, and I'm sitting here with Andrew Gould, and we.

Thought, you know, five years ago, maybe maybe six years ago, we did, and Neil, we did.

We did a podcast.

I did a podcast with Andrew Gould where at the end of the podcast he dropped a bomb on the conversation and suggested that there is a deep connection between orthodoxy and pirates.

I have to admit that I was very offended by that remark.

But until then, since then, we haven't talked about it.

And I know that people have actually written emails to Andrews saying, please.

Tell us the secret, what is the connection?

So we thought that being here in Florida would be the perfect place to finally ask the question, what is the relationship between orthodoxy and piracy?

And so, Andrew, You're gonna have to lay this out.

For us, because I have to admit that I have no idea what you're talking about.

What's to do with pirates?

All right, So, like orthodox monks, pirates flee the world for their adventure.

And not only do pirates and monks both live in a certain asthetical isolation from the ways of the world, from the laws of the world.

They both seek their adventure on a ship, the pirates, of course, on a pirate ship, and the monks in the ship of the church.

And remarkably, in this adventure apart from the world, they both accumulate treasure.

Of course, there's the monks seeking their spiritual treasure, but even in a purely material parallel, the monks accumulate actual treasure in their in their separation from the world.

Over the centuries, the monks practice beautiful liturgical crafts.

They become icon painters, ecclesiastical jewelers, and the the Orthodox monasteries of the Old World have literal treasuries full of full of splendid gold and jewels, just like a pirate ship.

It's it's one of the beautiful paradoxes of monasticism that those who flee the material pleasures of the world end up in the in the most beautiful place in the world.

The monasteries are the treasuries of art that can rival any any museum or any collection of a of a of a royal palace.

So here we have two groups of people.

They they they flee the world.

They're apart from society.

They're on their ship.

They're accumulating treasures of all kinds, and I particularly love looking at how they dress.

Also because of course Orthodox monks dress like it's still the Byzantine Empire.

They wear these these these splendid, old fashioned robes that come from the royal court dress of ancient Byzantium.

And so these these simple monks who in a sense own nothing or you know, are strutting around, you know, dressed like princes and emperors.

And we see the same thing in the popular images of pirates, your classic pirate look with the big broad brimmed hat cocked in an angle, in the great splendid long coat, and the you know, the the chorally mustache.

This this is all the the dress of the the cavaliers and the Jacobites of the seventeenth century.

These are the These are the the Royalist Englishmen who would dress up with this sort of House of Stuart Catholic swagger in the seventeenth century to show that their opponents of the Puritans in their in their austere address.

And many, many of these you know Jacobites, supporters of the exiled House of Stuart.

You know, they they went pirate because they weren't welcome back in England, and so this popular image of of pirates, all these pirate stories take place in the early eighteenth century, but the pirates are deliberately dressed like it's the mid seventeenth century.

It shows that they kind of left the mundane, boring order of the modern world because they remembered a more, a more glorious period of history, a more a more royalist period, more conducive to treasure, treasure seeking from the old days.

And they go out in their pirate ships and they dress like their aristocrats of the age of the House of Stuart.

And so I think, I think you can see these these beautiful parallels on so many levels between the monks and the pirates.

There's also some some literal historical connections because the the the Orthodox monks of the Mediterranean of mount Athos were constantly under attack by actual pirates, the Barbary pirates, And just like the monks of mount Athos created a sort of a little independent state, the Monastic Republic of mount Athos, the pirates operated little little little pirate states on other Mediterranean islands and on the North African coast.

These these little sort of these little sort of quasi kingdoms that existed outside international law, you know, and of course the monks had to fortify their monasteries and defend their monasteries against pirate attacks.

The pirates were always coming there because the monks had treasures.

The pirates wanted those treasures.

And so the monks and the pirates were, in a sense, two sides of the same society, two sides of one coin.

They knew each other, well, they knew, they knew how to fight, they knew how to negotiate.

So in a sense, you have these, you know, these two sort of these two little micronations, the monks and the pirates, existing in the middle of the world, in the Mediterranean, and you've got the whole sort of boring, modernizing world, the world of you know, bankers and merchants circulating all around them.

So, I mean, I guess now I understand.

So what do you actually mean is that they're opposite to each other.

That's what I'm getting is that in some ways they they represent two extremes within their in their extreme opposite end up mirroring, you could say, having a strange, a strange kind of weird reflection on one side or the other.

Because I mean I think the best way for me to formulate what I think in terms of the idea that they' opposite is I is I see I do see that in some ways, monks are an image of continuity and pirates are an image of disruption.

Right, So when I think of the fact that.

The pirates would wear these extravagant kind of passe costumes, I see it as the kind of caricature of death that there are in some ways carnivalesque in their representation.

They're they're representing a caricature of high society, a kind of dark a kind of dark inversion that is trying to imitate but also make fun of this type of hierarchy.

And at the same time, and so in the monks, what they're trying to do is actually preserve the continuity.

And so although there's something weirdly displaced about, like you said, them wearing these splendid robes, they're doing it in order to continue something which was threatened and is falling apart.

And so you have these two images, one which is disruption and with the image of the skull and crossbones as this image of death, and then the monks also But it's funny because now I'm realizing that the monks also have this kind of aesthetic of death, right.

But it's a but it's different, right, It's some ways it is the difference.

Between Halloween and all Hallows, right, the difference between the carnival aspect which is characterrol, which is which is h you know, off off the off the rails, and then another image opposed to it, which is in some ways the true orientation towards death.

Right.

So you could think that the pirates what they want to do is cause death to others, right, They are basically there to kill people and to rape into pillage, and the monks are saying, no, we need to die ourselves, like we need to be the ones that die.

And you can see that, like you said, in some ways both will use the image of the skull as an image of death, but they're they're opposed to each other, that's right, That's right.

Hello there, Well, this is Martin Shaw, and I'm afraid whatever you had planned for January scrap it.

I am returning to symbolic world gleefully with one of the great stories of our time, the Epic of Possible, the story of the Holy Grail itself over five nights I will be telling the tale.

These will not be dry lectures or PowerPoint presentations.

This will be wild, old philosophical storytelling in its deepest dimensions.

It is life changing stuff, this story.

I've written a book about it.

I've been studying it for twenty years.

I've told it all over the world, but I have not shared it with you.

I've not shared it with symbolic world.

So what else would you want to do in the great wintering time but to sit at the feet of this wonderful story and let me be your guide.

I'll see you there.

But here's an interesting way in which they're not opposites.

One might argue that there's a similarity between them in that they both sort of pick aside and go all the way with it.

So, you know, in in you know, in scripture, those who are lukewarm are condemned, and you can kind of see the monks and the pirates as those who are absolutely hot, and they're in there.

If you're gonna sind choice, just sin yeah, so just just yes, yes.

So of course, you know, you know, what is the difference between ordinary Christians and monks?

I think I think in a in a in a day to day sense.

The difference is that the monks are the ones who say, like, if if I believe the Christian story, if I believe that, you know, throwing myself behind Christ and asceticism is the way to eternal salvation like nothing else matters.

There's no other moral that concerns me.

I'm I'm all in.

I'm absolutely devoting my life to that path, and I'm just going to utterly leave all of the other pursuits temptations of the world for that.

And the pirates say much the same thing.

The pirates kind of say, you know, I'm I'm all in for like money, money, and pleasure in the moment, you know, live living, living in the pleasure of the moment, and the sort of outlaw glory and excitement that goes with that.

That's the only moral for me.

It's like no other ethic, no matter how obvious and basic, applies to me.

I will, I will, i will do anything in the name of treasure, even though it is the undoubtedly the path to a short life and a swift death.

And so again you see that, you see the the the strange sameness of how the pirates and the monks think and talk, and then that that leaves all of the rest of us, all the normal people of the world, in that sort of lukewarm middle where we're gonna say, well, we're sort of Christians, we're sort of on God's side, but we also like to make money and we also like to be comfortable.

It's like we're in between monks and pirates in our actual practice, our lives.

And so I see how in some ways that would explain also why there's a fantasy of pirates, like the idea that pirates inhabit this space in our imagination and in our desires.

They become an image of the desire that we have, or the tendency we have to kind of to stop bothering with all of these constraints and basically throw ourselves in a kind of nihilist, kind of nihilist pleasure seeking.

And so for that reason, they occupy a space of fantasy in our life in the same way that, at least for Christian for Orthodoxricians, the monk also occupies a place of fantasy in our life because we know that we're not willing to do that, but we admire the monks.

We admire the people that are capable of doing it, and we want to get close to them so that we can kind of get a little bit of that.

But I can see also why then, because sometimes you wonder, I mean, pirates were ruthless, horrible criminals, and so the question is why do we fantasize about them.

Why are all these fantasies.

I think it's because we admire people who are principled, no matter what the principles are, there's a certain there's a certain we recognize a certain virtue.

I don't mean a moral virtue, I mean a more abstract sense of the word virtue.

Yeah, we recognize a certain humanistic power in being absolutely behind a principle.

It's like the great the great men who change the world are are the men who are absolutely behind some ideological principle and go all the way with it.

It's I mean, it's often a fallacious principle, and their efforts to live it out, you know, are often murderous and tyrannical, but nevertheless that's how they become great men in the old sense of great.

And so we recognize that there's a certain human virtue in this and and going going outlaw and going all the way and doing it with a certain a certain stylistic splendor.

Is is it's very very appealing to us from a human standpoint.

What's the.

What's going on with hooks and peg legs, hotan's pig legs, eye patches, parrots?

But is there a monastic parallel to those things?

Well, I think that that especially may the parrot.

We can think about it.

I have never actually thought about the parrot, but for sure the hooks and the peg legs and all of these things are they are an image of incompleteness, there an image of death that you're living with death, like you're living with this.

You're like a here you're half a human.

You know, you've lost parts for your desires and so now and you're assuming it and you're living out you continue to live with these with with this kind of crippled nature.

You know, yes, absolutely the part you know that.

But there's they turned it into an esthetic.

Yeah, this is different from someone who lost the leg, you know, because of gangreen or something and they have a prosthetic leg.

The pirate turns it into a kind of like look at my glory, look.

At yeah trophy, Like look at what I lost?

You know, like the surfer that gets bitten by shark kind of and it's like, this is this thing happened to me and now I but I'm still I'm still going on.

And so it's turned the hook turns into a kind of image of power and glory.

It's like, look what I'm willing to lose to do this, Like you, you should be afraid of me because I lost an arm getting treasure, So get out of my way because I'm gonna I'm gonna destroy everything.

I don't care.

That's true.

That's true.

My leg was shot off by a cannon ball and my arm was cut off by a cutlass.

And yet I didn't I didn't give up, and you know, get an easy job.

You know.

That just shows how all in I am, and it shows that I'm death is the fact that seeking of treasure is an outlaw inevitably leads to death does not trouble me.

I'm already literally half dead.

Part of my body has died, and I'm still at it.

And the monks are kind of like this also, you know, And and the holiest of the monks they take the Great Schema, so they're literally walking around wearing a burial shroud.

So showing that, you know, I've essentially already died to the world.

But it's the same.

It's funny because the pirate that type, that aspect of the pirate esthetic is very similar to to you know, American gangster aesthetics as well.

Right, there is this idea of being shot, you know, I remember fifty cent basically becoming famous because he was shot, you know, in a criminal lifestyle, and that made him the superstar of that world.

But then also even the aesthetic of the of the excess of gold and bling and this this kind of caricature of wealth and a caricature of status, which for people that are actually in the world of status, it looks like a kind of a like a joke, but it does function in their own world as a display of power and status and riches.

You know.

So we've got some props in front of you.

Here we found a coconut on the beach and also a bottle of rum on the beach.

This was brought by swallows, though.

It was so Obviously, piracy has happened in lots of places in the world, but the only kinds of pirates that have really captured anybody's of attrivision are the ones in the Caribbean.

Yeah, so what's up with that?

I mean, you can.

I mean I think that has to do with what you're saying.

It has to do with something between this transition between the old world of monarchy and the modern world.

And they represent a kind of residue of a time that where the state was not as powerful, where the kind of bureaucracy of the world was not as solid as it is now.

And you feel this sense that it was a time when anything was possible, where all of these things could happen, whereas now you know, it's like there's too many pirates.

I'll just send a helicopter.

Yes, I mean pirates.

Pirates can only throne.

Yeah, pirates can only thrive in a power vacuum between empires.

And that's what we have behind us here in the Caribbean.

Right behind me on my left is Cuba not very far over the horizon, and on the right the Bahamas.

And so right behind us here we have we have Spanish and English imperial domains.

And it was because the Caribbean islands were this patchwork of Spanish and English rule, there was kind of a power vacuum.

It was very easy for people to fly false flags, you know, sneak past different navies, fined islands that were claimed by no one, which was true of this island.

In fact, the Florida Keys or Outlaw territory through the entire eighteenth and even into the early nineteenth century, they were claimed by no empire and no country, not until the eighteen thirties.

So the Florida Keys, along the outer banks of North Carolina and many other islands in between, there were places that pirates could actually build hideouts, just like in the movies, and not really be subject to anyone's laws.

So just thinking about the symbols of a piracy, this is not so much connected to monastics.

But you know, in some ways, what's interesting about that moment is there's also a way in which the empires are able to weaponize pirates to their advantage.

Right, So in some ways it's like, we're actually not going to do anything about this because we can see how it's damaging the other side.

You know, you see that in a lot of the Islamic pietry, for example, where you know they're not being sent by anyone, but we're kind of happy that they're pillaging sicily, you know, So there's this I think that there's something about that too, where because of this this buffer between two empires, they can also exist because maybe the British see them.

A little bit as helpful if they're attacking.

Yeah, for sure, Yeah, for sure.

In the Barbary pirates thrived because you had the you know, the Catholic Empires of Europe to the north, and you had the Automan Empire that nominally controlled North Africa to the south, and both the pirates and the monks existed in this in this odd space between empires.

You know, the Catholics nominally ruled Grease at times, the Automan Empire ruled Grease at time.

Nobody really touched Mount Athos.

And just like even though piracy wasn't really legal under the Ottoman Empire, the Ottoman Empire really didn't trouble itself too much with these North African coastal pirate city is.

Yeah, they existed in a little bit of a power vacuum, and that power of vacuum was intermittently helpful to both empires.

So you know, nobody did too much to stop it.

M Yeah.

And so do you see a parallel cause I'm trying to see is there a parallel, opposite parallel in terms of the monks as being in some ways beyond the the empire's desires, or are playing a role that is beyond like the divisions of the empire, Like why was why did nobody ever care to deal with Mount ATHLETs And say in that moment of shift between Catholic and and Byzantine power, Let's say.

Well, I don't know.

I think I think everyone recognizes that there's some value to society to have monks stand as I sort of rebuke to the to the decadence of the world.

We don't actually even the decadent people of the world don't want a world where everyone is decadent, because the decadent people kind of want to be at the top of the hierarchy of decadence, which means they like having holy Men as a foil to that.

They just don't like them being very close at hand.

They like the Holy Men being far away on a distant island where you can you can listen to them if you want to, and you could ignore them if they want to.

I think everybody was probably pretty pleased to have to have Mount Athos located at the at the border between the Venetian Empire and the Ottoman Empire.

They could sort of rebuke either side, and either side could say, we don't have to listen to you your way over there, you're beyond our border.

Hm hmmm.

So I mean, I'm happy to at least hear that the vision is still a kind of opposite.

I see how you're trying to always connect them together, but that in fact it is in some ways too.

Streams in uh you know that are that are meeting on the edge.

Because that in some ways, that's why the pirates would attack Montathos is because mount Athos was also kind of on the edge of the empire.

That it that it wasn't in the middle, like you couldn't attack some monastery in in the in Constantinople or or you know, in inside.

So there was this contact on the fringe.

And in some it's interesting because you can think about how the monks also in their extreme practice, they because they are out on the edge in this way, they also have this interaction between demons and angels, you could say, or between the saints and the demons, and they're in some way closer to the demons than we are, you know, uh, you know, because they kind of stand on the edge, and that seems to have been in some ways even practically when you go to mont Athos, it's beautiful because it's all fortified, but it's fortified because pirates would just.

Come and kill the monks and rampays through the monasteries.

And so how do you see the you know, how can I say this, like, do you think it's one of the things we saw with Disney is with their Pirates of the Caribbean, they were able to give us a version of piracy that is completely whitewashed.

Right, So basically these.

Pirates, they're virtuous.

They don't seem to be doing anything evil.

They actually don't seem to to kill and rape and pillage, although they it's hinted very subtly that they do in a way that they're able to actually present them as.

The heroes in the story.

And so I'm curious to know what you think of that, the capacity to represent it that way.

Well.

I love those I love those movies, but it is interesting how they had to for each movie, they had to give the pirates some adventure that was outside of just normal pirrating.

You get in the first movie, in The Curse of the Black Pearl when when the Black Pearl attacks Port Royal, you get you get your ownly glimpse in those movies of like what actual pirrating looks like, where they sailed into a normal town and blasted cannon balls and run in and kill and steel.

You know, it's and it's very ugly to see.

It kind of sets up this is this is the dark terror of pirates.

But then the plot begins, and of course the plot is that they they you know, they have this curse and there's a you know, there's a there's a piece of gold and they have to you know, find it and do this magic ritual and and every one of the movies has some kind of a plot like that.

That is, the plot is more than just you know pirate agnessy.

Yeah, it's it's it's some it's some legitimate adventure where they have to break some curse or find some some air to a bloodline.

And so the pirates actually go off on an adventure that you can really root for them because it's a you know, it's a great adventure and not an evil adventure.

Yeah, so that is that is that is a difficulty with pirate stories.

Yeah, you have you can't, Yeah, and what about?

What about?

It's kind of the same with monks stories though, it's like nobody wants to hear the story of a monk where it's just the monk spent and years fasting and praying.

That's a boring story.

Any any like really good hagiography about a monk, because where the monk has to you know, go off on some adventure and do something that's like not normal, you know, just monking.

Yeah, yes, monk.

And then there's the other story.

There's the other story which you can come on with this this Victorian fantasy of the conversion of the pirate.

Right, So in the Pirates of Penzance, you know, if people know the story with grbrid In Sullivan, there's a sense in which if you were able to call upon high enough for good, right, if you were able to ask them to submit or to be loyal to the right level, that all of a sudden you could transform these pirates into something interesting, in something more so.

In the story, basically, the pirates are doing their pirate thing, and they're being horrible, and they're trying to kidnap these girls, and at some point they call upon their loyalty to the queen, and they all kind of fall into rank and say, well, we're still pirates.

Where you know, we love all this stuff.

But we we love our queen so much that we're willing to yield and to submit.

So obviously, I don't know if the queen, but the fantasy of in some ways the criminal or the you know, the gangster.

You know, we see that in the story of Old as the Black for example, the molds of the Ethiopian.

That is, if he is able to see a high enough good, then that power gets given to the good.

So I don't know what you think about.

That, Well, I agree, I think I think for us to identify with pirates and root for pirates in a story, the pirates have to have enough of their humanity left that that seems possible.

If they're if they've degenerated to the point of being nothing more than the passions, we really couldn't identify with them as heroes in the story.

But if they seem like broken people that still have a kernel of virtue somewhere down there, that they can rise to the occasion of doing good when it needs to be done.

And you see that constantly through the Pirates of the Arabbean movie.

Yeah, that allows for us to to to root for them as the sort of the noble outlaw.

So I have two questions.

First question, is uh, anything going on there symbolically, I don't.

Know anything about.

I'm sure Andrew knows about.

If I know a few sea shanty is, I mean, they're they're typically just work songs.

They're not exactly pirrating songs.

There are songs about pirates.

Yeah, of course, the actual reality of historical pirates is they did not live very long, and they tended to They tended to you know, meet meet their end, you know, watery Grave.

So it's like if the pirates had actual pirate songs among themselves that were that were any good, I'm not sure.

I'm not sure any of those survived to us.

But there's certainly plenty of a good ballads about pirates.

I love those because.

I'm sure that in the world of pirates, and that's important to notice that outside of the story vision or the mythical version, you know, they were as much in danger between themselves as they were as what they would encounter on the outside.

Probably had a tendency to kill each other as much as they did you kill the others?

Absolutely.

The second question for each of you will start with you, Jonathan, what's your favorite pirate movie?

What's my favorite?

I don't have a favorite pirate movie.

I think that the Pirates of the Caribbean, obviously antip I could know.

Look, I like the.

Pirates of the Caribbean, the first movie, but I also despise those movies for how convoluted and narratively empty they are.

So I like the characterization, of course that Johnny Depp brings to the pirate and that's really it's fun because it's so weird and it's so out of whack that you can't stop but look at this person, because it's so fascinating to see something like that.

But I get annoyed with those movies.

Because it's so convoluted and so I don't even know what's going on anymore.

Do you know?

What are they doing?

What are they getting this one thing so they can get the other thing, so you can get the other things, so that you don't even know what's going on.

I'll tell you my favorite scene in a pirate movie.

This is in Pirates Caribbean number five.

I believe it is watched number five, so in in in movie.

Yeah.

So so this is Dead Men Tell No Tales.

Captain Captain Barbosa has taken over Queen Anne's Revenge from Blackbeard, and he's built up a whole fleet of pirate ships because Queen Ann's revenge is undefeatable among ships.

And so he's now a pirate admirable admiral, and he's unimaginably wealthy.

And so you see this scene where he is at his leisure on his pirate flagship, and he's he's converted the the captain's chambers of Queen Anne's Revenge into like an aristocrat's splendid, splendid parlor where all the walls are gilded and it's just mountains and mountains of treasure.

Of all the decks of the ship are overflowing with gold and jewels.

And he's, you know, he's lying back, twirling his mustache in his chamber.

And and and the part that absolutely thrills me is he has he has a little baroque chamber orchestra that he has hired.

There's you know, there's there's you know, a musician there, you know, cellos and violins and oh it is it is it is.

So he's got his little he's got his little he's got his little baroque chamber orchestra you know, in there with him, you know, playing Hondle or something like that.

And he's just lying back, twirling his mustache, the most successful pirate of all time.

And then, you know, and then his doom comes for him.

His doom is is is the the ghost the Spanish ghost Captain Captain Salazar.

I've already stopped knowing what's going on.

The movie, but anyway, Captain Captain Salazar, he he essentially died decades ago.

He was lured into some magic cave by Jack Sparrow.

His ship was wrecked, you know, he and anyway, due to various you know, instances of sea magic, the Captain Salazar, who's basically now a ghost captain on a ghost ship, emerges from his cave.

And his ship was a you know, a huge Spanish five decker, the biggest, the biggest ship's ever built, and huge enemy of pirates.

And he's he comes out as this ghost captain on a ghost ship, and the ship is skeletal.

It just looks like bones, it looks like the it sort of looks like the bones of Leviathan, just its ribs and things, and it comes up to Captain Barbosa's pirate ship, which is much smaller, and and his his ship, Captain Salazar's ship opens up like a monster, like like it's going to be the monster, you know, swallowing job.

But it's this sort of skeletal demon mon stir with a ghost captain.

And it looks very much like the the orthodox icon of the Last Judgment with as the giant monster coming coming up, you know, out of the out of sort of this fiery ocean of hell or to swallow everything.

And it's a it's just a magnificent image of this sort of end point of the most successful pirate and his and his end point of hell coming for him.

So I have to say, I just figured out the parrot.

So I'm like, it's just running.

I'm like, I need to figure this out for the end the conversation.

Yeah no, but that I think that that it is it's related to this idea of caricature that we're that I'm talking about when I talk about pirates, is that the parrot represents an illusion of meaning, right, It's an illusion of coherence, and it's an illusion of sense, and so this idea of the parrot is, I think is an image of the fact that the pirates are this illusion.

They're this caricature of civilization.

Right, they wear all this gold and they.

Look like like a kind of joke on an aristocrat, but it's empty ultimately, and I think I think that that's what the parrot represents it.

It is it's like a it's like a burp, right, it's like this, it's like this this reaction to to meaning or this this this fake version of of what meaning is.

What do you think do you think that makes sense yet?

Right?

So my favorite pirate movie is Aero Flynn Olivia The Heflin Basil Rathbo Captain Blood, which I think was Flynn's first film, and to me, it is the It is the quintessential like swashbuckling pirate film, and it has actually all of the elements that you're describing.

He's basically he's like a surgeon that helps a wrong person during the English Civil War and gets driven out of England, and so because of that he basically ends up taking up this life of piracy and then totally eventually just totally gives himself over to it, kind of loses himself in in the identity of a piracy, and then he meets this this young woman who he like basically captures from another pirate.

I think is that Eli.

I think it's Olivia to have a win in that movie anyway, Yeah, yeah, yeah, it is.

So he meets this, he meets this young young woman and then basically she becomes Yeah, basically she becomes a way for him to redeem himself.

In order to do that, he's gotta killed his big pirate rival and the climactic duel of the film.

So it has actually all the various elements of like the outcasts and the kind of the dissipation and then ultimately the big scene at the end.

The most quintessentially English thing to me is this idea that oh, yeah, you might be a bad guy, but as soon as as soon as you you know, like, oh but you could do this for the king, you could do this for the queen, and you're like, oh right, yeah, sure, didn't think of that before.

And so the big thing that happens is that at the end of the movie, they it's announced them that William and Mary are you know, have come in and they've taken over things, and so he's they're all pardoned, and so then they're like, all right, great, let's go kill the Spanish now.

And that's how that's how the.

Movie that ends.

Well, I love that ends with a certain redemption.

And I have to say another reason that I so enjoy Pirates of the Caribbean number five is because it ends with a redemption like that.

For Captain Barbosa.

The story of the movie is essentially that a woman appears who turns out to be Captain Barboza's daughter, and he's sort of gradually figuring this out over the course of the movie that this that this woman is his daughter.

And she challenges him at one point for his lifestyle and says his treasure worth dying for, and he responds, I'm a pirate and walks away.

Of course, treasure is worth dying for for a pirate.

But then eventually Captain Salazar comes for her, and Captain Barbosa has a moment of trial where he the only way he can save this woman, whom he now realizes is his daughter.

The only way he can save her is if he gives up his own life fighting Captain Salazar, and in this moment of struggle among the three of them, she pulls back on his sleeve of revealing a tattoo on his arm that matches the matches a symbol that she knows from her past, and she realizes, all of a sudden, in this moment of death, that he is.

Fun to get those tattoos when your kids are young, so they know, separate, exactly figure it out.

So in this, in this, in this moment of struggle where it's clear that two of the three of them are going to die, she suddenly realizes that Captain Barbosa is her father.

And he suddenly sort of makes a move to put himself in front of her, and she is astonished, you know, because she thinks he's the worst of a selfish pirate.

And she says, she says to him, who am I to you?

And he just looks at her and says treasure.

And then he gives up his life to take out to take out Captain Salazar.

Oh it's oh, it's splendid.

So the point that point is, at the very last moment of Barbosa's life, he's actually willing, He's actually willing to value something something.

Other hmm, more valuable.

Than you know, gold and jewels.

But he's not willing.

He's not willing to say, like, I'm not a pirate, I'm not giving up my life for love or family.

It's still treasure.

It's just I'm going to say, you're the treasure.

It's it's it's I love that that sort of partial, partial repentance.

So one of the one of the things I did not expect to come out of Art of Automada was a simultaneously from the same person, a take on why Thomas Kincaid's paintings have bad theology, but then also like an apologia for the parts of the Caribbean franchise.

I just couldn't have foreseen any of us.

This is why you have to come to these things.

All right, Yeah, everybody has to come to Florida, to the Keys to hang.

Out with us for sure.

All right, thank you guys.

Yeah, thanks veryone.

This was a lot of fun.

If you enjoy these videos and podcasts, please go to the symbol 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 go to the Symbolic World dot com and thank you for your support