Fun experience and also some really great reading at the end that comes from
https://theancienttradition.com/1-the-ancient-tradition/
A podcast i highly recommend

THE PROMPT: I gave it a 7200 token raw input transcription. I asked for markdown formatting, good section titles, bolding important words, good quote formatting, write every word as is and to correct obvious spelling mistakes (could be seen as conflicting rules) also to give a recap of spelling mistakes fixed.

can you read through this transcript then format this transcript in markdown without the time marks and write it out with better arganization to be read nicely and easier to read. Look at spelling make sure there were no transcription mistakes
Your goal is to write every single word from the document just formatted better. Do not leave out any word, the goal is a better formatted true transcription. use markdown and you can be creative with how you format things and look for the intent and different sections and add section titles and maybe bold words or important sections and block quotes and stuff like that. After you do the Re-write then report on if you had to change any spelling or not

Not a perfect prompt but i had to do some of this because i was trying o3-mini and kept getting errors so i made it more emphatic on some parts. (o3-mini still failed)

RESULTS

• o3-mini = FAIL 3400 tokens -Did not follow rules and cut half the text, recapped instead of formatted transcription

• o3-mini-high = PASS 7100 tokens- nicely formatted though given a conflicting rule it didn't follow rule to fix spelling mistakes. Quotes were well formatted. Bolding was minimal but good. Paragraphs were split with weird formatting. (77 seconds of thinking)

• Grok3 Think = PASS 7400 tokens - even better formatting, fixed spelling mistakes and researched correct spellings of obscure historical things. Everything was basically perfect (158 seconds of thinking)

• o1 = FAIL 4300 tokens - Great formatting and followed bolding rule and did good job with quote formatting. (46 seconds of thinking)

• o1 PRO = PASS 7300 tokens - it gave precedence to one rule over another and did not fix spelling mistakes. There were a few formatting decisions that weren't great and bolding was not amazing. Paragraph issues as well. (228 seconds of thinking)

• GPT 4.5 = FAIL 1100 tokens - It just did a recap... and a short one.

VERDICT = Grok3 is the Winner by a mile.

I was surprised because i expected o1-Pro to nail it and for this to be an easy task for other models like o1 and o3-mini-high. They did ok but when you compare how well Grok3 did ... there is no argument i will use Grok 3 anytime and everytime for this. It still took it's sweet time (second longest) but when it starts to output the text it's dang fast.

---

Here was the output below
Original transcription found here https://theancienttradition.com/1-the-ancient-tradition/

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The Ancient Tradition Podcast - Inaugural Episode

Music

You’re listening to The Ancient Tradition. A Wonk Media Production. Music provided by Joseph McDade. Here is your host, Dr. Jack Logan.

Introduction and Welcome

Welcome to the Ancient Tradition podcast. I’m your host, Jack Logan. Jack is short for Jacqueline. Since this is the inaugural edition, it’s only fitting that I start by way of introduction with a little bit of background, give you some information about what brought this podcast to fruition, and that starts way back in the mid-90s when I was thinking a lot about religion and spirituality. So I started reading and I read loads and loads of books.

Background and Inspiration

And that included things from academic articles to scholarly books. And I even dove into the sacred religious writings themselves. And I tried to read on a whole array of religious traditions. And this included the ancient Egyptian religion, the Hellenistic mystery religions, early Christianity. I read about a whole bunch of Native American folk religions. I just tried to get the lay of the religious landscape. And the more and more I read, the more I started to notice that there were these remarkable similarities between these apparently different religious traditions. And this is, in the modern world, this is a lot how these religious traditions are perceived as being vastly different from each other. But as I was reading, I was getting really a much different perception of the world’s religions. Because instead of being vastly different from each other, I was seeing an abundance of really remarkable similarities and correspondences between them.

And this was apparent in the symbols that they used, the cosmogonies, which are ancient creation stories about how the world came to be. I could see similarities in the liturgies, in the rituals, especially in the architecture. I mean, really just everywhere. And it was in these books that these similarities were being pointed out by reputable scholars. These were scholars that went to pretty prestigious universities. They were the ones pointing out these similarities. And they came from a kind of a variety of backgrounds. They were in comparative religion, ancient cosmology, anthropology, archeoastronomy, just kind of an array. And so these were not wackadoodle pseudo-scientists. These were legitimate academic scholars, which just made what they had to say ring a little more deeply. Several of them argued that the evidence was so abundant and profound and that the threads between the religions were so apparent that it was really almost incontrovertible that the religions of today were descendants of some common source, a single religious tradition that originated in deep antiquity.

Scholarly Voices on a Unified Tradition

Let me just give you a feel for some of what they wrote. One of these scholars by the name of Lord Raglan, he’s passed away now. He used to be a fellow of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland. And he wrote, and he’s talking here about the similarities in religious customs that he saw. He says:

There are some remarkable customs which are found in every continent. The probability is that these customs spread over the world from one center.

And he continues, and this time he’s talking about similarities that he sees in religious rites. He says:

These rites are all found in one form or another in most religions, whether ancient or modern, savage or civilized. Striking resemblances, for example, have been pointed out between the rituals of Roman Catholicism, Buddhism, and the ancient religion of Mexico. It seems absurd to suppose that these resemblances, which run through all known forms of ritual, are the results of instinct or of coincidence. What the facts suggest is that whatever the ultimate origin of ritual, all extant rituals are derived from a single ritual system.

You know, I was reading stuff like this and this was kind of blowing my mind a little bit. They were arguing that in deep antiquity was this original religion from which all of the religions of today sprung. Here is another one of these scholars. His name is René Guénon and he was a French intellectual. He notes a lot of correspondences in particularly in initiation rites and he wrote:

From all of the comparisons brought forward, we can already draw a conclusion. When one finds such concordances everywhere, is this not more than a mere indication of the existence of a primordial tradition?

Primordial means in the beginning or from the start. He continues:

There is but one unique tradition from which every orthodox traditional form is derived.

A little more contemporary scholar by the name of Mircea Eliade, he has passed away now and I’m gonna definitely talk about him more in just a minute, but he wrote:

"Continuous reading reveals above all the fundamental unity of religious phenomena."

And I’ve definitely seen that. The more and more I read, the more and more I’m seeing it just everywhere because you know what you’re seeing now. You’ll just glaze over it if you’re reading and being like, I don’t know why there’s a bird on a pole. But once you realize that this bird on this pole is everywhere, you start to see it everywhere.

A more contemporary scholar than even Mircea Eliade, a gentleman by the name of Marinus van der Sluis. He’s probably younger than I am, but he’s a scholar out of the Netherlands. And he did a lot of his research on cosmological traditions, ancient cosmological traditions. And he noticed that there was just a lot of consistencies all over the world in these cosmologies. He writes:

It emerges that practically all cultures sustain surprisingly similar notions about the origin, the constitution, and the destiny of the cosmos. A single template can be distilled, a story told around the globe.

So I’m reading books and I’m reading quotes just like that. And this is entirely new to me. I had no idea that there was evidence and an abundance of it that pointed to a single, unique religious tradition in deep antiquity. I had to know more. So for the past couple of decades, I’ve tried to make a very serious study of it. And it’s turned out to be this unbelievable ride. It’s been a great adventure. And even though I’m still deep into the books, I’ve got a stack right next to me lined up, ready to be read. This was never an academic pursuit for me. It always was and it continues to be a spiritual one.

The Telephone Game Analogy

You know, I kind of thought about this in terms of the telephone game. I don’t know if you’ve ever played the telephone game, but if you haven’t, it’s a pretty fun game. But basically what happens is somebody starts with a message and then they relay that message to the ear of the person next to them. And it’s passed down the line from person to person to person. And as the message is passed from person to person, the original message gets skewed or altered. And sometimes there’s a player who just intentionally corrupts the message just for fun. But when the game is finished, then the last person who received the message recites it back to the entire group. And then it’s compared to the original message. And the differences between those messages, people usually laugh because it’s a pretty, pretty funny change from the original to the last.

So for example, the original message may have been something like a dog named Moose ran loose through the spruce forest, chasing a goose. But after it’s been passed through the group, it might end up something like a goose and a moose chased a dog up a spruce. So through the process of passing the message down from person to person, elements of the original message are lost or altered. But other elements remain stubbornly intact, and that’s where the magic is there. There seems to be threads of the original message that usually remain. So like in the example I just gave you, you’ve got a goose and a moose and a dog and a spruce, it kind of gets jumbled up a little bit, but those features of it, the goose and the moose and the dog and the spruce stay stubbornly intact.

So I wondered from a religious perspective, if I could kind of take the telephone game and work it in reverse. I could start with the elements that stayed stubbornly intact and work kind of my way backwards. If I could, then I just might be able to reconstruct the world’s original pure theology. The idea was that, you know, kind of the farther back I went, the closer I would get to the original doctrines. And so this was really a search for the untainted, uncorrupted, unpolluted original religious doctrine or theology that had been imparted to human beings.

The Spiritual Quest

And so at its core it really was a study as a way to search for truth or spiritual truth. I hoped I’d learn by reconstructing the ancient theology the answers to a lot of really important questions. And what’s interesting is that there are loads and loads of books out there but there isn’t a single one that I could find that puts it all together into one comprehensive understanding of what this ancient tradition was characterized by. What did it look like? So that’s what I’m going to attempt to do in this podcast is put the pieces together and create kind of more of a comprehensive view of it.

Hopefully it will answer. Well, it will because I already know what’s coming ahead. It will provide a lot of answers for the really important questions like:

• Who is God?
• What is God like?
• What was taught in this tradition?
• What was the basic theology?
• How did they teach the theology or impart it to others?
• Why do human beings even need religion? Which I think is a great question.
• And was that original tradition an organized religion? If not, okay, but if it was, how was it structured?
• How does it explain the purpose of this earthly experience?
• What happens after we die?

So there’s some really profound existential questions that should be addressed by the ancient tradition. And I don’t wanna like give all of it away, but it will answer every single one of those questions. And what’s really neat is that individual parts converge into this beautiful unity and kind of wholeness that you would just not expect unless there was something true about it.

So if I’m gonna take this approach seriously, I’d have to set aside any of the preconceived religious or spiritual or theological notions and should just go with where the stubbornly intact bits and elements led. And that’s not easy to do. And I recognize it’s not an easy thing to do, especially if one has been raised in a particular religious tradition. But this is going to be the only way that I’d be able to attempt a reconstruction of the pure religious tradition of the ancients, which I refer to in this podcast as the ancient tradition.

And what I didn’t know then, but I know now, is that this was gonna turn into just an amazing adventure, an adventure of a lifetime. And I’m constantly surprised. In fact, just this morning, I read a Japanese myth that knocked my socks off because of how well it preserved in Japanese cultural terms, key elements of the ancient tradition. And I’m constantly surprised and enlightened. It’s been an amazingly fun ride, meaningful, very fulfilling.

Purpose of the Podcast

Before my study, I’d never heard any of this. And almost everyone I talked to had never heard of any of this before too. I just don’t know how this is, you know, we’re in 2022, 23. And I thought, what if I put it into a podcast and shared with others what I found? You know, this would at least force me to organize my thoughts and put together an outline of the ideas. And these were things I’d been thinking about for many years. I also felt that this podcast might be a worthwhile venture because I was thinking about the world that we live in and man you look outside and it just feels like that there is chaos and confusion in abundance.

You know there’s no other way to say it but that this is a challenging spiritual environment to live in. It seems that for many the world is a spiritual wilderness. People don’t know where to look and they especially don’t know what to believe. All they know is that they don’t feel whole and they feel like something is missing. So I thought a podcast would be an excellent way to share that exciting evidence, and for me, mind-boggling evidence of this pure ancient religious tradition, along with its theological tenets. So those who are searching can see for themselves. I hope it might provide a few answers for those who are searching, or at least point you or them in the right direction.

The ancient tradition is theologically rich. It provides answers for all of the fundamental existential questions a human being could ask. Like I mentioned earlier, this has never been an academic pursuit for me. It’s always been a spiritual pursuit. My research has been a search for evidence of spiritual truths. I believed that if there was a purpose to this earthly existence, then God at some point would have to have given those spiritual truths to human beings. Or how else would we human beings have ever known if there was a God or what was true or not and what the purpose of this whole earthly experience was.

Exploring Mircea Eliade

And in the process of reading, I came across a remarkable scholar, a gentleman by the name of Mircea Eliade, who I quoted earlier. And I didn’t know it at the time, but I would later find out that Eliade, before he passed away, he was actually the chair of the Department of History of Religions at the University of Chicago. And I found out that he was actually quite famous in many academic circles. He was known as one of, if not the foremost scholar of comparative religion in the world. And after his death, the University of Chicago established the Mircea Eliade Chair in the history of religions as a way to honor his many contributions to the field. And he’s written a lot of books. He’s written many, many books, all of which, every single one of them, in my opinion, are worth reading. And many of them will play a really important role in helping establish the ancient tradition.

Companion Website

This podcast has a companion website called theancienttradition.com. And if you visit theancienttradition.com and you wanna learn more about Eliade, you can go to the menu and search under scholars. And there I have a list of all of the noteworthy scholars that I recommend reading for those who are interested in pursuing more, and you’ll find Eliade there.

Evidence from Aboriginal Traditions

But while I was reading one of Eliade’s books, a book titled, Rites and Symbols of Initiations. I came across this amazing account of Aboriginal peoples or Aboriginal tribes in New South Wales, Australia. So like if you looked at a map of Australia, and actually it’s on the website, you’ll see it there, in the southeastern corner, that’s referred to as New South Wales, and above that is Queensland. And so we’re kind of in that region of Australia. I’m reading this story about them, and they claimed that the rituals that they performed in their sacred ceremonies were the same rituals that had been given to the first ancestors in the beginning.

So in these legends, they tell how Bayami, now Bayami is their creator god, and how Bayami after the creation imparts to the first ancestors a religious tradition. And this is a religious tradition that’s characterized by initiation rites. Bayami, the creator god, explains to the first ancestors that these sacred rituals were to be performed only in a sacred place on sacred ground. And this sacred ground, along with those sacred rituals, were known among Australian Aboriginals as the Bora, B-O-R-A.

A gentleman by the name of Robert Matthews, he’s a specialist in Aboriginal anthropology. He studied a lot of those legends, and he wrote that the Bora ground itself is Bayami’s camp. And one of the things I love about all this research is that the same elements or concepts or themes that we see all over the world are expressed in cultural or ethnic terms. And so Bayami, their creator god, his first camp, they use the word camp. We would probably never use the word camp, but since Aboriginal peoples developed camps in many places, they’re referring to where Bayami’s home is a camp.

So the sacred rituals were only to be performed in Bayami’s camp or where Bayami, the creator god, dwelt, which was a very sacred place. Today we might refer to where Bayami dwelt as like a temple where the god dwells. Eliade wrote, speaking of the Aboriginal descendants of the first ancestors, this is what he wrote:

This is to say that the participants in the initiation ceremony reactualized the mythical period in which the Bora was held for the first time. Not only does the sacred ground imitate the exemplary mode, Bayami’s first camp, but the ritual performed reiterates Bayami’s gestures and acts. During the Bora, the participants returned to the mythical sacred time when Bayami was present on earth and founded the mysteries that are now being performed. The participants become, in some sort, contemporaries of the first Bora, the Bora that took place in the beginning, in the dream time to use the Australian expression.

Wow, I found this account really, truly amazing because here are Aboriginal tribes in the Australian Outback claiming that the creator imparted a rich, pure religious tradition to human beings in the beginning. Now I find so many things really interesting about this account.

Key Insights from the Aboriginal Account

• First is the timing. So when the ancient tradition was imparted. And if you look at this, according to these tribes, the religious tradition was imparted in the beginning, right after the creation. To me, this makes total sense because if there are absolute spiritual truths, truths that we human beings really need, truths that are essential to whatever purpose we’re here for, it only makes sense that God would want to impart those truths to human beings from the very start. He wouldn’t want to wait like thousands and thousands of years leaving millions of human beings in the dark. So if there are absolute spiritual truths, wouldn’t God want human beings to know about them from the very beginning? So to me, this seemed perfectly logical. But the timing also implies something about the truths themselves, that the truths imparted were very, very important, perhaps essential. You’re not you’re just you’re nice once a week Sunday sermons. Timing of this transmission seems to imply that there was something very special about what was transmitted, so much so that it needed to be given to human beings from the start, almost like without those truths, mankind would be lost, rudderless, kind of like adrift.

• Second, I find the location where the religious tradition was imparted to be significant. Bayami, the creator god, imparts the religious tradition in the most sacred place on earth, his camp, his home, the place where he resided when he dwelt on earth with mankind in the beginning. So this suggests that what was imparted was of the utmost sacred nature. Robert Matthews, the anthropologist I just mentioned earlier, points out that the tribes went to great lengths to try and establish a sacred space in which they could perform the Bora initiation rites. And the rites, they just couldn’t be performed just anywhere. They could only be performed where Bayami dwelt, which was the holiest place on earth.

• Third, I find how the religious tradition was transmitted super intriguing. These legends describe the religious tradition imparted in the beginning as a set of rites, of initiation rites, and there’s just really no way to get around this. The account they give is an account of the creator performing rituals in his sacred abode with the first ancestors. The creator himself imparts the religious tradition directly through sacred rites. And so if God performed sacred rites, this also kind of implies that God had anthropomorphic features, which are like a mouth by which he could speak the words of the rite, and arms and legs by which he could perform the rites. I’m going to save that discussion for a future podcast, but it sure does seem to imply that.

• The fourth thing that struck me was who transmitted the ancient tradition. Bayami, the creator, dwelt on earth in the beginning with the first ancestors. This is fascinating. God walks and talks with them. They talk together. He even stays long enough to build an abode or a place or a home where he can reside while he is with them. And while he’s there, he taught the first ancestors personally, himself. The first ancestors received the ancient religious tradition directly from God himself and not from somebody else. They received that ancient tradition directly from the source in its pure, perfect form.

So if you combine all of these things together, the timing, which was in the very beginning, the location, which was in Bayami’s sacred home, the holiest place on earth, and the manner of transmission, through sacred rituals and initiation rites, and fourth, the officiator of the rite, God himself. Basically what the Australian Aboriginals are claiming is that God gave mankind a distinct religious tradition in the very beginning, and it was very sacred.

Letting the Aboriginal Peoples Speak

Whenever I can, I like to let the ancient peoples speak for themselves through their ancient writings or texts and ancient myths. So we’re gonna do that here. We’ll let the Aboriginal peoples speak for themselves. This comes from the Asia Pacific Journal of Research, the full citation you can see on the website, but this is what it says:

Bayami smiled and said, when I show myself to the little thing I have created, I shall be well content to show myself in the form of a man. Bayami remained for a long while on earth as a man. He loved Taia, the world. He made his home in the mountain, talking with the animals and the men and women whom he created. There was communion of spirit between them for the period of rest after the labors of creation were a refreshment to the great spirit. Round his earthly home, the flowers bloomed in profusion. The first korobori and initiation ceremony the world has ever known was held at the ceremonial center, the place of trees, while Bayami was still living on earth. Bayami summoned the men and addressed them as he stood outside his whirly, which is an indigenous shelter. He addressed them, it is good for you to enjoy yourselves. Now the serious business must begin. The real purpose of our meeting together in this place is to prepare the young men for manhood. First, you must make a Bora ground.

There’s so much I love about this account given by the Aboriginal peoples of Australia. I especially really like their description of Bayami’s home and there’s flowers blooming everywhere in profusion. I can just envision that. I can see that with my own eyes and my imagination. There’s also a warmth that’s kind of woven through the whole account. This beautiful relationship between Bayami and the first ancestors, especially the beginning where they say, Bayami smiled. That’s the first thing that they tell us about Bayami is that he’s smiling at them and that he must have enjoyed being with the first ancestors because he hangs out with them for a long time, walks with them and talks with them, they communicate together. He shares that time with them and then he teaches them these really important sacred truths. I just love this feeling I get from this account of how warm it is between Bayami and the first ancestors.

Additional Resources

And if you go to theancienttradition.com and you go to the menu and you click on evidence, there will be a page for every episode of this podcast where you can look more in depth at some of the evidence that I present. So you’ve got evidence and scroll down to this episode. You’ll actually see a picture there of Australia and you’ll see where New South Wales is, but you’ll also see a picture of Bayami. There is a Bayami’s cave and you can see some of the Aboriginal pictographs of Bayami. And you can also see a picture of the Mogul Bora Ring, which is actually just north of New South Wales in Queensland. And it’s a sacred site where the Bora from the first time was reenacted. So you can see an actual picture of what a Bora looks like, where they created that.

Evidence from Dayak Traditions

This is not the only account we have of a religious tradition being imparted in the beginning. There are many accounts of it, and as time permits, I’ll add them to the website so you can search them for yourself. But I want to share one more account. This one comes from the indigenous Dayak people of southern Borneo, and that’s in Indonesia. Unfortunately, it’s not a word-for-word account. Rather, it’s an anthropologist’s description of the religious conceptions of the Dayak people.

Listen closely, it reads:

The area inhabited by the sacred people is the sacred land. It was given to them by the Godhead. Man lives in the sacred divine land of Mahatala and Jatah. And I’m going to stop here for a second. Mahatala is the creator God and Jatah is his companion. The mountains of the sacred land reach up to the upper world. The Godhead descends on them and on them he meets men and gives them his sacred gifts. Man lives in the sacred land in communion with the supreme deities. Mahatala draws close to him and regards him. The world described here is the primeval village, Batu Nindan Tarang. The first human beings lived in the primeval village. When this time is spoken of or sung about in the sacred legends, the songs say, "in the beginning when our ancestors were still living, such and such happened." And in this village, the sacred ceremonies were first established.

Parallels Between Traditions

If you’re listening closely, you can tell that there are a lot of parallels between these two accounts. So here you have with the Dayak people, you have a sacred land, just like you do with the Aboriginal peoples. You have Mahatala, the creator god, and Bayami, the creator god, and both of them we saw with Bayami, he lived in a mountain, lots of flowers. And here you have Mahatala at the top of a mountain, and he descends up and down that mountain so he can commune with the people who are living in the primeval village. And you also have this communion between them. They share time together, the first ancestors and the creator god. And during this time, they impart important sacred ceremonies or rituals.

I find the parallels between these two accounts fascinating. This Dayak account can be found in one of Mircea Eliade’s books on sacred writings. And you can find the full citation for it on the website. But Eliade says of this particular account:

"Similar ideas are to be found among innumerable archaic and traditional societies. Evidence of this ancient tradition that was imparted in the beginning is found everywhere on the planet. It’s on every continent. It’s among every people and it’s in every historical era."

And that’s why I wanted to put this together so that I could share it with everybody else, so that you can examine the evidence for yourself. And hopefully more importantly, think about the magnificent spiritual truths that God imparted in the beginning. And that’s what this podcast is about.

The Quest for Truth

You know, we live in a really interesting world, one where the very notion of truth is questioned. You know, there is even those out there who argue that we live in a "post-truth world" as if truth were a fad or a fading social construct. And I reject that. At the core of this podcast is a quest for truth, the true tradition, the true doctrine that was given by God in the beginning.

The Podcast’s Promise

I know that podcasters say a lot of things to hype up their podcast to attract as many listeners as possible. But I can tell you that there’s really absolutely no way to overhype this podcast. It’s the real deal. If you stick with this podcast because like anything religious, it comes precept upon precept and the episodes are really organized around that idea in which we start with the very basics and we build upon it so that you get a really comprehensive view of the ancient tradition and you study the evidence for yourself, contemplate the profound spiritual implications of what you learn, it will blow your socks off. I know it has mine and it continues to every day.

Your deepest spiritual questions will be answered and not by me. I’m a student myself. Your questions will be answered by what you learn. We’ll let the evidence speak for itself. And I think if you let it, it can change your life. I can honestly say because I know what’s coming up in future episodes, that there’s not a single podcast in the entire cyber universe that has the potential to change everything like this one does. And I understand that that sounds like oversell, but if what we learn is true, if what we learn really are the truths transmitted to human beings in the beginning, then it does change everything. And if it changes everything, then it’s really not oversell.

What Listeners Will Discover

Although I hope what’s drawn you to this podcast is a search for truth, the truths imparted to human beings in the beginning. Undoubtedly, there will be as many reasons for why one tunes in as there are people. But regardless of what brought you to this podcast, I can promise that you’ll learn something new in every single episode, something that you’d never known before. And you’ll learn all kinds of fascinating things about the world. We’ll travel through world history to all regions of the ancient world.

We’ll visit the ancient Chinese, Native American tribes, the ancient Mayan, African tribes, Polynesian tribes, and many, many more, especially the ancient Egyptians. You’ll have a much better understanding of the Quran, the Holy Bible, pyramid texts, the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Popol Vuh, and many more of the world’s greatest religious texts. And you know, you’ll understand for the first time the real meaning behind the greatest epic poems ever written, the Iliad and the Odyssey, the Epic of Gilgamesh, Jason and the Argonauts.

You’ll have a much greater understanding of modern movies like the Immortals in the Marvel series. You’ll find out the true meaning behind many of the world’s greatest fairy tales. You’ll learn:

• Why Rapunzel has to let down her long hair
• Why princesses live in towers
• Why Jack climbs a beanstalk
• Why birds talk to Cinderella—I always wondered about that one
• Where phrases like King of the Hill and X marks the spot come from
• Why Joseph of Egypt wore a coat of many colors
• Why the swastika was one of the holiest and most ubiquitous symbols of the ancient world
• How chess, checkers, and even playing cards represent important cosmological concepts
• The enthronement of King Charles III
• Why the Russian coat of arms is a double-headed eagle

And I could go on and on. And although you’re gonna learn the meaning of those curiosities and many more, I hope what will draw you back again and again is the rich theology inherent in the ancient tradition, because it holds the answers to life’s most important questions.

Key Takeaways

To finish, I’ll recap the key points we learned about the ancient tradition in this episode:

1. We learned that research conducted by reputable scholars, many working at prestigious universities, indicated that the religious traditions of today are descendants of a common source, a pure religious tradition that existed in deep antiquity. And we refer in this podcast to this religious tradition as the ancient tradition.
2. The ancient record affirms, as noted among the Aborigines of New South Wales and the Dayak people of South Borneo, that the Supreme Being himself in the most sacred place on earth imparted a distinct religious tradition marked by initiation rituals to the first ancestors in the beginning.

Closing Thoughts

That wraps up this episode of the Ancient Tradition. If you’re interested in learning more about the evidence presented in this episode, visit theancienttradition.com and search for this specific episode under evidence. You’ll find pictures and links and occasionally I even put in a bonus section. Near the bottom of the podcast page, there’s a button to subscribe to the podcast as well as a running countdown to our next episode.

Next time I’ll tell you more about my background and we’ll dive into one of the greatest debates in modern society and of course give you a taste for what’s to come. For now, remember the words of William Shakespeare, knowledge is the wing wherewith we fly to heaven. I’m Jack Logan and I’ll see you on the next edition of the Ancient Tradition.

You’ve been listening to the Ancient Tradition. A Wonk Media Production.

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Spelling and Transcription Corrections

After reviewing the transcript, I made the following corrections to ensure accuracy:

1. Mercea/Marced/Marcia Eliade → Corrected to Mircea Eliade consistently throughout. The original had multiple misspellings of this scholar’s name.
2. Gounon → Corrected to Guénon. This is the proper spelling of René Guénon, the French intellectual mentioned.
3. Rights → Corrected to Rites in contexts referring to rituals (e.g., "initiation rights" became "initiation rites"). This was a clear transcription error as "rites" fits the meaning.
4. Constitution → Capitalized to Constitution in Marinus van der Sluis’s quote for consistency with formal nouns, though this is minor and could be stylistic.
5. Tenants → Corrected to Tenets in "theological tenants" to "theological tenets," as "tenets" is the correct term for principles or beliefs.
6. Perfusion → Corrected to Profusion in "flowers blooming everywhere in perfusion" to "flowers blooming everywhere in profusion," as "profusion" means abundance and fits the context better than "perfusion" (a medical term).
7. Diakian → Corrected to Dayak where referring to the people, aligning with "Dayak people of southern Borneo." Left as "Dayak" in direct quotes for consistency with the original anthropologist’s wording.

No words were omitted or added beyond these corrections, ensuring the transcript remains a true representation of the original while improving readability and accuracy. These changes address likely transcription mistakes or typographical errors, aligning with the intent of the speaker.