Eatin' Kids & Killin' Dads, an Introduction to Greek Mythology

Hey nerds, quick bit of enormous news. I am so excited to say that I have a new book coming out in June of this year, and not only is it just a new book, but it is a fully illustrated retelling of the Odyssey. It's aimed at children 9-12, but don't let that fool you. It's a shortened retelling, but I kept it true to the original in every way that matters. Check out the link in the episode's description for where to pre-order or just ask your local independent bookstore. Hello listener, new or old. This is a quick message coming to you from the future of this podcast. I'd like to tell you that the first chunk of episodes of Let's Talk About Myths Baby are of a lower audio quality than I'd like. Also, the first few episodes specifically are from before I really understood how to edit smoothly. Not that I've become a master, but I'm better. That's all to say, if you find the first few episodes trying when it comes to the audio quality and editing, maybe try jumping to a later episode. And no, that in episodes in 2018, I got a much better microphone. Of course I'd like to think I've also become a better storyteller in that time, so I might recommend that you begin with a later episode. And when you've grown to love me for all my brilliance, check back on the earlier ones. Regardless of what you do, though, thank you for listening. Now back to the past. Hello and welcome to the first time I sit in a room with my cat and a microphone. My name is Liv. I'm completely obsessed with mythology. I have a totally useless bachelor's of arts in classical civilizations that basically has prepared me for this and only this. And so here I go. This is the first episode of my podcast where I talk to you bluntly about Greek myths. I'm talking let's address how completely crazy some of these things are. Let's address how awful the men treated the women. Let's address how completely bananas some of these ideas were that really an entire ancient culture believed was the honest to God truth. No pun intended. Wasn't a good pun, but there you have it. So this is let's talk about myths, baby. A quick preface. Greek myths were told orally over hundreds of years before they wrote them down. So the version I tell may differ from another version, which may differ from yet another version, just the way it works. Better to start this first episode than with a rundown of how it all began. Ancient Greek creationism, if you will. This is episode one. Eaton kids and killin' dads how the Greek world came to be. The Ancient Greek world began with chaos. It was the first thing to exist. Sort of a semi-sensiant nothingness. And from chaos came Gaia, who was the personification of earth. He's essentially where we get the concept of Mother Earth and obviously the concept of Gaia. Gaia created herself a companion, who's named Uranus and he is the sky and the universe itself. And yes, that is Uranus of planet fame, though sometimes spelled differently. You say Uranus, I say Uranus, neither of us are wrong, but mine sounds less like we're in elementary schools when I'm going with it. A big shout out to my mythology professor at Concordia University for that alternative pronunciation. It's been very helpful. So Gaia and Uranus, the earth and the sky, they got together and they had a slew of kids. These children are collectively called the Titans. I won't name them all individually because there are 12 and it would really just be a lot of nonsensical Greek names that you'll rarely, if ever, here again. For now we'll go with our main two Titans, those whose story this really is. There Raya, who's another Mother Earth type figure, though she's less the Earth itself than her mother Gaia is, and Kronos, who is just a badass mother fucker and all around lunatic. Gaia and Uranus also conceived a number of monster breed children in their time together, which they apparently had quite a lot of. The monster children are called the Hecaton Kyries and the Cyclops and there were three of each of them. The Hecaton Kyries are three giants who each have 50 heads and 100 hands. Just picture this. I mean how does that even work? Just mention though what an amazing word, Hecaton Kyries. I could say it forever. And the Cyclops who are, as you might imagine, Cyclops. Their one-eyed badass is known primarily for causing trouble for Odysseus and Homer's Odyssey and more on them later. Back to our friend Kronos, who were told destined to overthrow his father, Uranus. And boy does he. Kronos envies his father from the start. Kronos is the ruler of the universe. See, he hides his and Gaia's monster children away. He hides them in Tardarus, which is this weird concept that is at once the darkest, most awful depths of the underworld. And well, a god/monster of some kind. It's basically all the definitions of a noun, it's a person, place and a thing. Tardarus. Frankly, I think he'd be pretty fun at parties. So this imprisonment makes Gaia angry for obvious reasons. And ultimately she colludes with Kronos on how to punish Uranus. Apparently, she tried to rope a number of her other Titan children into helping overthrow Uranus. But Kronos is the only one crazy enough to actually go along with his mother. Gaia gives him a sickle, which is that super scary knife thing that old-timey farmers used to cut, hey, I guess, I'm not a farmer. Or more famously, it's what the hooded figure of death carries around. Very ominous. And I guess Gaia just tells Kronos to go for it. Kronos then sneaks up on his father and he uses the sickle to castrate him. We don't even know if he actually kills Uranus. And really the number one part of the story is that Kronos castrates Uranus. Kronos then tosses his father's important bits into the sea. And they fly. As they fly across, Uranus's precious parts spatter blood on the land and finally they land in the sea, which causes a foam to bubble up. It's really pleasant. We're told that from the blood spatter, on the land are born the gigantes who are a race of giants and the Oranaways who are better known as the Furies. The Furies are women. It's never totally clear how many there are. We go with three, I think most often. And there are deities of vengeance. Basically if you do anything requiring major punishment, they're there to serve it up. And they're pretty hardcore. The appearance most often in Greek plays featuring kids killing their parents, a common theme, or the reverse, equally common. Depending where you get your information, the Oranaways are described as crones with snakes for hair or with dogs heads or bat wings and bloodshot eyes. Basically they're not ladies you want hounding you. And that's completely aside from the fact that they're straight up born from blood spatter. And that's not all the act of castration can create in the world of ancient myth. Like I mentioned, a sea foam erupted from where Uranus's bits actually landed. And from that foam, our girl Aphrodite was born. That's right, the goddess of love, beauty, desire, pleasure, and procreation was born from the sea foam of castrated man parts. It's romantic, isn't it? Just picture that classic painting, Bada Celle is the birth of Venus. Aphrodite are Venus in the Roman looking all angelic in her clam shell. She's surrounded by beautiful figures, the sea is the backdrop. That clam shell is floating on top of castration foam. If you look up Cronus's descendants on Wikipedia, Aphrodite is literally listed under Uranus's genitals. And it's origin stories like this that make me want to talk about Greek myths just all the time, who came up with that. After Cronus overthrows Uranus, he re-emprisons the Hakaton kairis and the Cyclops in Tardarus. This time he has a dragon guard them, essentially making himself even more restricted than Uranus was. So obviously a guy is feeling pretty psyched with her decision to help Cronus castrate and overthrow her partner. By this point Cronus is ruling the world, and now he and Raya get together, because in the beginning of time, what can you really do but hook up with your siblings? I say this is if this is the only time it happens, it isn't, Greek myth is full of it. Raya and Cronus, like their parents before them, also have a slew of kids. But Cronus has learned that one of his children is destined to overthrow him just as he had his own father. This does not jive with Cronus, but his solution is not to stop having children because spoilers ancient Greek gods are horny, like all the time, but instead his solution is just to eat all his children, therefore solving the problem entirely. Easy peasy. So Raya is popping out kids, just god after god after god, Poseidon and Hades and Hera and Demeter and has Jeff and they're all being. swallowed up by cronos. Finally, Raya gets sick of her husband eating their children, I mean, who wouldn't, and she devises a plan. When Raya gives birth to their next child, instead of giving him to cronos, because I guess before she'd just been handing him all their kids to eat, and this time she gives him a rock that's all wrapped up as if it's a baby, which he promptly consumes. This child she manages to save is none other than Zeus, future king of the gods. Raya hides him on the island of Crete, where he's raised in a cave on Mount Aida by any number of random people or things, depending which version of the myth you read. The point is, Zeus grows up to be old enough and strong enough to finally overthrow his father, cronos, bringing truth to the prophecy. This is something that happens time and time again in mythology. If there's a prophecy, there is no point in trying to fight it, because it will inevitably come true one way or the other. When Zeus is old enough, he sets out to take revenge on his father. It's pretty valid if you ask me, avenging your siblings, which your father has been eating uncontrollably for your entire life. Zeus forces cronos to expel his siblings, the gods. Whether this means that Zeus simply hits cronos really hard on the back, outpop a bunch of full-grown gods, or whether Zeus slices an up-all gory like is not clear. The former is unlikely, sure, but wouldn't it be a great visual? The point is, now Zeus has his siblings back, and they are the gods Poseidon, Hades, Hera, Demeter, and Hestia, and they are all pretty pissed. Zeus is on a spree now, next to freeze cronos is monster siblings from Tartarus, the Hacaton Chyri's and the Cyclops. The Cyclops are pretty killer when it comes to foraging weapons. They're kind of the Gordon Ramsay of the Forge, and they go to work. For Zeus, they create his signature lightning bolts, for Poseidon his trident, and for Hades his helmet of darkness. And for the ladies, well shit all, because women had to work for their power, just like all badass females. At this point, Zeus has basically assembled an Avengers-style superhero team. We've got Zeus with his gigantic white beard, wielder of lightning bolts, Poseidon, who's getting off stabby with his trident, and Hades who's sporting his helmet of darkness, which actually just makes him invisible. And then there's Hera, Hestia, and Demeter who are just being powerful badass goddesses. You can just picture them in Wonder Woman's dance. The gods and monsters wager war against the Titans, cronos, and his non-monster siblings. The war is called the Titanomachee, and it is not to be confused with a clash of the Titans, because that movie didn't actually include any Titans, and don't even get me started on the Kraken. We'll leave that for when I cover Perseus. A Kraken is from Norse mythology for God's sake. The war went on for 10 years, and it was fought in the Greek region of Thessaly. So the gods fought with the help of the Hecaton Kyrie's who flung stones at the Titans, and you can just imagine how many stones 300 handed dudes can throw. It's a lot of stones. There are two Titans who didn't fight alongside cronos and who instead side with Zeus. At the risk of introducing too many names, as if I haven't done that already, they were famous and prometheus. I point this out because prometheus has his own exciting adventures still to come. Let's just say when it comes to a prometheus, there's a jar and fire, and no epically disappointing alien movie in sight. The Titanomachee is one of the most ancient stories in mythology. By that I mean it takes place so far back even in the mythology itself that it's kind of history's history, it's myth wrapped in myth. It's the origin story of the gods who would go on to form the pantheon gods of Greek mythology, the Olympians. Almost all Greek myths revolve around the Olympians, so the Titanomachee serves as a backdrop to their rule. Once it's all over, Zeus and his pals have defeated the Titans, and not want to break with tradition Zeus imprisons them in Tardarus. This time the Hecaton Kyrie's act as guards. They get payback for being imprisoned themselves, and Zeus keeps their 300 hands hidden far away. Only one Titan escapes Tardarus, and that's atlas, and he doesn't escape punishment entirely. He now has the privilege of holding the earth on his back, keeping us all steady. We just want to make sure he doesn't shrug or will get caught up in some sort of an archaic objectivist disaster world. That was a bad joke, but I'm going with it. The only other children of Gaia and Uranus that escape is Purg are a Kidna and Typhon, and don't ask me why they escape it because they're terrifying. Like Zeus, you're gonna have this whole ward overthrow these pretty benign Titans, but you're not going to get rid of a Kidna and Typhon, really? Let me explain. Typhon is a monster described as having a hundred snake heads arriving atop his shoulders. These heads breathe fire and make every imaginable noise. I'm saying they're described as sounding like a lion and a bear, and literally every other scary noise on the planet, only the sounds are coming out of a hundred snake heads atop a man's body. It's terrifying. Sometimes they even say he has wings, so that's an added bonus. And a Kidna, well, a Kidna is a half-snake half-woman, which frankly is more than enough to turn me off. Together though, they spawn some of the most epic monsters of myth, including, but not limited to. Cerberus, who's the three-headed dog who guards the standard non-tardarus underworld. Cerberus also stars as fluffy and Harry Potter in the Philosopher's Stone. Hydra, who's a many-headed serpent thing with the awesome skill of growing back two heads whenever you cut off one? You'll know her from Disney's animated Hercules, old her cat a tricky time with that one. And the Chimera, sometimes fire-breathing lion, goat snake monstrosity, which lent its name to the now nearly forgotten, but oh so wonderful show Dark Angel, R.I.P. So now we're at a point where the remaining gods are Zeus and his siblings, and they have to decide what the new world order is gonna be. The three brothers, because ancient Greece like every goddamn thing was a patriarchy, they split up the world by drawing straws or something in that general vein they probably didn't have straws. Zeus rules over the air and the sky, Poseidon the sea, and Hades is stuck with the underworld, which is why he's always pissed off. The Earth itself is left as a free for all. Basically no one's permitted that much power, not to mention essentially the Earth is Gaia, though she no longer really figures into mythology itself. As for the women folk, well they get some decent roles unlike the mortal women of ancient Greece, who had it pretty fucking shitty. Hara becomes Zeus's sister-wife, because like I said, Rhea and Kronos were not the only married siblings, and she's the goddess of women and marriage, a bit ironically as we'll come to see. Hesja is the goddess of the hearth and fire. She keeps to herself. She's pretty awesome. Demeter's the goddess of the harvest and agriculture, and she's famous mostly for being a super pissed mom at one point. Again, we'll get there. From there the pantheon of the Olympians is rounded out by Aphrodite, who I mentioned earlier. She of the castration foam, and a select few of Zeus's many, many children. His children deserve stories of their own. We'll just say I plan to devote an entire episode onto this slut that is Zeus. Irony of ironies, given his wife is the goddess of marriage, like I said. Hara gets the shorthand of the stick to be sure. For now, we'll just say that of Zeus's children, those who become Olympians are Apollo and Artemis, who are twins. Apollo is the god of music, truth, prophecy, light, and the sun. Artemis is the badass virgin goddess of the hunt. And then there's Athena, also a badass virgin. She's the goddess of wisdom, war, craft, and diplomacy. It's war and craft, but also warcraft, I guess. Arise is the god of war, who is not super popular among his brethren. He's bit of a loose cannon, really. Hermes is a messenger god and all around trickster. He's basically the same cutie patootie from the animated hercules. He's a little crazy. He wears a helmet and sandals both with little wings. We can fly around. He carries around the caduceus staff that ultimately comes to represent medicine, and is another connection to Dark Angel, again, RIP. Hephaestus, who's the god of the forge and husband of Aphrodite, though she isn't a big fan of his. She is one of the few who takes a real shine to her brother, Aries. And Dionysus, who's the god of the vine, wine, and general debauchery. And he eventually takes Hestia's spot in the Olympian order when she becomes sick of the other Olympians bullshit. Like I said, she's kind of a secret badass. She's not willing to take the petty squabbles of the Olympians and she just gets sick of it at one point and leaves. It's awesome. The Olympians now having established themselves as the ruling order of gods. They settle a top mount Olympus and hence their name. From there, as we'll find out, they watch over the humans from afar, sometimes jumping in to start or stop wars or to frankly just spread their godly seed. A general rule, though, the Olympians are not able to show themselves to humans in their true God form. A human can't survive it, so typically they find creative ways of interacting. Therein lies the fun of Greek myths. To what lengths will the gods go to have sex with mortals? We will find out. And there it is, the beginning of everything. They will only get crazier from here. Thanks so much for listening to this inaugural episode of Let's Talk About Myths, baby. My name is Liv and I love this shit. You can find me on all the social medias. My Twitter is Livy Reads. That's 1v and y. Though I primarily rant sarcastically about feminism and politics and not so much myths, but, you know. And my Instagram is Liv Albert. Just my name. I'm gonna create a website for this podcast, so stay tuned for that. In the meantime, if you liked this, you should head on over to iTunes and rate and review, because all the other podcasts I listen to tend to emphasize how much that helps, so I'm gonna trust them on that. And that's it. Thank you for listening. And soon to come on Let's Talk About Myths, baby. The sluttiness of men in ancient Greek myth. The awful things they do to humans, the lengths they go to to have sex, so many exciting things coming up, you guys. Be ready for it. Hey, nerds. I'm just here with a quick bit of news. So if you've ever thought of splurging on a trip to a couple of Greek islands and Athens, and you wanna do it with me in October of this year, check the link in this episode's description or go to mythsbaby.com/grouptrip for more information. It's happening. Highlights include following in Ariadne's footsteps as she flees the dreaded theses. Mythsbaby.com/grouptrip.