Conversations: From Mythical to Curative to Poisonous, Mythic Plants w/ Ellen Zachos

Liv and Michaela chat with author and plant and foraging expert Ellen Zachos about all things myth and plant! From mythical plants like moly to which poisonous Hemlock killed Socrates, we're talking all things PLANTS! Find Mythic Plants https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/ellen-zachos/mythic-plants/9781523524396/?lens=workman-publishing-company wherever you get your books and learn more from Ellen here https://backyardforager.com/. Submit your question for the next Q&A via email http://mythsbaby.com/questions or a voice note https://www.speakpipe.com/LTAMB. Get ad-free episodes and so, so much more, by subscribing to the Oracle Edition at patreon.com/mythsbaby http://patreon.com/mythsbaby CW/TW: far too many Greek myths involve assault. I try to provide direct warnings when there is reference to anything with overtly traumatic themes but be aware that Greek mythology regularly features assault, death, and many other potentially triggering events. Attributions and licensing information for music used in the podcast can be found here:mythsbaby.com/sources-attributions http://mythsbaby.com/sources-attributions. Learn more about Liv's next group trips https://travelbugxlivalbert.my.canva.site/ to GREECE! Application deadline is November 30 (Subject to change due to demand). Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Liv Albert?

  Hey nerds, really quick note from me. I want to tell you that we now have the applications open for the next set of listener group trips. This is us going back to the original, the trips that we have held in the past that have been so much fun, so successful, and pretty affordable in terms of wandering around Greece with a bunch of nerds. So check out the details and get your applications in at mythsbaby.com/groups.

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• 2:10Speaker 05

  Hello, this is Let's Talk About Myths, baby, and I am your host Liv, here with a very quick introduction on my terrible microphone, because sometimes in a pinch. Today's episode is a really fun conversation that Michaela and I had with Ellen Zachos, who is a botanist, among other things, and the author of a new book called Mythic Plants. And now, I am an enormous nerd for plants, and I'm always so excited for episodes like this, and this was so much fun. We talk all about plants that may have been entirely mythical,

• 2:55Speaker 05

  others that have natural, still surviving species that they could be attributed to, so many different things, and of course, all the poisons of all the greatest witches of Greek mythology. Happy Friday.

• 3:24Speaker 05

  Conversations, from the mythical to the curative to the poisonous and everything in between. Mythic Plants with Ellen Zachos.

• 3:48Liv Albert?

  I'm obsessed with the plants in Greece, very much, and I know a lot about, like, you know, vaguely how they fit in with the myths, and the myths themselves I know very well, but the actual plants... Is something, I mean, my phone is just littered with photos of plants in Greece to like honestly, an unhinged level. So I'm very excited about this, but like how you're a plant person, right? Like, how did you get into plants with Greek myth?

• 4:14Speaker 06

  Well, first of all, I want to say I am sure it is not an unhinged level. I'm sure I would approve and applaud the number of plant photos on your phone.

• 4:24Liv Albert?

  I love the plant.

• 4:25Speaker 06

  Yeah, I love the plants too. I, um, you know, I'm, I'm half Greek and it's the half of me that I've always been most interested in. So I heard the myths growing up. And when I became a gardener, because that, that was my second career. I was a gardener in New York City and I started to realize how many plants were essential to the Greek myths. Like, the myths couldn't have happened without, I mean, Prometheus couldn't have brought fire down if there weren't fennel, right? So they are essential parts of these stories. And because I love plants so much, it just kind of was a natural combination for me.

• 5:03Liv Albert?

  I love that. I mean, one, one thing I think about when you say it that way, like the way they couldn't exist without them is the one thing that it took me way too long to realize is, is that, you know, we think about Apollo and Daphne all the time and the creation of the laurel. But what gets lost in English is that Daphne just means laurel in Greek.

• 5:23Speaker 06

  Exactly. And, and people still call it still, it's one of the common names for the plant even today. And I'm sure that people who say it, who call it Daphne are like, they don't have any idea what the story is or why it's called that.

• 5:37Liv Albert?

  Yeah, no, and that gets lost so much in Greek myth generally, where the words are the Greek word for something. But then when we put it into English, it just sounds like a beautiful name. And so like, that's something I try to talk about on the show as much as possible. But Daphne is one that really stuck with me because yeah, like it's, it's literally just the word for laurel in a different language. And that applies to so many things that it's just, it's a very interesting way of thinking about them in that way. And then, like you said, how they couldn't exist without them. Um, so yeah, I mean, also I'm glad to hear that you are Greek with your last name. I was like, I'm pretty sure, but we're gonna.

• 6:12Speaker 06

  You were right about that. You were right. Yes.

• 6:15Liv Albert?

  Um, so I mean, I don't even know how to get in because it's just like, there's so much and the, the plants are my real interest, but like, Michael and I were talking about this ahead of time. And one of the things that was interesting in like, kind of looking into what you do is the idea of these plants that are like entirely mythical. I don't know if that's like jumping right into the deep end, but I'm

• 6:35Speaker 06

  No, that's good. That's, that's the way to go.

• 6:37Liv Albert?

  Yeah. I, I can think of like Molly in the Odyssey. Yeah.

• 6:42Speaker 06

  It's one of my favorites. It's, this is, this is what I did to prepare, prepare for us today. The entire chapter of Molly is marked because it's so cool. And, and I mean, I, I think it was a real plant. I think it was the snowdrop Galanthus nivalis. I am convinced of that.

• 7:03Liv Albert?

  That's what I've learned when I did some Googling once, because I wanted to put on merch. It never happened, but I wanted to put Molly on merch and I did some like digging and I was like, okay, snowdrop. Oh, that seems reasonable, but I never got further than that.

• 7:14Speaker 06

  Okay. Well, you're about to get further than that right now. And I will totally buy that T-shirt when you make it. And I think that you should.

• 7:22Speaker 06

  So, so can I just like dive into the story?

• 7:24Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 7:25Speaker 06

  I mean, you know, the story.

• 7:26Liv Albert?

  Yeah. My listeners know the Odyssey pretty good. I'm currently actually working on a children's retelling that's supposed to come out next year in advance of the movie. So I am, I am so deep in the Odyssey. Um, but I also, I'm going to want to hear your interpretation as well. And it's such a small part, like tell away.

• 7:41Speaker 06

  All right. Well, I'll just, I'll just give a little prelude and, um, and then jump into the plant part. So, so Odysseus and his men land on Circe's island and he sends the guys out to see what there is to see and they don't come back. So he goes in search and he runs into Hermes and Hermes is like, be careful, dude. She turned your men into pigs and she's going to do the same to you. But here, if you take this plant, you'll be okay. She won't be able to turn you into a pig. And it's described as having a black root and a flower white as milk. And that's about, oh, and it's, this is what I love. And this is why I love Emily Wilson's translation so much. She says in the, in that part of the book, that it's difficult for

• 8:25Speaker 06

  men to find and pull up, but not for gods. And every other translation says something like, it's dangerous for men to pull up. But the word, and I'm, I don't, do you speak ancient Greek?

• 8:37Liv Albert?

  Michaela's got a lot more than me. I mean,

• 8:40Speaker 06

  So I, I don't, but I, I know a little, but I, I'm gonna, the reason I ask is because I'm gonna pronounce it the way modern Greek is pronounced, because that's the only thing I can do.

• 8:50Liv Albert?

  We've had a lot of fun conversations about that. Anyway, go with the modern Greek.

• 8:53Speaker 06

  Okay, so it says, and means difficult. It does not mean dangerous. And she's the only translation I've ever read that gets that right. So anyway, difficult for men to pull up. And you're like, all right, fine, whatever. It's probably a fake plant. It's probably not real. And then Theophrastus, a thousand years later, says, yes, black root like an onion, white flower. Not really sure it's so difficult for men to pull up. I think it's difficult for men to pull up because it's a spring ephemeral. It's a plant that only shows itself above ground for a couple of months out of the year. And then the foliage dies back. So depending on where you live, I used to grow them when I lived in Pennsylvania. They were up in February,

• 9:36Speaker 06

  March and April. And after that, you couldn't see anything. You couldn't see where they were. So how is a mortal supposed to be able to find that? The name Galanthus, Rala, milk, milk white flower. It's in the onion family. It's got the, the black root. But the thing that's coolest about it is that it contains this plant chemical called galantamine, which is being used today to help Alzheimer's patients think more clearly. It's not a cure, but it's being used in some therapies. And one of the things that it can counteract is this state called anticholinergic intoxication, which is basically

• 10:18Speaker 06

  When you just hallucinate. Cersei knew a lot about plants, right? She could easily have given these guys something that had mandrake or henbane or some other plant that would produce hallucinations so that they thought they were pigs. And then she could have given them molly to make them realize they were human beings again. And to me, that's like the best story. I love that.

• 10:44Liv Albert?

  I love, I love these kinds of interpretations where we can sort of pick apart some kind of reality from a story that is so, so mythological, right? Like that involves humans like transforming into animals. It's one of those ones where, you know, on its face, it seems like completely fantastical. But so often these stories have these elements of like possibility at least.

• 11:09Speaker 06

  And I think that's why they're so captivating. We, we know a lot of these things are not humanly possible, but, but there's often some little grain of truth or something that you want to be true. And that's what captures you. That's what makes it impossible to forget about them.

• 11:27Speaker 07

  And the other thing that's popping to my brain is sort of like the common knowledge of that where like for us nowadays, if we don't know the like about these things about plants, we wouldn't know, but there's this possibility like within antiquity that people would have been aware that they had these properties. And so when they're hearing these things, they're connecting the dots. So they're like, oh yeah, I know molly, I know that flower it does this.

• 11:54Speaker 06

  Exactly. That's knowledge that we've lost, but we can kind of piece it together if we, if we try.

• 12:01Liv Albert?

  Yeah. Well, there's so much in Greek epic, Greek mythology, like very broadly. There is so much that we can never fully understand because of that, exactly that lost knowledge, that, that commonplace concepts that were so normal to them and that everyone knew, but they didn't write down and therefore we lose them. And then we try to interpret it, but we're like missing this enormous puzzle piece. And it's just, it's so interesting to me to think about that and like, yeah, what? What is baffling to us purely because we don't have like this one little detail about how they conceptualize something?

• 12:39Speaker 06

  Mm hmm.

• 12:39Liv Albert?

  Yeah, okay, I mean, I want to go into like, now I'm like, how would that work with like the deer that we like to speculate was also a he, a man transformed by Circe, but it doesn't really, it kind of goes beyond that, I think. But I love the idea that, yeah, there's there, he's also just like, killed a random guy when he goes out looking for his men, or I guess beforehand, now I'm just rambling about the Odyssey, it's fine, again, this is what has consumed my life right now. But so Molly's a great example of like, yeah, mythical, but also very convincingly possible. Yeah, I couldn't think of any other off the top of my head examples. Do you have some?

• 13:17Speaker 06

  Yes, yeah, Sylphion.

• 13:19Liv Albert?

  Okay, great, I was trying to think of the name of that because I was like, it's not a Greek myth as far as I know, but I really want to hear about the abortion drug.

• 13:28Speaker 06

  Well, there's, you know, there's a lot of abortifacients, there's a ton of plants there, and, and you'll find that like, the, the men who are writing about these plants like, 50 to 100 years ago, will call them amenagogues, because what possible reason could any woman have to take these drugs other than to regulate her period? But, but they were also abortifacients, and the women knew that, they knew exactly what those things were going to do. So you've got a bunch of plants to fall into that category. But the Sylphion thing is interesting to me because everybody just assumed it was extinct back in like, the first century CE. And it's, it's, I think it's been rediscovered by this professor in Turkey, have you heard about him?

• 14:14Liv Albert?

  I, I might have at some point, but I would like to be reminded because I just really love hearing about this plant.

• 14:19Speaker 06

  I gotta, I've gotta look up, his first name is Mahmoud, and I'm trying to remember the last name, and I have to look it up, it's like Mokti or something, I'm gonna.

• 14:29Liv Albert?

  I've joked about, um, with friends about getting, um, whatever the most likely thing is for sylphium on, just tattooed onto my, directly over my uterus.

• 14:40Speaker 06

  Well, maybe that would work. I'm not sure you should rely on it.

• 14:45Liv Albert?

  It's not, not a, not for any reason other than to fuck you, to, to the world.

• 14:51Speaker 06

  Okay. So his name is Mamut Miski and he believes, and I think he's right, that Ferula drudiana is the actual sylphion plant. And it just, it just matches up with all the things that the Greeks said about this plant. Um, that the Greeks believed it could not be cultivated, that it only grew in Cyrene. Well, in fact, the Greeks couldn't recreate the conditions that it needed to germinate because this was a plant that required a lot of moisture and cold winter. And those are not things you usually find in Greece, unless you're, you know, at the top of Mount Olympus. Um, so, so Mamut, Mamut Miski has done all of this

• 15:34Speaker 06

  research into the chemicals that are in it, into the flavor of the plant, into how long it takes to germinate. And the, I mean, it, it needs like 10 or 11 years to reach flowering size. And then once it flowers, it dies. So it's, it's a really difficult plant to grow. But it, it's obvious from looking at it that it's a, uh, it's a fennel. It's right in the fennel family. And up until now, people have thought that the plant was, um, Ferula tinjatana. But that doesn't taste good. It's got a lot of ammonia flavor to it. So Ferula drudiana, I think, is really, really a strong possibility for being sylphion. And I love the fact that

• 16:16Speaker 06

  this plant that people thought was extinct for 2,000 years actually was just biding its time where it wanted to be.

• 16:23Liv Albert?

  Yeah. Oh, that's really cool. Okay. So are there, I, I usually associate it with Rome, but mostly because of just people have talked to me about it. Is there, like, what are the stories? Is there a Greek myth about it? I imagine it's in Greek sources? Or like, what do you know from that side?

• 16:39Speaker 06

  There's not a myth that I know specifically about sylphion. But I do know that it was the most, um, so Cyrene was a Greek colony on the coast of Libya, started by the Greeks, I think in 600 or 700 BCE. And sylphion right away became Super valuable. It was their most valuable export for food, for medicine, and for trade. It was supposed supposedly had a value equal to that of silver and gold.

• 17:08Liv Albert?

  Wow.

• 17:09Speaker 06

  Yeah, it was. It was really valuable. And there's a coin from Cyrene that has a picture of the plant and a woman, you might have seen this, and a woman, and she's got one hand on the plant, and then the other, she's pointing to her reproductive area.

• 17:23Liv Albert?

  Wow.

• 17:23Speaker 06

  So, you know, they did use it as an abortifacient. They did know the powers of this plant. But I'm not aware of any particular myth that uses it.

• 17:32Liv Albert?

  Yeah, okay. No, that's, I, I mean, it's interesting regardless, but I'm always just, yeah, curious if I've missed something.

• 17:38Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 17:39Liv Albert?

  But I'm glad to know, I mean, yeah, now I'm just, I'm glad to know to where to look more on my own, because I'm just, I'm also fascinated by it. And I know, um, like, hey, this might be totally crazy, but I, I feel like somebody told me once that they considered, or they wondered, or thought that pomegranate seeds might have also been like birth control in some way.

• 18:00Speaker 06

  Yeah. I do know something about that. Pomegranate is a weird one, because it was considered both birth control and a fertility inducer.

• 18:09Liv Albert?

  Right. That's reasonable.

• 18:10Speaker 06

  Yeah, of course. That makes perfect sense. Um, but there were a bunch of plants that were like that. And I'm trying to think which one, it was like Dioscarides and

• 18:22Speaker 06

  don't remember which one said it was witch. But any plant, any fruit, like the fig or the pomegranate that had a lot of seeds in it, was considered to be, uh, and, and quince also, to a certain extent, was considered to be something that promoted fertility, because the seeds represented propagation. And, you know, so, so that's why pomegranate was.

• 18:48Speaker 06

  Considered to to help fertility. I don't know why it was considered to be birth control, but the interesting thing is that, you know, palm wonderful, the pomegranate juice. They used to say that it was great for this and this and erectile dysfunction, that it was supposed to help solve problems with erectile dysfunction until they were taken to court and the federal court said, no, you can't say that anymore because because we don't really think that's true.

• 19:18Liv Albert?

  I mean, I was gonna say not to get political to you, but that company has single handedly stolen all the water from California. And I think that the people who own it deserve to burn in the fieriest pits of Tartaros. But that's really interesting to know.

• 19:31Speaker 06

  Yeah, I thought so.

• 19:32Liv Albert?

  Yeah. But also funny to be like, oh, yeah, go for the erectile dysfunction when it was obviously in the ancient world, like, used more for, like, uterus fertility.

• 19:41Speaker 06

  I did just remember why it was sometimes considered not to be for fertility. And that was because because of the whole Demeter and Persephone myth and the pomegranate seeds being responsible for the fact that Persephone has to spend, you know, part of the year in the underworld when the earth goes barren. And so people are like, damn you, pomegranate seeds. Look what you did. But I think the fertility thing is stronger.

• 20:06Liv Albert?

  Well, and I think too, like, there's a certain number, I always forget what it is, that she eats according to that. So I wonder if it was like, well, if you eat this many, then it's birth control. But if you eat like a whole pomegranate's worth, it's fertility or something.

• 20:18Speaker 06

  It could be. I, you know, no, I don't think anybody agrees on how many seeds she ate. Was it three? Was it four? Was it six? I have not been able to nail that down.

• 20:27Liv Albert?

  Well, no myth is nail downable, at least.

• 20:30Speaker 06

  I'm afraid that is true. Yeah.

• 20:33Liv Albert?

  But that's what we get for, like, these stories spanning 1,000 years. I love that you can't track anything because it it so exemplifies like how much time we're talking about here. We're now 2,500 years later. We're like, oh, but the Greek myth is this. And it's like, no, no, the Greek myth is 1,000 years of stuff.

• 20:51Speaker 06

  And that's, I love that, too. And I love that there are all these alternate versions. And sometimes there's a thread that runs through them all that is similar. But lots of times, the place that the myth came from will tailor the myth to its own.

• 21:09Speaker 06

  What it needs it to be. So I think that's another reason why you find so many different versions. Like if if some poet needs to prove a certain point, he'll spin it this way or that way. And I think for people just getting started with mythology, that can be very confusing. But I welcome it. I like it.

• 21:25Liv Albert?

  No, it's joyful. I was thinking about that. I forget how it came up. But I was talking about how there how many quote unquote birthplaces of Zeus there are, you know, like there is just there's countless different places that even today in Greece will still call themselves the birthplace of Zeus.

• 21:44Speaker 06

  Well, sure.

• 21:45Liv Albert?

  That's utterly delightful. Like I was on Naxos, which is my favorite island. And that's one of them of many.

• 21:51Speaker 06

  I have not been to Naxos. And I just have to say, I am wondering, I'm this is this is we're taking taking this out of the recording right now. I cannot see my audio. I cannot see a WAV file on my audio. Do you see that it's recording?

• 22:06Liv Albert?

  I do. I don't. Sometimes it doesn't show for the guest. And I don't know why that is because it's very confusing. But you're good. Yeah.

• 22:12Speaker 06

  Okay, because I could see it for the two of you. And I just realized that I wasn't.

• 22:16Liv Albert?

  Thank you. I appreciate checking that you're not the first to have noticed that and been like, why? So yeah, I can see yours.

• 22:22Speaker 06

  Okay, so I have never been to Naxos. And I would love to because you know, the whole Ariadne thing, I think that would be great.

• 22:29Liv Albert?

  Yeah, it's a good island. They got a lot of really good plants. We were this is only I mean, it's plant related, but there's there's this type of like snail that grows all over Naxos plants in certain areas. Like, we were walking down the street and like, every single plant was covered in like hundreds.

• 22:49Speaker 06

  It's kind of gross.

• 22:51Liv Albert?

  Snails. It is but like, there's snails, so you can just see the shell and they're all like curled up. So it's just like this weird thing where these plants are covered in like thousands. And I imagine it's like, quite modern and invasive. But like visually, it was cool.

• 23:05Speaker 06

  Well, so was it on just one kind of plant? Or was it on a bunch of different?

• 23:08Liv Albert?

  It was on like every plant in the area. It was even on like fence posts. Like, yeah, they're just I think that's why I think they're they are probably invasive. So it's probably not great. But visually, looked kind of wild.

• 23:21Speaker 06

  So you you've said like three times now how obsessed you were with the plants in Greece. Did you have any favorites?

• 23:28Liv Albert?

  I mean, so, okay, well, one of my favorites that I just love because of its name in English is the trumpet creeper. Because the trumpets are always creeping and they they just they look great. And I love a bougainvillea. These are not ancient. They're just like what's over there now. But oh, my God, the bougainviles of grace make me want to cry with happiness. And olives, obviously. And then every time I see a pomegranate tree either flowering or fruiting or somewhere in between because of pomegranate. When it goes from flower to fruit is one of the coolest things on the planet.

• 24:03Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 24:03Liv Albert?

  So all to say, no, I can't pick a favorite clearly because it just lists you like all like just a handful. But I mean, my phone contains so many more.

• 24:13Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah.

• 24:14Liv Albert?

  But I'm so, okay, that that did make me think.

• 24:18Liv Albert?

  And this is a tree that I so I grew up on the West Coast in on Vancouver Island. And we have trees that we call our beautus trees that are like iconic. They basically, I mean, there's like everything is named our beautus in this little area like they're they're everywhere. And they are also in the Mediterranean, I learned a few years back. And also in the States, I think you call them madronas.

• 24:45Liv Albert?

  Or maybe not.

• 24:46Speaker 06

  There's a bunch in that genus. And the one I was thinking of was the the strawberry fruit one that what people call it the strawberry fruit. And that's not a madrona. That's our beautus unato, I think, but.

• 24:57Liv Albert?

  Okay. Yeah, I don't know when I don't know which one that we have at West, but that's interesting. So they're not in the same family or the family is our beautus?

• 25:06Speaker 06

  The family, the way it goes with plants is.

• 25:10Liv Albert?

  Yeah, this is science that I don't know.

• 25:11Speaker 06

  But yeah, it's kingdom, king, king. Kingdom, division. Class.

• 25:23Speaker 06

  Anyway, family is right, family is right above genus and Dutch King's Plink. Yes, Michaela says, but I learned it as King David came over from England singing, from Great Britain singing, or something like that.

• 25:36Liv Albert?

  Oh.

• 25:37Speaker 06

  So it's definitely kingdom first. But anyway, family, finely ground sand, as Michaela says, or from Great Britain singing, is a family genus species. So they might be in the same family, but then the genus is either Arbutus or Madrona, and then species is the finer division.

• 25:58Liv Albert?

  Okay, well, then, I mean, that kind of leads, you led right into my question, which is that strawberry trees are a thing in a handful of Greek sources. And I didn't know the connection to Arbutus until just a couple of years ago. And having grown up where there are Arbutus everywhere, I love this connection that, like, you know, goes straight to ancient Greece, not least because there are very little other connections between Victoria, British Columbia, and Greece. But so do you know, I mean, I'm assuming now that we're just going to say they're vaguely in the right overall family because science is not my jam. But do you know anything about, like, how, I mean, I don't even know, just do you know anything about a strawberry tree? Because I think they're cool.

• 26:37Speaker 06

  I, I, I know a few things, but I have never seen them mentioned in a myth. And you said they're in a couple of sources, so I'm very curious as to which sources those might be.

• 26:45Liv Albert?

  Not, they're not in myth sources. I know they're in more historical, I can't think offhand, they're going to be in some of my notes somewhere, mostly for like novel stuff where I'm just like, I need to include them. So, yeah, I don't, I don't know offhand, but I think a couple of more like historical, like, oh, now I wish I could figure it out. I might, if I figure it out, I might let you know.

• 27:08Speaker 06

  Please do, because you know I'm going to Google it when we stop talking, because now I'm very curious. I have, I've harvested them, I'm a forager also, which you may or may not know, but, so, and I have a friend in San Jose, and there's a ton of the strawberry tree around there. So when I visit her, I will harvest them. They're not delicious. They're okay.

• 27:25Liv Albert?

  Or because you can actually like eat. See, we ours don't really fruit.

• 27:29Speaker 06

  Oh.

• 27:29Liv Albert?

  Up out in the Pacific Northwest.

• 27:32Speaker 06

  The season might not be long enough. I don't know. They do fruit in San Jose. In fact, all around the target. They're planted all around target. And they're really pretty when they're in bloom and the fruit ripens at different times. So you'll have some that are red and some that are yellow and it's lovely to look at, but they they look prettier than they taste.

• 27:50Liv Albert?

  Fair enough. Well, I just think the trees are beautiful, which is why I love them like with the peeling because they're so the

• 27:55Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 27:55Liv Albert?

  The actual tree is so orange and the the bark peels and that really beautiful and it's they're just like very iconic to me. So it's one of those things where I see them and I'm like, okay, no, that's an herbudus and now I have to be obsessed with it. But I Yeah, the fruit's a whole other. I mean, I had to Google why they were called strawberry tree when I figured out that they were the same as herbudus.

• 28:16Liv Albert?

  No, and it's, I mean, now I'm like, oh, which came first, like the strawberry tree or the strawberry? Because they're not the same thing at all.

• 28:22Speaker 06

  They're not even close to the same thing. But you got to figure if, well, that may be just the English. I was thinking, gonna say if they named it strawberry tree, there must have already been a strawberry. But but that's just the English name for it. And who knows what it was called?

• 28:35Liv Albert?

  I know I dug quite deep into the ancient Greek and like had it somewhere. Hold on, I'm gonna see how easy it would be. No, I don't even know.

• 28:44Speaker 07

  Okay, I'm I'm looking into it because I mostly hear just like I know nothing about plants and you keep saying strawberry and I'm thinking about my strawberries on my balcony and I'm like, there's a tree.

• 28:54Liv Albert?

  And somehow they're the same thing.

• 28:56Speaker 07

  Yeah, I'm very confused, but I will look into it as you should be.

• 28:59Liv Albert?

  No, but I, yeah, I I did find the ancient Greek ones. It's going to be somewhere in a in some document somewhere. But um, and I just remember being sort of almost still confused about how it came from. But now, now that I can't think of it. Um, but I know I they're they're not very common in Greece. I will say I've only ever seen one. Um, I was on the island of Samothraki once and it's. Got a whole other climate.

• 29:22Speaker 06

  All right. So I just looked it up and I don't have my Theophrastus is not with me. I, I should keep it with me always.

• 29:29Liv Albert?

  Oh, it was probably Theophrastus then, yeah.

• 29:31Speaker 06

  Well, he says, this is what AI is telling me and I never take that for, you know, for gospel. But I, um, my Theophrastus is at the office and he does talk about Arbuthnot, the strawberry tree. And, um, but mostly he talks about its use as wood and that it was used to make weaving spindles. So I will have to check on that to see if that's for real in Theophrastus, which, which I can do tomorrow.

• 29:59Liv Albert?

  So I do believe, once you said it, I think it, oh, yeah. Michaela, what do you got?

• 30:02Speaker 07

  So I'm looking at the Latin, right? Arbuthnot just comes from like the word for tree essentially, right? Arbor. But un, um, un eto comes from unum and eto. Una meaning one in Latin and eto is the word for to eat. Um, so it's like, it's, it's apparent, um, according to folk etymology by Pliny. It's because only one fruit can be eaten at a time due to the foul taste. But for some reason, it's just like, I'm looking at this, I'm saying un eto and the translation is just strawberry tree. So I don't know where, where the strawberry connection is. It's an, I think it's in English. I think it's, yeah.

• 30:46Speaker 06

  It's because it was a, a red, a red fruit and it was kind of bumpy. And I wrote about it in one of my, I'm looking it up now. Oh no, I didn't write about it in that.

• 30:55Speaker 07

  Oh, now I'm, now I'm seeing a picture. I've seen these. I've seen these out here.

• 30:59Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 31:00Speaker 07

  I didn't, I used to step on them as kids.

• 31:04Liv Albert?

  I feel like I've seen them like a little bit, but I, I don't know how, uh, yeah. Cause our, our beauties do something, but I don't know that they.

• 31:12Speaker 07

  Yeah. I'm looking at the fruits, the very like spiny, bumpy kind of thing. And when I was a kid, we would like step on it. Cause it'd be like squish and we'd be like, whoa, look at that.

• 31:22Speaker 06

  Bright orange inside.

• 31:23Speaker 07

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 31:24Speaker 06

  And it's not delicious, but it's not so bad that you would only eat one. You can use it. But, but also, um, I'm looking at this thing, which, you know, I wrote, but I wrote it like 20 years ago. So God forbid, I should remember that. Um, and it is used in a Portuguese brandy that's called Madrono. So there you go with the connection to the Madron tree again. So, you know, which is a relative.

• 31:53Liv Albert?

  Yeah, that's interesting. Well, I, I did some quick Googling because I was then also curious and I found Theophrastus. And I had to stop because it actually appears in, just in the topos text translation of Theophrastus. It's actually in there 13 times, the word Arbutus.

• 32:07Speaker 06

  All right.

• 32:07Liv Albert?

  We got lost trying to figure it out. So.

• 32:10Speaker 06

  Yeah. So I'm going to go do some checking on that.

• 32:13Liv Albert?

  Wonderful. I mean, we love a, a random tree.

• 32:16Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 32:17Liv Albert?

  But beyond, so beyond, um, Sylphion and, and Molly, like, do we have more of these mythical plants that, that you're interested in, or just in general, or, or semi mythical, debated, any of those?

• 32:30Speaker 06

  Um, those are the two that I know of as being, uh, that, that people have dismissed for thousands of years as not being real plants. And I say to them that they just didn't look hard enough. Um, but, but everything else, at least all the plants that are in my book, um, are real plants, whether they have all the, like, like the lotus from the lotus.

• 32:52Liv Albert?

  Oh, yeah.

• 32:53Speaker 06

  There you go. You're totally into the Odyssey these days. So, you know, you, you start looking and you're like, well, could there really be a plant that, you know, would make you just forget everything and want to sit on the beach eating lotus fruit? I don't know, maybe, but you, you start out looking at plants that have the name lotus in their title. And, and those don't really work. Um, so, but, but, but you can read the descriptions in Theophrastus and he says, well, it's a, a tree the size of a pear tree and the fruit is, you know, three quarters of an inch long and it ripens from green to brown. And you can eventually figure out what your best guess is.

• 33:32Speaker 06

  Uh, my best guess is, um, the wild jujube, Ziziphus lotus, which has it in the last name, which is, you know, probably just incidental. So I think if you, if you, if you come across these plants that sound like they're totally mythological, if you do the homework, you can usually find out where the story comes from.

• 33:54Liv Albert?

  Well, that, I mean, that makes sense. And I, I'd heard about that one, too, as soon as you said Jujube, because I think that's how I learned that Jujubes were actually a not candy thing.

• 34:04Liv Albert?

  But I remember I was, I, I've been writing a novel for a thousand years. So everything I researched just ends up like, I'm just Googling things and putting it in a document and half forgetting about it. Um, but that, that was also one of them. Cause I was like, what, what could make us do that and did some digging. But, uh, like I think about, you know, I think what gets lost a lot is the, the translation to English, but then simultaneously, like, obviously we can go back to the ancient Greek, but still we have, because so many plants have been named for Greek words and other Greek, like we, it, it becomes very complicated. Like one of the things I always forget is that like, uh, like a hyacinth in English, what we think of as a hyacinth, which is one of my

• 34:48Liv Albert?

  favorite flowers, they smell amazing, is not a hyacinth, as in from the myth of hyacinthus.

• 34:55Speaker 06

  Yeah. And I was reading, uh, yes, to, to prepare for today, I bought a copy of.

• 35:01Liv Albert?

  Oh, thank you.

• 35:03Speaker 06

  And, um, and when I read the bit on hyacinth, I thought, oh, that's really interesting because in my book, I talk about it being the name of the plant, uh, not Delphinium larkspur. I talk it because other people think it could be larkspur. And, and that's, you know.

• 35:20Liv Albert?

  Did I put that it's hyacinth, regularly? Like, did I put that it's like an English hyacinth?

• 35:25Speaker 06

  Um.

• 35:26Liv Albert?

  Probably. It's, I wrote that a while ago and I, they gave me a month to write it. So.

• 35:29Speaker 06

  Yeah. Oh, wow. That is so short.

• 35:32Liv Albert?

  Yeah. It's fine. It's paid off, but it's full, I'm sure it's full of incorrect, like stuff that I would not say now.

• 35:39Speaker 06

  But the fact is, I don't know. Was it hyacinth? Was it, uh, larkspur? I don't know. There, and there was, there was a guy who wrote an essay, a British horticulturist, and I, I have it in my citations, which I. Were not, there was no room for them in the book. So they're all online. But um, he, he wrote this whole essay that he delivered to some horticultural society at like Oxford or Cambridge about how you cannot believe the names in um, Liddell's Scott dictionary because the plant names, because they don't know what the hell they're talking about. They're just guessing. I'm looking at Michaela and she's laughing.

• 36:17Speaker 07

  That sounds like us historians. Like, we're just, we don't, we don't, we like words. We look at plants. We go, "Plant, great. Who knows?" This is why interdisciplinary studies are fantastic.

• 36:31Speaker 06

  Yes, that's why they're important. But, but you have to keep that in mind. A lot of the times, you know, if you look at Dioscarides, sometimes he gives really good descriptions of plants. You know, feathery foliage, a foot and a half or a cubit and a half, whatever. And you can figure it out. But other times, they just say, "It's pharmacon." Okay, it's a drug. That is not helpful to me. You don't know. So you, you have to really dig. And then you're left with, is it larkspur? Is it hyacinth? Hmm. They both have purply blue flowers. They're both arranged in a spike. Um, yeah, you know, then where do you go from there? Maybe, maybe you just make your best guess. Maybe you choose the plant that you like more. Yeah.

• 37:13Speaker 07

  Yeah. And I think also, um, like, so I've translated a bit of Pliny the Elder because I, I love a grumpy old man who retires and takes up bird watching. It makes me very happy. Um, and, but I'm thinking of Virgil's Aeneid, where I, I translated the entirety of Book Two for some classes. And they would constantly talk about like, trees, all these different trees that were in the area. But they were saying it's like one tree, but then they'd use different words for it all the time. Or they'd talk about the ship. The ship was made of, you know, this type of wood. But then, you know, a hundred line later, they'd use this other type of wood. So

• 37:54Speaker 06

  That's confusing.

• 37:55Speaker 07

  But like, when you're looking at it, you're just like, okay, are they actually trying to be specific? Or are they trying to be like, "Let's use all these different fun words. We got to match the meter" and stuff. So then it's also like, there's, um, Like, there's this level of confusion, especially with, um, I find with like poets and stuff, and this sort of poetry, where are they, uh, how true are they trying to be to the actual plant versus what is, what are they taking for literary, you know?

• 38:22Speaker 06

  License.

• 38:23Speaker 07

  Yes, exactly. So it's like, there's that different layer of difficulty.

• 38:28Speaker 06

  They probably didn't care about the plants as much as I do, or as much as Liv does now, and I don't know about you, Michaela, but yeah, you're right. Accurate botanical descriptions were not their primary goal. But you did just say something about Virgil and the Aeneid. So I would love to talk about a plant in that. Oh, I gotta look up which chapter it was in. I, I wanna say seven, but I'm not really sure.

• 38:54Liv Albert?

  I like to joke about how I prefer to have Rome told to me by other people, because I don't really care about it all that much.

• 39:00Speaker 06

  Um, no, it's not, it's not for me. I'm, I'm much more interested in the Greek, but I did include this because it's a really good story, and it's one of those stories that has the truth in it. So it's in Book Three, um, when, uh, of, of, um, of the Aeneid. So he, so Aeneas has fled Troy, and he's landed in Thrace, and he's, um, finds a mound that in my translation said, "overgrown with cornel," which is Cornelian cherry, which is cornus moss. And he starts to harvest it to build an altar, so he wants to start a colony there. And he cuts the stems, and they're dripping with blood. And he's like, ew, but okay, we'll keep going.

• 39:44Speaker 06

  And so he keeps cutting more, and, um, and he hears this man moan. And it turns out it's the ghost of Polydorus, who was sent to Thrace during the Trojan War by his father. The king was gonna protect him, but then, when the king sees that the Greeks are winning, he kills Polydorus and he takes all his treasure. So they bury him, uh, no, the, the spears that he was killed with were carved from Cornelian cherry wood. And, and Cornelian cherry wood is, is mentioned in a bunch of different ancient texts about being good for weaponry. But the, the thing that I love is that it's a dogwood. And if you're a gardener, you've probably seen this, even if you're not gardeners. You know how in the wintertime, people do containers with like,

• 40:29Speaker 06

  cut evergreen branches and red twig dogwood and holly berries?

• 40:34Speaker 06

  Well, the red twig dogwood is notorious for you stick it in soil and two weeks later, it's put out roots.

• 40:41Speaker 07

  Yay.

• 40:42Speaker 06

  Super easily. So there you are. The spears pinned his body to the ground and then they took root because they were made of dogwood and he couldn't get up. And isn't that amazing? That story? I just love it so much.

• 40:56Liv Albert?

  That's so cool.

• 40:57Speaker 07

  And the way it combines the like, you know, this now this tree grows, but it has his spirit in it. So when you hurt the tree, it's you're hurting him as well. That's so.

• 41:08Speaker 06

  I know. See, that's how I feel about it, too.

• 41:11Liv Albert?

  I'm writing this down. That's the greatest.

• 41:13Speaker 07

  Yeah. My childhood, my, um, my hometown, my father, uh, stuck a stick into the ground. Um, and anyways, it grew into a giant willow tree that now is like the people, when they go through the town, they're like, there's the willow tree. I'm like, yeah, it's a stick. My dad stuck in the ground one day randomly and now it's this giant tree.

• 41:31Speaker 06

  That's great.

• 41:33Liv Albert?

  That's so cool. No, I, I didn't know that about dogwood, but dogwood, I, that's always it's a like coat or a, yeah. I don't know what word I want.

• 41:42Speaker 07

  Is that our tree? Is that cannabis?

• 41:44Liv Albert?

  Oh, B C's tree.

• 41:46Speaker 06

  Oh, cool.

• 41:48Liv Albert?

  Or whatever.

• 41:48Speaker 07

  That's why I know the name.

• 41:50Liv Albert?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 41:50Speaker 06

  This is, this is a slightly different dogwood. Um, it has a bigger fruit, but it's, it's in the same genus. So it's, it's closely related.

• 41:58Liv Albert?

  Well, and ours are like white and stuff like I imagine.

• 42:00Speaker 06

  Look at the white flower, the big white flower. Yes.

• 42:02Speaker 07

  I, I, I would have been able to point out a dogwood if I was.

• 42:06Liv Albert?

  Really?

• 42:06Speaker 07

  I'm not good. I, I like trees. I, I'm so happy. You know, when I'm home, I, it's, I know my trees. Do you know what I mean? Like I can walk through the woods and I'm like, these are what my trees look like.

• 42:17Speaker 06

  Where are you from?

• 42:18Speaker 07

  Uh, Vancouver. So I live in.

• 42:20Speaker 06

  You are? Okay.

• 42:21Liv Albert?

  Yeah. So she's no dogwood, really.

• 42:24Speaker 07

  I should, but like, you know, go into the, the forest and I just know my big, beautiful trees. And I'm just like, I'm going to hug them like a weirdo. And then, you know, somebody walks around the trailhead and I'm like, oh no.

• 42:33Liv Albert?

  Well, we have, we have much bigger and more impressive trees than dogwood. So they get kind of.

• 42:39Speaker 07

  Yeah. I think that's why I like the big trees.

• 42:42Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

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• 44:47Speaker 07

  Yeah, I was curious about something.

• 44:53Speaker 07

  Oh no.

• 44:54Speaker 06

  Did you lose it?

• 44:54Speaker 07

  I lost it. Why does this keep happening to me? Oh, I'm mostly curious what like, what then is your, um, like as a historian, like I'm more like the, you know, like, I like, I like the drama and the gossip of history. So I don't pay attention to sort of like these sort of things, the plants or the animals or the stuff like that. So I'm curious about like what the processes that you find, you and other people who do this kind of work,

• 45:20Speaker 07

  can do to sort of like identify these plants and like, you know, figure out what they are versus what they aren't. And, you know, the fights you get into, is it data, is it ablative? You know, like we do in archaeology. Like, where do those?

• 45:37Speaker 06

  How do you do the research?

• 45:39Speaker 07

  Yeah, like, what, what do you, what do you look for? What do you pick up on?

• 45:43Speaker 06

  So for me, it's, you know, the interesting thing, to me, this was interesting. Um, I knew some of the stories I wanted to tell, but, but half of the stories I just found as I was doing the research and I would, I would sit down at my computer in the morning and I would say, okay, I'm going to write about quints today because I knew that it was probably the apple that started the Trojan War and I, I knew a bunch of different things about it, but I didn't know about, and I can't pronounce this, Kydipe and a Contius, maybe it's, it's a story that's mostly in Ovid's Heroides.

• 46:18Speaker 06

  And, and it's, it's a terrible stalker story.

• 46:22Speaker 07

  Oh, that.

• 46:22Speaker 06

  Yes. So, so this woman is, she's engaged to be married. She goes to the temple of Artemis, I think, with her nurse and this, you know,

• 46:35Speaker 06

  stalker is stalking her and he takes a quince and he writes on it, I will marry, I promise to marry a Contius and he throws it into the temple and the nurse picks it up and she's illiterate. So she hands it to Kydipe and says, can you read this? And she's, she reads it out loud. And so then it's considered a sworn oath. Now she's, she's never met this guy. She's already engaged to somebody else, but she gets sick on her wedding day. So it's postponed and it happens three times. Her father finally goes to the oracle at Delphi and says, what the hell is going on? And the oracle says, well, Artemis has cursed your daughter because she's breaking her vow.

• 47:18Speaker 06

  And so the woman is forced to marry this guy whom she's never met. And then Ovid writes these letters between the two of them when basically he does this classic victim blaming thing where he says, oh, well, it's only it's your fault because you're so beautiful. How could I possibly resist? And and, you know, she's forced into marrying him. Why was I saying that? Oh, but I didn't know that story. So, you know, I sit down to write about Quince and then I start Googling and I swear, J. Store. Do you guys ever use J. Store?

• 47:50Liv Albert?

  Oh, yeah.

• 47:51Speaker 06

  It's my very best friend. And during the pandemic, when they opened it up, so you didn't have to go to a library that has J. Store because here in in New York, I had it in Santa Fe. I don't. But I could do it all alone and I would just spend hours reading and it was so exhilarating to me. Michael would come home at the end of the day and I'd be like, look what I found out today and now I get to write about it. So it was that kind of thing where you just got deeper and deeper and deeper. And then you would always, always I rely on the primary sources, though. I read about them.

• 48:25Liv Albert?

  Speaking my language. Yeah.

• 48:26Speaker 06

  You read the journal articles, but you can't rely on just what somebody says. And so then I would take those for the primary sources and that's what I would use.

• 48:34Liv Albert?

  Yeah, I was gonna say that's what I do, but with primary sources, mostly because I find journal articles to be really inaccessible because I haven't been in the academic realm in so long and I I just now fall back on my sources. But that's me on top of text, which is just me like clicking around to like every different character, every name I could think of, oh, I've heard about this one like it. Yeah, there's like 50 tabs open on my computer right now where I've been doing that exact thing with various stories and everything I can imagine because it really is, it's so endless. And I think that the once you, yeah, have this like these couple ideas or or this like inspiration, you can spend forever

• 49:16Liv Albert?

  learning about this and and all the intricacies and like never even remotely get tired of it.

• 49:22Speaker 06

  And that's the thing. It doesn't feel like work. It's so exciting with each new thing that you discover.

• 49:27Liv Albert?

  Yeah, yeah, it's such it's such a joy. And well, not to, I mean, I could keep talking about how much I love it forever. But you also said a key word earlier that I want to make sure that we don't miss out on, which is farmaca. I don't know why I didn't think about that in the first, I mean, we talked about Molly, but. I would love to know about any and all of the poison plants.

• 49:49Speaker 07

  Oh.

• 49:50Liv Albert?

  That are in myth generally, or pharmac that's not poison, but I like a bit of.

• 49:55Speaker 07

  Or now, in case, you know.

• 49:56Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 49:57Speaker 07

  You need a poison.

• 49:58Liv Albert?

  Don't worry.

• 49:59Speaker 06

  You might need a poison.

• 50:01Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 50:01Speaker 06

  The first thing that comes to my mind, and this may be something you've talked about to deaths, and if you don't want to, just tell me, is the fact that the description of poison hemlock that killed Socrates does not match up at all with the description of symptoms of poison hemlock as described by Nicander in Alexa Pharmicon.

• 50:24Liv Albert?

  Which I've not looked at any of this.

• 50:25Speaker 07

  No.

• 50:25Liv Albert?

  This is delightful. Tell me everything.

• 50:27Speaker 07

  This is the thing that like, you know, we're told, you know, classical period ends when Socrates dies. He dies, Socrates, oh my God. Uh, he dies via hemlock, but then they're like, is it hemlock? Is it not? And I'm like, I don't know plants, so I'll just trust the people who know plants and what these things would look like.

• 50:45Speaker 06

  Well, it's, it's not the hemlock tree. It's, it looks a lot like.

• 50:49Speaker 07

  Tree?

• 50:51Speaker 06

  Oh, come on, Michaela. You live in the Pacific Northwest. What the hell? You're surrounded by hemlock trees.

• 50:58Speaker 07

  I believe you. I probably love them and I.

• 51:00Speaker 06

  You probably hugged them. Yes. You probably have, but it's not that hemlock. It's, it looks more like a Queen Anne's lace, except it's bigger. So it's got this flat, white umble of flowers.

• 51:13Speaker 07

  Oh.

• 51:13Speaker 06

  And, um, but you know, the, the, the death of Socrates is described as being really not so bad. You know, he's talking. He walks around, his legs feel heavy. He lies down. He could still talk. And then just gradually he like, he can't breathe and he dies. So that's, that's the story that we're told. But then Nicander, who wrote Alexa Pharmica, which is a poem all about poisons and their antidotes, um, says, oh, no, oh, no, no, that's not it. He says, you, you have vomiting and diarrhea and seizures and, and cardiac arrest. And it's really, really bad. And we're like, well, which is it? But this is, to me, the plant person was so interesting.

• 51:59Speaker 06

  Poison hemlock is Conium maculatum.

• 52:02Speaker 06

  And it affects the peripheral nervous system. And so that is a plant that would have produced the symptoms described in The Death of Socrates.

• 52:12Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 52:12Speaker 06

  Where he just gradually feels tired, can't breathe, lies down and dies. Water hemlock, which is Secuda maculata, is an equally poisonous plant. The flowers look very similar. The foliage is a little bit different. But it affects the central nervous system, and that's what causes the vomiting, the diarrhea, the seizures, and the cardiac arrest. So these are two closely related plants. But there was no dichotomous key back then. There was no regulated botanical nomenclature. So these two plants got confused. And then the Victorians, God love them, started experimenting.

• 52:54Speaker 06

  And the doctors, Victorian doctors, would give themselves and their patients ever-increasing dosages of poison hemlock to see. I don't think they actually killed anyone. I think they just, you know, did it, like, little doses. But they were trying to figure out which was which.

• 53:13Speaker 07

  Oh.

• 53:16Liv Albert?

  Oh, that's, that's so interesting. So it's like two hemlocks.

• 53:20Speaker 06

  Uh huh.

• 53:20Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 53:21Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 53:22Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 53:22Speaker 07

  And do they, so, okay, this is, this is me not knowing, like, I know plants, but I don't know plants. Do they look similar? Like, could you look at it and like, because I, I know what Queen Anne's lace looks like. And I knew that there was a plant that looked just like it, but was poisonous. Because I quite like the way it looks. And I know there's like something about like the bottom, if there's like some like spiky. But I don't know.

• 53:45Speaker 06

  You think of, the, the bottom is called a calyx. If, if my head is the flower, think of it as like, comes out like this, like the turtleneck sweater. Um, so poison hemlock, if, is like Queen Anne's lace on steroids. Queen Anne's lace might get to be three or four feet tall. Poison hemlock could get to be eight feet tall. The flowers, like, uh, Queen Anne's lace flower would be maybe three inches across and max. The, the poison hemlock could be five or six inches across. Um, so they look a lot alike. The flower of water hemlock looks similar, but it doesn't have that feathery foliage.

• 54:21Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 54:21Speaker 06

  Like Queen Anne's lace and poison hemlock does. It has pinate foliage, which is like when you have a stem and leaves coming out from either side.

• 54:30Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 54:30Speaker 06

  But it's, it's not so feathery. So it's really easy to tell that one apart.

• 54:34Speaker 07

  Okay.

• 54:34Speaker 06

  Once you know what you're looking for.

• 54:36Speaker 07

  So it's like, the, okay. So like these, all these plants are, um, or at least the hemlock one, like it's not so, um, out of the realm of possibility that ancient people would have been, especially at the time and, and space difference where they would have been like, no, no, this is what we call hemlock. And that couldn't possibly do what you're describing is happening over there, like in the case of McAndras and, um, the.

• 55:00Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 55:01Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 55:01Speaker 06

  You know, I don't know about that, but I will say it's a poison hemlock is a very, very common plant. It grows in like forty-six of the fifty states. It grows all over Greece. And hot, dry weather intensifies the, um, the strength of the poison.

• 55:18Speaker 07

  Wow.

• 55:18Speaker 06

  In the plant. So you're, you know, you pick one in the Pacific Northwest, you pick one in the dry, arid climate of Greece. Uh, the Greece one is going to be more poisonous. Um, water hemlock. Why? Water hemlock is not nearly as common because as its name suggests, it really needs a moist, damp soil. Uh, I usually find it growing either, sometimes even in streams. So it's, it's, it's not quite as common. So I think poison hemlock would have been better known. And then there's that, the island of Chios on, in Greece is where, you know, once you got to be of a certain age and they didn't feel like you were contributing to society anymore, you were supposed to commit suicide.

• 56:00Speaker 06

  Cause the, the saying was, if you could not live well, you should not live.

• 56:05Speaker 07

  Jeez.

• 56:05Speaker 06

  And people would, and, and, and the government would encourage people to take poison hemlock. And you've got to think, if it's a nice, easy death like Socrates, somebody who's like, you know, getting up there in age might say, yeah, okay, I, I can do that. Give my house to my son, whatever. But if it was going to be the symptoms of water hemlock, where you like stagger through the streets choking and puking, nobody's going to want to do that. So, uh, you know, poison hemlock, I think was much more. Used as a, as a poison.

• 56:35Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 56:36Speaker 06

  Them water hemlock, yeah.

• 56:37Liv Albert?

  That's so interesting. So, and then I, it's funny that that's the first one because I'm thinking farmaccan, I think more of like the stuff that I read about in um Medea's potions or you know, any of that and but hemlock is such an obvious one too. There's, I mean, there's a lot of poison plants in Greek stories, I guess.

• 56:56Speaker 06

  There are, and, and I'm glad that you mentioned Medea because um I think it was aconite.

• 57:04Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 57:04Speaker 06

  Was it aconite? Yes, it was an aconite. So um aconitum is a gorgeous perennial and it's still grown today.

• 57:12Liv Albert?

  Um, I got a tattoo of it for her.

• 57:14Speaker 06

  You, you have a tattoo of it?

• 57:17Speaker 06

  Oh, yes, you do. Yeah, my, my botanical tattoo is not something that I can easily, maybe I can, oh, there we go.

• 57:27Liv Albert?

  Oh, that's cool.

• 57:28Speaker 06

  But it's not a mythological plant. It's just my favorite plant. Anyway.

• 57:32Liv Albert?

  I mean, fair enough. This, my arm is full of mythological poisons for the various witches.

• 57:36Speaker 06

  That's great. Well, aconitum and, and what is, what do you, oh, wow.

• 57:41Liv Albert?

  You're.

• 57:41Speaker 07

  I have a, I can't show it easily. I have a chrysanthemum.

• 57:44Speaker 06

  Nice. I see it. I could see it.

• 57:46Speaker 07

  I love chrysanthemums. They look like aliens. It makes me happy.

• 57:50Speaker 06

  Have you ever eaten chrysanthemum leaves?

• 57:53Speaker 07

  No. Are they good?

• 57:56Speaker 06

  Yeah, they are. They're quite herbal and um in Japan, they sell them in grocery stores in packages like lettuce.

• 58:02Liv Albert?

  Wow.

• 58:03Speaker 06

  So you could try that sometime. But, but the aconitum is beautiful and was used a ton of times to poison people. And there's the story of Medea poisoning Theseus with it, or trying to poison him with it when he came to Athens to claim his birthright, which is a great story.

• 58:22Liv Albert?

  It really is. And sometimes we just wish she succeeded. I don't know. Theseus did some bad stuff.

• 58:28Speaker 06

  Oh, God, yes. Yeah, he does.

• 58:31Liv Albert?

  Yeah, I think of aconite and then what are some other ones I I'm trying to think of what I I know I just Googled poison plants from myth once and then took it into a tattoo artist. So I have I have hellebore. I don't know how poisonous that is.

• 58:43Speaker 06

  It's pretty poisonous.

• 58:44Liv Albert?

  Okay, great. That one grows in B C. I know too. It's really pretty.

• 58:47Speaker 06

  It's very pretty and and it blooms really early in the season and people who are gardeners just love it because it blooms for so long. Um, and it's also a really nice looking plant and it's probably evergreen in the Pacific Northwest.

• 59:00Liv Albert?

  Yeah, I think, yeah, I know that it's in a lot of gardens around there because it is so like easy and it's gorgeous and like almost black the flowers.

• 59:08Speaker 06

  Yeah, I wanted to write about that one because it's a very cool plant, but I couldn't find any um stories that had depth to them about that one.

• 59:16Liv Albert?

  That is the problem with so much myth, isn't it? It's like that that's something that comes up for me all of the time where people will, you know, find a name or a character and they're like, I want to hear the story of this person. And it's like, I'm sorry, we have a sentence like, you know.

• 59:34Speaker 06

  Yeah, it's like, it's like I'm thinking of um Mekon, who was the mortal lover of Demeter. And there's a plant, the blue poppy is called Meconopsis and it's it's from Mekon. And you're like, oh, great. What's the story of Mekon? And here's the story. He was uh Demeter's mortal lover and when he died, she turned him into a poppy and that's the story. Yeah, so but you know, at least there was no abduction, no rape, no assault, you know, so in that respect.

• 1:00:02Liv Albert?

  Winning in Greek myth.

• 1:00:03Speaker 06

  Yes.

• 1:00:05Liv Albert?

  I it's funny you say that that made immediately made me think of um Minthy, uh which is another story like that where it she ended up being a character um in a graphic novel, um Lore Olympus, uh which was about Hades and Persephone and because. That character ended up, this like fairly big character in this graphic novel, for the longest time I had people asking me about her. And I'm like, we got one sentence. I think it's in Pausanias too. Like, it's not, I don't think it's in any like plant person. It's Pausanias being like, this is where they say that like, there was a nymph, Menthie, who had an affair with Hades, and so Persephone turned her into mint. And that's the whole story.

• 1:00:45Speaker 06

  That's just about it. Oh, here's one thing you can add to it. And I have to, I would have to look at my citations to see where this came from, was that after she was turned into the plant, Hades felt bad for her, and so he made her smell good.

• 1:00:59Liv Albert?

  Right.

• 1:00:59Speaker 06

  Oh, okay. That's fine then. That's fine. Now you're gonna step on me and I'll smell good.

• 1:01:05Liv Albert?

  And what's, what's great about that is what, like, because as a story, it's like, okay, like, it's two sentences long. But as a concept, it's so interesting as this way of explaining the use of mint to cover the smell of dead bodies. And so you're like,

• 1:01:21Speaker 06

  Exactly. Yeah.

• 1:01:22Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:22Speaker 06

  Related to, and see, and sometimes I think, you know, there's, like you said, there's one sentence, there's two sentences. And it's frustrating when you're trying to find the original, the primary. But like you just said, in this modern retelling, she has a much bigger role. And when you have stories that are so minimal, or only a few lines, I think it gives other people the opportunity to flesh those things out, which is really interesting, or can be really interesting. And we're seeing that in a lot of the retellings, you know, from a feminist point of view, which I eat up like their ice cream. And, and, and it's, and those are people who have the creative thought process to say, what if I take this

• 1:02:05Speaker 06

  story, and I just make it a little different, or I expand this part? And I just, I love that.

• 1:02:11Liv Albert?

  Yeah, no, and it's, I mean, that's something I've, I've also been working on my own, whether I'll ever finish it is a whole other question. But it is, there is so much to work with. And I think, I mean, especially from like a women's perspective, for me, this is something that I Less so with the retellings, because unfortunately now with my job as it is, I can't read them without it feeling like work. So I love that they exist. I'm so happy and I get through one someone I can, but it's like, when I've spent 10 hours of the day researching mythology, you know, I just don't pick it up for fun at the end, but it's for me, I think all I do is think about the sort of the women in the stories, but but specifically like

• 1:02:53Liv Albert?

  what else there could be, you know, I think plants are probably a really good way of theorizing on what women were doing outside of the sources, which made them into like caricatures of nothing.

• 1:03:05Speaker 06

  And you're absolutely right about that because women were the herbalists, men were the doctors, but they weren't helping any women with reproductive issues or feminine health issues. And and so the women in ancient Greece had to rely on other women who were midwives or herbalists, and that that was plants. I mean, you read, you read some Dioscarides recipes for cures and it's like, okay. Oh, I think it was for aconitum, maybe it was for something that it was like human feces, that'll take care of it. Or, you know, donkey dung mixed with this, but but I really think it was the women herbalists who knew.

• 1:03:48Speaker 06

  All right, if you take this much pennyroyal, it's going to regulate your period. If you take this much pennyroyal, it's going to cause an abortion. So I think they were the the living encyclopedias who had that knowledge and and that was essential.

• 1:04:04Liv Albert?

  Well, and that's the thing that never gets written down, right? The I mean, for for countless reasons, I talk about it endlessly. I think I'm becoming a broken record. I don't care. It's never stopping, but like like, you know, we we can conceptualize all of this. We can understand because of what little we do know. You know, I've had a number of conversations with my friend Kristy Vogler, who did her PhD in I'm sure it was very specific and I'm going to broaden it because PhDs are very specific, but like in generally like women in medicine in, I think this really specific area of like, it was Southern Italy where it was very Greek. And, you know, she talks so much about the work that women were doing in this overall

• 1:04:48Liv Albert?

  field of medicine, but how they were seen in it, which is that they were, you know, witches, they weren't the doctors, they were, yeah, they were, they were all of these various things meant to devalue them, meant to make the men more important, when, for all intents and purposes, even in the, the record, like, the women were doing the work that other women actually needed and went to them for.

• 1:05:13Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:05:13Liv Albert?

  But obviously, they weren't allowed to have like a profession, so they were just like a, an old witch. And then we get into Roman witches, which are just like terrible caricatures of, of older women. And it just becomes this, like, it's wild to, to be looking into that and like see through that facade and then just wonder what, what the women were actually doing, or what, what they would say about their lives and their careers.

• 1:05:36Speaker 06

  And we will never know what they would say.

• 1:05:38Liv Albert?

  No.

• 1:05:39Speaker 06

  But, but, um, but the idea of, you know, belittling the knowledge of an herbalist by calling her a witch when she's more helpful than most of the doctors who were feeding people donkey dung is, um, not so far off, sometimes it feels like, from where we are today. But,

• 1:05:59Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:00Speaker 06

  Um, yeah. But, yeah.

• 1:06:02Speaker 07

  So I, um, well, this is just like, wow, I, I, I, I'm normally smart, I promise. I'm normally good with words.

• 1:06:10Liv Albert?

  Got some jet lag in there.

• 1:06:11Speaker 07

  Oh, truly. Um, it's sort of the way that patriarchy stays functioning in that it devalues women's work in order to devalue women as a whole, in order to justify the putting women under a need to be taken care of kind of thing. Um, and then, so I just, I read this book, and I will forget the author, but the title is called The Subversive Stitch. And it was looking at embroidery throughout um the past couple hundred centuries and um so it's about like women's work specifically and it was talking a lot about how in like the Victorian period around then um you know, women are doing this work.

• 1:06:53Speaker 07

  We know women are doing this work, but we also know that men are doing this work and men are being employed by the aristocracy. And they are being given more um like their work is being seen as more legitimate. And it's it's it's ringing that bell where it's saying, you know, when a man is cooking, he's a chef. When a woman is cooking, well, that's her job in the home, you know, it's like it's that thing where it's um. Men, when they do embroidery or stitch work, it's art. When women do it, it's a craft. You know, i- it's the just the devaluing of women's work and puts them under and that's like what we see in heavily patriarchal societies. Where, you know. It's just, yeah, it's just, that's the bell that's ringing for me where it's just like, yeah, let's just, if we call her a witch.

• 1:07:39Speaker 07

  Cause she knows what she's doing in order to help people and she is actually helping people, not just saying, hey, rub feces all over you, that'll that'll cure it or let's cut you and let you bleed and that'll probably make you feel better. It's just. Yeah, it's just patriarchy.

• 1:07:58Speaker 06

  I don't think, I don't think I realized how how incredibly restricted the lives of women in ancient Greece was.

• 1:08:05Speaker 07

  Yes.

• 1:08:06Speaker 06

  Until I started working on this. And one of the things that really brings it home, well, one, I mean, there's like a million things, but um have you guys ever talked about the gardens of Adonis?

• 1:08:17Speaker 07

  Oh, off the top of my head, not enough yet.

• 1:08:19Speaker 06

  It was this thing, it was done in the heat of summer and women in Athens um.

• 1:08:25Speaker 07

  This is something. What you're gonna talk about, but go ahead.

• 1:08:28Liv Albert?

  Please do, yes, I also think I did some research and I've forgotten it already.

• 1:08:32Speaker 06

  They they would make these dish gardens and they would plant herbs and lettuces in them. And they'd bring them up to the roof and that they would germinate and grow really, really quickly. And then they would also die very quickly because of course we all know lettuce doesn't grow well in the heat of summer. But planting the gardens of Adonis and then following them through the life cycle, which was very short, gave women this opportunity to do things that they couldn't do in real life, like.

• 1:09:02Speaker 06

  Get out of the house without being followed by a servant. So they could go to the rooftops, they could meet their friends and they could talk. And it was ostensibly so that they could mourn the loss of Adonis and celebrate his life. But it also gave them the opportunity to talk to their friends, to mourn their family, maybe their parents, talk about their kids, do all these things that you would just assume they could do anyway. But when you learn that they weren't allowed out of the house, because God forbid, they might, you know, have an illegitimate child, because isn't that what happens whenever a woman goes out of the house alone?

• 1:09:32Liv Albert?

  It taps me a couple of times.

• 1:09:33Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:09:35Liv Albert?

  That's why you need the tattoo of Sylphion on your uterus. I walked in and suddenly I'm pregnant and I'm like, oh.

• 1:09:43Speaker 06

  Yeah, so, so that is like, to me, I love that because these women found a way to have some kind of community, even on a very limited level, whether it was that or the thesmaforia, or, you know, some of these other ceremonies that were supposed to be all about fertility and having children who were in wedlock, but that also filled another space in these women's lives that was really important and, and were very closely related to plants.

• 1:10:14Speaker 07

  Yeah, it's working within the system. So, yeah.

• 1:10:18Liv Albert?

  Yeah. And you know what? Thinking about it in this context too, it's, it's occurred to me that, that plants and, and growing in, in all of these different ways, be they poison or otherwise. But I do like to think about the women.

• 1:10:32Speaker 06

  I know you do.

• 1:10:33Liv Albert?

  I mean, I just like to think about all the ways that the women were quietly subverting their situation. And poison is a pretty good one.

• 1:10:40Speaker 06

  It is.

• 1:10:41Liv Albert?

  But I, you know, one of the things that's come up for me more and more over the, the past couple of years doing this is, is how much women's work is, you know, gets lost for various reasons, whether it's intentional, like how we, we don't record the work that women did in that way, or we don't have the history books talking about them, or on like a very basic level of, you know, Michaela was talking about the embroidery and of course, in ancient Greece, we have the equivalent being weaving.

• 1:11:11Speaker 06

  Right.

• 1:11:12Liv Albert?

  And, you know, we know all of, objectively, we know that women were doing this kind of like very specialized work. Like, I think I read, I think you told me about it, Michaela, when you were reading Mythica, this, a new Emily Howser book. In the States, it's called Penelope's Bones.

• 1:11:27Speaker 07

  It's very good.

• 1:11:28Liv Albert?

  Is writing about the, a lot of, of, of lost women, of particularly tying them to Homeric epic.

• 1:11:34Speaker 06

  Wait, the book is called Myth Penelope's Bones?

• 1:11:36Liv Albert?

  Yeah, in the States, it's called Penelope's Bones.

• 1:11:39Speaker 07

  Yes, Emily Howser.

• 1:11:41Liv Albert?

  Yeah, who's delightful. She's been on my, on the show a couple of times now. And, you know, she's talked about a whole host of things. But, well, I, I think, you know, in this context, I think, Michaela, you told me how long it took for, like, or how long it would have taken to, for Calypso to weave the sail for Odysseus.

• 1:11:57Speaker 07

  Just the sail.

• 1:11:58Liv Albert?

  And it was like, five years or something.

• 1:12:00Speaker 07

  It was incredibly

• 1:12:02Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:02Speaker 07

  Long time. And as someone who is, like, I'm literally knitting right now, um, I know how long, just like, making, like, this, that took me days of hours of work.

• 1:12:14Liv Albert?

  Well, and imagine you have to prepare the thread, too. Like,

• 1:12:17Speaker 07

  Yes.

• 1:12:17Liv Albert?

  We're coming at it, like, at a very late stage for us today, where you just go buy the yarn, right? But like, these women are spinning the thread, and then they are weaving very intricate things.

• 1:12:28Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 1:12:28Liv Albert?

  And, so, you know, we, we have, they're doing this work. They're, they're growing plants in, for various things, you know, and

• 1:12:36Speaker 07

  What the conditions are, and how long it takes to grow, and sort of

• 1:12:39Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:40Speaker 07

  When things are ready.

• 1:12:41Liv Albert?

  Specialized work, absolutely. And, and it's, I mean, it's also specialized work, growing humans. And, but, everything that, that women did in those ways was, by its very nature, biodegradable. And so, you know, other than some loom weights, we have, you know, almost nothing that survives in terms of material culture from the work that these women were doing all of the time. And so, it's this, like, Additionally infuriating thing to realize that like not only were we completely cut out of the history books and the stories for the most part, or turned into like one dimensional

• 1:13:23Liv Albert?

  bodies to be used, you know, but on top of that, all of this work that we objectively know that they were doing all of the time and contributing to society in these like fundamental and like completely, you know, like invaluable ways, like we, we just don't have any of it. We know that they were making the humans and they were so, the men were so worried about the women being able to make the humans that they didn't let them outside because whoa, she'd stumble and get pregnant by some random guy. And then where would the Athenian man be not knowing who his son is? And you know, it's just such a, it's fascinating as it is, like I, it makes me want to bash my head in, you know, the,

• 1:14:02Liv Albert?

  the more you realize like the levels to which it is so, I don't know, stacked against everyone, but it's just so fascinating to now add, I'm adding plants and, and that kind of the, the gardens of Adonis, but and, and anything that they were doing in that way. Like I'm adding that to my list of like, all the things that women did that were just plain biodegradable, let alone like being excluded from everything else.

• 1:14:26Speaker 06

  Yeah, there were no sculptors, there were no metallurgists, there were, you know, we've got a little something from Sappho, but that's about it. That's all I can think of.

• 1:14:35Liv Albert?

  We have a handful of Greek of, of women poets, but like a handful over 700 years. So, you know, like.

• 1:14:43Speaker 07

  And I think it's, um, there were two things. Um, the, the other way we can sort of see evidence of the kind of work that women do or did, and we can only really see that now because we have the technology to do that is by examining the skeletons. Cause we can see like from the bones, the amount of like wear that it has based on like what they're doing. If they're gonna be, you know, standing all day weaving, that leaves a mark on the body. It's the same like we have like early hunter gatherers where we can see that we know women were the ones who were doing most of the grinding because we can see the wear and like their wrists and their knees and their stuff. And so it's like there are, our bodies, you know, like I often wonder like what is, what's gonna

• 1:15:26Speaker 07

  be like, how messed up is my wrist gonna look from all the knitting all the time? Um, but it's, yeah, the women, women's work, um. It kind of gets lost. Like Liv was saying, it's biodegradable. It's, you know, everything that traditionally we were seen as doing kind of falls apart. But I also think what's really beautiful is the way things stay within culture, because it gets passed down through the generations of mothers where, you know, even when like, you and I go to Greece today, you you hear things and people are like, oh, yeah, this is, you know, this is what we were told to do. And you're like, oh, in antiquity, they did something similar. And you just realize it's like, oh, this is mothers telling.

• 1:16:03Speaker 06

  Passing it down.

• 1:16:03Speaker 07

  Yeah, over and over throughout the generation. And I think that's like, that that highlights sort of like um, the, I guess, the role of women, but the importance of women is we are the ones um, and even like in my own culture, this is like my First Nations. So it's like very heavy women are the ones who are, we pass down culture and stories. That is our job. It's, you know, we, it's not, you know, seen as negative. We're the ones who hold it and nurture it and make sure it continues living on by not just creating the children, but then giving them the information. And so it's interesting to see those echoes.

• 1:16:42Speaker 06

  Yeah, and it seems like the Greek culture did not particularly appreciate that the way the First Nations cultures are that that you describe. Um, you know, it's unfortunate because, I mean, the Greeks didn't even think that the women contributed genetic material to their kids.

• 1:17:01Speaker 07

  I know.

• 1:17:01Speaker 06

  Just, just the incubator. I'm gonna put it in there and then you make sure it gets ripe and and push it out. So it's not, it's not a culture I would have enjoyed being in, certainly not in Athens. Maybe, maybe in some of the more rural places.

• 1:17:18Speaker 07

  I think so.

• 1:17:19Liv Albert?

  Athens is the big issue.

• 1:17:20Speaker 07

  Yeah, whenever.

• 1:17:21Speaker 06

  Well, Sparta, Sparta was terrible.

• 1:17:25Liv Albert?

  Yeah, but women could like own property and stuff there. So you got, you still like, you know.

• 1:17:31Speaker 06

  But, but, but the.

• 1:17:32Liv Albert?

  They got two husbands.

• 1:17:33Speaker 06

  But they could also be loaned out by their husbands. If their husband had a friend

• 1:17:39Speaker 07

  Right.

• 1:17:39Speaker 06

  whose wife couldn't conceive to be like, okay, you you go over there,

• 1:17:42Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 1:17:42Speaker 06

  have sex with him, give him, and then the whole wedding night ritual where they kidnapped the bride, shaved her head, dressed her in men's clothes.

• 1:17:52Speaker 06

  Husband came in, had sex with her, then went back to the barracks.

• 1:17:55Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 1:17:56Liv Albert?

  Spartans had some stuff going on.

• 1:17:58Speaker 07

  And I'm a little skeptical about some of the stuff we know about Sparta, just because so much of it is.

• 1:18:03Speaker 06

  It might not be true.

• 1:18:04Speaker 07

  Yeah, so it might have, it might be just them being like, hey, this is what we do. Let's make sure everyone thinks that so that they're scared of us and weirded out by us. So we can keep having power.

• 1:18:13Liv Albert?

  There are some modern parallels of countries that fear monger over other countries and their cultural differences.

• 1:18:20Speaker 07

  But yeah, I think that, I think, um, this is something I think a lot about where I think, like, if you were an upper class woman,

• 1:18:29Speaker 07

  I think that is where life would have been. You, I think you have some freedoms, but I think you have a lot more restrictions where.

• 1:18:35Speaker 06

  I agree.

• 1:18:35Speaker 07

  You're a lower class, if you're just a, you know, you work the land, you kind of have a family, that's it. I think women have more agency there that, you know, women have to work. We know that women worked in antiquity. They, they tried to tell us they did it, but.

• 1:18:50Liv Albert?

  Everyone was wearing clothes and the men weren't making them, so.

• 1:18:53Speaker 07

  If you're a poor family, you can't afford to have certain members of your family not working because it's not seen as, seen as society, societally acceptable. Like, that's true even in the past hundred years. If you, you know, sometimes.

• 1:19:07Speaker 06

  It was a luxury.

• 1:19:08Speaker 07

  Yes, it was a luxury to have just a person who wouldn't work. So it's like, I don't know. I think, I think lower class women also probably carried a lot of the information as well because they had to be the ones out and about doing the things, getting, getting the plants.

• 1:19:23Speaker 06

  They were growing their food. They were not buying their food. They had to know when it was the right time to harvest because there are plants out there even today that foragers know when they can harvest because they're, they're safe at some stages and toxic at other stages. And so you, you can't pick it too late or you're going to poison your entire family. You, you have to know these things and that's the kind of knowledge that was passed on.

• 1:19:45Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:45Speaker 07

  Yeah.

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• 1:21:50Liv Albert?

  Well, and yeah, to, as you also brought it back to plants, thankfully. We, I couldn't, I couldn't ramble and rant about women's rights and patriarchy for literally ever. But the use of plants has been really interesting, interested, eh, has been really interesting. I can't, I can't speak words. Anyway, I'm very interested in plants, as I've said a thousand times. But specifically, when it comes to female bodily health, I guess. You know, we've talked about sulfonyl, we've, and, and the potential of a pomegranate.

• 1:22:23Liv Albert?

  But I, one thing that I found fairly recently in a truly delightful way for my own weird little brain is I was doing some research for, again, a novel, which I just go too deep into the research. And I was trying to find like the ancient Greek word for lavender and then rosemary. And I ended up stumbling on this, this bit of, I don't remember the source because I know I found it on, on theo.com, which is great for sources, but I don't remember who their source was. And they were talking about how the plant chaste tree, which yeah, has a thousand other names, I'm sure, but is in that family of rosemary and lavender and is sacred to Hera and was used

• 1:23:07Liv Albert?

  for all of these things. And the thing that blew my mind, and I can't wait to hear you share more about this, but the thing that blew my mind into a million pieces was that last year I was seeing a naturopath, because I get the delight of being not quite 37 and going through perimenopause. And, oh, it's, it's truly a joy. I'm not dying at all. But the one thing that she suggested for me and for all the terrible symptoms of it is chaste tree. And I'm pretty sure it's working better than anything else. And, and that's how I stumbled into this. Oh my, I'm like, oh my God, I've been taking this herb that's sacred to Hera that they've been using for something in

• 1:23:48Liv Albert?

  this realm for 3,000 years. And here I'm like, I forgot to take it a bunch when I was in Greece. And my night sweats were so bad that I was like, oh my God, it's working. Like, and so it's just so fascinating to me that the way that stuff carries through. And to me, that's like, a woman figured that out, a woman was using it, a woman made it sacred to Hera, like all of these things. And so, yeah, like, what more do you have on that incredible plant?

• 1:24:12Speaker 06

  Okay, well, first of all, I planted one last year in my garden. So, because apparently you can use the ripe seeds as sort of a peppery spice. So I'm going to definitely try that. But the thing that I love about chaste tree, there's, there's so many things I love about that plant. It was both an aphrodisiac and an anaphrodisiac.

• 1:24:32Speaker 06

  It was an essential part, like, like the, uh, like the pomegranate, there you go. It was essential, an essential part of the thesma phoria. They, they used to make weave mats out of the branches of chaste tree and leaves and sit on those. And that was to prevent them from having unchaste thoughts. So, yeah, and so that was the Yes, so the men said, so that was the anaphrodisiac side. And then it was, you know, sacred tahera and supposed to help with childbirth. So that was the, um, that was the chaste side. But also, do you, do you know the story about the Spartan boys and the stealing of the cheeses?

• 1:25:16Liv Albert?

  I've been told it before, but it's been a minute. So please remind us all about the

• 1:25:21Speaker 06

  Michaela's nodding over there.

• 1:25:23Liv Albert?

  Yeah, I, it sounds very familiar, but it's been a while since I talked about Sparta.

• 1:25:26Speaker 06

  It's just, it's an insane story.

• 1:25:29Liv Albert?

  Very weird, those Spartans.

• 1:25:30Speaker 06

  Yeah, the, the Spartan, so, so the Spartan, Spartan boys, as they were getting their training, were encouraged to steal food, not just because the Spartan diet sucked, but also because, um, it was a good skill to have. Like if you were out, you know, fighting and running low on supplies. If you could steal food, that was a good thing to do. So, um, there was the altar of Artemis Orthea, which was the special Spartan Artemis. And, um, they would pile cheeses up on the altar. And the older Spartans would gather round with whips made from chaste tree. Because chaste tree, like willow, has a really flexible branch and can be used to tie things and to whip people.

• 1:26:14Speaker 06

  And the Spartan boys would run around naked. Cause you know, they only got one article of clothing a year, xenophon tells us. I don't know if that's true or not, but that's what he says. And so you would have these naked boys running around a temple, stealing cheeses, being whipped with chaste tree branches. Because the idea was, it wasn't, you weren't being punished for, for stealing. You were being punished for stealing badly. So if you were so slow that you got caught and they could whip you, well, that was bad. You clearly had no talent as a thief. And whoever got the most cheeses was like the winner and champion.

• 1:26:53Speaker 06

  So that's, that's one of my favorite chase tree stories and it's, I, I just, it's so hard to believe, but I've read it in multiple sources. I think there's some basis there.

• 1:27:03Liv Albert?

  I mean, the Spartans did some deeply weird stuff and I kind of love that we have like so many sources that say stuff like that, but at the same time, almost none of them are like, you know, quote unquote, purely Spartan. And so it's so interesting to be like, well, this is, this is the best we have. And so it's comfortable for us to say it's right.

• 1:27:27Speaker 06

  Yeah. But the Spartans, they didn't leave like a great library behind.

• 1:27:32Liv Albert?

  No, they did. Exactly. We just need to assume.

• 1:27:34Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:27:36Liv Albert?

  Yeah. Because they were more concerned with stealing cheese and whipping boys. So like, that, yeah, it's just fascinating. But I didn't know that was chase tree. That's delightful.

• 1:27:45Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:27:45Liv Albert?

  I mean, I, I also always think this, this is purely like a weird non sequitur that my brain did with it. But I also think it smells, because I just have them in like tablet form. Um, and it smells like catnip to me. And then it led me down a realm of like catnip, I think is also in the same vaguely a similar family.

• 1:28:03Speaker 06

  Um.

• 1:28:04Liv Albert?

  But I could be wrong.

• 1:28:05Speaker 06

  It's not.

• 1:28:05Liv Albert?

  Maybe I'm wrong. It's not. Okay. It smells the same then.

• 1:28:08Speaker 06

  I, I have to go out after we finish and, and smell the chase tree in my backyard because I have never smelled it before.

• 1:28:15Liv Albert?

  I mean, maybe I'm crazy. I, again, like I only have it in like a tablet. I've never actually seen the plant itself, but I'm always, it's just every time I open it, it smells like the same as when I opened my cat's catnip.

• 1:28:24Speaker 06

  The lea- the leaves of the chase tree plant look a lot like cannabis leaves. And in the, in the horticultural community, not so much anymore, but like 10 years back, you were hearing these stories of like people waking up and, you know, finding the cops in their backyard, digging up their chase tree because some neighbor had reported them for growing weed. So that's what the leaves look like, in case you're wondering.

• 1:28:46Liv Albert?

  Well, I know. I love that. That's, I mean.

• 1:28:49Speaker 06

  But the flowers are beautiful, long, sort of like purple butterfly bush, except they're a little bit paler and a little bit taller and spikier. And so late in the summer, you get these really, really beautiful flowers.

• 1:29:00Liv Albert?

  That's so lovely.

• 1:29:02Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:29:02Liv Albert?

  That reminds me of, okay, so the, another flower that I've become obsessed with in Greece. And what, what's funny is I didn't know the like historical connection. This happens to me a lot where I'll like spot something over there and decide I'm obsessed with it and, and become, you know, enamored and then give it a silly name. Or in this case, it, it comes with a silly name. So I had like a plant identifier app on my phone for a while when I was over there and it was so much fun. And one of the, the, these beautiful flowers that are everywhere in the agora, specifically in Athens, are what is in English, um, labeled as bear's breeches.

• 1:29:41Speaker 06

  Oh, my God. Yes.

• 1:29:44Liv Albert?

  Well, I didn't, I didn't know the connection, but I'm like looking at these adorable flowers and I'm like, they're called bear's breeches. That's such a joyful name. The flowers are so pretty. And so I just became obsessed with like, like I was, and with the, the trumpet creepers where I'm like, oh, look at these beautiful bear's breeches. Oh, check out those, those bear's breeches. And then I figure out that it's not just bear's breeches, but it's a canthus, which is literally the leaves that, that like inspired a Corinthian column capital. And meanwhile, I'm like, bear's breeches?

• 1:30:16Speaker 06

  Yes. Yeah. Yeah. That's, that's, that's, that's a good story. Yeah. I like that one.

• 1:30:21Liv Albert?

  They're, I mean, they're so beautiful, but like, I, I feel like the leaves in the Corinthian capitals don't do the flowers justice.

• 1:30:30Speaker 06

  Well, they don't, it's really just the leaves that they, they use for the, for the columns. Um, and that is the story. And I don't know why they left the flowers out, but.

• 1:30:40Liv Albert?

  Yeah. And I don't know why they're called bears breeches. Do you know?

• 1:30:44Speaker 06

  No, I don't. It doesn't make any sense. There's, I mean, I A have never seen bears wearing breeches.

• 1:30:50Liv Albert?

  Neither.

• 1:30:51Speaker 06

  And I think if I did, it would not look anything like that plant.

• 1:30:54Liv Albert?

  No, and they're, I mean, they're quite a flower. They're so intricate and like, there's so many like layers in there.

• 1:31:02Speaker 06

  Different layers, different colors and they're tall and yeah.

• 1:31:05Liv Albert?

  And they're everywhere, which, but which also is because what I, what I didn't know until I realized the same thing about the acanthus, it's also the national flower of Greece. So.

• 1:31:14Speaker 06

  Oh, I didn't know that.

• 1:31:16Liv Albert?

  Yeah, yeah. So unsurprising that it's everywhere.

• 1:31:20Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:31:20Liv Albert?

  And has a nicer name in Greek than bears breeches.

• 1:31:24Speaker 06

  What is it called in Greek? Do you know?

• 1:31:26Liv Albert?

  Just acanthus.

• 1:31:27Speaker 06

  Oh, just acanthus. Okay. Yeah.

• 1:31:28Liv Albert?

  Yeah. Yeah. But that's the easy thing with the Greek is if you go back to the scientific, half the time it's just.

• 1:31:35Speaker 06

  The same name.

• 1:31:35Liv Albert?

  That the same in Greek. Yeah. But so is there, you know, we'll, we'll wrap up soon, but I'm, I'm so, I would love to know if you have like a favorite story that you learned doing this, or like if you have a one, I mean, it's so hard in these moments, but like any silly realization you had similar to my bears breeches.

• 1:31:56Speaker 06

  I'm, I'm thinking, you know, we started out with Molly and that's, that's really my favorite story because I love how the more you learn about the plant, the more you realize it's, it's really possible. Um, I'm just.

• 1:32:11Liv Albert?

  No pressure either, or if you're, there's one you want to talk about.

• 1:32:13Speaker 06

  No pressure, none at all.

• 1:32:17Speaker 06

  No.

• 1:32:17Liv Albert?

  I could also wrap it up like I did, so don't worry.

• 1:32:19Speaker 06

  We've, we've covered a lot of my favorite things already. We really have. I mean, I could talk about these plants forever. I could, you know, talk about how, how cannabis, you know, how Herodotus talked about how cannabis was, the Scythians used cannabis and, and, and how in 1999 in the Ukraine, they actually excavated the exact equipment that he described. As to how how they used it because they didn't smoke it in a pipe. They built this tent and they put hot coals in it. Well, you I'm sure you've read that part of history.

• 1:32:51Liv Albert?

  No, here's the thing, the mythology I've got down, but you're you're telling me brand new information. I've heard like vaguely that the Scythians smoked weed. But this is this is delightful.

• 1:33:02Speaker 06

  Yeah, so they they would make these tents and they would put hot coals in the center of the tent and then they would throw the weed onto the hot coals. And Herodotus says that they would get in the tent and they would howl with delight. And I can just picture these Scythians howling as they sat around getting high. And a lot of classicists who probably did not want to believe that their beloved Greeks got high were like, oh, no, this is completely fabricated. And then in 1999, in the Ukraine, on a dig, they found exactly the equipment that Herodotus described, which I loved because, you know, cannabis was used as

• 1:33:42Speaker 06

  as fiber, as medicine, and as an intoxicant in ancient Greek and in ancient Greece. And it just seems silly not to admit that. We know they drank wine. What's what's the difference?

• 1:33:55Liv Albert?

  I mean, yeah, the the difference is literally nothing, except for like weird Western purities. But because I it's there's so many things like that, though, where, you know, people really, especially like old white men scholars, let's be honest, like.

• 1:34:12Speaker 06

  Well, no, that's exactly it.

• 1:34:13Liv Albert?

  Yeah, like, it's changing now. It's there's definitely like things opening up. But yeah, I mean, from 50 years ago onward, you know, we have these like intelligent old white men who just want the Greeks to be only be impressive. And they just did such smart things and they created philosophy and all of this, you know, and they were so against. Learning about the silliness and the, the, the more absurd nature, or just also the stuff that yeah, like the Western Christian ideal doesn't like. And I love that now we are learning more about that. Like the fact that the Scythians, which to the listeners is the most likely source also for the myth of the Amazons, the fact that they were getting high, hotboxing a tent,

• 1:34:56Liv Albert?

  like that's delightful, you know, or like, you know, the, I mean, even just how drunk they'd get on their wine. Like we think of wine now as a fancier drink, but it's all they drank. They had multiple drinking games and we have so many stories about people getting drunk or how much wine is too much wine. And if you want to avoid someone puking, like, don't serve this much, you know? And I think it's so nice. And it made me think of it when we were talking earlier about, you know, all of this, all of the things that we always associate like with, oh, well, it was women. So this festival must have been about fertility, you know? And, and so much of that too, is like the old white men who've been interpreting this for so long. And

• 1:35:37Liv Albert?

  it's like, well, ladies are there. It's about fertility. Oh, she's a, she's a goddess. Well, she's a fertility goddess. And it's like, that's ridiculous. Like,

• 1:35:47Speaker 06

  You just reminded me and something that we haven't talked about at all. And I don't know if we have time, but the main ads, the main ads.

• 1:35:53Liv Albert?

  Oh, my God, if you have time, we have time. I actually, thank you. I meant to write it down earlier and then I, because I wanted to ask with the thyrus. So, please, I mean,

• 1:36:01Speaker 06

  Okay, so the, the main ads and the thyrus. Well, the thyrus is, you know, three, three, three plants in one. It's the fennel stalk twined with ivy and a pine cone on the top.

• 1:36:13Liv Albert?

  And I don't, I've never gotten a full, such a clear definition. That's so, yes, that's amazing.

• 1:36:19Speaker 06

  So the, the, what I, what I know about why the thyrus was made from fennel is because after Dionysus gave the gift of wine initially to humans who had never drunk wine before and didn't know what it would do. They would sometimes get so drunk and then they would start hitting each other with their staffs and they could do some real damage. And Dionysus didn't want to deny humans the beauty of wine, but he didn't want them to hurt each other. So he made them have their, make their staffs out of fennel. But the Maenads would also carry these and they could use them as weapons and to strike the ground and make wine come forth. And it's pretty much the only, I mean, you

• 1:37:02Speaker 06

  read about women serving wine, mixing wine in a bowls. You read about the flute girls, but you don't read about women getting drunk unless they're Maenads.

• 1:37:11Liv Albert?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:37:12Speaker 06

  And I would be like, if I were a little Greek girl and somebody said, what do you want to be when you grow up? I'd be like, I want to be a Maenad so I can follow Dionysus, hang out with my friends, dance and drink whatever I want.

• 1:37:25Liv Albert?

  Honestly, just hang out in the woods, getting drunk with your girlfriends and like the least predatory god. It sounds like a dream.

• 1:37:33Speaker 06

  Yeah. So, you know, but, but clearly, um, Greek men were terrified of the Maenads and with good reason. And I think it's a great, you know, like if they had let their wives attend these feasts and enjoy wine, maybe the Maenads wouldn't have been so pissed off all the time. Who knows?

• 1:37:55Liv Albert?

  Well, and then chicken or the egg, right? Because would they need to tell stories of women being so scary as to rip people apart because they were drunk on Dionysian wine if women were allowed to go outside? Like, no, because, you know, the more, this, this happens through like every myth now is like, I, I feel like I can like see beyond this little veil of like what the men were saying, which is that almost every story featuring a woman in that kind of way is like, meant to be kind of a cautionary tale or meant to elicit like some kind of feeling that, that like keeps a woman in check or keeps a man above, you know, like, because, yeah, like, the Maenads are scary because of that, because free women are scary.

• 1:38:40Speaker 06

  They can't be trusted. They can't be trusted. And this is what will happen if you trust them. You'll get ripped apart.

• 1:38:46Liv Albert?

  Yeah. Well, I mean, you're, you're wearing a Medusa t-shirt. I think about this for the Gorgons all the time. To me, the more I read about Medusa and the Gorgons broadly, they simply represent women that men couldn't have sex with, that like, women that could defend themselves against an aggressor.

• 1:39:04Speaker 06

  Mm hmm.

• 1:39:04Liv Albert?

  And that's why they became monstrous and terrifying and like, that's why they're, the, the idea of Medusa now is that this like seductress, when in the myths, no matter the source you read, there is no. Seducing of anything like

• 1:39:17Speaker 06

  No, she was assaulted. She was raped by Poseidon. And that's another thing. And this is where the female gods let us down.

• 1:39:25Liv Albert?

  Well, depends. You're gonna go with Ovid's version, though, if Athena's at play. Because I love not blaming Athena for shit in that, but I also would love to hear your side.

• 1:39:34Speaker 06

  But then you also have to, I was about to say, you know, it's the female goddesses who often punish the women who were the victims. But but was it really? Or was it the men who wrote these stories about the female goddesses? So, you know, it's not, yeah.

• 1:39:50Liv Albert?

  Yeah, no. And what I love about Medusa and why, sorry to, like, I also am bad at talking about Medusa because I just like, go so hard. But the thing I love is that Athena really isn't involved outside of Ovid. And like in the other sources where the, you know, oldest and sort of most quote unquote, original, there's no, nothing like original, but you know, is Hesiod, who people love to read it as like, you know, that he, they say lay with in the English translations all the time. Meanwhile, the Greek verb, it also means to pluck. Like, and they're like, oh, it's consensual. I'm sorry, the verb to pluck. Like, when I look it up on on Perseus Project, because I did literally this morning, because this is what I do with my life.

• 1:40:34Liv Albert?

  It it like the first definition of the word is to pluck a superfluous hair.

• 1:40:40Speaker 06

  Oh.

• 1:40:41Liv Albert?

  Yeah. And then we have people reading that as like, like, the number of times people will tell me like, that reading assault into the Hesiod is wrong. And I'm like, that's crazy. The verb was to pluck, like, nah, like, I think that the, you know, that the assault was it, but that they're in the oldest kind of notion of it, that at least in that case, there wasn't a goddess punishing her. You know, I mean, there are so many others and Athena, I mean, I could go on about Athena. As a character written by men, like she, she reads like a woman written by men. She is like this agent of the patriarchy in that really unique way. But it's just so interesting to me, the the way the Gorgons exist as like, yeah, just like creatures. Creatures that could defend themselves.

• 1:41:24Speaker 06

  This is one of the things that I liked best about your book. Was that you, but you said assault every single time. Okay. And that's what it was. And and and and, you know, the way rape was used in the Victorians to mean, not necessarily the sexual act of raping, but just, you know, The the whisking away of or something, something that was supposed to be slightly less horrific. It makes these myths. It's first of all, it it it diverts from the truth. It it makes them nice so that children can listen to them.

• 1:42:05Speaker 06

  But I I really appreciated the fact that you called it assault because that's what it was, goddammit.

• 1:42:12Liv Albert?

  Thank you. Thank you. I mean, that's that's one of those things. I mean, yeah, that that's been my way for years, but I'm glad it comes across in the book, too.

• 1:42:22Speaker 06

  It does.

• 1:42:23Liv Albert?

  Yeah, where I know there's also there's mistakes in that book. But I did say that every time, so that's great. But it's, you know, I think it is really important. And, you know, even just the way you said that about the Victorian usage, because the number of times I have had people complain to me and say, like, it wasn't rape because the word rape just meant abduct. And I and I just want to scream in their faces, like, why do you think that was? It's because the crime was stealing someone's property, but the implication was always that there was assault.

• 1:42:53Speaker 07

  Yeah, yeah, the the because the Latin word, like, rapio, it was to take, to seize, that sort of thing. But the implication is, yes, but but but it's it was also always used, like, when I I translated Libby's The Rape of the Sabines. And, you know, the thing is, yes, the word just means, like, to take or seize, just that kind of thing. But there is an implication of harm being done with the word. It is a violent word. So while it's like, yeah, OK, our modern word comes from it, but in antiquity, that's not what it meant. They weren't saying, they wouldn't, they didn't really have a way to say that. This was their way to say it.

• 1:43:37Speaker 06

  Well, because if something's property and you just take it, you seize it, well, then you own it and you can do whatever that you want with it. So why would that be a crime? It's mine. Yeah, I want to have sex with. It's mine, I can do that.

• 1:43:51Speaker 07

  And then it's like, after all these events, what happens? The woman is pregnant, the woman has a child after it's like, what the hell do you think happened?

• 1:43:59Liv Albert?

  Exactly, that's what I was gonna add to.

• 1:44:01Speaker 07

  They they seize them and then suddenly the child, the woman has a baby? What, how do you think she got there?

• 1:44:08Liv Albert?

  Well, she just immediately decided she was okay with it like, yeah, no, it's, I think it's really important. And there are, there's still a lot of pushback. Um, on, on. I mean, it depends who the, the realms that you're in, you know? And I I've filtered out a lot of it by just being a, like raging feminist, you know? And but like, yeah, there's still some times or or certain stories people get really touchy about. Medusa's always been one of them. People are weird about that. Um, and and and Persephone, you know, there's.

• 1:44:41Speaker 06

  Persephone, God, we didn't, we barely touched on that. That's a whole, I mean, the whole, the whole Persephone Demeter story. I I just love that story so much, but it's also, you know. But I'm sure we don't have time to get into that.

• 1:44:54Liv Albert?

  Well, I mean, we have a bit more if you want to get in, depending on if you have time, but I'm, yeah.

• 1:45:00Speaker 06

  I mean, it just, it just kills me that, you know, Zeus and Hades get together and they're like, oh, yeah, sure. You go ahead, you take her. Uh, and then, and and then.

• 1:45:11Speaker 06

  Is she, and then does, is it? Is it, yes, and then Zeus, one of the stories about Dionysus's birth is that Zeus had sex with Persephone. And the description. In, I think it's in Nonus is is really like how.

• 1:45:29Liv Albert?

  Well, no, yeah, he's like a whole other wacky guy.

• 1:45:32Speaker 06

  Yeah, but but, you know, I love the story of Persephone and Demeter, not for the abduction part, but there's so many plants. I mean, she was, she was. Out there picking flowers with her nymphs and saw this daffodil with a hundred flowers, which Zeus had created specifically to entrap her and seduce her. So that works. And then there's the pomegranate. And then there's all the stuff about the mysteries at Elepsis, like what was the intoxicant in the Kikion? There's just so many plants, which makes sense because Demeter was, you know, goddess of the harvest. So I think I have a special fondness for, for all the stories related to the two of them because of all the plants that were there.

• 1:46:13Liv Albert?

  Yeah, I didn't even, I didn't even, I, I've had to become a little, um, I hon, I can't, I can't talk too much about Persephone on the show because people get really weird about it because people just really have romanticized that story and

• 1:46:28Speaker 06

  Wow.

• 1:46:29Liv Albert?

  Yeah, it's just an odd thing. So I'm, I'm a little specific, like, you know, it's fine, I'm fine with everything. And I stand by like the, the reading, especially of the Homerichn to Demeter is very clearly assault.

• 1:46:39Speaker 06

  Oh, I love that. What's your favorite translation of that?

• 1:46:42Liv Albert?

  Uh, the Diane Rayer, I think, uh, is one, yeah, that I, it's one I've, I haven't read that in a while. Um, but the, I mean, I'll always go and try to find a woman translating. That's my role. Yeah.

• 1:46:58Speaker 06

  Yeah. Yeah. I, I don't know. Go ahead.

• 1:47:01Liv Albert?

  Have you read the Stephanie McCarter Ovid's Metamorphoses? Because if not, I'd also highly recommend that.

• 1:47:07Speaker 06

  Um, I will check. I don't remember the translator. I would have to like go into my citations and see which ones.

• 1:47:13Liv Albert?

  It only came out a couple of years ago, maybe three now.

• 1:47:17Speaker 06

  I think, I think my, my translation might be Charles somebody. I'm not sure.

• 1:47:22Liv Albert?

  Yeah, fair. No, there's, I mean, hers is fairly recent.

• 1:47:24Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:47:25Liv Albert?

  Um, but she, we, she was on my show to talk about it, um, when it came out and, and she was really, um, clear in her, in her, you know, explanation of, of the translation, you know, that she went into it. You know, she talked about her bias as a, as a woman, but also how She went into it explicitly trying to pick apart the biases of the men who had done it before and and look at kind of how they'd translated certain things.

• 1:47:52Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:47:53Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:47:53Speaker 06

  I want to read that now.

• 1:47:54Liv Albert?

  Very explicit in a way that a lot of other Greek myths aren't. So it's particularly powerful.

• 1:48:00Speaker 06

  You know, before I started writing Mythic Plants, I had read no Ovid at all. He's full of plants. I know he is. He's full of plants and and and the stories are great. I really loved him. So I would I would like to look at that translation.

• 1:48:14Liv Albert?

  Yeah. Well, and Ovid, so he's so interesting because, you know, he's this Roman writing about Greek myths, but in a really Roman story that's serving Roman propaganda. Like, there's so many things going on. It's particularly interesting as the sort of like thing in itself. But I mean, yeah, the there's so many plants in Ovid. That's I was also trying to think of those when I was trying to come up with. I mean, not that I we had had any trouble having a conversation, so I didn't need to come up with all these ideas. But it's, you know, I think I'm just so interested in the way that that women use these plants. So I'm glad that that was such a focus for you and and just generally. I mean, I, yeah, more and more with every passing day in the year 2025, you know, I am more interested in

• 1:48:57Liv Albert?

  in the women of the past and and like what, you know, what we can learn from them to tear down the patriarchy.

• 1:49:04Speaker 06

  Yes, which seems like we'll be doing. They were doing it, trying it 2,000 years ago, and we'll probably be trying to do it 2,000 years from now. Although I really hope it's not.

• 1:49:13Liv Albert?

  I mean, I want that's I think it's optimistic to think humans will be here in 2,000.

• 1:49:19Speaker 06

  Well, you you may be right, the way we're headed. Yeah.

• 1:49:22Liv Albert?

  Oh, God, if we can take down capitalism before that, maybe we'll be okay. Uh, well, okay, we're not going to end it on that. I'm going to find something happy. Oh, I do, because you said the magic word earlier. Um, well, there were two magic words, but they're very related. The kikion, do you have theories about what was in that?

• 1:49:40Speaker 06

  Oh, yes. Oh, yes, I do.

• 1:49:42Liv Albert?

  I know they say it's barley, honey, wine, something, but like, there's got to be something wacky in there.

• 1:49:47Speaker 06

  Well, and that's what people have said for years. And some people said, oh, it was cannabis. Some people said, oh, it was opium poppy. But the fact is that the most common poppy in Greece was the corn poppy, Papaveros, which has no psychoactive properties at all. And the other thing is that, I mean, I know we don't know a lot about the mysteries because, you know, pain of death and everything. But but cannabis and and the opium poppy were both well-known drugs. I think barley was the essential ingredient.

• 1:50:16Liv Albert?

  Right.

• 1:50:17Speaker 06

  I think it was the ergot fungus on that grew on that grows on grew on grains all over, especially on barley. And this is the same fungus that historians believe may have been responsible for the hallucinations that prompted the Salem witch trial and that killed thousands, tens of thousands of people in Europe in the Middle Ages dur- and during the Ice Age because it especially thrives in in wet weather. So ergot is something that grew on barley and that produced hallucinations. But the other thing is, if you if you look at the Eleusinian mysteries, and I you've got to think of them as like an ancient rave, right?

• 1:51:02Speaker 06

  So they were fasting, they were dancing, they were staying up all night.

• 1:51:07Liv Albert?

  Telling dirty jokes is something I learned.

• 1:51:10Speaker 06

  Yes, yes.

• 1:51:11Liv Albert?

  Is part of it, and I think that's delightful.

• 1:51:14Speaker 06

  Yeah. So you but you've got to figure after three days of that, you might be ready to think that you were seeing something that wasn't there. And if or or even if you were in that state and then you drank the kiki on that had this hallucinogenic fungus in it, that would totally do the trick. So my vote is for the ergot fungus. That's what I think it was on barley.

• 1:51:35Liv Albert?

  So it was not deadly enough that that they would have died from it, but if they're just doing it like in this way, just because you said it'll kill people, I'm just curious.

• 1:51:44Speaker 06

  Yeah, it's not it's not it's not something that's used it's not something that was used medicinally at the time.

• 1:51:52Liv Albert?

  Right.

• 1:51:52Speaker 06

  It wasn't like something that was used as an aphrodisiac or as an abortifacient, but but it is used today. And this is this is, oh, God, this is what I love. Okay, so ergot. Is a natural predecessor to the synthesis of LSD.

• 1:52:10Liv Albert?

  Oh, wow.

• 1:52:11Speaker 06

  And if you've read any of Michael Pollan's recent writing, how LSD therapy is being used in terminal patients to make them not be afraid of death.

• 1:52:20Liv Albert?

  Wow.

• 1:52:20Speaker 06

  And the Kikion was supposed to make the ancient Greeks, "See, I can see by your face, you know exactly where I'm going."

• 1:52:27Liv Albert?

  Oh, I did, yeah.

• 1:52:28Speaker 06

  But death is just part of the cycle and part of life. How cool is it that ergot was, could have been the thing that, that helped them do that then? And that today we synthesize that into LSD and we're using it in the same way?

• 1:52:41Liv Albert?

  I, I have to write that down.

• 1:52:44Speaker 06

  I just think it's really interesting.

• 1:52:46Liv Albert?

  Yes. No, and it, you know, this is why I love, this is why I love this work so much and just being able to like, I mean, honestly, I say this in almost all of my conversations because this is why I love having other people come and talk about their specialties too. Because I want to know all of the weird nerdy things like that, like, and it's such a joy that I just get to have other people share all of these vast types. Because there is so much in the ancient world and it is truly so endless. Like, we could keep studying this forever and still be learning more and to have these, these, it, Michaela, you, you're going to hear about it when we edit, but like, oh my God. I just, yeah, I'm so obsessed with that, this idea.

• 1:53:32Liv Albert?

  I mean, just the fact, it's also timeless, right? Like, I think it's so easy when you're on the outside of Greek mythology and ancient Greece, but specifically the mythology, to conceptualize it as, you know, this like fantasy world. This, like this thing, this time and existence that is like completely separate from our own. But it, you know, as soon as you're in with any detail, let alone like to this degree, you know, all you realize is how much humanity stays the same in both infuriating and really beautiful and fascinating ways.

• 1:54:12Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:54:13Speaker 10

  And I think that's also a very like Western thought because I think a lot of the time, Western people don't go up with myth, I'm putting that in quotation marks because they absolutely do, they just don't realize it. But like myth is a reflection of a culture trying to understand their place in the world. So you're going to see so much of real life in myth and explanations for real life. Like, you know, I grew up in a myth culture, so we have, you know, we have stories to explain why Raven is black. We have stories to explain, you know, why do we have these cultural objects like dream catchers, you know, the, these

• 1:54:53Speaker 10

  are stories to explain the world we live in. And it's not removed from the world. It is an explanation for the world that they lived in. And that is very true for the ancient Greeks as well. These stories exist to explain why.

• 1:55:13Speaker 06

  Yeah. And the thing is, we, we, we lose those things as we think, as we think we're getting smarter and we think we don't need the stories anymore. But then, like with the ergot and the LSD, it was forgotten, but now we're getting back to it. And it was always there, we just weren't paying attention.

• 1:55:33Liv Albert?

  Yeah, yeah. No, it's, well, and it, you know, reminds me of the, the chase tree. Just, I had that prescribed to me by a naturopath months and months before I learned, you know, its significance back then. And it just, it felt like such an immediate thing for me to be like, okay, like I'm, you know, I'm, I'm taking this thing for me. It's because I hate everything about this experience. But also like, it's this kind of connection to that ancient world and this idea that like some things, particularly the type of stuff that is so often ascribed to women, this like folk medicine type of stuff, like, you know, that it is timeless. And, you know, science is great and we definitely need to

• 1:56:15Liv Albert?

  listen to science, but also there are some things like this that have existed for so long because they are real and work, you know, in this way that this knowledge gets passed down and it's beautiful.

• 1:56:28Speaker 10

  Well, and I think science isn't divorced from it. It's just science explains it. But I think people.

• 1:56:34Speaker 07

  Don't see that they don't understand that, you know, for example, the chase tree and the way it can help with things like perimenopause symptoms and stuff. That is explained via science, but we knew that beforehand because we could see the effects. We know the why now, the very specific whys, but it's, you know, still the same thing.

• 1:56:53Liv Albert?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:56:55Speaker 06

  Yeah, they work together. They can.

• 1:56:56Liv Albert?

  Yeah. Yeah, no, it's just beautiful. And I mean, well, before we hit the two hour mark, this, this has been so much fun, honestly, like I, yeah, I didn't totally know what to expect because we do, we, we know the myths so well. So I was like, well, I'm excited about plants, you know, but this would really, this has been so much fun. You were a joy to talk to. Thank you so much for coming on the show.

• 1:57:24Speaker 06

  Thank you. I feel the same way. I had no idea that you were obsessed with plants. And I was like, oh, is she even going to be interested in plants? Cause I listened to some of your back stuff and, you know, that wasn't very planty. So, um, this was great. And, and I'm really glad to have met you both.

• 1:57:39Liv Albert?

  Oh, no, thank you. Yeah.

• 1:57:41Speaker 07

  Now I know it locks a tree.

• 1:57:43Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:57:44Speaker 07

  I looked it up and I know which tree it is.

• 1:57:49Liv Albert?

  Well, and I will say, if you're interested in listening to anything more, I forget when it was, it would have been like three or so years ago now, but I did do an episode on, trying to think of what would be in the title.

• 1:57:59Speaker 07

  Was it the sacred? Yeah, I can look at, I can find it and, and send you a link.

• 1:58:05Liv Albert?

  Lovely Australian woman on to talk about this. And it was the closest I got to plants, but it, you, you'll be able to tell then that I, I, the, the plant love has gone back. I just don't get as much opportunity to talk about it, but great timing, two of us coming right back from Greece because I really do fill up my phone with photos of like very, I, at one point I like crossed the street and made Michaela and another friend just like sit waiting for me to take photos of this flower. Because I have to.

• 1:58:35Speaker 06

  I'm not going to fault you for that. That's, that's my life, you know? So, so I'm the go, you, you go, you go live.

• 1:58:42Liv Albert?

  It's so fun. Yeah. Well, I, do you, um, I mean, your book is called Mythic Plants. Do you have anything else you want to share with the listeners about following more, reading more, if you have a website or anything you want to share?

• 1:58:52Speaker 06

  I do. I have a website. It's, believe it or not, mythicplants.com. So if you're, if you, if you're reading Mythic Plants, which I hope everybody will.

• 1:59:03Speaker 06

  The citations are all on the website, you know, publishers never have enough pages or enough money to publish everything you want. But to me, those citations are really important because I've read too many books where people say something and I'm like, really?

• 1:59:16Liv Albert?

  Yeah, then you have to backtrack, flipping through every single thing, trying to find proof. Yeah, no, I'm with you completely.

• 1:59:22Speaker 06

  So if, if, if anybody who does read Mythic Plants wants to see the citations, they're all on the website. So that's there. Plus, you know, there's a picture of me at the age of 14 in front of the Acropolis, which is, you know, kind of fun.

• 1:59:34Liv Albert?

  Oh, I recently found one of me at 16. Annoyingly, I'm not in front of it because I'm 16 and feeling emo. But I, it is a photo of me like from the, the Acropolis is clearly facing me, but from that, and I realized it was 20 years ago last year. So it was like a fun, it's nice to have those. And another person who's been to the Acropolis before, when the old museum was around.

• 1:59:58Speaker 06

  Well, and also, I was there so long ago. And in this photo, I am also looking very emo and very, very sullen. Like, why are you taking my picture? But this was when you could still go up on the Acropolis and actually walk. And my mom, in the days before the internet.

• 2:00:16Liv Albert?

  The Parthenon?

• 2:00:16Speaker 06

  Why? Oh, yeah.

• 2:00:17Liv Albert?

  Oh, my God.

• 2:00:18Speaker 06

  My mother was the best trip planner, pre-internet. You could, at the full moon, two nights before and two nights after, you could go up to the Acropolis at night with no lights and walk on the Parthenon. I stood inside the Parthenon, lighted only by moonlight, and hid behind the columns because I was so mad at my parents, for whatever reason, I don't know. But it was, you know, it was magical. And to me, that's a really nice memory. So.

• 2:00:45Liv Albert?

  That's the greatest thing I've ever heard. I'm, I'm glad you cherish that memory. You should. I had a friend who did some program with the British School of Athens last year, and she got to walk through, like, on like, an officially sanctioned, you know, like, academic thing. And I was so jealous. But to hear yours, oh, my God.

• 2:01:08Speaker 06

  Like, that's because I'm really old. And that was, that was 51 years ago.

• 2:01:13Liv Albert?

  Well, you know, I mean, respect, you got a great memory for it.

• 2:01:17Speaker 06

  Well, fortunately, I've got the photo to jog my memory. So there's that.

• 2:01:21Liv Albert?

  Well, I, when we were on the group trip, I told the story of how it had been 20 years since I'd been visiting Greece when I was 16. Um, and one of the girls on the trip looks at me and very, very aware of what she was doing said, that's the year I was born.

• 2:01:34Speaker 06

  Oh, God.

• 2:01:36Liv Albert?

  I was like, thank you. Yeah, that's what I wanted to.

• 2:01:39Speaker 06

  This year, the year that I had my photo taken at the Acropolis was probably well before you were born because it was 1974. So.

• 2:01:47Liv Albert?

  Yeah. See, there we go. I mean, yep, I'm 88. It was a handful of years later.

• 2:01:52Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 2:01:53Liv Albert?

  No, that's, I, I love that. That's, it's so cool to see. I mean, honestly, just having known, seen the Acropolis over the years, like the changes and things are so interesting. So to have that extra depth, like.

• 2:02:04Speaker 06

  I'm dying to go back.

• 2:02:06Liv Albert?

  Yeah, you've got to.

• 2:02:07Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 2:02:07Liv Albert?

  Yeah. Well, and, um, I mean, yeah, you, you gotta go back for the plants alone because. My God, that country and their plants.

• 2:02:14Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 2:02:15Liv Albert?

  Like, it's just incredibly cool. Um, why did I think I had something else from that thought? No, I've lost it. But I, I do hope you get to, I hope you get to go back soon because.

• 2:02:25Speaker 06

  I, I think I will. I think I will. Whether it's with this tour or some other.

• 2:02:29Liv Albert?

  Right, yeah.

• 2:02:30Speaker 06

  I just, I've been so submerged in it, working on this book and thinking about it all the time. I've really been feeling the, the need to return.

• 2:02:38Liv Albert?

  Yeah. Climate change has made it really, really hot. Go before June. June is no longer even June anymore.

• 2:02:45Speaker 06

  No, I, I would, I would aim for April, May, that, or maybe, maybe October. I've been in October also.

• 2:02:52Liv Albert?

  Also great.

• 2:02:53Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 2:02:53Liv Albert?

  Yeah, we had hit 44 degrees when we were there.

• 2:02:56Speaker 06

  What is that in Fahrenheit?

• 2:02:58Liv Albert?

  Like a 110, I think. It was definitely 110 or over.

• 2:03:02Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 2:03:03Liv Albert?

  Yeah. Cause I converted it for the Americans and I'm remembering it very quickly. Yeah, it was, it was painful, um, but worth it. But, um, yeah, I, I could keep going on forever, but this was really so much fun. Thank you so much.

• 2:03:15Speaker 06

  Thank you for having me.

• 2:03:17Liv Albert?

  Such a joy.

• 2:03:34Speaker 05

  Oh nerds, thank you all so much for listening. Once again, this is a very quick outro because I had to record it first thing in the morning because I slacked off and didn't get this episode totally finished on time. Because our excuse is Michaela's actually here and thus we've been distracted, but here we are. This was so much fun. Ellen was such a joy. We had an incredible time recording this episode, so I hope you enjoyed it. And check out Mythic Plants by Ellen Zaccos if you are intrigued by the... I mean, it's just so much. There's just so much about plants. Obviously, you're intrigued. Let's talk about Miss Baby, as written and produced by me, Liv Albert. Michaela Penguish is the Hermes to my Olympians, my incredible producer. Select music by Luke Chaos.

• 2:04:19Speaker 05

  The podcast is part of the Memory Collective Podcast Network. More on that really soon, really soon. Oh, I have a new website. It's gonna launch September 1st, but you know, official stuff like that coming again more later when my brain functions.

• 2:04:35Speaker 05

  I am Liv and I love this shit.

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