Let's F--k With the Patriarchy, LTAMB x the Missing Witches Podcast

Liv teams up with the Missing Witches podcast to talk ancient Greek witches and women... Because when a woman wields freedom, she must be a witch! Check out more from the Missing Witches Podcast https://www.missingwitches.com/podcast/. 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.

• 0:42Speaker 01

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• 1:39Liv Albert?

  Hello, this is Let's Talk About Myths, baby! And I am your host, Liv, here with something a little fun and different. So this is a crossover episode. It is one I recorded with the podcast Missing Witches. Because if someone emails me asking if I want to talk about witches from ancient Greece, the answer is usually yes. And when I learned that I share a university and a somewhat hometown kind of with the hosts of Missing Witches, well, I was even more thrilled. That's right, we are all from Montreal. Okay, fine, did I leave Montreal when I was six years old and not

• 2:21Liv Albert?

  return until I was like 22 only for university? Sure, but I was born there. And we all went to Concordia. And isn't that adorable? Okay, this is literally not about that, but it was fun. So I sat down with one of the hosts of Missing Witches and we just, we talked about witches. It was absolutely so much fun. The premise was for their podcast, so it's a little bit like me getting interviewed, which frankly, I love. If you can't, if you can believe it, like I can talk about Greek mythology and women, like, pretty easily, pretty easily. So it was a really fun time, just a really fascinating chat about women and witchcraft in the ancient world, but also today too, and sort of all of, I mean, everything in between, I guess. We had an amazing

• 3:06Liv Albert?

  time and you can find information about Missing Witches and all of their wonderful goodies in the episode's description. You should check them out.

• 3:17Speaker 02

  Let's fuck with the patriarchy. We're gonna share this conversation on both our podcast streams. We're in the bend in the Venn diagram right now. But we do a thing on our podcast, this quote by Alan Watts is really important to us. You're under no obligation to be the person you were five minutes ago. And so we often reintroduce ourselves, allowing ourselves to kind of be reinvented with the times and the circumstances. I mean, today I'm live and I'm overwhelmed. That's unfortunately the only person I've been for the last few weeks, that type of

• 3:50Liv Albert?

  Good, will be good in the long run, but right now, does my brain have an off switch? Kind of overwhelmed, but yeah.

• 3:58Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:59Liv Albert?

  What about you? I don't know, that's a fun way of doing things and my brain does not immediately know how to reply.

• 4:05Speaker 02

  No, that's great. I mean, your audience doesn't need you to restate that you're the creator and host. Let's talk about Miss Spacey. Or the books we've written, or that you're the founder of the Memory Collective. I really appreciate the honesty of the overwhelm. I feel that too. I'm Marisa Dickens from the Missing Witches Podcast. What are the words for what I am? I told Liv right before we got on the call, I am like a year and a bit into cancer treatment. I am in remission. I'm starting a new clinical trial because I have this aggressive cancer, but I'm healthy and fine and like home and swimming in my lake and hanging out with my kid.

• 4:47Speaker 02

  I'm so excited to write about witches and talk about witchcraft and feminism and fucking with the patriarchy. But yeah, my brain is in all places at all times. Yeah.

• 5:01Liv Albert?

  That's why we do this as a team.

• 5:04Speaker 02

  Yay, that's why we're a team.

• 5:09Speaker 02

  I was just talking with some other witches about activism these days and how you sort of have to form into like transformer style groups. When you're advocating on the left these days, like put aside some of the ways that they try to divide us to get action done. We have to be like Power Rangers a little bit.

• 5:31Liv Albert?

  I love that you phrase it that way because that is what I'm trying to do with the Memory Collective. It's very slow moving because I decided I had to create this community and network of people who were all trying to share history from this viewpoint of giving a shit. I have more intellectual sounding details, but like. It's about that. It's one of those things where, yeah, it's like, especially right now, trying to keep people connected in this world where social media and things are less and less safe every day. Like, it's such a wild thing, but I feel like it's a little bit of like a transformer. It's me being like, I don't know, I'm gonna try to find a way of pulling us all together to do this thing. I don't know how it's gonna work. I don't know what I'm doing, but I also think that someone has to do it, so I'm gonna try.

• 6:13Speaker 02

  That's one of the first episodes I listened to, because I wasn't like a long time listener. Somehow, I missed it, which is, you know, shame on me. But my kid, like, a couple months ago, was like, I need to learn of all the gods.

• 6:27Liv Albert?

  Everyone has a moment in their lives when I think they've reached that point.

• 6:31Speaker 02

  And so we went looking for podcasts, and I found yours. The first one I listened to, I was walking to the hospital, and it was you talking about the Memory Collective. You were talking about this idea that she's the mother of the Muses, and this idea of a different way of doing history, that when we look at these stories, that we have to kind of inhabit them, or inhabit a different reality to see oppressed people, and especially women in the way that they lived. Can you talk more about how we even do that kind of history?

• 7:00Liv Albert?

  It's funny, because I actually think witches are a perfect example of how this functions, particularly in ancient Greek mythology. Greek mythology is the thing I know well. The wider ancient Mediterranean history, I'm decent enough at, but it typically comes from my conversations, whereas like, the mythology lives in my brain in this way. And I say mythology, but at this point, it's really so much bigger than that, and that's where that this idea of like, how we interpret history comes in. Because I think the number one thing we all are taught, particularly in North America, is that history is just this solid state thing. This is what happened. This is how it happened. And I'm sure it's more broadly true of like, history in general, but particularly when it comes to-

• 7:45Liv Albert?

  Ancient Greek history and Greek mythology, like that is only this tiny piece of the puzzle because history is not this like finite thing. When it comes to Greek sources, all that we have, we have because of so many different reasons, most of them are men. We know all of these stories from Greek mythology, not because these were all of the stories that were told in the ancient world to everyone and in which everyone kind of inhabited these realms, but we know them because this particular version got written down by a man and then maybe 200 to 300, probably way more

• 8:25Liv Albert?

  men over the course of millennia, determined that thing was worth preserving, except for very rare cases of preservation. We don't actually have the ancient sources from the ancient world. Like the Iliad and the Odyssey that we have, I think in terms of the actual text, the physical text that survives is maybe a thousand years old. I don't know exactly, but a good thousand years after the ancient Greeks, even that version was copied down by so many other people for it to survive, except for very rare cases of weird instances of papyri surviving. Other than that, all of the stuff we have is chosen to be preserved for various reasons. There are rare cases where that's not true. One of my favorites is that we only have three surviving playwrights from

• 9:10Liv Albert?

  ancient Greece. We know there were hundreds. They were putting on these plays every year. There were people aspiring to be playwrights, those who were getting into the big festivals. There would be thousands of plays, hundreds of playwrights, but only the plays of three guys survive today. Their work primarily survives because they were considered to be the best. Their works were put in schools, particularly Byzantine schools, and later their works got preserved because there were like these school kids in 600, 700 CE, reading these texts and getting copied down by different scribes and monks. At some point, Christians decided what was and was not okay. But even well before the Christians, the Greeks were very patriarchal. It was all

• 9:53Liv Albert?

  long before. And, and so like those three playwrights, their work survive. And we have, I think it's something like, it's something under 10 plays from Aeschylus and Sophocles, because they were taught in schools. And we have that same number for Euripides, because they were taught in schools. We also have an additional 10 plays from Euripides that we don't have from other playwrights. And that is purely because one Byzantine collector's scroll that was in alphabetical order and happened to be one scroll out of like a complete Euripides set, there would have been multiple scrolls, all again, in this alphabetical order, one scroll managed to survive through purely random things happening over time. So we have like 10 Euripides plays that survive, not because they were the best

• 10:37Liv Albert?

  or read in schools, or all of the various men decided that they were worth preserving for humanity. We have them for completely random reasons. And because of that, we have these plays that were considered not as good. And surprise, a lot of them feature like really strong and independent women in this like distinctly fascinating way. Like, the most iconic one of these plays that wouldn't otherwise survive is called The Helen. It's this alternate universe of the Trojan War, where Helen never went to Troy. The gods put a fake ghost version of her in Troy. And meanwhile, she ended up stranded on Egypt for 10 years. And it's like, all about how she basically saves the day. Her husband ends up shipwrecked, and he's like a big bumbling loser throughout this entire play. And Helen saves them and escapes from Egypt. And it's like, no one would have wanted that

• 11:22Liv Albert?

  to survive, otherwise, because it doesn't play into any of the like, big, amazing Western civilization ideas about what the ancient Greeks did. It's just like a wacky play where a woman is the one holding everything together. There's my example of how history is not inherent at all. It's completely subjective. And that's, you know, completely excluding the fact that like, for thousands of years, it was all these white British men who were reading the classics and no one else. They were forming how we think about them and translating them. But it's only for the last 80 years, that women have been actively involved with all of this, using their lived experience minds to translate and interpret these things. And it's why like, There are those translations by women that can be distinctly different in fundamental ways from the men's.

• 12:05Liv Albert?

  The biggest example being that in the Odyssey, there are all these instances of the word women being translated as sluts. Or the word dog being translated as bitch. And it's like, there's all of these things like related to women that are not in the ancient Greek text. It was just men deciding that like, that's what they were reading because like, oh, these women clearly they're sluts. Even though the word in ancient Greek was like, yinica, which literally to this day still means woman. It's where we get gynecology. And that's my preamble.

• 12:32Speaker 02

  Oh, my God, it's so good. Yeah, I mean, this is why we started Missing Witches, right? That's why it's called that, because we were looking for spiritualities, histories. It's almost like a speculative fiction project, right? Like, what are the stories that did exist or could have existed if there hadn't been thousands of years of oppression? And if the use of misogyny hadn't been such a rampant tool in the colonial project and in the project of empire? So to try to like, find those traces. Can you give some examples of witches in Greek mythology? And when we first were emailing each other about this, you were like, surprise, it's super misogynist, the way the story gets changed. I want to hear that through line too.

• 13:16Liv Albert?

  Yeah, so because that that is this like, yeah, very clear example to me of like. So the the most famous witch, or one of two most famous witches of Greek mythology is Circe, who's in the Odyssey. You know, that one of the oldest surviving works of quote unquote, Western literature. In the Odyssey, she uses a potion to transform all of these men into pigs. She lives on this island that is basically only populated by women. And when these men arrive, they find all of these like wild animals that are clearly tame. Like she lives in this island with like bears and wolves that don't attack anyone. And lions and wolves, not bears. I always want it to be bears. Lions and wolves, they don't attack

• 13:57Liv Albert?

  anyone. And then these guys show up and she's so pretty and she's singing. So they're like, oh, we gotta go see her. And I go inside and she's like, oh, welcome. And she taps them on the head and they all turn into pigs. Part of the story is them transforming back and it's a whole thing. But we have this really strong woman who lives on an island with only other women. They're said to be herd nymphs, which there's a lot going on with that word, but there's all these other like semi-divine women living with her. And she has all these transformation skills. She uses them against men. And it leaves open this question of like, are all of the wolves and the lions on her island? Men are all the animals on her island? Men? And at the very beginning, Odysseus kills this stag that's just like standing there and it doesn't run. And he's like, oh, great. We have some food to eat. But then you very quickly are supposed to question like, whoa, was that

• 14:42Liv Albert?

  once a guy? We are told their minds are the same, but their bodies are these animals. So it's just very cool. And the other famous witch is Medea, right? Whose story, there's levels of its age. The most famous version is considerably later, a few hundred years. That's Euripides, because he actually was interested in women, which is why we love that his plays survive. He was considered a misogynist in the ancient world because he wrote women who were both good and bad, which is my favorite like claim for misogyny. He literally just wrote realistic women and the ancient Greek men were like, he hates them. And women were like, I mean, no, he's just like thinks that we're people. Weird. And so, yeah, Medea is a whole other question, but she does these

• 15:24Liv Albert?

  terrible things. She famously kills her children. She kills her brother. All of this is for a man. There's so much story behind it, which I won't get into, but she does all of these terrible things simultaneously in almost every source that talks about her. She is seen as this like very righteous, like even in Euripides's play, which is the version where she kills her children. She goes on these like speech after speech where he convinces you to understand where she's coming from. You finish that play and you're like, you did a terrible thing. You shouldn't have done that. It's awful. And also, I see where you were coming from, like, why you thought that that was your only option. And so there's just like this very, these, these understandable sympathetic

• 16:04Liv Albert?

  characters, even when they are doing terrible things, or, you know, in the case of Circe, less murder, but still all of this non-consensual transformation, you know? So we have these characters, and then there's the very famous witch goddess, Hecate, who has very few stories about her, but is a perpetual incredible badass. Those are the three evident witches. Helen does some witchcraft, too, but Helen is meant to be incredibly beautiful, very, or, like, she's just incredible in kind of every way, not just looks, but she is really smart. And in the Odyssey, we get this version of her where, like, she's come home from the war that was fought for her, she's back with her husband, and all is seemingly forgiven,

• 16:49Liv Albert?

  and she's suddenly really good at witchcraft. And she brews this potion that calms everyone down. And she's like this very calming presence, and generally, just this fascinating character. And like, that's kind of how witches are seen in ancient Greece. You get the sense that it's a very old concept of women and their understanding of herbs. The brewing of potion in ancient Greece is called pharmakon. It's literally where we get the word pharmacy, and that, that was like, understood as magic. Pharmakon is like, that's magic. Pharmakis is a witch. They didn't really have any, like, it really is kind of meant to be masculinized, despite all the women, you

• 17:29Liv Albert?

  know, being the ones who do that. And then you get into Rome, and Rome was like, Greece tried to be an empire, and they weren't very good at it. They did a lot of colonization, but we don't have a lot of examples of them doing really violent colonization. It tends to be them going in and being like, okay, well, we're here now, but you can keep doing whatever you're doing. We're just gonna bring our religion in, and we'll kind of like, mix them all together, and everyone will kind of be okay. They were not great at empire. And Rome came in, and they were like, we're really good at empire. We also are so much more virulently misogynist, and like, they're, the Romans, their witches are like these horrific caricatures of old,

• 18:08Liv Albert?

  wrinkled hags, placing love spells on unsuspecting men, and every witch in Roman mythology is some form of this. They're these, like, Scary, crones, like all old and rickety and just they want to like bring these young men into their web. And all of this, like, it's just, it like oozes misogyny in this way that is like so different from the Greek. And I'm sure people have done interesting arguments on what is going on there, but to my mind, it's just a really obvious indication of like, the kind of difference culturally, very much like cultural differences, but also like time period differences because

• 18:48Liv Albert?

  particularly these Greek characters are coming from this like very early time before, before, almost before the written language of the Greeks, right? Because the Odyssey was like really on that line of like when they're developing their alphabet to write things down. And so these characters are almost older than a level of misogyny that like then comes in. Because there are lots of other characters in Greek myth that are like so inherent of the misogyny and patriarchy that is indicative of ancient Greece, but particularly the witches tend not to be. The Greeks were way more concerned about other quote unquote scary women. They tended to be more monstrous in nature. Like this impossible to understand monstrous woman.

• 19:33Liv Albert?

  I conceptualize it. The Greeks were afraid of women who could say no or stop them from assaulting them. The Romans were like, no, no, we're afraid of women who will like trick us into like their, you know, their seductive web and then steal our money or whatever. Whereas like, yeah, I don't know. I, I that sort of that went, took my ADHD brain in circles to the point where I talked myself into being unsure of what I was saying, but like they just, we have these like really interesting ideas. The Greeks were terrible to women in other ways, but their witches were amazing. And the Romans came in and they were like, we're afraid of women who think they're practicing medicine. Like the men who did

• 20:13Liv Albert?

  any kind of medicinal work were called Medica and the women were called witches. Women could be doing the same thing medically, but they were witches and the men were doctors. And I have, I have episodes on my show because I have a friend who's like an expert in ancient women's medicine, which is like some of the darkest and most incredible conversations I've had on the show. But yeah, it's all about how afraid they are of women. It's just the various forms of being afraid of. The overall idea of women.

• 20:44Speaker 02

  And you see it happen again in these cycles that have to do with power and capital and land. We've had guests on our show trace the depiction of women's bodies, especially even around breastfeeding. And then it becoming like the witch's tit and like the woman's body becomes like, like scary and emaciated. And all of those associations get tied to her right around the sort of betrayal of the common land. And the enclosure prospects, the colonial powers are taking common land and saying, you can't have it. The people that are able to resist that are like women who've managed to own a little bit of land and are farming on this common land.

• 21:28Speaker 02

  And they don't have young kids anymore and they're like, fuck no, they start to resist. And suddenly, you know, careers that they were able to have as brewers are suddenly, and the brewers would wear the pointy hats and would have a cat. All of this stuff, suddenly, suddenly, suddenly, this is the imagery of witchcraft, right? I want to go back to Circe because there's so much that I love about her. And there was a couple of pieces that you dropped in that I want to pick up on. I want to talk more about nymphs and her relationship with land and her relationship with plants. You had an episode recently that I think was a flashback episode, but that got me so excited thinking about the archaeological record

• 22:09Speaker 02

  of plants and sacred groves and, and the way that nymphs get characterized. Let's get into it.

• 22:16Liv Albert?

  Yeah. So in Greek mythology, when we use the word nymph, we mean these female deities who are like lesser deities. They tend to be daughters of rivers or the sea, things like that. So these bodies of water or more natural things, it's a bit like, so there are nymphs of the water, who are very clearly like the daughters of either these big rivers or the sea itself. Or oceanus is the word for a big river. So it's kind of confusing, which is why I'm not using the word ocean, because ocean is a freshwater river, just to throw everyone off. But they are all of these daughters or there are nymphs associated with every type of tree or the mountains.

• 22:59Liv Albert?

  Or every time there's a stream, there's a nymph for that stream. And so they seem to be this quite nice idea, like these women associated with the natural world, very specifically, sometimes they are almost the trees, or they're really connected with this natural world. And so I think you can see a lot of like the reminiscent, or the remains of, of like an earlier world, right? I could talk for hours about the evidence of an earlier, more, I don't want to say overtly matriarchal society, but one where there was at least like a much stronger sense of egalitarianism, where gender was not this enormous divide. You can see like evidence of that. And I think all of these goddesses

• 23:42Liv Albert?

  of natural world elements are reminiscent of that, like how Mother Earth, Gaia is Earth, even in Greek myth. The women are clearly meant to be the goddesses of life in various ways. That said, the stories that we have of the nymphs are almost exclusively stories of these nymphs getting assaulted or defiled in one way or another by gods and other men. That is most of the stories. Of course, when it comes to ancient Greek myth, we have to remember that the stories we have are just the ones that we have, but also the stories they wrote weren't like stories that we write. They weren't meant to just entertain. They've

• 24:23Liv Albert?

  served a purpose, right? They're sort of this cultural identity in a story. What's really going on is these stories of either gods merging with this body of water, this river, or whatever, right? Like, the women's bodies are used as this sort of vessel for something else in the story. That is primarily what happens with nymphs, very specifically. That tends to be the purpose that they serve in the stories. Now, the big issue for me and the place where my knowledge cuts off, this is actually something that I think about all of the time. If I had more time, I would figure out someone who has done more work on this and read all about it. But one thing I learned in the process of actually writing

• 25:05Liv Albert?

  the Medusa book that I was talking about in that episode, is that the word nymph simultaneously meant young bride.

• 25:15Liv Albert?

  So the fact that we refer to all of these characters as nymphs, like in ancient Greek, it did refer to them, but it also referred to young brides, mortal or otherwise. And so that's the thing I think is like literally never mentioned. When we think about these nymphs, we just think of them as characters. But if you look more at the etymology of the word, they are called that because of what I was saying about the stories functioning as this way of these women are serving as vessels, but like in that kind of way that these women are serving a purpose

• 25:53Liv Albert?

  specifically, specifically around, they're really specifically tying to the gods' actions. Like it's not, you know, it's not like, oh, they just happen to be called nymphs and this is what happens to them. There has to be some connection to the fact that all of them serve as just these bodies for the gods to do other things with, and that the word is exactly the same as young bride. And it's that idea of bride being before and which is very important is that the concept of virgin in Greek mythology and ancient Greece more broadly meant unmarried. So Parthenos, like is the word for virgin. That's where we get Parthenon because it's for the virgin goddess Athena.

• 26:38Liv Albert?

  Virgin didn't have anything to do with whether or not they had actually been penetrated. Like there are, there's lots to say about that because the ancient Greeks were also like deeply obsessed with penetration. Um, but that, yeah, virgin meant unmarried and childless really specifically. So it was really all about the bodies, like quote unquote, purpose to the men. We always see like Artemis and her nymphs are all virgins. That's used all the time, right? But what it is, is they are unmarried and childless. And to me, there's that connection being made that, you know, all of these goddesses, be they Circe or Artemis, these goddesses that hang out with nymphs. They are always virgin goddesses. They are characters that exist to be, and I'm going to use this word intentionally, but it's gross, plucked by gods, by men, all of these

• 27:20Liv Albert?

  things. And so the thing about Cersei that makes it a little harder is that so much of what we conceptualize about her now is from stories that span a good thousand years. We have to remember that nymphomaniac comes from the word nymph in one way or another, like be it young bride or these women that were made to be quote unquote defiled. It's so gross. But yeah, Cersei is hard because she as a character exists primarily in the Odyssey, almost exclusively in the Odyssey. She doesn't really feature into later sources until we're talking like six or 700 years down the line. And then people start put

• 28:02Liv Albert?

  like, or we have these stories that start existing about her that gives her all of these other aspects, particularly when it comes to nymphs. I'm trying to recall if they use the word nymph specifically to talk about the women around her on her island or whether they are just servant women. It's tough to say. If they use that word, which one did they mean? Did they mean a young unmarried woman? They could mean a woman of marriageable age who is living freely on Cersei's island, or they could mean these goddesses of various things. But because these women don't have trees to be explicitly associated with, or rivers, or any like definable natural element, like I think it's likely that they're also just meant to be like these young women of marriageable age who are not marrying. Great. Good for them. There's a lot of questions about Artemis with that

• 28:47Liv Albert?

  too. There's a lot going on.

• 28:48Speaker 02

  I was gonna ask about Artemis as well, since you bring her up, I'll interrupt, but

• 28:52Liv Albert?

  because I can ramble forever.

• 29:06Liv Albert?

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• 29:51Liv Albert?

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• 30:33Liv Albert?

  So find the fall pieces you'll reach for most at Quince. Download the Quince app for app-exclusive offers, or go to quince.com. Get free shipping on your order and 365-day returns. Now available in Canada and the UK, too. And when Quince asks where you heard about them, let them know it was me. Let's talk about myths, baby. It's the best way to support the show.

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• 31:46Speaker 02

  Is there also a pre-layer where we can imagine these are stories of places where women went to be safe? Where women went to be together? Where women went to practice? Or to see them as coming in and taking on a piece of that knowledge that Circe has in the pharmacon of the plants and representing that sort of channeled spirit relationship with each of those plants? I just want to add that the other piece I love about Circe is that Penelope comes and lives with Circe.

• 32:19Liv Albert?

  So here, there's the thing.

• 32:21Speaker 02

  Not really.

• 32:22Liv Albert?

  No?

• 32:23Speaker 02

  I love that.

• 32:24Liv Albert?

  Oh, see, it's funny because I actually hate that version so much. Because what it comes with, the only way that Circe and Penelope meet is from this fragment that probably wasn't anything real. I actually jokingly refer to it on the show as like, that it doesn't exist. My rule is that this doesn't exist. It's called the telegamy. And it's this idea that there was a lost epic. It probably never existed. There's this idea that the only way they could have met is that...

• 32:53Liv Albert?

  Cersei had a son by Telemachus or by Odysseus, which I hate because I mean, also I think she's better than having children. That's a me issue. But yeah, so she has the son by Odysseus named Telegannus. And when Telegannus is grown up, he goes looking for his father and lands on Ithaca and accidentally kills Odysseus. The end of that story and the only way that Penelope and Cersei meet also involves Penelope marrying Telegannus and Cersei marrying Telemachus. Penelope's son by Odysseus. So as you can see, it's about the ickiest thing you could possibly imagine. So in terms of sources, I do not ascribe to then ever meeting. But I understand that desire. To me, there's a lot

• 33:37Liv Albert?

  that I come at because I am so obsessed with the ancient sources. And so I tend to bring in a lot of context to ruin people's otherwise nice ideas. Because we're talking about a period where a lot of the stories about Cersei, like there's also this story that suggests that like she transformed Skilla into this like monstrous creature, right?

• 33:56Speaker 02

  This also shows up in the Madeline Miller

• 33:59Liv Albert?

  Yes.

• 33:59Speaker 02

  novel, right?

• 34:00Liv Albert?

  Yes. And I believe that mostly comes from Ovid, unless I'm totally wrong. But regardless, it's a very late sourcing that explains that. And that doesn't mean that it wasn't a concept that existed back when the Odyssey was being written, but it's also not conclusive. I don't think that she has any connection to Skilla in that way, because like, I think that it would come up in the Odyssey and there's zero indication that she had anything to do with Skilla. It's her transformation. I don't like the idea. I really take issue with any time a story involves a quote unquote monstrous female being turned into that monster, but she was once this pretty mortal. Like, I hate all of that because these monstrous women exist as

• 34:46Liv Albert?

  Signs that the men feared women's power and women's independence. And so to me, they are these monsters because that is what the men were afraid of. I really hate when we make them sympathetically, oh, she was once pretty, but then transformed. It's the same with Medusa. Has those tinges of misogyny where you think you're seeing women's empowerment, but it's not actually like what that is, is like, kind of making it so that, because all of these monsters tend to be that like men couldn't have sex with them. And so they turned them into these monstrous ideas. That's why like Medusa is a monster because she, she literally could defend herself against a man. And so they had to make her into the scariest concept imaginable. And, and so like, I don't know, I, I think I just prefer monsters because of that,

• 35:30Liv Albert?

  because to me they represent this fear. And Skilla is like also a bitch in the best way. Like she's literally a female dog, which was an insult. But like it's the Cersei and the nymphs and the Artemis and the nymphs. I think what they are is reminiscent of this. Because it's hard because we can't necessarily say that they're like, you know, this, this example of like what you were saying of like women getting to kind of escape, live with Cersei, learn from her. Like, I don't think we can say that they're a direct representation of that at all. But I think they are kind of like the monsters. They are like a shadow of something else that was going on, whether that was women living free lives or something else. I have this running theory that the women, particularly in ancient Athens,

• 36:15Liv Albert?

  were just having a queer old time together. Because like I said, the ancient Greeks were obsessed with penetration. To them, that's the only thing that ever mattered. They also locked women away because they were afraid of paternity, particularly in Athens. The women were just hanging out with each other, like weaving. I think you were all just having a great time, living lives away from men locked in your house, but with others. I imagine they didn't even conceptualize that women could have sex with each other because they're so fucking obsessed with penetration that they're like, oh no, these ladies. Well, they're just being innocent behind closed doors together. They, they couldn't, they couldn't. Yeah. And so that's also what's going on with stories like Circe and Artemis, where it's this imagined world for men to write about why women would be away from men

• 37:00Liv Albert?

  or yeah, like existing without them. There's, there's also a story of the island of Lemnos, where there was like supposed to be a time when they were cursed in various ways and essentially the women all killed the men. And it's because the men were all sneaking off to a different land and like sleeping with other women over there. And then the women found out. But then there's also this story about like how after they killed all the men, the gods made them like ridiculously smelly so that no one would ever want to go near them again. And all this, this island ruled by women and all of the men were killed except this one woman. She wanted to save a man. So they expelled her.

• 37:38Speaker 02

  And they're sticky and disgusting because they don't want to fuck us. Yeah.

• 37:43Liv Albert?

  Yes. I'm interested in how you come at, I guess, I would love to know more about your knowledge of ancient witches. My problem is that I am too deep in the ancient sources. And so I am actively also wanting to hear from people who don't exist in this realm where they're like, well, that was 700 years apart. So I don't think we can reasonably say that that's canon, which is how I am with so many things, which is like all of the Circe stuff. And everything is like, we're talking about a 700 year gap in time of like this stuff being developed and filled out. It's like, you know, us saying that like something in Shakespeare fully applies to now or something. We tend to smoosh all of ancient Greece into this one singular concept, but Odyssey was like, from the time that the Odyssey was like put down onto paper, but it had probably been formed in

• 38:26Liv Albert?

  whatever way for a couple hundred years before that. We're still talking like seven or 800 years between that and like Ovid or Pseudo Apollodorus, who tends to give us these like extra details about certain characters like this. And he again, like is coming 700 years later. And he could be writing about an existing detail or he could not be. That started as a question for you and then my ADHD turned it into another ramble. So I apologize. But like, do you have other, I don't know, connections to ancient?

• 38:51Speaker 02

  Yeah. Well, I'll tell you, I'll tell you the one thing that comes to mind. And it's an episode that will come out in this same season. This conversation. So if you want to hear the actual person talk about the actual thing, you can find her. We have a former professor of psychology, director of research projects, really fascinating thinker, who leaves all that behind to become a Hecatean priestess. And so she brings those research skills to going to try to understand who Hecate is and was and why she's showing up for her. She gets into sort of the hundred epithets of Hecate and the difference.

• 39:32Liv Albert?

  So many.

• 39:33Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 39:34Liv Albert?

  They mean so many different things.

• 39:36Speaker 02

  Yeah. And part of what we do is play a little bit, like I referenced earlier, we do play in that realm of what if it were? Or what can we use now? Because we're interested in using, witchcraft is like a term for us that summarizes our spirituality, activism and art practice. It's a talisman word that lets us into those places. And so we do sometimes allow ourselves to not be so like, what is in the original story?

• 40:06Liv Albert?

  Yeah, that's the thing. And I think there's such a place for that, which is why I'm interested in it, because I can't live in that realm. My brain won't do it anymore. But like, there is such a place for that.

• 40:14Speaker 02

  Right. Well, and it's really generative and really empowering when you feel like the world is full of white men destroying us for profit so they can fuck children for the last 50 years that the climate exists or whatever, to try to be together and to feel like, at very least, calling upon Hecate and as the spirit of the world or as a spirit of between places, of changes, of land, sea and sky, that an idea of like, yes, like a tripartite goddess that isn't the way that sort of so easily gets.

• 40:56Speaker 02

  Used and maybe it's useful to some people but of like maiden mother crone, but that that wasn't really her zone or a way that people thought about her at all. That the three part goddess is really to do with land, sea and sky. And so moving transitional places between states on earth. And so that when we're experiencing fear that comes at transition, at crossroads, and we're carrying the weight of the massiveness of change, she still is a figure that we can call to. Whether you want to dress all in black and wear a pointy hat or pass in other realms really easily.

• 41:40Speaker 02

  And it's not always clear to other people that I'm a practicing witch or that I call on Hecate as like one of the many archetypes that gives me an imaginative realm of the world that exists beyond like Judeo-Christian capitalist writing of what's possible. Do you know?

• 42:02Liv Albert?

  Yeah, it's so interesting hearing all of that because I not really consider myself a spiritual person. I think I might like to be, but I just never am. So much of what you're saying about how you do this is kind of how I feel I work within the ancient sources because breaking them down into that level is what I'm most interested in, right? Like the 700 year gap. Who wrote this and why do we think it's real? To me, that is kind of doing a really similar thing. My piecing apart these things and overloading it with context is my way of understanding or like exploring these ideas

• 42:42Liv Albert?

  of the real women of that world and how they might have existed. And I'm not big on theorizing beyond this type of like, I mean, I think I can see, or I know I can see the evidence of the slow decline of the world of goddesses and the power of goddesses in the Theogony, which is the oldest form we have of the world of the gods. And to me, I think that is such a clear indication of the way that the goddesses went from being the big, important deities of that culture and this like slow decline and this slow growth of the men until the point where you can, it's so generational in that

• 43:24Liv Albert?

  text that you can really see what's happening. And so to me, like picking apart those things or like saying that Cersei and Penelope couldn't have met, that's my way of taking their story back. I would love to use it more in practice in my regular life, but in terms of that kind of connection of going beyond the ancient sources, it's almost what I feel like I'm doing, but in a really different way.

• 43:45Speaker 02

  Yeah. And I find it really exciting. I love listening to you do it to get right into the material and into the text so that we can see what the actual, it's like seeing a shadow or like seeing, seeing their outline. We can see the gap where they were excised. I want to know what you know about current archaeology into Hecatean temples, into places that are maybe giving us a little bit more of that outline.

• 44:15Liv Albert?

  Hecate, for me, I know a lot of the ancient sourcing about her, which again is something that like over the thousand years or so, like changes so much because she wasn't always a witch goddess. Like in the oldest everything, she is like you're saying, like this goddess of all, like she's the goddess, she's the only one who gets to have dominion over the sky, the earth and the sea. But the stories never really give her any kind of agency or she doesn't ever actually utilize that control or wield it in any way. And so to me, she is one of these figures that is very unknown because she was known by the women and therefore we don't have writing about it. And she was also a goddess who wasn't

• 44:57Liv Albert?

  regularly depicted. And so to me, what I'm obsessed with is like the mystery of-

• 45:01Speaker 02

  Or if she was, it was in tapestries that we don't have.

• 45:03Liv Albert?

  Well, exactly, because women's arts are decomposable. So I'm sure and, and like women would have been talking to each other, working with each other. They would have been weaving everything. All of these things would have existed. And Hecate reminds me of Hestia in that way, which is like Hestia is this ridiculously powerful goddess. She represented the hearth in every single home, which was like the thing that kept you warm, that fed your family, everything. And she is so important in that realm, in the home, that she's not in any stories. None. And to me, that's so indicative of like this goddess who was so important in a woman's space that no stories exist of her. And that's like what Hecate feels like to me because they

• 45:43Liv Albert?

  also later they go on to try like, there's this, I believe it's Diodoro Siculus, who goes on to try to make her into a much more evil character. This would be like, contextually, when she was becoming this witch goddess, and he's working really late. I mean, he's like Roman period. I feel like he's like first century B.C. or C.E. like, very late. And he was doing really weird things overall. But he tries to make Hecate into this evil witch. She's the mother of Medea, I think, in that story, and she was testing poisons on people and all of this. Like, you can almost see how she went from being this all-powerful but almost explicitly benevolent goddess to this witch who was testing out her potions on a man, you know, and that's

• 46:25Liv Albert?

  the thousand years. And so, again, that's where I go with the context and the sourcing and where I'm like, okay, well, that's what I'm obsessed with. I wish I knew more about the archaeology. I might have to go look now. I have unfortunately been sort of, not forced, but like, a little, to avoid a lot of modern Hellenic polytheism, because a lot of teenagers have been really ridiculous to me in my DMs. And so, I just tend to like, really avoid a lot of the modern spirituality around it, not because I don't respect it, but because the people who are mad online, oh, they just get really mad at me for saying that Zeus assaulted everyone, which he did. Sorry. I respect everyone's desire to worship whoever they want.

• 47:10Speaker 02

  That's just in the story.

• 47:11Liv Albert?

  But somebody once threatened to sic Zeus on me, and so I just kind of stick away from modern spiritualism. But I'm interested in it, particularly from people who are coming at it from this kind of space. No, but Zeus did that. And I'm like, I know, I'm just reading the sources. But this kid's saying he's gonna send Zeus to get me. So, you know, but it's, it's just been a weird, a weird space.

• 47:32Speaker 02

  What a weird journey you've been on. Like, you started this podcast, and it's sort of massive, and you get to talk to all of these academics and bring them together. But you're like, one of the more deliciously rage-filled feminists in the classical history space that I've found. And it makes me-

• 47:52Liv Albert?

  I think I'm the most rage-filled.

• 47:54Speaker 02

  It makes me so happy. I hope that it fuels you, too.

• 47:58Liv Albert?

  Oh, it really does. It really does.

• 48:01Speaker 02

  That makes me so happy and I'm so excited for the, especially the idea of this memory collective. I guess I do relate it to the way that I think about these things with this braiding of researchers and voices that are anti fascist and feminist centering the spaces where we can see the outlines of queer stories and trans stories as well, the way that you do. It does feel like we're, you're, and I am writing myself into it, like that tapestry is happening or that river is happening, even if it has to go around horrifying collapse and acts of violence. Don't you feel like sometimes you're channeling the women?

• 48:44Liv Albert?

  Yeah, no, and I think that that is, yeah, that I think that fuels me a lot. Channeling the real women, but also just like the lost stories or like these women that we know were so powerful and yet we have nothing about them in surviving sources because no one wanted to copy it. For the longest time, these are people, characters and topics that the world of history, particularly in academia, but like just generally in how we're all meant to consume it, like tends to want to just pretend that those things didn't exist because they're not in the sources rather than contextualize why they're not in the sources. And that's been the most important thing for me.

• 49:18Speaker 02

  Right, and then flip side, to have to read Greek mythology as a young girl in school and for it to just be a given that the constant rape and sexual assault and sex trafficking was just like, that's the norm, that's culture.

• 49:38Liv Albert?

  You can't be annoyed about it. You can't put your modern morality onto it. That's just the way it was.

• 49:43Speaker 02

  Right. But it still is how it fucking is and I am still angry about it.

• 49:48Liv Albert?

  Yeah. Like news flash, also I hear from people all the time about, oh, you can't put your modern morality onto it. It's human morality. It's not modern morality. It's human dignity. That's what I'm putting on it by interpreting these ways. It's equality and dignity. And I don't know, you want to hear, this is related to what you just said, but one of the things that will stick with me forever that I heard from, I think multiple, honestly, but I have been sort of reminded over the years by these very intelligent people for sure, who are definitely not men, no, they are in their dumb asses, but they have said, Oh, you know, it wasn't so bad as that because the word rape originally just meant abduction.

• 50:33Speaker 02

  Cool, cool, cool, cool.

• 50:35Liv Albert?

  Yeah. Do you know, do you want to know why? Do you know why? Because they were abducting property. They were ruining somebody's property. That's rape. We considered the people property. So it was literally just about stealing and breaking, that's air quotes for people who are not in the video, breaking somebody's property. The word just meant abducted because the rape was inherent.

• 50:56Speaker 02

  The person was fully dehumanized already.

• 50:59Liv Albert?

  Exactly. It wasn't about them being a person. It's like the same people who tell me that the story of Medusa being assaulted by Poseidon is explicitly only in Ovid because Hesiod says that they lay together. Hesiod didn't care whether women were human at all. He's like one of the most misogynistic voices in the ancient world. Even still, the way he describes Medusa and Poseidon, like quote unquote, laying together, because that's always the words they want to use, is this word that one also means to pluck out a errant hair. Now, but you know, that's meant to be like a romantic sexual encounter, despite it being that like the depiction in the poem is like Poseidon, who's the dark haired

• 51:38Liv Albert?

  god, lay with her in a field of spring flowers. Like it's so meant to be this juxtaposition of violence on something pretty and then she has children. Anyway, it's basically like all of Greek mythology is just a lesson in how men rewrite

• 51:57Liv Albert?

  human interactions to fit their narrative. And that's essentially all I want to do with my life. Um, and it's just.

• 52:04Speaker 02

  Just rewrite them right back.

• 52:05Liv Albert?

  To finish any thoughts right now, but yeah, I'm just gonna, I mean, it, the thrill right now, just in the wider world of this is, is the reason I'm so overwhelmed is that I've got a book deal to write a children's version of The Odyssey, which is going to be published by the biggest children's publisher in the world. And at the very least, I'll be able to like, kind of, you know, The Odyssey is for kids. It's hard to make it explicitly feminist, but at the very least I can make it explicitly not misogynist in this way that's like. I don't think has really been done before for children because we're all just meant to believe that Odysseus is this great guy who did great things and did nothing wrong. So, you know, I don't, baby steps, I suppose, in the ancient world while fascism overtakes the rest of the world.

• 52:46Speaker 02

  We just do what we can and it's so important to me every time to see the people who are here listening and to hear you and to imagine our collective audiences and to remember that we are not alone in our rage and also in our labor of calling forth something else. We're deeply not alone, so fuck fascists forever. Do you want, should we share? Because I want to let the people here, we'll turn off the mics and let the people here get to hang out for a little bit. Closing words, closing thoughts? People will find your book when it comes to the world alongside your other badass books.

• 53:26Liv Albert?

  Yeah, I've got the Medusa book. It's funny. The Medusa book is the one I'm most proud of for badass thoughts, badass everything. I've never been more proud of something I've written. I also don't make royalties off of it, but you should buy it anyway because it's really pretty. And I broke down the ancient history of Medusa in this way that I have never been more proud of anything. The Odyssey is coming out in June. I feel like I've just rambled my way through this because if somebody gets me talking on the topic, I just go until my brain spirals into circles. This has been so lovely, so nice to connect with people who are doing similar things, but also inherently different. I feel like all I did was talk and I didn't let you at all. Thank you.

• 54:03Speaker 02

  It's my great pleasure. My co-creator of Missing Witches, Amy Torock, and I co-authored two books. One is called Missing Witches: Recovering True Histories of Feminist Magic, and the other one's called New Moon Magic: Thirteen Anti-Capitalist Tools for Resistance and Re-Enchantment.

• 54:22Speaker 02

  And that's what we do. And we have a coven of hundreds of people all around the world who are feminists, anti ableist, trans inclusive, and we love science. We get together and do this. I feel like because of the way my memory is to try to pull in more classical or Greek sources, especially because I've never really been a deist. I'm sort of an atheist witch who talks to the lake, you know what I mean?

• 54:49Liv Albert?

  I feel like that's kind of what I feel like, which is I'm an atheist witch who talks to the ancient sources kind of thing, you know, where I'm like, I'm not, but I am, but I'm like, yeah.

• 54:58Speaker 02

  Oh, I fucking feel that. Like, we've had people on this show who, who told us they do ancestor work, but they ask for their ancestors to only talk to them in the archives. And so then when they really feel like guided, this is people doing history of enslaved people and enslaved ancestors in the United States, trying to find in archives where these things have been intentionally obfuscated, trying to find traces of family. And so, yeah, we're all witches in our own ways, probably.

• 55:28Liv Albert?

  Oh, I'm thrilled to hear that. And it's really interesting to hear how other people are working with this. I have to say too, that not just the subtitle of your books, but whatever else you put into the email was the reason why I was like, I don't even have to look into these people. They've said enough angry leftist feminist shit that I will be so happy to be on this show.

• 55:47Speaker 02

  So dope. I was like-

• 55:49Liv Albert?

  I have to be pretty selective, honestly, because I get like a lot, but I was like, oh, there are so many keywords in here. We're gonna have so much fun.

• 55:57Speaker 02

  I'm so happy. I will say the words that officially end my podcast, blessed fucking be.

• 56:03Liv Albert?

  Oh, I love that. I'll do the same. And I always end with, I am Liv and I fucking love this shit.

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