For thousands of years the legend of The Trojan War inspired songs, poetry, and stories. Helen, Queen of Sparta, was kidnapped and forced to marry Paris, Prince of Troy. The king of Sparta was not pleased with his wife’s displacement, and began a decade-long war to bring her home. Athena, goddess of strategy created the trojan horse ploy of legend. When the Trojans brought the horse into the city and began drinking and celebrating their victory, the Spartans spilled from the horse and slaughtered every last Trojan warrior, burning down the city and saving Helen of Troy, and restoring her as Helen of Sparta.
For millennia, we have believed this legend to be just that, a legend. The Trojan War took place before Greek became a written language and almost 400 years before Homer began documenting both history, and religion, and the lines in his writing between fact and fiction are blurred. So, we thought The Trojan War was a religious myth, an enforcement of the power of Greek culture and countries.
In 1863 a German archaeologist began to study Troy and began to excavate the area. Excavators found a city which mysteriously burned to the ground at the same time as the estimated end of the Trojan war. Over the course of years and additional discoveries, history and myth have been rewritten, and we now know that the Trojan war is no longer a myth, but a piece of history.
I’m Hannah Harper and you’re listening to: Of Witches and Women. Welcome to our first full length season. Of Witches and Women is a bi-weekly podcast where we explore the lives of powerful women, both historical and mythological, to better understand their lives and impact. Please subscribe to us on Apple podcasts, Google Play, or even YouTube and if you do social media, follow Of Witches and Women on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook!
We also have a great website, ofwitchesandwomen.com where we have lots of salty merchandise and the Grimoire Gallery, our internet gallery dedicated to art about women and the occult. The gallery is curated each season to go along with our theme, so check out the amazing Greek goddess interpretations and more on there right now. All the art in the Grimoire Gallery is created by current working artists, and you can link to their sites directly from the Gallery. We’ve also got a page called the Lamia Library (which you are on now) which is where the episodes, show notes, and sources will be posted.
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Check out the about me page to learn more about me, Hannah.
I’m incredibly anxious about this podcast failing or sucking, and it’s taken me well over a year to overcome my anxiety and take enough adderall to successfully pull this all together. I’ve been putting off the idea for a long time and trying to get other people on board so I won’t have to be vulnerable and accountable all by myself. However, the time has come for me to step up and do some very scary growing, learning and sucking. I’m super passionate about the subject material, namely kick-ass women, witches and creatures of the occult, and I want to study them and share what I learn with you.
I’ve been inspired by so many amazing women in my life. This podcast is a part of my journey to do the same. So, subscribe and I promise to talk less about me next time and more about the complex women and witches of history and mythology. I’ll be telling their stories, and musing about the meaning of the stories, how people of the time felt, and how we can use or interpret their stories today.
What I’ve taken away from my life experiences and the examples of other amazing women, is that I need to step-up or lean-in, or take-up space or whatever you want to call it. But more than doing this in public, I also need to push myself on a personal, psychological level to value and accept myself as fierce and strong woman. So I invite all you witches and listeners to be fierce. Not just act fierce, but work hand-in-hand with your inner lioness, like Beyonce. “Stay fierce” is my new mantra, and I invite anyone who feels they need those words in their life to adopt them as well. As every witch knows, words have power, and it’s important that we use them to tell ourselves and others positive things.
Being fierce and being true to who you are is important, but for me it’s so, so very difficult, which is part of the reason I’m studying these witches and women, learning from the legends and stories, some of which are frivolous or prey on stereotypes, but upon analysis, most are full of meaning and ferocity.
This season our topic is women of ancient and middle Greek mythology and history. Together, we’ll learn about all the major goddesses, gorgons, witches, damsels, and real-life, bad-ass Greek women. In today’s episode we’re dipping our toes into Greek history with a brief timeline of ancient Greece and a retelling of the basic Greek Mythological origin story. We’ll also tap into Roman mythology sometimes, since they are incredibly similar, and Rome basically came in and swept all of Greek mythology into its culture bag and said “this is mine now.” Occasionally there will be a goddess or story retold in more detail in Roman lore, but the gist will be the same, so we’ll use what we can from both to piece together the lives of some amazing witches and women. So, let’s dive into Ancient Greece, both real and mythological.
About 4,000 years ago, the first settlers that we know of arrived in ancient Greece. The temperate, fertile Mediterraniean climate made it the perfect place to begin building one of the greatest civilizations earth has ever seen.
Around 1,600 BCE, the Mycean people inhabited Greece during the Bronze Age. They were the first people we know of to speak Greek, and were influenced by the earlier Minoan civilization in the area. We don’t know much about Mycean religion except that they practiced animal sacrifice and rituals. They also built monumental grave sites and buried precious objects with their dead, much like their Egyptian neighbors to the south. The thriving Bronze Age mysteriously collapsed around 1,200 BCE.
Next came the Trojan war, a relatively new part of our retellings of Greek history, but a long-loved Greek myth. About 100 years after the Mycaen-Greek’s triumph over Troy, Dorian Invaders conquered the Mycaens in about 1100BCE, and in 850, the Greek alphabet was invented and put into practice. From about 800 to 300 BCE is when most of the exciting stuff we learn about in school happened in Greece. Around 800 Homer began his epic poems, and it is thanks to Homer and the beginning of the alphabet that we have both the history and mythology of Ancient Greece and the surrounding areas. After Homer, we had the first Olympic games, several wars, and the rise of the aristocracy in Greece. In 600, money was introduced and about 100 years later democracy was introduced in Athens. More wars and philosophers followed, and in 380 BCE Plato established the Academy in Athens. Officially, Greece fell to the Roman empire in 146 BCE, but the two hundred years prior to that were filled with invasions and changes in rulers as Alexander the Great and Persia set their sites on ruling the countries of the Greek region. But as Greece fell, in the Western World, Ancient Greece.
Some of the women we’ll be discussing this season were real, and greatly impacted Ancient Greece and world history, others are the Goddesses and monsters of Ancient Greek religion and culture. It’s important to be conscious of the fact that these myths and legends grew out of the need to explain the world and were reflections of personal and cultural ideologies. These ideas morphed overtime, and so the legends sometimes conflict with each other and they definitely adapted repeatedly over the several thousand years that Greece grew and changed as a region. I am here telling stories, and because my degree is in storytelling and not greek history, I will tend to focus more on theme and meaning than on nailing down exact facts, especially when it comes to the myths that changed to adapt to cultural changes and new hierarchies.
The origin of Greek Mythology begins, not with the Gods, but with their Grandmother. Yes, the Pantheon family tree is incredibly complex, but basically, Gaia, the OG, AKA Mother Earth was born out of the endless void of nothingness. Eros, or love, emerged after her. Gaia produced Oranos or Uranus, the primordial male deity of the sky, and Okeanos, the deity of the water. Along with Gaia, and Eros, Chaos also produced Erebus, the darkness of death, and Nyx the darkness of night.
Gaia the primordial female deity of earth bore a generation of titans, primarily with Oranos. These titans were figures of immense power. Unlike later Christian deities, the titans were extremely flawed, and fell victim to the classic flaws of the flesh. Uranus, afraid of his children’s power, forced all twelve of them to stay in the womb of their mother. But Gaia, hurting physically, and not impressed with this nonsense, castrated Ouranos with the assistance of her son Cronus. As Ouranos' genitals fell to earth they created nymphs, giants, eyranies, and the goddess Aphrodite. Gaia whispered to Cronus a prophecy that he and his siblings would overthrow their father. And they did. Cronus grew up to be nearly as strong and just as power-hungry as his father. He freed his siblings and led them in a successful revolution against their father.
In order to ensure that Gaia and Ouranos would never be together again, creating more titans, the titan Atlas was forced by Cronus to keep them apart, physically separating the earth and the sky with his body for the rest of eternity.
This would be only the first revolution amongst the higher beings. Homer wrote, “At the beginning, there was Chaos.” And he was right, not only in what existed before earth, but in what came after. Cronus lived with the same fears as his father. Cronus’ wife Rhea also resented Cronus’s destruction of their children, and like her mother Gaia before her, Rhea hid her child Zeus on the island of Crete, raised the the titaness Metis. Metis also became Zeus’s first wife and was a goddess of wisdom, prudence and deep thought. At Zeus’s birth, Rhea instead fed Cronus a rock, which speaks not too well of this deity’s intellect. It was Zeus who ultimately freed his 5 siblings from the belly of their father. Together, the first of the Greek Gods overthrew the titans, throwing Cronus and his allies into Tarturus, the deepest, darkest, unending pit in Erebus, the underworld.
Zeus, king and god of the sky married his older sister Hera, and the two of them ruled the Gods and humanity. But Zeus has more than just a wandering eye. His affairs with titans, goddesses, nymphs, and human women caused a myriad of problems and drama for the world and for his marriage. Poseidon, ruler of the water married the titaness Amphitrite, and Hades, the God of the underworld later married Persephone. Zeus, Poseidon, and Hades occasionally vied for power, and fathered many of the heroes of Greek mythology. The brothers were worshiped for providing the balance and stability needed for humanity to prosper, but in the legends fought recklessly, which devastated humanity as their fights caused natural disasters, famine, and plague.
The three original Goddesses of the Pantheon, Hera, Demeter and Hestia seem to be the real providers of the balance and prosperity enjoyed by humanity, and somehow, peace and prosperity continued, much of the time, both on earth and on Olympus.
Slowly other Gods were added to the Pantheon. Aphrodite, Goddess of love, rose from the sea, and ascended to Olympus to claim her place among the all-powerful. Athena burst from Zeus’s head, the child of an affair with a titan, and became the Goddess of war and strategy. Ares, was born of Zeus and Hera, and became the God of War and violence. Hephaestus, the child of Hera, and possibly Zeus begrudgingly became the God of fire and crafts. Then, of course, we have Hermes, son of Zeus and the nymph Maia, daughter of the Titan Atlas, Maia hid herself and her child from Hera’s wrath until the very young and crafty Hermes forced the pantheon to pay attention to him and accept him as one of their own. Apollo and Artemis, twins and the god and goddess of the sun and moon respectively, were the children of Zeus and the Titan Leto.
When Dionysus, God of wine, fertility and madness, arrived on the scene, he forced Hestia out of the 12 pantheon seats, taking the place of the last of the 12 seats of power and judgement in the Greek Pantheon.
So where do people and humanity figure into all of this? Well, the Titan Prometheus formed the first man from clay. Athena, goddess of wisdom breathed life into the man, and he became alive. Qualities of safety, speed, warmth and natural protection had already been given to the other creatures of earth, so Prometheus gave the man fire. This angered Zeus, who did not like the man and wanted to keep the secret of fire to the Gods. After some back-and-forth shenanigans, Zeus punished Prometheus by chaining the immortal titan to a rock, where vultures would eat his insides each day and they would regenerate each night. Zeus punished the man by creating the first woman, Pandora. Zeus then gave Pandora a sealed pot as a wedding gift, now known as Pandora’s Box. Zeus, knowing the curiosity of the human mind, commanded Pandora to never open the gift, and waited in anticipation for Pandora to cause the downfall of humanity. But that’s a story for another day.
The men women and children of ancient Greece worshipped the pantheon of gods by building temples and giving sacrifices of food and comfort, and prayer. The God were the explanation for prosperity and devastation, as well as the detritus of the day-to-day. Goddesses were worshipped for fertility and health, Gods for strength and prosperity. And the people of the Greek region did in fact, prosper. They traded amongst each other, and shared common religion and ideologies. Just like the Gods they worshiped, the people of Ancient Greece fought amongst themselves, but the countries united as fierce allies against all external enemies, proving an almost almost as undefeatable as the Gods they prayed to.
The Trojan war is a fascinating piece of history. For so long, western civilization heralded the myth, until a few people began to believe it was possible, and started the long, seemingly impossible process of uncovering the ancient city of Troy, and accepting a new possible reality. That’s why I love mythology. People like Helen of Troy or Mulan very well may have existed. Or perhaps they didn’t, but the power of their stories can inspire nations and individuals. I choose to believe in the power of these stories, because that power is real, regardless of their factuality.
Each episode Of Witches and Women will end with a charm or spell, either from history, or something you can use today to improve your life. Today’s magical charm is from history, and it is… the apple. Not only did myths and fairytales of Europe write about the dangers of the apple, even in ancient Greece the Apple was a mystical symbol. In Greece, the apple was a mystical symbol of passionate love. Both apples and pomegranates were used in all sorts of erotic spells. So, to use apples in the ancient greek sense, share an apple with someone special today, as they are full of fiber, vitamins, natural sugars, and maybe... a little bit of passion.
Thank you for listening today. Please leave us a review on Google Play or Apple Podcasts! Check out our salty merch in the shop, and the beautiful art in Grimoire Gallery, and to subscribe to The Oracle, our upcoming newsletter, below.
Stay fierce, witches.
Of Witches and Women is brought to you by SHH Media, LLC
SOURCES
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trojan_War
https://www.historyonthenet.com/ancient-greece-timeline
https://www.ancient.eu/Mycenaean_Civilization/
https://www.greekmyths-greekmythology.com/c/greek-myths/
https://www.ancient-origins.net/human-origins-folklore/greek-mythology-and-human-origins-0064