Missing Witches - October 14, 2025


WF Liv Albert of Let's Talk About Myths, Baby：  I'm An Atheist Witch Who Talks To The Ancient Sources

WF Dr. Cyndi Brannen - Hekate The F＊CK Out Of It MW Killing Joke - We Must Dream Of Promised Lands

Episode Stats


Length

51 minutes

Words per minute

182.05

Word count

9,374

Sentence count

126

Harmful content

Misogyny

29

sentences flagged

Toxicity

57

sentences flagged

Hate speech

32

sentences flagged


Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.000 The Missing Witches Coven is trans-inclusive, anti-racist, feminist as hell, and welcoming
00:00:05.460 to men and all people.
00:00:08.460 We are pro-science, anti-ableist, and utterly full of love and awe.
00:00:14.500 If you've been searching for a community that believes resistance is sacred and re-enchantment
00:00:19.940 is necessary, that feminism is a spell we're still weaving all together, that care is radical,
00:00:26.780 that the future depends on our collective imagination, 0.97
00:00:31.200 you found us.
00:00:32.680 We're always learning from each other.
00:00:35.940 We'd be lucky to get to learn from you, too.
00:00:38.740 Whether you claim the word witch or not,
00:00:41.020 if you're hungry for this work, this is your circle.
00:00:44.680 Join us at missingwitches.com. 1.00
00:00:46.800 You aren't being a proper woman, therefore you must be a witch. 1.00
00:00:49.880 Be a witch. 1.00
00:00:51.480 Be a witch. 1.00
00:00:53.380 You must be a witch.
00:00:54.780 i'm really so excited i'm excited it was one of those days where i was like if i wasn't so 0.88
00:01:00.320 confident about this conversation i would feel differently my workload is unhinged at this
00:01:04.040 moment but i know this will be fun we're a couple canadians vaguely from montreal and talking about 0.98
00:01:09.480 witches so i'm not worried yeah let's fuck with the patriarchy we're gonna share this conversation 0.78
00:01:14.600 on both our podcast streams so we're in the bend in the venn diagram right now but we do a thing 0.99
00:01:21.600 on our podcast. This quote by Alan Watts is really important to us. You're under no obligation to be
00:01:26.200 the person you were five minutes ago. And so we often reintroduce ourselves, allowing ourselves
00:01:31.200 to kind of be reinvented with the times and the circumstances. I mean, today I live and I'm
00:01:39.300 overwhelmed. That's unfortunately the only person I've been for the last few weeks. That type of
00:01:45.040 good will be good in the long run but right now does my brain have an off switch kind of
00:01:52.360 overwhelmed but yeah yeah what about you I don't know that's a fun way of doing things and my brain
00:01:57.940 does not immediately know how to reply yeah no that's great I mean your audience doesn't need
00:02:03.900 you to re-state that you're the creator and host of Let's Talk About Miss Baby or the books you've
00:02:11.640 written or that you're the founder of the memory collective i really appreciate the honesty of the
00:02:18.680 overwhelm i feel that too uh i'm marisa dickens from the missing witches podcast what are the
00:02:25.060 words for what i am i told live right before we got on the call i am like a year and a bit into
00:02:29.900 cancer treatment i am in remission i'm starting a new clinical trial because i have this aggressive
00:02:35.940 of cancer but I'm healthy and fine and like home and swimming in my lake and hanging out with my 0.98
00:02:42.540 kid I'm so excited to write about witches and talk about witchcraft and feminism and fucking 0.75
00:02:50.680 with the patriarchy but yeah my brain is in all places at all times yeah that's why we do this as 0.91
00:02:59.620 a team yay that's why we're a team i was just talking with some other witches about activism
00:03:07.400 these days and how you sort of have to form into like transformer style groups when you're
00:03:15.000 advocating on the left these days like put aside some of the ways that they try to divide us to get
00:03:21.000 action done we have to be like power rangers a little bit i love that you phrase it that way
00:03:28.320 because that is what I'm trying to do with the Memory Collective.
00:03:32.640 It's very slow moving because I decided I had to create this community
00:03:37.100 and network of people who were all trying to share history 0.99
00:03:40.460 from this viewpoint of giving a shit. 0.98
00:03:43.120 I have more detailed and intellectual sounding details, 0.99
00:03:46.540 but like, it's about that.
00:03:48.380 It's one of those things where, yeah, it's like,
00:03:49.660 especially right now, trying to keep people connected
00:03:52.000 in this world where social media and things are less and less safe every day.
00:03:56.480 Like, it's such a wild thing.
00:03:57.880 But I feel like it's a little bit of like a transformer.
00:04:00.940 It's me being like, I don't know.
00:04:01.980 I'm going to try to find a way of pulling us all together to do this thing.
00:04:05.160 I don't know how it's going to work.
00:04:06.300 I don't know what I'm doing.
00:04:07.460 But I also think that someone has to do it.
00:04:09.640 So I'm going to try.
00:04:10.540 It's one of the first episodes I listened to because I wasn't like a long time listener.
00:04:14.840 Somehow I missed it, which is, you know, shame on me.
00:04:17.860 But my kid, like a couple months ago was like, I need to learn of all the gods.
00:04:24.240 Everyone has a moment in their lives when I think they can reach that point.
00:04:27.880 and so we went looking for podcasts and I found yours the first one I listened to I was walking
00:04:32.180 to the hospital and it was you talking about the memory collective you were talking about this idea
00:04:38.780 that she's the mother of the muses and this idea of a different way of doing history that when we
00:04:44.320 look at these stories that we have to kind of inhabit them or inhabit a different reality to
00:04:49.360 see oppressed people and especially women in the way that they lived can you talk more about how
00:04:55.540 we even do that kind of history it's funny because i actually think witches are a perfect example
00:05:00.460 of how this functions particularly in ancient greek mythology greek mythology is the thing i
00:05:05.900 know well the wider ancient mediterranean history i'm decent enough at but it typically comes from
00:05:10.440 my conversations whereas like the mythology lives in my brain in this way and i say mythology but
00:05:16.160 at this point it's really so much bigger than that and that's where that this idea of like how
00:05:21.820 we interpret history comes in because i think the number one thing we all are taught particularly in
00:05:28.480 north america is that history is just this solid state thing this is what happened this is how it
00:05:36.000 happened and i'm sure it's more broadly true of like history in general but particularly when it
00:05:41.000 comes to ancient greek history and greek mythology like that is only this tiny piece of the puzzle
00:05:47.080 because history is not this like finite thing when it comes to greek sources all that we have
00:05:53.760 we have because of so many different reasons most of them are men we know all of these stories from
00:06:03.360 greek mythology not because these were all of the stories that were told in the ancient world to
00:06:08.460 everyone and in which everyone kind of inhabited these realms but we know them because this
00:06:15.260 particular version got written down by a man and then maybe two to three hundred probably way more
00:06:22.500 men over the course of millennia determined that thing was worth preserving except for very rare
00:06:29.660 cases of preservation we don't actually have the ancient sources from the ancient world like
00:06:35.780 the Iliad and the Odyssey that we have I think in terms of the actual text the physical text that
00:06:41.280 survives is maybe a thousand years old. I don't know exactly, but it's a good thousand years
00:06:47.220 after the ancient Greeks. Even that version was copied down by so many other people for it to
00:06:51.660 survive, except for very rare cases of weird instances of papyri surviving. Other than that,
00:06:56.820 all of the stuff we have is chosen to be preserved for various reasons. There are rare cases where
00:07:02.100 that's not true. One of my favorites is that we only have three surviving playwrights from ancient
00:07:07.700 Greece, we know there were hundreds. They were putting on these plays every year. There were
00:07:12.620 people aspiring to be playwrights, those who were getting into the big festivals. There would be
00:07:16.580 thousands of plays, hundreds of playwrights, but only the plays of three guys survive today.
00:07:24.700 Their work primarily survives because they were considered to be the best. Their works were put
00:07:29.780 in schools, particularly Byzantine schools, and later their works got preserved because there
00:07:35.440 were like these school kids in 600 700 ce reading these texts and getting copied down by different
00:07:42.360 scribes and monks at some point christians decided what was and was not okay but even well before the
00:07:47.820 christians the greeks were very patriarchal it was like long before and and so like those three
00:07:52.900 playwrights their works survive and we have i think it's something like it's something under 10
00:07:57.760 plays from aeschylus and sophocles because they were taught in schools and we have that same
00:08:02.700 number four Euripides because they were taught in schools we also have an additional 10 plays
00:08:07.280 from Euripides that we don't have from other playwrights and that is purely because one
00:08:12.960 Byzantine collector's scroll that was in alphabetical order and happened to be one
00:08:18.360 scroll out of like a complete Euripides set that would have been multiple scrolls all again in this
00:08:23.060 alphabetical order one scroll managed to survive through purely random things happening over time
00:08:29.300 So we have like 10 Euripides plays that survive not because they were the best or read in
00:08:33.940 schools or all of the various men decided that they were worth preserving for humanity.
00:08:38.220 We have them for completely random reasons.
00:08:40.980 And because of that, we have these plays that were considered not as good.
00:08:44.040 And surprise, a lot of them feature like really strong and independent women in this like
00:08:48.160 distinctly fascinating way. 0.99
00:08:49.940 Like the most iconic one of these plays that wouldn't otherwise survive is called The
00:08:54.960 Helen.
00:08:55.240 it's this alternate universe of the trojan war where helen never went to troy the gods put a
00:09:01.600 fake ghost version of her in troy and meanwhile she ended up stranded on egypt for 10 years and
00:09:07.120 it's like all about how she basically saves the day her husband ends up shipwrecked and he's like
00:09:11.860 a big bumbling loser throughout this entire play and helen saves them and escapes from egypt and
00:09:17.080 it's like no one would have wanted that to survive otherwise because it doesn't play into any of the 0.59
00:09:21.960 like big amazing western civilization ideas about what the ancient greeks did it's just like a wacky
00:09:27.240 play where a woman is the one holding everything together there's my example of how history is not
00:09:33.860 inherent at all it's completely subjective and that's you know completely excluding the fact
00:09:38.560 that like for thousands of years it was all these white british men who were reading the classics
00:09:42.520 and no one else they were forming how we think about them and translating them it's only for
00:09:46.520 the last 80 years that women have been actively involved with all of this using their lived
00:09:52.180 experience minds to translate and interpret these things and it's why like we have these translations
00:09:56.760 by women that can be distinctly different in fundamental ways from the men's the biggest
00:10:01.480 example being that in the odyssey there are all these instances of the word women being translated 0.98
00:10:06.220 as sluts or the word dog being translated as bitch and it's like there's all of these things 0.90
00:10:12.380 like related to women that are not in the ancient greek text it was just men deciding that like 0.99
00:10:17.340 that's what they were reading because like oh these women clearly they're sluts even though 0.94
00:10:20.100 the word in ancient greek was like genica which literally to this day still means woman it's 0.98
00:10:24.360 where we at gynecology and that's my ramble oh my god it's so good yeah i mean this is why we
00:10:31.840 started missing witches right that's why it's called that because we're looking for spiritualities
00:10:36.560 histories it's almost like a speculative fiction project right like what are the stories that
00:10:41.640 did exist or could have existed if there hadn't been thousands of years of oppression and if
00:10:47.020 the use of misogyny hadn't been such a rampant tool in the colonial project and in the project
00:10:54.040 of empire so to try to like find those traces can you give some examples of witches in greek
00:11:02.680 mythology and when we first were emailing each other about this you were like surprise it's
00:11:07.640 super misogynist the way the story gets changed i want to hear that through line too yeah so
00:11:13.400 because that that is this like yeah very clear example to me like so the the most famous witch
00:11:19.920 or one of two most famous witches of greek mythology is cersei who's in the odyssey you
00:11:25.260 know one of the oldest surviving works of quote-unquote western literature in the odyssey
00:11:29.320 she uses a potion to transform all of these men into pigs she lives on this island that is basically
00:11:36.340 only populated by women and when these men arrive they find all of these like wild animals that are 0.92
00:11:43.460 clearly tame like she lives on this island with like bears and wolves that don't attack anyone 0.67
00:11:48.160 and lions and wolves not bears I always want it to be bears lions and wolves that don't attack
00:11:53.240 anyone and then these guys show up and she's so pretty and she's singing so they're like oh we
00:11:58.080 gotta go see her and they go inside and she's like oh welcome and she taps them on the head
00:12:01.540 and they all turn into pigs part of the story is them transforming back and it's a whole thing but
00:12:06.020 we have this really strong woman who lives on an island with only other women they're said to be
00:12:11.400 herd nymphs which there's a lot going on with that word but there's all these other like semi-divine 1.00
00:12:16.040 women living with her and she has all these transformation skills she uses them against men
00:12:20.100 and it leaves open this question of like are all of the wolves and the lions on her island men are
00:12:25.380 all the animals on her island men and at the very beginning Odysseus kills this stag that's just
00:12:31.040 like standing there and it doesn't run he's like oh great we have some food to eat but then
00:12:35.200 you very quickly are supposed to question like well was that once a guy we are told their minds
00:12:40.700 are the same but their bodies are these animals so it's just very cool and the other famous witch
00:12:46.360 is Medea right whose story there's levels of its age the most famous version is considerably later
00:12:53.900 a few hundred years that's Euripides because he actually was interested in women which is why we
00:12:58.140 love that his plays survive he he was considered a misogynist in the ancient world because he wrote
00:13:03.040 women who were both good and bad which is my favorite like claim for misogyny he literally
00:13:08.160 just wrote realistic women and the ancient greek men were like he hates them and women were like i
00:13:12.860 mean no he's just like thinks that we're people weird and so yeah medea is a whole other question 0.55
00:13:19.060 but she does these terrible things she famously kills her children she kills her brother all of 0.52
00:13:23.340 this is for a man there's so much story behind it which i won't get into but she does all of
00:13:28.220 these terrible things simultaneously in almost every source that talks about her she is seen as
00:13:32.940 this like very righteous like even in Euripides's play which is the version where she kills her
00:13:38.680 children she goes on these like speech after speech where he convinces you to understand
00:13:44.080 where she's coming from you finish that play and you're like you did a terrible thing you shouldn't
00:13:48.300 have done that it's awful and also I see where you were coming from like why you thought that
00:13:54.060 that was your only option and so there's just like this very these these understandable sympathetic
00:14:00.380 characters even when they are doing terrible things or you know in the case of Cersei less
00:14:07.120 murder but still all of this non-consensual transformation you know so we have these
00:14:12.220 characters and then there's the very famous witch goddess Hecate who has very few stories about her
00:14:18.120 but is a perpetual incredible badass those are the three evident witches Helen does some witchcraft
00:14:26.140 too but helen is meant to be incredibly beautiful very or like she's just incredible in kind of 0.77
00:14:34.080 every way not just looks but she is really smart and in the odyssey we get this version of her
00:14:38.880 where like she's come home from the war that was fought for her she's back with her husband all is
00:14:44.160 seemingly forgiven and she's suddenly really good at witchcraft and she brews this potion that
00:14:49.740 calms everyone down and she's like this very calming presence and generally just this fascinating
00:14:56.220 character and like that's kind of how witches are seen in ancient Greece you get the sense that it's
00:15:01.720 a very old concept of women and their understanding of herbs the brewing of potion in ancient Greece
00:15:11.640 is called pharmakon it's literally where we get the word pharmacy and that that was like understood 0.97
00:15:16.700 as magic. Pharmacon is like, that's magic. Pharmakis is a witch. They didn't really have
00:15:21.600 any, like, it really is meant to be masculinized despite all the women, you know, being the ones 0.99
00:15:26.220 who do that. And then you get into Rome and Rome was like, Greece tried to be an empire and they
00:15:33.900 weren't very good at it. They did a lot of colonization, but we don't have a lot of examples
00:15:37.520 of them doing really violent colonization. It tends to be them going in and being like, okay,
00:15:40.960 well, we're here now, but you can keep doing whatever you're doing. We're just going to bring
00:15:45.140 our religion in and we'll kind of like mix them all together and everyone will kind of be okay
00:15:48.760 they were not great at empire and rome came in and they were like we're really good at empire
00:15:54.080 we also are so much more virulently misogynist and like they're the romans their witches are 0.91
00:16:01.480 like these horrific caricatures of old wrinkled hags placing love spells on unsuspecting men and 0.90
00:16:08.800 every witch in roman mythology is some form of this they're these like scary crones like all
00:16:18.060 old and rickety and just they want to like bring these young men into their web and all of this
00:16:24.140 like it's just it like oozes misogyny in this way that is like so different from the greek and i'm 0.98
00:16:31.940 sure people have done interesting arguments on what is going on there but to my mind it's just 0.64
00:16:36.280 a really obvious indication of like the kind of difference culturally very much like cultural
00:16:41.740 differences but also like time period differences because particularly these greek characters are
00:16:46.460 coming from this like very early time before before almost before the written language of
00:16:53.860 the greeks right because the odyssey was like really on that line of like when they're developing
00:16:58.160 their alphabet to write things down and so these characters are almost older than a level of
00:17:04.100 misogyny that like then comes in because there are lots of other characters in greek myth that
00:17:09.380 are like so inherent of the misogyny and patriarchy that is indicative of ancient greece
00:17:15.260 but particularly the witches tend not to be the greeks were way more concerned about other 0.87
00:17:20.220 quote-unquote scary women they tended to be more monstrous in nature like this impossible to 1.00
00:17:26.500 understand monstrous woman i conceptualize it because the greeks were afraid of women who could 1.00
00:17:32.900 say no or stop them from assaulting them the romans were like no no we're afraid of women who 1.00
00:17:40.060 will like trick us into like their you know their seductive web and then steal our money or whatever 1.00
00:17:46.820 whereas like yeah i don't know that sort of that went took my adhd brain in circles to the point
00:17:53.340 where i talked myself into being unsure what i was saying but like they just we have these like 1.00
00:17:57.540 really interesting ideas the greeks were terrible to women in other ways but their witches were
00:18:03.040 amazing and the romans came in and they were like we're afraid of women who think they're
00:18:06.100 practicing medicine like the men who did any kind of medicinal work were called medica and the women
00:18:13.760 were called witches women could be doing the same thing medically but they were witches and the men
00:18:18.580 were doctors and i have episodes on my show because i have a friend who's like an expert in
00:18:24.260 ancient women's medicine which is like some of the darkest and most incredible conversations 0.97
00:18:28.860 I've had on the show but yeah it's all about how afraid they are of women it's just various forms
00:18:33.420 of being afraid of the overall idea of women and you see it happen again in these cycles that have 0.53
00:18:43.860 to do with power and capital and land we've had guests on our show trace the depiction of women's
00:18:51.360 bodies especially even around breastfeeding and then it becoming like the witch's tit and like
00:18:57.960 the woman's body becomes like like scary and emaciated and all of those associations get tied 0.87
00:19:04.860 to her right around the sort of betrayal of the common land and the enclosure prospects 0.95
00:19:13.280 the colonial powers are taking common land and saying you can't have it people that are
00:19:18.040 able to resist that are like women who've managed to own a little bit of land and are farming on 0.95
00:19:23.100 this common land and they don't have young kids anymore and they're like fuck no they start to 0.89
00:19:27.660 resist and suddenly you know careers that they were able to have as brewers are suddenly and 0.94
00:19:33.820 the brewers would wear the pointy hats and would have a cat all of this stuff suddenly suddenly
00:19:37.940 suddenly this is the imagery of witchcraft right I want to go back to Circe because there's so much
00:19:45.940 that I love about her. And there was a couple pieces that you dropped in that I want to pick
00:19:50.720 up on. I want to talk more about nymphs and her relationship with land and her relationship with
00:19:58.020 plants. You had an episode recently that I think was a flashback episode, but that got me so
00:20:03.040 excited thinking about the archaeological record of plants and sacred groves and the way that
00:20:09.300 nymphs get characterized. Let's get into it. Yeah. So in Greek mythology, when we use the word
00:20:15.320 nymph we mean these female deities who are like lesser deities they tend to be daughters of
00:20:24.720 rivers or the sea things like that so these bodies of water or more natural things it's a bit like
00:20:32.680 so there are nymphs of the water who are very clearly like the daughters of either these big
00:20:37.580 rivers or the sea itself or oceanus is the word for a big river so it's kind of confusing which
00:20:45.300 is why i'm not using the word ocean because ocean is a freshwater river just to throw everyone off
00:20:49.840 but they are all of these daughters or there are nymphs associated with every type of tree
00:20:54.460 or the mountains or every time there's a stream there's a nymph for that stream and so they seem
00:21:00.980 to be this quite nice idea like these women associated with the natural world very specifically
00:21:06.000 sometimes they are almost the trees or they're really connected with this natural world and so 0.96
00:21:11.440 i think you can see a lot of like the reminiscent or the remains of of like an earlier world right
00:21:19.200 i could talk for hours about the evidence of an earlier more i don't know want to say overtly
00:21:26.060 matriarchal society but one where there was at least like a much stronger sense of egalitarianism
00:21:32.040 where gender was not this enormous divide you can see like evidence of that and i think all of these 1.00
00:21:37.280 goddesses of natural world elements are reminiscent of that like how mother earth gaia is earth even
00:21:43.660 in greek myth the women are clearly meant to be the goddesses of life in various ways that said
00:21:49.720 the stories that we have of the nymphs are almost exclusively stories of these nymphs getting
00:21:58.460 assaulted or defiled in one way or another by gods and other men. That is most of the stories.
00:22:07.520 Of course, when it comes to ancient Greek myth, we have to remember that the stories we have are
00:22:11.360 just the ones that we have, but also the stories they wrote weren't like stories that we write.
00:22:16.440 They weren't meant to just entertain. They served a purpose, right? They're sort of
00:22:20.800 this cultural identity in a story. What's really going on is these stories of either gods merging
00:22:27.500 with this body of water or this river or whatever right like the women's bodies are used as this
00:22:33.680 sort of vessel for something else in the story that is primarily what happens with nymphs very
00:22:40.100 specifically that tends to be the purpose that they serve in the stories now the big issue for
00:22:46.760 me and the place where my knowledge cuts off this is actually something that I think about all of
00:22:52.680 the time if I had more time I would figure out someone who has done more work on this and
00:22:57.140 read all about it but one thing i learned in the process of actually writing the medusa book that
00:23:02.080 i was talking about in that episode is that the word nymph simultaneously meant young bride
00:23:09.520 so the fact that we refer to all of these characters as nymphs like in ancient greek it
00:23:19.400 did refer to them but it also referred to young brides mortal or otherwise and so that's the thing
00:23:26.520 i think is like literally never mentioned when we think about these nymphs we just think of them as
00:23:32.180 characters but if you look more at the etymology of the word they are called that because of what
00:23:39.980 i was saying about the stories functioning as this way of these women serving as vessels but
00:23:46.300 like in that kind of way that these women are serving a purpose specifically specifically
00:23:51.520 around they're really specifically tying to the gods actions like it's not you know it's not like
00:24:00.800 oh they just happen to be called nymphs and this is what happens to them there has to be some
00:24:04.560 connection to the fact that all of them serve as just these bodies for the gods to do other things
00:24:10.900 with and the word is exactly the same as young bride and it's that idea of bride being before
00:24:18.840 and which is very important is that the concept of virgin in greek mythology and ancient greece
00:24:25.740 more broadly meant unmarried so parthenos like is the word for virgin that's where we get parthenon
00:24:32.340 because it's for the virgin goddess athena virgin didn't have anything to do with whether or not
00:24:36.200 they had actually been penetrated like there are there's lots to say about that because the ancient
00:24:40.220 greeks were also like deeply obsessed with penetration um but that yeah virgin meant
00:24:45.620 unmarried and childless really specifically so it was really all about the body's like quote
00:24:50.460 purpose to the men we always see like artemis and her nymphs are all virgins that's used all the
00:24:56.620 time right but what it is is they are unmarried and childless and to me there's that connection
00:25:01.260 being made that you know all of these goddesses be they cersei or artemis these goddesses that
00:25:05.920 hang out with nymphs they are always virgin goddesses they are characters that exist to be
00:25:11.980 and I'm going to use this word intentionally, but it's gross, plucked by gods, by men, all of these
00:25:16.580 things. And so the thing about Cersei that makes it a little harder is that so much of what we
00:25:22.680 conceptualize about her now is from stories that span a good thousand years. We have to remember
00:25:30.280 that nymphomaniac comes from the word nymph in one way or another, like be it young bride or
00:25:35.760 these women that were made to be quote unquote defiled. It's so gross. But yeah, Cersei is hard 0.98
00:25:41.180 because she as a character exists primarily in the odyssey almost exclusively in the odyssey
00:25:48.300 she doesn't really feature into later sources until we're talking like six or seven hundred
00:25:54.800 years down the line and then people start put like or or we have these stories that start
00:26:00.680 existing about her that gives her all of these other aspects particularly when it comes to nymphs
00:26:06.120 I'm trying to recall if they use the word nymph specifically to talk about the women
00:26:10.580 around her on her island or whether they are just servant women.
00:26:14.640 It's tough to say.
00:26:15.720 If they use that word, which one did they mean?
00:26:17.820 Did they mean a young unmarried woman?
00:26:20.260 They could mean a woman of marriageable age who is living freely on Cersei's island.
00:26:24.920 Or they could mean these goddesses of various things.
00:26:28.620 But because these women don't have trees to be explicitly associated with or rivers or
00:26:33.960 any like definable natural element like I think it's likely that they're also just meant to be 0.99
00:26:38.960 like these young women of marriageable age are not marrying great good for them there's a lot
00:26:42.680 of questions about Artemis with that too there's a lot going on I was gonna ask about Artemis as
00:26:46.180 well since you bring her up I'll interrupt but because I can ramble forever is there also a
00:26:50.080 pre-layer where we can imagine these are stories of places where women went to be safe where women
00:26:59.420 went to be together where women went to practice or to see them as coming in and taking on a piece
00:27:06.100 of that knowledge that Circe has in the pharmacon of the plants and representing that sort of
00:27:10.800 channeled spirit relationship with each of those plants I just want to add that the other piece I
00:27:16.040 love about Circe is that Penelope comes and lives with Circe at the end in some versions not really
00:27:24.900 like no i love that oh see it's funny because i actually hate that version so much because what
00:27:31.800 it comes with the only way that cersei and penelope meet is from this fragment that probably
00:27:37.400 wasn't anything real i actually jokingly refer to it on the show as like that it doesn't exist
00:27:42.120 my rule is that this doesn't exist it's called the telegamy and it's this idea that there was
00:27:46.940 a lost epic it probably never existed there's this idea that the only way they could have met
00:27:53.960 is that Cersei had a son by Telemachus or by Odysseus which I hate because I mean also I
00:28:02.800 think she's better than having children that's a me issue but yeah so she has the son by Odysseus
00:28:08.060 named Telegonus and when Telegonus is grown up he goes looking for his father and lands on Ithaca
00:28:14.940 and accidentally kills Odysseus the end of that story and the only way that Penelope and Cersei
00:28:20.080 meet also involves Penelope marrying Teleganus and Circe marrying Telemachus. Penelope's son
00:28:27.420 by Odysseus. So as you can see, it's about the ickiest thing you could possibly imagine.
00:28:32.160 So in terms of sources, I do not ascribe to them ever meetings. But I understand that desire. To
00:28:39.080 me, there's a lot that I come at because I am so obsessed with the ancient sources. And so I tend
00:28:45.040 to bring in a lot of context to ruin people's otherwise nice ideas yeah because we're talking
00:28:49.980 about a period where a lot of the stories about Cersei like there's also this story that suggests
00:28:55.040 that like she transformed Scylla into this like monstrous creature right this all shows up in
00:29:00.920 the Madeline Miller yes novel right yeah and I believe that mostly comes from Ovid unless I'm
00:29:07.700 totally wrong but regardless it's very late sourcing that explains that and that doesn't
00:29:12.480 mean that it wasn't a concept that existed back when the odyssey was being written but it's also
00:29:18.420 not conclusive i don't think that she has any connection to skilla in that way because like
00:29:24.220 i think that it would come up in the odyssey and there's zero indication that she had anything to
00:29:29.080 do with skilla her transformation i don't like the idea i really take issue with any time a story
00:29:34.560 involves a quote-unquote monstrous female being turned into that monster but she was once the
00:29:42.460 pretty mortal like i hate all of that because these monstrous women exist as signs that the
00:29:50.560 men feared women's power and women's independence and so to me they are these monsters because that 0.95
00:29:57.460 is what the men were afraid of i really hate when we make them sympathetically oh she was once pretty
00:30:02.680 but then transformed it's the same with medusa has those tinges of misogyny where you think you're
00:30:09.040 seeing women's empowerment but it's not actually like what that is is like kind of making it so 0.83
00:30:14.340 that because all of these monsters tend to be that like men couldn't have sex with them and so they 0.95
00:30:18.840 turned them into these monstrous ideas that's why like medusa is a monster because she she literally
00:30:24.240 could defend herself against a man and so they had to make her into the scariest concept imaginable
00:30:28.820 and and so like i don't know i i think i just prefer monsters because of that because to me 0.95
00:30:33.780 they represent this fear and skill is like also a bitch in the best way like she's literally a 0.83
00:30:38.780 female dog which was an insult but like it's the cersei and the nymphs and the artemis and the 0.92
00:30:44.580 nymphs i think what they are is reminiscent of this because it's hard because we can't necessarily
00:30:49.760 say that they're like you know this this example of like what you were saying of like women getting
00:30:54.640 to kind of escape live with cersei learn from her like i don't think we can say that they're
00:30:59.440 a direct representation of that at all, but I think they are kind of like the monsters. They
00:31:04.920 are like a shadow of something else that was going on, whether that was women living free
00:31:10.720 lives or something else. I have this running theory that the women, particularly in ancient 0.81
00:31:17.300 Athens, were just having a queer old time together because, like I said, the ancient Greeks were
00:31:24.040 obsessed with penetration. To them, that's the only thing that ever mattered. They also locked
00:31:28.660 women away because they were afraid of paternity particularly in Athens the women were just hanging 0.99
00:31:33.520 out with each other like weaving I think you were all just having a great time living lives away
00:31:37.260 from men locked in your house but with others I imagine they didn't even conceptualize that women 0.99
00:31:41.060 could have sex with each other because they're so fucking obsessed with penetration that they're 0.99
00:31:44.580 like oh no these ladies well they're just being innocent behind closed doors together they they 0.99
00:31:49.340 couldn't they couldn't yeah and so that's also what's going on with stories like Circe and
00:31:55.680 artemis where it's this imagined world for men to write about why women would be away from men or
00:32:03.780 yeah like existing without them there's there's also a story of the island of lemnos where there
00:32:11.240 was like supposed to be a time when they were cursed in various ways and essentially the women
00:32:17.560 all killed the men and it's because the men were all sneaking off to a different land and like
00:32:21.620 sleeping with other women over there and then the women found out but then there's also this story 0.73
00:32:26.180 about like how after they killed all the men the gods made them like ridiculously smelly so that 0.94
00:32:31.820 no one would ever want to go near them again and all this island ruled by women and all of the men 0.97
00:32:36.740 were killed except this one woman she wanted to save a man so they expelled her and they're stinky 1.00
00:32:42.560 and disgusting because they don't want to fuck us yes i'm interested in how you come out i guess 0.99
00:32:50.220 i would love to know more about your knowledge of ancient witches my problem is that i am too deep 0.98
00:32:54.900 in the ancient sources and so i am actively also wanting to hear from people who don't exist in
00:32:59.500 this realm where they're like well that was 700 years apart so i don't think we can reasonably
00:33:03.480 say that that's canon which is how i am with so many things which is like all of the cersei stuff
00:33:07.840 and everything is like we're talking about a 700 year gap in time of like this stuff being
00:33:14.140 developed and filled out it's like you know us saying that like something in shakespeare fully
00:33:18.660 applies to now or something we tend to smush all of ancient Greece into this one singular concept
00:33:23.640 but the Odyssey was like from the time that the Odyssey was like put down onto paper but it had
00:33:28.340 probably been formed in whatever way for a couple hundred years before that we're still talking like
00:33:33.020 seven or eight hundred years between that and like Ovid or Pseudo-Apollodorus who tends to give us
00:33:38.040 these like extra details about certain characters like this and he again like is coming 700 years
00:33:42.540 later and he could be writing about an existing detail or he could not be that started as a
00:33:47.480 question for you. And then my ADHD turned it into another ramble. So I apologize. But like,
00:33:51.420 do you have other I don't know? I'll tell you. Yeah, well, I'll tell you. I'll tell you the one
00:33:56.260 thing that comes to mind. And it's an episode that will come out in this same season as this
00:34:01.640 conversation. So if you want to hear the actual person talk about the actual thing, you can find
00:34:07.040 her. We have a former professor of psychology, director of research projects, really fascinating
00:34:15.760 thinker who leaves all that behind to become a Hecatean priestess and so she brings those
00:34:21.780 research skills to going to try to understand who Hecate is and was and why she's showing up for her
00:34:29.960 she gets into sort of the hundred epithets of Hecate and the different yeah they mean so many
00:34:37.860 different things yeah and part of what we do is play a little bit like I referenced earlier we do
00:34:44.100 play in that realm of what if it were or what can we use now because we're interested in using
00:34:50.180 witchcraft is like a term for us that summarizes our spirituality activism and art practice it's
00:34:58.800 a talisman word that lets us into those places and so we do sometimes allow ourselves to not be so
00:35:07.100 like what is in the original yeah no but that's the thing and I think there's such a place for
00:35:11.140 that which is why i'm interested in it because i i can't live in that realm my brain won't do it
00:35:14.920 anymore but like there is such a place for that right well and it's really generative and really
00:35:20.460 empowering when you feel like the world is full of white men destroying us for profit so they can 0.99
00:35:30.160 fuck children for the last 50 years that the climate exists or whatever to try to be together 1.00
00:35:35.660 and to feel like at very least calling upon Hecate 1.00
00:35:42.000 and as the spirit of the world
00:35:44.460 or as a spirit of between places,
00:35:47.300 of changes, of land, sea, and sky,
00:35:50.420 that an idea of like, yes,
00:35:52.440 like a tripartite goddess
00:35:53.780 that isn't the way that sort of so easily gets used
00:35:59.780 and maybe it's useful to some people,
00:36:01.240 but of like maiden mother crone,
00:36:03.200 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.
00:36:18.660 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.
00:36:43.000 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.
00:37:04.380 Do you know?
00:37:04.880 Yeah.
00:37:05.780 It's so interesting hearing all of that because I not really consider myself a spiritual person.
00:37:11.960 And I think I might like to be, but I just never am.
00:37:14.760 So much of what you're saying about how you do this is kind of how I feel I work within
00:37:19.920 the ancient sources because breaking them down into that level is what I'm most interested
00:37:25.540 in, right?
00:37:26.040 Like the 700 year gap.
00:37:27.300 Who wrote this and why do we think it's real?
00:37:30.740 To me, that is kind of doing a really similar thing.
00:37:33.860 my piecing apart these things and overloading it with context is my way of understanding or like
00:37:43.180 exploring these ideas of the real women of that world and how they might have existed and i'm not
00:37:51.440 big on theorizing beyond this type of like i i mean i think i can see or i know i can see the
00:37:58.760 evidence of the slow decline of the world of goddesses and the power of goddesses in the
00:38:06.940 theogony which is the oldest form we have of the world of the gods and to me i think that is such
00:38:13.220 a clear indication of the way that the goddesses went from being the big important deities of that
00:38:19.660 culture and this like slow decline and this slow growth of the men until the point where you can
00:38:25.440 it's so generational in that text that you can really see what's happening. And so to me,
00:38:30.980 picking apart those things or saying that Circe and Penelope couldn't have met, that's my way of
00:38:35.880 taking their story back. I would love to use it more in practice in my regular life. But in terms
00:38:41.160 of that kind of connection of going beyond the ancient sources, it's almost what I feel like
00:38:46.460 I'm doing, but in a really different way. Yeah. And I find it really exciting. I love listening
00:38:51.320 to you do it to get right into the material and into the text so that we can see what the actual
00:38:57.800 it's like seeing a shadow or like seeing seeing their outline we can see the gap where they were
00:39:04.820 excised i want to know what you know about current archaeology into hecatean temples into places that
00:39:14.740 are maybe giving us a little bit more of that outline hecate for me i know a lot of the ancient
00:39:20.440 sourcing about her which again is something that like over the thousand years or so like changes
00:39:24.440 so much because she wasn't always a witch goddess like in the oldest everything she is like you're
00:39:30.880 saying like this goddess of all like she's the goddess she's the only one who gets to have
00:39:35.780 dominion over the sky the earth and the sea but the stories never really give her any kind of
00:39:41.160 agency or she doesn't ever actually utilize that control or wield it in any way and so to me she
00:39:48.300 is one of these figures that is very unknown because she was known by the women and therefore
00:39:56.680 we don't have writing about it and she was also a goddess who wasn't regularly depicted and so to
00:40:02.700 me what i'm obsessed or if she was it was in tapestries that we don't have well exactly because 0.78
00:40:07.020 women's arts are decomposable so i'm sure and and like women would have been talking to each other 1.00
00:40:13.140 working with each other they would have been weaving everything all of these things would 1.00
00:40:17.740 have existed and hecate reminds me of hestia in that way which is like hestia is this ridiculously
00:40:23.080 powerful goddess she represented the hearth in every single home which was like the thing that
00:40:27.560 kept you warm that fed your family everything and she is so important in that realm in the home
00:40:33.020 that she's not in any stories none and to me that's so indicative of like this goddess who was
00:40:39.180 so important in a woman's space that no stories exist of her and that's like what hecate feels
00:40:45.620 like to me because they also later they go on to try like there's this i believe it's diodora
00:40:50.720 syclus who goes on to try to make her into a much more evil character this would be like
00:40:55.700 contextually when she was becoming this witch goddess and he's working really late i mean he's
00:41:00.560 like roman period i feel like he's like first century bc or ce like very late and he was doing
00:41:05.600 really weird things overall but he tries to make hecate into this evil witch she's the mother of
00:41:10.400 Medea I think in that story and she was testing poisons on people and all of this like you can
00:41:15.920 almost see how she went from being this all-powerful but almost explicitly benevolent
00:41:21.600 goddess to this witch who was testing out her potions on a man you know and that's the thousand
00:41:28.500 years and so again that's where I go with the context and the sourcing and where I'm like okay
00:41:33.260 well that's what I'm obsessed with I wish I knew more about the archaeology I might have to go look
00:41:37.140 now i have unfortunately been sort of not forced but like a little um to avoid a lot of modern
00:41:48.060 hellenic polytheism because a lot of teenagers have been really ridiculous to me in my dms and
00:41:59.620 so i just tend to like really avoid a lot of the modern spirituality around it not because
00:42:02.800 i don't respect it but because the people who are mad online oh they just get really mad at me for
00:42:07.640 saying that zeus assaulted everyone which he did sorry i respect everyone's desire to worship
00:42:12.800 whoever that's just in the story but somebody once threatened to sick zeus on me and so i just
00:42:18.340 kind of stick away from modern spiritualism but i'm interested in it particularly from people who
00:42:23.580 are coming at it from this kind of space no but zeus did that i'm like i know i'm just reading
00:42:28.240 the sources but this kid's saying he's gonna send zeus to get me so you know but it's yeah it's just
00:42:34.340 been a weird weird space what a weird journey you've been on like you started this podcast
00:42:38.800 and it's sort of massive and you get to talk to all of these academics and bring them together
00:42:45.560 but you're like one of the more deliciously rage-filled feminists in the classical history
00:42:53.880 space that I've found and I think I'm the most rage filled it makes me so happy I hope that it
00:42:59.420 fuels you too oh it really does it really does um yeah it makes me so happy and I'm so excited
00:43:06.700 for the especially the idea of this memory collective I guess I do relate it to the way
00:43:11.960 that I think about these things with this braiding of researchers and voices that are
00:43:17.640 anti-fascist and feminist centering the spaces where we can see the outlines of queer stories
00:43:27.040 and trans stories as well the way that you do it does feel like we're your and I am writing myself
00:43:34.720 into it like that tapestry is happening or that river is happening even if it has to go around
00:43:39.820 horrifying collapse and acts of violence don't you feel like sometimes you're channeling the women
00:43:46.500 yeah no and i think that that is yeah that i think that fuels me a lot channeling the real women but
00:43:52.740 also just like the lost stories or like these women that we know were so powerful and yet we
00:43:58.000 have nothing about them in surviving sources because no one wanted to copy it for the longest
00:44:03.060 time these are people characters and topics that the world of history particularly in academia but
00:44:09.500 like just generally and how we're all meant to consume it like tends to want to just pretend
00:44:14.580 that those things didn't exist because they're not in the sources rather than contextualize
00:44:18.240 why they're not in the sources and that's been the most important thing for me right and then
00:44:22.080 flip side to have to read greek mythology as a young girl in school and for it to just be a given
00:44:31.960 that the constant rape and sexual assault and sex trafficking was just like that's the norm
00:44:39.920 that's culture you can't be annoyed about it you can't put your modern morality onto it that's 0.98
00:44:45.380 just the way it was right but it still is how it fucking is and i am still angry about yeah 0.88
00:44:51.200 like newsflash also i hear from people all the time about oh you can't put your modern morality 0.96
00:44:57.520 onto it it's human morality it's not modern morality it's human dignity that's what i'm
00:45:03.000 putting on it by interpreting that these ways it's equality and dignity and i don't know you
00:45:08.500 want to hear this is related to what you just said but one of the things that will stick with
00:45:13.520 me forever that i heard from i think multiple honestly but i have been sort of reminded over
00:45:20.200 the years by these very intelligent people for sure who are definitely not men no they are and 0.97
00:45:26.160 they're dumbasses but they have said oh you know it wasn't so bad as that because the word rape 0.97
00:45:32.540 originally just meant abduction cool cool yeah yeah do you know do you want to know why do you 0.99
00:45:40.060 know why because they were abducting property they were ruining somebody's property that's right
00:45:45.840 we considered the people property so it was literally just about stealing and breaking
00:45:51.700 that's air quotes for people who are not in the video breaking somebody's property the word just
00:45:56.540 meant abduct because the rape was inherent the person was fully dehumanized yeah exactly yeah
00:46:02.800 it wasn't about them being a person it's like the same people who tell me that the story of medusa
00:46:07.560 being assaulted by poseidon is explicitly only in ovid because hesiod says that they lay together
00:46:14.420 hesiod didn't care whether women were human at all he's like one of the most misogynistic voices
00:46:19.100 in the ancient world even still the way he describes medusa and poseidon like quote unquote
00:46:24.060 laying together because that's always the words they want to use is this word that one also means
00:46:28.500 to pluck out a errant hair now but you know that's meant to be like a romantic sexual encounter
00:46:35.000 despite it being that like the depiction in the poem is like poseidon who's the dark-haired god
00:46:41.980 lay with her in a field of spring flowers like it's so meant to be this juxtaposition of violence
00:46:49.120 on something pretty and then she has children anyway it's basically like all of greek mythology
00:46:54.880 is just a lesson in how men rewrite human interactions to fit their narrative and that's
00:47:03.680 essentially all i want to do with my life um and just just rewrite them right back to finish any
00:47:08.720 thoughts right now but yeah i'm just gonna yeah i mean the thrill right now just in the the wider
00:47:14.300 world of this is the reason I'm so overwhelmed is that I've got a book deal to write a children's
00:47:19.340 version of the Odyssey which is going to be published by the biggest children's publisher
00:47:22.420 in the world and at the very least I'll be able to like kind of you know the Odyssey is for kids
00:47:27.420 it's hard to make it explicitly feminist but at the very least I can make it explicitly not
00:47:31.760 misogynist in this way that's like I don't think has really been done before for children because
00:47:37.340 we're all just meant to believe that Odysseus is this great guy who did great things and did
00:47:41.320 nothing wrong. So, you know, baby steps, I suppose, in the ancient world while fascism
00:47:47.520 overtakes the rest of the world. We just do what we can. And it's so important to me every time to
00:47:56.260 see the people who are here listening and to hear you and to imagine our collective audiences and
00:48:02.140 to remember that we are not alone in our rage and also in our labor of calling forth something else. 0.99
00:48:10.260 we're deeply not alone so fuck fascists forever do you want that should we share because i want 0.98
00:48:17.400 to let the people here we'll turn off the mics and let the people here get to hang out for a 0.98
00:48:21.340 little bit closing words closing thoughts people will find your book when it comes to the world
00:48:26.660 alongside your other badass books yeah i've got the medusa book it's funny the medusa book is the
00:48:32.600 one i'm most proud of for badass thoughts badass everything i've never been more proud of something
00:48:37.080 I've written. I also don't make royalties off of it, but you should buy it anyway because it's
00:48:40.220 really pretty. And I broke down the ancient history of Medusa in this way that I have never
00:48:46.300 been more proud of anything. The Azusa is coming out in June. I feel like I've just rambled my way
00:48:51.140 through this because if somebody gets me talking on the topic, I just go until my brain spirals
00:48:55.680 into circles. This has been so lovely. So nice to connect with people who are doing similar things,
00:49:01.140 but also inherently different. I feel like all I did was talk and I didn't let you at all.
00:49:04.640 thank you it's my great pleasure my co-creator of missing witches amy torok and i co-authored
00:49:12.840 two books one is called missing witches recovering true histories of feminist magic
00:49:17.900 and the other one's called new moon magic 13 anti-capitalist tools for resistance and re-enchantment
00:49:24.720 and that's what we do and we have a coven of hundreds of people all around the world who
00:49:31.660 are feminist anti-ableist trans-inclusive and we love science we get together and do this i feel
00:49:38.040 like because of the way my memory is to try to pull in more classical or greek sources especially
00:49:44.820 because i've never really been a deist i'm sort of an atheist witch who talks to the lake you know
00:49:51.420 what i mean so i feel like that's kind of what i feel like which is i'm an atheist witch who talks
00:49:55.440 to the ancient sources kind of thing you know where i'm like i'm not but i am but i'm like
00:49:59.860 yeah oh I fucking feel that like we've had people on the show who who told us they do ancestor work
00:50:06.820 but they ask for their ancestors to only talk to them in the archives and so then when they really 0.96
00:50:12.200 feel like guided this is people doing history of enslaved people and enslaved ancestors in the
00:50:18.440 United States trying to find in archives where these things have been intentionally obfuscated
00:50:23.980 trying to find traces of family um so yeah we're all witches in our own ways probably
00:50:30.400 oh I'm thrilled to hear that and it's really interesting to hear how other people are
00:50:35.000 working with this I have to say too that not just the subtitle of your books but whatever else you
00:50:40.860 put into the email was the reason why I was like I don't even have to look into these people they've 0.98
00:50:44.340 said enough angry leftist feminist shit that I will be so happy to be on this show so dope 0.96
00:50:51.440 i was like i have to be pretty selective honestly because i get like a lot but i was like oh there 0.99
00:50:55.560 are so many keywords in here we're gonna have so much fun i'm so happy i will say the words that 0.51
00:51:02.820 officially end my podcast blessed fucking be oh i love that i'll do the same and i always end with 0.99
00:51:09.600 i am live and i fucking love this shit 1.00
00:51:12.900 you must be a witch 1.00
00:51:17.540 you don't have to know if you're a witch 0.84
00:51:21.480 you just have to be curious
00:51:23.640 and ready to share
00:51:25.160 in wonder
00:51:26.080 come find us at missingwitches.com