LP0050 Q&A

Legendary Passages #0050 - Q&A -
A very special episode of Legendary Passages.

    Hi there, my name is Joel, I am the long time host of this podcast, and I have with me here my sister Aly.

    "Hello everyone!"

    So, I'm going to have my sister Aly ask me why I'm doing this and all sorts of other things that'll spring to her mind.

    "Alright, so I guess my first question is: what made you so interested in Greek Mythology to begin with?"

    Ah! I've been interested in Greek Mythology probably ever since the Hercules and Xena era of television. So, ah, I just started doing some light reading, researching. And then I discovered, wait a minute, all these stories don't really make sense and work well together. And that kinda turned into a project were I was gonna write a book about the Amazons and the Argonauts and how those adventures happened at the same time. And I discovered all these other things that were going to happen before that, so I started writing a book called BASTARD HEROES, and I was doing research on that and I was like, well I could just turn this research project into a podcast just so I could keep everything straight. And that's how this whole thing kinda got started.

    "Wow, that's awesome. So what is your end goal in all this?"

    Oh, goodness. While it's rich and complex and vast and contradictory... there actually isn't a whole lot of it. So it's theoretically possible to say it all out loud, have it be in public spaces, and people can take a little here, and a little there, and a little here and get the gist of it, or they could go in depth.

    "Great. So in your podcasts, you often use, um, groups of six- why do you do that?"

    I like to have a focal point- I like telling one story and various different angles on it I can find. Because most of these texts are just- this happened, then this happened, and this happened; sometimes its just kind of an anthology that will jump around completely random. I want to know what the actual story behind all these texts were. I'm trying to triangulate on it, and six seemed like an even number...

    "Great. You also mentioned a book named BASTARD HEROES- what is that?"

    It is currently the story of Theseus and Hercules and their initial adventures- and it will lead up through with the adventures with the Argonauts. And eventually those stories will come to their natural conclusions, and I will move on to stuff that happens before the Trojan War, then the Trojan War itself, then the Odyssey....

    I'm not just trying to do a podcast about all these things, I'm actually trying to write a book that has, not quite official but orderly version of all this, that is comprehensible to people like myself and any other intense mythology geeks or whatever!

    "Um, lets see..."

    How about I ask you a question?

    "Sure!"

    Do you have any interest in Greek Mythology?

    "I do, and it started from a very early age, with me pretending to be Xena..."

    I remember this-

    "...when I was very young. And I think I- I would watch it with you, if I'm not mistaken."

    Yep, way back in the nineties.

    "Yeah, so that was my initial peak. And then, during the same time, the Disney version of Hercules came out too. So, from just from a very early age, television has kinda influenced my looking into Greek mythology."

    Well that was kinda the only avenue you had to at the-

    "Yeah."

    The texts themselves are obscure, and annoying to read, and archaic. And that Hercules movie- they took some dramatic liberties, considering just how violent Hercules is. Anyone that's listened to some of the Hercules episodes, they know just how insane he went, and destroying his own family, and he would be locked up away in prison if he was in modern times.

    *laughter*

    Now Xena is interesting because she was kind of made up and thrown into Greek mythology, but that's not actually unusual because, well, from what we can tell, people just started adding things into Greek mythology as the years and years went by. Most of these events happened, you know, over three thousand years ago, but they weren't written down until about two and a half thousand years ago. So there was a long period of time where it was just oral storytelling. And whatever official records there were- we can't even read because those were written in Linear A and Linear B. A few pieces we have been able to translate are not that interesting, sadly.

    So what I usually do for my podcast is, I listen to them myself. I usually play them as I'm going to sleep. That's one of the reasons I'm kind of reading in a slightly soothing voice is because I'm imitating our grandfather who used to read us bedtime stories.

    I have a YouTube channel that actually has a bunch of interesting collections of all these podcasts so far, 'cause I've got each individual section of six, and I've got Hercules, Theseus, adventures by the Cretans or the Minoans; and I also have 'em by text, I have Diodorus Siculus, also the Library of Apollodorus. I will be filling in those gaps as I go, but since I'm arranging by story (I'm not going to tell them in order here on the podcast), but if you really wanna listen to the texts in order, you can do that on YouTube.

    "Do you have a hard time finding sources for your material?"

    Yes and no. I have a website I usually go to called THEOI.COM; a lot of these are public domain translations, and that's my main source for most of them; there's also another website I go to called SACRED-TEXTS. For some of the others- I really have to scrounge online to find a public domain translation, and some of them don't exist.

    Now I am planning to do alternate translations of some of my earlier podcasts. So, stuff I found on THEOI.com I also found in a few other places, and just have an alternate take, an alternate translation on some of those early texts. Sadly, I discovered that some of the texts I would like to find alternate translations of- there aren't any! There's only one guy who did it one hundred years ago, and maybe there is a modern translation, but that's not public domain, and I really would prefer not to violate copyright law, if I can avoid it.

    "So: Heracles or Hercules, which do you prefer?"

    Heracles is what he was called in- that's his Greek name in Greek mythology. He's called Heracles because it means 'Glory of Hera'. The reason he took that name is because she and him had a very long-standing feud (lets put it that way) and he was either trying to placate that, or piss her off by taking that name, depending on how you want to interpret that.

    He's called Hercules in Roman mythology, and because, uh, during the middle-ages they only really had access to the Roman texts and the Roman translations, so Hercules was the name that stuck. Oddly enough, now that we have the original texts, people know all the Greek names of the gods, not the Roman names of the gods. So people recognize the name Hercules and not Heracles, but people are much more likely to recognize the name Zeus rather than Jupiter, or Aphrodite rather than Venus.

    "Which myth really started this adventure in looking to combine all the myths together?"

    It was originally the Argonauts. I like the story of the Argonauts, it's got everybody in it. Hercules' story happens at the same time; he does his ninth labor while he's on the Argonauts trip. It's like- 'Ooh! Cool!' I can tie these two stories together. And then I saw Theseus, hey, he's part of the Argonauts, looks like goes with Hercules on his trips to visit the Amazons, that's where he meets a woman he eventually marries, and that goes horribly, horribly wrong as most things do in Greek mythology. And I was, like- ooh, I'll just put this all in one big book. And there was way, way, way too much material, particularly when you get to the story of Medea.

    I don't know. I like these contradictions because I'm a comic book collector. There's all these crossovers, and everyone has their own story-line, and trying to figure out, alright, if these were real people, how would all these line up?

    "So have you seen the land of Atlantis in studying all these Greek myths?"

    Yes. One of my latest episodes was just called 'The Amazons versus Atlantis'.

    "Really?"

    Yes! Sadly, those Atlanteans are in the Atlas Mountains that are just south of Spain in Morocco, in Northern Africa, not quite the Atlanteans from myth.

    I am of the opinion that the Atlanteans were probably related to the Minoans. They lived on the island of Crete, and eventually they were overrun by Greeks from the mainland who conquered them, and that's where the line of Minos started up. He was kind of living on the bones of this earlier empire. And his massive war with Theseus, is something that also intrigued me because it was kind of the last gasp of that whole story of Atlantis.

    We dug up many interesting ruins on the island of Crete, and it was an advanced civilization there, that matches the descriptions that Plato wrote about in his Dialogues. Previously we had advanced technology, and it all got blown up, because we know that sort of thing in history has happened before. The Bronze Age Collapse which happened after the Trojan War, writing systems were gone, populations plummet, cities were destroyed. Something similar happened at the end of the Roman Empire. There seems to be some sort of cycle to history, where things become great, things become corrupt, and things collapse.

    "What is that, um, goddess, the hunter one?"

    Artemis! Yes, she is a very interesting goddess. She is the goddess who is worshiped by the Amazons. She's the goddess of young unmarried women, and hunting, and childbirth; she kind of the teenage rebellion goddess.

    "So can we expect a story about her?"

    I have touched upon her a couple of times. I have not focused on the gods as of yet because, well, their stories are not very linear. Their interactions with mankind are usually were the great epics come from, but there is a lot of material about their conflicts with each other and so yes I will eventually get to Artemis and various other Greek gods.

    "Great."

    So this has been a very special episode of Legendary Passages. I would like to thank you all for listening, and expect another Q&A session for episode 100.


https://www.YouTube.com/channel/UCZwZfV-Uhyge_14zkKFlG7w
http://www.library.theoi.com/
http://sacred-texts.com/cla/index.htm