EPISODE 02 – THE SEA, THE SEA – TRANSCRIPT

A young woman is standing on a rock surrounded by the sea. She's actually chained to the rock - and in a short time a sea monster is going to come and devour her. Of course, this is Andromeda, and if you know the story, you're not too worried because you know that Perseus is going to fly in on his way home from having killed Medusand chopped off her head, and he's going to rescue Andromeda-  for sort of extra credit - and marry the Princess and live happily ever after. And if you know the story of the Odyssey, you're probably wondering, why are we talking about Andromeda? She has nothing to do with Odysseus. But Andromeda in a way has everything to do with the ocean, the sea, this this moment where she's on that rock, surrounded by the ocean. So many different facets of the sea intersect in this story. Hello, I'm Tom Lee and this is “The Odyssey Odyssey,” the podcast in which I tell the story of the Odyssey and also the stories that surround the story. And we have to talk about Poseidon. And I was really a little worried that I was going to start with Poseidon and not Athena. They are definitely the two most important gods in the story, and I really think Athena is more important and a little more “kick-ass” as Emily Wilson calls her. Then Poseidon and I wouldn't want to offend Athena by not giving her pride of place. But I think when we think about the Odyssey we, we obviously think about the ocean and when we think about the ocean, we think about Poseidon. We often take what I call a sort of “laundry list” approach to teaching mythology. You learn a list of gods and you learn what they do and you learn one or two things that distinguish them visually, something they wear or something they carry. And when we think about the ocean, we think about Poseidon and we think about his Trident. And usually we're done. But really, the ocean and the seare so much more than Poseidon in classical mythology, he's certainly important. But there's much more to it. So let's get back to poor Andromeda on that rock. How did she get there? She was a Princess and her father was King Cepheus, and her mother was Queen Cassiopeia. And the story, which was written down by Apollodorus or somebody pretending to be Apollodorus around 200 AD in Greek. The story says that. Cepheus was a king in Ethiopia, and we've already heard about Ethiopia.   Ethiopia for the ancient Greeks, could be anywhere from Libya to Egypt to current Ethiopia. Northern Africa is this realm where Cepheus was King and his wife Queen Cassiopeia made a boast about her own beauty, not about her daughter's beauty. But about her own beauty. And she said that she was even more beautiful than the Nereids. And it's obvious that Cassiopeia didn't know any mythology at all, or she would never have done anything so foolish as to boast to compare herself against an immortal being. This happens a lot, and it never ever ends well for the humans involved. Anyone that dares to compare themselves to a God is going to meet a pretty gruesome end.  When Marcius dared to say that he was a better musician than Apollo, he was punished by being skinned alive by the God of music and light. But I already digress. Poor Andromeda. She's still on the rock. So Queen Cassiopeia had compared herself to the Nereids. So who were they? The Nereids were the fifty daughters of the very oldest God of the sea, much older than Poseidon. His name was Pontos, and Pontos is the word in ancient Greek that means “the  sea.” Not even the God of the sea, but the actual body of water pontos. And this is a God we don't often hear about, and he's kind of amazing. There's no way around going back to the very beginning of the Hesiod epic version of creation. And I always want to stress that we don't know that this is what every ancient Greek person believed, that there is no Bible of the ancient Greek religion. There's no single text, and this is both wonderful and and frustrating a lot of times I'll go to a school and the teachers will get very annoyed with me. They'll say, well, this isn't the way it is in our book. And I have to remind them that there is no one single version of Greek mythology. And Hesiod is the one who happened to write it down, and the one who happened to survive. And it's it's a magnificent poem, but we can't say for certain that every person in ancient Greece believed this, the way people might ascribe to the Bible or to the Koran, but in Hesiod's story of creation out of the Great Void, the Great Chasm of Chaos, the absolute nothingness that was always in existence before anything else. Then the only other force that existed was Eros. The God of love, the force of love. And I'm not talking about little babies on Valentine cards, Eros. I'm talking about the powerful drive of love that existed before anything else. And then in my favorite thing to say in any classroom, I visit -        ‘the earth gave birth to herself. “ And you can just sort of let that sentence hang for a moment and watch the 8th graders’ faces as they try to work that out. And then you move on. The Earth gave birth to herself. And then she gave birth almost immediately to the sky and the heavens, the sky Uranos wrapped himself around Gaia, the Earth and Gaiand Uranus would go on to have many, many children. They would begin to populate all of the universe. But Gaia gave birth again without love, without sex, she gave birth of herself first. She gave birth to the mountains, and I think This is why mountains like Parnassus mountains like Helicon. These mountains themselves are are sacred beings, but then she gave birth again, and that was to Pontos. And Pontos was the sea, the ocean, and then in a particularly God like manoeuvre, she and her son conceived a child, and that child was Nereus. So you see, we're still a long way from Poseidon, and Nereus is one of my very favorite gods. He's going to turn up a little bit later in the Odyssey. He's called the old man of the seand he's always sort of benign -  and he was married to Doris, the daughter of Oceanus. If you remember my first metaphor, that mythology is a web within a web. Here we go. So after Gaia gave birth to Pontos by herself, she and Uranos. Gave birth to the 12 Titans. And among those Titans were Oceanus and Tethys and the brother married the sister and they were the gods of the sea. They ruled over the ocean. And the ocean for ancient Greeks was very definitely a river that surrounded a disk. That was the earth. Everything was flat and creation. The Earth itself was bound by this river that circled around the earth -  over and over again, you hear about the “river ‘Ocean’”. So if you're following along at home, Nereus, who was the child of Pontos and his mother Gaia, he married Doris and Doris was the. Daughter of Oceanus and his sister Tethys and Nereus and Doris gave birth to the Nereids and there were fifty of them, and they were ocean goddesses. If you're creating a mythology and you want to have lots of people in your story, it's really good to have ancestors with families of 50 with families of 3000 brothers or 3000 sisters, and this is what the ocean gods and goddesses do. In classical. And this is extremely useful if you're a storyteller, because you can trace every character back to their very, very beginning to the origin and, and very often the origin of characters in Greek mythology comes somewhere from the sea - somewhere, from the Nereids or the Oceanids, the children of the gods and goddesses of the. And I compare this to the Hebrew scriptures. If you're telling the story of Adam and Eve, you run into a problem early on when you're talking about Cain and Abel.

First of all - Cain gets married. OK. Who was that then? Who was Cain's wife? There were no other human beings on the planet. Some people will say, well, Adam lived for 800 years and he had lots of children. And so Cain married one of his sisters because it wasn't considered a sin at that time. OK, fine. But then after Cain kills Abel. And God puts the mark of Cain on him and he goes off into the world so that anyone he encounters won't murder him. Who's he going to encounter? There's no one else on the planet. A storyteller telling that story is sort of quickly boxed in, but the ancient Greeks give you no such trouble. They give you thousands of ancestors from whom your heroes and heroines can descend. So these children of the sea gods, there are three thousand female children and 3000 male children, and they're all rivers. And this is a wonderful (I'm going to say it) fluid metaphor of throughout all of mythology that a character can be a river, an actual river flowing through a forest, flowing through a battlefield, and can also be a character anthropomorphized human appearing as a god the God of the River Scamander, the God of the river Styx, the God of the river Achelous. Lots and lots of great stories about the river Achelois and this character, but also the river itself. Even the Ganges and the Euphrates, these are all included among the children of Oceanus and Tethys, and it's a wonderful idea to just think that all of nature, everywhere you look, if you saw a river, a stream, a brook, that it was somehow part of this great family of gods. But that's Oceanus and Tethys. And then we have Nereus, Nereus and Doris. The old man of the sea. The son of Pontos, his children are the Nereids and one of those Nerieds is Amphitrite. There's only 50 of them. And a lot of them are identifiable, a lot of them are actually very important. Thetis is the mother of Achilles, and she's one of the Nereids and Galatea who Handel makes famous in his oratorial “Acis and Galatea,” and perhaps for our purposes, one of the most important. Nereids is calypso. And yes, we have finally come back to the story of Odysseus, who spends 7 years as the prisoner in The Cave of the beautiful goddess, the siniff Calypso, the daughter of Nereus and Doris. As is Amphitrite, Amphitrite is a sea goddess. And she marries Poseidon. And if you remember our story of Andromeda, Casio PIA compared herself to the near it. She said she was more beautiful, so not only has she offended the Nereids, but she's offended the husband of one of the Nereids she has offended. Poseidon's really bad idea. And Poseidon, furious, as are the Nereids they use the powers that they have, they send a great flood into the Kingdom of Cepheus and Cassiopeia in Ethiopia, and the flood is accompanied by this sea monster. And who knows what to do? Who knows, even why this is happening? Land is flooding. The Sea monster has appeared. Nobody has figured out that Cassiopeia has annoyed Poseidon with this vain boast. So they go to the Oracle. The Oracle of Ammon.

And the oracles, of course, were the communication between the gods and the humans, and these were these were real. The Oracle at Delphi - this was a real place. This was a priestess. This was a very important position that someone could hold to be the interpreter of the will of gods and to communicate that to the human. (Fun fact about the Oracle of Amon, when Alexander the Great was in northern Africa, he went specifically to this Oracle to hear his his future.)  And the Oracle tells King Cepheus that his wife has offended Poseidon and the only possible way to end this flood. Is to sacrifice their own child, Andromeda, if she is given to the sea monster, then the curse of Poseidon will end and the flood will recede and the people of Ethiopia, the subjects of King Cepheus and Queen Cassiopeia. They hear about this and they have absolutely no mercy for Andromed and she is chained to the rock to be the victim of the sea monster. But of course, flying through the air- who could it be? It's Perseus and he's on his way home from killing Medusa and chopping off her head. And he sees Andromeda on the rock, and he kills the sea monster, and he marries the Princess. But even that detail connects back to the ocean, Medusa and her two sisters. They are also descendants of the ocean. There's one other sea God I haven't mentioned, and you rarely hear about him. His name is Phorcys and he marries Ceto and between the two of them they create some of the most hideous monsters that exist in the ocean, and many of them, Odysseus is going to encounter in the course of his story. Bu,t sort of weirdly and wonderfully, I think Phorcys and Ceto give birth to not only the Graeae, the three women who are born old, they're born with Gray hair, and between the three of them they have only one eye and one tooth. And in order to see, they have to stand at the side of the ocean holding hands with each other. And when one of them wants to see, they take the 1 eyeball and they pass it from one to the next, and that's whoever has the eye. Is the one who can see and that's why they have to hold hands. But Perseus, when he was trying to find the location of the Gorgons, he hid himself until they had removed. The eyeball, one of them had taken the eyeball away, and when the eye was in transit, so to speak, Perceus has stepped forward and took it. He put his hand out and one of the three sisters put the eye into Perseus's hand and he told them if they wanted their eye back they would have to reveal the location of their sisters, the Gorgons, and yes, these were another three daughters of  Phorcys and Ceto. These were Stheno, Urii and Medusa and next to Polyphemus, the Cyclops Medusa. Is everybody's favorite in certainly in fifth grade. It's all they want to talk about is Medusa. Who, of course  her hideous ugliness is what made her so famous, but originally she was very beautiful, but she had the misfortune to fall in love with the blue haired God, the dark haired God Poseidon. And Poseidon and Medusa made love. And according to some stories, they actually made love in the temple of Athena. And Athena was so angry - and the rivalry between Poseidon and Athena, it just it keeps reappearing - But Athena was so angry at what Medusa had done that she took away this beauty and she made her so famously hideous with her, her teeth growing up around her lips and down over her lips, and every one of her hairs transformed to a snake and this face -you see this everywhere in ancient Greece. I love that bakers in Greece sometimes had a copy of Medusa's face on their ovens to keep people away. Warriors would go into war with Medusa on their armor and this was the head thatPerseus was to chop off. And one of my very favorite things in all of Greek mythology when he does chop off Medus’a head, two children are born. These are the children of Poseidon and Medusa, and they're born out of her neck. And one of these is chrysaor. Who is most famous for giving birth to one of the monsters that Heracles has to kill, but the other one- and If you don't know this, I bet you're going to be shocked-  is Pegasus. The winged horse is born from the neck of Medusa, after Perseus has chopped off her head. Don't you just love this stuff? Footnote Speaking of Heracles. I just love to hate the Disney movie Hercules. I love to hate it because every single - Every single thing that is presented as a fact about mythology in that movie is wrong from the beginning - absolutely do not let me start. One of my favorite errors that they make is to have little baby Pegasus born on Mount Olympus at the same time as Pegasus, so that that couldn't be further from the truth. The horse emerges from the neck of the decapitated monster that, my friends, is classical Greek myth. And it's another link to Poseidon, because Poseidon is the God of horses. In addition to being the God of the ocean, Poseidon is the God of horses and. Just kind of speaks to all of the stories that we have no doubt lost the stories that were told orally long before people were writing the stories down. The beliefs that people held who knows 500 years, 1000 years before Homer, I'm sure there was a whole other life to these gods and goddesses, and one of the little echoes that we have of that is Poseidon's connection with horses. In a very unfortunate episode in Poseidon's history when he rapes his own sister she, in an effort to escape - transforms herself into a horse, and Poseidon transforms into a horse and mates with her. And they have a child. So there are all these sort of echoes of this idea of Poseidon as the horse God, but one of the one of the most exciting is this child, Pegasus, the winged horse. So if all of this is new to you, I can't imagine the tangle that your mind might be in right now trying to keep all of this straight, and what I would say is don't worry about it. Sink into the story, sink into the mythology, and after you've heard about these characters again and again and again, they do start to take on realities of their own. And I'm sure that's the way it was for the ancient Greeks. Who were, I think. Saturated in these stories, but if it helps to just go over it again, Gaia the earth gives birth to Pontos and then Pontos and Gaia give birth to Nereus, and Neus marries one of the children of Oceanus and Tethys, and they give birth to the Nereis, one of the Nereids is married to Poseidon. And by the way, they have a son we haven't mentioned yet and that's Triton and it's hard to tell a lot of times when you're looking at a sculpture or a mosaic or a painting. Are you looking at a Triton or are you looking at a Poseidon? A lot of museums aren't even sure. In fact, there's a magnificent. Bronze sculpture that was found in a shipwreck. It was found under the ocean, which is the only way that bronze sculptures could survive being melted down. In the past 2000 years. But this was safely under the sea until 1926. And now it's absolutely the prize of the National Archaeology Museum of Athens. But what I love about it is nobody's quite sure if it represents Zeus or it represents Poseidon. It's a magnificent and  beautifully balanced statue. And the arms are outstretched in both directions, it looks almost like a yoga pose. He would originally have been holding something in his hand, and if it if he was holding a lightning bolt then it would have been Zeus and if he had been holding a Trident then it would have been Poseidon and nobody's really sure which one he represents. And Triton is is the same way. He's bearded, he's muscular. He's holding a seashell, and sometimes he's holding a Trident so it makes it a little confusing and there's no end of paintings and sculptures and mosaics of the Nereids and the Oceanids and even the river God. Bernini's magnificent sculpture in the Piazza Navona in in Rome. You can have the Trevi Fountain if I can have this fountain of the four rivers. It's it's just wonderful. It has the Nile River, who is one of the children of Oceanus and Tethys. But, of course, nobody knew the origin of the Nile. So Bernini shows this magnificent God, but his head is veiled, his identity, his, his origin  is unknown. And then, of course, the Oceanids and the Nereids gave all kinds of artists, particularly in Victorian times, a great excuse to paint lots of nubile, young nude women. Hylas was a beautiful young man who accompanied Heracles, and he was abducted because of his beauty. He was abducted by water nymphs and that story has been illustrated many times, probably most famously in 1896 by the appropriately named John William Waterhouse, this is a splendid painting. If you like this sort of thing. But this idea of the water goddess, the water nymph abducting a human. This becomes one of the longest lived elements of Greek mythology that trickles down into the folklore, certainly of Europe and and many parts of the world, the grim brothers have many stories about Walter Nixies water. Fairies, the spirits of a pond or the spirits. Of a river. And they're invariably very evil. They're very alluring. They're very beautiful, but they are out to steal. Your husbands. Steal your son. They're going to drag these men under the water. And of course, Rusalka the Czech fairy tale that was turned into the opera by Dvorak. This is the same story. This is a water spirit who falls in love with a human and gives up her voice in order to. Become a creature of the land and yes, yes, you see where this is going. You cannot escape Walt Disney, my friends. We have come to The Little Mermaid and I had to go back and check. Hans Christian Andersen simply refers to “the king of the sea.” The Little Mermaid's father is the king of the sea, but in the animated movie. The Mermaid's father is Triton, he's called King Triton, so that just further confuses things. So there you have it. My friends from Hesiod, Homer to Walt Disney to, this is “The Odyssey Odyssey.” And it might be time to remind you that this is a podcast that has no advertising because it is brought to you. By me, Tom Lee, storyteller. And I hope that you enjoy this program and these stories and if you work at a museum, if you work at aneducational program and Arts educational program and you're interested in a storyteller bringing this kind of work to your group, please look me. up:  www.tomleestoryteller.net. If you enjoy the podcast, you can subscribe on Spotify on Apple Podcasts. You can also find it on my website www.tomleestoryteller.net  - there's also an Instagram page where I'm posting some of the images that I talk about in the course of the show, and you can always send me an e-mail from any of those platforms, and I'd love to hear from you. So until next time, I'm Tom Lee. Thank you for listening.