The Forgotten Goddess of Memory, Mnemosyne & All She Gave Us
35:44 Share

Spice up get togethers at Whole Foods Market during the Flavors of Latin America event. Look for sales on shrimp for a tantalizing ceviche. Craving tacos? Save on their no antibiotics ever marinated beef skirt steak. Top your taco with their pre-made pico de gallo full of fresh tomatoes, cilantro, onions, and jalapenos. And get saucy for less with 365 by Whole Foods Market enchilada and mole sauces. Shop Whole Foods Market in store and online.

Thank you.

Hello, this is Let's Talk About Myths, baby, and I am your host, Liv. Here, once again, with an unscripted episode.

Because everything. But this one, this one is relevant. So I thought I would refer back to some of your listener questions because those have been really helpful for getting me into this vibe of being like, I want to know.

Would love to give you an episode where we talk about important Greek mythological things, but also I'm doing 10,000 other things and don't have time to write 5,000 words about it. And so, again, I'm going back to your messages or your questions rather. I would love to hear more from you guys. And also I should say, so I've created this account where I can get your voice notes and

and play them on the podcast. So if you are at all interested in leaving a question via a voice note, I would absolutely love that. So you can find a link to that in the episode's description. So consider it if you want, or if you just want to type it out, that's fine too.

But give me more questions. I am loving this. I like that I can kind of bounce off of the ideas that you guys have and that I can be like, I need to record this episode at 10 a.m. on the day that it was already supposed to be out. Here are a bunch of questions I can use as a jumping off point. So thank you. So today's this is, again, a jumping off point more than anything, because I have a lot to say about a lot of goddesses.

This question is from Stephanie, and she says, Are there any lesser-known myths or forgotten figures from Greek mythology that you think deserve more attention, and why? Stephanie, thank you. What a great question. Because, surprise, surprise, yes, there are absolutely lots. And I've just realized that I've already gotten into this question, and I haven't given the episode of title. I don't know. We'll figure that out in a second. The Forgotten Goddess of Memory.

Mnemosyne and all that she gave us. So today I want to talk about Mnemosyne for lots of reasons. The first of which is this is the name of the collective of creators and educators that I am putting together. I'm not making everyone call it that because no one knows how to pronounce that word and I know blame them. It's a particularly Greek word. It just means memory. Memory. So

What Michaela and I have launched is called The Memory Collective. I've mentioned it in a couple of episodes before. It's still very much in the making, but we are slowly pulling it together.

And it is named for this goddess of memory, Mnemosyne, who I am obsessed with as a concept, but like so many women of Greek myth, there is little to nothing about her that survives in any kind of, like, story-based way.

So Mnemosyne, we know, is this very early Titan goddess of memory. She's a daughter of Uranus and Gaia, so the first generation of Titans. And she just is memory. She is the personification of memory as an idea.

And she is the mother of the muses by none other than Zeus. And so essentially, like, that is what we know about her. And that, you know, it's coming from a few different places. The simplest and least problematic is that she just...

was memory and so like so many personification deities she doesn't necessarily need stories in order for the people of ancient Greece to utilize her concept her her like notion the fact that she just is memory right so

inherently, you know, it makes sense that she doesn't have these stories. But there are a lot of places or a lot of ways where we can tell that there is a little bit more going on. Mnemosyne is the mother of the Muses. The Muses are, of course, these goddesses of the arts and creativity and just generally, you know, human creation in that way. And yet...

And yet they are totally subsumed by these gods who get to still control those things. You know, Apollo is the kind of quote unquote leader of the muses. He is said to inspire the muses and the muses themselves are.

exist in this kind of amorphous state where they are not the creators of anything. They are not the creators of art and poetry and, you know, anything that falls under their sort of

Purview, maybe. They are not the creators of those things. They inspire those things. And so it makes me think back to the episode I did with Emily Hauser a few months back where we talked about how women became poets. That's the name of her book. And it really...

blew my mind in a lot of ways about how we understand this stuff because you know it's based in this idea that there was no word for a female poet because the language was so gendered and it was gendered in such a way that there literally was no word there was no word to call Sappho

And so instead, because women weren't given this word to describe themselves as artists in the sense of poetry, which was sort of the highest form of art in the ancient world, they were not allowed to have this name. And so just like the Muses, they were instead these like

inspirational concepts, these people in the background, right? Like they were not the ones doing it. They were the ones kind of prompting it. It reminds me of the saying behind every great man is a woman or whatever it is. I hope it's great woman. I don't even know. It's all bullshit, right? It's this idea that women are

you know, can exist in this important way, but we have to do it behind men. We have to be the quieter ones. And so we get this idea that, you know, the muses who were so important, but they still don't have the agency allotted to someone like

And Mnemosyne, who is their mother, this progenitrix of the arts and creation in that form, and she is completely forgotten in favor of Zeus and Apollo.

But at the heart of these things is this idea that memory is a woman, that the idea of memory in humanity is feminine. And so that is why I wanted to call this collective mnemosyne, why I wanted to call it the memory collective, because I think it's a good reminder that history is about memory.

remembering and it should be more about remembering than I think it has often been portrayed. You know, I talk about this all the time, but

The fact that everything that we have from the ancient Greek world, you know, gives us this idea about the patriarchal structure and the confines of women and their lack of accomplishments is, you know, it gives us this idea about them, not because that was the whole truth, but it's because it was the truth that was deemed worthy of preservation and therefore remembrance. But if we look

back into the past beyond that kind of lens, like recognizing the context of everything that survives and why it survives and sort of try to pick that apart and find the literal memories beneath, we're going to get something closer to whatever we can call like a true human history because history is not

objective. History is completely subjective. History is determined by the people preserving it. It's determined by the people studying it. It's determined by the people amplifying it. And when all of those people have been historically, you know, the patriarchal white men, and I say patriarchal because in this case, we don't even necessarily mean white. We mean the men at the top of the power structure.

When it was them who have been preserving it all of this time, it has defined...

It has allowed history to be defined by these men rather than by the people who actually lived it. And if we look at it more from this idea of the lost voices, the memory of those voices, the memory of the voices of women who were not preserved in whatever way, I think we'll have a better grasp on true human history and generally like a more

egalitarian human history because we are intentionally remembering everyone not just the men who made all of these decisions over the last 2 000 years that mean that these works survive for us today because we do know that that there was so much more we have so much in the realm of of archaeology and material culture that says that that there was so much more that really gives us

like a strong, strong memory of the impact that women and other people had on the ancient world. That comes across in things like the archaeology, but the material culture, the things that survive sort of unintentionally.

And I'm just really interested in what we can learn about that and finding people who are looking at that stuff. And so in this very roundabout way, this is me telling you about Mnemosyne and these lost goddesses to really ground you in this idea of what I am trying to build with the collective. And I'm sharing it all with you guys in this way because...

I'm I just it's one of those things Michaela and I've been talking about it all the time. And it's just it's one of those things where I feel like this needs to exist. I feel like we need to have a place where not only creators and educators can feel supported in the important work that they're doing, but that people who are ready to learn from this contextualized process.

more broad under and egalitarian understanding of the past a place where people who are looking for that can come and find the work of so many creators who are trying to to share this stuff but are having an increasingly difficult time doing so because the fascists are taking over the west um

because the West was always pretty fascist. They're just not hiding it anymore. And, you know, with social media becoming what it is, you know, I had, I've said this before in an episode, I'm going to say it again. I had my first comment removed on TikTok. It wasn't a public page. It's like my little hidden one that I just used to scroll. And I commented on some loser guy who was

spouting shit about history with a username Molon Labbe and I called him a dweeb and a loser and said that that phrase is often misunderstood by the right. And I got that comment removed for, I guess, bullying, for calling a guy a dweeb, for using intentionally inflammatory right-wing language. And I think that's a good example of

Of just sort of where we're at in trying to share this kind of stuff, in trying to promote and reach as many people as possible. You know, I've been posting very minimally on Instagram because...

Because it's terrifying there and they, you know, are openly allowing people to bully based on gender expression and gender identity, but they're not allowing people to bully based on fascism and racism and anything.

Or rather, they're calling that bullying and not questioning someone's identity as a human being. And so I'm trying not to be on there. And there's little to no alternatives, particularly since Trump seems to have signed some kind of deal with TikTok that made them just as terrible as Instagram. And so it's this idea of like, how do we...

spread this knowledge? How do we share it? How do we support each other while trying to teach it and learn it? And so that's why Michaela and I have founded this collective. But we're also doing it in an increasingly unstable market in the podcasting realm. I'm going to be totally upfront with you guys and say that I'm

I left behind any guarantee of income in order to get some freedom back in the show and be allowed to create these other shows and be allowed to bring these existing shows onto my new network. You know, in the bigger picture of podcasting, most of the time there are

A lot of limitations about what you're allowed or not allowed to do once you sign on to like a certain level. And it requires, you know, anything that you want to do being maybe not necessarily sanctioned by a network, but...

They have to deem that it's monetarily worth it for the advertising. And I think that that is the worst way of going about sharing this kind of really important stuff. And so that's all to say I very happily gave up any kind of guarantee of income in order to be able to do this. But what it also means is that I am now...

Working on whatever money I had saved and just hoping that that the revenue from this this new system is going to at least pay the bills for.

This episode is sponsored by Boost Mobile. It's James Afuhad from Shits and Geeks podcast and we're here to talk about Boost Mobile, the newest 5G network in the country. With compelling deals for new lines, Boost Mobile makes it easy to switch today. Boost Mobile's new network delivers customers the speed and service they'd expect from the big three, plus groundbreaking benefits you'd only get from a true challenger in the industry. These include letting people try the network risk-free for 30 days and...

offering a $25 per month unlimited plan that's guaranteed to never go up in price. They have blazing fast 5G and plans for all the latest devices. Visit your nearest Boost Mobile store and find us online at boostmobile.com.

Visit your Verizon store today. Additional Apple Watch and iPad terms are applied. They require a service plan.

Dear old work platform, it's not you, it's us. Actually, it is you. Endless onboarding? Constant IT bottlenecks? We've had enough. We need a platform that just gets us. And to be honest, we've met someone new.

They're called Monday.com, and it was love at first onboarding. They're beautiful dashboards. Their customizable workflows got us floating on a digital cloud nine. So no hard feelings, but we're moving on. Monday.com, the first work platform you'll love to use.

And I also am simultaneously building this collective because I think it's so important, but I also don't want the collective to be about money. And so it's not. But I just am sort of... This is like...

I hope you're all listening to this episode, but it's really more of like a personal kind of explanation via these kind of hidden away goddesses who, you know, were shunted off to the side in favor of

the men who could come and take control and sort of make it real. Like the goddesses ended up in this sort of background as they often, so often do. You know, the women are sort of put in the back and acknowledged as being the sort of vessel for this type of stuff, but not the actual creator of it.

And it's just, I mean, obviously that is so real right now. I haven't been talking about the state of modern politics quite as much because...

It turns out it can get a little overwhelming to have your career based on your personality and also, you know, this drive to talk about important stuff. It takes its toll sometimes. And I'm trying to, you know, keep myself going as well.

Um, but that's all to say, you know, I'm going to be giving you, they will be different episodes than this. This is me really just wanting to explain also the collective. But please just bear with me while I try to build this collective with zero money and turns out some costs and simultaneously bring you guys the show and also work on this Odyssey children's book, which is the coolest thing I've ever done.

gotten to do in a really long time and also finished the

spicy romantic novel of Cupid and Psyche that I've been working on forever. It's in a pretty okay draft right now. So I'm really hoping that my agents can put it into a place where it could also be sold and, and maybe bring in some more money for, for the show and the collective. But I just want you all to understand kind of where we're at in terms of keeping this all going.

Which I will do until someone pries it, you know, from me. But that's sort of the situation and why we're doing this memory collective. And so what the hell is it? I'm 20 minutes in and I've just been talking. Yeah.

The Collective is not only a podcast network, but it is in part a podcast network. We are working on bringing in some more shows. I've been talking to the partial historians. They're going to be coming on. We have Movies We Dig. We have Sweet Better. We just have these people who are doing...

A certain type of work. And I have laid out the the collective's values on our website. And I'm going to I'm going to read them to you if I haven't already.

So the intentions, the initial and perpetually expanding intentions of mnemosyne are to create and share content which addresses and contextualizes biases, both our own and those which have historically affected the field itself.

addresses and makes understandable the political nature of not only history itself, but the study interpretation of it throughout time, highlights voices that have been historically marginalized both then and now, dispels dangerous inaccuracies and links to modern ideologies, shares not only the history, mythology, culture, and art itself, but the appreciation of it in forms that everyone can enjoy, understand, and learn from.

And then the most important is our statement that history is and has always been political and ideological in its preservation, interpretation, and how it is shared. Mnemosyne recognizes this and is founded on a set of core beliefs which are vital to its ongoing work and the broader future of humanity. I'm not being subtle here. These are the official...

And this is something that I am asking everyone in the collective to sort of recognize and agree with in order to be part of it, because I think that this is fundamental to what I want to do here. And so the memory collective accepts that the following are indisputable truths.

The Western world in which we are living was founded on patriarchal ideas which fundamentally affected not only the preservation of history as we know it, but the ways in which it has been understood and interpreted to this day. The patriarchal structure of the Western world is and has functioned as a mechanism for controlling not only women and those beyond the gender binary, but many people of color and those outside the confines of the West.

Humanity consists of people of all genders and sexuality is that and that has been the case for the entirety of human history. All humans are created equal and regardless of gender, sexuality, ability or disability, nationality, religion, ethnicity and or skin color, everyone should be treated with dignity. No human life is worth more than another.

Humans are fallible and have inherent biases through which everything is filtered. We have our own and will work to constantly address, adjust, and evolve as not only our individual selves, but the memory collective as a whole. We will make mistakes and we'll do our best to address and remedy them accordingly. So that is the founding value system that we're working off of here. And in addition to podcasts, which will be coming on the network itself, we're

I'm pulling together creators in lots of other fields. So I've been talking with friends who work in education through art, infographics, that kind of thing, who share this kind of content through YouTube and Substack. And basically, I want to acknowledge...

That everyone learns in different ways. Everyone takes in information in different ways. And the best way of teaching this kind of human history is to do it in ways that everyone can appreciate and learn from no matter their background.

neurodivergence or neurotypicalness. What's that like? No matter their learning style or attention span. And so I want to have all of these possibilities. I want to bring everything that is coming at the field of history with this contextualized acknowledgement of

of where we're at because I think that if we are not acknowledging how we got here and

and what it took to get here, and all of those things that go into the preservation and sharing of history, if we don't acknowledge those things and work within that acknowledgement, then I think that we're not doing the world any favors. I think that those people who believe that history can be apolitical, that believe that we should not

to history through our modern lens, I believe those people are actively causing harm, even if they don't intend to or they think they're well-meaning. I think that ignoring the political ramifications of history is a thing that only a small set of

the privileged few can do. And I think that without acknowledging that, again, this is causing active harm in the world. I just think that these are things that should be talked about, that should be contextualized, that we should be looking at all of these things in order to really understand human history.

And I think it starts with acknowledging the volume of forgotten people, people who just never made it into the ancient sources, people who didn't fit, people whose stories were skewed and changed over time for varied reasons.

This actually leads me to I had a comment on Spotify from someone about my Aspasia episode, and I think it was really interesting. And I fucking love Spotify comments, you guys. I absolutely I love them. So feel free to to chat with me there anytime. But this person was sort of questioning this idea of Aspasia as a sex worker or rather as questioning Hatera, Hatera broadly as sex workers. And I think it's a really interesting point.

And I think that there are sort of two things to say about this idea of like whether or not Haterai were, you know, quote unquote sex workers. And I think I would say that it doesn't matter whether they were doing literal sex work because in terms of the overarching idea of

of how they were treated, how that career was viewed in the broader ancient world, and how that career was viewed in the intervening 2,000 years.

I think that regardless of whether or not they were doing actual sex work, they were sex workers in that way where they were stigmatized to the same degree and where their sort of livelihoods were dependent on something that may or may not have included literal sex, but did include like selling your time.

to a man in order to get certain access or or even just to to survive um and so i think it is a really interesting question about like what what was actually involved in being a hetera but i would maintain that that in the ways that it matters they were sex workers because i think that the

the whole stigma stuck regardless. And so we have to kind of acknowledge it in that way of looking at the, not necessarily the literal work itself, but the, the life and livelihood and the impact that it had on the very real people in there. And so it just sort of all blends together. Um,

again, that was me just, um, finding another thing to talk about. This episode was not particularly Greek mythological, um, but I think it is important and I just wanted to kind of really sit down and share these plans with the collective. So be patient with us. I'm building all of this in, um, free time that I don't actually have. Um, I have some help with some friends, uh,

Who are simultaneously going through personal tragedies that just seem to keep happening. And so just like, you know, everything's terrible, but we're working really hard to bring something that can just feel like a little bit less terrible or this place where we can all...

learn and connect with other people who give a shit, hopefully outside the confines of social media. And so just keep an eye on the podcast, sign up for my newsletter, mythsbaby.com slash newsletter, everything. Our website is collectivemem.com, like collective memory, but that was like

$10,000 and collective mem was like 20. So it's collective mem.com. And for now it is still sort of housed in my MythsDB website, but we're working on that as well. But my intention is to bring, um,

into that space to link to articles on working classicists, on bad ancient, on historian substacks, to link to YouTube episodes being done by people who are

acknowledging this this kind of truth and history and working within it um and and art and and books and really any and everything that that I can find and you know people who want to be part of the collective obviously honestly I'm probably going to have like a recommended page where we also recommend this kind of content that's not even part of the collective because I just want

us to all have a place to find it and to connect and, and hopefully it'll grow beyond that. Um, I would love us to have, uh, uh, a more direct means of, of communicating. I want to build a community. Basically. I want to build this community of people who give a shit about history and learning from it and acknowledging the, um,

The bullshit of the past and recognizing that that doesn't change, you know, how we can appreciate it. Well, it does. It doesn't stop us from appreciating it, but it does change how we should approach that appreciation and understanding. And I think that that is so beneficial to everyone. So stay tuned if you...

have recommendations of people that should be in the collective if you are someone who creates this kind of educational content um and would like to be in the collective please come to our website collectivemem.com um there is i believe it's contact at collectivemem.com is the email address it's going to be slow it it again is like we're doing this without any extra money um and

And so just, you know, be patient. But I really want to connect people in this way. And so whatever way I can, I'm going to be doing it. And in the meantime, ask more questions. I would love to do more.

more q and a's like that tell me which stories you want to hear on a deeper level um you know maybe one that i that i covered years ago and you want me to go deeper a couple people have asked for cupid and psyche i'll do that one eventually but um because i've been working on this novel it's sort of like a weird space for me right now um but any others please let me know i really i

I would love to break these things down a little bit more. And aside from that, we still have all of the conversations in the world coming on Friday. I sat down with Maciej Popowski, who, oh my God, we did two episodes together a few years ago. And he's one of the few people who studies mythology in this way that is like, to me, it's like the myth itself rather than sort of everything surrounding it or rather like in terms of people I've talked to. But like,

it's mind blowing. We talked specifically about Thedas, um, because it was his article that I worked off of when I did that episode about her a couple months ago and really opened up all of these avenues of thought. And, and so he and I spent like basically two hours talking about Thedas as this, this incredibly powerful goddess, um, that she was. Um, and anyway, so much more coming. Um,

This is not stopping even slightly. It's just shifting a little as I figure out how to do all of these things all at once. But in the meantime, let's keep raging against the patriarchy. I just...

I just think that we should care about other people. And it seems so foreign that it's a weird time to just be like, what if we gave a shit about all other humans, no matter what? Like, I just, I don't know. I don't know how I'm ending this. Thank you all so much for listening. If you got to the end, you're the best. You're the true ones.

Let's Talk What Miss Baby is written and produced by me, Liv Albert. Michaela Pengewish is the Hermes to my Olympians. My incredible producer, Select Music by Luke Chaos. The podcast is part of the Memory Collective Podcast Network, bitches. Learn more at collectivemem.com. Listen on Apple Podcasts or Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. Find ad-free episodes and so much fun and more nerdy stuff.

the Oracle edition patreon.com slash myths baby all of this is linked in the episodes description leave me a question maybe a voice note I don't know let's get into this I am Liv and I love this shit hi it's

It's Eugenio Derbez. Did you know that with Boost Mobile, you can cut your phone bill in half this tax season? Yes, half. Buy six months of service and get six months free. That's a full year of service paying half. That sounds good, doesn't it?

And all on the Boost Network with 99% nationwide coverage. Don't wait. Visit your Boost store today. Requires upfront payment, taxes and fees extra. Terms and exclusions apply. Visit BoostMobile.com for full terms. Work management platforms. Ugh. Endless onboarding. IT bottlenecks. Admin requests. But what if things were different? We found love.

Monday.com is different. No lengthy onboarding. Beautiful reports in minutes. Custom workflows you can build on your own. Easy to use, prompt free AI. Huh. Turns out you can love a work management platform. Monday.com, the first work platform you'll love to use.