The Rest Is History - 59. The World Cup of Gods - Part 2

Episode Date: June 1, 2021

Competition for top deity hots up as we look back on the knock out stages of the Rest is History World Cup of Gods. Dominic Sandbrook and Tom Holland discuss the last eight contestants and analyse the final outcome. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thank you for listening to The Rest Is History. For weekly bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series, and membership of our much-loved chat community, go to therestishistory.com and join the club. That is therestishistory.com. Hello, welcome to The Rest Is History, the second part of our coverage of the World Cup of Gods 2021, which was running all last week on Twitter. In the first episode, if you listened to that, you'll know that we talked about the group matches. We discussed the gods that got knocked out. So that was Moloch, Chippy Totec, Ishtar, Bridget, Augustus Caesar, Loki, Kibale, and very sadly, Prince Philip.

In today's episode, we're going to go through the quarterfinals, the semififinals and then the final uh and with me is my co-presenter co-sports analyst dominic sandbrook saints and greavesy of uh saints and gravy of um of uh world cup divine sport um and so dominic moving into the into the quarterfinals we had zeus against athena mithras against dionysus anubis against Isis, Apollo against Odin, talking points around all of them. Shall we focus in on the familial clash that was Zeus against Athena? So father and daughter. What was your take on that? Yes.

So I thought Athena was going to win that particular tie. And of course she did. She's born from Zeus's head. So as Jonathan Wilson said in his preview, she'd given him a headache in the past, and she did so again. The funny thing is, you know, Zeus, a lot of people said at the beginning,

well, Zeus will win it, because he's probably the most... Alpha male. It's the most famous, isn't he? He's a god that everybody knows. But I find Zeus quite boring. Do you? I do.

There's not... He doesn't... He's always plunging down. Yes. Had 150 affairs. Yeah, exactly. His sort of modus operandi is he transforms himself into a bull. An animal.

An animal or something, and impregnates somebody, and then just goes back to Olympus again to face the wrath of Hera. But ultimately, I find that quite a repetitive story. And he's not... To me, Zeus doesn't seem to have some of the weird complexity of some of the gods we discussed on the last podcast. We talked about Cybele, for example, and nearly had strokes brought on by hysterics.

But with Zeus, I mean, Zeus seems to be quite a humorless figure. Do you think that's fair, Tom? I think I'm being too harsh. Turning yourself into a swan or a bull. I mean, I mean, it's faintly sinister. I mean, it's a bit pervy, but I don't think it's boring. In the age of Me Too, maybe Zeus would always face... Oh, I mean, it seems to be massively cancelled but

yeah but but he'd also be cancelled as as a kind of prime patriarch because he's the model of an indo-european sky god yeah and also isn't he i mean he's your father but he's so so his name uh zeus patter um sky father yeah you still get you know the full the full title in Jupiter and you get it in Sanskrit too, apparently. So he knocks off the pater bit, the father bit, it just becomes Zeus. But he's absolutely the embodiment of this,

the god of the sky who rules the universe. Let's talk about Zeus and Jupiter a little bit because he's a good opportunity to talk about. People generally think of the Greek and Roman gods as identical, don't they? But is that wrong? So Zeus is the classic example. Zeus and Jupiter, they basically have the same name.

So they clearly reflect Indo-European traditions that have been brought to Greece and Italy, respectively. By and large, the Roman gods are less fleshed out than the greek ones because the greek ones are fleshed out by homer first of all and then by the tragedians though interestingly zeus is the only kind of major greek god who doesn't appear on the the tragic stage so that's a kind of measure of i think of his ultimate significance that he can contain entirety in a way that that the other gods can't. But on the Roman thing, the Roman gods, by and large, are less detailed. But when the Romans annex Greece, when they, and even before that, when they're annexing the Greek states in Italy,

you know, Greece is the cultural trendsetter. And so inevitably, the Romans kind of pair up their gods with with the greek gods but you know right the way through into the imperial period jupiter has has a role and a significance and a status that is distinctive within rome that owes nothing really to zeus and what is that then what's that status that's different from his so his temple on the capitol is the most significant temple in Rome. And it's where the most significant annual ritual practices are taken place that help to maintain the spiritual health of Rome.

And that's incredibly important. So every year when the consuls are elected, they go up to the Capitol and the auguries are taken in front of Jupiter's temple. That has nothing to do with the stories that are told in Greece about Zeus. Although, obviously, they're conflated. Yeah. I mean, I think Jupiter is properly boring in the sense that he is quite stiff.

Yes. Where I don't think Zeus is boring. I mean, he's Thunderbolts. He's the only guy who can handle Thunderbolts. He's got weapons of mass destruction. He's sleeping around with everybody. He's a bull. He's an eagle. He's an oak. He's got all these children. I mean, so

Athena and Apollo, both contestants in this World Cup, are his children. And then he's got all the heroes. And he's got Helen. Helen of Troy is his daughter. Is he almost too powerful, though? Is he so powerful that that makes him a little bit boring to think? Well, what happened? I mean, it's an interesting question that it could be argued that there is a kind of monotheistic trend within polytheism.

In a sense, what ultimately happens is that, and you see this in India as well, is that gods are simultaneously worshipped as individuals, but ultimately come to be seen as expressions of the one kind of expression of divinity. And in the Greek world, that can only be Zeus. He's the only god who can play that role. Who can contain multitudes. Who can contain multitudes. So I think he's clearly an alpha male, a big player, but perhaps just not his year.

This is not, the 21st century is not his time then, is it? It's not his time, is it not his time is it um all right patriarchal harasser of women is you know he's never going to win the people assumed he was going to win um and for that reason they he was never going to because he was the kind of person who would have won in 1980 but wasn't going to win in 2021 so exit zeus uh and then we had i thought a very interesting clash probably a bit more of a walkover than I was expecting Mithras against Dionysus now Mithras

he's a fascinating god I think I think he's incredibly boring this is very strange because we completely disagree on this why do you think he's interesting because he's so mysterious and also because he's sort of a bit of a rotary club character I like that I like that last bit there speaks a man who's written because he's so mysterious and also because he's sort of a bit of a Rotary Club character. I like that.

I like that last bit. There speaks a man who's written histories of Britain in the 1970s. Yeah, I see him as a very 1970s... He's a very 1970s god. He is. You can imagine him in a sitcom. Yeah. He's coming for supper. Ding dong. Oh, it's Mithra.

You know, in The Good Life, the people who live next door um paul eddington and penelope keith they're definitely members of them they're definitely members of a mithras sort of aren't they um he's the god of civil servants basically if you're a low-ranking civil servant or an aspiring roman officer yeah you go to so let's let's explain what we mean for those people who think we've just gone mad so okay mithras he it does he or does he not come from iran from persia it's generally seemed that he does because there's a kind of um a large number of a swirl of gods that sound a bit like mithras so there is um an indian god called mitra who's god of the skies

um there's an a persian god called mithra who likewise ends up the god of the skies and they essentially um a bit like jupiter and zeus you know again this is these are indo-european gods in sanskrit and in persian they essentially they're the same um and then what's the relationship of mithras to that um because if mithra the persian god and mithras the roman god are the same then obviously his ultimate origins is persia i i think um that basically mithras is a roman invention um that's what some historians think now isn't it that there's a tenuous link with the east but actually he's really a God for and created in Rome. And the Romans have a deep prejudice against upstart cults.

So that's why they're perfectly happy to tolerate, for instance, Jewish worship, because it's authentically ancient, even though the Romans see it as weird, but they regard Christianity as beyond the pale because it's of recent origin. So I think that the Mithras cult, it's astrologically centered. It's about the tracking of recent origin. So I think that the Mithras cult, it's astrologically centered.

It's about the tracking of the heavens. But because the people who are developing it don't want it to look like it's an upstart cult, they essentially kind of identify it with Persia, which gives it a sense that it's venerable and ancient. Yeah, a sense of a pattern of kind of authenticity and so basically the way it works is there are these places called mithraeums which are generally i think underground aren't they they're sort of you go to a mithraeum and you generally

tend to be invited to go if you're a you've joined the roman army you're an officer in the roman army or you're a bureaucrat or something and you're trying to make your way in the world. You get invited by colleague, come to the Mithraeum on Friday night or whenever it is. I don't know when it is. Put on a mask. Yeah. You go to them and there's,

roll up a guy's leg. It's that kind of stuff. There's a, there's a sculpture often of a God killing a bull. Yeah. That's all we've found there. There's also a sculpture that nobody's ever been able to explain of a man with a lion's head.

People don't know where that fits in, but it does. And you go and you have a banquet and you sort of meet and greet you know middle managers and other you know coming men in the in the room it's men only um like the freemasons yeah and it's i mean there's an argument isn't there among historians that one reason why you know it's got a ceiling it's got an inbuilt ceiling in terms of numbers because it's a cult for sort of middle class kind of you know aspiring bureaucratic kind of people and it has levels that mean yes and there's gradations as initiation just sort of and because of that that means it's never going to become a mass market cult like christianity which is for the common man is that right well? Well, there's often this thing that if the world hadn't become Christian, it would be Mithraic, but it wouldn't. Because it was too much like the Rotary Club, basically.

Because it's too much like the Rotary Club, exactly. But it was very successful. So there's a Mithraic that was found in London that for a long time, they kind of put it with crazy paving in the middle of the city. And now it's beneath the new bloomboat building it's really good strongly recommend it and can you go and see it yeah you can yeah they've done it really well and they've kind of um they use light to show so you've got what does remain the stones and then they use light to show you um what it would what it might have looked like

and also there's a very atmospheric one on hadrian's wall just And it's associated a lot with the army, isn't it? The Roman army. Yeah, so that's why the one on Hadrian's Wall is there. But I think Mithras is boring. I can't believe people haven't brought it back. I think it should come back. I think it's a very great... I mean, if there's a room for the Masons and the Rotary Club,

I don't see why there isn't room for Mithras as well, for Mithraeums. I mean, it just is a more exotic version of Masonry. Anyway, Mithras did crash out. He was beaten by Dionysus, so people clearly prefer wine drinking to bull killing. Yes. Which is sad. Right. Now we come to probably the...

I mean, this match was the huge talking point on Twitter, wasn't it? Anubis against Isis. So what we actually didn't mention last time was that Lockie had only lost by the slimmest of margins to Anubis. The barest of margins. I mean, he'd lost by like three votes or something because it was 50-50 in the percentages.

But Anubis clearly had won a couple more votes. So Anubis had been through this incredibly exacting round against Lockie and then he's up against Isis. So Anubis had been through this incredibly exacting round against Loki, and then he's up against Isis. So another ancient Egyptian, an ancient Egyptian goddess, a huge figure. And this was, again, a very tight... Anubis got an early lead, didn't he? And then thanks to your efforts, subverting the competition

and corrupting the principles of the tournament, Isis won a very narrow and controversial victory. I just felt that it would be better for the sport to have the Queen of the Heavens in the semifinals than a dog. First of all, he's not a dog. He's not a dog. You clearly do have something against dogs because you're a cat person, as is well known.

But he's not necessarily a jackal. Because jackals are golden and he's black. No, he's he's a gold he's been reclassified i think as a wolf as a sort of uh so the jackal is is not right so i know a bit about anubis because i made an anubis costume as listeners will know give us tell us why you should have won well he usually had a great name originally he was wet whichp Wah Wet, which I think... You can imagine the chants from the... He's black. The stans.

He's black. Yes, like a corpse. So the colour of death and also the colour of the soil, the fertile soil of the Nile. So he's linked to regeneration. Supposedly, I read that of historians believe that the Egyptians adopted him because wild dogs were digging up their corpses. So that it was obvious you'd need a dog-like protector to ward off the wild dogs.

This is one theory. He begins as the son of Ra. Then he evolves into the son of Osiris in the way that Egyptian gods did evolve over the course of Egyptian history. And Osiris, one of the great gods, married his sister Isis. Yes. So he's up against Isis, obviously. And I'll tell you what he is, Tom.

He's a psychopomp. Yes, he is. A word that I didn't know until this morning existed. A spiritual butler. Yeah. He's present when you die. The psychopomp is the god who accompanies you to the underworld. He doesn't judge you.

He doesn't give you a hard time. So what he is, he's in a tradition that includes Hermes, St. Peter, and DCI Gene Hunt in Life on Mars and Ashes to Ashes. So Gene Hunt is Anubis. And I think that's another reason why Anubis should have won the entire tournament, because Gene Hunt's a great character for those people who've seen Life on Mars. And Anubis is basically the Egyptian Gene Hunt. Because Gene Hunt welcomes 1970s British policemen into purgatory, doesn't he?

I'm so impressed with your ability to get a discussion of 1970s policing into a podcast on ancient gods. It's great. So anyway, all this is why Anubis is such an interesting figure. The sad thing about Anubis is there's no stories attached to him. Well, there is, isn't there? Because so he, in the kind of the more recent stories about him, by more recent, I kind of mean.

When you say more recent. 3,000 years ago. Yeah. He is the child. So Osiris is married to Isis. And their sister, Nephthys, is married to seth who is the kind of i suppose the loki he's the baddie isn't he he's the baddie who who then kills osiris but uh osiris prior to this has um had sex with nephthys and give an anubis as the result of this with his daughter is that

no his sister oh his sister sorry yes i've got um and isis is the result of this. With his daughter, is that? No, his sister. Oh, his sister. Sorry, yes. And Isis, no hard feelings about this. Your brother-husband has slept with your sister. Doesn't seem too fazed by this. And brings Anubis up. So she's his stepmother. And then when Osiris gets killed by Seth, and we'll come to this when we talk about Isis,

Anubis wraps him up and embalms him and makes Osiris into the first mummy. Yes, he's the god of mummification. He's the god of embalmment. So he invents the mummy, basically. And I think that's the key story. But I agree. I mean, aside from that, I think he's not very interesting. Whereas Isis is a lot more interesting.

I think Anubis has an immense appeal to children because of his dog head. And also he's appeared in loads of kind of films, hasn't he? And computer games. Well, he's just become a sort of emblem of ancient Egypt. Yes. In a way that's probably not true of...

I mean, how many Egyptian gods... Egyptian gods are fascinating but how many of them do people remember? Three? Four? And Anubis is always one of them because of the canine. And Horus, I guess, is the other because he's got a head of a hawk. Yeah, exactly. So my son made a horse costume. When he was doing what I did when I was five or six, he made a horse costume.

I made an Anubis. Did you ever make an Egyptian costume, Tom? No, I didn't. I missed out on this rite of passage. Yeah, I missed out on that. It's obviously a Midlands thing must be

must be yes all right so Anubis was defeated in very controversial circumstances

I think when we have future World Cups there will clearly have to be a code of conduct about the judges

or the organisers not getting involved in I did what I did for the benefit of the sport

well that's Sepp Latta I mean that's what Sepp Latta says. Fine. That's what Florentino Perez says at Real Madrid. The Super League. The sport, c'est moi.

Yeah, clearly. All right. Let's do one more goal before the break. And let's do Apollo. It's Apollo against Odin. Yeah, Apollo against Odin. Now, Apollo, to me... And Odin won.

...is quite comfortably. Yeah, I was surprisedin. Now, Apollo to me... And Odin won. Quite comfortably. Yeah, I was surprised by that. I mean, surprisingly comfortably. Now, Apollo to me is the absolute epitome of a Greek god. I mean, he is the statue that seems to symbolise ancient Greece. And yet, what is it about him I wonder? Is it a blandness, a perceived blandness? He's not bland though.

I mean, he's terrifying. Well, I don't think he's bland, people uh the voters didn't go for him i think i think odin is is a kind of very popular figure because he's again he's got that kind of slight computer game yeah edge to him which apollo doesn't really have which apollo doesn't and i think also apollo is kind of associated with a slightly chilly 18th century classicism. Yeah, that's what I meant, I guess. So I guess in the kind of the 18th century, the Apollo Belvedere was seen as being the most beautiful statue in the world

and nobody now rates it at all. But of course, actually Apollo was a terrifying god. Why terrifying? Well, he's the god of plague for starters. Okay, that is terrifying. So having gone through the past year, it's Apollo's plague arrows god why terrifying why do you think well he's the god of plague for starters so that is today having gone through the past year um it's it's apollo's plague arrows that have been raining down on us um you know that's what the iliad begins with is is apollo raining down plague

arrows on the on the greek camp um he's also that you know he's the father of sclapius he's the god of healing so again you get that kind of weird tension that we see again through you know in all these gods um and he's the god of um of prophecy yeah um but you know again we talked about this before the way so he's one of his um epithets is loxias which is kind of the oblique god um so anything he tells you is likely to trick you that's a sloppy-ish element to him no because I think it's not setting out to deceive you it's factored in it's kind of like a crossword puzzle

and the Greeks were puzzled by the people who had other oracles that when they got their oracles they just took them you know they just took them straight whereas the greeks knew that apollo's comments utterances yeah had to be read quite carefully and if you didn't get them properly then you'd probably come a cropper and this is the oracle of delphi so does the apollo cult begin at delphi or does delphi just adopt him well there's two there are two great cult. There's Delphi is one and Delos is the other. And Delos is where Apollo and his twin sister, the equally terrifying Artemis,

the Virgin Huntress, are born. And it's said that Delos was kind of floating around and then it gets anchored when they're born. And the thing that's interesting about both Delos and Delphi is that they're effectively neutral. So that's something that you don't get with other Greek gods. So it's not associated with a particular power, but a city state. Yeah. So both of those, they almost have a kind of missionary quality that's very exceptional in the Greek context.

And it means that both Delphi and Delos become neutral spaces where people from different cities can meet up. But as you say, Apollo, I think for that reason, becomes the archetype of the Greek god because he's, you know, he's with Zeus. He's kind of a properly universal one. But then the weird thing is that he's, you know, the epitome of the Greek god, but in the Trojan War in the Iliad, he's on the side of the Trojans, not the Greeks.

What's all that about? Because the Trojans in the Iliad are seen as basically belonging to the same world as the Greeks. Because they're part of the Greek world and he just happens to be on their side rather than the Achaeans or whatever they're called. Yeah. I mean, talking of the Trojan War, of course, there's a terrible warning there about picking gods and crowning one as the victor. Because that's what basically starts the whole shebang. Let's hope that um yes that doesn't one more question about apollo oh yeah um he has this habit of pursuing people who then

turn into plants isn't that right hyacinth he does yes he does well so we had um one of the we had the um peerless jonathan wilson doing providing sensational punditry but we also had in the semifinals we had commentary from Llewellyn Morgan, the great Ovidian scholar, whose short introduction to Ovid is really fantastic, highly recommended. And he makes the point in that, that a lot of what we think of

as being Greek mythology is actually Ovidian mythology, because Ovid, the great Roman poet, takes these stories and packages them as a kind of single entity. And he's obsessed with people changing form and he writes his whole poem about it um and uh yes all the nymphs that apollo is changing they're kind of turning into laurel trees or whatever um that's that's

absolutely a constant um but that's basically coming from ovid and from that it then passes into obviously huge influence on so So the Greek Apollo is not he's not molesting all these people who become trees. Well he kind of is, I mean there are these stories but it gets packaged in a way that then gets taken out around the world by Ovid

so it's kind of like the Beatles absorbing all these various traditions and packaging them in a way that people can consume okay uh the beatles have made their um long expected appearance on the podcast about ancient gods and on that note card is filling up yeah on that note we'll take a break and we will come back to discuss the four semi-finalists after the break i'm marina hyde and i'm richard osmond and together we host the rest is entertainment after the break. to live tickets, head to therestisentertainment.com. That's therestisentertainment.com.

Welcome back to The Rest Is History. We've now reached the semi-final stage of the World Cup of Gods. There are four contenders left and they are Dionysus, Isis, Athena and and Odin. So, Tom, let's do the two gods who would have ended up in the third, fourth place playoff, the bronze medal match that nobody ever wants to play in. And they are Dionysus, lost comfortably to Athena. Dionysus is a very interesting god, isn't he? So he's the son of Zeus and Persephone, is that right? Simile. Simile. I think there are different accounts with all these gods

um often of their origins he's the god of wine he's the god of theater um and of course associated with the dionysian mysteries and with the bacchus cult in rome so again is bacch Bacchus and Dionysus, are they the same? Yeah. And the Bacchantes are people who follow Dionysus in kind of ecstatic rituals, and is the theme of Euripides' great play, The Bacchae, which describes how Dionysus comes to Thebes, and the king of Thebes tries to basically

chase him off. So it's kind of like, I suppose, the police trying to stop you know ravers having raves in fields um but uh dionysus isn't having any of that and um he he goes disguised as a woman so he dionysus's followers the maenads are are women who get possessed and incredibly violent and ecstatic. And so Pentheus, the King of Thebes, goes there disguised as a Maenad. But he gets discovered and his own mother tears him to pieces.

And that teaches him to try and stop people having a drunken orgy. So in the public mind, Dionysus is the god of drunken orgies. Is there more to him than that, do you think? Well, I don't know if you've read Roberto Colasso's Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony. I have not. Which is a wonderful book about the Greek gods. Very inimitable. And my favourite sentence in that book is as follows.

Dionysus's phallus is more hallucinogenic than coercive okay um so talk me through that well he he's he's he's a very erotic god yeah um he uh the Scythianians we're told worshipped him as lord of the female sex so he um it's said that he's the one whose fingers can can make it vibrate like the strings of a lyre so that is one of his one of his superpowers yeah um but the other superpower obviously is that um he can bring his followers into a kind of ecstatic altered state. So you get sexual fulfillment, but you also kind of leave the diurnal tedium of your everyday life behind and enter this kind of ecstasy state.

But isn't there something, as the Euripides story suggests, something that's a kind of a more sinister side to this. I mean, weren't people alarmed even at the time about that sort of Dionysian cult and the Dionysian mysteries? The Romans ban it. They regard it as sinister and dangerous. And obviously there's a strong element of that

in Euripides as well. But there's also a sense that Dionysus represents aspects of human character that it is folly to repress. Right. So the id, his pure id, basically. And that's what underpins Nietzsche's famous essay on the birth of tragedy, where he counterpoints Dionysus with Apollo as the kind of the yin and yang of Greek culture. Another very interesting aspect of Dionysus is that the story goes that he originally comes from India and he comes with a kind of great invasion force.

Not soldiers, but, you know, girls in leopard skins and satyrs with vine leaves and things like that. But he brings elephants. And it was said that lots of these elephants died on the battle of of on the island of semos in in the um eastern aegean and what's interesting is that the skeletons of pleistocene um mastodons have been found there that's interesting and so adrian may, who's written a wonderful book about kind of classical paleontology, says that it's the first example that she can think of Macedon goes east to India, the Macedonians find places where Dionysus is worshipped. And they think that Dionysus has climbed these rocks

and all this sort of thing. So there is clearly a sense in the Greek world that Dionysus has something to do with things that are going on further east. There are some Dionysus stories in which Dionysus is killed and reborn. And some scholars have said, well, this, you know, he's part of a kind of continuum with Osiris,

who's also killed and reborn. And of course, Jesus, who's the same story. Do you buy that? Also, his mother gets incinerated because she gets tricked into asking Zeus to reveal himself in his full glory. And she gets kind of shriveled up and Zeus rescues Dionysus, whose little baby in the womb and implants it in his own thigh.

So that's, that's another kind of weird unusual. Do you know about Dionysus' association with Scotland? No. So in 1282, and that's in Viquething, the local vicar organised a Dionysian revel. Did he?

He persuaded the women of the village to join him in a Dionysian rite or some such. And what happened? A Christian mob killed him. Right. Well, fair enough. I mean, I think you're asking for trouble if you... 13th century Scotland holding Dionysian revels. I think, yeah, it's a risk, isn't it I mean, I think you're asking for trouble if you... 13th century Scotland holding Dionysian revels. I think, yeah, it's a risk, isn't it?

It's a bit cold apart for anything else. Yeah, it's true. So anyway, Dionysius, that wasn't enough. The Scottish vote wasn't enough to get him over the line. In fact, he lost very comfortably in the end. And so that was the end of him. And the other semi-final loser to your great sorrow, I imagine, given your stated position, was Isis.

No, I was fine. I just wanted to your stated position, was Isis. No, I was fine. I just wanted to see her get to semis. Isis is a very, very interesting god, isn't she? She's a massive god. She's a god who's part of this Egyptian kind of pantheon, as it were. They call it a pantheon. She's the wife of Osiris and the mother of Horus. But as time goes on, she becomes bigger and bigger.

She becomes a sort of Apple computers or a Microsoft of gods. She's a startup that has just become imperial. So that by the end of the sort of ancient, the Ptolemaic period, she is one of the Mediterranean's absolute, you know, she's the Coke or the Levi's. She's a colossal brand, isn't she? She is. And she appears all over the Roman Empire. absolute you know she's the coke or the levi's she's a colossal brand isn't she she is and she appears all over the roman empire um and there's a kind of ecstatic account in um the golden ass

by pulius which is the the only kind of surviving la roman novel in its entirety and this is sky lucius who gets turned into an ass uh and that's what he does throughout the course of the novel. And then at the end, he prays to Isis and she turns him back into his human shape. And he then goes on to become a massive devotee of Isis. And he shaves his head and is absolutely proud to go around bald. And then at the end, he has another vision of isis um and although we're not given the full details of this because this is a secret that you you can't reveal it it's it's a literally a mystery um nevertheless it's it's fascinating because it's one of the very very i think maybe even the only one really

that gives you a sense of kind of the ecstatic sense of identification that a worshipper of a god in the Roman period was capable of feeling. So it's a counterpoint to the sense of cults as being purely civic and transactional yeah um and and i think that um the story that we get that we get told about isis and the reason why isis and osiris and anubis and seth and all those guys kind of do have a cut through in a way that perhaps other egyptian gods don't is that it gets told by plutarch the um greek writer of the second century a.d uh and and he basically gives it to us as the equivalent of a kind of Greek myth. And so he gives us this story

about how Isis is married to Osiris. Osiris's brother, Seth, kills Osiris. Anubis then embalms him. Seth sends the coffin that he's been put into flowing down the Nile, ends up in Phoenicia. Demeter goes and sources it, rescues Osiris, brings him back to life fleetingly, has sex with him. Osiris gets her pregnant with Horus before going off to become Lord of the Underworld.

Horus grows up and then kind of chases Seth away. And that's a story like we get in greek mythology well you and by and large we don't get that kind of stuff otherwise in egyptian mythology which is why i think it has less resonance with people than say greek myths you made a slip there which i thought was really revealing which is why i didn't correct it because it's really interesting you called called her Demeter. Ah, did I? And Isis and Demeter have been identified as similar, haven't they? I mean, they play a similar part. Well, so what happens when Isis goes to source the tomb of Osiris is that she pretends to be a nursemaid for the prince of, where is it?

I think it's Byblos or Tyre, one of them. And she wants to give the son of the Prince of Tyre immortality. And so she prepares him and is going to put him in the fire. And she's surprised doing this. So she has to reveal who she is. And a very similar story is told of Demeter

at the time when she's roaming the world looking for her daughter, Persephone, who's been abducted by Hades, the god of the dead, and taken to the underworld. So do you think the Demeter cult is basically the Greeks? Because the Isis cult is obviously older.

Have the Greeks, probably through merchants or whatever, picked up the Isis cult? Do you think? Very difficult to know. And the Greeks themselves weren't sure. So there are lots of theories about that. The relationship of the Greek gods

to the um to the egyptian gods so herodotus who's the first person really to write about egyptian gods absolutely clear that uh the egyptian gods come first and the greek gods are kind of pale echoes of the egyptian gods whereas for us it you know it's often the other way around the greek gods are much more vivid in our imaginings. But that's because of their sources. It's not because they're more... So I don't know is the answer. Maybe there's a kind of direct influence. But I think also it's the fact that people in antiquity

are prone to accepting that everyone essentially is worshipping the same kind of gods. It's just that they manifest themselves in different ways. They're more ecumenical, weirdly, than we are. Yeah. And so, therefore, if you're a Greek going to Egypt, you're going to identify, say, Amun or Ra with Zeus. You're going to identify Isis with Demeter,

rather like the Romans do as well. Well, then there's this period, isn't there, Tom, which is fascinating, which we haven't massively talked about, of pure sort of syncretism, when the Greeks are running Egypt. So when the Ptolemaic family, these Macedonian Greeks are running Egypt, and then they actually go out of their

way politically to identify Greek gods and Egyptian gods, because it obviously suits them, it suits their sort of empire building project. And they invent one, Serapis. Yes. Who we were thinking perhaps should have been included, but wasn't. But I mean, he's completely made up,

kind of fusion of Greek and Egyptian elements. But that raises a really interesting question, doesn't it? That again, a bit like we were talking about Augustus on the last podcast and about how including him sort of, it changes the way you think about the division between mortal and immortal the sort of slightly simplistic way that we might think of it today i mean clearly they don't think there's anything wrong with inventing a god i think i think we bring a you know and i've said this before i'll say it again but we bring a christian perspective

and we find it very imagined you would say that. The very idea of kind of gathering all these together as pagan gods is a Christian perspective. And in the last podcast, we talked about the way in which gods become dead. Christianity is like a kind of radiation leak killing them off. Yeah. And Islam. And we see them through that prism, I think.

And one last thing about ISIS. So ISIS is very political because Cleopatra VII, the famous Cleopatra, she takes the title, the new ISIS, and she dresses up as ISIS. And this is all part of claiming her legitimacy, but it's also linking herself

to this incredibly successful cult. And Octavian Augustustus who we talked about in the last podcast um he tries to to sort of keep this out of his self as apollo does he i didn't know that yeah so anthony had identified himself with dynisis yes uh octavian identifies himself with apollo and and cleopatra is going the full isis but then when he wins he says, let's not have any Isis temples in Rome. And the Senate is very hostile to the Isis cult. Is that because it's seen as too Egyptian? It's sort of orientalizing. Yeah, but it's there.

I mean, by the end of, say, by 69 AD, the year of the four emperors after Nero, there are priests of Isis everywhere and they get embroiled in a kind of punch up that ends up with the incineration of the Temple of Jupiter on the Capitol. So they're absolutely a part of it. And actually, the worship of Isis

carries on into the reign of Justinian, the great Christian emperor of the 6th century who builds Hagia Sophia in Constantinople. There's a temple to Isis at Philae, which is kind of right at the bottom of the south century who builds Hagia Sophia in Constantinople, there's a temple to Isis at Philae, which is kind of right at the bottom of the south of Egypt, an island in the Nile, that's only closed then. So she goes on a very long way. Very long time.

And what do you think of this argument among some comparative sort of scholars that the relationship between Isis and Horus is sort of paving the way for the relationship between Mary and Jesus I'm sure I mean I'm sure that that um there's you know if you're if you're having statues of of Isis suckling Horus um it's not a great leap then to yeah you know it's it's it's not that um Christians are kind of stealing it it It's just that it's the kind of the emotional fulfillment that you get, I guess, from identifying with Mary has been prefigured by the emotional identification

that generations and generations of people have had from looking at Isis. Yeah, and the idea, I suppose, is just there in the ether, isn't it, of the mother and child? I mean, it's just part of the cultural conversation. Okay, so Isis, I mean, there was a similar margin in the two semifinals. Isis also got knocked out. I think, frankly, she did well to make the semis.

She's very interesting. She's an interesting god, though. I don't begrudge her her place in the last four. I think it was great, actually, to have somebody who, from out of the traditional sort of superpowers of Greece and the Norse world, and somebody who worshipped across the Mediterranean and stuff. So let's get to the final.

Athena versus Odin. I think Athena was our number one seed. So we clearly always saw this coming. Odin, I think, I can't remember what, he was seeded about five or six, wasn't he? Who should we do first? Let's do Odin first and see, I can't remember what, he was seeded about 5 or 6, wasn't he? Who should we do first? Let's do Odin first. He was the runner-up.

So Odin was beaten. It was a very tight result. Exciting match. 52-48. Athena got off to an early lead. Odin ate into it, but not by enough. And it was 48-52. Yeah, I mean, very Romain leave.

But the roles reversed, because I think Odin had a bit of a lever kind of. Yeah, definitely. He's sort of, you know, he's all about plucking out his eye. Which they're all doing. Sunderland and the Brexit heart. Well, he's very red meat, isn't he, Odin? He certainly is, yeah. He's Woden or Wotan.

Tacitus. Didn't Tacitus equate him with Mercury, which seems very odd. Yeah. I mean, they're all over the place. I mean, yeah. So in his form as Woden, of course, he's given his name to Wednesday. Yeah. And he's the ancestor of the Queen.

And he's the ancestor of the Queen. West Midlands. And the ancestor of the Wednesday. Yeah. And he's the ancestor of the Queen. And he's the ancestor of the Queen. West Midlands. And the ancestor of the Queen. Yeah. Who is descended from Woden then among the Queen's ancestors? The House of Wessex. Is it?

Yeah. So the Queen's, you know, trace her ancestry back to Alfred and Alfred can trace his ancestry back to Kurdic, who's the first of the Wessexan kings, supposedly. Yeah.

And he can trace his ancestry all the way back to Woden. So Prince Philip was, who got knocked out in the first round, king supposedly yeah and he can trace his ancestry all the way back to woden so prince philip was who got knocked out in the first round he did have family connections in the tournament which is nice well he married it he married the descendant of a goddess yeah that's that's good and that's one that's one of the reasons why i'd be sad personally to see the monarchy go is because i love the idea of having of being ruled by you know having a head of state who's descended from a god. Yeah. So not just a god's vicegerent on Earth, but the descendants of another god.

So Macron calls himself Jupiter. Does he? But we know that he's a people. Does Macron call himself Jupiter? Yeah, he does. How do we know that? It's all over the place. Oh, my word.

French. But our head of state is descended from a god. But Woden is quite boring oh my word French but we we have you know our head of state is descended from a god but Woden is quite boring because we don't really know anything about him

so hold on Odin so Odin and Woden it's the same thing but Odin is the name is the Viking name for him yeah and he's eye plucking out

to make himself wiser yeah he wounds himself with the spear it's very sort of fissure he hangs himself from a tree from It's very sort of Fisher King-ish. He hangs himself from a tree. An Yggdrasil.

Is it Yggdrasil? Yeah, probably. Well, it's a rootless tree, and so people assume it is. And he hangs himself there for nine days, nine nights, and this wins him wisdom. Right, yes. And the other way he gets wisdom, yes, so the eye plucking. Yeah.

So the well of Mimirir and he plucks out his eye and then is able to drink from the water so he absorbs this this um all this wisdom and then mime is who's a kind of giant spirit kind of guy has he he dies and so odin chops his head off and carries it around with him uh and consults the head of mime whenever he needs something so it's a bit like an iphone i guess it's a kind of oh you're always looking at your head a norse iphone yes yeah um and well that i mean okay so that's pretty gory and the sort of the the image that the the in the in the popular imagination is that the greek gods are all about kind of strumming lyres and drinking wine

and sort of admiring grapes. Well, Odin, there's a brilliant line. On wine alone does weapon-glorious Odin live. On wine alone? Yeah, so that's... That's quite surprising. So he's not all about meat hauls and beer. I think he had that as well.

There's a more sophisticated side to him that we don't often see. But this is my question. In the public imagination, the life of the Vikings, the life of the northern peoples before the coming of Christianity was very nasty, brutish, and short. It's always raining, and they're always killing each other. And that, therefore, their gods are similarly violent, and their mythological world is similarly bleak,

in contrast to the more sort of loose ways of the Mediterranean gods. Do you think that's true? Or was that just a sort of silly stereotype? The classical gods are pretty terrifying, as I'm sure we'll talk about when we come to Athena. I mean, they kill a lot of people. I mean, basically, they start the Trojan War just because they're bored.

Yeah. There's a lot of death. But Odin is a very, yes mean i think he's you know he's the the lord of the valkyries who you know there's kind of terrifying descriptions of them um stretching out intestines across battlefields as though they're the threads on a loom i mean kind of terrifying images and odin himself um he so one of the other ways in which he he gets wisdom is to sit under under people who've been hanged so that's so he clearly absorbs wisdom from the experience of human suffering and you've just got to look at the list of names so there's a fabulous book by neil price i think it's called

the viking way oh yes that's the predecessor to his children of ashnell it's really brilliant really really brilliant i and i read it in as a pdf before it's been properly published and and it was kind of like a samizdat work that people were handing around and he his argument is that this is all about kind of shamanism that you you have to get into a heightened state um And Odin, he lists all the names that Odin has been given in all the various epics and the runes and whatever. And there are over 200. So I noted down some of them.

You've got Father of the Slain, Lord of Treachery, Screamer, the Hooded One, Battle Wolf, Evil Worker, Lord of the Dead, Hangjaw,, nourisher of carrion eaters, lord of the hanged. Wow. I'd like some of them on my tombstone. That's not somebody you want to mess with. No, that's very impressive. And also he's got pets, hasn't he?

Well, he's got ravens. What else has he got? He's got two ravens who are both called Thord. He's got his eight-legged horse Sleipnir, and he's got two wolves, Freckie and brill brilliantly, Jerry. Jerry. If I had a wolf, I'd call him Jerry, I think. Actually, I think it's Gary, but it's funnier if it's Jerry.

But he comes to a... I mean, none of that avails him much because he's eaten by a wolf himself. Yeah, Fenrir. Isn't he? Fenrir, yeah. So he comes to... The son of Loki. And this is, again, quite unusual in the Norse cosmology, isn't it?

Because we don't have a sense of how the Greek cosmos will end. But we do have that with the Norse gods, a sense of apocalypse, looming apocalypse. And there's no sense that for Apollo, it's all going to turn horribly nasty one day and come to a hideous end. Whereas for all the Norsese gods we know precisely what's going to happen to them and it's never very pleasant and you'd assume that that's an authentic tradition i mean the the complication is that the account of ragnarok you know the end of the gods got much later is written by a christian writer and so to what extent has this been mediated through Christian takes on the apocalypse

and the end of the world? And we don't know. And, but so Odin does, you know, like so many gods fades before the coming of Christianity. But there is, in Iceland, there are kind of charm formulas that continue to mention Odin right the way into the early modern period.

And even in Sweden, there are kind of folk memories of him, not as a god, but as someone who I think if he appears, he will bring you wealth. He's a kind of devil, a demon. So he kind of leaves trace elements there. There's all the stuff about him leading the wild hunt as well, isn't there? Well, that's kind of more, yes, perhaps, but hugely contested. Right. So it may not be the same thing. It may not be the same Odin.

Yeah. So Odin essentially then gets reinvented in the 19th century. Yeah. And, of course, gets adopted by the Nazis. So he's very popular with neo-Nazis. I think the guy who wore the bison head who broke into the Capitol. He's done the Viking gods no favours.

No, he hasn't. I think he had all kinds of Odin tattoos and stuff. Did he? He's the man who had, when he was imprisoned in Arizona or New Mexico or wherever it was, his mother made a great fuss and said he had to have vegan food.

Did you see that? Organic food. Right. Okay. Well, Odin wouldn't. No, he wouldn't. Well, anyway, Odin put up a very, very strong showing. He got 48% of the vote, but it wasn't enough because he was up against the number one seed, Mary Beard's choice before the tournament. Athena. Athena.

Athena won. I was a bit disappointed, Tom, if I can be quite. Why were you disappointed? I wanted Athena to win. Did you? She's my patron goddess. I didn't want Athena to win. I was a bit disappointed because I thought she was a bit of an obvious choice. You will be horrified by this because you're going to now tell me this is

completely a complete misreading. I find Athena a bit colourless. I am horrified. Yeah, to me, she's just a bit too mainstream. She's – I like a niche god. I like her kind of music. I like her – yeah, she's the Coldplay. She's Coldplay.

Yeah, you liked her before she – Before she was – I saw her when she was nothing. She's Coldplay. You liked her before she... I saw her when she was nothing. Before she became famous. I saw her at the Civic Hall in Northampton. She's the embodied... She's, again, a bit like Ishtar. She fuses warfare with the arts of civilisation. So she's wisdom and war.

And war. And is it right? I'm thinking she takes her name from Athens rather than the other way around. Probably. She began as the civic goddess of Athens. Yeah, probably. We don't know. But yes, so she gives her name to Athens.

She's the patron of Athens. Her name is the same as athens um and she is the presiding genius of the golden age of the democracy and actually it it it's impossible to understand the significance of democracy without understanding the relationship that the athenians had with athena why because well she got to do with it so so what you'll hear about athenian democracy and it's always said is um it wasn't real democracy because only men you know free men had to vote what about the women um and what about the slaves the thing is that that athena is the is is the the guarantor of the um relationship that the Athenians have with their past and with their future. And the demos, the power that's vested in the demos, the demos is the totality of every Athenian

that's lived and will live. And you have to have been born on the soil of Attica because that's sacred to Athena. So you can't be an Athenian if you're born elsewhere. You were literally born from the soil, you're Tocthonus. And therefore, it's as important to keep Athena on board as it is to sit in the assembly and draw up laws. So the role of men is to sit in the assembly and draw up laws. The role of women basically is to keep Athena happy. And for the Athenians, that's just as significant.

So female listeners who will say, well, that just sounds like typical men making up a reason to keep women sort of in their place, you'd say that's not true at all. That's actually... That's a very 21st century perspective. Yeah. And it's a perspective, again,

that ultimately comes from Christianity that says that every human being is of equal value and equal right. That's not how the Greeks saw it. The Greeks saw it in a very, very different way. So when we we assume we think of democracy as a kind of abstract principle that everyone should have a vote because everybody has an equal value. And therefore, if you're saying that women can't have the vote, then you're saying that women have are less, less valuable, that their opinions are less valuable, that their rights are less significant. For the Athenians, it's about keeping the demos on the road. And you do what you do to ensure that happens. So the men draw up the laws and they go off and fight to defend the demos. And the women have this relationship with Athena and they do the necessary rituals that will keep Athena on board, which likewise is just as important.

But it's so you've got to kind of put yourself into the shoes of someone for whom Athena is a powerful, terrifying, but ultimately wooable figure. Why terrifying, Tom? You've said that a few times. She kills a lot of people. Okay. I mean, the classic one is that anyone basically who calls her out, she kills or turns into spiders. So Arachne, the maiden who claims that she's better

at weaving than Athena. And Athena zaps her into a spider. And she's merciless to those who offend her equally. And this is why I think she's a great god and why I think that she corresponds to something kind of fundamental in the nature of the way that life is. You know, she has people she hates

and she has her favourites. And that seems true to life. There are people who have a kind of golden existence. And of course, her most famous favourite is Odysseus. Yes, because she's copped up again and again, doesn't she, in the Odyssey and also in the Iliad. She's very, very close to her protégés in a way that other gods aren't. Other gods are kind of more distant. But Athena is always at their ear, kind of whispering in them. There's a wonderful collection of short stories about the Odyssey called The Lost Books of the

Odyssey by Zachary Mason. And there's a great story in that where Athena is secretly in love with Odysseus. And she tells Odysseus that she's in love with him and Odysseus laughs and she then vanishes. She goes bright red and vanishes. Very effective. Nice. Highly recommended. She's a virgin, isn't she? She's a virgin, yes. And so do you think there's a link? We've talked a few times about this, about links with

Christianity or with subsequent religions. Is there a link with the Virgin Mary, do you think there's a link? We've talked a few times about this, about links with Christianity or with subsequent religions. Is there a link with the Virgin Mary, do you think? Well, her shrine, the most famous shrine, Temple Parthenos, Parthenon, the Virgin, the kind of the Virgin's temple becomes the church dedicated to the Virgin in the Christian period. And what's what's also interesting is that um athena guards the walls of athens so when athens is is attacked she can be seen walking the walls patrolling it i know where you're gonna what you're gonna say constantinople so constantinople the virgin is seen yeah protecting constantinople when when when the city is under siege and that's a tradition that then passes into the folklore

that's told about the defense of Moscow in the Second World War. Because it's said that Stalin sends up an icon of the Virgin in a plane that flies around the city limits of Moscow. So there is these kind of strange inheritances that pass down through the centuries. So I think Athena is a wonderful god and a worthy winner. And I'm very happy that she is. You're with Sigmund Freud on that.

Didn't Sigmund Freud have a sculpture of Athena on his desk? Yeah, probably. I certainly have. You're very similar people in many ways. Anyway. Wonderful work to which to end. So that concluded the World Cup of Gods. Athena was the champion. Tom, what have you

learned from this process as Alan Sugar would call it? That gods are very weird and that um we tend to have a very one-track sense of what gods should be that um the diversity of belief over the course of the centuries and because the span of the globe um undermines yeah i mean you think there's lots of continuities, but people don't dress up in other people's inverted skins anymore,

do they, as the Chibitotech? I mean, I still think it's a tragedy that Prince Philip didn't win. Would have been very good for Britain, good for the Queen. Nice in a tough time, but it wasn't to be. Clearly the public thought otherwise, and the voters, I suppose, are never wrong. So Athena was the champion and we'll have to do another World Cup in a few months.

Tom, got any ideas? I think Kings and Queens of Britain. I think it would be brilliant. Brilliant. Maybe American presidents. Okay. Jolly good. I still look forward to it.

We shall... We've got some great episodes coming up. We've got Magna Carta coming up. We've got Mohammed. Which is topical because he was a great toppler of idols. So in a way, a kind of perfect follow-up to this. See you next time.

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