The Goddess Divine Podcast

Nearly 3,900 years ago, in the Mesopotamian city of Isin, something happened that had never happened before: the temple dogs stopped barking.Step into the ancient world with us and meet Gula, also called Ninisina, Ninkarrak, and Lady of Life. She was the Great Physician of Mesopotamia, a goddess worshiped for more than two thousand years by kings, midwives, scribes, and mothers in the middle of the night. She could send a sickness and she could lift it. She carried a scalpel, and she came with a dog at her side.In this episode you'll hear an immersive microstory set in the goddess's own city, then explore how people 4,000 years ago understood the cosmos, illness, and the gods. You'll meet Gula's family, walk into her legendary Dog House, learn how she helped human beings, and discover what people offered her. We finish with why she still speaks to us today, and a simple, heart-centered ritual you can try at home.This episode is educational and devotional. It is not medical advice. Gula's own devotees always paired prayer with skilled care, and so should we.REFERENCES Dalley, Stephanie, trans. Myths from Mesopotamia: Creation, the Flood, Gilgamesh, and Others. Rev. ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. (Atrahasis and creation narratives.) Foster, Benjamin R. Before the Muses: An Anthology of Akkadian Literature. 3rd ed. Bethesda, MD: CDL Press, 2005. (Includes the Gula Hymn of Bulluṭsa-rabi and prayers to appease angry gods.) Lambert, Wilfred G. "The Gula Hymn of Bulluṭsa-rabi." Orientalia n.s. 36 (1967): 105–132. Parpola, Simo, and Kazuko Watanabe. Neo-Assyrian Treaties and Loyalty Oaths. State Archives of Assyria 2. Helsinki: Helsinki University Press, 1988. (Esarhaddon's succession treaty and its curses invoking Gula.) Roth, Martha T. Law Collections from Mesopotamia and Asia Minor. 2nd ed. Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1997. (Code of Hammurabi, including the medical fee laws and epilogue curses invoking Ninkarrak.) Black, Jeremy A., Graham Cunningham, Eleanor Robson, and Gábor Zólyomi. The Literature of Ancient Sumer. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. (Sumerian hymns and texts relating to Ninisina; also available online as the Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature, etcsl.orinst.ox.ac.uk.)

In the summer of 429 BCE, Athens was dying. Plague had come in through the port, bodies were stacked in the streets, and the city that believed it needed no one went looking for help from a goddess it had spent a century calling barbarian.Her name was Bendis. She came from Thrace, the wild country north of Greece,  and she came by sea, carried in the memory of merchants, mercenaries, and enslaved women who had been taken from their homes and sold in the Athenian market. She was a huntress. She carried two spears, and the ancients could never quite agree on what the second one was for.Athens gave her land. Athens gave her a sanctuary on the hill above the harbor. And Athens gave her something it had never given any god before: a race of torches, run at night, on horseback, with fire passed hand to hand through the dark.This week, we follow Bendis from the Thracian highlands to the Piraeus waterfront, through Plato's strangest opening paragraph, through the fox-skin cap and the fawn skin, through an etymology that may mean the one who binds and we ask what it means when a city in crisis opens its gates to a goddess it doesn't understand.REFERENCES & FURTHER READINGAncient sources Plato, Republic 327a–328b — the Piraeus opening, the two processions, the mounted torch relay. Herodotus, Histories 4.33 (wheat straw offering to "Queen Artemis" by Thracian and Paeonian women); 5.7 (the gods of the Thracians). Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War 2.47–2.54 — the plague at Athens, including the collapse of religious observance. Strabo, Geography 10.3.16 — Bendis among Thracian ecstatic rites, alongside Cotys. Cratinus, Thrattai (Thracian Women), fragments — the dilonchos / two-spear epithet. Scholia to Plato, Republic 327a — ancient explanations of the twin spears. Modern scholarship Robert Parker, Athenian Religion: A History (Oxford, 1996) — chapter on foreign cults at Athens; the standard treatment of how Bendis got in. Robert Parker, Polytheism and Society at Athens (Oxford, 2005) — festival calendar, the Bendideia. Christopher Planeaux, "The Date of Bendis' Entry into Attica," Classical Journal 96.2 (2000–2001) — the core article on the contested chronology. Read this one if you read only one. Zofia Archibald, The Odrysian Kingdom of Thrace (Oxford, 1998) — Thracian religion and material culture on its own terms rather than through Greek eyes. Jan Bremmer, Greek Religion and Culture, the Bible and the Ancient Near East — useful on ecstatic cult and Greek anxieties about it.

In the winter of 1679, a woman walked out of a church in Paris and into the hands of the police. Her name was Catherine Monvoisin, but all of Paris knew her as La Voisin: "The Neighbor." She read palms, sold love potions, and, investigators claimed, supplied poison to some of the most powerful women in France. Behind her garden wall, they said, a priest said midnight masses over a naked woman's body, and the blood of infants was offered to demons for the love of a king.This Halloween, we go to the edge of seventeenth-century Paris, to a house with a furnace in the garden, a courtroom draped in black, and a scandal so dangerous that Louis XIV ordered the evidence sealed. What did La Voisin really do? What was invented under torture? And who, exactly, was she selling to?Content note: this episode discusses poisoning, infant death (alleged), torture, and execution by burning. It is based on historical sources, and much of the most sensational testimony was extracted under duress. We'll flag what is documented and what is legend.SOURCES AND FURTHER READINGBooks and scholarship Anne Somerset, The Affair of the Poisons: Murder, Infanticide, and Satanism at the Court of Louis XIV (New York: St. Martin's Press, 2003). The best modern English-language narrative and a core source for this episode. Lynn Wood Mollenauer, Strange Revelations: Magic, Poison, and Sacrilege in Louis XIV's France (University Park: Penn State University Press, 2007). A careful study of the trials and the culture of magic and sacrilege. Frances Mossiker, The Affair of the Poisons: Louis XIV, Madame de Montespan, and One of History's Great Unsolved Mysteries (New York: Knopf, 1969). An older, popular narrative. Frantz Funck-Brentano, Le Drame des poisons (Paris, 1899). Foundational early scholarship, available in English as Princes and Poisoners (1901). François Ravaisson (ed.), Archives de la Bastille (Paris, published in volumes from the 1860s onward). Published documents from the Bastille archives, including material from the Chambre Ardente. Nancy Mitford, The Sun King (1966). For general background on Louis XIV's court, including Madame de Montespan. Primary sourceMadame de Sévigné, Letters (to her daughter, Madame de Grignan). The letter following La Voisin's execution (dated the 23rd of February 1680) is the best-known contemporary account of her final days. Many English translations exist. Her letters also track the Brinvilliers scandal.Reference works and articles consulted while preparing this script Encyclopædia Britannica (1911 ed.) entry "La Voisin," notes the role of La Reynie's preserved notes and gives the fate of other prisoners. Wikipedia, "La Voisin," and "Affair of the Poisons" (useful for dates and names; note that the "2,500 victims" figure appearing there and elsewhere is unsourced and should be treated with caution). Encyclopedia.com, "La Voisin (?-1680)." Paris Zigzag, "Paris sombre : la terrifiante Affaire des Poisons" (French-language popular history; useful on Desgrez and the Chambre Ardente). Connexion France, "Sorceress, midwife, poisoner: meet La Voisin."

Four thousand years before anyone worried about being watched online, the people of ancient Mesopotamia believed something far worse: that a goddess named Belet-Seri had been recording every single thing they said and did, every day of their lives and that when they died, she would read it all aloud.Tonight, for Halloween, we descend into Irkalla, the Mesopotamian land of no return, to meet the "Lady of the Steppe," scribe of the underworld court of Ereshkigal. Who was she? Whose daughter, whose sister, whose wife? Why did a civilization obsessed with omens, ghosts, and proper burial fear a goddess who never raised a weapon, never cursed a soul, and simply... wrote? Grab a candle. She's already writing this down.References: Asher-Greve, J. M., & Westenholz, J. G. (2013). Goddesses in Context: On Divine Powers, Roles, Relationships, and Gender in Mesopotamian Textual and Visual Sources. Academic Press Fribourg / Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht Göttingen. Krul, J. (2018). The Revival of the Anu Cult and the Nocturnal Fire Ceremony at Late Babylonian Uruk. Brill. Katz, D. (2003). The Image of the Netherworld in the Sumerian Sources. CDL Press. Brisch, N. (2019). "Geštinanna/Belet-ṣeri (goddess)." Ancient Mesopotamian Gods and Goddesses, Oracc and the UK Higher Education Academy. Available at: oracc.museum.upenn.edu/amgg Epic of Gilgamesh, Tablet VII (Enkidu's dream of the underworld) multiple translations, including Andrew George's The Epic of Gilgamesh (Penguin Classics). Udug-hul incantation series (Old Babylonian exorcism texts) referenced via Krul (2018) and Katz (2003). Wikipedia contributors, "Belet-Seri" and "Geshtinanna," Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia Black, J., Green, A., & Rickards, T. (1992). Gods, Demons and Symbols of Ancient Mesopotamia: An Illustrated Dictionary. British Museum Press.

She had the head of a lion, the teeth of a donkey, and the talons of a monstrous bird. She nursed a dog and a pig at her own breast, rode a donkey through the rivers of the underworld, and  according to the people of ancient Mesopotamia, she came for your children in the dark. This October, we meet Lamashtu: a figure so feared that an entire industry of amulets, incantations, and household exorcisms grew up around keeping her away from newborns and their mothers. We'll dig into who she really was not quite a demon, not quite a goddess, something ancient Mesopotamians themselves struggled to categorize and what four thousand years of terrified parents can tell us about how a civilization confronted the fragility of new life.References: Primary: Old Babylonian and Old Assyrian Lamashtu incantations (c. 2000 BCE onward); Neo-Assyrian amulets and plaques (British Museum, Louvre, Metropolitan Museum of Art collections).Modern: Farber, Walter, Lamaštu: An Edition of the Canonical Series of Lamaštu Incantations and Rituals and Related Texts from the Second and First Millennia B.C. (Winona Lake, 2014); Black & Green, Gods, Demons and Symbols of Ancient Mesopotamia (1992); Abusch & Schwemer, Corpus of Mesopotamian Anti-Witchcraft Rituals (2011).