Mythology And Folklore For Sleep

Griffins: The Complete Legend of the Gold-Guarding Beasts of Hyperborea | Greek Mythology for SleepA slow, quiet retelling of the griffin, made for falling asleep to.Lion at the back, eagle at the front, and a job: sitting on a hoard of gold somewhere out past the edge of the map, in a cold place nobody Greek had ever actually been to.The griffin is older than Greece. It turns up on Egyptian walls and Persian seals and Minoan frescoes centuries before the Greeks got hold of it, which makes it one of the longest-lived images in the ancient world — borrowed, passed along, and reinvented by everyone who met it. What the Greeks added was a location and a feud. They put it in the far north, in a land beyond the north wind that was supposed to be perfect, and they set it against a people who kept trying to take the gold — a running conflict that ancient writers described as a simple matter of fact, the way you’d describe a border dispute.Then the stranger part. These stories came along trade routes out of Central Asia, through territory full of fossil beds, where the eroding ground gives up the bones of a beaked, four-legged animal about the size of a lion, lying near nests of eggs, in gold-bearing country. Whether that’s where the griffin came from is argued about, and it probably can’t be settled. But the stories, the bones and the gold were all in the same place, which is more of a coincidence than most legends can offer.The recording itself is the usual thing. A low, even voice, no music, no sound effects, nothing that rises or drops or suddenly arrives. Nothing in it is built to frighten you. Slow enough that following along stops feeling necessary somewhere in the first twenty minutes. If you drift off somewhere south and surface far out past the north wind, that’s the intended use. Most people don’t make it past the first half hour, and the rest will still be here tomorrow night.Put it on, turn the volume down, and let it go on without you.Mythology & Folklore for Sleep — long, calm retellings of Greek myths, Norse legends, Egyptian tales, Hindu epics, Chinese classics and old folklore from around the world, made for insomnia and the hours when you can’t sleep. Bedtime stories for adults, told in a slow, quiet voice. New episodes every day.

The Complete Story of Hindu Mythology: Creation, Gods and the Great Epics | Mythology for SleepA slow, quiet journey through the whole of Hindu mythology, from the first creation to the great epics, made for falling asleep to.This is the long one. Not a single story but the whole arrangement — and it is by some distance the largest of them, because unlike most of these traditions it never stopped. These are not myths that belong to a civilisation that ended. They are still in use.It begins with a question rather than an answer. The oldest hymn about the creation of the world ends by wondering whether anyone knows how it happened at all, including whoever is looking down on it — which is an unusual way to start a cosmology and tells you something about what follows. Then the images: a god asleep on a serpent on an endless ocean between worlds, a flower opening from him with the maker of this world sitting in it, and the cycle of ages turning underneath all of it, in spans of time so long that the whole of recorded human history is a rounding error.Then the gods. One who makes, one who preserves, one who dissolves — and the one who preserves comes down into the world whenever it goes badly wrong, in a different shape each time: a fish, a boar, a dwarf, a prince, a cowherd. The goddesses, who are not secondary: a figure of speech and learning, a figure of fortune, and the one made out of the combined anger of every god in the heavens when nothing else would work. And the ocean churned for a thousand years with a mountain for a stick and a serpent for a rope, to get at the thing that makes you deathless.And then the two epics, which together run to something like fifteen times the length of the Bible: a prince exiled into the forest and the war fought to get his wife back, and a quarrel between two sets of cousins that ends in a field with two armies facing each other and a conversation about duty that people are still reading every day.Hours long, by design. There’s no part of it you have to be awake for.The recording itself is the usual thing. A low, even voice, no music, no sound effects, nothing that rises or drops or suddenly arrives. Slow enough that following along stops feeling necessary somewhere in the first twenty minutes. If you drift off on the endless ocean and surface somewhere on a battlefield many ages later, that’s the intended use. Most people don’t make it past the first half hour, and the rest will still be here tomorrow night.Put it on, turn the volume down, and let it go on without you.Mythology & Folklore for Sleep — long, calm retellings of Greek myths, Norse legends, Egyptian tales, Hindu epics, Mesopotamian stories and old folklore from around the world, made for insomnia and the hours when you can’t sleep. Bedtime stories for adults, told in a slow, quiet voice. New episodes every day.

Freyja: The Complete Story of the Goddess of Love, Magic and the Fallen | Norse Mythology for SleepA slow, quiet retelling of the story of Freyja, made for falling asleep to.People reach for “the Norse Aphrodite” and it isn’t right. She takes first pick of the men killed in battle — before Odin does — and only what she leaves over goes to his hall. That detail alone puts her somewhere no other love goddess sits.She isn’t originally one of them either. She arrived in Asgard as part of a settlement at the end of a war between two families of gods, hostage and ally at once, and she brought with her the kind of magic the Æsir didn’t have and had to be taught. What follows is a life assembled out of strange, vivid pieces. A cloak of falcon feathers that she lends out to whoever needs to fly somewhere. A chariot pulled by cats. A famous necklace, and what she is said to have done to obtain it, which the sources are not shy about. A husband who disappeared and never came back, and the fact that she travels looking for him under different names in different places, and that her tears turn to gold wherever they fall.And then the two things together. She is the one you asked about love, and marriage, and childbirth — and she is also the one who rides out over a battlefield afterwards and takes half of what’s lying there. The Norse saw no contradiction in that at all, which may be the most interesting thing about her.The recording itself is the usual thing. A low, even voice, no music, no sound effects, nothing that rises or drops or suddenly arrives. Slow enough that following along stops feeling necessary somewhere in the first twenty minutes. If you drift off early and surface somewhere in the middle of a journey, that’s the intended use. Most people don’t make it past the first half hour, and the rest will still be here tomorrow night.Put it on, turn the volume down, and let it go on without you.Mythology & Folklore for Sleep — long, calm retellings of Greek myths, Norse legends, Egyptian tales, Hindu epics, Chinese classics and old folklore from around the world, made for insomnia and the hours when you can’t sleep. Bedtime stories for adults, told in a slow, quiet voice. New episodes every day.

The Complete Story of Mesopotamian Mythology: From Creation to Gilgamesh | Mythology for SleepA slow, quiet journey through the whole of Mesopotamian mythology, from the first creation to the oldest surviving story, made for falling asleep to.This is the long one. Not a single story but the whole arrangement — and the oldest one we have. These stories were already ancient when the Greek gods were new. They were written in wedge-shaped marks pressed into wet clay, and they survive because a palace burned down and fired the tablets hard.It starts with fresh water and salt water mixing, and gods born out of that who made so much noise that the older generation decided to be rid of them. What follows is a war in which a mother turns against her own children, a young god who is given the kingship on the condition that he fights her, and a world made afterwards out of what was left of her — the sky one half, the earth the other. Then people, made from clay and the blood of a condemned god, and made for one reason: to do the work the gods had got tired of.And because they were made for that, the rest follows. They multiply, they become loud, and the gods try to get rid of them — which is where a man is told to build a boat, take the animals aboard, and ride out a flood that lasts seven days. That version is a thousand years older than the one most people know.Then the last part: a king who was two parts god and one part man, bored and unbearable, who met his equal, loved him, lost him, and could not accept it. What he does about that — walking to the end of the world to ask a man who survived the flood how to live forever — is the oldest piece of literature we have, and it is about failing to get what you want and going home anyway.Hours long, by design. There’s no part of it you have to be awake for.The recording itself is the usual thing. A low, even voice, no music, no sound effects, nothing that rises or drops or suddenly arrives. Slow enough that following along stops feeling necessary somewhere in the first twenty minutes. If you drift off in the first water and surface somewhere out past the edge of the world, that’s the intended use. Most people don’t make it past the first half hour, and the rest will still be here tomorrow night.Put it on, turn the volume down, and let it go on without you.Mythology & Folklore for Sleep — long, calm retellings of Greek myths, Norse legends, Egyptian tales, Hindu epics, Mesopotamian stories and old folklore from around the world, made for insomnia and the hours when you can’t sleep. Bedtime stories for adults, told in a slow, quiet voice. New episodes every day.

The Eagle of Zeus: The Complete Story of Ganymede and the Thunderbolts | Greek Mythology for SleepA slow, quiet retelling of the eagle of Zeus, made for falling asleep to.Most of the gods had an animal. Only one of them had a servant that carried his weapons, fought in his wars, and was eventually put into the sky as a constellation so that everyone would remember it.The eagle has more than one origin depending on who you read, which is part of the fun. In one account it was a bird that appeared to him as an omen before the war against the Titans, and he kept it for luck. In another it was something else entirely, transformed. What’s consistent is the job: it carried the thunderbolts — the weapons forged in the dark under a mountain by craftsmen he’d released from a prison, which is a story of its own — and it was sent out whenever something needed collecting.Which brings in the boy. A prince on a hillside above Troy, looking after his father’s flocks, taken up in the eagle’s claws and carried to the top of the mountain to serve the gods their wine. His father was compensated with horses, which is the detail that tells you how the Greeks felt about it. The boy didn’t age and didn’t come back, and was eventually put in the sky as well, pouring water out of a jar, next to the eagle that took him. Two constellations, still next to each other, from one afternoon on a hill.The recording itself is the usual thing. A low, even voice, no music, no sound effects, nothing that rises or drops or suddenly arrives. Slow enough that following along stops feeling necessary somewhere in the first twenty minutes. If you drift off on the hillside and surface somewhere up among the stars, that’s the intended use. Most people don’t make it past the first half hour, and the rest will still be here tomorrow night.Put it on, turn the volume down, and let it go on without you.Mythology & Folklore for Sleep — long, calm retellings of Greek myths, Norse legends, Egyptian tales, Hindu epics, Chinese classics and old folklore from around the world, made for insomnia and the hours when you can’t sleep. Bedtime stories for adults, told in a slow, quiet voice. New episodes every day.