Mythology And Folklore For Sleep

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.

The Churning of the Cosmic Ocean: The Complete Quest for Immortality | Hindu Mythology for SleepA slow, quiet retelling of the churning of the cosmic ocean, made for falling asleep to.It’s a thousand-year engineering project, and that’s not a figure of speech. The gods wanted the nectar of immortality, which lay at the bottom of the sea of milk, and the only way to raise it was to churn the entire ocean — which meant finding a mountain to use as a churning stick, a serpent long enough to wrap around it as a rope, and something underneath to stop the mountain sinking.It also meant working with their enemies, because no one side could do it alone. So the gods took one end of the serpent and the demons took the other, and they pulled, and the ocean turned, and they kept at it for a very long time.What came up out of it, one thing at a time, is the body of the story. A poison first — so concentrated that it threatened everything living, and had to be swallowed and held in the throat of a god who would not let it go any further. Then treasures: a wish-granting cow, a white elephant, a horse, a tree, a jewel, a goddess rising on a lotus who chose her husband on the spot. And at the end, a physician walking up out of the water with the vessel everyone had been churning for.And then, inevitably, the argument over who gets it, and the disguise, and the trick, and the one demon who slipped into the line and drank — and what was done to him in the half-second afterwards, which is why, in the stories, eclipses happen.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 in the churning and surface somewhere near the end of it, that’s the intended use — it goes on for a thousand years, after all. 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 Roman Mythology: The Gods, Heroes and Founding of Rome | Mythology for SleepA slow, quiet journey through the whole of Roman mythology, from the gods to the founding of the city, made for falling asleep to.This is the long one. Not a single story but the whole arrangement — and the first thing to say about it is that it isn’t simply the Greek version with the names changed, however often people claim that.The oldest Roman gods are stranger and vaguer than their Greek counterparts: forces rather than personalities, with almost no stories attached, worshipped carefully by farmers who were mainly concerned with getting the ritual exactly right. A god of doorways and beginnings who faces both ways. Household spirits kept in a cupboard and fed. A goddess whose fire in the centre of the city was never allowed to go out, tended by women who gave thirty years to it. Only later, once Greek literature arrived, did the big Olympian personalities get laid on top — and the seams are still visible.Then the part the Romans actually cared about: how the city got here. A refugee sailing out of a burning Troy with his father on his back, seven years at sea, a queen in Carthage, a descent into the underworld to speak with the dead, and a war in Italy to win a country he’d been promised. Centuries later, in the same line, twin boys put in a basket on a flooding river, a she-wolf, a quarrel over a wall, and a killing that the Romans never stopped being uncomfortable about. Everything afterwards — the kings, the rape and the revolt that ended them, the heroes who held bridges and burned their own hands — was told less as myth than as instruction.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 among the old household gods and surface somewhere on a hillside above the Tiber, 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, Roman myths 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.

Laelaps and the Teumessian Fox: The Complete Story of the Unending Hunt | Greek Mythology for SleepA slow, quiet retelling of Laelaps and the Teumessian fox, made for falling asleep to.It’s the shortest paradox in Greek myth and one of the strangest things the gods ever had to deal with.There was a fox sent to punish a city, and it had been made so that nothing could ever catch it. And there was a hound, given as a gift and passed down through several hands, which had been made so that nothing it chased could ever escape. The two of them were eventually, inevitably, set against each other — and the moment they started running, the world had a problem that could not be resolved by anything inside it.What follows is how they got there, which takes some telling. The fox has its own story, demanding a child from Thebes every month until somebody thought to solve the matter with a dog. The hound has a longer one: a wedding present, then a payment, then an inheritance, passed between people who each used it for something and each came to a bad end — including a husband and wife who kept giving each other magical gifts out of mutual suspicion, which ended exactly as badly as that sounds.And then the chase, which is still going in one sense. Zeus looked down at a creature that always catches and a creature that is never caught, both at full speed across the Theban countryside, and did the only thing available: he stopped them both, turned them to stone, and put them in the sky, where they are two of the constellations. The hunt never finished. It was simply paused and hung up where everyone could see it.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 before the chase begins and surface long after both of them are in the sky, 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 Japanese Mythology: The First Gods and Japan’s Creation | Mythology for SleepA slow, quiet journey through the beginning of Japanese mythology, from the first gods to the making of the islands, made for falling asleep to.This is the long one. Not a single story but the opening of the whole arrangement, in the order the oldest surviving Japanese book puts it — a text written down in the eighth century precisely because the court was worried the stories were slipping away.It starts with something formless and a bridge in the sky. The first generations of gods come and go without doing much, and then a pair of them are handed a jewelled spear and told to make something of the ocean below. They stir it, and when they lift the spear the brine that drips off the tip hardens into the first island, and they go down and stand on it. What they do next — the courtship, the circling of a pillar, the wrong word spoken first, and the terrible result that followed — is one of the stranger beginnings in any mythology, and the way they correct it says a great deal about the world being built.Then the islands are born, one after another, and then the gods of the sea and the mountains and the trees, and then the one whose birth killed her — and what follows is a husband going down into the land of the dead after her, a warning not to look, a lamp lit anyway, and a flight back up with the whole underworld behind him. What he washes off in a river afterwards becomes the sun, the moon, and the storm — and from there the rest of Japanese myth begins.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 floating bridge and surface somewhere on the way back from the underworld, 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, Japanese legends 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.

Argus and Io: The Complete Story of Hera’s Hundred-Eyed Guardian | Greek Mythology for SleepA slow, quiet retelling of Argus and Io, made for falling asleep to.The useful thing about a guard with a hundred eyes is that he only ever closes half of them. He never slept — not properly, not all at once — which is why he was given the job, and which is also, eventually, what killed him.The story is a domestic quarrel that got badly out of hand. A god took an interest in a young priestess, his wife came looking, and he turned the girl into a white cow before she arrived. The wife, who was not fooled for a second, asked politely for the cow as a gift, and then tied it to a tree and set the hundred-eyed watchman over it. What follows is what was sent to get her back: not force, but a storyteller — somebody who sat down beside the guard and simply talked, and played, and told a long, slow, circling tale until the eyes began to close one pair at a time.And then the rest, which is the sad half. A girl still in the shape of an animal, driven across the whole of the known world by a stinging fly, from Greece to the Black Sea to Egypt, passing a chained Titan on a rock along the way. It takes years. She is restored at the end of it, in Egypt, and the eyes of the dead guardian are set into the tail of a bird, where they still are.There is something fitting about an episode whose central scene is a very long story being told to put somebody to sleep.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 before the last eye closes, 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 Egyptian Mythology: Creation, Battles and the Underworld | Mythology for SleepA slow, quiet journey through the whole of Egyptian mythology, from the first mound of earth to the last gate of the underworld, made for falling asleep to.This is the long one. Not a single story but the whole arrangement, which is worth taking in one sitting — because the Egyptians kept the same world running, with the same gods in it, for longer than any other civilisation has kept anything, and the pieces only make sense together.It starts in water, with nothing in it. Then a mound rises, and on it something stands up and begins naming things into existence — and there are several versions of that moment, from several cities, all of them certain their own mound was the first. What follows is the family that came out of it: a sky, a ground, air and water between them, and the generation after that, whose quarrel is the heart of all of it. A good king killed by his own brother. A wife who searched the length of the country for the pieces. A son who grew up to take the throne back, in a dispute that ran for eighty years and was settled in a courtroom.Then the two things the Egyptians thought about most. The sun, which is not simply up there but a boat crewed every night through the dark on the other side of the world, attacked at the same point every single night by something that has to be driven off before morning. And the dead, who make a journey of their own — gates with their own keepers, each with a name that has to be spoken, a hall where a life is weighed against a feather, and whatever lies past that.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 first mound and surface somewhere deep in the night boat’s 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 Ramayana: The Complete Story of Rama’s Journey to Rescue Sita | Hindu Mythology for SleepA slow, quiet retelling of the Ramayana, made for falling asleep to.Twenty-four thousand verses, and the whole thing turns on a promise a king made years earlier to somebody he’d rather have forgotten about.It opens at court. A prince who is about to be crowned, and a stepmother who calls in an old favour instead: her own son on the throne, and the heir sent into the forest for fourteen years. He goes without arguing, which is the point of him. His wife insists on coming. His brother does too. And for a long stretch of the story nothing much happens except exile — a forest, a hut, sages, seasons passing.Then she is taken. A king from across the water, ten heads, a flying chariot, a golden deer sent as a distraction, and a woman gone from a place she had been told not to leave. What follows is the long second half: an alliance with an army of monkeys, a scout who crosses the sea in a single leap and comes back with word that she is alive, a bridge built stone by stone across the water, and a war at the end of it. And then, after the victory, a final section that is much harder than the war — about doubt, and reputation, and what a king owes his people against what a husband owes his wife. It does not end the way the first half promises.Three thousand years old, still performed every autumn, and still argued about.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 forest and surface somewhere on the far side of the sea, 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 Irish MythologyA slow, quiet journey through the whole of Irish mythology, from the first arrivals to the last of the heroes, made for falling asleep to.This is the long one. Not a single story but the whole arrangement, in the order the medieval scribes put it in — because Irish myth was written down as a history, and it reads like one. Wave after wave of people arriving on an island, each of them displacing the last.So it starts with the invasions. A succession of peoples who came, settled, were wiped out by plague or war, and were replaced. Then the arrival of the ones everyone remembers — a people who came out of the north with four treasures and a great deal of skill, who won the island in two enormous battles and held it for a long time. Their gods are the figures the rest of it hangs on: a father with a club and an endless cauldron, a woman of war who appears as a crow, a craftsman who could make anything. And then another wave came, the last one, and beat them — and rather than leave, they went underneath. Into the hills. Which is where every fairy story told in Ireland for the next two thousand years comes from.After that it becomes the stories of people. A young man who took up arms knowing it would kill him young, and held a province’s army at a ford on his own. A warrior band living out in the woods under a leader with a thumb that gave him knowledge. Voyages west to islands that shouldn’t exist. And the children turned to swans for nine hundred years, which is the one everybody’s grandmother knew.It ends roughly where the old world does, with the gods under the hills and the monks writing it all down.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 during the first invasion and surface somewhere out on the western sea, 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, Irish mythology 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.