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

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 READING
Ancient sources

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 READING
Books and scholarship

• Madame 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.

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:

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).

Before there were jack-o'-lanterns, there was garlic and poppy heads hung on doorways to keep death away. This October, we descend into one of the darkest and least-discussed corners of Roman religion: Mania, the goddess of the dead, the mother of ghosts, and the terrifying matriarch behind the household spirits every Roman family depended on. We'll trace her from Etruscan tomb paintings to Roman crossroads shrines, uncover the disturbing oracle that once demanded child sacrifice in her name, and ask what her worship and Rome's discomfort with it  reveals about how an entire civilization made peace with death. This is a goddess whose name survives today in a word we all use, usually without knowing where it came from: mania.

References:
Ancient: Varro, Macrobius, Festus, Ovid, Arnobius, records of the Arval Brethren. Modern: Smith's Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology; Laing, "The Origin of the Cult of the Lares" (1921); Müller, Die Etrusker; Dennis, The Cities and Cemeteries of Etruria.

For over a thousand years, ordinary people across the Greek and Roman world wrote their darkest, smallest, most desperate wishes on thin sheets of lead, rolled them tight like secrets, and buried them in wells, graves, and temple floors, trusting a goddess to finish what they couldn't. We've already met Sulis and her cloak thieves in Bath. Today we widen the lens across the whole Mediterranean: to Aphrodite and the ache of unwanted love, to Demeter and a woman named Antigone who used a curse tablet to swear her own innocence, to the many small, human names: Theodotis, Polias, Theophilos, history would have completely erased if they hadn't once been angry, jealous, frightened, or heartbroken enough to write something down and hand it to a god. Along the way, we'll ask an uncomfortable question the popular imagination usually skips: when we say curse tablets, whose hands were really doing the cursing?

REFERENCES: 

Beneath the green hills of what is now Somerset, England, a wound in the earth has been pouring out scalding, mineral-red water for over ten thousand years. Long before Rome ever set a sandal on British soil, the people who lived beside that wound believed a goddess lived inside it, one who could heal a dying body and curse a thief's soul in the same breath. Her name was Sulis. 

In this episode, we descend into the sacred spring at Aquae Sulis to meet a goddess of sun, water, sight, and vengeance; a deity so rooted to her one square mile of earth that even the Romans, who renamed every god they met, could not fully rename her. We trace her murky lineage, the cosmology of the Iron Age Britons who first knelt at her waters, the curse tablets that still whisper the grudges of ordinary Roman-British people, and the strange, patient way she disappeared and never quite left. 

REFERENCES

Before Zeus, before Olympus, before light had a name, there was Night. In this episode, we sit with Nyx, the primordial goddess who existed before the gods we know, and ask what it means to worship a deity who is older than order itself. We trace her lineage from Chaos, meet her vast and unruly family of children (Sleep, Death, Fate, and more), explore the myths where even Zeus dared not cross her, and unpack the popular misconceptions that paint her as simply "evil" or "dark" in the shallow sense. We close with a practical, respectful guide to connecting with Nyx today,  including offerings, timing, and a guided closing reflection for anyone who has ever needed permission to rest.

REFERENCES

Who was Coyolxauhqui, the moon goddess whose body was cast down a sacred mountain in one of the most powerful myths of the Mexica (Aztec) world?

In this episode of The Goddess Divine Podcast, we journey into the cosmology of Tenochtitlan and the sacred stories of the Mexica people to meet Coyolxauhqui "She of the Bells on Her Cheeks." Beginning with a creative historical microstory set beneath the stars near the Templo Mayor, we trace her lineage, her contested position within Mexica cosmology, and the full, harrowing myth of Coatlicue, Huitzilopochtli, and the war at Coatepec. We follow the story forward more than five hundred years, to the moment in 1978 when a Mexico City electrical crew struck stone instead of soil and, without meaning to, brought Coyolxauhqui back into the daylight.

We examine how the Mexica understood the moon, sacrifice, sacred warfare, and humanity's responsibility within a living cosmos. We also explore the fraught survival of her story through colonial documentation by Bernardino de Sahagún and Diego Durán, the archaeological discovery of the Coyolxauhqui Stone, and what modern historians, artists, and Indigenous and Chicana scholarship reveal about her enduring, unfinished significance.

This episode contains discussion of ritual sacrifice, dismemberment, and colonial history.