Synergy to Synastry: Greek Lore in Modernity (S3E3) Podcast Transcript

Listen to the Episode

Welcome

Renee: You're listening to Synergy to Synastry, the podcast where two corporate girlies call to follow their intuition take you on a journey of self-exploration through metaphysical modalities.

Christine: I'm Christine, intuitive coach and clairvoyant.

Renee: And I'm Renee, psychic intuitive and astrologer.

Christine: We're excited that you're here and honored to be your spiritual guides.

Christine: If you enjoy this podcast, make sure to subscribe, rate and review wherever you listen.

Christine: It helps listeners find our show, plus it automatically enters you into our raffles to win a free psychic reading.

Renee: Now, let's get into the episode.

Greek Ancestry

Renee: Hello, and welcome to our very first Modernity episode.

Renee: I have been looking forward to this one because so much has come up literally in the last week related to Greek culture.

Renee: So to break down the timeline here, I recorded the Greek Lore episode.

Renee: If you have not listened to that, please do head back in the feed.

Renee: It'll be the episode right before this one.

Renee: You'll hear me offer a foundation for the lore conversations throughout this season as well as dive into specifically Greek lore.

Renee: And I do share a bit of my connection to it as somebody who has Greek ancestry.

Renee: And what is so funny is I knew at the start of this week that I was going to be recording this modernity episode.

Renee: I was doing my research and getting my notes and it was like it was all just falling into place as they say divine timing.

Renee: As the week progressed, it just amped up even more and more to place us in time.

Renee: I am recording this the day of the opening ceremony for the Olympics.

Renee: I will be talking about that more in this episode, but obviously that is a huge historical marker connected to Greek culture.

Renee: Yesterday I was on a work meeting and it happened to be with a vendor that we're collaborating with who, you guessed it, is living in Greece.

Renee: So I was picking her brain and she was bringing up this whole thing about if you look at the last name, it tells you where your family was from in Greece.

Renee: So then my mom and I were doing all this research on it and we actually have an ancestry book that my aunt had created some years ago on our family genealogy and we discovered that our specific Greek ancestry is tied to Sparta.

Renee: And I was like, that is so sick because it's like one of the major cities that is talked about historically.

Renee: Then I'm in a meeting today, somebody was using an analogy and started talking about Sparta.

Renee: And I was like, what is going on?

Renee: Because of course I knew that this recording session was on the schedule for this evening.

Renee: So it has been compounding as the week has progressed.

Renee: And of course, after I record this, I'm going to be heading down to our living room and watching the Opening Ceremony Replay.

Renee: It is certainly a time and I am fully steeped in Greek culture in the present moment.

Introducing Greek Lore in Modernity

Renee: So with that, I am going to be picking up where our last episode left off, discussing the spiritual side, rituals, practices, how that is present in current day.

Renee: Because of course, you can't have a Synergy to Synastry podcast without talking about divination, intuition, all that fun stuff.

Renee: So I will be starting there and then I will get into more on the Olympics because I had to go on a whole side tangent and research that.

Renee: And then I will talk about language and pop culture references.

Renee: So how we are seeing, just a sample because there is so much, how we are seeing ancient Greek culture and Greek lore present in today's society.

Renee: To provide a bit of an umbrella for today's conversation, I'm going to start by defining Hellenistic Reconstructionism.

Renee: This is the practice of recreating ancient Greek rituals via historical records and adapting them to modern times, especially cutting the sexism, misogyny, all that horrible stuff.

Renee: Modern adaptations could include creating alters to the Greek gods and goddesses, maybe offering gifts to them.

Renee: People engaging with the ancient Greek spiritual traditions may also observe or attend festivals.

Renee: There are still some active events and traditions in Greece, so if you live there, you're more likely to be participating.

Renee: However, I'm sure that there's some pockets of highly concentrated Greek populations around the world where some of these cultural events are present.

Renee: You also could meditate with the ancient Greek symbology.

Renee: As an example, maybe you are holding the caduceus.

Renee: Hermes staff.

Renee: It's two snakes swirling around the main staff, and then there's wings extended out of the top.

Renee: I'll include a picture on social media, but if you want to look it up yourself, it's spelled C-A-D-U-C-E-U-S.

Renee: A small token, symbol, statue, anything that is in reference to any of the lore tied to the Greek gods or goddesses.

Renee: Maybe you're sitting in meditation holding that, or around you, or maybe it's clothing.

Renee: You're draped in something that is symbolic and tied to those stories.

Thesmophoria

Renee: One of the festivals that I ended up doing a whole deep dive into because it was incredibly fascinating, Thesmophoria.

Renee: This is a women's only exclusive festival that traditionally celebrated the cycles of life and fertility.

Renee: This festival was a three-day long event.

Renee: Most of the time, it took place in October.

Renee: Some reporting that maybe it would fall in early November.

Renee: It varied a little bit.

Renee: And it was dedicated to Demeter, who is the goddess of harvest and agriculture, hence the fertility piece in this conversation.

Renee: As well as her daughter Persephone, who was very famously abducted by Hades.

Renee: That is the cycle of life and death.

Renee: She would spend six months in the underworld and then six months up here with the plebeians.

Renee: These events, as I mentioned, were women only.

Renee: And I don't say that lightly.

Renee: There are reports, there are ancient artifacts depicting this.

Renee: If men tried to spy or interrupt, festivities is not even the right word, because it was a very sacred, extended event and experience.

Renee: If men were invading that space, they would literally be punished, castrated, assaulted, etc.

Renee: This was very, very serious.

Renee: And of course, of note here, this is one of the only times where women who were participating actually had access to weapons in order to do this harming, as a means of self-defense, protection for the sacredness of the ceremonies.

Renee: And the reason that they had these weapons is so that they could perform their sacrifices.

Renee: If you want to get more details on the specifics of what they did each day, I do have a link in the show notes where you can read more.

Renee: In the modern day, fun twist here, because you're like, how are we celebrating this now?

Renee: We're not having people off doing sacrifices, doing three-day events, ain't nobody got time for that.

Renee: But, I was reading that in a way, it's the equivalent of American Thanksgiving.

Renee: When Greeks are honoring the harvest, abundance of food, and expressing gratitude, those are all the major hallmarks of the American Thanksgiving.

Renee: You're gathered together, you have a ton of food loaded up on your plate.

Renee: Oftentimes, I know my family does this, people go around the circle, say what they're grateful for.

Renee: So it's a bit of that vibe in modern times.

Origin of the Olympics

Renee: Speaking of celebrations and gatherings of people with global impact, have to talk about the Olympics.

Renee: The modern Olympics, as we are really experiencing them today, is traced not back to the way way ancient period that we were talking about with the 300 BC to 300 AD.

Renee: The modern Olympics link back to 1896, where the games repeated every four years.

Renee: And at that time, it was in August.

Renee: And that's because it linked to an ancient festival, Panathena.

Renee: And this was a festival that was in Athens.

Renee: Athena is actually in that name.

Renee: Our girl, who we talked about last time.

Renee: These weren't the Olympic Games.

Renee: They were the Panathenaic Games.

Renee: But where do those come from?

Renee: There were iterations previous to that, according to Greek Lore, played by the actual gods themselves.

Renee: Like Mount Olympus, the Olympiads.

Renee: Such as Apollo racing Hermes, and Heracles wrestling everyone and their mother.

Renee: The original run of the people version of the Olympic Games, inspired by that Greek Lore, happened during the Hellenistic period we've been talking about.

Renee: There were races, jumping events, discus, javelin, wrestling, pentathlon, which was all of the aforementioned ones, as well as boxing.

Renee: So those were the only sports included at that time.

Renee: They also over time added music and equestrian competitions.

Renee: Of course, now we have so many more.

Renee: Back in the Hellenistic period, the prize was 40 liters or 10.5 gallons of olive oil from a sacred grove.

Renee: Mentioned this previously in the lore episode, but the olive tree associated with Athena is the iconic symbol, olive oil being a top export for Greece across the globe.

Renee: That naturally has evolved over time.

Renee: We're not being handed big jars of olive oil if we win Olympic medals.

Renee: There seems to be a range for how much the gold medalists actually win.

Renee: I've seen numbers are like $100,000 closer to a million or maybe even less than $20,000.

Renee: Part of the variability ties to the countries themselves.

Renee: Such an indicator of the change in times.

Renee: And if you're looking for an explanation as to why we had this original run of the games and then we had this large gap and then the Panathenaic games that happened several hundreds of years later, that is because in 393 AD just after the Hellenistic period, the Roman Emperor Theodosius I banned the games in their entirety.

Renee: So that's why we had this large gap without any competitions of this nature honoring the gods.

Greek Lore in Language & Pop Culture

Renee: Last episode, I talked about how the Hellenistic period in Ancient Greece had such a huge, rippling and continuous impact on global culture when it comes to language in particular.

Renee: It's estimated that more than 150,000 English words and phrases have Ancient Greek origins.

Renee: Some specific examples that tie to Lore are Achilles' Heel, someone's soft spot or weakness that is directly linked to stories in Greek Lore.

Renee: We also have a Herculian task in reference to Heracles, also known as Hercules, who completed the  labors.

Renee: Arachnophobia.

Renee: Arachne was a woman who was turned into a spider and then phobia also originated in this time and it means fear of.

Renee: And those are just a few that I found really quickly.

Renee: And there are other countless representations of these stories being retold, reimagined or made reference to throughout pop culture.

Renee: As an example, we've talked about Harry Potter a few times on this podcast.

Renee: Hermione is the daughter of Helen of Troy and the King of Sparta.

Renee: Mary Shelley's Frankenstein was inspired by the story of Prometheus, who I spoke about very briefly, who was one of the three deities that was involved in the human creation story.

Renee: Four Matrix fans out there.

Renee: Morpheus, the god of dreams.

Renee: Cusco from Emperor's New Groove.

Renee: This one I was really surprised by.

Renee: This was actually based off of Metamorphoses, which was a myth about a rude young man who was transformed into a donkey and had to redeem himself before he was changed back into a human.

Renee: Because this Disney adaptation was set in South America, he was turned into a llama instead of a donkey.

Renee: But the premise is pretty much the same.

Renee: There's also countless other movies and book series just to rattle some others off.

Renee: The Percy Jackson series, a book series that's been adapted to film and is currently ongoing as a TV series, Pan's Labyrinth, Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?

Renee: All of the Thor Marvel movies and countless modern retellings such as the Stephen Fry series that I mentioned, Song of Achilles and Circe by Madeleine Miller.

Renee: Once Upon a Time TV series, throwback, loved that show, that has some characters who were linked to Greek lore, as well as Disney and other fairy tale characters.

Renee: And then just to bring in a little bit of musical theatre, we have Hadestown, which is fully inspired by the story I mentioned earlier.

Renee: It's Hades and Persephone.

Renee: And I have to mention, because I am so excited for this film to come out, my guy Christopher Nolan, I see every one of his films.

Renee: The big blockbuster of the summer 2026 is The Odyssey.

Renee: I will definitely go see that in theaters and maybe I'll record a little reaction and my thoughts on it when we get there.

The Chariot Card & Greek Lore

Renee: The last thing I'll highlight to close out our Greek Modernity episode and transition into our conclusion, part  of our Greek Lore mini-series, I'll tease a little bit about divination tools and methods.

Renee: I wanted to look at the association between Greek Lore and the Chariot card in Tarot.

Renee: This card is thought to be specifically linked to Greek mythology with a theme of triumph.

Renee: This motif of the chariot appears repeatedly in Greek Lore.

Renee: For example, Heracles is shown with a chariot, especially for his achievement of those  labors, which was stemming from courage and strength.

Renee: And those are also keywords linked to that card.

Renee: We have Apollo, classic, iconic.

Renee: His chariot is one that he flies across the sky in order to move the sun to bring us day and night.

Renee: And his chariot represents clarity and enlightenment.

Renee: And then my last example, we have Poseidon.

Renee: This is a horse drawn carriage that reflects emotional self mastery.

Renee: Now this makes sense for all my astrology besties out there.

Renee: Poseidon's Roman name is Neptune.

Renee: And Neptune in astrology is a planet linked to our intuition and our emotions as well.

Closing Thoughts

Renee: Tune in next time for the conclusion of this series, Greek Lore in Practice.

Renee: Please let me know in the comments by sending an email, messages on social media.

Renee: What did you think of this episode?

Renee: Have you been enjoying our mini-series format, Greek culture?

Renee: Any questions that you have?

Renee: Things that you have been inspired to learn?

Renee: Or were there any revelations from today that surprised you about how present Greek lore has been in your life?

Renee: As a little tease for next time, not only am I going to be talking about ancient Greek divination methods and tools, but similar to our Divine Exploration episode in Season 2, I'm going to be selecting practices inspired by ancient Greek divination, experimenting with them, and then reporting back in that episode.

Christine: Thanks for listening.

Christine: If you'd like to learn more, the resources we used to prepare for this episode are listed in the show notes.

Renee: If you're curious to develop your intuition, we've partnered with the Nuurvana Be Light program to give our listeners a $500 discount on tuition fees.

Renee: Email us for more details and we'll connect you with the founder, Deganit Nuur.

Christine: Want to connect with us?

Christine: You can reach me, Christine, @ChanneledbyChristine with one L on Instagram.

Renee: And you can reach me, Renee, @_readbyrenee, or connect with both of us via email at synergytosynastry@gmail.com.

Christine: Keep your spirit curious and your aura sparkling.

Renee: We'll see you when the stars next align.

Outro

Renee: Okay, I knew I was going to do this.

Renee: I said to myself, I am not going to know how to say this word.

Renee: Maybe I should write down the phonetics.

Renee: And then I said, that's a problem for my future self.

Renee: I'll just look it up when I'm recording.

Renee: Pronunciation please. What?

Renee: Caduceus?

Renee: That makes so much more sense.

Renee: Okay, just scramble the letters.

Renee: Snack break.