The Chat: Leucippus

A short little chat about some things I left out of the talk. A connection between the goddess Leto and Isis!

If you'd like to read the story of Iphis and Ianthe, here's the link:

Ovid's Metamorphosis, Book IX: Iphis and Ianthe

https://ovid.lib.virginia.edu/trans/Metamorph9.htm#483366551

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:13

To falto roadja. Tom anshokje taresh more episode Queen Lukopus, say enough. Hey friends, I'm here right after finishing the Lukopus episode. I usually wait a little bit before I do the chat, but I figured I wanted to go ahead and get it done. So here we are. I don't anticipate this chat is gonna be very long, because the episode itself uh was not very long. But I'd wanted to talk about it since I had briefly mentioned it and another one like it in the Abbott of Drumna story. So, here we go. We're just gonna go through a couple little notes here, and I do mean a couple, there's not many. And uh talk about 'em. The first note here is about an old survey done of fifty-six societies. This was done in 1958, and I don't know the details of it. This was just, I think, a little subnote in one of the articles that I read. Uh, it said that male initiation rituals were most widespread in societies in which boys spent a lot of time with their mothers and had had relatively little contact with men, which from what I've read about this culture would fit right into that. So when the worlds are more clearly separated, that's when you'll see these rites that sort of show the person going from the one world uh to the next world and not returning, presumably. The next note is that there is another story I mentioned it about Iphis and Iantha. It's from Ovid's Metamorphosis, which was composed in 8 CE. Ovid was Roman. It's a lot longer than this story. I started reading it in this episode, but it it really was taking a long time, and I'm gonna be honest with you, there's kind of a a middle part in it that I didn't really like because it's Iantha and Iphus have fallen in love, and it's Iphus, rather, bemoaning how unnatural a desire would be between two women going on at length about it, so I thought, uh don't really want to read this. And so I just decided to make the focus as the focus was for the most part of this piece on Leukopis's story. But an interesting thing about Ovid's Metamorphosis story is that the goddess that changes, Iphis, is not Leto, it's Isis. And Isis is there, Isis appears to Telethusa in a dream. If you remember the story about Leukopus, Leukopus's mother is said to have had visions from Sears. It doesn't go into detail at all, but I wonder if perhaps that was similar to what is described here, where Isis shows up to Telethusa with her entourage of Egyptian deities such as Bast and Anubis, and I um Isis advises her, or really commands her, to raise the child, whatever the gender is, whatever happens to it. So it's kind of theorized that there may be a connection between Leto and Isis. Leto was probably an early goddess of the Greeks, and may have originally been an Egyptian deity due to the nearness of Crete to Egypt and the similar role that the two goddesses played in the stories. If you want to read Ovid's Metamorphosis, it is a long series which is all available online for free, but the story of Iantha and Iphis is in book nine. So if you look it up, uh look for book nine. I actually have the link saved, I had the link saved anyway, and I can put it in the show notes for those who do want to go read it. Moving on, there was this commentary in Francis Soloria's The Metamorphosis of Antoninus Liberalis, a translation with a commentary that talked about uh the meaning of the names of some of the characters who were in that story. The name of the mother, Galatia, means like milk white. There we go, it means white as milk. And she's been seen as the milk white moon, and Lampris as the shining sun with its blazing chariot and horses, where Leukopus means white horse. Uh it says the word leukopus in Greek might be taken to refer to a rider or herder of white horses. So you have the mother as the moon, the father as the son, and Leukopus as the white horse. So with that in mind, I wonder what sort of interpretation one could make out of the story. If any at all, perhaps that's a stretch, but interesting anyway. And lastly, I think I would just ask people listening to consider what is a gender transition. Is it something that one must have surgeries to have that one must be on hormones? Is it something rather that is more of how your society sees you? And if it's how your society sees you and how you see yourself, then perhaps this really was a story of gender transition. Agishanaharja. I know this was a shorter episode, but as I mentioned at the end of the last one, the Kibele one was quite long, it took a lot of research to do, so I thought it'd be a nice little short pop in for this week. No idea what I'm gonna talk about next time. But whatever it will be, I hope to see you there. Have a good day. Agaslan Gafala Harja.