Hephaestus: The Complete Story of the Rejected God Who Forged the Weapons of Olympus | Greek Mythology for Sleep

Hephaestus: The Complete Story of the Rejected God Who Forged the Weapons of Olympus | Greek Mythology for SleepA slow, quiet retelling of the life of Hephaestus, told from the beginning and made for falling asleep to.The whole story of the god who was thrown out and forged everything anyway, at a pace that's deliberately too slow to follow properly. That's the point. You're not meant to reach the end.His own mother looked at him when he was born and threw him off the mountain. He fell for a day and landed in the sea, and was raised down there by two sea goddesses in a cave, where he taught himself to make things. That is the whole shape of his story: the only one of them who was rejected, the only one who worked with his hands, and the one who ended up making nearly everything the others depended on. What follows is the throne he sent up to his mother as a gift, which nobody could get her out of once she'd sat in it, and the terms he set for releasing her. The marriage he was given to a wife who had never wanted him, the affair she conducted with his brother, and the net so fine it couldn't be seen that he built to catch them both in front of everyone. The armour he made for a hero whose mother came to ask him personally. And the automatons he built to help him in the workshop, described three thousand years ago as golden women who could think, which is a strange thing to find in a poem that old.But the point of this recording isn't really the story. It's the hour or two spent drifting through it. The voice stays low and even the whole way through. No music, no sound effects, nothing that rises or drops or suddenly arrives. Every sentence sits at roughly the same level as the one before it, so nothing ever pulls your attention back up to the surface.That's what makes it work on the nights when your head won't switch off. It's just interesting enough to give your thoughts something to hold, and slow enough that they let go of it on their own. You don't have to follow along. You don't have to remember any of it in the morning. If you drift off somewhere in the workshop and wake up much later, in the middle of something you've missed the start of, you've used this exactly the way it's meant to be used. 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.