Hestia: The Complete Story of the Quiet Goddess of the Hearth Who Guarded Every Home | Greek Mythology for Sleep

Hestia: The Complete Story of the Quiet Goddess of the Hearth Who Guarded Every Home | Greek Mythology for SleepA slow, quiet retelling of the story of Hestia, the gentlest of the Greek gods, made for falling asleep to.The whole story of the goddess of the hearth, told at a pace that's deliberately too slow to follow properly. That's the point. You're not meant to reach the end.She is the one with almost no myths, and that turns out to be the interesting part. She was the eldest of them and the first to be swallowed and the last to be brought back up, and when it was all over and the world was being divided, she asked for nothing. Two of the others wanted to marry her and she turned them both down and asked instead to be left alone by the fire. What follows is what that meant in practice, because she may have the fewest stories and still had more worshippers than almost any of them. She was in every house in Greece, in the fire that was never allowed to go out. She got the first portion of every offering, before any of the loud ones did. A city sending people off to found a new colony would carry fire from its own hearth to light the first one there, so that the new place was connected to the old. She never left, never quarrelled, never took revenge on anybody, and was quietly present in more Greek lives than Zeus ever was.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 early on 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.