The Endless Knot Podcast ep 3: Plato to Pluto (audio only)

welcome to the endless knot podcast where the more we know the more we want to find out tracing serendipitous connections through our lives and across disciplines hi I'm Nathan and I'm mark today's podcast is really just marking me having a conversation one of the ideas that we had originally when we thought of doing this podcast is we wanted to kind of replicate the over the dinner table conversations that we often have yeah we have a lot of rambling conversations because there's a lot of things that occurred of us when we're chatting and telling each other about the weird things that we discovered that day and capping each other's stories so what we thought we'd do is have some of the podcast episodes just be basically us talking about the things that we've been finding out and topics that are of interest to us right now and in order to make it more like our relaxed dinnertime conversations we're having a cocktail while we do it indeed after all that's also part of our normal routine a nice cocktail before dinner and part of the videos yeah some of the videos are about cocktails they're definitely something that's been important in our lives actually so today we're having a hoarfrost cocktail this is something neither of us has had before we'll get to why we've chosen that one for today a little later when we get onto one of the later topics we lined up to talk about Cheers we can't clink because they're sugar-coated I'll put a link to the cocktail recipe in the show notes and a picture and you'll see that the rim is coated in sugar and so it makes a very unpretty thump when we tried to clink them it didn't work but cheers Cheers mmm it's a very sweet cocktail but that's not surprising mm-hmm the reason we chose it is one of its main ingredients is grenadine and as I said I'll explain why that's important later all right so we want to start with some follow up I know we've only had we've only at this point when we're recording this we've only released two episodes and recorded three this is the fourth episode that we're recording and yet we already have follow-up on our own we already had some things you wanted to talk about that we shouldn't should say though this may also be going up third yeah we don't know when exactly we're gonna put this up you as the audience no but we're certainly only responding to follow up from things we've already posted yes that much is true the first thing we wanted to talk about was to go back over some of the stuff about memory right that was so and there were some recent articles that have been floating around in the media that we wanted to pick up on yeah before we get to that I just wanted to make a point about something that I linked to in the show notes from the detective story episode right but that I didn't actually talk about in detail in that episode so in the detective story we talked about how there were people all the way through the medieval period and the ancient world who complained that when you learn to read you forgot things it was detrimental to your memory to learn to read and we neither of us actually gave an exact citation for that so I went and looked it up afterwards because I was curious what I found that was sort of the most often quoted on this topic as Socrates in the fie dress it was a dialogue by Plato so I put a link to that on the last one I'll put it up like again in the show notes for this episode so Plato writes a dialogue called the fee dress in which Socrates tells a story a myth near the end of the dialogue in which he says I heard a story about Egypt he says that in Egypt there was gardening toys I guess who invented writing and he brought this invention to show to another God who said well you think you've come up with something that's really beneficial for humans but really this has not helped humans it's been a problem for humans for this invention will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it because they will not practice their memory their trust in writing produced by external characters which are no part of themselves will discourage the use of their own memory within them you have invented an elixir not of memory but of reminding and you offer your pupils the appearance of wisdom not true wisdom all right this is often cited all over the place as Socrates disapproved of writing because writing led to the lack of memory I think it's really interesting because it is one of these examples of quotes being taken out of their context right which we are both very well aware of this is the sort of thing people love to do with the ancient world in the medieval world right which is take a little quote forget about the context forget about the genre forget about anything else and just use it to prove so-and-so thought such-and-such right so the thing is I just want to give one moment to talking about Plato and the fee dress so Socrates is not the author of this text he is the author of no text right a very key point here socrates wrote nothing down he's famous for never having written anything down Plato wrote the fee dress right right so Plato wrote a dialogue specifically a forming new form which was a recording of dialogue so as in courting of conversation and he wrote all these dialogues and in them Socrates features so in this dialogue that Plato wrote Socrates features he is talking to someone else and he is telling a story about another dialogue that happened in which somebody said that writing leads to forgetfulness but of course that conversation which is layered several times then was written down by Plato so Plato is telling is writing down the conversation that Socrates had about another conversation which said that writing things down makes you forget stuff and gives you only the appearance of wisdom not true wisdom but of course Deidre's the person you spoke is speaking to has been the whole context of this speech and that's the important thing the context of the dialogue is feature escaped him with this really great speech made by a speech writer and he's like oh it's your wonderful speech isn't it great maybe cites it and then Socrates says oh it's good but makes up another one it's a big long you know philosophical dialogue with a lot of points to it the thing about it is when Socrates says writing is bad because all it does is remind you that's really interesting to have that in a dialogue that is writing down to remind us that the things Socrates said so it's these levels and levels of undercutting if Socrates thought writing was bad why did Plato write a list yeah I suppose there's two possible things going on there one Plato could be accurately reporting something that Socrates said and is knowingly writing it down with some irony or for some purpose and of course Socratic irony the main way in which Socrates teaches is by saying things and is a method of irony it's a specific type Socratic irony is a particular kind of irony where you say something that seems to be false but then you prove it's true or vice versa and what you sort of play with the expectations of truth in your audience so that could be part of it the other possibility is that Plato could be misrepresenting Socrates and just using Socrates as a puppet yeah as a ironically mouthpiece for a certain kind of language yes and the funny thing is too that a lot of the larger quest of Socrates is for truth and wisdom right it's all about wisdom all of this the dialogues are finding wizards aha and the whole Socratic method is based on the idea that somehow we all know the platonic ideals we know the truth of the world but we've forgotten we don't remember it we can't and we have to be led to it by the Socratic method of conversation asking questions you ask questions you prompt people to think more deeply until they remember the truth of things right while saying that memory that writing doesn't increase memory increase it's a method of reminding people well that's what the Socratic method does it reminds people of things they supposedly already know so then maybe Plato is saying in fact writing is exactly that it is a reminder of wisdom it isn't the writing is not the wisdom but the writing allows you to remember and be led to true wisdom just the same way that Socrates is dialogues right led people to remember their wisdom so these dialogues are not wisdom but reading these dialogues allows you to work your way through it's a virtual conversation yeah it allows you to participate in the conversation in such a way that you end up we recovering your memory of wisdom now I am NOT a philosopher I do not study philosophy I find Plato kind of fascinating from his narrative technique but otherwise I'm really not good at it so if there somewhere there's somebody who studies Plato and to study this dialogue who is thinking what you weren't crazy you are not understanding this at all correctly so sorry now Plato wasn't the only student of Socrates who wrote stuff down no Xena find it as well mm-hmm so to what extent do they coincide in terms of their characterization of that's a huge that's a huge field that I'm really not a specialist in but there's a huge field well even in Plato the Socrates of the early dialogues and the Socrates of the later dialogues is quite different and as internal contradictions and there seems to be some sort of general theory that at the beginning that most dialogues are actually replication of things that happened at least in part but by the end Socrates is just a mouthpiece for Plato's own developed thought develops his own because then all of the dialogues I think I think all of the dialogues are written after Socrates is death right and they're written over a long period of time so by the last ones there long after he died I might be getting that quick wrong but it's it's pretty close to correct and then Xenophon writes quite different characterizations as Socrates - yeah so there's a whole but I just think it's really interesting because we would we were talking about writing in memory that here we have a quote about writing and memory that is used by people in a way that is not really very cognizant of its context so it's taken out and so people are remembering that Socrates didn't like writing but they don't really have any understanding of the larger context which make which cause a lot of that into question and that's I don't know it just seems like a very appropriate for a quote about memory to have problems because people are forgetting about the context right that it was in and then therefore makes it difficult to interpret so I just wanted to bring that up I'm still looking for medieval sources for the idea that writing leads to forgetfulness that people shouldn't learn to read because I don't know of any but I feel like there are some I think and I haven't search didn't yet but I think because I can't go more than an episode without mentioning James Burke I think it gets into this in not connections but the day the universe changed and I believe it's an episode for a matter of fact so either in there or in the in the book based on the series there may be a reference to specifically medieval version of that idea night where somebody says that writing or reading is problematic for okay but if anyone listening to this knows of a specific reference let us know on Twitter because I'm totally interested in following that up I don't know what I'll do with it but I think it's an interesting idea and this gives us an opportunity for coming back to this topic again and another follow-up yeah I want to revisit these topics in as many layered ways I too want to be Plato writing talking about a dialogue that we had about a dialogue that we had about a dialogue that we had that appeals to me alright so that was one point I wanted to bring up and then tying into that we talked about how really the whole point there was that new technologies affect the way our brains work right and then that was where you said that as you said they've been some articles about that going around yeah specifically what's what's often referred to as the Google effect on memory and we'll put links to the popular article summaries and the original research if you're just interested in tracking all of that down but the the sort of summary of it is that if you think you will be able to have access to information online or on a computer on a computer on a computer at a at some point in the future you will be less likely to remember the information itself but you will have an enhanced memory of how to find that information again right so what you do is when and I think that the study was basically the people were primed to think about computers yeah they weren't told you will have access but they were given priming that made them think about computers and then they were given information to remember and the findings were that people who had been primed to think about computers were worse at remembering that actual in from but we're better at remembering where to find it which oh that's what we were talking about last time that's not necessarily bad I mean we have a lot of memory we have a lot of things to remember and does it actually make sense for us to try to remember all those things if you can remember where you found it then why bother remembering the thing at all as long as you can find it again yeah and I mean yes the it requires the persistence of access to that information so then if you don't have access to that computer or whatever that information is no longer available so that can be flaws to it so they can be caused to it but if you obviously if you do buy into the argument that writing makes us remember things less and the book available you don't have that memory but the benefits outweigh the cost is the point and and this this idea that the the Google effect and so forth comes out of larger research on what sometimes referred to as transactive memory so it's distributed memory systems it was originally noted noticed before the internet and all of that comes into the into the picture that you can have distributed memory systems in group sort of like what might be popularly referred to as groupthink or something like that the the sort of interconnected memories of people people in for instance in an organization may have a specialty in a certain area so rely on them to know that thing you don't have to know it we talked about that as institutional memory all the time you know one person one member the department retires and suddenly nobody knows how to file course change forms anymore because it was always that person who told you how to do it because we not everybody bothers to remember it one person is sort of in charge of remembering and even if you never make it explicit now there is also a sort of collaborative inhibition effect that sometimes produces worse results it depends on the relationship between the people that are interacting so for instance if they did a study with pilot and co-pilot and because they're so practiced and they know whose task yes it is - that's the benefit outweighs the potential cost and the other the other example of this is with married couples yes you pointed me to this to the article that talked about that that people can actually remember certain kinds of certain kinds not all but certain kinds of memories better if as a couple they talked about it together because they prompt each other and they feel in each other's details and they do a better job of recalling particular kinds of memories than others I've also seen that talked about in another context where much like we see one splits up housework according to jobs right you'll split up one member of the couple will be the person who's really in charge of remembering birthdays and the other person doesn't ever do that not because they can't but because that's just not their job and well another person will be really good at remembering what needs to be bought at the grocery store and I mean to certain extent that's just really tasks division but I think it kind of functions the same way and you see that when two people divorce or a long term couple dies the other person only has half the memories left they really are functionally cut off from a lot of their important memories the interesting thing though is it's not just a question of the aggregate memory the the researchers on this talk about emergence so that the sort of result is an emergent memory system that is more than the sum of the two individuals so it's not just that I keep half of the memories you keep the other half it's not as distributing the cognitive load it's a question of the way that they queue each other off can produce more information than either one could have individually added together so now we get back to the Socrates idea that what you're doing is reminding the other person of memories they actually have but are not accessing exactly because if if my remembering a detail about our wedding day reminds you of another detail that I don't remember that you didn't remember until I'd cued you then that memory was in you you had that memory you were actually the one storing that memory I wasn't storing it right but my ability to cue you is what allows you to access that memory so it's as if we're doing better file routing or something rather than necessarily storing each other's memories yeah yeah yeah and it's yes so it's an emergent property you know it's it's one of these one plus one times three its Socratic method so what do you want to remember something you just have to dialogue about it but yeah I think that article said they really depended on the relationship too because if what you do if in trying to recall a memory one of you simply critiques the other person's memory no that wasn't right he was not there I tell you he wasn't there that that actually has a negative effect on your ability to remember things and so they tracked the sort of closeness and quality of the relationship and that was apparently an important factor I thought that was very interesting all right I think that's everything oh oh I know there was one other element that article about the Zeigarnik effect I'll point to that it's a scientific American blog and there the idea was that you're better at remembering things when you're in the process of doing them then you are once the process has completed and therefore if you allow a process to continue by never finalizing it you'll do better for some reason or another you'll do better remembering it and it's the example that was given was waiters they'll take an order and they'll remember it perfectly but the minute the order is fulfilled they forget it it's complete they cannot recreate it that's not true from all waitest but this is an effect that was noticed and the thing that's interesting about that is that writing things down seems to have an effect on your brain that says this is now completed this is now a completed action and you stop remembering it or thinking about it and so this was a reference in particular to the idea of writing and creativity yeah that if you write something down you can't it's done your brain says oh I don't need that information anymore and wipes it and then in creep when reference to creativity what that means is if you lose the work if you lose the work you can't recreate it we created it because the act of creating it is over and your brain just won't do it again yeah the article gives the example of Hemingway yeah famously I lost a suitcase full of work but also of various writers who've said things like don't make notes about a story you're going to write write a first draft once you've written the notes you'll never be able to recall that moment of creativity that you had going into it what we thought was interesting about that so we've been doing a little research on our follow-up and pointing each other to these articles but we've been being really careful not to discuss them until the mics on because we can't have the same discussion again yeah because you can't recreate it we want it to be natural and I mean that's exactly this idea that once we've written it down or shared it with one another our brains are not going to want to do that again and they're gonna discard that interesting thought that we had it's not quite exactly the same thing but I think it's definitely related by the way I wanted to point out that article that we're both talking about here it was written by Maria konnikova who wrote that book that I've talked to you before about mastermind which okay it uses Sherlock Holmes as an example of ways of thinking right right mm-hmm look at the articles so yeah we'll give a link to that okay so does that cover the follow up by the way by speaking about follow up we are shamelessly stealing from hello Internet go to the podcast that we both like very much with CGP grey and Brady I'm sure others use it too but yeah but there was no question that we are using their application of it though I don't think we have yet but we will see we're only on a third podcast we'll see if we can have a episode where the follow-up massively eclipses the actual new business as ever all right but I do think that's everything that we wanted to get back to so there were a couple of other things that came up the main thing and the reason we're drinking for frost cocktails that we wanted to talk about that's been in the news is the recent flyby of Pluto so for us we're recording this about a week after maybe a little longer than that now week and a half after yeah what are we gonna half after mm-hmm so this probably won't go up until a while later but that's okay because there'll be pictures from Pluto coming in for a while so you all still be excited about it right yeah we've been thinking about Pluto and all the wonderful pictures coming in and the new information we have about it and so we thought we'd talk a little bit about specifically the name Pluto and other names because we care about names words and etymologies and mythology and yeah it's just that we did we'd look at a couple of things maybe the first thing to say is why we're drinking hoarfrost cocktails the prime ingredient or there's an important ingredient that what we were working on yeah is grenadine mm-hmm granddaddy knows of course made historically and in the case of the one we have from pomegranates and pomegranates are relevant to Pluto because of Persephone and then of course this is the hoarfrost which was relevant to Persephone as well because it signifies winter no I reference this story in a video and we'll we won't get into that video today but I'll put a link to it well and we'll get to we'll get to that one in a future podcast but the basic thing is it's the story of Persephone or Proserpina who is abducted by Pluto the god of the underworld brought to the underworld her mother gets so upset that she's lost her mother is Demeter who's the goddess of the grain that she causes a massive drought over the whole earth so there's nothing grows finally Persephone is allowed to return only if she's eaten nothing in the underworld but unfortunately she's eaten six pomegranate seeds and by doing so she's doomed herself to spend half the year in the underworld as the queen of the Dead and half the year in the overworld with her mother Demeter as one of the twin goddesses of fertility and then this is used as an explanation for the seasons so when she's in the underworld it's the winter and when she comes out it's the summer and that's why we thought hoarfrost and grenadine wasn't appropriate non cold that to that story and of course that's what Pluto is named after so let's yeah let's start with the discovery of Pluto itself all right this comes out so in the in the 19th century before they discovered Neptune they predicted its existence on the basis of its gravitational effect on Uranus fact they were able to see that there was something that's perturbing the orbits yeah due to their observation then of the orbit of Neptune it was discovered once it was discovered they knew that there had to be something else they believed that there had to be something else affecting its orbit now as it turned out as it turns out they were wrong mmm I think they just had a they had they just didn't have an accurate estimation of its mass okay so in fact you don't need another planet beyond it to be affecting its orbit just one of the reasons Pluto is not a planet because it's not it's too small much of an effect yeah so they were wrong about this and it was what was called the Planet X hypothesis at the time but at the time they believed oh there's got to be a Planet X to make sense of our observations so they started searching and in particular the person who started really pushing for the its discovery is the wealthy scientist Percival Lowell okay so he was he was independently wealthy and he poured a lot of his personal finance into astronomy his big interest including establishing what is called the Lowell Observatory and as it turns out they they did actually within his lifetime I believe take pictures of what later turned out to be Pluto they didn't realize it at the time so he died before they actually formally found it right but he was really interested by the way the other reason that that Lowell is famous figure to most people he's the Martian canal guy oh right who thought that there was right yeah but in terms of Pluto he was really interested in this whole Planet X thing and so here's when we get where we get into a little bit of an extra wrinkle into in terms of the mythology now Pluto is not only the god of the underworld he's also associated with well well appropriate when when you consider that Lowell is a wealthy well the guy pouring his money into this thing but when he died there was a bit of a legal battle over his estate over where his money he wanted it to go with some money to go to continuing to fund the observatory his widow however fought a legal battle to hold on to the money for herself mmm-hmm so I guess greed comes into play here though interestingly she she seems to have been quite an interesting person and it suggested that he was originally in love with someone else and his family didn't approve his you know he came from this sort of upper-class Harvard family I believe so when he married her people the question you know what is the quality of their relationship and that might have been played into nevertheless she was very insistent that when Planet X was discovered she wanted it to be named after him named there Percival Lowell which it would have really broken with the naming convention down planets though as it turns out it probably was an influence in terms of what name they picked because his initials PL right Pluto and the astronomical symbol for Pluto is pl so it did have a bearing on that but where the name came from actually is an 11 year old girl yeah her name is Venetia Burney the daughter of Reverend Charles Fox Bernie who was a professor of holy scripture at Oxford more importantly she was the granddaughter of and this is one of the best names ever ever Falconer Madden who was a very important scholar in his own right so Falconer Madden by the way when we have these dinnertime conversations we don't normally have notes so they're not quite as well referenced dr. Falconer Madden was the librarian of the bog lien library at Oxford okay and he told his granddaughter about this discovery he was talking about it with her and and she suggested the idea which he then passed on okay so came from her but it was her but she P he sort of delivered this what was his connection to the person who discovered it why did he get to decide to suggest I think he just as as a noted scholar and he just passed it on I'm not sure if there was any more specific connection than that okay well the other interesting thing is Madden was just in relation to some of our other lexicographical interests involved in the revision of the little and Scott greek-english lexicon okay as a sort of librarian so I think he I'm not exactly sure what he did but he he gathered the text of collections that were used in the revision of that and he was also a noted scholar on Lewis Carroll oh so he was involved in the revision of a biography of Carroll and I believe he edited some collection of scholarship or something like that alright so that's where the name suggestion came from and I guess it was probably considered appropriate as you say because the PL and because of you know it was a planet that was invisible to us I wonder how much that actually had to do with it because Pluto is in the name for Hades the name Hades means invisible the invisible one well that was it that I think was Venetia Burney z-- reason for suggestions were suggesting yes she was she was apparently quite interested in mythology yeah and and but you'd go for Pluto because so far all of them the major planets have been named for the Roman versions of their names of the gods that's how what the astronomical cannon invention now here's where it gets really slightly convoluted and interesting alright so the name Pluto itself as you say it's great is Greek but it was adopted by the Raman Romans and in fact I think was probably at least as common as some of the other oh it was 13th right it was the main name for the God in Roman mythology the other name they use is dis dis yo dis is hotter so which just means it's the equivalent of you spatters Jupiter the overworld despot Harris that God is the underworld but Pluto is certainly by the time that what they're writing about all the others becomes the most common name it was never the most common name for the god of the underworld in Greek though in Greek it was one of the epithets right for Hades Hades was the name the moralistic that was the sort of official name of the god of the underworld was Hades I donate now dis makes that wealth yes that aspect clear and that's why I think they as far as I know and that would make sense why they accepted why Pluto became once they knew once they heard about that as the Greek one of the possible Greek names for the god of the underworld why they chose Pluto and why that becomes the official or common Roman name is because of the pun on this this means wealthy right and Pluto Pluto is wealthy and Greek right and so it made sense it became then sort of the Greek equivalent but then becomes the standard Roman name now do you know why Pluto where is it in Greek Pluto who told ya why that root means well there's I mean I looked a little bit of it up to do you have the quote from the Cratylus from Socrates because here we bring Socrates back in ok ok so let me bring this and so this is an actual ancient Greek etymology of the word ok ok no no any of the the proto enduring yeah and then you can you can talk about what what scholars now think which i think is connected i think it's relevant he may be right yeah i think it's not too far wrong so in the cratylus which is do you know that you don't probably know this this isn't a dialogue I didn't even realize because as I said not a Plato scholar the cratylus is a dialogue all about artem ology the entirety of it is Socrates Cratylus believes that etymology is truth and so he's coming at it from this idea that like if you can find out where the word comes from it gives you some real understanding of the essence of the thing in the world you know that kind of fallacy right so does this makes me think that does isidore of seville know of this I have no idea I'm so hopelessly knowledge less about late but and whether he would have known yeah you'll have to look this all up I looked I found this and I was like oh tell mark oh wait no I can't tell mark I have to wait for the podcast since I didn't do any more extra research on it there catalyst is all about entomology I will point you to it put a link in the show notes and we'll have follow-up on this probably and in it Socrates so Socrates doesn't really believe that etymology is truth in this he but he leads him to but in the course of it he gives all these etymologies for all these words and all these names and there seems to be a whole lot of discussion about them because a lot of them are weird etymologies or stupid etymologies and so the point is like what is he trying to see trying to show that it's not true anyway we'll have to think about that but he says he gives a whole set of etymologies of gods names and for Pluto he says as for Pluto he was so named as the giver of wealth Pluto's because wealth comes up from below out of the earth that's why because wealth comes out further out of the earth and Hades I fancy most people think that this is the name of the invisible on a tee so they are afraid and call him Pluto so he says Hades is the name that means the invisible but that's Guerry name for a scary thing so they use a euphemism when I see you from his employer and then he has a little dialogue about that and then he uses this to convince that people that he says that the reason he's called wealthy is not because wealth comes out of the earth and that would mean both mineral wealth and fertility to like and plants and stuff but no it's not that it's because all people want to go to the underworld because that's what real truth is it's a whole Socratic thing and that this is the reason why no one has been willing to come away from that other world not even the sirens but they and all the others have been overcome by Pluto's enchantments so beautiful as it appears are the words which Hades has the power to speak and from this point of view this God is a perfect softest and a great benefactor of those inhales realm he who also bestows such great blessings upon us who are on earth such abundance surrounds him there below and for this reason he is called Pluto so this is you know a Socratic reimagining of the idea he's called Pluto because of the wealth from the ground but really it's because he knows such wisdom that everyone who goes to the underworld doesn't want to come back that's why no one ever comes back from the dead and that's true wisdom and true wealth right now that so that part is obviously just Socratic ok but the part that he's saying that everybody thinks is that it comes from him being a giver well interestingly in Hesiod the god Pluto's is a God of wealth you see it doesn't no use the name Pluto to mean Hades Pluto says his own personification of wealth just like this personification so everything he's the son of Demeter because again wealth comes from the ground and I'm gonna come back to that point and then the lsj says but I'll let you sit like that so little and Scott Jones talks about where that word probably comes from right so I'll let you talk about that that's I thought that was really interesting that we have this whole dialogue all about etymology and I figured you would want to look into that yes it's all strange folk etymologies as well as somebody's like manipulating etymology sure to make his point yes I will definitely check that out but so we do have a very productive proto indo-european root that lies behind Pluto Plue yeah which has a lot of derivatives in a bunch of different languages so in greek play or play o is to flow to flow and so the idea is overflowing massing abounding hints wealthy and indeed we get the word flow right from that as well as fly flood flee fledge flight lots of different words so you mentioned this other figure right who does Pluto support yeah Plutus who is yeah maybe more specifically a god or a personification of wealth if you said when I say and he said I mean in the Theogony when he tells about the birth of all the gods he mentions the god Pluto's is born from Demeter right and I guess the idea is that the two become essentially associated and combined completed they become which makes me wonder if is it possible that the other pluto comes from a different kind of source and it's because the two names sound similar pluto as an epithet for hades for instance does not turn up in homer as far as i know so it's a late we don't have the earliest evidence we don't have it in homework we haven't heats yet but only as the god of wealth we don't have it as an epithet for the underworld until 5th century or so so it's hard to trace them and the other thing is that as you say since the wealth is connected with the underworld and this this other Pluto's is also connected you said with Demeter mhm yeah so maybe the stores are getting confused and that's another way that the to become yeah and of course yet because Damodar is associated with Plato through Persephone that start yeah so that's I mean there is an important and an understand meaning full symbolic connection there about the idea of wealth coming from the earth I mean Damodar is the goddess the Eleusinian mysteries which were the great worship of demin promised initiates wealth in this life and happiness in the afterlife at least they seem to have their mystery that's the name but that connection is definitely there that there's this idea of abundance with fertility goddess and then somehow but it's interesting because in other ways Hades is very much a sterile God so in mythology Hades has almost no children right right Hades and Persephone are a famous couple but they don't have we don't have children because death is the ultimate sterility so in that sense it makes I mean he's wealthy but and that's why I think by the Roman period Pluto is seen as wealthy because of mineral wealth because all of the metals and precious gems are stored in the earth right and things that are buried with people are stored in the earth right but not as an agricultural God that link if there ever was one in the Greek world is not there in the Roman world you know if you look up his myths the main one is the Pluto and Persephone and beyond that there's a couple of mentions of a possible child or two maybe but basically nothing and given the male gods in the Greek world they have kids even the non fertility gods they all have kids and he doesn't now while we're on the topic of the Roman tradition and the completion of different gods we talked about dis as being another associate God there's another Roman figure Orcas yes or case yeah of course is very commonly used as the poetic name for the underworld so Horus uses Argos a lot as the metonym for the underworld so the shades of Marcus now orcas it's believed may come through the Etruscans mmm-hmm okay the word orcas seems to actually come from Greek a lot of adjusting and stuff is like these linked to Greek so there's a Greek figure Horus okay Porco's who is God a false oath because the word Porco's is as a word oh yeah so God a false oath as in the God who punishes those who swear falsely exactly right yeah and he's mentioned in Hesiod I believe yeah probably works in days where he talks a lot about people who break oaths that's interesting because of course swearing by the rivers of the underworld was the oath the gods could not break so when the gods have to swear an oath they swear by I'm suddenly blanking what is the river of the underworld the river that Karen will come back to him fast across not leafy not easy not the other not at the they swear by oh I can't remember I have to look it up sticks yes thank you faster than my googling yes so the gods when they want to swear an oath swear by the River Styx and it's unbreakable for the gods so that's who they swear by so that's interesting that orcas is tied to oaths and those who break it I don't know what it means but it's interesting so [ __ ] 'kiss has been a leader sort of etymological journey it gives us the word ogre yeah only through French because of the underworld not the oats well it seems to have just become a kind of like a Dean demon like monstrous thing and becomes more of a sort of folklore II my figure that comes out of that when you get into a sort of leader I guess Christian Christians right there is an alternate suggestion I believe for the etymology it was suggested that it might I think this is now not may not believe but that it might be from an early word for Hungarian oh that oh that ogre might come from a word wrong but I think most etymologists now discount that that earlier theory and it is connected with orcas yeah the other word of course that we get from orcas the more obvious when I suppose is work all right of course and I think so now we're gonna get a connection to talking mm-hmm I think talking gets well I mean talking knew everything of course so he certainly knew his his classical mythology is certainly knew orcas commented on the etymology of this word and why he used it he had in his mind because it also comes into Old English oh alright so there is an orc the reference to orcs essentially a slightly different form in Beowulf for instance yeah basically to refers to a devil because there's that Ben akane stuff yes or that the descendants yeah that the various monstrous descendants of Cain slew Grendel yes that includes ground Giants and so forth so that's I mean he's probably specifically thinking of the Old English but he certainly knew the the Latin word or Etruscan word orcas the other interesting thing about orcas hmm this gets us back finally - to Pluto mm-hmm is that of course Pluto was downgraded to a dwarf planet it's no longer considered a planet and in fact there is another dwarf planet in the same category as food oh no well that too and there is oh there's an orcas I think it's fun that series is given we were just discussing how Devin is you know since Ceres is the Roman name for demodex scimitar now she's not it's not anywhere near Pluto but it's also another dwarf planet so yeah 9 0 4 8 - orcas a dwarf planet considered and it's one of these Kuiper belt objects in a specific category that's called a pluton oh not after Pluto yes and it specifically implies something about its orbit in relation to Neptune okay so essentially Pluto and orcas are the same kind of orbit but they're from what I understand kind of in opposite arrangements so that orcas is kind of an anti Pluto okay they're never in the same part of their orbit at the same time because of the way that they resonate with that child's I'm with Neptune right okay that is interesting so the name was chosen specifically for that reason because it was twin because it was joined with Pluto interesting I didn't realize that the person who'd suggested the girl who suggested it was particularly interested in mythology to that extent because the other thing about Pluto as I said there's almost no myths about oh really there's the story about how the earth that all of the world was divided into three that he appears in that story where Jupiter or Zeus gets the heavens they draw a lots and he gets the heavens and Poseidon or Neptune gets the sea and Pluto or Hades gets the underworld he appears in that story he appears in the Persephone story and he appears obviously as the place people go for death so he also appears in the Orpheus story right as in where our fuse goes to the underworld and there's a few other places where Herakles goes three underworld or you know when people go to the underworld they meet him other than that he was worshipped but there's very a lot of you know there were shrines and there was worship ritual and ritual but there was there's almost no myths about him one of the things you things that said about him is that he is represented as isolated under the earth he doesn't hear unlike all the other gods who live on Olympus and see things they're not all-seeing but they they see what's happening in the world and they kind of take part in it he was isolated he couldn't see or hear anything on earth except when people swore by him or made prayers to him so the only things he could hear were when people actually basically invoked him with their name so I think that that's again really appropriate for Pluto which is so far that we can't see it and when you think about all this you know the time is taking the signals from the pictures to get to us and how isolate it is it's the most isolated part of our solar system that we still consider the solar system at least as far as we know until something else beyond it but at the moment it's the one that is isolated that only knows about us when we send a probe into it because nothing you know it's hardly even touched by the Sun so I do think it's really interesting how that works well at least the Disney Hercules got that part of his character right there that he only hears well I bet he's isolated yes he's very nice to ladies a loner that's true it's about the only thing the Disney Hercules got right about 80 Pluto was never represented as having flames on his head for instance I've never seen that me versus the other one I wanted to just mention was Karin of course which we're also getting lots of pictures of and it's now I don't know if you looked it up but it's interesting because Karin is named after in a sustainable food Oh is named after the figure the ferryman who would ferry the souls of the dead across the river Styx and his name comes from an adjective that means fierce or bright and is used bright when it's referring to eyes and seems to mean sometimes bluish gray or gray oh you're Ripa T's says his name comes from his fierce or bright eyes now again that's your Eponine sees a playwright he doesn't know anything about language that's just a thing he says but it's not impossible but I wonder and the source I just looked in the dictionary I didn't look beyond the thinking lexicon so I didn't look any further into it but I wonder if it comes from gray or dirty appearance like the idea that he'd be gray because he is almost represented a squalid and dirty and an old bent old man it's not a attractive figure he's the man you have to pay the coins to that's why corpse is buried with coins emphasized so that's Karen and so I think that that's an interesting pairing of course it was given to the planet or to Karen when they thought it was a witch it still sort of but it's because of that association just thought it was an interesting naming point to bring out and gray or blueish gray certainly seems to describe the planet as we have it Karen doesn't appear to be any other color than that anyway sadly we don't seem to have any other clear etymology for that name it seems no it's a fairly isolated term even Greek it's not it's not a productive word it doesn't have other forms doesn't seem to I just thought I'd mention that I think that's everything I had to say about Pluto I don't know if you had any other data oh I know what else we wanted to talk about about Pluto that article that just sent you about from BuzzFeed oh yes about the names the other names of the of the features on Pluto I don't have a lot to say about it but we are just this afternoon saw going around that the proposed names are the sort of temporary names that are being used for the various features like craters and hills and other features on the surface of Plato of Pluto and Charon and the naming conventions they're using and I just thought that was interesting we'll put a link to that they're using for Pluto lots of references to infernal various mythologies yeah so equivalent ideas and they had apparently they had apparently solicited names from the public in categories for it space missions and spacecraft scientists and engineers historic explorers and underworld locales beings and travelers and they solicited names for that and they're picking from those pools of suggested names for their various things as they find stuff that they need to be able to identify in their conversations I thought that was interesting so you can go we'll put the link up you can go and look at the various names but there's lots of things to do with underworld from not just classical math and that's the nice thing yeah they've got some some that are mythological they've got Mayan and Inuit and African names for the underworld but also things like Zulu yeah and Morgoth Balrog things to do with the underworld in fiction as well as in real life there's also a feature named after Lowell mm-hmm because scientists yeah and there's a crater named Bernie Bernie crater after Venetia Burney whoo yes suggested the name yeah and then Charon has its own naming convention so they're using fictional explorers and travelers fictional origins and destinations fictional vessels and exploration authors directors and artists and that's where all the ones that are going to make the hearts of many nerds like us very happy references Kirk and Sulu and Kubrick and Spock and calamari and TARDIS Ripley and Skywalker and Leia Organa Vader all of these names are on there Nemo and I saw some comments because of course I'm stupid and read a few comments on the BuzzFeed article before I remembered that you don't do that I saw a couple come to say I can't believe these stupid names are now on the solar system and what it made me laugh about that is oh yes because Pluto is such a real thing and Jupiter Vulcan oh those are real things as opposed to our fictional Sulu and Kirk no the mythological names for them are just as made-up they come out of a certain heritage sure but I don't see any reason we can't have Spock on Charon and why there's any reason that we can't have modern fictional stuff as well as old fictional stuff they're just names people getting back to some of the pluto ones and in terms of sort of literary reference there is pandemonium yes any moon pendulum dorsa which is of Norman coined by Milton reflecting pantheon of gods and diamond underworld reference and also if you look a little closely there are two sort of trenches which are called fossa yeah yeah because all the names for the types of features all the names what the features are unless a ratio and fossa and stuff like that a fossa related to the word fossil oh yes but there's a Virgil fossa and Beatrice fossa and that of course is Dante you know in the world right now I think it's lovely I mean the reason I even saw this article was because it was it was tweeted by a classicist friend who's saying oh you know classes system nerds are like are gonna love these names they're just they're wonderful they're I think they're a great range of things and why on earth not all right I think that wraps up Pluto what do you think yeah I think we've said as much as we have just to contribute to it that's what I've got alright the one other thing I wanted to do before we finish is to say thank you to someone speaking of Tolkien there's another podcast that I listened to one of the people on it is an old Twitter friend of ours Jonathan Cox the podcast is called talking talking and they at the end of their last episode that I listened to mentioned this podcasters having just started and suggested that people come in listen to it which I really appreciate and I wanted to say thank you very much for doing so thanks and I also wanted to return the favor because I genuinely think it's totally something that people who might be interested in this might be interested in if you like Tolkien because what they're doing is going through the works of Tolkien reading the books and talking about them chapter by chapter Jonathan Cady and chase last name and they went through the whole Silmarillion now they're working their way through the Hobbit by the time this goes up they'll probably be moving on to the Lord of the Rings I assume that's where they went after The Hobbit and I've just found it really interesting I've read these books before some of them a long time ago The Silmarillion I read once at the cottage and didn't understand at all advice I haven't reread them as they've been talking about them but I've been enjoying having talk about the details in the books and talk about the mythology and the reactions to it they are all at different levels of Tolkien mania katie is a die-hard Tolkien expert who's was raised on it literally from by her mother who's an academic who's written on The Hobbit and Jonathan has read them all or been a lot of them and enjoyed them but it's not particularly doesn't consider himself an expert I think sorry Jon if you do and Chase is hasn't read very much of it and is reading them for the first time so they kind of had an interesting battle yeah having a little discussion anyway I just think it's a fun podcast so check that out if you have a moment and if you're interested in either revisiting some of those books or reading or hearing about them for the first time you don't even need to have read it frankly if you don't want to have to read Tolkien but want to know all about the books you can just listen to the podcast you'll get the gist of it so thanks to you guys and I look forward to more of your episodes in the future all right well I'm finished my drink yep pretty much you're gone mm-hmm all the pomegranates are gone I'm gonna have to go back to the underworld for the winter I guess for the moment though we can enjoy the summer it's very hot here right now so I think we should wrap it up all right so thanks for listening and we'll be back soon for more information check out the website WWL iterative net where you can find links to the videos blog posts sources and credits we've also got all the ways you can follow us twitter facebook tumblr g+ a mailing list an Instagram you can go directly to the videos at youtube.com slash alliterative our email is on the website but the easiest way to get in touch with us is Twitter I'm at even Sarah a ve and aah and i'm @alliterative to keep up with the podcast subscribe on itunes or to the feed on the website and please review it on itunes if you can and if you've enjoyed it because it helps us a lot we'll be back soon with more musings about the connections around us thanks for listening bye [Music] you come in oh my I molested money yeah I feel like fix wages actually when I can be okay [Music]