{"type":"rich","version":"1.0","provider_name":"Transistor","provider_url":"https://transistor.fm","author_name":"The Tender Hour","title":"Sleep Meditation for Seasonal Depression & the Dread of Winter · Persephone, Greek Queen of the Underworld · Female Voice · 3 Hours","html":"","width":"100%","height":180,"duration":10800,"description":"A soft three hour sleep meditation for the sinking feeling that arrives when the light starts leaving earlier every day. A gentle female voice tells you what the Greeks actually said about the girl who went down, which is not the story most people were told, and then lets you fall asleep to hours of warm ambient sound. This one is for anyone who can feel a dark season coming and has already decided it is going to be bad.\n\nThe oldest full telling we have is a hymn written down around seven hundred years before the common era, and it opens in a meadow. She is gathering flowers with the daughters of Ocean, and the hymn names them one by one, roses and crocuses and violets and iris and hyacinth, the way you would name them if you had been there. Then the earth grows one more flower, a narcissus with a hundred blooms on a single stem, and the hymn says plainly that it was grown as a snare. She reaches for it because it is the most beautiful thing in the field, and the ground opens. She did not choose it. Her father arranged it with his brother and did not tell her, and the hymn says the mountain peaks and the depths of the sea echoed her voice. That is in the source, it is not softened here, and it is also not where the story goes.\n\nHere is what almost nobody is told. She has two names. Above she is Kore, which is not really a name, it just means the girl, what you would call a young woman whose name you did not know. Below she is Persephone, and Persephone is the name the Greeks were frightened of. They argued about what it meant and never agreed, and scholars think the word is older than Greek itself, so nobody can tell you what her real name means. But they knew what it was for. In the Odyssey, when Circe tells Odysseus he has to go to the land of the dead, she does not say the house of Hades. She says the house of Hades and dread Persephone. Dread is Homer's word.\n\nThen the pomegranate, and here the neat version you have heard is a lie. The oldest telling gives...","thumbnail_url":"https://img.transistorcdn.com/RV6rkvW5dw7PQo7B9NNH_aBPQmo62cpvlrp87r-UST0/rs:fill:0:0:1/w:400/h:400/q:60/mb:500000/aHR0cHM6Ly9pbWct/dXBsb2FkLXByb2R1/Y3Rpb24udHJhbnNp/c3Rvci5mbS85OTM2/MWJkMzZlMzliYzJh/Y2M4YzUwNDVmYjM2/ZDZhOS5wbmc.webp","thumbnail_width":300,"thumbnail_height":300}