Interveiws

Interview with In a Time of Ancient Gods: The Xena Podcast

I talked to Justine about the podcast she runs with Hayley and how the Xena: Warrior Princess series deals with mythology.

Let us talk about your podcast. When and why did you launch it? What do you hope to achieve with it?

Thank you for reaching out! Hayley and I started thinking about the podcast in 2018. We’re both big podcast listeners and were interested in stretching our producer muscles. We decided to do a recap podcast, telling the story of each Xena episode chronologically, and include research on myths, histories, and historical characters that show up in the Xenaverse. We’ve been obsessed with the show since it first aired and always loved the mythologies in every episode. Right now, Hayley is working on her Ph.D. in History and I’m working on my Master’s in Information Science with a focus on Archival Studies, so the research elements felt like a natural fit! A podcast felt like a great way to connect with the bigger Xenite community and follow our passions of researching history, mythology, feminism, the occult, etc. I’m also fascinated with audio editing and have learned a lot working on the podcast.

We launched the podcast in January 2019 once we had a few episodes in the bank and figured out how we wanted to promote it on social media (Facebook and Instagram). Hayley and I have been best friends basically since birth; our families have always been close. We’ve always done creative projects together and this felt like a natural progression for our sense of humour! Xena the show can be so goofy, and we’ve always been inspired by the “low budget” film-making techniques. Plus Xena is arguably the best hero of modern pop culture.

What caused you to be interested in mythology?

I think Hayley and I both were raised on myths, legends, and fairy tales - being read to by our parents. Since then I’ve always been drawn to stories from different cultures that shape how people think or empower us to act. I’m a big fan of Joseph Campbell’s works on mythology, especially his book The Hero with a Thousand Faces. I’m also very interested in types of astrology that focus on the archetypal characters and stories associated with planets and signs, the relationships between the myths and gods associated with the archetypes, and how these relationships are metaphors of our own internal experiences.

Do you have a favourite myth, mythological figure or mythological tradition?

In Greek myth I’ve always been really taken with Medea, the witch who forgoes her country, past, and entire identity for a love; Who once scorned in love, commits a ton of egregious murder and flies off into the sky on a serpent chariot! I love that kind of drama and angry powerful women! I also really love Achilles’ back story in Statius’ Achilleid. There’s one scene where Chiron the centaur is teaching him hero strength and has him stand in the middle of this raging river and not let it sweep him away. That image always stuck with me!·

I wonder what you think about the theories of myth. Are there any that are especially compelling to you and how capable do you think that any of these theories are at deepening our understanding of particular myths or mythology in general?

I’ve been reading a lot of the Cambridge school of mythology lately, like Jane Ellen Harrison, thinking about myth and ritual. I’m open to many styles of interpretation. I’m very interested in how myths cross-pollinate naturally, how many rituals humans enact often precede the current iteration of the myth they think they’re processing. It’s also important to identify when dominant religions have usurped more ancient ones intentionally. I’ve been reading the book The Immortality Key, and it’s fascinating to read the similarities between the Eleusinian Mysteries and contemporary Catholic mass. The actions continue on, but the gods and stories are different! I’m a spiritual person, not a religious person, and strongly believe cross-cultural ancient and contemporary gods and goddesses are all metaphors for the same entities, archetypes, psychological expressions, etc. Myths are the collective unconscious of the people!

To what extent do you think that myths reflect human psychology or even events from history?

So much so! I think ancient gods and stories represent aspects of the human psyche, and to honour and remember them is to honor ourselves, each other, and the world around us.

Do you think that mythology still offers lessons for us today?

Definitely! It’s been so interesting researching myths and realizing how many iterations there are of a single myth, and how contemporary retellings (T.V., comics, etc) are often just the latest iteration in a 2000 year tradition. The essence of these stories and characters are archetypes of human experiences.

Some readers may not be familiar with Xena: Warrior Princess. Can you tell us more about it and how mythology plays a role in the series?

Xena is an American fantasy/action/comedy/drama T.V. show filmed in New Zealand that aired from 1995 to 2001. It was a spin-off from the show Hercules: The Legendary Journey. Xena’s character (a former warlord now trying to make up for all the evil she brought into the world) was so popular she was given her own storyline of redemption. Every episode takes place in the ancient, typically Meditteranean, world. Often characters are named after real historical figures. In the first few seasons especially, the writers often take a western cultural myth or story and retell it, inserting Xena and her partner Gabrielle into the storyline. Xena herself is driven by a larger-than-life need to repent for the evil things she did before she met Hercules. It shares themes with the Hercules myth. She’s a warrior princess trying to save the world and redeem herself one episode at a time! The writers write women extremely well and the romantic relationship (although not always explicitly out in the open) between Xena and Gabrielle was ahead of its time.

Are you pleased with the ways in which fantasy series like Xena: Warrior Princess have adapted and used mythology?

For the most part I think Xena does a beautiful and thought provoking job retelling ancient myths. Sometimes I wish they dug a little deeper and didn’t fall back on tropes. For example, in the episode Girls Just Wanna Have Fun they portray Bacchus as a Devil or Dracula character. I wish they had created a different character to tell that story. In modern-day retellings Bacchus is often sidelined as a caricature of a drunk or devious character when historically he was a very important fertility god (among other things). Reducing mythologies to caricatures isn’t fair to the stories, or to ourselves! But more often than not Hayley and I find ourselves really impressed with the amount of research the writers did for each storyline.

Justine and Hayley run In a Time of Ancient Gods: The Xena Podcast. You can listen to it on Apple, Spotify and Google, follow on Facebook and Instagram, support them on Patreon and buy their merchandise.