Hi. This’ll be a quick and personal and joyous one—a vacation from any more serious thinking—because a) I’m visiting family and loading up on all the key lime things I can, and b) I want to turn the spotlight on this week’s guest, whose writing I’m including as a little treat for you.

Angela Natividad left San Francisco for Paris nearly two decades ago and set about building multiple new lives, languages, and businesses. She’s been an ad woman (which you’ll hear about), and an editorial director. But underneath it all, she’s a mythologist. 

I met Angela at a beloved friend’s insistence. “You’re the same, but different,” was what I was told, and then exhorted to meet them in Paris. I accidentally showed up a day early at her place, expecting our mutual friend to have already arrived. He had not. I nearly vommed.

But Angela took my unexpected arrival in stride, offered me tea, and seated me at her kitchen table while she finished an article for which she was on deadline. I ate a banana and flicked through my phone across from her, silently gobsmacked that I had fumbled my arrival date. Suddenly, she stopped tapping at the keys and took a thoughtful pull on her vape. 

“Caitlin, do you consider yourself a product of Colonialism?” she asked—0 chill. I answered, also with 0 chill. We’ve been friends ever since.

Angela was always a mythologist, I think, but she transformed more fully into her version of one during the pandemic. She did a master’s degree in myth and storytelling and wrote the book we’ll talk about in this episode. In Remember His Name: Unmasking the Faceless God of the West, Angela makes the case that capitalism isn't an economic system. It's a religious one.

We talk about the hidden god at the center of it all, the ancient mythologies that laid the groundwork, and a concept called the egregore that might be the most useful (and slightly unsettling) idea I've encountered in a long time. Angela also makes a case for why the stories we tell ourselves about productivity, laziness, and whether we're doing enough aren't personal failings—and they’re not even really our stories. They’re inheritances that work upon us perhaps more than we them. 

Following is an excerpt from Angela’s Substack, Midwifing The Mother, in which she de-mystifies and re-mythifies what it means to be a mother through the lens of story. I’m including it not because it explicitly points to our Simplify conversation, but because it’s a great example of Angela’s thing: she pulls myth out of its drowsy tomes and pops it into an Adidas track suit, cool new shoes, and maybe a fancy new hat. She gives it a fist full of rings. Sunglasses. A nifty bag for stowing all its stuff. And then she takes it on a walk through contemporary lived reality, stopping at dinner parties and bars and homes with myth as her timeless guest. 

Enjoy.

From Persephone Comes in the Spring on Midwifing the Mother

“Demeter, great goddess of plenty, has a daughter called Persephone. Dark-eyed, lithe and solar, she’s best described as “such a PYT, catching all the lights,” per Justice, and one day while dancing around, picking crocuses with her companions, she plucks a narcissus.

And the earth, full of roads leading every which way, opened up under her. Hades appears on his chariot. He sweeps her up and the land swallows them whole.

What a flower, the narcissus. Subject of a myth of its own, that of the vain boy Narcissus, it’s forever connected with the notion of youth being netted by its own beauty.

Narcissus never leaves the edge of the pool through which he discovers his own reflection, and becomes the flower that traps Persephone. When she gazes into it—into the timeless reflection of seemingly immortal, but desperately fragile youth—it’s land itself that embraces her, forever.

Demeter goes crazy with grief. Where is her baby? Why hasn’t she come home? No one answers, neither on Mount Olympus nor on earth. On the 10th day of her weeping, Hekate the titaness emerges from a cave and says, “I heard your child’s scream.”

Hekate, the goddess of crossroads and lost children, attended to always by great black dogs. She takes Demeter to Helios, who sees everything from his great sun-chariot in the sky.

Helios intones, “Demeter of Rhea, with the beautiful hair, out of respect I’ll tell you that Hades has taken her. Zeus made this arrangement because Hades wanted her for a wife. I have to say, though, you could do worse than have him for a son-in-law.”

This is shit consolation for a mother and I don’t know why he didn’t put a sock in that last bit. Unsurprisingly, Demeter’s grief becomes so much worse that the Homeric Hymns compares it to the Hound of Hades in terror. Her rage lambasts the land: Nothing grows, all goes bare.

Eventually this suffering trickles up to Olympus. People are starving; there are no harvests to gather, no burning fat to please the gods. So Zeus sighs and sends sympathetic Hermes to gather Persephone back from hell.

Persephone emerges, pale and blinking, flanked by Hermes and Hekate, the only two gods that can move between the worlds. Demeter embraces her daughter, then draws away: “You didn’t eat anything, did you?”

That eternal rule: Never eat of the underworld!

Except Persephone has—pomegranate seeds. It’s enough to bind her to death’s landscape, at least for a time. For one-third of the year, she returns to Hades. The land goes barren as Demeter’s grief returns, sharp and piercing. But she always comes back in the spring.

Persephone’s other name becomes Kore: “Maiden” or “shoot.” She represents the fertile element that must be buried to catalyse new life.”

I hope you enjoy this episode and it calls you to scrutinize the stories that you’re living inside. And I also think you should subscribe to Midwifing the Mother—it’s almost always my favorite thing I read every month.

More soon,
Caitlin on vacation

P.S. Please share with a friend you think will enjoy this episode. It’s the best way you can help Simplify stick around! Also, let me know what you thought by replying here or writing to me and Ben at [email protected]. 

You can also follow the show on instagram at @simplifypod.

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