Charlie and Nikki Marmery (Lilith) discuss her epic tale that looks from the start of the Genesis story all the way to our present day, showing how the biblical stories did away with an all-important goddess for women – Yahweh’s wife – and the consequences that has had. There is discussion, too, on the Gnostic gospels, various mythologies, and environmentalism.

General references:
Jeremiah 7:18 says: “The children gather wood, the fathers kindle fire, and the women knead dough, to make cakes for the queen of heaven, and they pour out drink offerings to other gods.”
About Asherah poles, which Charlie notes, there are many references in the Bible. One such is Deuteronomy 16:21: “Do not set up any wooden Asherah pole beside the altar you build to the Lord your God.”
Jennifer Saint’s episode where she mentions Sarah Clegg is is 95
The quote from St Paul Nikki includes is from 1 Timothy 2:12

Books mentioned by name or extensively:
Francesca Stavrakopoulou: God: An Anatomy
John Milton: Paradise Lost
Nikki Marmery: On Wilder Seas
Nikki Marmery: Lilith
Sarah Clegg: Women’s Lore
The Bible

Buy the books: UK || USA

Release details: Recorded 18th April 2024; published 23rd September 2024

Where to find Nikki online: Website || Twitter || Facebook || Instagram || TikTok

Where to find Charlie online: Twitter || Instagram || TikTok

Discussions

00:01:36 The inspiration – the way the goddess Asherah, god’s wife, was taken out of tradition, and the icons that have survived through time
00:04:23 Is there a way Asherah might’ve been able to continue as a worshipped goddess longer than she did?
00:10:13 All about Nikki’s character of Lilith and how the original faiths saw men and women as equal
00:18:25 Nikki’s employment of other myths and religions, how they they interacted, and the origins of now-Christian symbols
00:24:49 Nikki’s inclusion of Ereskigal, goddess of the Underworld in Sumerian mythology
00:28:41 Nikki’s effective dismissal of Heaven and her historical and Biblical reasoning
00:34:23 The environmental aspect of the book
00:37:12 How Nikki’s Eden and the events therein are just a small part of the wider world, and, also, Noah’s Ark in this context
00:42:50 Nikki’s Biblical language. We then move on to her character of Samael specifically
00:48:41 The varied inclusions of Jezebel and Salome
00:53:04 Nikki’s depiction of Jesus and using the Gnostic gospels
00:59:51 Nikki’s religious background
01:02:07 Brief notes on what Nikki’s planning to write next

Transcript

Please note that this transcript has been edited for legibility and is not a 100% accurate representation of the audio. Filler words and many false sentence starts have been removed, and words have been added in square brackets for clarity.

Charlie: Hello and welcome to The Worm Hole Podcast episode 106. Bringing on an author and talking with them, about one – occasionally more – of their books in detail. And if you find yourself enjoying today’s episode, do share it with your friends. I’m Charlie Place and today I am joined by Nikki Marmery to discuss her second novel, Lilith. In Nikki’s book, Lilith was created alongside Adam to live as equals in the Garden of Eden, but Lilith eats the fruit of the tree of knowledge and thereby understands all that the god Yahweh did not want the couple to know. Yahweh banishes Lilith from Eden which actually turns out to be not such a bad thing because it means she becomes immortal, and therefore has time to try and reverse the tide of man now being superior to woman. Once out of Eden she finds that she and Adam were not the only humans on earth as they were told, and she looks to help Adam’s replacement wife, the subservient Eve, from a fate the goddess Asherah, Yahweh’s wife, did not plan. Hello Nikki!

Nikki: Hello, Charlie, thank you so much for having me. And by the way, that is a brilliant, very succinct intro to the book [laughs]. I wrote the thing and I don’t introduce it as succinctly as that, so thank you for that.

Charlie: It took me a couple of drafts, but I think I was first focusing on what most wowed me with my own religious background, and we’re going to be talking about a couple of those things, basically. I would like to start with a question I know you’ve had before, the inspiration, the way Asherah was taken out of tradition.

Nikki: So in my book, Asherah is the wife of God, Yahweh in the Old Testament. And that comes from the historical reality – Asherah was worshipped alongside Yahweh in early Israelite religion. She was erased, really, out of the mainstream part of the religion over the course of the first millennium BC. But we have lots of archaeological evidence that shows us how important she was, especially to ordinary men and women, rather than you have the texts which tell us what the authorities in the religion want people to believe, and then you have real life, everyday religion, and we have lots of evidence that Asherah was very central, especially to women, in what became Israel in the first millennium BC.

Charlie: You say about the evidence, did I read rightly, there are like thousands of different icons of her that we’ve got?

Nikki: Yes, I mean, thousands of these terracotta figurines of her, and they’re usually interpreted as fertility figurines, which is true – like all mother goddesses, that’s her big thing, the fertility. But that also kind of downplays her significance. There’s a statue of her in a museum in Israel that is still labelled ‘Asherah the sacred prostitute’. And that, again, is another thing that often happened to female divine figures in religion; they get viewed through a modern lens, a lens that says if they are overly sexualized, that means they’re profane rather than define. But of course, in the ancient world, that’s not the way it was. There was literally nothing more important than bringing life into the world. And especially for ancient people, your ability to regenerate, to have new generations, depends on your fertility. It’s literally the most important thing there is. And so that sort of downgrading of status, and it happens not just in the Israelite religion, in all the religions of that region, that downgrading of the female divine figure, a mother goddess, fertility goddess, into a more profane idea – that’s something that you see in every part of that region, from Greece, Anatolia, Syria, all around, Iraq, Iran.

Charlie: Well, I want to stick on the subject because your book is what’s introduced me to Asherah and this whole concept, and it has blown my mind completely. Yeah, I think it’s going to actually be a catalyst for changing what I think about religion, frankly, your book.

Nikki: That’s amazing to hear. That’s absolutely amazing to hear, yeah.

Charlie: Well, I want to ask, in all the research that you’ve done, do you think there was ever a chance that Asherah might have been able to survive history for longer, or maybe other female gods?

Nikki: That’s a fantastic question, and I think the answer is absolutely. The impetus for erasing Asherah from mainstream religion really came from the top down. And it was a reaction to these disasters that befell the Israelite people in the first millennium BC. First of all, the Syrian invasion, then the Babylonian invasion and exile. And the response to those disasters was, ‘Yahweh’s angry with us because we’re worshipping other gods’, and chief among those other gods was Asherah, his consort. And so that was very much a top down effort to sort of say, ‘no, that’s in the past’. The idea of Yahweh as a monotheistic god, a sole god, when we’re looking back, we think that’s the way it always has been in the early Hebrew religion, but that is not the case. Israelite religion, like all religions of that region, started off as polytheistic, and that move towards a monotheistic god, a sole male god was a process, and it was very much a top down process. In fact there are these wonderful passages in the Bible where you see people’s resistance to her erasure. See these passages where the prophet Jeremiah is bemoaning the fact that people won’t give up their worship of the queen – she’s called the ‘queen of heaven’ at that point in the Bible. And you see the popular people saying, ‘no, we won’t stop worshipping her, we will carry on’. And he’s berating the fact that the women are making cakes for the queen of heaven. There’s a wonderful passage where he’s saying, ‘the fathers are kindling the fires and the women are making cakes for the queen of heaven’, and they don’t want to let go. These are the women of Jerusalem in about the 6th century BC. They don’t want to let that go. And I think that makes complete sense! For me personally, the idea of a sole male god just seems absurd. Apart from the fact that life comes from women, the idea that all divinity is manifest in a sexed male being is just absurd to me. But when you think about the context of the ancient world, it becomes even more absurd. Because for women, the most important thing in your life – you have no contraception, no access to medicine, no access to birth control – the most important thing in your life is your fertility and ability to have children. Huge risk and dangers that are involved in having children. Every time you’re pregnant, you’re staring death in the face. The chances of your babies dying, the chances of your children dying is very, very, very high. And that is why women needed female goddesses in the ancient world, because they’re the ones that were prayed to, to ensure safe pregnancy, safe delivery of their children. And you can see – when that switches to this idea of a sole male god – when you look through the Bible, there is nowhere in the whole Bible where the sole male god is remotely concerned about women dying in pregnancy or the risks of childbirth or the risks of babies dying. He’s just not interested. And that’s what female goddesses did. They were interested, they cared. That’s who women prayed to. They were very, very, very important to them. And so I think looking at it that way, you know, what purpose did gods serve in the ancient world? And you can see why ancient goddesses were really important to real women. And I think that’s a real loss, that I think in the modern day women still feel the loss of that; certainly that loss of status which goes along with losing the idea of female divinity. But I think that’s something that we’re still grappling with today.

Charlie: Yeah, no, as you’re saying, I’m thinking that a female goddess, be she Asherah or, well, you quote Artemis in your book, Inanna, whoever she is, obviously she takes away fear. Whereas traditionally, well, you ‘put the fear of God in you’ – there’s a reason that is a phrase. So I suppose, yeah, having a goddess there would have taken away that fear. And obviously fear is very useful sometimes to some people, isn’t it?

Nikki: Yes, absolutely. You use fear to control people. And it’s no coincidence that the beginning of Genesis, which is the inspiration for this book, it’s no coincidence that this male god punishes the first woman for this sin of seeking wisdom by punishing her to give birth in agony. That sort of link is not really a coincidence. You have a male god punishing the first woman and by extension all women for the sin of curiosity or seeking wisdom – which, by the way, there was absolutely nothing wrong with [laughs], in fact, most people think seeking knowledge is a good thing – for that sin, she is punished to give birth in agony and be subject to the authority of her husband. Now, who does that benefit in the real world? Obviously, that is a story that has been created because it proves immeasurably beneficial to men. That’s the whole point of it, really.

Charlie: Yeah, yeah. And listeners, I am actually going to… it’s just occurred to me it’d be a good idea to link you to these passages that Nikki is talking about in Jeremiah and that because, I mean, as you’re reading it, whether you know the Bible a lot or not, you kind of get the sense that, Nikki’s giving you the real deal and she absolutely is. You read these passages and if you read them in this different light, it’s very interesting with all the pillars and the poles and things about the goddess. So I will include them for you. We have to bring in Lilith, I think. Can you tell us when she came into the book, into your mind, I suppose. And all about her in the context of your book?

Nikki: Lilith is a very, very ancient archetype in myth, in fact, she’s probably the oldest female archetype there is. She started life in Iraq nearly 5000 years ago and she starts life as this demonic figure and she’s particularly threatening to pregnant women and babies. There’s a brilliant book called Women’s Lore by Sarah Clegg, which I highly recommend, which explains the meaning and significance of Lilith through time. And her point is that it’s very likely that that, again, demonic figure emerged as a way for women to control their fears of pregnancy and childbirth. Because this Lilith would drag foetuses from her mother’s womb, she preyed on babies and children. In the real world, that’s a way to control your very real fears about things that you have no control over, pregnancy and childbirth, as we’ve said, being incredibly dangerous. So that’s how she starts life. And almost two… more than that – it’s not until 1000 AD that she becomes linked with the garden of Eden and becomes, in Jewish mythology, the first woman. And so really, at that point, what’s happening is you’ve already got this existing demonic figure who is very dangerous to pregnant women, small children, and she’s also, at that point, acquired this reputation for appearing to men in their dreams and seducing them in their dreams as a succubus figure. And so this idea of her as being the first woman gets tagged onto that very long history of all these dangerous qualities that she has. And this story emerges that she was created equal to Adam originally, but when she asserted her authority, she was thrown out of the Garden of Eden, and that’s when God creates Eve, who is very clearly a subservient figure: she is made from Adam’s rib to denote her subservience. Adam is then given full control of her. So it’s a story that explains how woman came to be inferior. And so that’s really what attracts me about that story, because that’s a myth, obviously, but it does reflect something that did happen in the ancient world, in the Bronze Age and prehistory, and that is that demotion in status of women. For thousands of years, women have been… not worshipped, but female divinity is responsible for bringing life into the world. For thousands of years, any mind that conceived of a god conceived of a female mother goddess because that’s what seemed obvious to people, because women give birth. And when women have status along with that, in ancient religion, they are certainly equal, and in some scenarios are in control of religious worship and things like that. And then along comes this idea that not only are there no female mother goddesses any more, but there’s one god, and he’s male, and he’s decided that all women are inferior. And that’s a sort of a mythological reworking of something that did happen, and that is that demotion of women as patriarchy arose across the Middle East in the Bronze Age and became the dominant social model. And that’s really what I wanted to explore. I wanted to use this myth of Lilith to explore two things, really – that loss of women’s equality that happened in prehistory and the loss of the concept of mother goddess, which is absolutely linked, the two things go hand in hand. You can argue about what comes first, but for me, it’s probably a spiral, a circular thing where one informs the other, and it just gets worse and worse and worse for women until they literally become property belonging to men. And that’s the rise of patriarchy. So that’s really what I wanted to explore, and I wanted to show how relevant it is. This isn’t a thing that happened several thousand years ago – I wanted to show how relevant it is to the way we live today because it is so fundamental. Once you see it, you can’t unsee it. Once you see how that idea that man is superior and woman is inferior, once you see how that was reinforced through very powerful religious authorities for thousands of years, and when you see how recently it is that we’re coming out of that, but everything we have, everything in our culture, everything in our institutions, was built by people who absolutely thought that male authority was ordained by God. And so it is all around us. And that’s what I wanted to show, and that’s why I wanted to bring Lilith up to the modern day. I wanted to show the consequences of that mythical moment in Genesis where God announces that woman is inferior, which really also refers to a real thing that happened in the real world.

Charlie: I mean, it sounds like there’s trickery all around, really, doesn’t it? Obviously, there’s a concentration in your work and in the whole idea of Lilith and goddesses in general, of women being equal, but the whole thing sounds like a trickery for everybody.

Nikki: It’s a con. It’s a huge con. I mean, it’s con, obviously, for women, but I think it’s also a con for men because who… well, they have gained for several thousand years, but it’s no way to live. It’s damaging. It’s damaging to think that one sex has authority over the other. It’s damaging in the way we think about our relationships to each other. It’s also damaging to the way we think about the world, because those two things are very connected as well, because in the ancient world, women were very closely connected with the natural world. The mother goddesses were all very incarnate in the world, as opposed to this new idea of a male god who sits above the world and is above it. He’s not involved in it. He’s got a superior spiritual realm – that’s a new idea. The old idea is that this world is everything we have, and, divinity is incarnate within it. And so because women had that association with the natural world, you then have that second thing that happens in Genesis, which is that God gives man power over the natural world as well. He gives Adam two jobs – he’s in charge of women and he’s in charge of the natural world. It encourages this idea that the world is ours to do with, as we will, rather than that we are just one of many species who live here, and it’s not ours to control, it’s not ours to exploit relentlessly, and no concern for what it can sustain. That idea that we have dominion over it, I think, is incredibly damaging. And it’s very different to how people thought in the ancient world. In the ancient world, the earth was holy, it was divine, because it was literally the body of the mother goddess. The earth was her body. It provided sustenance for people in the same way that a mother’s body provides sustenance for its children. And people cherished and respected the land because of that. So I think that, again, is something that we have really lost and could well be the final thing that finishes us off, that lack of respect for the world, that lack of respect for the other creatures and species that live within it could well be the thing that finishes us off.

Charlie: Well, also, you said divinity there and I’m going to ask you about that later because the whole heaven on earth and not necessarily needing or having a heaven, I’m definitely going to come to that. Listeners. I’ve also noted that Nikki has said about Sarah Clegg, and you may remember that Jennifer Saint, a few episodes ago also mentioned Sarah Clegg. So I think we should all go off and read this Women’s Lore already. So, yeah, also, you’ve answered a question I had in what you said, Nikki, in that I was thinking of how you views Lilith as more of a conduit of knowledge and she’s travelling through time, I mean, my goodness, she travels through so much time and looking for a prophet instead of herself being one, which was something that I was wondering about. I actually wondered if she was going to turn out to be the prophet. I also wondered if maybe actually Jesus was going to turn to be a prophet. I understand why that doesn’t work now, but that was in my head as well as a possibility. Yeah, I would also like to ask more about your use – you have added in ancient Greek, as I said, Artemis, Ancient Greek mythology. You’ve added in Mesopotamian history, I think it is, Sumerian. I’m going to stop there because I’m going to start getting it wrong and add ones that you haven’t. I want to ask you about your research and how you’ve included it into the book in this way, using religion. Yeah, if you could just talk about your use of religion and your various sources.
Nikki: Well, I wanted to bring in all these various mythologies and the reason for that is that all of these cultures, we think in silos, really; you think about Mesopotamian mythology, Egyptian mythology, Greek mythology, Hebrew mythology and biblical mythology, but really these people all interacted with each other. They all influenced each other. In the Bible you see, especially in the Old Testament, the large parts of the Bible are re-workings of much older Sumerian and Mesopotamian myth – the flood myth, even the Garden of Eden – all those motifs originally came from much, much earlier Sumerian mythology. And there’s lots of interactions with Greek mythology as well, which are less obvious. And all the other mythologies of the region. So that’s really the reason that I wanted to bring all these things in. I wanted to connect all these things up because they were connected, these people in the ancient world all lived, traded, alongside each other and ideas and myths and beliefs travelled from culture to culture, and they got adapted and changed as they went. And in fact, Lilith is a great example of that. Lilith who starts life in ancient Sumer, which is ancient Iraq, she then travels to literally every culture of the Levant and the Middle East. She appears in Greek myth as Lamia. She goes absolutely everywhere. Then in the modern day, she’s most recognisable in the Jewish mythology as the wife of Adam. So that’s why I wanted to link all these things together – I really wanted to join the dots. And also for me, in my reading of it, mythology is not just a dead collection of stories that people used to believe in. I think mythology, A) there’s echoes of historical reality that you can read in mythology, which make it much more interesting to me because it means there’s aspects of it that’s real. And I think it often lives on as well. So there are aspects of these myths that are still very, very relevant in the modern day. And one of the things that happens, for example, with symbols of the ancient mother goddess, is that they all get reinvested and they all really ended up with the Virgin Mary. The Virgin Mary inherits in Christian iconography and mythology, all of these aspects that were once belonged to these local, regional mother goddesses.

Charlie: Mind blown! [Both laugh.]

Nikki: And you see that very much, I’m half Greek Cypriot, so you see that very much in the Greek world, where all of these symbols, the dove, which also then becomes the symbol of the Holy Spirit, that’s originally the ancient mother goddess. Pomegranates, which were really associated with fertility goddesses. Then it becomes linked to the Virgin Mary. That very idea of a mother and child that’s much more ancient than Mary and Jesus – you see Isis and Horus, you see it in the ancient world all that time, that duology of a senior mother goddess and her junior infant male child, that’s a really very important motif in the ancient world that got reinvented in Christianity. So these things, you see them, they come up to the modern day. I find that absolutely fascinating; I find these sort of things that people used to believe thousands of years ago are still here in one form or another, and I find that absolutely fascinating.

Charlie: You’ve actually made me think of Catherine of Aragon, which is obviously something completely different [Nikki: yeah], but I believe that her symbol was the pomegranate.

Nikki: Yes. Yes, and I presume that’s probably to link her to the Virgin Mary. In the ancient world, the pomegranate’s relevance is regeneration. And so that’s why it becomes linked to death and the afterlife, the Persephone myth. But then in the Christian era, that changes subtly from regeneration to eternal life, which is a different thing; in the Christian era, it becomes associated with eternal life, a and that’s why you see it in so much Christian iconography. But that’s a reinvention of a much, much earlier idea, which is that very female centric idea of regeneration of, ‘you personally don’t live forever, but you will create the next generation, and the next generation will create the next generation fruit, the seed, the tree, the circular aspect of life’. And that changes to become very linear under Christianity – you lose that idea of that sort of regeneration, and you move towards this idea of an eternal spiritual afterlife, which is much more linear. So, yes, these ideas get reinvented and they acquire slightly different meanings, but their original meaning is much older and goes much, much, much further back.

Charlie: I’ve got so many questions I want to ask the writer/writers of Genesis right now. I want to know the editor, I want to know what happened…

Nikki: Yeah, well, I mean, it was finalised in its current form around 500 BC. There are much, much, much older bits of the Bible than that, so it’s actually one of the later bits to be settled in this final form. And so that’s very much a product of its time – 500 BC is not actually that long ago. And of course, that was a very, very, very patriarchal era. And so the writers of that story knew exactly what they were doing. These symbols – the snake, which at this point has had thousands of years of association with female wisdom, the fruit of the tree, which are the ancient symbols of the mother goddess, for obvious reasons – these are the things which in this new world-view become evil and wrong and sinful. And there’s a reason for that – they need to suppress these earlier beliefs that the people had, which coincidentally gave women power. And in this new system, they have to be suppressed. So it’s no coincidence, it’s propaganda and it has a purpose.

Charlie: Well, I want to ask you on someone who I think will fit into this, and also this is going to be, I suppose, the start – or a touch of – the things I want to ask you about the divinity and the heaven and the earth and that kind of thing. Ereshkigal, I don’t know if that’s how you pronounce it, I’m not sure, but I want to ask about your use of her because you’ve got her as Asherah’s sister, which I believe is only from one source, which is really thrilling – obviously you’ve had to get your story from different things and you put different variations together and I just want to ask you about using her in the underworld and yeah.

Nikki: Yes. Ereshkigal in Sumerian mythology is an important goddess, she’s the goddess of the underworld and she is the sister of Inanna, who is a very, very important goddess. In my reinvented world, I have her as the sister of Asherah because I’ve identified Asherah with Inanna. As I mentioned before about ideas and myths, crossing cultures and national boundaries, that archetype Inanna, she has correspondence in all of those later religions of the Levant and the Middle East. So Asherah has some many qualities that link her to Inanna, in the same way that other mother goddesses do as well. So that’s a very tenuous link I meant, which I wanted, again, to bring in this idea of the much older Sumerian mythology being the precursor to the biblical mythology. So in my book, when Lilith and Samael are seeking Asherah – they want to know what’s happened to her, she’s disappeared and they want to know where she is – they go looking for her and they get information that she is in the underworld. And again, that’s a very ancient recurring motif in mythology, that descent into the underworld to get something, but which also changes you.

Charlie: Like Orpheus.

Nikki: Yes. So that’s a very, very recurring ancient idea. You can read it as a sort of descent into your psyche that going within, there comes a point in your life when you realise something’s missing and you have to go within, you have to go and search for it and it requires a cutting off from the real world, it requires a withdrawal and a really deep soul searching to find the thing that you’re looking for. So this is what Lilith does. Lilith and Samael go to the underworld to seek Asherah. And in all these myths, something must always be left behind, something must be lost. To return from the underworld you have to pay the price, always. Something must be given up, something must be sacrificed. In the Sumerian myth, which is very, very, very ancient, Inanna goes to the underworld where she confronts her sister Ereshkigal, and Ereshkigal does what happens in my book, which is she hangs her from a meat hook and this is a symbol of Inanna losing her divinity. She is losing everything that makes her special, she has to disrobe before she goes into the underworld – there are seven gates and at each gate she takes off another piece of clothing. She is removing all of these outward aspects of herself so that she can really go deep and soul search. And when Inanna finally comes out of the underworld, she has to provide a replacement and the replacement that she provides is her husband, Dumuzid, who has to go to the underworld in her place. So that’s the inspiration for what happens in my book, which is that Lilith and Samael go to the underworld to search for Asherah and something or someone must be left in her place when Lilith finds her and removes her.

Charlie: Well, I loved your character of Samael so much that as much as seeing the donkey die, because the donkey hadn’t done anything wrong, I did kind of want it to be left at that. And I thought, ahh, he’s gone but obviously I can see why you do it but he comes back, so that’s all right. I’m gonna have to ask about him later because I love that character. Continuing on this then, I suppose, you’ve drawn a very hard line against the existence of Heaven in your book, I would say, that’s my interpretation [Nikki: yes]. But you’ve looked at the underworld. I find that fascinating. You’ve got an underworld, but then you haven’t got Heaven, but then obviously you’re using the underworld in a certain way and it seems that later it won’t be around. Can you talk about your choices here?

Nikki: Yes. Now, it’s very complicated [laughs].

Charlie: Go for it [laughs].

Nikki: And one of the reasons it’s very complicated is that the idea of Hell was not there at the start of Christianity, which might be surprising to some people – it comes a lot later. In early Christianity, what people were expecting to happen was when Jesus was talking about a kingdom of heaven, what people were expecting to happen was that in their lifetime, which is something that Jesus said to people, he said, ‘this will happen in your lifetime’, they were expecting the dead people literally to come back to life on earth, on this earth. That’s what they were expecting to happen and it didn’t happen. And so this idea of the afterlife, in the version that most Christians would recognise, it comes later, much later. In Hebrew mythology, there is an idea of Sheol, which is what I call it in my book, this idea of an underworld, but it’s confused and there are different versions of it depending on which text you’re reading. It’s not a clear, very straightforward understanding of what the underworld is. But in some references to it, it is very similar to that ancient Greek world of an underworld where shades or shadows of people go after they die. So that’s why it’s complicated – I wanted to write about the idea of an afterlife, but it was complicated by this idea that that has changed throughout the time frame of my book. So it was very difficult to do, and I’m not entirely sure I got it right! But what I really wanted to get at is this idea of judgement. I wanted to get at the idea that the concept – I think very few people today sort of believe in Hell as a place of judgement, but that’s quite recent. For most of the history of Christianity, people have absolutely believed in that. People have absolutely believed in the idea of Hell as an eternity of punishment. And that’s really what I wanted to get at, because it’s such a horrible idea. It’s [chuckles] so, so, so horrible. This idea that you will be judged and you will either have an eternity in Heaven, which actually, to me doesn’t sound that great either, because the thought of an eternity of disembodied spiritual life doesn’t really appeal to me – I know it does to some people, but it doesn’t appeal to me. And certainly the idea of an eternity of grievous bodily punishment is hideous to me. So that’s what I wanted to write about, really, and the reason it’s relevant in my book is that I wanted to contrast these two belief systems – in the ancient female focused belief system, you have this idea of regeneration on the earth. The earth is all there is. It’s holy. You have this idea of people being buried and returned to the earth, but they’re not expecting to be resurrected, they’re not expecting an eternal individual life, it might just be the idea of a general regeneration, a return to the soil, that sort of thing. This new idea that this world is like a waiting room, a blink of an eye before the real business of eternity, I find really damaging and worrying, because it leads us to not cherish and respect this world we have, which is all we have. And again, that idea of an eternity of consciousness, or however you – you know, different people, of course, imagine it in different ways – but it doesn’t seem appealing to me at all. And this, the judgement aspect of it indicates that it’s about control. This idea that you will be judged for your actions and that will determine where you spend eternity, indicates that it was a way of controlling people, which is exactly how it worked. You were told what to do and if you didn’t do it, you would have an eternity of hell. And that comes into the equation when you have this idea of a sole male god, because this sole male god is about hierarchy, he’s about judgement, he’s about authority. He’s about setting the rules, and you have to follow them, you’re not allowed to question them, you’re not allowed to seek wisdom, you’re not allowed to look for alternatives – this is the way it is and you must follow it. And that, for me, is a very bad belief system, it’s a very hierarchical way of looking at things. And that doesn’t seem to me ideal. And I wanted to contrast that with these previous ideas that people had, which in many ways seem much healthier to me and would not have caused the damage to this planet and to so many people that we have seen with these ideas of judgement and control.

Charlie: Yeah, I know it goes against… we’re meant to believe. I think the answer is always, ‘oh, you just got to believe it’. But I’ve always struggled with the idea that what you do on earth is going to be effective, with what you do after life, you know, with judgement and everything you said. Yeah, it’s just, it’s bonkers, isn’t it? Because, yeah, okay, we’re meant to just ‘believe’, that’s the whole Christian thing. You just believe. But we don’t know for definite.

Nikki: It’s just so unfair. People are not having the same experiences in this world by any means. And that idea that you’ll be judged for eternity on the way you behaved in a completely different sphere when you had different priorities, it doesn’t make sense to me.

Charlie: You’ve got looking after our planet. You’ve said it here. And that is big in the novel. And obviously it gets more important the further we get towards our modern day in your book. So I did want you to maybe expand on this in that how much is this to you an environmental novel?

Nikki: I was writing this book throughout lockdown. And in fact, I don’t think I could have written this book if I hadn’t been in those very particular circumstances. So I was separated from the world forcibly, like everyone was. And I was thinking about big things. I was thinking about really big things, about the way we live and why, and why we were in this situation. And especially at that time, there was this understanding that the reason that Covid was happening was because of a mistreatment of the natural world or disrespect for the way that we interact with the natural world. So I was thinking about that a lot. And so it became a big thing in the novel. I hadn’t set out from the start for that to be a big focus, but it really did creep in, all following, really, from that moment in Genesis where God gives Adam dominion over the natural world. And it connected in lots of ways. And it has led to where we are now. We’re now facing potentially been wiped out as a species because we haven’t paid attention to our habitat. We haven’t cherished it in the way that we should have. And it’s the biggest crisis that we’re facing as a species. And it’s all because of this idea that we are in control of it. You know, Eastern philosophy has a completely different prioritisation that is much more about balance and harmony. And I think that is one of the reasons we’re in this mess.

Charlie: We all saw, didn’t we, whether on TV or in person, how the natural world just took over quite quickly when we were in lockdown and how wonderful it was in many ways [Nikki: yeah]. Obviously, okay, we’re not going to be able to make that happen all the time, we need to go out, we need to do our shopping, we need to use our roads and stuff. But maybe we really need to think back on that and do something to… I don’t know, 10%, 20% of that. Bring it back.

Nikki: Yes, lockdown was really… I mean, obviously, you know, I don’t want to be flippant, it was an absolutely horrendous time, and so many people have died who shouldn’t have. But it was a very sort of epoch changing moment where you got to really look at what you’re doing, whether it’s what you want to be doing, and to look at so many systems and think, ‘does this work? This is crazy, why are we doing it this way? We don’t need to do it this way’, which is a good thing. It’s good to reassess how things work every now and again.

Charlie: I think this is going to link to things you’ve said before, but I suppose to concentrate on it more – I alluded to it in my intro: you have first changed the creation story to there being more people outside Eden, which is… wow. And then you also – I’ve actually put here, ‘see also Noah Ark’s flood happening in only one region’. Yeah, can you talk about this specific nature of the Bible stories, and how they’re actually in a vacuum and everything is just getting on with life around them?

Nikki: Yeah. These are stories that were told for a long time as oral stories and then were nailed down in their current form mostly throughout the first millennium. So mostly between about 800 BC and up to about two or 300 BC. And of course, they reflect the views of the people who lived at that time and had that world. And so they didn’t know about places that were very far away. Their world was limited to what they knew. So you have this kind of crazy scenario where you have a book that’s purportedly talking about a universal explanation for the creation of the world, but of course, it’s very, very, very local. And so from a modern era, we know everything we know, you can look back at that and it’s no mystery; we know why it’s like that, it’s because that’s what people knew at the time. But it does underline the absurdity of it really, the idea that there’s a god who creates a world, a whole world, but he’s only interested in this very, very, very small part of it; that doesn’t make any sense. In particular, all the things that happen are these very localised things that happen in this very small part of the much bigger world. So I wanted to reference that, really. So you have the scenario when the flood is happening, that Norea, who is in my book the wife of Noah, of course she’s not mentioned in the Bible, but Norea is the one that says, ‘don’t be so stupid, Lilith, of course, this isn’t happening everywhere else. There’s other parts of the world’. So I just wanted to knowingly reference that because it’s one of the things that is kind of absurd about the Bible purporting to be a universal explanation for life. And that whole part of the book is very much taken from the biblical texts. So Noah’s drunkenness is absolutely referenced in the Bible. When you read the Bible deeply, it is infuriating the way that you see men who are really not very admirable in any way, not just drunkards, but rapists and murderers, who are still held up as righteous. And then of course, the women get vilified for nothing, for, well, seeking wisdom, for starters. So all that business about Noah is very much taken from the biblical texts. And there’s that moment where he curses his grandson Canaan, and of course, in the Bible that’s the explanation for why the Israelites enslave the Canaanites. And the explanation is that Canaan’s father, Ham, saw Noah naked, which is obviously ridiculous and absurd [laughs] but there are some commentators on that passage who think that it’s been edited to obscure what’s really happening, which is that it refers to a much older myth which is in line with lots of other myths in the region, where what’s happening is that Ham… in the Bible, the terminology that’s used is also the terminology that’s used for having intercourse with. And so the idea is that it refers to a much older myth in which Ham has either sodomised his father or perhaps removed his genitals. Because that’s the sort of thing that happens in myths of that region – the son unmans the father and takes over. So there’s all these ideas that perhaps that’s what’s actually going on in that mythical. And I don’t [laughs] go into that myself but I do reference this crazy story where Noah curses his grandson to slavery because his son saw him naked, it doesn’t make any sense! But that is what’s in the Bible, which I think is surprising to some people.

Charlie: Well, what you’re saying about the translation and stuff, I mean, the effective original sounds a lot more reasonable a reason to get all cursy with someone, doesn’t it?

Nikki: It certainly does because otherwise it doesn’t make much sense! And there’s lots of episodes like that in the Bible where the language has changed over time, many, many times, and the original meaning has been slightly obscured or hidden. And there’s an absolutely brilliant book by Francesca Stavrakopoulou who wrote God: An Anatomy. A) it’s just a really fascinating book, but also she’s forensic in all of these episodes in which that language has changed, and in which it completely obscures the original meaning. She outlines many episodes in the Bible, where God’s genitals are discussed, which, of course, is not very obvious when you read a sort of a modern version in English, but it’s there in the original Hebrew, which is fascinating because it harks back to that idea of that God, originally, being just like all other gods in that part of the world, a very physical, bodily god, not this idea of a floating entity, which I think more people would think about today.

Charlie: Yeah, no Sistine Chapel god. White hair and coming from the clouds. Yeah.

Nikki: No. Yeah, no, that’s quite a modern, relatively new image of God. There are much older images in which Yahweh is a young, strapping man which is really surprising to the modern reader.

Charlie: Fascinating. Okay. So I think, yeah, I would actually like to get onto the writing. I haven’t read On Wilder Seas, your first book, but I have previewed the writing. I had to because I really liked Lilith for its writing, it felt to me very biblical, which I thought was absolutely perfect for what you’re doing and the setting. And then, yes, On Wilder Seas, okay, I can see that it’s written by the same person, but you’ve definitely got a honing in on the on the biblical here [Nikki: yeah]. I would like to just ask you about how you’ve written it here and was being similar or the same as the Bible important?

Nikki: Yes. I think looking back, I wasn’t really aware of it at the time, actually. It felt like a very natural way to write it when I was writing. But actually looking back, I did make some very [laughs] unusual choices because the language is very mixed. It is very biblical, parts of it very biblical, but parts are very modern. And there’s this mixture of the biblical and this very modern slang. And that’s partly because when you read the book, you discover that really it’s being narrated by Lilith from the modern day, and so that’s why she has this very ancient and modern speech. But also I wanted the biblical language, especially in the older bits of the book, I wanted the biblical language to be there, partly because those bits are satirical and I wanted to reference that biblical way of speaking. At the beginning, for example, Adam is going through his various inventions and creations and he keeps saying that, ‘and it will be good’ – that’s a reference to the biblical terminology. You’ve got the angels, and that was a very conscious decision of mine that I wanted the angels to speak in this Miltonian way because I wanted to have that vibe for them. I wanted them to be this Miltonian era, that sort of hellfire and damnation, kind of idea. And so their language is very much mined from Milton. I went through Paradise Lost and picked out those words that really communicate that feeling. And as I say, when I started writing it, Lilith’s voice just came out like that. I didn’t actually give it much thought; it’s just that how she spoke, I guess because in my head I knew she was speaking from the modern day but I knew she was speaking about things that happened 6000 years ago. So it came out like that. And it is odd! And not everyone likes it; some people really don’t like it. And I think your having mentioned On Wilder Seas there, when I wrote that, I was very much immersed in 17th century texts – it’s set in the 16th century; it’s about Francis Drake’s circumnavigation. And that fed through to the language as well. I found myself thinking and speaking in that different syntax, the different sentence construction and those unusual words that you know instantly are not modern that communicate in another time and place. So I do like to do that in my writing, I do like to use words that transport you to whatever that other time and place is to communicate that you’re not in the normal everyday, you’re in a completely different place.

Charlie: Yeah, and I think it’s absolutely acceptable that someone who’s lived for 6000 years is going to pick up various phrases and words from all over the place.

Nikki: Yeah.

Charlie: But it’s interesting actually – in all that [chuckles] you’ve actually said everybody but the person who actually made me ask the question [Nikki: oh!] which is fascinating actually, because… I think you’ve pronounced it as ‘Sa-ma-el’. I was reading your book before then and seeing the biblical stuff and then you’ve got him, he comes in and I mean, his personality, it’s amazing because suddenly I could just see this guy who was ready to go down the pub [Nikki laughs] and get a drink and then later on, when he comes back, he’s very different in his speech [Nikki: yeah] which makes sense, 6000 years have passed [Nikki: yeah]. And you’ve got this guy who’s basically very posh sounds ‘oh, jolly hockey sticks’ and like he might have stepped out of a DH Lawrence novel or something [Nikki chuckles]. So I want to ask specifically about how you created him in terms of his language?

Nikki: When I was thinking about him, what was important to me was that he needed to be what Adam isn’t. He needed to be a proper partner to Lilith. So that’s really what was at the forefront of my mind. He needed to be very, very attractive because, of course, Lilith is immediately attracted to him when she meets him. And he’s an angel, you know, of course he’s sublime. Of course he’s angelic looking, he’s gorgeous. So those are the main priorities. But again, like Lilith, he has survived. He’s there at the end of the book. He plays a very important role at the end of the book. In fact, he’s even older than Lilith because he has been around since the dawn of time. He is the oldest character in the book. And I wanted him to be funny, I wanted him to be likeable. And he’s a trickster, really. He is a mischief maker, but he’s not cruel or mean, but he’s naughty. And so I wanted that to come out in his language and I wanted him to be light hearted and funny. But at the very bottom of it, he just adores Lilith, and it’s his love for her, really, that sets the whole book in motion. You discover that this whole business, it’s come about because he loves her, but he probably loves her, he doesn’t love her in the way that he wants to control her – he loves her, he wants the best for her, and that’s why this whole situation has come into being. So, yes, that’s really all I was thinking about when I was writing Samael. I wanted him to be… yeah, I wanted him to be the man that Lilith deserved.

Charlie: That’s interesting; there’s things that I didn’t see in there before. I mean, I know for me, I did question, like, what’s he doing sometimes, which sounds like what you were trying to get us to do as readers kind of thinking, ‘well, he seems to be very happy going to the underworld, that seems all right’. But at the same time, is he? It’s very strange to say this, but my favourite character in a book is an angel of death [Nikki: yeah, and both laugh]. Yeah, it’s really good, really, really fun. I want to ask about your use of… I’m going to put them together [Nikki: yep, yep] – Jezebel and your references to Salome, which, I mean, it’s simply just Lilith takes on the name Salome at a point in time. But that felt important.

Nikki: Yes.

Charlie: So, yeah, I mean, talking about your use of Jezebel, obviously, in the context of what we use Jezebel to mean and Salome.

Nikki: Yeah. Well, when I was deciding which biblical stories would appear in the book, there’s a obviously a huge time frame, huge amount of things to choose from. I knew I wanted to write about Jezebel, but it wasn’t really until I started really researching her that I discovered just how apt she is for this particular book. Because, of course, if you mention Jezebel to most people today, they will say, ‘oh, yes, yeah, she’s a famous whore, famous slut in the Bible, she painted her face, she was a famous adulterer, and she was the evil queen of Israel’. Actually, that’s not what’s going on at all. The reason that she is vilified so much in the Bible, and the reason she’s called an adulterer, and a whore, is because she worships other gods other than Yahweh. And specifically, what I did not know until I started the research for Jezebel is that one of the main gods that she worships is Asherah. In that part of the Bible, in the Book of Kings, which tells the story of Jezebel, Asherah is presented as a foreign god. Now, she wasn’t a foreign god – she was very much, a Hebrew goddess but she’s being presented as a foreign god because that’s the intention of the people writing that book. It’s about events that took place in about the 9th century BC, but it’s being written 300 years later at a time in history when, as we’ve already discussed, the writers and the editors of the text that became the Bible were trying to make the point that there’s only one god. And that’s why that part of the Bible is absolutely obsessed with God getting angry that people are worshipping other gods, because that’s the point that is being made by the writers of those texts. And so Jezebel is vilified because she worships Asherah. And, her prophets are ‘prophets of Asherah who sit at Jezebel’s table’, that’s how the Bible puts it. There’s this big contest between Yahweh and Baal, who is really a Canaanite god, to determine who should be the God of Israel. And that’s a turning point in history, really, because that’s really a decision between should the Israelite religion be polytheist or monotheist? And of course, what happens in the Bible is that Yahweh wins and it becomes very much a monotheistic religion. But Jezebel is not a whore, she doesn’t do anything sluttish or whorish at all, she’s very faithful to her husband, she merely worships another god. And that is a real example of what happens in the Bible to the way the Bible treats women. She does nothing that her nemesis Elijah does. But of course, Elijah is held up to be this righteous prophet and she’s a dirty slut. Elijah murders hundreds and hundreds of Jezebel’s prophets. So, it’s just one of those, those real examples in the Bible of the difference between the way men and women are treated. Now, Salome, it’s really a very brief reference that Lilith starts calling herself Salome because she can’t call herself Lilith any more because everyone knows who Lilith is. Salome in the Bible is the girl who presents St Paul’s head on a platter [editor’s note – it’s actually St John the Baptist’s head]. It wasn’t really intentional to bring that story into the book; I wanted Lilith to have a name of the era and I wanted it to be a naughty girl of the era because that’s her vibe. So that’s really why she’s called Salome. So I don’t really go into the story of Salome much, but it is a fascinating side story in the Bible. It’s a really interesting story, which probably, I suspect, lots of hidden meanings and hidden contexts that are not immediately obvious. But, yeah, Salome is not necessarily a reference to that story of St Paul.

Charlie: Interesting. I think I caught on it as well because I was wondering, again, if the prophet might be John the Baptist and yet… well, this does move me on to asking about Jesus! Well, that there’s a lot of controversial content you’ve got in your book. I think we’ve made that clear, if anyone hasn’t read the book already [both laugh]. But let’s say this, I think that your depiction of Jesus, while it’s not by any means saying that Jesus was a bad man, you’re not – you’re saying he was a really good man – I’d say this is probably the most controversial part of your book. So, yeah, I just want to ask you about the changes. I know you’ve used aspects of the gnostic gospels [Nikki: yeah], the Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of Mary, particularly Mary. Can you just talk about changing Jesus and [Nikki: yes] and being bold?

Nikki: [Chuckles] Well, this was the most difficult bit of the book to write. In fact, I wrote it several times and it was completely different every time.

Charlie: I’m not surprised.

Nikki: Very, very difficult to get right and to communicate what I wanted to say without being needlessly offensive. What drew me… I mean, the reason A) I didn’t feel able to ignore Jesus [chuckles] well, he had to be in there. And my book is about that suppression of female divinity, it’s about the prioritisation of the male over the female and the refusal to see male and female as equal. And I felt that that pattern was repeated in early Christianity, because what you see in early Christianity is this prophet comes along, as there have been many, many prophets before him, and he comes along with a message of equality, which is a wonderful message. But then what happens? In the early Christian era, you did have proper equality, you had female bishops, you had congregations where no one was in charge. People spoke very much like modern Quakers, people spoke and led the service, if they felt able to, whether they were male or female. In some early Christian communities, you absolutely did see women being treated as equals. But what happens in the 4th century AD is that all of these sects – there were very many different sects of Christianity, they weren’t unified. Many of them had very different beliefs. Some of them didn’t even believe in the resurrection, they thought that was a metaphor for finding new wisdom, a new way of living. But what happens in the 4th century AD is that all of these sects are declared heretical. And by huge coincidence, all of these sects that practise true equality with men and women are those that are declared heretical. And so again, you see this pattern emerging. You see from a top down approach, the male assertion of male superiority over women. And it’s the tragedy, I think, of Christianity. It’s the tragedy of all religions that that keeps happening. And the gnostic gospels are fascinating and I would really urge people to read them if they’re interested. These are gospels that was very much circulating in those early years of Christianity, but which became heretical around this time that the Christian authorities decided what was orthodox and what was heretical. And so they were buried in a desert in Egypt and the only reason we have them is that they were discovered in 1945. They give a very different picture of early Christianity. And the person who they give the most different picture of is Mary Magdalene. And in these gospels you see Mary Magdalene very much as much higher status than you’ll see her in the Bible. Not only the most important disciple, but also someone that they go to for teaching, someone who has teaching herself. And so there are possibilities that originally you might have had a scenario where you have a male and a female partner spreading a message of true equality. Now we don’t have the evidence to say that’s what was going on with Jesus – that’s one interpretation that I’ve made in my book – but there are examples of other prophets around that era who did that. So that’s what’s interesting. And again, that goes back to much more ancient ideas of the sacred marriage, the male and the female in partnership. And what you see in the gnostic gospels is Mary Magdalene being sidelined by the other disciples, in particular Peter, who is just blatantly misogynistic. He complains to Jesus that Mary speaks too much, he complains to Jesus that Mary shouldn’t be there at all because she’s a woman, that all the women should go. He complains to Jesus that women aren’t worthy of life. So again, for me, you see this pattern – you’ve got two competing ideas. You’ve got the one idea: men and women as partners, versus the idea of hierarchy, man in control of women. And you had a possibility where the former idea could have won. How different would that have been? But of course it didn’t. But that’s what that bit of the book is about. And there are very feminist readings of theology which show Jesus very much as bringing a message, and in fact, you see this in the gnostic gospels as well, that Jesus is talking about bringing a message not just from the father but from the mother. And there are early examples of Christians invoking the mother and invoking the mother in the Eucharist, which is fascinating to me, and I have that in my book. So you have these two possibilities, and the one that we ended up with was not inevitable. How different would the world have been had the other model won? That model of true equality, of true partnership, and not the elimination of everything female, not the erasure of the mother to prioritise the father. It’s the big tragedy, I think.

Charlie: No, it is fascinating. And I mean, again, it makes me think of like an editing stage or something. But I mean, what you’re pointing out about Peter and his attitude in these gnostic gospels, it sounds like there’s a possibility there that someone was writing in response to the gospels that we do have, which is just a fascinating… I’m just thinking of that, but it’s fascinating to think of how these gospels might have all influenced each other.

Nikki: Yes, yeah.

Charlie: Yeah.

Nikki: And you know, St Paul as well says some extremely misogynistic things in the Bible. And there are possibilities that those were edited in later. We don’t know, we don’t know if those were originally his words or whether that’s something that came about two or 300 years later when there was this very misogynistic attitude in the church. St Paul, in the Bible says, ‘I do not permit a woman to have authority over a man. She is to remain silent’. And he’s speaking in response to something that was happening in the early church at that time, that women were speaking in churches, that they did have authority and he’s condemning that.

Charlie: Well, I would actually like to ask, we have talked about the afterlife. We’ve talked about various things that make me want to ask you this question. What was your religious background and what do you believe now?

Nikki: I have perhaps an unusual background. So I’m half Cypriot, so I was baptised into the Greek orthodox religion, but my immediate family is not very religious. But I do have these halves of my family where one half is very, very religious, and so I see my elderly relatives and I see the comfort that the beliefs they have give them. And in fact, especially the women. Even though I have concerns about the way Christianity and religion treats women, I can see how much comfort it brings to the women, the elderly women in my family. And yet I have these questions and I think that tension perhaps, is what sparks my interest in religion. And I think, yes, that’s what drives my interest in it. I do have a lot of positive feelings about religion and the way it functions for people in the real world; I have lots of positive feelings about that. There are many things about churches that I love – the smells, the emotion, the symbolism – but it’s the words that I have trouble with because they don’t make much sense to me. So I think, yes, I think that did spark my interest in it. And I think not coming from a very overtly religious background, encouraged me to question and to wonder what’s really going on.

Charlie: I thought I picked up on that you had a Christian background, yeah, because you include so much in it. It’s just seemed something to know, I think.

Nikki: Yeah, no, I’m interested in all religions. I’m fascinated in that very human need for religion or for an explanation of who we are, where we come from. It’s a fundamental human need because it’s expressed across every culture and in every history. It’s obviously a very basic need for humans to think about these things.

Charlie: Yeah, it helps a lot in life and things. So what are you writing now, or are you still on that writing break?

Nikki: It’s taken me a long time to get over Lilith, actually [chuckles]. I feel like I need to exorcise myself!

Charlie: Understandable!

Nikki: There is something I really, really want to get started on and I’ve done the bare bones of the research; I’ve got myself a reading list. But I haven’t started it yet and I really am feeling that need to start. I can’t wait. That moment at the beginning of a project where you have an idea, you can almost see it out before you and all the things that you want to find out; I think for me, writing a book is about finding out things that you’re interested in or answering questions that you have, following a path of curiosity. So I can see that path. I know the thing that I’m really interested in and I just can’t wait to get started. But I’ve just got so much stuff to do that, you know, I get very into it when I’m writing [chuckles]. So everything else goes by the wayside. So I need to finish off doing all the things that I’ve been ignoring for several years.

Charlie: Well, I won’t pry too much, but is it in the realms of history, historical fiction, mythology, or are we looking at something different completely?

Nikki: No, it’s historical. It’s ancient world. In fact, there’s three things I want to do!

Charlie: Write them all [both laugh].

Nikki: Not sure which one I’m going to do, but there’s three things I’m really interested in. They’re all in the ancient world. They’re all historical/mythological, one of them slash biblical. So yeah, I’ve just got to decide which way I’m going to go. But that’s what fascinates, me, it’s the ancient world that really fascinates me. A few hundred years doesn’t do it for me, I want thousands of years. That’s what I really, really like.

Charlie: I’d say rather you than me [Nikki chuckles]. The idea of trying to construct a story and from something that we’ve got less research on would be very scary to me, but I’m absolutely so glad that you’re here to do that! Nikki, thank you so much for coming today. And I know we’ve been talking for a while, but yeah, there’s so much to talk about in your book and it’s been absolutely wonderful. I said you’ve blown my mind; this content is going to stay with me for a long time. Thank you for being here.

Nikki: Thank you so much, Charlie. Thank you so much for having me.

Charlie: I do hope you enjoyed this episode. Do join me next time, and if you have a moment to spare, please do leave a rating and/or review of this podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or Podcast Addict. Thank you. The Worm Hole Podcast episode 106 was recorded on the 18th April and published on the 23rd September 2024. Music and production by Charlie Place.

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