Medusa, the subversion of the Triple-Moon Goddess, and #metoo

Medusa: the hideous face that could turn any who look upon it to stone.
Versace logo.
It is one of the oldest, and most familiar myths from Greco-Roman mythology.
Much like my recent post where we discussed zombies as a monster that stood for the philosophical “other,” stories from mythology are also often tied to important historical events.
Myths are symbolic stories that we invest with meaning.
What that meaning is depends entirely on who is telling the story, and how it is told.
This is where the roles of artists and authors throughout history take on a whole new weight and importance, as the stories they tell add or detract from a collective social identity.
First: we will tell the story of Medusa as it is known in its most recognizable form, as told by the Roman poet Ovid.

Medusa was a young maiden of notorious beauty, most of all due to her long ringlets of golden hair.
She had spurned all suitors who sought her.
While worshiping in the temple of Athena, goddess of wisdom, she is attacked by Poseidon, god of the sea, and raped.
Athena, outraged at the defilement of her temple, punishes Medusa by transforming her into a hideous monster, whose face is so terrible that anyone who looks upon it is petrified (turned to stone).
Her golden ringlets become a wreath of living snakes upon her head.
Tradition finds her guarding the gates of the underworld.
She re-emerges in the more famous half of this mythology in the story of Perseus.
Perseus, child of Zeus, is sent on a fool’s errand when a king who has decided to wed his mother sends him to fetch the head of Medusa, a mission that was supposed to end in his death.
Instead, he embarks on a quest which leads to him receiving favor and support from the gods, so that before facing Medusa he finds himself wearing Hades’ helm of darkness (invisibility) and Hermes’ winged sandals, while carrying both Zeus’ adamantine blade and Athena’s reflective shield.
When he comes into the presence of Medusa, in the cave where she resides, he uses the reflective shield to locate her, and then decapitates her with Zeus’ blade.
From her corpse Pegasus, the winged horse is born.

From there Perseus begins his journey home, carrying the head of Medusa in a satchel.
On the way, he comes across Andromeda, maiden daughter of the local king, chained naked to a rock as a sacrifice to a sea monster.
Perseus uses Medusa’s head to slay the sea monster, then to slay the man to whom Andromeda was betrothed, and takes her for his own bride.
Reaching his own home, he uses the head to petrify his mother’s suitor.
He returns his helmet, shield, and sword to their divine owners, also giving the head of Medusa to Athena, who affixes it to her shield.

I think it is safe to assume that an initial reading of this myth could present the following first reaction: why was Athena punishing Medusa for being a victim of rape?
Perhaps that is why this side of her story is left out in the recent cinema productions featuring Medusa: Clash of the Titans (2010) and Percy Jackson and the Olympians (2010)
What has endured is the symbol of Medusa’s head, a symbol synonymous with ugliness and destruction, and of that head being severed from its body.

The name “Medusa” traces back to the meaning guardian, or protectress.
In the Roman mythological tradition, Medusa was the guardian of the underworld, keeping the living from entering the realm of the dead, serving that role chiefly as an outcast of the living world with nowhere else to turn to.
However, Roman mythologies were recreations of Greek mythologies which preceded them.
The Greek myths were often recreations of myths from the civilizations that preceded them: namely, the symbols and and deities used by the North African/Balkan tribes.
From what historians have gathered from this period, Medusa would have been one of the personas of a three-part goddess, of which Athena was one of the aspects.
Medusa stood for death, rebirth, and sexuality in a civilization that had matriarchal attributes.
Female priestesses guarded her temple, wearing the Gorgon (snake-haired monster) mask to ward off intruders.
She was not an object of fear, but instead the strongest aspect of a triune female deity, the “Triple moon goddess,” of which Athena was not a rival, but instead a different face of the same identity.
Why the sudden change in her identity, from a goddess Trinity to a goddess with a grudge against a victim?
Why the introduction of the Greco-Roman myth which pits her against Perseus?

Mythologies, especially to primitive civilizations, were more than stories: they were core elements of religions, further tied into the traditions and identities of entire societies.
Anything that unites a society and gives it a common identity, makes it stronger.
The Romans would forget this, thousands of years later, when they tried to persecute Christianity into extinction and only succeeded in its gathering more attention and sympathy through its martyrs, until eventually an emperor of Rome was a Christian convert, and Christianity was the Roman religion.

But the Greeks knew that what was more effective than fighting a mythology was to subvert it.
Their Pantheon was ruled by male gods, who were severe and merciless, and the heroes of Greek mythology were men who attained their goals only upon first attaining favor with those gods.
These gods were always in constant strife, and being constantly at odds with one another and mankind makes for an entertaining mythology that has endured for thousands of years and infiltrated every level of Western civilization.
When it came to assimilating the North African/Balkan tribes as the Greek empire expanded, their deities were assimilated but also subverted.
Athena and Medusa are no longer two aspects of one unified benevolent goddess.
Instead, Athena becomes a subordinate goddess to the mighty Zeus, and Medusa becomes a mortal, significant for nothing other than a beautiful face, which is said to have incited the jealous rage of Athena.
Poseidon, male god of the sea, has his way with Medusa, and rather than come to the defense of the woman worshiping in her temple, Athena instead punishes her.
Think of the psychological effect that this would have had on a society of people where temples were sacred places to worship goddesses guarded by female priestesses.
Athena, in Greco-Roman tradition, isn’t even given a mother: she is supposed to have sprung directly from Zeus.
She must stay subservient to Zeus and in addition wear the face of her own slaughtered identity upon herself.
Not only does Athena get cast as a jealous, vindictive antagonist, but the entire Pantheon unites to aid Perseus in the destruction of her twin aspect.

Here is some interesting back-story on Perseus.
His grandfather in the myth is King Acrisius, who upon asking the Oracle of Delphi if he would ever have male heirs, is instead told that he will be slain by his own grandson.
In an attempt to prevent this future event, he locks his daughter Danae in a tower, to prevent any possibility of her bearing children.
In a cosmic "middle finger," the “mighty Zeus” takes the form of a “golden rain” and impregnates Danae in her tower.
This results in the birth of Perseus (from the Greek verb perthein: to sack, pillage, destroy.)
Perseus, child of rape, will grow up to accept the gift of a sword (phallic symbol) from his mother's rapist to finish the quest of slaying a victim of rape.
Everyone on board with the Greek plan to mind-fuck the goddess-worshipers now?
Fun fact: King Acrisius does not get slain by a Perseus looking to avenge the one who kept his mother locked in a tower, but instead his death is an accident at an Olympic games event.

The message to a conquered people was clear: get in line, or share the fate of your goddess.
Not only was the identity of the “Triple Moon goddess” all but lost to time as its constituents were swallowed by the Greek pantheon, but the identity of femininity as an equally powerful and venerable part of existence and social identity took a crushing blow that has endured clear up until the present day.
The “goddess” has never re-emerged as a significant element of Western civilization.
Tribal religions and all traces of matriarchy gave way to the Greco-Roman wave of patriarchy.
Not only did the Greco-Roman civilizations conquer the Western world: they obliterated the identities of everything in their wake.
This is how wars are won. In modern terminology it is known as propaganda.
Propaganda is still alive and well: it is just much more difficult to identify in this day and age.
Successful propaganda is passed off as history.
Successful propaganda is seen as fact by those who don’t take the time to investigate deeper.
We may not associate with a pantheon of gods, but we are just as susceptible to losing a social identity.

When is the last time that we asked, “Who wrote the history that I believe?”
How different might modern history look if the beautiful mythology of the “Triple-moon goddess” had been built upon and memorialized instead of subverted?
What if women had stayed equals, from Neolithic times onward, simply because a mythology to which respect for them was tied had been preserved instead of perverted?
We could have had several thousands years of stories and images of the benevolent “Triple-moon goddess” whose aspects are tied to the phases of the moon and who stands for a natural cycle of life and death, love and war: balanced and united by wisdom.
Instead, we have been left with the ghastly face of a beheaded goddess, stripped of her divinity, and left with a heart-breaking narrative that is supposed to read as a fun side-note to the monster-fighting thrill ride of the new protagonist, the warrior Perseus.
Violence and aggression are memorialized, and the victim is blamed.

Victim blaming.
It’s been in the news a lot lately, but that is only due to the #me-too movement, and the efforts of women to stand together and support one another in reclaiming their voice.
The movement has been around since 2006 but didn’t go “viral” until 2017.
Let's reflect on that as a "progressive" society: women have to band together and start a movement just to form some sort of consensus that “rape is bad.”
This is the cusp of history that we are living in right now, where information flows faster and more easily than at any other point in history.
All of us are on this platform because it is a venue to exchange information.
Right now, we are forming and defining a new identity, a new “mythology” if you will.
The lessons of the past are now more relevant than ever.
Mythology is a way that we can preserve the good for future generations to be inspired by.
It is also a way for us to remember the mistakes of the past so that we need not repeat them.
We do not have an “Ovid” who is writing the narrative that we all will hear and re-tell.
Mythology has been democratized.

The Greco-roman myths are a pet favorite of psychologists and philosophers to read more deeply into the human condition.
Psychology in particular has often redefined much of mythology as mere ugly reflections of our own human imperfections.
Sigmund Freud takes what is already a mortally wounded myth and manages to make it even uglier in his essay “Medusa’s head,” where he claims that the head of Medusa stands for nothing more than the castration complex of a young boy when he views female genitalia for the first time and is horrified to see that she has no penis.
Then, to overcompensate for this shock, the hair for snakes substitute as multiple phallic symbols, while the “turning to stone” represents an erection.
I am not even going to credit Freud’s arrogant analysis with any further discussion.
It does go to show however, that something can be presented to mean anything to an audience that is gullible enough to believe everything.
At a certain point, we all need to build and maintain a “pantheon” of our own: a core set of beliefs and standards that can serve as a moral compass and allow us to find beauty and direction in an often ugly and confusing world.
I hope that this discussion will inspire you to continue this quest.

History is written by the victors. - Winston Churchill

The sculpture used in the images for this essay is my own: "Transformation of the Gorgons," without a doubt the most work-intensive studio art I have ever done.
It stands 18 inches tall, carved in the round from a maple burl, and took a year and a half from the first chisel strokes against the bark of the burl section until its completion.
Back when I created this, I was fascinated by the Medusa story but had not researched it thoroughly enough to have discovered the subverted identity of the "Triple moon goddess" or I might have created an even more compelling piece.
Instead, what you see is Medusa in a mesh of transforming bodies: snake heads, snake tails, arms, legs, hands, and missing faces. There is one skull-like face that I included to stand for the horror of the recreated Medusa.
You see Poseidon's trident and a dolphin tail as symbols of the sea god.
What horrified me most about the story at the time was the transformation of a beautiful woman into a hideous monster, and I tried to capture the agony of this loss of identity.
I just did not know how deeply this loss of identity actually ran.
Thank you for taking the time to read through my article and view my artwork.

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@corpsvalues is a US military veteran who does artwork to promote discussion and healing to those involved in wars, and is an avid cartoonist and writer. He does all of his own artwork in his posts, which range in topic from comic to tragic. He firmly believes that artwork is for everyone, backed by studies that have shown how artwork builds and mends neural pathways in our brains. For him, this competition is a mission to bring as many people as possible into visual creativity and foster the continued work of those already doing it.