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.
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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.
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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?
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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.
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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
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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.
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Amazing article * ___ * Written beautifully, well researched, and accompanied by an astounding art work <3 This was a very wonderful post, @corpsvalues !
Feminine forces should have an equal claim to masculine forces but I guess history had shaped in the way that there is an imbalance between what is titled and bequeathed onto each gender's stereotypical privileges. But I think ... the future will continue to work towards a betterment of this imbalance :>
It is good to keep hope !
Articles and words such as yours are a flame in the dark, long night that we all must fight and strive through, so I thank you for taking the time to put this together and to share it with us <3
Really, really amazing post <3
Thank you so much spider!
The fact that we are living in times where something as basic as respect for one another is actually turning into battle-lines saddens me, so I think that it is time to take a step back- waaay back and examine how it is that we arrived here. And the story is so much bigger than this little article, but this is the one little piece of it I wanted to share, and hopefully it will inspire others to think about where the stories and ideas that we grow up with originate.
Good on you for writing about it. Sometimes I consider it, but realize I'd just be inviting a lot of hostility that made me move away from FB to here. Your writing is getting better each time I read one of your posts. Good work.
Thank you for the compliment! And thanks for taking the time to read.
I feel like if I'm not inviting some sort of disagreement from someone with what I write, then I am probably playing it too safe. But I hear you on the FB crowd. It's can be a battle royale of idiots.
I'm kind of the same way, but in real life. Doing it online feels like playing chess with a pigeon. No matter what move you make, the pigeon is just going to shit all over the chess board and flap their wings like they won something. I don't have time for it, but I respect those who aren't so cynical that they are willing to try.
I read the story yesterday but didn't have time to comment. Your sculpture is awesome. I've always loved Greek mythology; it was a great read. Glad postcurator stopped by too. I know yabapmatt mentioned the curation initiative there. It was a great post selected to show support
Thanks beeyou! And I was very surprised and grateful for the postpromoter support.
I love your sculpture; it is both beautiful and disturbing.
I'm still working to assimilate the information about older myths being subverted by those that came to dominate later. You've done your research and it makes sense, but I think anyone from a modern culture risks looking at these stories through a modern (or post-modern?) lens and drawing different conclusions.
If Medusa fell from her position as a powerful goddess of chaos and destruction to be forgotten as some lesser monster, that does seem like a loss. But my interpretation of the nature of that loss might be different from yours.
Medusa falling victim to the rapey male gods and becoming terrible is part of who she is. That sounds heartless if you think in human terms, but she is a goddess. She's not the part of the trinity that's young and beautiful, not the nurturing mother. She represents the destruction that is necessary for life to continue, and you can only deny that aspect of life for so long. Humans get to be all three. Bad things happen and we don't have to become Medusa. But surely we feel her terrible presence.
I don't think it's fair to conclude that the monstrous aspects of this deity were caused by subversion from a patriarchal system. If she isn't terrible, she isn't powerful. I think it's an error to resurrect feminine deities as 100% positive images with no negative. If Medusa bears the bad things that happen to her with dignity, grace, and wisdom, who are humans supposed to relate to when terrible things happen? We have to go through grief and come out the other side before we can find grace and wisdom.
I don't know you aside from reading your blog, but I know you've experienced some of the terrible things I allude to here. This isn't meant as a message to you, only a way to clarify the thoughts you've provoked with your piece. Thank you for writing it!
Thank you for your careful response.
So we are clear, mythologies are just stories. However, if I was in a position to be rewriting myths that would be assimilated, preserved, and passed down to progeny, you would have to wonder why I changed a story. To use a modern example, the North Korean government has its people believe that Kim Jung Un was born atop a sacred mountain and that the event created a new star and turned winter to spring; also: that he doesn't need to poop. Also: that the internet is a myth and no such thing exists.
Sure, with the right perspective, life lessons can be gathered from the most tragic of stories.
However, I chose to pursue the origins of this myth deeper to demonstrate a historical incident and older myth that is all but lost.
It's a fair issue to be speculative of. But also a fair issue to consider as plausible.
In prehistoric times, the victors rewrote the history of the conquered, destroyed their temples, destroyed historical records and monuments, and punished any attempts to preserve them. It might not have been a concerted effort to assert a patriarchy, but it was part of a patriarchy's larger effort to erase the identity of what used to be a matriarchy.
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Thank you for the recognition, always an honor!
What a great and thorough article about Medusa! Very excellent observation about how history has yet again perverted another symbol of feminine strength and turned it to ugliness and jealousy. The word jealousy itself is so heavily associated with women even though I have met many men who are displaying the exact feelings. And a lot of women associated words are still perceived negatively, like "soft" and even "feminine" itself are used as pejorative words when men use it against another. Sorry for going on a tangent.
Thank you for writing this post, I admit I don't usually read long writing, but this one is totally worth reading.
The sculpture that you created is also awesome btw :).
Yeah, not at all a tangent.
It's actually a really big subject that I would like to see get a lot more attention.
The problem when we think of women's rights, equality, and public perspective on the "feminine" is that we are looking at such a narrow area of history that we are missing the huge, sweeping ways that the feminine has suffered for thousands of years and are instead focusing on a very small number of incidents in recent years to formulate our opinions.
I like your point about feminine associated words: I am actually thinking of a way to discuss that in another post, where I would try to explore how our negative associations with femininity have resulted in an unhealthy definition of masculinity.
Congratulations! This excellent post was chosen by the new curation initiative of the @postpromoter content promotion service to receive a free upvote!
This post exemplifies the type of great content that we at @postpromoter enjoy reading and would love to see more of on the Steem platform. Keep up the good work!
Very impressed by your article. I learned a lot and also holding much inspiration for me. Your sculpture is an amazing piece of art. I love how the natural structure of the wood supports so much the vision you had. I am not into working with wood, but I think it needs a lot of planning to integrate the natural structure of the wood so perfect like you did!!! Thank you very much for sharing!
Thank you so much!
You are right, it is not easy to get a non-block piece of wood to fit the needs of a figurative sculpture. I'm glad someone noticed =p
It's a very very slow process of peeling away layers and trying to get a feel for what lies underneath. Maple burl is a very hard wood so it requires a lot of work to get detail and finish out of it, and very careful movements, because there is no way to patch up a surface that you damage! Then again, there are people who are far more skilled at wood carving than I am and who could probably do it a lot quicker and with better results =p
Usually burl wood, due to its extreme hardness and swirling grain movements, is used for turning on lathes or else slabbed and polished to show off the natural beauty. However this also means chopping off a lot of the burl and losing a lot of its natural movement and variety. So, my goal was to retain as much of the piece of wood's natural movement while still striving for a polished end result.
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