So we describe somebody’s weakness as their Achilles heel, or we talk about the dangers of opening up Pandora’s box. The Greek myths are over two thousand years old – and perhaps, in their earliest forms, much older – and yet many stories from Greek mythology, and phrases derived from those stories, are part of our everyday speech. This detail has been interpreted as an example of the misogyny we find in many of the patriarchal Greek myths: here’s a woman so ugly that merely looking at her will literally petrify you.īut even this interpretation carries its fair share of problems, not least the fact that a number of classical writers, from Pindar onwards, described Medusa as beautiful as well as terrifying: for Pindar, she was ‘fair-cheeked Medusa’. Medusa cannot be looked upon: to look directly at her is to be turned to stone. Of course, one of the key elements of the story of Perseus and Medusa is the important of sight and vision. Certainly, it’s odd that Medusa was mortal while her two sisters were not. Jane Harrison, the great classical scholar whose work was so influential on Robert Graves when he wrote his ‘grammar of poetic myth’, The White Goddess, argued that Medusa was the one true Gorgon: her sisters were probably a later invention, to replicate the ‘triple goddess’ feature found elsewhere in myth (compare the Three Furies and the Three Fates, among others). Herodotus, the ancient historian, meanwhile, stated that the Gorgons lived in Libya, and it’s been suggested that they originated in a north African Berber myth, which may have been co-opted by the Greeks. Joseph Campbell, for instance, who was probably the most influential comparative mythologist of the twentieth century after James Frazer, suggested that Perseus’ beheading of Medusa is mythologising of a real historical event, namely the sack of a temple (in the 13th Century BC), during which Greek invaders killed priestesses who wore Gorgon masks. There are other theories which also see Medusa as representing a particular religious idea. Eventually, Perseus gave Medusa’s head to Athena to place on her shield, and this, one surmises, is meant to be the origin of the Gorgoneion. In the case of the Gorgon Medusa, although it is similarly speculative, numerous mythologists have put forward the idea that the story of Perseus’ slaying of Medusa may be a sort of ‘origin myth’ created to explain the Gorgoneion, a protective pendant worn by followers of Athena and Zeus and displaying the ugly head of a woman, surrounded by serpents.Īfter he had slain Medusa, Perseus was said to have used her head as a weapon against his enemies, since it retained its power to turn to stone those who looked at it.
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