Medusa
Medusa is a figure so potent that her name alone has come to mean monster in common usage, even as the details of her story are largely forgotten. She was one of three Gorgon sisters, the only mortal among them, and her appearance was said to be so hideous that any living being who met her gaze was instantly turned to stone. Yet by the fifth century BC, sculptors and painters were already depicting her as beautiful as well as terrifying. A figure condemned to monstrous form, then reclaimed as a comely woman sleeping peacefully, then transformed again into a symbol of female fury. How did a mythological creature from ancient Greece come to appear on the flag of Sicily, in the halls of feminist journals, in the art of Caravaggio and Canova, and in the political discourse of a twenty-first-century American election? And who was Medusa before Perseus ever raised his sword?
Phorcys was a sea-god of Greek mythology, and it was he and his sister Ceto who gave the world the three Gorgons: Medusa, Stheno, and Euryale. Hesiod and Apollodorus agreed on this parentage, though Hyginus held a different view, naming the father simply as "Gorgon" rather than Phorcys. The three sisters shared their genealogy with the Graeae, another trio of frightful female beings. Aeschylus placed all six far off on Kisthene's dreadful plain, describing the Gorgons as winged, with snakes for hair, as the "hatred of mortal man."
Of the three, only Medusa was mortal. That detail would prove decisive. Her two sisters, Stheno and Euryale, could not be slain, and so they survived to become what the scholar Jane Ellen Harrison called "mere appendages due to custom." Harrison argued that the tripling of Medusa into a sisterhood was a secondary invention; the real Gorgon was always Medusa alone. The ancient sources placed her death on Sarpedon, near Cisthene, according to Hesiod and Aeschylus. The second-century BC writer Dionysius Scytobrachion located the Gorgons instead in what is now Libya, a placement that Herodotus also reported from traditions he had gathered.
King Polydectes of Seriphus sent Perseus to fetch the head of Medusa not out of any heroic imperative but because he wanted Perseus out of the way. Polydectes intended to marry Perseus's mother, and the young man was an obstacle. The gods were well aware of this scheme, and Perseus did not go unequipped. Athena gave him a mirrored shield; Hermes provided sandals with gold wings; Hephaestus furnished a sword; and Hades contributed his helm of invisibility.
Perseus used the mirrored shield to approach Medusa without looking directly at her, seeing only her reflection. At the moment he beheaded her, Medusa was pregnant by Poseidon. From her severed neck sprang two beings: Pegasus, the winged horse, and Chrysaor, a giant who wielded a golden sword. What emerged from her death was not ruin but creation.
On his journey back, Perseus carried the severed head and wielded it as a weapon. Over northwest Africa, the Titan Atlas attacked him, and Perseus transformed Atlas into stone. Where Perseus rested the head beside the shore in Ethiopia, Medusa's blood dripped onto seaweed and hardened into the corals of the Red Sea, according to Ovid. Other ancient sources, including the Argonautica and Lucan's Pharsalia, traced the venomous vipers of the Sahara to drops of that same blood. Her blood also spawned the Amphisbaena, a horned dragon-like creature with a snake-headed tail. Back on Seriphos, Polydectes himself was turned to stone before Perseus finally gave the Gorgon's head to Athena, who placed it on her shield, the Aegis.
Jane Ellen Harrison offered a reading of Medusa that inverts the obvious interpretation. Her potency, Harrison argued, only begins when her head is severed; the head itself, not the living creature, is the source of power. Harrison's conclusion was stark: "the Gorgon was made out of the terror, not the terror out of the Gorgon." The frightening face came first, and the body was appended later as an explanation for it.
Harrison saw the Gorgoneion, the ritual image of Medusa's head that appeared on shields, breastplates, and temple walls across the ancient world, as the original object. It was a cultic mask, apotropaic by design, meant to avert evil. The living Gorgon with snakes for hair was, in her view, a mythological story invented to account for why the mask existed. Homer himself, in the Odyssey, does not specifically name Medusa: he refers only to the terror of an awful monster's grisly head sent up from Hades. The head always precedes the story. The Medusa on the breastplate of Alexander the Great, depicted in the mosaic from Pompeii's House of the Faun, and the column bases of the Basilica Cistern in Constantinople, both carry forward this same tradition: Medusa as a protective face rather than a defeated enemy.
Pindar, writing an ode in 490 BC, already called her "fair-cheeked Medusa." By the fifth century BC, vase-painters and sculptors were depicting a Medusa who was simultaneously beautiful and terrifying. The earliest example of this shift comes from Polygnotus, who drew Medusa as a comely woman sleeping peacefully as Perseus beheads her. Whether those images were meant to elicit sympathy for her or to mock the traditional hero is not clear from the ancient record.
The Roman poet Ovid provided the fullest elaboration of Medusa as an originally beautiful maiden. In his version, Neptune mated with her in the temple of Minerva, and the goddess punished Medusa by transforming her beautiful hair into snakes. Ovid was not inventing the concept of a beautiful Medusa; ancient depictions of her as a maiden predate him. But his account gave the transformation a moral cause: not Medusa's own nature but a god's assault and a goddess's anger. This version made Medusa both aggressor and victim, a tragic figure in her death, and it planted a question that interpreters would return to for centuries. Harriet Hosmer's 1854 marble sculpture of Medusa, now in the collection of the Detroit Institute of Art, and Antonio Canova's marble Perseus with the Head of Medusa, completed in 1801 and modelled on the Rondanini Medusa, both reflect this tension between beauty and horror that the classical tradition itself introduced.
Sigmund Freud's essay "Das Medusenhaupt" was published posthumously in 1940. Freud argued that the terror of Medusa is a terror of castration, triggered when a boy catches sight of female genitals surrounded by hair. In his reading, the beautiful Medusa represents the mother remembered in innocence; the monstrous Medusa is an Oedipal symptom. He noted that there are no recorded instances of Medusa turning a woman to stone.
Joseph Campbell approached the myth from a different direction. He argued that the legend of Perseus beheading Medusa encoded a real historical event, specifically, that the Hellenes overran the goddess's chief shrines and stripped her priestesses of their Gorgon masks. Those masks were apotropaic faces worn to frighten away the uninitiated. Campbell located this rupture in the early thirteenth century BC, calling it a sociological trauma registered in myth much as a neurosis registers in dreams: hidden yet present, known unconsciously but misconstrued consciously. Beth Seelig offered a further revision from within psychoanalytic literary criticism, arguing that Medusa's punishment by Athena should be read as the consequence of rape rather than willing consent, and that Athena's response reflected her own unresolved conflicts with Zeus.
In 1978, a feminist journal called Women: A Journal of Liberation ran a cover featuring the image of the Gorgon Medusa by Froggi Lupton. The editors explained on the inside cover that this image "can be a map to guide us through our terrors, through the depths of our anger into the sources of our power as women." It was one of the first publications to explicitly adopt Medusa as a symbol of female rage.
Mary Valentis and Anne Devane, in their book Female Rage: Unlocking Its Secrets, Claiming Its Power, found that when women were asked what female rage looks like, the answer was consistently Medusa. She was called "the most horrific woman in the world," even by women who could not remember the details of her myth. In Fall 1986, Emily Erwin Culpepper wrote in the magazine Woman of Power that "The Amazon Gorgon face is female fury personified." Elana Dykewomon's 1976 collection They Will Know Me by My Teeth featured a Gorgon on its cover specifically to act as a guardian for female power.
Hélène Cixous addressed the myth directly in her essay "The Laugh of the Medusa," arguing that men's retelling had turned Medusa into a monster because they feared female desire. Cixous urged women to reclaim identity through writing. "You only have to look at the Medusa straight on to see her," she wrote. "And she's not deadly. She's beautiful and she's laughing."
Stephen Wilk, author of Medusa: Solving the Mystery of the Gorgon, proposed that her longevity among feminist circles owes something to her role as a protector: "Only the Gorgon has the savage, threatening appearance to serve as an immediately recognized symbol of rage and a protector of women's secrets." Elizabeth Johnston's November 2016 essay in the Atlantic called Medusa the original Nasty Woman, noting that her repeated comparison to Hillary Clinton during the 2016 presidential election confirmed her ongoing function: "Medusa has since haunted Western imagination, materializing whenever male authority feels threatened by female agency."
Medusa in Lully and Quinault's 1682 opera Persée is sung by a countertenor, and her aria translates as "I have lost the beauty that made me so vain." The artwork stretches from Caravaggio's oil on canvas in 1597 to Luciano Garbati's 2008 sculpture, which reverses the familiar image by showing Medusa holding the severed head of Perseus. The fashion company Versace adopted Medusa as a logo, a usage that feminist critics read as further evidence of the name's shift from myth to general cultural symbol.
The head of Medusa appears on the flag and emblem of Sicily alongside the three-legged trinacria. The Sicilian Gorgon implies the protection of Athena, since the goddess wore Medusa's likeness on her aegis. The coat of arms of Dohalice village in the Czech Republic also carries Medusa's image. Her name has entered scientific nomenclature as well, honoring the figure in the names of species and taxa. Jack London used Medusa in his novel The Mutiny of the Elsinore to represent an unavoidable nihilistic truth, quoting a character who describes flight from "Medusa-Truth" into "Maya-Lie" as the defining condition of human consciousness. Judy Takács's contemporary portrait #Me(dusa)too, inspired by the MeToo movement, returned Medusa's beauty and added a hashtag stigmata, extending the myth into living political argument.
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Common questions
Who killed Medusa in Greek mythology?
Perseus, a Greek hero, killed Medusa by beheading her while looking only at her reflection in a mirrored shield given to him by Athena. He was sent on the errand by King Polydectes of Seriphus, who wanted Perseus's mother for his wife.
Who were Medusa's parents and sisters in Greek mythology?
According to Hesiod and Apollodorus, Medusa's parents were the sea-god Phorcys and his sister Ceto. Her sisters were Stheno and Euryale; together the three were known as the Gorgons. Medusa was the only mortal among the three.
What creatures were born when Medusa was beheaded?
When Perseus beheaded Medusa, two beings sprang from her body: Pegasus, a winged horse, and Chrysaor, a giant wielding a golden sword. Medusa had been pregnant by Poseidon at the time of her death.
What is the Gorgoneion and how is it connected to Medusa?
The Gorgoneion was an evil-averting device in classical antiquity, depicting the head of Medusa. It appeared on shields, breastplates, and temple architecture across the ancient world. Scholar Jane Ellen Harrison argued it originated as a ritual mask, with the myth of the living Medusa invented later to explain it.
How did Ovid change the story of Medusa?
The Roman poet Ovid presented Medusa as originally a beautiful maiden whose hair was transformed into snakes after Neptune mated with her in the temple of Minerva, and Minerva punished her for the transgression. Earlier Greek sources did not include this origin, though ancient depictions of a beautiful Medusa predate Ovid.
Why did feminists adopt Medusa as a symbol in the 20th century?
Feminist writers and artists began reclaiming Medusa from the mid-1970s onward as a symbol of female rage and protective power. A cover of Women: A Journal of Liberation in 1978 featured Medusa's image with an explanation that it could guide women "through the depths of our anger into the sources of our power." Hélène Cixous's essay "The Laugh of the Medusa" argued that patriarchal retellings had turned a figure of female desire into a monster.
All sources
26 references cited across the entry
- 4Bulfinch Mythology – Age of Fable – Stories of Gods & HeroesThomas Bullfinch
- 11BookThe Greek MythsRobert Graves — Penguin Books — 1955
- 12BookProlegomena: To The Study Of Greek ReligionJane Ellen Harrison — Princeton University Press — June 5, 1991
- 13BookThe Masks of God, Vol. 3: Occidental Mythology.Joseph Campbell — Penguin Books — 1968
- 14JournalThe Rape of Medusa in the Temple of Athena: Aspects of TriangulationSeelig, B. J. — 2002
- 17The Timeless Myth of Medusa, a Rape Victim Turned Into a MonsterChristobel Hastings — Vice — 9 April 2018
- 18The Original 'Nasty Woman'Elizabeth Johnston — 6 November 2016
- 19Me(dusa)tooJudy Takács — September 30, 2018
- 20JournalThe Laugh of the MedusaHelene Cixous — 1976
- 21BookLiterary Theory: A Guide for the PerplexedMary Klages — Continuum International Publishing Group — 2006
- 23JournalJack London's Medusa of TruthPetersen, Per Serritslev — 2002
- 24BookThe Mutiny of the ElsinoreLondon, Jack — Mutual — 1914