Medusa (mythology)

Medusa, from Caravaggio (Galería Uffizi, Florence, Italy).

In Greek mythology, Medusa (in ancient Greek Μέδουσα Médousa, 'guardian', 'protector') was a female chthonic monster, who turned people into stone. those who stared into her eyes. She was beheaded by Perseus, who then used her head as a weapon until he gave it to the goddess Athena to put on her shield, her aegis. Since classical Greek antiquity, the image of Medusa's head has been represented on the device that wards off evil known as the Gorgoneion. The myth may have originated from the abolition of cults of the Moon goddess Caria and Libyan Neith in which the priestesses wore gorgon masks.

In classical Greek mythology

The three gorgon sisters—Medusa, Stheno, and Euryale—were daughters of Phorcys and Ceto, or sometimes of Typhon and Echidna, in both cases chthonic monsters from the archaic world. This genealogy is shared by his other sisters, the Greas, as in Aeschylus' Prometheus in Chains, who locates both trinities far away, on the “terrifying plain of Cistene”:

Not far, the limp sisters
with snakes by hair; gorgonas,
enemies of man

Perseus with the head of Medusa, by Benvenuto Cellini, installed in 1554.

Ancient Greek vase painters and relief carvers gave Medusa and her sisters the aesthetic of beings born with a monstrous form taking into account the nature of chthonic monsters.

Literature

Hesiod mentions it for the first time in his work Theogony:

and the Gorgonas that live on the other side of the illustrious Ocean, in the world's trust toward the night, where the Hesperides of sharp voice: Esteno, Euriale and the Medusa desventurada; this was mortal and the other immortal and exempt from old age both. With her alone, she lay down the one of Azulada Cabellera in a soft meadow, between spring flowers.

Despite its monstrous origin, in an ode written in 490 B.C. In C. Pindar already speaks of the "beautiful-cheeked Medusa". A beautiful maiden, "the jealous aspiration of many suitors," and a priestess of Athena's temple, but when she was raped by the "Lord of the Sea," Poseidon, in the same temple, the enraged goddess turned her fair hair into serpents.

In most versions of literary history, which differ from the original myth, she had been given her monstrous appearance by Athena and Medusa was pregnant by Poseidon when she was beheaded by the hero Perseus, who had been sent to fetch her head by King Polydectes of Seriphos. With the help of Athena and Hermes, who gave him winged sandals, Hades' helmet of invisibility, a mirrored sword and shield, the hero went to visit the Graias to be told where the gorgons' cave was. Finally Perseus fulfilled his mission. The hero killed Medusa by approaching her without looking directly at her but looking at the reflection of the gorgon in her shield to avoid being petrified. Her hand was being guided by Athena and so he cut off her head. Medusa's sisters sought him out for revenge, but Perseus escaped by turning invisible thanks to Hades' helmet. From Medusa's neck sprouted her offspring: the winged horse Pegasus and the giant Chrysaor.

Jane Ellen Harrison argues that “his power only begins when his head is severed, and that power resides in the head; it is in a word a mask with a body later added... the base of the Gorgoneion is a cult object, a misunderstood ritual mask". In the Odyssey, Homer does not specifically mention the gorgon Jellyfish:

the pale terror took hold of me, fearing that the illustrious Persephone sent me from Hades the head of the horrendous greyish monster

Which Harrison translates as "the gorgon was created out of terror, not the terror of the gorgon."

According to Ovid, Perseus passed through northwestern Africa alongside the Titan Atlas, who was there holding up the sky, and turned it into stone. Similarly, the corals of the Red Sea were said to have formed from the blood of Medusa that splashed on the algae when Perseus left the petrifying head on the beach during his brief stay in Ethiopia, where he saved and married the beautiful princess Andromeda. It was even said that the poisonous vipers of the Sahara had sprouted from the fallen drops of his blood.

Perseus then flew to the island where his mother was about to be forcibly married to the king. He shouted "Mother, protect your eyes," and all but her were turned to stone by the sight of the Medusa's head.

Ovid is the first known author to narrate the version of the petrification of Atlas by Perseus, but this narration is anachronistic with respect to mythical genealogy, since Heracles held up the firmament while Atlas went in search of the golden apples of the sky. Garden of the Hesperides: Perseus being an ancestor of Heracles, for which reason Atlas could never have succumbed to the petrifying gaze of Medusa generations before Heracles' life.

Although some classical references allude to the three gorgons, Harrison considers Medusa's multiplication into a trio of sisters to be a secondary feature of the myth:

The triple form is not primitive, but simply an example of a general trend... that makes every goddess a trinity, which has given us to the Hours, the Carites, the Eriniahs and a multitude of other trioes. It is immediately obvious that the gorgonas were not really three but one more two. The two surviving sisters are mere appendices due to custom: the authentic gorgona is Medusa.

Then he gave the head to Athena, who placed it on her shield, the aegis. According to some sources, the goddess gave the magical blood of Medusa to the doctor Asclepius, since the one that flowed from the left side of her neck was a deadly poison, and the one on the right side had the power to raise the dead.

Pausanias collects two alternative traditions about the origin of the Medusa myth: one of them said that she had been a queen of a territory located near Lake Tritonis, in Libya. She would have died at night during a campaign against Perseus, a prince of the Peloponnese. The second said that wild men and women lived in the Libyan desert region and that Medusa had been one of them, who had begun to harm the inhabitants of the Tritonian Lake area until she was killed by Perseus.

Bernini jellyfish.

Interpretation from psychoanalysis

In 1940 Sigmund Freud's article Das Medusenhaupt ('the head of Medusa') was published posthumously, laying the groundwork for a body of criticism of the monster. Medusa is depicted as "the supreme talisman providing the image of castration—associated in the child's mind with the discovery of maternal sexuality—and its denial." Psychoanalysts continue the archetypal critique to this day. Beth Seeley analyzed Medusa's punishment for the "crime" of being raped in Athena's temple as a result of the goddess's unresolved conflicts with her father, Zeus.

The origin of the myth within the war and religious context

The British writer and scholar Robert Graves, in his work entitled The Greek Myths (Vol. I), comments that after the fall of the kingdom of Knossos, in approximately 1400 BC, a One of the largest warring forces in the Mediterranean became the Carian fleet. Homer mentions the Carians as allies of the Trojans and that they would have come to inhabit at some point along the river Meander in the ancient Greek polis of Miletus. According to the cited work by Robert Graves and the British Jane Ellen Harrison in their work Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion (1903), an Argive colony in Caria led to a religious confrontation between the Hellenic invaders and a local cult of the goddess Moon whose priestesses, who represented the goddess herself at the time, wore a prophylactic mask of a gorgon or even an animal, to scare away the uninitiated or profane; masks of which they were stripped to abolish that cult.

Also, Robert Graves considers it probable that the myth reflects another war and religious conflict in which during an Argive conquest in Libya the matriarchal system would be suppressed and the mysteries of the goddess Neith would be interrupted. The writer of the century II a. C. Dionysius Scytobrachion considered in accordance with Herodotus, that the myth could originally be embodied in Libya as part of the religion of the Berbers.

The gorgon mask in culinary art

In the culinary art of ancient Greece, bakers placed a gorgon mask over ovens to keep curious people away and prevent them from opening the doors, thus preventing cold drafts from ruining them the baking of bread.

In art

Since ancient times, Medusa and the gorgons have been immortalized in numerous works of art, both in sculpture and in vase paintings. In archaic times it was common to represent these beings with a monstrous appearance, snakes in their hair, winged, and sticking out their tongues. Despite her monstrous gorgon-like appearance, Medusa was a frequent subject of inspiration that artists seemed to enjoy. Some outstanding examples have been preserved in the museums of Syracuse, Louvre or Corfu.

Western front of the temple of Artemisa de Corfu (about 580 BC), Archaeological Museum of Corfu. Gorgona from the Temple of Apollo of Syracuse (500 BC), Archaeological Museum of Syracuse. Dinos del Pintor de la Gorgona (about 580 BC), Louvre Museum. Painting of a gorgona on an amphora (about 520-510 BC), Louvre Museum.

Among other outstanding antiquity works from later periods, mention can be made of the shield of Alexander the Great, as it appears in the Issus mosaic found in the House of the Faun in Pompeii (c. 200 BC)..) and Rondanini's Medusa, a Roman copy of the Gorgoneion on the aegis of Athena.

Some examples of representations of Medusa from the Renaissance are:

• Perseus with the head of Medusa (bronce), by Benvenuto Cellini (1554);
• Medusa (on canvas), by Caravaggio (1597);
• Head of Medusaby Peter Paul Rubens (1618);
• Perseus petrifies Fineo and his minions (on canvas), by Luca Giordano (first years 1680);
• Perseus with the head of Medusa (marble), by Antonio Canova (1801);
• Medusa (on canvas), by Arnold Böcklin (c. 1878);
• Perseus (bronce), by Salvador Dalí.

Accompanying the resurrection of the legend by Thomas Bulfinch's Mythology, "Medusa had become a common theme in art" by the XIX. Paintings from the Perseus Cycle by Edward Burne-Jones and a drawing by Aubrey Beardsley gave way to works of the XX by Paul Klee, John Singer Sargent, Pablo Picasso and Auguste Rodin, with his bronze sculpture The Gates of Hell. Medusa has also been represented in art from her own perspective psychological and sociological, as illustrated by the sculpture Medusa by contemporary artist David Master.

Vexillology and heraldry

Flag of Sicily

The head of Medusa is represented both on the flag and on the shield of the Italian island of Sicily.

Medusa is present as a symbol of the Italian island of Sicily, represented both on its flag and on its regional coat of arms. The flag has in its center a variant of the trisquel, which consists of three bent legs that represent the shape of the island and in the center the face of Medusa with wings and three ears of wheat that represent the prosperity and fertility of the island..