Medusa

Medusa is one of the three Gorgons, daughter of the sea gods Phorcys and Ceto and sister of Stheno and Euryale. Hesiod's Theogony places them beyond Ocean, at the world's edge, towards Night, where the Hesperides sing; and it adds the detail that settles everything: her two sisters neither age nor die, and she does. Hesiod does not say she was the youngest, nor the fairest, nor the fiercest. He says she was the only mortal one, and in a heroic tale that is not a trait but a sentence: if a thing can die, someone will come to kill it.

Her family is that of the sea's primordial monsters. Phorcys and Ceto also beget the Graeae (three old women who share a single eye and a single tooth) Echidna, mother of monsters, and the dragon Ladon who guards the apples. It is not a line of fallen or punished gods: it is the part of the world left on the far side of the boundary, where the map ends. The Gorgons attack no cities and demand no tribute. They are far away, and the danger lies in going to find them.

Of the Medusa who was first a woman Hesiod says nothing: that is Ovid's version, eight centuries later, and this encyclopedia keeps it on its own page, Medusa the Priestess. Both traditions are ancient, incompatible and never reconciled; separating them is the only way not to misrepresent either poet.

What almost no one knows about Medusa is that her face changed completely, and that the change can be dated. The archaic gorgoneion of the seventh and sixth centuries BC is not a woman: it is a frontal mask, round, with bulging eyes, boar's tusks, protruding tongue and often a **beard**. It appears on shields, pediments, roof tiles and kilns, and it is drawn not to frighten within a story but to frighten in earnest, the way a scarecrow is hung. It is the oldest form, and there is nothing seductive about it.

In the classical period the mask begins to grow human, and here belongs Phidias's Athena Parthenos, about 438 BC, which carries the gorgoneion on the breast already as an emblem rather than a terror. In the Hellenistic age the change is complete: the type called the Medusa Rondanini appears, the face of a young woman, serene, almost asleep, with two snakes knotted under the chin and small wings on the head. It is the same being eight centuries later, and it is beautiful. The Romans inherited that version, and from there it passed to the Renaissance and to everything after.

The features literature gives her are the ones art had already fixed: hair turned into living snakes, a gaze that petrifies, and in some accounts golden wings and bronze claws. Her body matters less than her face, and her face less than her eyes, because the danger is not that she attacks but that she is seen. She is the only creature in Greek myth whose weapon is being looked at.

The version of a beautiful woman turned into a monster by divine punishment does not belong on this page but on that of Medusa the Priestess: it is Ovid's, it comes eight centuries after Hesiod, and the two are told separately.

Perseus does not find her by chance: the road has to be wrung out of someone. First he surprises the Graeae, her sisters, and takes the single eye they share until they tell him where the nymphs live; from the nymphs he gets three things and only three, according to Apollodorus's Library: the winged sandals, the kibisis (a wallet to put what he cuts in) and the cap of Hades, which makes its wearer invisible. The steel sickle, the harpe, is given him by Hermes, and Athena guides his hand while he watches the reflection in a burnished shield so as not to look at her.

He kills her asleep. That detail, which popular versions tend to erase, is the key to the whole episode: against someone whose weapon is being seen, the only possible tactic is not to see her, and the only possible moment is when her eyes are shut. From the severed neck spring Pegasus, the winged horse, and Chrysaor, both sons of Poseidon. Her two sisters wake and pursue him, but the cap makes him invisible and he escapes.

Two distinct etiologies come from the severed head, and they should not be mixed, because Ovid tells them apart. Flying over Libya, the dripping blood falls on the sand and breeds the venomous serpents that infest that desert. Later, on the Ethiopian coast and after rescuing Andromeda, Perseus lays the head on a bed of seaweed: the seaweed hardens at the touch, and so coral is born. And there is a third remnant: Apollodorus says Athena kept the blood from her veins and gave it to Asclepius, that of the left side to kill and that of the right to raise the dead.

The head ends up on Athena's aegis, and it goes on petrifying after death, which is the strangest thing in the whole myth: Medusa is more dangerous beheaded than alive. Her face became the most repeated amulet of the ancient world. In modern times it has had two weighty readings worth dating: Freud, in a short text of 1922, read it as an image of the terror of castration; and since Hélène Cixous's essay of 1975 feminist criticism has reclaimed her as a victim, leaning above all on Ovid's version.