Medusa

Summary

Medusa is one of the three Gorgons of Greek myth, and the only one of them who can die. Hesiod says in the Theogony that Ceto bore to Phorcys the Gorgons, who live beyond the river Ocean at the frontier towards Night, near the Hesperides: Sthenno, Euryale and Medusa. Her two sisters were deathless and ageless; Medusa was mortal. Poseidon lay with her in a soft meadow among spring flowers.

Her story is the story of the man who killed her. Acrisius, king of Argos, shut his daughter Danaë in a bronze chamber underground, because an oracle told him her son would kill him, and Zeus came to her as a shower of gold, and she bore Perseus. Her father put mother and child in a chest and threw it into the sea, and they came ashore on Seriphos. When Perseus was grown, Polydectes, king of the island, wanted him away from his mother and demanded the Gorgon's head. Hermes and Athena led him to the Graiae, the old sisters of the Gorgons who shared one eye and one tooth between them; he took the eye and the tooth until they showed him the way to nymphs who kept winged sandals, a wallet and the cap of Hades that hides its wearer. Hermes gave him an adamantine sickle. He flew to Ocean and found the Gorgons asleep: their heads were wrapped in the scales of serpents, they had tusks like boars, bronze hands and golden wings, and whoever looked at them turned to stone. Perseus stood over them while Athena guided his hand, looked at Medusa's image in a bronze shield, and cut off her head. Out of her neck sprang the winged horse Pegasus and Chrysaor, her sons by Poseidon. He put the head in the wallet and went back, and her sisters could not see him because the cap hid him.

The head did not stop working when its owner died. Perseus showed it to Phineus and his fellow plotters and they became stone; then he walked in on Polydectes and his friends, turned his own face away and held up the head, and each of them became stone in whatever posture he had struck. Then he gave the head to Athena, who set it in the middle of her shield. That is why Homer describes Athena's aegis with "the head of the dread monster, the Gorgon" at its centre. Pegasus flew to the house of Zeus, carrying his thunder and lightning.

The idea the story turns on is looking. Whoever looked at Medusa became stone, and Perseus survived because he looked at her image in the shield and not at her. Then death by looking became a weapon in the hand of whoever held the head: Perseus turns his face away and lifts the head before his enemies, and Athena wears it on her breast to frighten those who fight her. The monster dies and her power remains, passing to the goddess who helped kill her.

We read the name in the Arabic tongue like this. Μέδουσα, Medousa, ends in -ousa, the Greek ending of the feminine participle, and the Greek lexicon files the name under the verb μέδω. Take off the ending and med- remains, which is Arabic madda. In Lisān al-ʿArab, madda baṣarahu ilā al-shayʾ is said when one raises one's sight to a thing and keeps looking, and madadtu ʿaynī ilā kadhā, "I stretched my eye to such a thing", is to look at it with longing. This is the Greek essay's reading: madda, to look intently, "and whoever looked at her turned to stone". On this reading Medusa is the one towards whom the gaze is stretched, which is what the story makes her: everyone who stretched his gaze to her became stone, and the one who overcame her was the one who did not.

Linguistic Root

Medusa and the stretched gaze

The Greek lexicon gives μέδω as "protect, rule over", used by Homer only in the participle μέδων, "lord", once in the singular of Phorcys, "lord of the sea", and gives Μέδουσα as its feminine, become the Gorgon's proper name. In Greek, then, the name is "the ruling one", after her father's title.

Lane's senses of madda include drawing a rope, drawing a bow, stretching out the hand, "God spread out the earth", and madda baṣarahu ilā al-shayʾ, raising one's sight to a thing and keeping it there. The whole root is stretching and lengthening, and the lengthened look is one of its uses. The sounds: m is m, d is d, and the Greek ending drops, as the Juthoor laws allow for receiving-language affixes. The doubled d of madda appears in Greek as a single d.

Other readings in the essay

The Greek essay has other readings for Medusa. The first is madūsa from dāsa, "the trampled, the crushed"; Lane gives dāsa as treading hard upon a thing with the foot. It matches every letter of the name, but it takes the Greek ending into the root, and its sense is closer to Ovid's late story than to Hesiod's. The second joins madda and asā, "the harmful stuff"; the third joins mayt and aws, "the bearer of death by the gaze", which fits the story directly but splits the name in two and needs the Greek d to be a t.

The essay reads Perseus, Περσεύς, from f-r-s; Lane says the lion is called al-fāris because he farasa his prey, breaks its neck, and Perseus is the one who cut Medusa's neck. It reads Pegasus from baraqa, the one that flashes off like lightning, while Hesiod says he was so named because he was born by the springs of Ocean, πηγή being a spring. It reads Gorgon from karra and gharra, attack and terror; the Greek lexicon explains it as "the Grim One", from γοργός, fierce.

Key Mythic Narratives

From beauty to monster

Pindar, in the fifth century BCE, calls her "fair-cheeked Medusa" and says Athena made the music of the pipe to imitate the shrill cry of Euryale lamenting her sister. Then Ovid, the Roman poet of the early first century CE, gives a reason for the snakes in her hair: Medusa was the most beautiful of women, and her hair the most beautiful thing about her; the lord of the sea violated her in Minerva's temple, the goddess turned her face away and covered it with her shield, and then changed the Gorgon's hair into snakes as a punishment, and still wears those snakes on her breast. This is a late version: in Hesiod Poseidon lies with her in a meadow of spring flowers, and the Library notes that some said her head was cut off because she wished to rival Athena in beauty.

What the head did on Perseus's road

Ovid adds that the drops of blood falling from the head over the sands of Libya became snakes; that Perseus asked Atlas for shelter and was driven off, so he showed him the head and Atlas became a mountain, his beard and hair forests, his shoulders and hands ridges, his head a peak; and that when Perseus laid the head on seaweed, the weed turned to stone, which is why coral is soft in the water and hardens in the air.

Perseus after Medusa

On his way home Perseus found Andromeda, daughter of the king of Ethiopia, bound to a rock for a sea monster, because her mother had boasted of her beauty over the daughters of the sea and Poseidon had sent a flood and a monster. Perseus killed the monster and married her. Later, at games in Larissa, his discus struck his grandfather Acrisius on the foot and killed him, fulfilling the oracle; ashamed to inherit Argos, he ruled Tiryns and fortified Mycenae. Among his descendants was Alcmene, mother of Heracles, and Heracles killed the three-bodied Geryon, son of the Chrysaor who sprang from Medusa's neck.

The head in the underworld

At the end of Odysseus's visit to the spirits of the dead, their crowds came on with an eerie cry, and he feared that Persephone would send up the Gorgon's head from the house of Hades, so he went back to his ship. When Heracles went down to the underworld the spirits fled from him, all but Medusa; he drew his sword on her, and Hermes told him she was an empty phantom. Athena gave Heracles a lock of the Gorgon's hair in a bronze jar, and he gave it to the daughter of the king of Tegea: if an army comes against the city, hold it up three times from the wall without looking ahead, and the enemy will flee.

Symbolic Reading

The essay "Rereading Greek Myths" sets Medusa in its table of natural phenomena and reads the turning to stone of whoever looks at her as an image of lava cooling into rock, or of the fear that paralyses. Greece is a land of earthquakes and volcanoes, and the essay reads many of its monsters this way.

In the texts themselves the terrifying face becomes a guard. Athena carries it at the centre of her shield, it crowns Agamemnon's shield in the Iliad, "grim of aspect, glaring terribly", and Hector's eyes in battle are likened to it. The face that killed whoever looked at it is now held up before the enemy to frighten him, and a lock of its hair protects a city. Pindar says Athena took the lamenting sister's cry and turned it into a tune that gathers people at contests.

Cross-Cultural Parallels

The story closest to hers is that of Humbaba, guardian of the Cedar Forest. The Sumerian poem Gilgamesh and Huwawa says that when Huwawa "looks at someone, it is the look of death"; when he was overcome, Enkidu cut his throat, they put his head in a leather bag, and they came before Enlil, threw the bag down, tipped out the head and set it before him. So Perseus put Medusa's head in his wallet and gave it to Athena. Both stories have a hero who kills a guardian whose look kills, a god who helps the hero, and a head carried in a bag to a god. The endings differ: Enlil was angry that his guardian had been killed, while Athena set the head on her shield.

The sea monster Perseus killed at Andromeda's rock was sent by Poseidon with a flood, one of the monsters from the sea in divine combat with sea and serpent. Odysseus's fear of the Gorgon's head at the door of Hades, and Heracles's meeting with her shade, are witnesses of the descent to the underworld.