The Many Faces of Medusa

Contemplating the desire to rewrite mythology

Medusa is a complicated woman. The only human Gorgon, no one can meet the terror of Medusa directly without being transformed.*

Once a young priestess in the temple of Athena, Medusa’s vow is broken when she has sex with Posiedon. Some versions say rape, other’s seduction, but this moment is her first transformation — Medusa is no longer a beautiful maiden.

Athena punishes her to a life on the edge of the world with her Gorgon sisters, in the dark extremities of the earth, where she is transformed into the snake haired figure we know as the caricatures on Athenian breast plates of antiquity.

She becomes an emblem of protection, as her gaze turns onlookers to stone. She is a warning sign to other women who move against the female coalition of the Athenian temple. A a warning sign to men — stay away or die from the gaze of the snake haired woman. Like Persephone, the forever-maiden, Medusa is cast into desolate transformation. As are we all.

This is not a tale of the woes of being a woman dominated by patriarchy.

In psychology, she becomes the face of the Death Mother the internal force that turns us to stone. “During my training to become a teacher, we were assigned a class to teach. I would be in front of my class speaking, but the room would be filled with a painful silence. I was making the motions with my lips by no sound came out.”** From Marion Woodman’s perspective, the Death Mother internalizes herself through story, primarily the woman’s own mythology around her mother or parental figures. She is the ugly voice that tells us we are failures. With internalization comes physical symptoms, an arrest of language. Once stone, we become silent.

But for Woodman, Medusa is not a complex and archetype to eradicate, she is one to balance. We do not murder parts of ourselves in efforts to reach wholeness.

In Helene Cixous’ The Laugh of the Medusa, she writes, “Women must write her self: must write about women and bring women to writing from which they have been driven away as violently as from their bodies…Woman must put herself into the text — as into the world and into history — by her own movement.” It is as if by being torn from…

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