Clash of the Titans Redux
Unveiling the real Medusa
Hello Friends,
Apologies for this delayed missive. It turns out my last post was prophetic: a couple of days after proclaiming I would change my circumstances if they continued to inhibit my writing, I was invited to move to a new place with only a smidgeon of chaos to urge me out the door and up the hill on to my fourth volcano of Moku o Keawe’s five, Hualalai.
So here I am writing to you from 1500 feet instead of sea level. A rooster is crowing in the yard and somewhere down the street another is answering. I have a desk and privacy! I expect great things to come from this move up the mountain.
Next week you can expect an essay about an alternative view of moving, but in the meantime as I ground into this new place this week I’m sharing my version of the Medusa story. If, like me, your first exposure to Medusa was the 1981 film “Clash of the Titans,” you probably were conditioned to think of her as a vicious and vengeful monster.
Medusa was first mentioned in literature in the 8th century BCE by the poet Hesiod, but her story goes back even further into the time when the power of the feminine was not feared, but revered as a way to union with the Divine. The stories that we have received about her in modern times show the transition into a society founded on the distorted masculine, what we have come to know as patriarchy. As always, it’s worth repeating that both masculine and feminine dwell within each one of us. The way forward is for us to individually correct the distortions in our own personal feminine and masculine centers. Thus will we come together as integrated beings and create a more balanced civilization.
Here’s Medusa in her own words:
The Rape of Medusa
Ironically, I wasn’t born a monster—though my sisters were. Our parents were the sea nymphs Phorcys and Ceto and they called us The Gorgons, three hideous girls and one beautiful—me. My hair was exceptionally eye-catching, shiny copper ringlets to my waist. I was so gorgeous I caught the eye of Poseidon, God of the Sea, and he raped me. There’s no other way to say it. I won’t ask for your forgiveness for not sparing you the details. If you don’t want to hear it stop reading. One afternoon I was a virgin in Athena’s temple, by evening totally depraved. Not the way you think, not because I liked it. I was depraved because Athena said so. Raping me, Poseidon desecrated her temple. Guess who took the blame? I was the one she punished. In a flash of lightning I can still feel shuddering through my body, she changed my lustrous, copper hair into writhing snakes. My heart turned to stone that day, and soon after anyone who met my gaze did, too.
I would still probably be turning people to stone if it weren’t for the hero’s quest, which obliged young men to go out in the world to prove themselves so we could all pretend this wasn’t a shit life. A lot of heroes had tried to kill me. This one was different. Perseus was his name. Not only was he actually truly noble and not just a buffoon trying to puff himself up to get laid, he had the help of a whole bevy of my relatives, which is the only way he defeated me. Hades gave him a Cape of Invisibility, he got winged sandals from Hermes, and a sword from Hephaestus. But it was the bronze shield from Athena that did me in. Perseus knew he’d be turned to stone if he faced me, so he tracked my reflection in Athena’s child and slashed my head off while I was sleeping.
He killed my reflection.
That wasn’t me.
But I am dead.
If I am dead, who is this speaking?
I had children. That’s what almost no one remembers. Poseidon knocked me up. I carried them so long I forgot I was pregnant, too. I was hoping if I forgot them they’d just go away, my children of rape, but that’s not the way the body works. It has a life of its own despite our desires, ironic, since desire is what drives the body. My children’s names were Pegasus and Chrysaor. They spilled out when Perseus slashed my throat, born on a venomous blood spurt. He was shaking in his boots so bad trying not to look at my dead head still writhing with snakes he couldn’t lift his sword to kill them, too, so they escaped. I watched them with my many eyes as the blood surged out of me. The marble floor was slick and Perseus stumbled when he stooped to lift my head. They don’t show that in the movies.
If Perseus hadn’t cut my head off they could still be inside me kicking to get out or stabbing me with a spear that could have eventually punctured my guts. But Perseus did slash my throat, and despite how it looks in the movies, one clean sweep of the blade, he had to hack through my spine to separate my head from my body. Maybe that’s why Chrysaor grew up to be a great warrior with a golden sword, although that doesn’t explain Pegasus, who was so noble and beautiful everyone wept when he flew over them. Pegasus, the white winged horse came from me. Hard to believe, right? I wouldn’t have believed it if I hadn’t watched him stand for the first time on his thin, shaky legs with the eyes of a hundred dying snakes.
Perseus flew off with my head and into many other lives. Everybody knows from “Clash of the Titans” how he used my head to rescue Andromeda by killing the kraken sent by Poseidon because he was pissed off that Cassiopeia, her mother, had boasted her daughter was more beautiful than the Nereids. As if! And a few people know the part about how when we flew over Libya on Pegasus snakes sprang from the drops of my blood that shattered on the desert sand, and that’s why to this day, Libya is infested with snakes. But not many know the part of my story that gives me the most satisfaction. When Perseus finally made it to Athena she finally acknowledged what she’d done to her me, in her own calculated, cool-hearted goddess way. She set my head in an aegis, which you probably know as a shield, that she gave to her father Zeus. So there I was protecting Zeus’s heart. And Athena’s sometimes, too. She liked to borrow the shield because, even in death, my gaze could slay. Athena could protect herself and kill at the same time when she carried me.
Athena did something else that pleased me. She didn’t just send a slave in to mop my blood off the marble. She had her slave collect the blood in a vial and gave most of it to Asclepius, the god of healing, and from what I’m told he used the blood from my left side to take people’s lives, and the blood from my right to raise people from the dead. The last two drops she gave to her son Erichthonius. I don’t know if he ever used them, but it was said one was a cure-all, the other a deadly poison.
Not many remember Erichthonius, probably because he doesn’t exactly have a hero’s name like Perseus or Hercules, vigorous and easy to pronounce, and what I’m going to tell you about him is going to weave my story with Athena’s in a way that will surprise you, and perhaps make you think differently of how harsh she was to me after Poseidon raped me.
Most people don’t know Athena had a son because she tried to hide it. But it’s hard enough to hide a human, let alone a demigod, and Erichthonius was actually born of two gods, so there’s no halves about it. He was born when Athena, wanting some new weapons, went to visit Hephaestus who was so overcome by lust he tried to “seduce” her. Athena fled, not just to save her virginly reputation, she was seriously repulsed by Hephaestus’s hot paws on her breasts. She wanted nothing to do with him and was absolutely horrified when he came on her leg. Disgusted, she wiped off his spunk with a wool scrap like millions of women since and flung it to earth. Of course, being a god’s, the filthy seed couldn’t just seep into the soil, it had to sprout into a son—voila!—Erichthonius. Athena wanted to abandon him, but couldn’t. Even the cool-hearted goddess found she had feelings when faced with her own son. Instead she hid him in a small wood box and gave him to the King of Athens, making him swear he’d never open it.
Well, we know how that goes.
The king held off, but his daughter’s couldn’t.
Some say when the daughters opened the wood box they saw an infant with a snake coiled around it, some a creature half-child, half-snake. What everyone agrees on is the three sisters went mad at the sight and threw themselves off the Acropolis, and that this was the end of their story, though not of Erichthonius, who somehow grew up to be a normal looking King of Athens who married Praxithea, a naiad, and begot a son, Pandion, who taught his people to smelt silver and till the earth with a plough, and how to yoke horses to a chariot, which is quite a coincidence since I know Jennifer had no idea who he was when she started writing my story today. This whole narrative she’s concocting for you to read is moving through the Major Arcana right on schedule. Fool, Magician, High Priestess, Empress, Emperor, Hierophant, Lovers, have been chanting here in the background, and today the Chariot’s wheels have rattled into this story.1
Have you ever seen The Chariot card? The prince (who looks a lot like Athena), stands crowned and ready to battle in his chariot, pulled by a black sphinx on the left, a white on the right.
Have you ever wondered why life is so hard? Why for every one step forward there are at least two back? Yet somehow we all keep going. Willpower they call it. Determination. Erichthonius had it. He was such a competitive charioteer in the races, Zeus raised him into the sky to become Auriga, the constellation of the Charioteer. He’s still up there lashing his sphinxes, one black, one white. Poison, antidote. Poison as antidote. I wanted to hate Athena’s son, but he was part snake. It would be like hating myself, and I have suffered too much for that. And though Athena has never apologized for punishing me for being raped, in her own way she has acknowledged me. They say the snake behind her symbol is her son, but I know it’s also me.
I know my story has been distorted and you probably think I’m a monster. Do I want to change your mind? I don’t know. Do I want you to stop being afraid of snakes and lopping off their heads with machetes? Yes. I can say yes to that. What do I really want?
I have to stop and think about that. No one has ever asked me.
I never thought to ask myself.
What I want is to be remembered as an ancestor—for I am. I am a mother. I brought life into this world, not just terror, and my children’s heroism and grace still inspires people today. And here’s, to my mind, the most gratifying part of this story: not many know Pegasus gave birth as well, not to a mini flying horse, but to a holy spring on Mt. Atticus. When his hooves touched down on the slopes a spring burst forth. Hippocrene. Holy water flowed down Mt. Atticus and inspired The Muses to recite. I am the grandmother of poetry.
Photo by Hans-Peter Traunig on Unsplash
What do you think? Do you see some part of yourself in Medusa? In the rapist Poseidon? In vengeful Athena? I’m curious to hear how you relate to this story. Even as a child, before I knew the background story, I related to Medusa. Interesting how the chthonic powers call to us, even when we have no idea what they are.
And of course, as a poet, I love that she is the grandmother, through her offspring Pegasus, of the sacred art of rhythm, line and word.
Kō aloha la ea
Concentrate on love by way of the light,
Jen
This is a reference to the context this story will be read in my upcoming book, “Piko: A Return to the Dreaming.”