April 6, 2021 • 57 mins
We all know snake-haired Medusa, the gorgon of Greek myth whose very gaze turns mortals and titans alike to stone. But where does this iconic monster come from and why has she lingered so very long in our art, minds and culture? In this Stuff to Blow Your Mind two-parter, Robert and Joe venture to the Gorgade isles in search of answers. (Originally published 4/28/2020)
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:05):
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name
is Robert Land and I'm Joe McCormick, and I was
about to say it's Saturday, but it's not Saturday though.
Today is a vault episode. Rob and I are out
this week for spring break, so we are sharing with
you an episode that originally published April. This is part
one of our Medusa series. Yeah, this is a lot
of fun. Hey, you welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
(00:40):
My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick. And hey,
it's Halloween in April. I'm so excited because we decided
it's got to be monster time here on Stuff to
Blow your Mind, even though it's not October yet. You know,
we we can't put all the monsters in October. There's
too much monster. Yeah, what would we talk about the
rest of the year if we didn't occasionally check in
with the monstrous denizens of the dark. And we have
(01:03):
a great one here for a couple of episodes. Because
there's there's just so much about it, so much about her.
We're going to be talking about the Gorgon, the most
famous of the three Gorgons, Medusa. Now Medusa is just
fascinating and enthralling figure, often above and beyond the source material.
But perhaps it's the perfect balance of the sort of
(01:26):
counterintuitive aspects in her being, or or sort of the
the shadow archetypes that seemed to resonate behind her. But
she is a long burning monstrosity in the minds of humanity.
Oh yeah, I mean this is I'm so excited about
this pair of episode. So just to give you a
little bit of a roadmap, I think in this first
episode here we're going to be mostly discussing the ancient
(01:47):
Greek myths of Medusa the origins of those myths, and
then later on in in part two, we're going to
explore more of the later interpretations of Medusa and how
she might apply to some interesting scientific and cultural topics.
But this, this is such rich territory. I don't know
if there is a richer monster out there than Medusa,
other than maybe the vampire archetype. Indeed, this is this
(02:11):
is fertile soil. And we we've talked about doing an
episode on Medusa for years. Uh it's one we've kind
of uh kicked around, but this time we're covering it
because uh, my son urged me to do it. So
here we are he's about to turn eight years old,
and since we couldn't actually go anywhere for spring break
due to the pandemic, we did kind of a makeshift
(02:33):
camp here at the house. We did a myth and
mushrooms camp. So my wife did a lot of mushroom
related crafts and activities with them, mushroom growing kid and
going out and you know, looking for mushrooms. And then, uh,
we both partook of a lot of mythology with him,
given the boy's recent enthrallment with it due to the
Percy Jackson novels by Rick Ryerdon I've heard of those,
(02:56):
but I don't know anything about them. So they have
something to do with with great myth. Oh yeah, they're
They're full of Greek myth. You know. It's it's sort
of a post Terry potter um world where you have
a you know, a boy, a young boy slash teen
by the name of Percy Jackson who is Percy Us
and he's encountering all the gods and monsters you would expect.
And yeah, it's the book seemed to be a lot
(03:18):
of fun, uh for the kids. And more to the
point it it gets them into mythology. I was talking
with Alison louder Milk about it and she said there
her son had gone through a phase of being just
super into Greek mythology because of it. Um, so, uh,
you know, we were, you know, we really got into
the mythology and Medusa really stood out to him. So
(03:39):
of course we watched the original nineteen eight one Clash
of the Titans, which features a very memorable Medusa sequence.
We also watched the nineteen nineties series Jim Hinson's The
Storyteller Greek Myths, which is excellent and features an episode
about the Gorgon's actually just watched this last night at
your recommendation. It's uh, it's streaming right now on the Yeah.
(04:00):
The episode about Perseus and the gorgon medusas is just
wonderful and it has great narration by Michael Gambon. Is
that Yeah, he plays the storyteller in this one. Uh. Yeah,
all four episodes are as of this recording anyway on
Amazon Prime. So yeah, they're they're they're wonderful, fun you
get what. Orpheus is one of the episodes of the
Minotaur and uh and Icarus and Datalus and of course
(04:22):
you know. With with my son, we also were reading
a lot of Carol Rose, one of my favorite monster
chroniclers and Folklori's and the boy himself absolutely demolished Deal
Larry's Book of Greek Myths, that nineteen sixty two illustrated
book that I know a lot of us grew up with.
So there's something I always wonder about with with ancient mythology,
(04:43):
including Greek myth and and that's that I I since
a couple of things are intention when you're you're exposing
children to them. Uh. One is that I feel like
kids are naturally drawn to mythology, like they just eat
it up, they love it. But at the same time,
a lot of ancient myths are just full of obscene
cruelty and stuff that like, uh, you know, the stuff
(05:04):
that that I don't always remember from the tellings of
those myths that I got when I was a kid,
I must have gotten some kind of sanitized versions of them.
Often do you find that a lot of that is
going on? And oh, yeah, yeah, Because on one hand,
some of the versions that he's he's reading, you know,
they they've sanitized it to a certain extent. You know,
certainly with Percy Jackson. Uh, certainly with this this really
(05:26):
cool comics series called The Olympians that I also recommend
um and then also the Book of Greek Myths does
that as well. But that he'll also come up and
he'll he'll tell me about some just awful detail from
a myth where somebody, you know, killed their parents or
their sign or something, and I'm like, oh, yeah, yeah,
Greek myths, Uh, a lot of horrible stuff happens in them,
and and a lot of these tales are are tragic.
(05:47):
And then of course one of the ironies of these
episodes is that, uh, as we really dive into the
origin story in the varied origin stories of Medusa, like
some of them are just very brutal in in a
way where I probably can't let him listen to these episodes. Yeah,
and I understand that. I mean, I think we'll try
not to dwell on the most obscene and cruel aspects
(06:09):
of these myths, but they are ancient myths. A lot
of ancient myths have obscene in cruel elements, So do
be prepared that kind of thing is coming. Yeah, So
if you're listening with children at cetera, Yeah, I know
that this is it's going to get into some really
dark territories, so you might want to scout it out first,
is all I'm saying. Yeah, now, you know we've mentioned
Jim Hinson Clash of the Titans. These are examples. Will
(06:29):
come back to it again and again because a lot
of times these are these are introductions to these worlds.
Percy Jackson uh is often an introduction to Greek mythology,
for for for younger folks these days. Um, Dungeon and
Dragons is another big one. Medusa has long resided within
the Monster Manual, where she's sort of she sort of
becomes a species unto herself. Oh, can you play as
(06:51):
a Medusa? I'm I'm sure somebody there's I'm sure there
have been some homebrew rules at some point, or even
some official rules for playing a gorgon. Yeah, but um,
but I'm not aware of them offhand. It would be
It's one of those things would be kind of hard
to h if you really have petrifying gaze, Like how
do you run like that in a tavern? I'm a
(07:11):
gorgon bard So all these audiences hate me. So all
of these are very much downstream versions of the myth
of Medusa, and some of you might, you know, you
might have have this sort of instinct to criticize any
discussion of the mythic creature, to begin with via such
(07:31):
recent pop culture expressions like Percy Jackson or Clash of
the Titans, which you know at times certainly plays fast
and loose with the myth. But one thing we have
to keep in mind is that pretty much all versions
of Medusa or any mythological tale are a downstream product,
the result of centuries upon centuries of oral tradition, various
(07:53):
tellings and retellings, various written accounts and references, cross references,
continually and perpetual reshaping the myth and the monster itself
to tell better stories, to impart specific cultural ideas, or
to merge with other tales or other belief systems. So yes,
while watching Clash of the Titans, which uh, you know
(08:16):
that was that was big for me, introducing me to
a lot of mythological ideas because it was always on
td S or T and T back in the day.
But but watching that it can be frustrating because we
inevitably recoil from you know, at the tale being told
one way and not another. Of liberties being taken the
influence of modern ideas and narratives like Star Wars, uh,
(08:37):
you know, obviously being in play in the creation of
this movie. But to a large extent, this was always
the way with myths. This there is often this illusion
of solidarity with the Greek, with Greek mythology, because all
these various tales come to be largely canonized within certain
major works uh, such as those of say Hesiod and
(08:58):
Ovid who will discuss us and then much later in
key modern mythology books. So much in the same way
that there is no one unchanging you. There is no
single unchanging Medusa. It is a creature that spans the ages,
altering its form along the way, sometimes slightly, sometimes in
major ways, while retaining certain aspects that resonate with us
(09:20):
on a on a truly universal level. Yeah, I mean, uh,
it's a very good point. The same way that modern
authors are sometimes cleaning up myths for you to make
them more palatable to children, or to make them more
acceptable to the morals of the day, or even not
not even just the moral Sometimes myths I think are
altered just to sort of make them more acceptable to
(09:40):
the narrative logic that's dominant within a within an era
um that was going on back then too. Yeah, So
it's just all I think, always something to keep in mind. Boy.
It's a hard thing to explain to to a young
person though, because like my son really wants he wants
the cannon version of the tail and he's they're into correcting, uh,
(10:02):
film adaptations and all, and I have to kind of
explain to them. It's like, well, you know, there's not
really just one story. There's no you know, there's this this,
This is a great point. I feel like children are
naturally cannon pedants? Why is that? Why is it that
when you're I was when I was a little kid,
and now I abhor that kind of thinking, but that's
(10:23):
absolutely how I was when I encounter all kinds of
mythology as a child, with Star Wars, with you know,
with everything. Why why are kids obsessive about cannon and
turn always turned to cannon pedantry? I guess A part
of a big part of it is, you know, you
look to your parents and authority figures you know, adjacent
to your parents, as as being the providers of truth
(10:46):
of telling you how the world works. And it's it's
only later that you really begin to understand that it's
not so cut and dry that your parents didn't have
it all figured out, that you have to figure some
out the stuff out for yourself, and something are beyond
figuring out or just sort of amorphous, like uh, you know,
the true nature of a mythological being. And then certainly
(11:08):
if they're if they're really into something like say Harry Potter,
like there is one version of Harry Potter, you know,
I mean, it is, it is, it is whatever J. K.
Rowling says it is. You know. So, um, it's hard
to compare. You can't really compare that to Greek myth. Well,
so maybe the place that we should start with here
(11:29):
is to try to give a basic retelling of the
main myths of the Gorgon, the main myths and Medusa
and Perseus um. What with the understanding that there are
a lot of different versions of these myths, and different
things will come in that we can explain as we
go on, but it probably makes sense to start with
a coherent version of the story. Absolutely, yeah, what uh? What?
(11:52):
Author David A. Limming in Medusa in the Mirror of
Time two thousand eighteen book referred to as quote, what
can reason to be called a canonical myth of Medusa. Yeah,
I think that's a decent way of putting it. And
that David Lemming book you mentioned Medusa in the Mirror
of Time, that that's going to be one of our
main sources over the course of these episodes. That's that's
a great, short, succinct book that captures a lot of
(12:15):
what's interesting about the Medusa myth. Uh, And so we'll
be referring to him a lot throughout these episodes. Yeah.
David A. Lemming is a Narritus Professor of English and
Comparative Literature at the University of Connecticut, and he's an
author of various works on myth. Yeah, and his his
this book is is well worth checking out. Before we
do that, however, we're going to take a quick break,
(12:36):
but we'll be right back. All right, we're back, So
it's time to tell the story of Medusa. Now. Of course,
as we said earlier, there are a lot of versions
of the Medusa story. This is a theme that evolves
over time, and we'll discuss the shifting canon as we
go on, but at the beginning here, it would probably
(12:56):
be best to start with the most commonly received version
of the myths of Medusa and Perseus. And I'll try
to summarize the story as best I can, um, relying
a lot on on work by David Lemming that we
mentioned earlier, but also with a bit of poetic color
from Ovid's telling in the Metamorphoses, the Garthen Dryden translation. Uh.
That we should note that though Ovid's telling is far
(13:19):
from the earliest, it's where some of the best known
aspects of the story come from today. Absolutely, And Uh,
one other thing I want to point out that will
become obvious is that, you know, we tend to refer
to this story is that of of Perseus and Medusa,
and that it is you know, that is that the
key conflict, uh, that we tend to focus on, and
(13:40):
it's the conflict that is brought out in these various
cinematic adaptations. But I think in some respects it's almost
more fair to consider it the story of Athena and
Medusa featuring Perseus. And we'll get into that as we go. Yeah,
And it's weird how Perseus can, sometimes, even though he's
ostensibly the hero of the story, feel kind of like
a little like Paul on or game piece that's being
(14:01):
moved around by various powers. Yeah, we're just a character
of chaos that is just occasionally nudged in different directions
by more powerful entities. Yeah. Okay, So, according to some
of the most ancient sources of the actual Medusa myth
as opposed to just sort of like the imagery of Medusa. Um,
(14:22):
this will be especially the Greek poet Hesiod, who would
have been writing in the seventh or eighth century b c. E.
Medusa was originally descended from a family of primordial gods
and monsters. The original being in this lineage of gods
and monsters was Gaya, who is the personification of the
(14:43):
Earth itself. And at first Guya was without a mate,
so she conceived a son parthenogenetically meaning virgin birth, much
like an island stranded komodo dragon. And this son that
she gave birth to was no as Pontus, and he
became her counterpart. She was the personification of the Earth
(15:05):
and Pontus was the personification of the ocean. Yeah, and
this is the sort of thing is not uncommon among
primordial mythic beings. Uh. So, then together Guya and her
son Pontus conceived more children, including the two figures who
would become the parents of Medusa. And these figures were
focus the sea god, who Homer called the Old Man
(15:26):
of the Sea. He's sometimes depicted with claws. He was
generally kind of a fishman, crab person type thing. So
it's kind of like the Crabby character on a SpongeBob basically.
I'm actually not familiar with SpongeBob canon. I can't go
in there, but there's a fishman, crab person monster. Yeah.
The character is Mr Crabs who runs um runs a restaurant.
(15:49):
And he's voiced by Clancy Brown. Oh wow, Clancy Brown.
He was on SpongeBob. Oh yeah, he's he's a major
part of it. Well, I'm glad to hear he's doing voicework. Yeah. Yeah,
he has a great voice. It's a great to see that.
You know, he lends it to a number of different projects. Okay,
so we gotta focus the Old Man of the Sea.
And then on the other hand, we've got Ketto or Keto,
(16:11):
which is where we get our classic terminology for whales,
the idea of the ketas or the SETAs, and and
Keto was a giant sea monster and together focus and
Ketto produced a whole mess of monsters from their union.
So first of all, you've got the gray and this
is a set of triplets who were all born with
gray hair. They're described as hags who share one eye
(16:35):
and one tooth between the three of them, and their
gray hair was believed to embody the foam of heavy
seas during a storm. Yeah. They are often depicted in
TV and film adaptations of them De Deuce's story. You
see them in Clash of the Titans, Hintson, Percy Jackson
and others. My son is really into them, and the
other day he quizzed me on what their names were,
(16:58):
at which I had no idea, uh, but then he
spouted them off. They are Dino, Inyo and the Fredo.
When there are three anyway, so in some tellings there
are only two. Yeah, and I think their names I
don't recall exactly what they translate to, but they have
something to do with the qualities of the sea. Their
names translate to things like depth and terror and stuff. Now,
(17:20):
another offspring of this union of of Forcus and Kato
or Quito is Thusa, who became the mother of Polyphemus.
Polyphemus of course, is the Cyclops in the Odyssey who
discus stabs in the eye. Uh. And then you've got
a kidna, the she Viper. This is a woman who
was half snake. Yeah. And sometimes she's credited as being
(17:41):
the mother of Monsters and other tellings, mother of Medusa
even and I guess you know, there's a little bit
of a kidna in the recreation of of of the
gorgon Ian Clash of the Titans Ray Harry Housen's fabulous sequence.
Oh is she half snake in that? Yeah? She's she's
depicted as being um a snake from the waist down,
(18:04):
you know, having been kind of a serpentine centaur uh
and and then being more traditionally a gorgon from the
waist up, but without the wings. Okay. So another one
of the offspring here is one that's familiar to us,
is going to be Scilla, the the sea monster with
many heads, who swallowed sailors who came too close to
her rocks. And she's classically the counterpart of Charybdis. Right,
(18:27):
So you've got this pair of hazards in the ocean
that is difficult to thread a pathway through. Charybdis of course,
is like a whirlpool. Yeah, and then, of course, finally
you've got the Gorgons, and the Gorgon's are a trio
of sisters whose name comes from the word gor ghos,
which means frightening or terrifying. Medusa is one of the
(18:48):
three Gorgon sisters. The names of the other two are
Thinno and Urially, and curiously, we are told by multiple
ancient sources that while the other two Gorgon sisters are immortal, tragically,
Medusa is not immortal. Hes He had writ specifically that
her fate was a sad one, for she was mortal,
(19:08):
though it's I'm not sure if it's ever explained anywhere
why specifically she and only she was mortal. Yeah, nothing
ever seems, at least in anything I've read, seems to
be really made of that fact. Like it's not like, oh, well,
that means that Perseus is forever hounded by these immortal
gore guns or anything like that. It's just kind of
here's the facts. It seems like one of those things
(19:31):
that might have been when people were trying to stitch
together disparate versions of a of a myth cycle that
that had incompatible facts. You might just paper that over
by inserting a little like, by the way, she was
mortal for some reason. Yeah, yeah, if someone was like,
well I thought they were immortal. No, No, she was mortal,
so she's dead. She was the only one though. Yeah. Anyway,
(19:53):
according to a fragmentary document called the Shield of Heracles,
the three Gorgon sisters would talk about with serpents hanging
from their girdles. So imagine a kind of Batman utility built,
but all the pouches are replaced with snakes, and the
belt snakes would lear and they would flick their tongues
that anyone who beheld them. Yeah, and I have to
(20:15):
say depictions of this are cooler and grizzly are looking
than it sounds, because that sounds cool enough for you. Well, yeah,
I know it doesn't sound cool when I read it initially,
because it's like, oh, and that she had they had
snakes for belts. That just sounds kind of, I don't know,
kind of lame. But then you see an image and
it's like these snakes you're hanging off and you know,
(20:37):
and maybe writhing a bit, and there's there's perhaps a
sense of the we won't get into this until the
second episode. But uh, you know, you get into some
of these Freudian concepts of what Medusa is all about,
and you look at an image like that and you
can you can see it. But again, more on that
in the second episode. Yeah, it should not come as
a surprise that some people, especially Freud, read a lot
(20:58):
of genital sygnificance into the depiction of the snake bearing sisters.
Here now, writing of the three Gorgon sisters, Apollodorus says
that their heads were twined about with the scales of dragons,
and that they had golden wings or I've also seen
it said sometimes bronze wings, and also great tusks, like
(21:21):
a swine's tusks. Yeah, those wings are often forgotten in
art and you know, other depictions, cinematic or otherwise. I
think in part because that's just one more thing you
have to try and bring to life, either with effects
or otherwise. Though Hinson does have the wings in his version.
I think also sometimes, as with the Clash adaptation, there's
(21:42):
an attempt to focus more on those serpentine details, you know,
like people want hybrid city, but they don't want to
deal with a chimera um uh, you know, generally speaking, chimera.
Of course, for the most part, you don't see a
lot of like cinematic adaptations of the mythical chimera either.
We want half and half, we don't want uh you know,
(22:02):
three different types of animal physiologies merged together. Well, yeah,
I mean, I want, at what point do you start
pushing from minimally counterintuitive into just like too complicated, too weird? Yeah, yeah,
I think that's a big part of it too. Yeah.
So anyway, you've got these three terrifying sisters, all with
snakes of England. They've got scaly dragon heads, they've got
(22:23):
wild boar tusks and huge metal wings. And in this telling,
Medusa is quite clearly a primordial monster, right, She's ancient.
She springs from a line of beings with deep roots
in the earth and sea and natural forces. And it's
in this version of Medusa it's easy to see similarities
here with other primordial monster gods who embody or spring
(22:47):
from embodiments, especially of the sea, right like Tia Mott,
the saltwater dragon of ancient Babylonian myth, particularly in the
Uma a leash who spits poison and death upon the
world to create. It's creatures that are kind of xenomorph
like in that they have acid for blood. Yeah. And
I think in all this to remembering the salt water
(23:08):
origin of these creatures, we have to remember the you know,
the importance of sailing and fishing in the Mesopotamian and
in the know, the Greek world that we're discussing here,
like the terror of the sea, the risks of the sea,
the unknown depths of the sea, you know, all of
these impacting the psyche and the creativity of of of
(23:30):
early people. Well, I think it's no coincidence that Poseidon
is maybe the most like cruel and capricious and bad
tempered of all the Olympian gods, right because the sea
is a place of great bounty and promise, but it's
also full of chaos and death and and it can't
be it can't necessarily be predicted. The sea itself is
bad tempered. Yeah. Yeah, it really cannot be trusted. Uh.
(23:54):
And you see that with with arguably with the gods
in general, but especially with Poseidon. But Okay, that's the
version of Medusa where she she's from this primordial lineage
of ancient creatures and monsters there are other tellings in
which it seems like Medusa was once maybe a human
or at least something more vaguely humanoid like. One of
(24:18):
the main examples is the version of the Medusa myth
that we get presented in Ovid's Metamorphoses, which is probably
the most familiar version of the myth to us today,
probably the most canonical version, and in this it says
that Medusa was once a beautiful young woman with many suitors.
She was widely admired for her beauty and her glamorous hair.
(24:39):
Um Avid writes, quote, Medusa once had charms to gain
her love a rival crowd of envious lovers strove they
who have seen her own they ne'er did trace more
moving features in a sweeter face. Yet above all her
length of hair they own in golden ringlets, waved and
graceful shown. So the this goes very much against like
(25:01):
the the version of Medusa we were just talking about,
who's like this, uh, you know who, who's sort of
monster to the core and monster from the beginning. But
in this version of the story, tragically Medusa catches the
attention of the cruel and violent god Poseidon, the lord
of the sea, the commander of natural disaster is like
(25:22):
earthquakes and storms. And in Avid's telling, Poseidon comes down
to the earth and he rapes Medusa in the midst
of the temple of Pallas Athena, the virgin goddess of wisdom.
And this attack represents a desecration of Athena's temple. And
so because her sacred home is defiled, Athena becomes furious.
(25:43):
And you, you, of course, do not want to be
on Athena's bad side. After the attack is over, Athena
takes out her revenge horribly, not on her uncle Poseidon,
but on Medusa. Yeah, it's as if Poseidon is is
kind of untouchable and us, Yeah, based one of the
Big Three after all. And uh, you know, I think
(26:04):
Arachne would remind us that the gods as a whole
are cruel and violent. You might remember, listeners, Arachne was
turned into a spider for disrespecting the gods, namely Athena,
of whom she lost a weaving contest to um. But yeah, this, this,
this particular telling of god and possibly mortal interactions really
(26:29):
smacks of cruelty. I should note a couple of things here, now, Uh,
Ovid chiefly contributes or at least records, the sexual assault
aspect of this story in the classical tradition, while Hesiod
and uh Apahollodorus keep it at lay with you know,
they lay together, and and uh and that offended Athena,
(26:50):
while others tellers of the tale have described the union
as an act of seduction, such as folklore Carol Rose. Now,
I don't know how much of that is just sanitizing
it again, a little bit like we've said, you know,
you don't taking some of the more horrific details out
of the story for specially younger readers. Um, but uh,
I just I thought that was important to note. Apollodorus, however,
(27:14):
added the wrinkle that Medusa had previously claimed that her
beauty matched that of Athena. So we get into territory
where from the point of view of the gods, this
is just mortals paying for their vanity one more time,
so that it's not just Athena is blaming the victim
for the crime, but Athena also has it in for
(27:34):
the victim because she previously had the gall to say
that she was on Athena's level. Yeah, exactly, And and
so Athena, she turns her fury against Medusa. Here of
it again, writes the bashful goddess that's talking about Athena.
The bashful goddess turned her eyes away nor during such
bold impurity survey. But on the ravished virgin vengeance takes
(27:56):
her shining hair is changed to hissing snakes. These in
her aegis Palace joys to bear the hissing snakes, her
foes more sure and snare than they did lovers once
when shining hair. It's interesting that he describes Athena as bactful. Uh,
it's not great first description when it comes to mind. Yeah, well,
(28:16):
I mean there's this weird thing the way Athena is
depicted as I mean, it's often emphasized that she is
like there's something pure about her, that she is the
virgin goddess, they say, um and so, so that's sometimes
described as this weird quality of like shyness or something.
But of course we know that Athena is quite bold
(28:36):
and quite powerful and has great uh wisdom and strength
and rage and you do not want to be her enemy. Yeah.
I hope she didn't listen to the podcast. I don't
know if we're really portraying her in the best light here. Now,
not a lot of the gods come out of this
looking great. Um. But so anyway, this is how Medusa
becomes a monster. Athena transforms her into this hateful mockery
(29:00):
of her former self. She's once known for her beauty,
you know, her curly locks of hair. Now she's a
creature with slithering snakes for hair, a creature so hideous
that anyone who looks upon her would instantly be turned
to stone. Yeah, it's it's a it's a weird and
dark origin story, but you know, here we are. But
so beyond her tragic origin story, Medusa is probably best
(29:22):
known as the monster, the sort of dragon figure of
the Perseus myth, And so I think maybe now we
should turn to the myth of Perseus's journey. And one
of my main sources here, of course, is going to
be that book by David Lemming, which provides an excellent
overview of and synthesis of the different sources on the story.
Like a great many heroic narratives, the story of Perseus
(29:42):
actually begins with a miraculous conception under dire circumstances. So,
once upon a time, and the ancient Greek city of Argos,
which is on the eastern end of the Peloponnese. It's
often said to have been the oldest Greek city or
one of the oldest Greek cities. The city was ruled
by a fish and paranoid king named a Chrysis, and
(30:04):
a crisis had a daughter named Danny, but a Chrysis
he longs to have a son to carry on his line,
and one day a Chrysis visits an oracle to ask
whether he will ever be able to father a son,
and instead, the oracle warns him that he will not
have a son, but his daughter Danny will, and the
(30:25):
boy she gives birth to will one day murder him.
Now how many Greek stories start with an oracle and
then they turn out good? Yeah, it's like, why would
you visit an oracle at all? It just never works out, right,
I mean, it's always some like ironic point about trying
to avoid faith. Yeah, yeah, I mean, it's it's really
(30:46):
a story we continue to tell to this day. You know,
just the idea that if you, yeah, you don't really
want to know what's coming, because it's only going to
make things worse. You're not going to be able to
really duck fate or you're ye're just gonna, you know,
double down on the horrors to come. Uh yeah, it's
I mean, it's it's it's one of these stories resonate
so strongly with us. Yeah. Uh So, of course, a Chrysis,
(31:08):
being selfish and kind of paranoid, he fears for his
own life, so he resolves to prevent the prophecy from
ever coming true. And he says, Okay, Danny right now
is childless at the time he gets the warning, she
doesn't have a son yet, and so the Chrysiest figures
he can escape his fate if he just locks her
in a prison cell forever. I've seen the prison characterized
(31:30):
in different ways. Sometimes it's a tower. I've seen it
elsewhere characterized as like some kind of subterranean dungeon, or
even a box of bronze. But anyway, So, of course,
the crisis believes that by imprisoning his daughter like this,
she will stay childless forever. But Zeus, the king of
the gods who reigns in the sky, he sees the
(31:51):
young woman locked away in her prison cell, and he
comes down to her in the form of a shower
of gold from the clouds, and Danny conceives a child.
This is her child as a boy, and she gives
him the name Perseus. Uh. This part is yet another
recurring theme in Greek mythology. Of course, God coming down
and having sex with a mortal woman to father a
(32:13):
child to become a type of demigod or a son
of God. Here. Yeah, that's this is also one of
the key plot points in those Percy Jackson books is
that all the the the young characters are the children
of the gods that have been in the modern world
created sired the same way and kind of you know
left uh, you know, none of them have any real
(32:35):
connection with their divine parents and have a lot of
mixed up feelings concerning them. Well yeah, I mean, the
gods do not tend to be very good parents here.
So like, so you Perseus, Now, this boy is half
human and he's half king of the gods. And so
Perseus begins to grow up in this prison cell with
his mother, and at some point a Chrisius discovers this
(32:59):
boy and prison with Danny and crisis. Of course, is
still in fear for his life, and so he says, okay,
I've got to I've got to be more more extreme
even now. So he has Danny and the young Perseus
locked inside a box and tossed into the ocean to die.
It's interesting. Living describes this box as quote a sort
(33:20):
of arc as in the Ark of the Covenant, and
indeed that's often how it is depicted, including in the
Clash of the Titan and also in that Jim Hinson adaptation. Yeah,
the strategy is often presented as a kind of indirect
murder method. It's like, hey, I didn't kill them, I
just left them to their fate. Uh. It seems like
(33:40):
a kind of weird moral sensibility that makes a real
distinction there. But he a lot of characters in Greek
cultures seem to think along these lines. Yeah. It's as
if to say, for legal purposes, the ocean is the
one that will murder you, right, um. Yeah, But of
course Danny and Perseus didn't die. Instead, while they're floating
(34:04):
around in this box, they are rescued by a fisherman
named Dictus, who is the brother of Polydectes, the king
of the island of Seraphos. And there on the island
of Seraphos, Danny and Perseus come under the protection of
Polydectes court under under the protection of his house. Now
eventually the king Polydectes here. He turns out to be
(34:27):
a pretty wicked king too. He decides that he wants
to marry Danny, but she refuses him, and Perseus supports
his mother in her refusal of the king's hand. So
Polydectes what he wants a way to get rid of
young Perseus, to sort of get him out of the picture,
to improve his chances of of wedding Danny. And a
(34:49):
great opportunity actually presents itself. Let's send Perseus out on
a suicide mission. Polydectes sends Perseus out with the task
of killing the mom Sir Medusa, who is of course
one of the dreaded Gorgon sisters, and to bring back
her severed head. Now, this version that you just said,
this makes the most sense, right, Like Percy's wants to
(35:10):
protect his mother, Polydectes wants to marry her, and he's like, sure,
I'll leave your your mother alone if you bring me
the head of the Medusa. Ha ha. But and the
typical version of the story is that Polydectes just demands
some fine horses, like, oh, I need some just ridiculously
nice horses. Uh, let's see you get those. And then
(35:31):
Perseus just leaps up like a final bidder in a
Hollywood auction scene, you know, where they just outrageously outbid
everybody by like a million dollars and gives himself the
suicide mission. He's like, I'll tell you what, I'll bring
you the head of a gorgon, and um In Polydectes
is like, okay, um, you know, I was thinking about
trying to send you on a suicide mission, but if
(35:52):
you just want to propose one, go for it. Um.
So he's He's of course delighted and accepts. Yeah. But
but it's like Percy's who's just who comes up with
the idea in in most of these tellings where it's
just like, i'll kill the gorgon. How about that? Yeah? So, actually,
I think the way it works as Polydectes he tries
to ruse where he says, actually, I'm not going to
marry your mom. Don't worry about it. Chill out. I'm
(36:14):
gonna marry some other woman. But if I marry this
other lady, I'm gonna need some good Mayor's as a
wedding present. And of course Perseus what he doesn't have
any money to go out horse trading and get horses
for a wedding present, so what does he have to offer.
Basically just has his courage, so he's like, hey, hey,
I know I'll go find a prime primordial snake lady.
(36:36):
I'll kill her. I'll bring you her head. And again,
of course this works out great for Polydectes because Polydectes
knows that the gaze of Medusa turns men into stone.
So this is an easy way to be rid of Perseus.
Here's one less pesky kid getting in the way of
his his dating game. I mean, I criticized Perseus because hey,
it's really easy to hate perseus um based on all
(36:59):
the details of the story. But but I guess you
can see this as being really clever on his part
because he chooses something, He chooses a task that is
difficult enough or even seemingly impossible enough that Polydectes agrees
to it. But also he has he has enough confidence
that he can somehow pull it off, right. I mean,
(37:19):
I think again, one of the most common personality traits
we see in these heroes of old is just kind
of like endless confidence. You know, you should have no
reason to think that you can kill the gorgon Medusa,
but he just, yeah, I can do it. Yeah, I'll
figure it out. Stuff just kind of falls into my lap.
That's how it works. But but either way you kind
of look at it. Medusa is not even the adversary
(37:43):
that is thrust upon him by a cruel king, which
is which is what we see like saying the Labors
of Hercules. She is instead just out there on the
edge of the world, minding her own business, already punished harshly,
when percy Is simply decides that killing her would be
an ideal feet to accomplish his ends. Yeah, she's not
doing anything. It's not it's not like Baowolf, like she's
(38:05):
raiding the hall or something. She's just on the other
side of the world. Yeah, Like Clash of the Titans, Like,
one of the things it does is it retrofits the
story where the head of the Medusa is the thing
we need to overcome some other adversary or to get
through some some great horror that's coming um, which you know,
I think makes it a little more palpable to to
(38:27):
modern audiences. But again, looks like you said, we have
to we have to think about what the model of
the hero is that we're dealing with in these ancient versions. Right,
all right, we need to take a quick break, but
we'll be right back with more than and we're back.
So Percius sets out on his quest, and along the
(38:47):
way he's given aid by the god Hermes, who is
of course the messenger of the gods who flies between
worlds on his winged sandals, and of course also by
Athena popping back up in the story yet again to
to just never stop spitting calamity in Medusa's direction. Yeah,
as if Medusa hadn't suffered enough for angering Athena, the
(39:09):
gray a had goddess instantly jumps into help Perseus out
in his quest to murder her. Right, Uh, And it's
worth considering that there are sort of double alliances here. Like, first, yes,
it really does seem just kind of like Athena hates
Medusa and is always making things worse for her. But second,
also Perseus is Athena's demi god half brother. Right, they
(39:29):
both share Zeus as a father, and both were conceived
in these unconventional mythological ways Athena springs from the head
of Zeus. H So, I think you could see Perseus
as a kind of champion or representative of the interests
of the Olympian pantheon down here on Earth, like the
(39:49):
Zeus administration has as an agent on Earth Perseus, and
you're kind of going to see that in the way
that he fights against and causes trouble for these other
primordial non Olympian beings, Like the enemies of the Zeus
administration will just get endless grief from Perseus. Like Perseus,
(40:09):
I need you to go on Network News this evening,
just make all the rounds and just verbally attack all
of my enemies, all the all the Titans, all the monsters.
You just let them have it, right, anybody from the
line of Guia, any Titans out there, Yeah, just go
at them. But anyway, Percy, so he goes on this
journey with multiple stops, so we don't have to get
(40:30):
into all the stops on the journey right here, there's
some that are more Germane to what we're talking about
than others. I think, Yeah, but if we were to
make a montage on it, basically Perseus needs to I
d the Gorgon's he needs to gear up with magical
weapons to fight them, find out where they are exactly,
and of course travel there. Right. That's that's a good summary.
So at one point Perseus does encounter the three gray sisters,
(40:52):
the gray haired hags who share the one eye and
the one tooth between them and perseus strategy here is
quite clear, for he steals their one eye. Just seems
which just I mean, he sounds just like such a bully.
There's like three hags who share one eye, and he
takes their one eye, and he uses the eye to
(41:13):
get leveraged basically to leverage information out of them, specifically
about how to acquire some pieces of magic equipment that
he needs. Yeah, he's direct and to the point. Now,
I and I love how in some versions of the
tale Perseus returns their eye and tooth, because sometimes he
takes the tooth as well afterwards, and other times he
just keeps them right. And some modern tellings find a
(41:37):
middle ground by having him return the eye but just
like throwing it into the room somewhere where they have
to like scramble for it, So he's not being you know,
a complete meaning about it, like he's not just gonna
keep the eye forever, squash it or whatever. But he
doesn't just hand it back like okay, business concluded. I
don't know something about it just seems like so classically
(41:57):
bullysh It's like the bully stealing the kids glasses. It's like, oh,
four uys need his glasses. Yeah. Anyway, so we know
he's got to get this magical equipment, so we has
to go to the realm of the Nymphs to get
some of it, and he ends up acquiring a number
of powerful objects and tools to to help him in
his quest, including a pair of winged sandals, a leather
(42:20):
bag that's known as a kipsist, sometimes translated as a wallet,
but I think this is best understood as like a
sack of some kind, a helmet from hades that confers
the power of invisibility, a magic sickle made of unbreakable adamantine,
and a shield that is so well polished that its
(42:41):
face is as a mirror. I mean, he really gears
up for this quest, and the thing is like, if
these are magical items, if this was dungeons and dragons,
I don't think he'd even be able to attune to
this many items. I think there's like a three attunement limit. Uh.
And he's just like just just geared up to the gills,
which high power magical items in video game terms. I
(43:03):
was thinking this might be described as over leveling. Yes,
but anyway, once he has all the weapons he needs, uh,
and once he discovers where he needs to go, percy
As uses the winged Sandals to fly to the dwelling
place of the Gorgon's which is someplace out at the
edge of the world. Yeah. I love how Limbing describes
(43:24):
this place is a quote a kind of underworld at
the end of the ocean. Yeah. In more rationalist accounts,
it's described as a place kind of far out to
the west, like a series of islands in the Atlantic Ocean.
But wherever this otherworldly places. Once he gets there, Perseus
knows he remembers in advance that he cannot look at
(43:46):
Medusa or he will be turned to stone, so he
uses the mirror faced shield to see her as he
sneaks up upon the sisters while they're sleeping, And they're
sleeping among a garden of stones that are currently the
remains of men and animals who once looked Medusa in
the eye. Yeah, and this is a haunting uh setting
(44:07):
that that is really brought to wonderful life. And in
some of these adaptations again that the clash of the
Titans uh sequence with Perseus and Medusa is just uh
so wonderfully brought to life totally though. One of the
things that again it's like how it gets adapted to
our modern sensibilities. Modern adaptations tend to make it some
(44:27):
kind of heroic fight against this threatening enemy. I mean
in the story, he sneaks up on the sisters while
they're sleeping, you know, they're they're taking a nap, and
Perseus comes up to Medusa and uses the magic sickle
to chop off her head and then put it in
a leather sack. Yeah, and then run before the other
two Organs can really do much about it. Which, yeah,
(44:49):
it doesn't. It's not very cinematic, it's not very um,
it's not intense. You know. The the Ray Harry House
and sequence, for instance, makes it where it's more like
Perseus is hunted by the monster because that ultimately creates
more tension you know, for our for us is as
viewers and resonates more with with our our modern expectations. Uh,
(45:10):
but but not so much with like the role of
the Greek hero. Yeah. So Strangely, when Medusa has killed,
it's noted that a couple of mythical beings just sort
of erupt out of her dead body. One of them
is the winged horse Pegasus, and the other is a
warrior known as Chris or Yeah, who, by the way,
would himself go on to father the three headed monster. Garon.
(45:33):
The Limbing notes that there's some indication that Medusa somehow
unnaturally birthed these creatures via the parentage of Poseidon. Fair enough,
I mean, we're up to our waist in a in
a pretty weird story. That doesn't really make it too
much weirder, uh to imagine that. For some reason, when
I was reading about this, I was reminded so much
(45:53):
of the ending of The Fly Too, where where like
the monster is kind of defeated and you end up
with like two entities emerging from it. Though in that
like one is pure and one is monstrous, and this
one like both are beautiful, Like it's a seemingly normal
humanoid hero and a beautiful flying horse. So I don't know,
you know, the original Fly, I just realized would fit
(46:15):
in quite well with a of its metamorphoses. Right, It's
a story about a change in the body brought on
by Hubris. Oh man, that's perfect anyway. So back to
Perseus a Medusa. So Medusa is dead, head chopped off.
Perseus has got it, and he crams the head into
the bag into the Kivisus and now Medusa's Gorgon's sisters
thin Oh and your Reality. They are awakened, and of
(46:38):
course they become enraged because they see their sister dead,
and they give chase, trying to kill the boy. But
fortunately Perseus still has some gear. He uses the helm
of invisibility and the winged Sandals to escape them. Now
Medusa is dead, and the story is far from over.
On the journey home with the Gorgon's head in the sack,
(46:58):
Perseus stops to take part in several other adventures. A
major one that we're not going to get into in
depth is uh this part of the story where he
rescues a princess named Andromeda from a dragon and ends
up marrying her, but also as part of the story
where where the head of Medusa becomes very relevant. Perseus
comes across Atlas Atlas is of course a a Titan.
(47:21):
You know, he was one of the original race of
Titans that were defeated in a war by the gods
led by Zeus, and so now he's the sort of
like defeated prisoner of war type figure who is tortured
after losing this war by the gods by being forced
to hold up the sky for eternity. And when Perseus
arrives in Atlas's lands, Atlas is obviously not a fan
(47:44):
of course. First of all, Atlas is suffering after his
people lost this war to Zeus, and Perseus claims Zeus
is his father. Second, like, who is this kid with
a bloody leather bag? But uh so, because he feels
not welcomed by Atlas, Perseus pulls the severed head of
Medusa out of the bag and shows it to Atlas.
Atlas looks on the head and he turns to stone,
(48:06):
and in this form, Atlas becomes a mountain range that
holds up the sky. Then, when Percy has finally arrives
back home with his bride Andromeda, he uses Medusa's head
to turn the wicked king Polydectes and his servants into stone,
and he sets his mother free. So really, Percy's is
just going on a freaking rampage with the Gorgon's head,
(48:28):
just petrifying anyone he likes, even a Titan before finally, uh,
you know, eventually handing it back, in which we'll get
to uh fun fact um. Atlas shows up in that
Hintson adaptation and played by none other than Pat Roach.
Oh yeah, Pat Pat Roach of course played the bald
Nazi that Indiana Jones fights uh in front of the
(48:51):
uh the airplane and Greater the Lost Art gets turned
into propeller soup. Yeah, yeah, he plays uh. Oh, he's
in like Conan the Barberry and well no, he's encoding
the Destroyer. Uh, he's in that. Um. He is also
in Clash of the Titan where he plays the Festus
and of course his background was British professional wrestling, so
he's quite an interesting fellow. Now in the hints And
(49:14):
version of the story, they change it so they don't
they don't make Percy is so vindictive, and they don't
make it like Petrofaction murder. Right. It's portrayed that Atlas
is weary of this. You know, he's tired from having
to hold up the sky and it's like, uh, Perseus
takes pity on him and turns him to stone to uh,
(49:34):
you know, I guess to save him his burden. Oh sweet,
it was. It was a mercy petrofaction. There was another
interesting fact that Limming mentions in his book, and that's
that the petrofaction of Polydectes and his followers might be
a type of ideological myth, the myth explaining, you know,
an origin or feature of something, and in this case,
it would be a known circle of standing stones on
(49:55):
the island of Seraphos. That you know, it's like, oh,
here's you know, Polydectes and his followers who were turned
to stone once. But anyway, at the end of the story,
here's where we get into some really interesting territory. Perseus
doesn't just like, you know, keep the head as a trophy.
He gives the head of Medusa to Athena and it
becomes the emblem of Athena's breastplate or shield. Now, of course,
(50:20):
in addition to being the goddess of wisdom, Athena was
sometimes styled to say goddess of warfare, and this, of
course becomes part of the very interesting tradition of the aegis,
the idea that both Athena and Zeus had this object
that's mentioned in ancient Greek literature all over the place,
but exactly what it is is sort of unclear. Now,
(50:43):
it's called an aegis. It's sometimes translated as a shield
or a breastplate or piece of armor, or some kind
of animal skin like a goat skin. Whatever it is,
it's it's some kind of protection device or some kind
of covering that the gods can hide behind or can
shield themselves with. And it has this power that's described
(51:07):
both as protective and as frightening, which is very interesting.
Like normally you might think of a weapon as terrifying,
but this is a terrifying shield or a terrifying covering
or piece of armor. And in many depictions, the central
visual feature of the aegis of Athena and of Zeus
(51:27):
becomes the head of Medusa, or at least the image
of the head of Medusa. Yeah, and this is really
one of those points where the story does seem to
just come back around to being all about Athena's rage
against Medusa, as as she accepts the whole head of
the gorgon and absorbs it into her shield or makes
her shield out of it. The less harsh interpretation of
(51:48):
this is that, you know, via the creation of the
Gorgon's Athena unleashed a powerful weapon on the world, and
now she has taken it back and claimed it as
her own. But I also can't help but think of
Medusa as is still being alive in some fashion, you know,
in the same way that the snakes continue to writhe
in the cinematic and artistic um depictions of Medusa's head.
(52:10):
So you know, it's there's even this idea that perhaps
the head is still alive as its essence is infused
into a thenis shield. And if so, it just seems
like another level of just you know, horrible God inflicted fate.
You know, speaking of fate as a coda to the story,
I should mention, of course, Perseus, Denny, and Andromeda eventually
(52:33):
do return to uh Denny and Perseus's home city of Argos.
And when Perseus shows back up, a Crisius remember him
from the beginning, the king didn't want to be murdered
by his grandson. Well he's just like dude, I am done,
and he just flees. He goes to another city to hide,
and later on in the city where the king goes
(52:53):
into hiding, Perseus just happens to show up and he
takes part in some funeral games or funeral games are
a feature of a lot of stories back then, remember
the funeral games at the death of Patroclus and the Iliad.
Funeral games include things like the throwing of the discuss.
So Perseus is like, yeah, I'll play. So he decides
to throw the discus and he accidentally hurls the discus
(53:15):
into his grandfather's head, killing him and proving the oracle's
prophecy true. And it has like nothing to do with
the the the adventure with the Gorgon or anything. He
just accidentally throws a disk and hits him, almost as
if someone said, storyteller, what about that that oracle and
(53:35):
the prophecy that you mentioned at the beginning. Oh, yeah,
he he threw a discus at a funeral game and
it hit hit him in the head. He died, after all,
he died, after all, we kid. But again, this guy's
come back to the you know, sort of the nature
of myth about like converging and uh in the absorption
of different stories and the continuing uh, you know, retinkering
(53:59):
of the tay ole in the myth as we as
we as we experience it. Uh So, you know, sometimes
I think there are elements like that where things don't
maybe completely come together. There's some little plot holes that
emerge that you know, sometimes other storytellers come around and
try to fill them or smooth and out. I feel
like it would be more conventional and make more sense
if like Perseus, I don't know he got out the
(54:21):
Medusa will say he still had the Medusa head. Maybe
he gets it out of the bag every now and
then to clean it or something, and you know, he
gets it out of the bag right at the moment
that a crisis accidentally walks into the room and sees
it and then turns to stone. You know that seems
like that would be more more connected in a holistic way. Yeah,
but you know, instead that would be nice and tragic,
would have an air of tragedy to it to a
(54:43):
certain extent. I mean, but then also not that much,
because the grandfather did lock his mother up in a prison,
and that's what he's a bad guy. Yeah, so yeah,
there's not you know, what what can you say is
the disc ascending supposed to be funny. Maybe it is maybe,
or you know it, it also kind of sounds like
(55:04):
to me, this is just me spitballing here. This is
nothing that lembiting argues. But it also has the smack of, say,
a story that originally didn't have any of that middle stuff. Like,
let me tell you the story about a king who
heard that his grandson would kill him. So he, uh,
he didn't let his daughter out of a box. She
had a son anyway, so he threw him in another box,
(55:25):
threw him in the ocean. They and they were lost
for years and years. Then they came back. He was
in a funeral game through a discus and he died.
I mean, it's not I'm not saying that's a great story,
but at least it's it gets to the end a
little quicker. But instead we have this whole additional story
that ends up sandwiched in the middle. You know, it
actually forms a very similar kind of bracket to the
(55:46):
bracketing in the narrative of Jason and the Argonauts, right
where like, you know, he goes on a journey in
the middle, but then comes back to the court situation
at the end, and and there's sort of you know,
vengeance happens or fate is delivered. Yeah, at any rate,
it does bring us to the end of this particular
mythological story, and it brings us to the end of
(56:08):
this episode, but not the end of our discussion of Medusa. Yeah,
it looks like we need to call part one here.
But next time we'll be able to come back and
explore so many more fascinating angles on this myth. Uh.
We'll get to talk about possible origins and aperture, pic magic, Uh,
sort of backwards development of myths that can sometimes happen.
(56:29):
We'll talk about reception history, you know, all throughout cultures
and in different time periods. We'll talk about art, we'll
talk about science. I'm very excited, absolutely all right. So
in the meantime, if you want to check out other
episodes of Stuff to Blow your mind, and we have
done quite a few episodes about monsters and myths over
the years, you can find us wherever you get your podcasts,
(56:51):
wherever that happens to be. Help us out by rating, reviewing,
and subscribing. Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio
producers Seth Nay Chillis Johnson. If you would like to
get in touch with us with feedback on this episode
or any other, to suggest a topic for the future,
or just to say hi. You can email us at
contact at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com.
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name
is Robert Land and I'm Joe McCormick, and I was
about to say it's Saturday, but it's not Saturday though.
Today is a vault episode. Rob and I are out
this week for spring break, so we are sharing with
you an episode that originally published April. This is part
one of our Medusa series. Yeah, this is a lot
of fun. Hey, you welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
(00:40):
My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick. And hey,
it's Halloween in April. I'm so excited because we decided
it's got to be monster time here on Stuff to
Blow your Mind, even though it's not October yet. You know,
we we can't put all the monsters in October. There's
too much monster. Yeah, what would we talk about the
rest of the year if we didn't occasionally check in
with the monstrous denizens of the dark. And we have
(01:03):
a great one here for a couple of episodes. Because
there's there's just so much about it, so much about her.
We're going to be talking about the Gorgon, the most
famous of the three Gorgons, Medusa. Now Medusa is just
fascinating and enthralling figure, often above and beyond the source material.
But perhaps it's the perfect balance of the sort of
(01:26):
counterintuitive aspects in her being, or or sort of the
the shadow archetypes that seemed to resonate behind her. But
she is a long burning monstrosity in the minds of humanity.
Oh yeah, I mean this is I'm so excited about
this pair of episode. So just to give you a
little bit of a roadmap, I think in this first
episode here we're going to be mostly discussing the ancient
(01:47):
Greek myths of Medusa the origins of those myths, and
then later on in in part two, we're going to
explore more of the later interpretations of Medusa and how
she might apply to some interesting scientific and cultural topics.
But this, this is such rich territory. I don't know
if there is a richer monster out there than Medusa,
other than maybe the vampire archetype. Indeed, this is this
(02:11):
is fertile soil. And we we've talked about doing an
episode on Medusa for years. Uh it's one we've kind
of uh kicked around, but this time we're covering it
because uh, my son urged me to do it. So
here we are he's about to turn eight years old,
and since we couldn't actually go anywhere for spring break
due to the pandemic, we did kind of a makeshift
(02:33):
camp here at the house. We did a myth and
mushrooms camp. So my wife did a lot of mushroom
related crafts and activities with them, mushroom growing kid and
going out and you know, looking for mushrooms. And then, uh,
we both partook of a lot of mythology with him,
given the boy's recent enthrallment with it due to the
Percy Jackson novels by Rick Ryerdon I've heard of those,
(02:56):
but I don't know anything about them. So they have
something to do with with great myth. Oh yeah, they're
They're full of Greek myth. You know. It's it's sort
of a post Terry potter um world where you have
a you know, a boy, a young boy slash teen
by the name of Percy Jackson who is Percy Us
and he's encountering all the gods and monsters you would expect.
And yeah, it's the book seemed to be a lot
(03:18):
of fun, uh for the kids. And more to the
point it it gets them into mythology. I was talking
with Alison louder Milk about it and she said there
her son had gone through a phase of being just
super into Greek mythology because of it. Um, so, uh,
you know, we were, you know, we really got into
the mythology and Medusa really stood out to him. So
(03:39):
of course we watched the original nineteen eight one Clash
of the Titans, which features a very memorable Medusa sequence.
We also watched the nineteen nineties series Jim Hinson's The
Storyteller Greek Myths, which is excellent and features an episode
about the Gorgon's actually just watched this last night at
your recommendation. It's uh, it's streaming right now on the Yeah.
(04:00):
The episode about Perseus and the gorgon medusas is just
wonderful and it has great narration by Michael Gambon. Is
that Yeah, he plays the storyteller in this one. Uh. Yeah,
all four episodes are as of this recording anyway on
Amazon Prime. So yeah, they're they're they're wonderful, fun you
get what. Orpheus is one of the episodes of the
Minotaur and uh and Icarus and Datalus and of course
(04:22):
you know. With with my son, we also were reading
a lot of Carol Rose, one of my favorite monster
chroniclers and Folklori's and the boy himself absolutely demolished Deal
Larry's Book of Greek Myths, that nineteen sixty two illustrated
book that I know a lot of us grew up with.
So there's something I always wonder about with with ancient mythology,
(04:43):
including Greek myth and and that's that I I since
a couple of things are intention when you're you're exposing
children to them. Uh. One is that I feel like
kids are naturally drawn to mythology, like they just eat
it up, they love it. But at the same time,
a lot of ancient myths are just full of obscene
cruelty and stuff that like, uh, you know, the stuff
(05:04):
that that I don't always remember from the tellings of
those myths that I got when I was a kid,
I must have gotten some kind of sanitized versions of them.
Often do you find that a lot of that is
going on? And oh, yeah, yeah, Because on one hand,
some of the versions that he's he's reading, you know,
they they've sanitized it to a certain extent. You know,
certainly with Percy Jackson. Uh, certainly with this this really
(05:26):
cool comics series called The Olympians that I also recommend
um and then also the Book of Greek Myths does
that as well. But that he'll also come up and
he'll he'll tell me about some just awful detail from
a myth where somebody, you know, killed their parents or
their sign or something, and I'm like, oh, yeah, yeah,
Greek myths, Uh, a lot of horrible stuff happens in them,
and and a lot of these tales are are tragic.
(05:47):
And then of course one of the ironies of these
episodes is that, uh, as we really dive into the
origin story in the varied origin stories of Medusa, like
some of them are just very brutal in in a
way where I probably can't let him listen to these episodes. Yeah,
and I understand that. I mean, I think we'll try
not to dwell on the most obscene and cruel aspects
(06:09):
of these myths, but they are ancient myths. A lot
of ancient myths have obscene in cruel elements, So do
be prepared that kind of thing is coming. Yeah, So
if you're listening with children at cetera, Yeah, I know
that this is it's going to get into some really
dark territories, so you might want to scout it out first,
is all I'm saying. Yeah, now, you know we've mentioned
Jim Hinson Clash of the Titans. These are examples. Will
(06:29):
come back to it again and again because a lot
of times these are these are introductions to these worlds.
Percy Jackson uh is often an introduction to Greek mythology,
for for for younger folks these days. Um, Dungeon and
Dragons is another big one. Medusa has long resided within
the Monster Manual, where she's sort of she sort of
becomes a species unto herself. Oh, can you play as
(06:51):
a Medusa? I'm I'm sure somebody there's I'm sure there
have been some homebrew rules at some point, or even
some official rules for playing a gorgon. Yeah, but um,
but I'm not aware of them offhand. It would be
It's one of those things would be kind of hard
to h if you really have petrifying gaze, Like how
do you run like that in a tavern? I'm a
(07:11):
gorgon bard So all these audiences hate me. So all
of these are very much downstream versions of the myth
of Medusa, and some of you might, you know, you
might have have this sort of instinct to criticize any
discussion of the mythic creature, to begin with via such
(07:31):
recent pop culture expressions like Percy Jackson or Clash of
the Titans, which you know at times certainly plays fast
and loose with the myth. But one thing we have
to keep in mind is that pretty much all versions
of Medusa or any mythological tale are a downstream product,
the result of centuries upon centuries of oral tradition, various
(07:53):
tellings and retellings, various written accounts and references, cross references,
continually and perpetual reshaping the myth and the monster itself
to tell better stories, to impart specific cultural ideas, or
to merge with other tales or other belief systems. So yes,
while watching Clash of the Titans, which uh, you know
(08:16):
that was that was big for me, introducing me to
a lot of mythological ideas because it was always on
td S or T and T back in the day.
But but watching that it can be frustrating because we
inevitably recoil from you know, at the tale being told
one way and not another. Of liberties being taken the
influence of modern ideas and narratives like Star Wars, uh,
(08:37):
you know, obviously being in play in the creation of
this movie. But to a large extent, this was always
the way with myths. This there is often this illusion
of solidarity with the Greek, with Greek mythology, because all
these various tales come to be largely canonized within certain
major works uh, such as those of say Hesiod and
(08:58):
Ovid who will discuss us and then much later in
key modern mythology books. So much in the same way
that there is no one unchanging you. There is no
single unchanging Medusa. It is a creature that spans the ages,
altering its form along the way, sometimes slightly, sometimes in
major ways, while retaining certain aspects that resonate with us
(09:20):
on a on a truly universal level. Yeah, I mean, uh,
it's a very good point. The same way that modern
authors are sometimes cleaning up myths for you to make
them more palatable to children, or to make them more
acceptable to the morals of the day, or even not
not even just the moral Sometimes myths I think are
altered just to sort of make them more acceptable to
(09:40):
the narrative logic that's dominant within a within an era
um that was going on back then too. Yeah, So
it's just all I think, always something to keep in mind. Boy.
It's a hard thing to explain to to a young
person though, because like my son really wants he wants
the cannon version of the tail and he's they're into correcting, uh,
(10:02):
film adaptations and all, and I have to kind of
explain to them. It's like, well, you know, there's not
really just one story. There's no you know, there's this this,
This is a great point. I feel like children are
naturally cannon pedants? Why is that? Why is it that
when you're I was when I was a little kid,
and now I abhor that kind of thinking, but that's
(10:23):
absolutely how I was when I encounter all kinds of
mythology as a child, with Star Wars, with you know,
with everything. Why why are kids obsessive about cannon and
turn always turned to cannon pedantry? I guess A part
of a big part of it is, you know, you
look to your parents and authority figures you know, adjacent
to your parents, as as being the providers of truth
(10:46):
of telling you how the world works. And it's it's
only later that you really begin to understand that it's
not so cut and dry that your parents didn't have
it all figured out, that you have to figure some
out the stuff out for yourself, and something are beyond
figuring out or just sort of amorphous, like uh, you know,
the true nature of a mythological being. And then certainly
(11:08):
if they're if they're really into something like say Harry Potter,
like there is one version of Harry Potter, you know,
I mean, it is, it is, it is whatever J. K.
Rowling says it is. You know. So, um, it's hard
to compare. You can't really compare that to Greek myth. Well,
so maybe the place that we should start with here
(11:29):
is to try to give a basic retelling of the
main myths of the Gorgon, the main myths and Medusa
and Perseus um. What with the understanding that there are
a lot of different versions of these myths, and different
things will come in that we can explain as we
go on, but it probably makes sense to start with
a coherent version of the story. Absolutely, yeah, what uh? What?
(11:52):
Author David A. Limming in Medusa in the Mirror of
Time two thousand eighteen book referred to as quote, what
can reason to be called a canonical myth of Medusa. Yeah,
I think that's a decent way of putting it. And
that David Lemming book you mentioned Medusa in the Mirror
of Time, that that's going to be one of our
main sources over the course of these episodes. That's that's
a great, short, succinct book that captures a lot of
(12:15):
what's interesting about the Medusa myth. Uh, And so we'll
be referring to him a lot throughout these episodes. Yeah.
David A. Lemming is a Narritus Professor of English and
Comparative Literature at the University of Connecticut, and he's an
author of various works on myth. Yeah, and his his
this book is is well worth checking out. Before we
do that, however, we're going to take a quick break,
(12:36):
but we'll be right back. All right, we're back, So
it's time to tell the story of Medusa. Now. Of course,
as we said earlier, there are a lot of versions
of the Medusa story. This is a theme that evolves
over time, and we'll discuss the shifting canon as we
go on, but at the beginning here, it would probably
(12:56):
be best to start with the most commonly received version
of the myths of Medusa and Perseus. And I'll try
to summarize the story as best I can, um, relying
a lot on on work by David Lemming that we
mentioned earlier, but also with a bit of poetic color
from Ovid's telling in the Metamorphoses, the Garthen Dryden translation. Uh.
That we should note that though Ovid's telling is far
(13:19):
from the earliest, it's where some of the best known
aspects of the story come from today. Absolutely, And Uh,
one other thing I want to point out that will
become obvious is that, you know, we tend to refer
to this story is that of of Perseus and Medusa,
and that it is you know, that is that the
key conflict, uh, that we tend to focus on, and
(13:40):
it's the conflict that is brought out in these various
cinematic adaptations. But I think in some respects it's almost
more fair to consider it the story of Athena and
Medusa featuring Perseus. And we'll get into that as we go. Yeah,
And it's weird how Perseus can, sometimes, even though he's
ostensibly the hero of the story, feel kind of like
a little like Paul on or game piece that's being
(14:01):
moved around by various powers. Yeah, we're just a character
of chaos that is just occasionally nudged in different directions
by more powerful entities. Yeah. Okay, So, according to some
of the most ancient sources of the actual Medusa myth
as opposed to just sort of like the imagery of Medusa. Um,
(14:22):
this will be especially the Greek poet Hesiod, who would
have been writing in the seventh or eighth century b c. E.
Medusa was originally descended from a family of primordial gods
and monsters. The original being in this lineage of gods
and monsters was Gaya, who is the personification of the
(14:43):
Earth itself. And at first Guya was without a mate,
so she conceived a son parthenogenetically meaning virgin birth, much
like an island stranded komodo dragon. And this son that
she gave birth to was no as Pontus, and he
became her counterpart. She was the personification of the Earth
(15:05):
and Pontus was the personification of the ocean. Yeah, and
this is the sort of thing is not uncommon among
primordial mythic beings. Uh. So, then together Guya and her
son Pontus conceived more children, including the two figures who
would become the parents of Medusa. And these figures were
focus the sea god, who Homer called the Old Man
(15:26):
of the Sea. He's sometimes depicted with claws. He was
generally kind of a fishman, crab person type thing. So
it's kind of like the Crabby character on a SpongeBob basically.
I'm actually not familiar with SpongeBob canon. I can't go
in there, but there's a fishman, crab person monster. Yeah.
The character is Mr Crabs who runs um runs a restaurant.
(15:49):
And he's voiced by Clancy Brown. Oh wow, Clancy Brown.
He was on SpongeBob. Oh yeah, he's he's a major
part of it. Well, I'm glad to hear he's doing voicework. Yeah. Yeah,
he has a great voice. It's a great to see that.
You know, he lends it to a number of different projects. Okay,
so we gotta focus the Old Man of the Sea.
And then on the other hand, we've got Ketto or Keto,
(16:11):
which is where we get our classic terminology for whales,
the idea of the ketas or the SETAs, and and
Keto was a giant sea monster and together focus and
Ketto produced a whole mess of monsters from their union.
So first of all, you've got the gray and this
is a set of triplets who were all born with
gray hair. They're described as hags who share one eye
(16:35):
and one tooth between the three of them, and their
gray hair was believed to embody the foam of heavy
seas during a storm. Yeah. They are often depicted in
TV and film adaptations of them De Deuce's story. You
see them in Clash of the Titans, Hintson, Percy Jackson
and others. My son is really into them, and the
other day he quizzed me on what their names were,
(16:58):
at which I had no idea, uh, but then he
spouted them off. They are Dino, Inyo and the Fredo.
When there are three anyway, so in some tellings there
are only two. Yeah, and I think their names I
don't recall exactly what they translate to, but they have
something to do with the qualities of the sea. Their
names translate to things like depth and terror and stuff. Now,
(17:20):
another offspring of this union of of Forcus and Kato
or Quito is Thusa, who became the mother of Polyphemus.
Polyphemus of course, is the Cyclops in the Odyssey who
discus stabs in the eye. Uh. And then you've got
a kidna, the she Viper. This is a woman who
was half snake. Yeah. And sometimes she's credited as being
(17:41):
the mother of Monsters and other tellings, mother of Medusa
even and I guess you know, there's a little bit
of a kidna in the recreation of of of the
gorgon Ian Clash of the Titans Ray Harry Housen's fabulous sequence.
Oh is she half snake in that? Yeah? She's she's
depicted as being um a snake from the waist down,
(18:04):
you know, having been kind of a serpentine centaur uh
and and then being more traditionally a gorgon from the
waist up, but without the wings. Okay. So another one
of the offspring here is one that's familiar to us,
is going to be Scilla, the the sea monster with
many heads, who swallowed sailors who came too close to
her rocks. And she's classically the counterpart of Charybdis. Right,
(18:27):
So you've got this pair of hazards in the ocean
that is difficult to thread a pathway through. Charybdis of course,
is like a whirlpool. Yeah, and then, of course, finally
you've got the Gorgons, and the Gorgon's are a trio
of sisters whose name comes from the word gor ghos,
which means frightening or terrifying. Medusa is one of the
(18:48):
three Gorgon sisters. The names of the other two are
Thinno and Urially, and curiously, we are told by multiple
ancient sources that while the other two Gorgon sisters are immortal, tragically,
Medusa is not immortal. Hes He had writ specifically that
her fate was a sad one, for she was mortal,
(19:08):
though it's I'm not sure if it's ever explained anywhere
why specifically she and only she was mortal. Yeah, nothing
ever seems, at least in anything I've read, seems to
be really made of that fact. Like it's not like, oh, well,
that means that Perseus is forever hounded by these immortal
gore guns or anything like that. It's just kind of
here's the facts. It seems like one of those things
(19:31):
that might have been when people were trying to stitch
together disparate versions of a of a myth cycle that
that had incompatible facts. You might just paper that over
by inserting a little like, by the way, she was
mortal for some reason. Yeah, yeah, if someone was like,
well I thought they were immortal. No, No, she was mortal,
so she's dead. She was the only one though. Yeah. Anyway,
(19:53):
according to a fragmentary document called the Shield of Heracles,
the three Gorgon sisters would talk about with serpents hanging
from their girdles. So imagine a kind of Batman utility built,
but all the pouches are replaced with snakes, and the
belt snakes would lear and they would flick their tongues
that anyone who beheld them. Yeah, and I have to
(20:15):
say depictions of this are cooler and grizzly are looking
than it sounds, because that sounds cool enough for you. Well, yeah,
I know it doesn't sound cool when I read it initially,
because it's like, oh, and that she had they had
snakes for belts. That just sounds kind of, I don't know,
kind of lame. But then you see an image and
it's like these snakes you're hanging off and you know,
(20:37):
and maybe writhing a bit, and there's there's perhaps a
sense of the we won't get into this until the
second episode. But uh, you know, you get into some
of these Freudian concepts of what Medusa is all about,
and you look at an image like that and you
can you can see it. But again, more on that
in the second episode. Yeah, it should not come as
a surprise that some people, especially Freud, read a lot
(20:58):
of genital sygnificance into the depiction of the snake bearing sisters.
Here now, writing of the three Gorgon sisters, Apollodorus says
that their heads were twined about with the scales of dragons,
and that they had golden wings or I've also seen
it said sometimes bronze wings, and also great tusks, like
(21:21):
a swine's tusks. Yeah, those wings are often forgotten in
art and you know, other depictions, cinematic or otherwise. I
think in part because that's just one more thing you
have to try and bring to life, either with effects
or otherwise. Though Hinson does have the wings in his version.
I think also sometimes, as with the Clash adaptation, there's
(21:42):
an attempt to focus more on those serpentine details, you know,
like people want hybrid city, but they don't want to
deal with a chimera um uh, you know, generally speaking, chimera.
Of course, for the most part, you don't see a
lot of like cinematic adaptations of the mythical chimera either.
We want half and half, we don't want uh you know,
(22:02):
three different types of animal physiologies merged together. Well, yeah,
I mean, I want, at what point do you start
pushing from minimally counterintuitive into just like too complicated, too weird? Yeah, yeah,
I think that's a big part of it too. Yeah.
So anyway, you've got these three terrifying sisters, all with
snakes of England. They've got scaly dragon heads, they've got
(22:23):
wild boar tusks and huge metal wings. And in this telling,
Medusa is quite clearly a primordial monster, right, She's ancient.
She springs from a line of beings with deep roots
in the earth and sea and natural forces. And it's
in this version of Medusa it's easy to see similarities
here with other primordial monster gods who embody or spring
(22:47):
from embodiments, especially of the sea, right like Tia Mott,
the saltwater dragon of ancient Babylonian myth, particularly in the
Uma a leash who spits poison and death upon the
world to create. It's creatures that are kind of xenomorph
like in that they have acid for blood. Yeah. And
I think in all this to remembering the salt water
(23:08):
origin of these creatures, we have to remember the you know,
the importance of sailing and fishing in the Mesopotamian and
in the know, the Greek world that we're discussing here,
like the terror of the sea, the risks of the sea,
the unknown depths of the sea, you know, all of
these impacting the psyche and the creativity of of of
(23:30):
early people. Well, I think it's no coincidence that Poseidon
is maybe the most like cruel and capricious and bad
tempered of all the Olympian gods, right because the sea
is a place of great bounty and promise, but it's
also full of chaos and death and and it can't
be it can't necessarily be predicted. The sea itself is
bad tempered. Yeah. Yeah, it really cannot be trusted. Uh.
(23:54):
And you see that with with arguably with the gods
in general, but especially with Poseidon. But Okay, that's the
version of Medusa where she she's from this primordial lineage
of ancient creatures and monsters there are other tellings in
which it seems like Medusa was once maybe a human
or at least something more vaguely humanoid like. One of
(24:18):
the main examples is the version of the Medusa myth
that we get presented in Ovid's Metamorphoses, which is probably
the most familiar version of the myth to us today,
probably the most canonical version, and in this it says
that Medusa was once a beautiful young woman with many suitors.
She was widely admired for her beauty and her glamorous hair.
(24:39):
Um Avid writes, quote, Medusa once had charms to gain
her love a rival crowd of envious lovers strove they
who have seen her own they ne'er did trace more
moving features in a sweeter face. Yet above all her
length of hair they own in golden ringlets, waved and
graceful shown. So the this goes very much against like
(25:01):
the the version of Medusa we were just talking about,
who's like this, uh, you know who, who's sort of
monster to the core and monster from the beginning. But
in this version of the story, tragically Medusa catches the
attention of the cruel and violent god Poseidon, the lord
of the sea, the commander of natural disaster is like
(25:22):
earthquakes and storms. And in Avid's telling, Poseidon comes down
to the earth and he rapes Medusa in the midst
of the temple of Pallas Athena, the virgin goddess of wisdom.
And this attack represents a desecration of Athena's temple. And
so because her sacred home is defiled, Athena becomes furious.
(25:43):
And you, you, of course, do not want to be
on Athena's bad side. After the attack is over, Athena
takes out her revenge horribly, not on her uncle Poseidon,
but on Medusa. Yeah, it's as if Poseidon is is
kind of untouchable and us, Yeah, based one of the
Big Three after all. And uh, you know, I think
(26:04):
Arachne would remind us that the gods as a whole
are cruel and violent. You might remember, listeners, Arachne was
turned into a spider for disrespecting the gods, namely Athena,
of whom she lost a weaving contest to um. But yeah, this, this,
this particular telling of god and possibly mortal interactions really
(26:29):
smacks of cruelty. I should note a couple of things here, now, Uh,
Ovid chiefly contributes or at least records, the sexual assault
aspect of this story in the classical tradition, while Hesiod
and uh Apahollodorus keep it at lay with you know,
they lay together, and and uh and that offended Athena,
(26:50):
while others tellers of the tale have described the union
as an act of seduction, such as folklore Carol Rose. Now,
I don't know how much of that is just sanitizing
it again, a little bit like we've said, you know,
you don't taking some of the more horrific details out
of the story for specially younger readers. Um, but uh,
I just I thought that was important to note. Apollodorus, however,
(27:14):
added the wrinkle that Medusa had previously claimed that her
beauty matched that of Athena. So we get into territory
where from the point of view of the gods, this
is just mortals paying for their vanity one more time,
so that it's not just Athena is blaming the victim
for the crime, but Athena also has it in for
(27:34):
the victim because she previously had the gall to say
that she was on Athena's level. Yeah, exactly, And and
so Athena, she turns her fury against Medusa. Here of
it again, writes the bashful goddess that's talking about Athena.
The bashful goddess turned her eyes away nor during such
bold impurity survey. But on the ravished virgin vengeance takes
(27:56):
her shining hair is changed to hissing snakes. These in
her aegis Palace joys to bear the hissing snakes, her
foes more sure and snare than they did lovers once
when shining hair. It's interesting that he describes Athena as bactful. Uh,
it's not great first description when it comes to mind. Yeah, well,
(28:16):
I mean there's this weird thing the way Athena is
depicted as I mean, it's often emphasized that she is
like there's something pure about her, that she is the
virgin goddess, they say, um and so, so that's sometimes
described as this weird quality of like shyness or something.
But of course we know that Athena is quite bold
(28:36):
and quite powerful and has great uh wisdom and strength
and rage and you do not want to be her enemy. Yeah.
I hope she didn't listen to the podcast. I don't
know if we're really portraying her in the best light here. Now,
not a lot of the gods come out of this
looking great. Um. But so anyway, this is how Medusa
becomes a monster. Athena transforms her into this hateful mockery
(29:00):
of her former self. She's once known for her beauty,
you know, her curly locks of hair. Now she's a
creature with slithering snakes for hair, a creature so hideous
that anyone who looks upon her would instantly be turned
to stone. Yeah, it's it's a it's a weird and
dark origin story, but you know, here we are. But
so beyond her tragic origin story, Medusa is probably best
(29:22):
known as the monster, the sort of dragon figure of
the Perseus myth, And so I think maybe now we
should turn to the myth of Perseus's journey. And one
of my main sources here, of course, is going to
be that book by David Lemming, which provides an excellent
overview of and synthesis of the different sources on the story.
Like a great many heroic narratives, the story of Perseus
(29:42):
actually begins with a miraculous conception under dire circumstances. So,
once upon a time, and the ancient Greek city of Argos,
which is on the eastern end of the Peloponnese. It's
often said to have been the oldest Greek city or
one of the oldest Greek cities. The city was ruled
by a fish and paranoid king named a Chrysis, and
(30:04):
a crisis had a daughter named Danny, but a Chrysis
he longs to have a son to carry on his line,
and one day a Chrysis visits an oracle to ask
whether he will ever be able to father a son,
and instead, the oracle warns him that he will not
have a son, but his daughter Danny will, and the
(30:25):
boy she gives birth to will one day murder him.
Now how many Greek stories start with an oracle and
then they turn out good? Yeah, it's like, why would
you visit an oracle at all? It just never works out, right,
I mean, it's always some like ironic point about trying
to avoid faith. Yeah, yeah, I mean, it's it's really
(30:46):
a story we continue to tell to this day. You know,
just the idea that if you, yeah, you don't really
want to know what's coming, because it's only going to
make things worse. You're not going to be able to
really duck fate or you're ye're just gonna, you know,
double down on the horrors to come. Uh yeah, it's
I mean, it's it's it's one of these stories resonate
so strongly with us. Yeah. Uh So, of course, a Chrysis,
(31:08):
being selfish and kind of paranoid, he fears for his
own life, so he resolves to prevent the prophecy from
ever coming true. And he says, Okay, Danny right now
is childless at the time he gets the warning, she
doesn't have a son yet, and so the Chrysiest figures
he can escape his fate if he just locks her
in a prison cell forever. I've seen the prison characterized
(31:30):
in different ways. Sometimes it's a tower. I've seen it
elsewhere characterized as like some kind of subterranean dungeon, or
even a box of bronze. But anyway, So, of course,
the crisis believes that by imprisoning his daughter like this,
she will stay childless forever. But Zeus, the king of
the gods who reigns in the sky, he sees the
(31:51):
young woman locked away in her prison cell, and he
comes down to her in the form of a shower
of gold from the clouds, and Danny conceives a child.
This is her child as a boy, and she gives
him the name Perseus. Uh. This part is yet another
recurring theme in Greek mythology. Of course, God coming down
and having sex with a mortal woman to father a
(32:13):
child to become a type of demigod or a son
of God. Here. Yeah, that's this is also one of
the key plot points in those Percy Jackson books is
that all the the the young characters are the children
of the gods that have been in the modern world
created sired the same way and kind of you know
left uh, you know, none of them have any real
(32:35):
connection with their divine parents and have a lot of
mixed up feelings concerning them. Well yeah, I mean, the
gods do not tend to be very good parents here.
So like, so you Perseus, Now, this boy is half
human and he's half king of the gods. And so
Perseus begins to grow up in this prison cell with
his mother, and at some point a Chrisius discovers this
(32:59):
boy and prison with Danny and crisis. Of course, is
still in fear for his life, and so he says, okay,
I've got to I've got to be more more extreme
even now. So he has Danny and the young Perseus
locked inside a box and tossed into the ocean to die.
It's interesting. Living describes this box as quote a sort
(33:20):
of arc as in the Ark of the Covenant, and
indeed that's often how it is depicted, including in the
Clash of the Titan and also in that Jim Hinson adaptation. Yeah,
the strategy is often presented as a kind of indirect
murder method. It's like, hey, I didn't kill them, I
just left them to their fate. Uh. It seems like
(33:40):
a kind of weird moral sensibility that makes a real
distinction there. But he a lot of characters in Greek
cultures seem to think along these lines. Yeah. It's as
if to say, for legal purposes, the ocean is the
one that will murder you, right, um. Yeah, But of
course Danny and Perseus didn't die. Instead, while they're floating
(34:04):
around in this box, they are rescued by a fisherman
named Dictus, who is the brother of Polydectes, the king
of the island of Seraphos. And there on the island
of Seraphos, Danny and Perseus come under the protection of
Polydectes court under under the protection of his house. Now
eventually the king Polydectes here. He turns out to be
(34:27):
a pretty wicked king too. He decides that he wants
to marry Danny, but she refuses him, and Perseus supports
his mother in her refusal of the king's hand. So
Polydectes what he wants a way to get rid of
young Perseus, to sort of get him out of the picture,
to improve his chances of of wedding Danny. And a
(34:49):
great opportunity actually presents itself. Let's send Perseus out on
a suicide mission. Polydectes sends Perseus out with the task
of killing the mom Sir Medusa, who is of course
one of the dreaded Gorgon sisters, and to bring back
her severed head. Now, this version that you just said,
this makes the most sense, right, Like Percy's wants to
(35:10):
protect his mother, Polydectes wants to marry her, and he's like, sure,
I'll leave your your mother alone if you bring me
the head of the Medusa. Ha ha. But and the
typical version of the story is that Polydectes just demands
some fine horses, like, oh, I need some just ridiculously
nice horses. Uh, let's see you get those. And then
(35:31):
Perseus just leaps up like a final bidder in a
Hollywood auction scene, you know, where they just outrageously outbid
everybody by like a million dollars and gives himself the
suicide mission. He's like, I'll tell you what, I'll bring
you the head of a gorgon, and um In Polydectes
is like, okay, um, you know, I was thinking about
trying to send you on a suicide mission, but if
(35:52):
you just want to propose one, go for it. Um.
So he's He's of course delighted and accepts. Yeah. But
but it's like Percy's who's just who comes up with
the idea in in most of these tellings where it's
just like, i'll kill the gorgon. How about that? Yeah? So, actually,
I think the way it works as Polydectes he tries
to ruse where he says, actually, I'm not going to
marry your mom. Don't worry about it. Chill out. I'm
(36:14):
gonna marry some other woman. But if I marry this
other lady, I'm gonna need some good Mayor's as a
wedding present. And of course Perseus what he doesn't have
any money to go out horse trading and get horses
for a wedding present, so what does he have to offer.
Basically just has his courage, so he's like, hey, hey,
I know I'll go find a prime primordial snake lady.
(36:36):
I'll kill her. I'll bring you her head. And again,
of course this works out great for Polydectes because Polydectes
knows that the gaze of Medusa turns men into stone.
So this is an easy way to be rid of Perseus.
Here's one less pesky kid getting in the way of
his his dating game. I mean, I criticized Perseus because hey,
it's really easy to hate perseus um based on all
(36:59):
the details of the story. But but I guess you
can see this as being really clever on his part
because he chooses something, He chooses a task that is
difficult enough or even seemingly impossible enough that Polydectes agrees
to it. But also he has he has enough confidence
that he can somehow pull it off, right. I mean,
(37:19):
I think again, one of the most common personality traits
we see in these heroes of old is just kind
of like endless confidence. You know, you should have no
reason to think that you can kill the gorgon Medusa,
but he just, yeah, I can do it. Yeah, I'll
figure it out. Stuff just kind of falls into my lap.
That's how it works. But but either way you kind
of look at it. Medusa is not even the adversary
(37:43):
that is thrust upon him by a cruel king, which
is which is what we see like saying the Labors
of Hercules. She is instead just out there on the
edge of the world, minding her own business, already punished harshly,
when percy Is simply decides that killing her would be
an ideal feet to accomplish his ends. Yeah, she's not
doing anything. It's not it's not like Baowolf, like she's
(38:05):
raiding the hall or something. She's just on the other
side of the world. Yeah, Like Clash of the Titans, Like,
one of the things it does is it retrofits the
story where the head of the Medusa is the thing
we need to overcome some other adversary or to get
through some some great horror that's coming um, which you know,
I think makes it a little more palpable to to
(38:27):
modern audiences. But again, looks like you said, we have
to we have to think about what the model of
the hero is that we're dealing with in these ancient versions. Right,
all right, we need to take a quick break, but
we'll be right back with more than and we're back.
So Percius sets out on his quest, and along the
(38:47):
way he's given aid by the god Hermes, who is
of course the messenger of the gods who flies between
worlds on his winged sandals, and of course also by
Athena popping back up in the story yet again to
to just never stop spitting calamity in Medusa's direction. Yeah,
as if Medusa hadn't suffered enough for angering Athena, the
(39:09):
gray a had goddess instantly jumps into help Perseus out
in his quest to murder her. Right, Uh, And it's
worth considering that there are sort of double alliances here. Like, first, yes,
it really does seem just kind of like Athena hates
Medusa and is always making things worse for her. But second,
also Perseus is Athena's demi god half brother. Right, they
(39:29):
both share Zeus as a father, and both were conceived
in these unconventional mythological ways Athena springs from the head
of Zeus. H So, I think you could see Perseus
as a kind of champion or representative of the interests
of the Olympian pantheon down here on Earth, like the
(39:49):
Zeus administration has as an agent on Earth Perseus, and
you're kind of going to see that in the way
that he fights against and causes trouble for these other
primordial non Olympian beings, Like the enemies of the Zeus
administration will just get endless grief from Perseus. Like Perseus,
(40:09):
I need you to go on Network News this evening,
just make all the rounds and just verbally attack all
of my enemies, all the all the Titans, all the monsters.
You just let them have it, right, anybody from the
line of Guia, any Titans out there, Yeah, just go
at them. But anyway, Percy, so he goes on this
journey with multiple stops, so we don't have to get
(40:30):
into all the stops on the journey right here, there's
some that are more Germane to what we're talking about
than others. I think, Yeah, but if we were to
make a montage on it, basically Perseus needs to I
d the Gorgon's he needs to gear up with magical
weapons to fight them, find out where they are exactly,
and of course travel there. Right. That's that's a good summary.
So at one point Perseus does encounter the three gray sisters,
(40:52):
the gray haired hags who share the one eye and
the one tooth between them and perseus strategy here is
quite clear, for he steals their one eye. Just seems
which just I mean, he sounds just like such a bully.
There's like three hags who share one eye, and he
takes their one eye, and he uses the eye to
(41:13):
get leveraged basically to leverage information out of them, specifically
about how to acquire some pieces of magic equipment that
he needs. Yeah, he's direct and to the point. Now,
I and I love how in some versions of the
tale Perseus returns their eye and tooth, because sometimes he
takes the tooth as well afterwards, and other times he
just keeps them right. And some modern tellings find a
(41:37):
middle ground by having him return the eye but just
like throwing it into the room somewhere where they have
to like scramble for it, So he's not being you know,
a complete meaning about it, like he's not just gonna
keep the eye forever, squash it or whatever. But he
doesn't just hand it back like okay, business concluded. I
don't know something about it just seems like so classically
(41:57):
bullysh It's like the bully stealing the kids glasses. It's like, oh,
four uys need his glasses. Yeah. Anyway, so we know
he's got to get this magical equipment, so we has
to go to the realm of the Nymphs to get
some of it, and he ends up acquiring a number
of powerful objects and tools to to help him in
his quest, including a pair of winged sandals, a leather
(42:20):
bag that's known as a kipsist, sometimes translated as a wallet,
but I think this is best understood as like a
sack of some kind, a helmet from hades that confers
the power of invisibility, a magic sickle made of unbreakable adamantine,
and a shield that is so well polished that its
(42:41):
face is as a mirror. I mean, he really gears
up for this quest, and the thing is like, if
these are magical items, if this was dungeons and dragons,
I don't think he'd even be able to attune to
this many items. I think there's like a three attunement limit. Uh.
And he's just like just just geared up to the gills,
which high power magical items in video game terms. I
(43:03):
was thinking this might be described as over leveling. Yes,
but anyway, once he has all the weapons he needs, uh,
and once he discovers where he needs to go, percy
As uses the winged Sandals to fly to the dwelling
place of the Gorgon's which is someplace out at the
edge of the world. Yeah. I love how Limbing describes
(43:24):
this place is a quote a kind of underworld at
the end of the ocean. Yeah. In more rationalist accounts,
it's described as a place kind of far out to
the west, like a series of islands in the Atlantic Ocean.
But wherever this otherworldly places. Once he gets there, Perseus
knows he remembers in advance that he cannot look at
(43:46):
Medusa or he will be turned to stone, so he
uses the mirror faced shield to see her as he
sneaks up upon the sisters while they're sleeping, And they're
sleeping among a garden of stones that are currently the
remains of men and animals who once looked Medusa in
the eye. Yeah, and this is a haunting uh setting
(44:07):
that that is really brought to wonderful life. And in
some of these adaptations again that the clash of the
Titans uh sequence with Perseus and Medusa is just uh
so wonderfully brought to life totally though. One of the
things that again it's like how it gets adapted to
our modern sensibilities. Modern adaptations tend to make it some
(44:27):
kind of heroic fight against this threatening enemy. I mean
in the story, he sneaks up on the sisters while
they're sleeping, you know, they're they're taking a nap, and
Perseus comes up to Medusa and uses the magic sickle
to chop off her head and then put it in
a leather sack. Yeah, and then run before the other
two Organs can really do much about it. Which, yeah,
(44:49):
it doesn't. It's not very cinematic, it's not very um,
it's not intense. You know. The the Ray Harry House
and sequence, for instance, makes it where it's more like
Perseus is hunted by the monster because that ultimately creates
more tension you know, for our for us is as
viewers and resonates more with with our our modern expectations. Uh,
(45:10):
but but not so much with like the role of
the Greek hero. Yeah. So Strangely, when Medusa has killed,
it's noted that a couple of mythical beings just sort
of erupt out of her dead body. One of them
is the winged horse Pegasus, and the other is a
warrior known as Chris or Yeah, who, by the way,
would himself go on to father the three headed monster. Garon.
(45:33):
The Limbing notes that there's some indication that Medusa somehow
unnaturally birthed these creatures via the parentage of Poseidon. Fair enough,
I mean, we're up to our waist in a in
a pretty weird story. That doesn't really make it too
much weirder, uh to imagine that. For some reason, when
I was reading about this, I was reminded so much
(45:53):
of the ending of The Fly Too, where where like
the monster is kind of defeated and you end up
with like two entities emerging from it. Though in that
like one is pure and one is monstrous, and this
one like both are beautiful, Like it's a seemingly normal
humanoid hero and a beautiful flying horse. So I don't know,
you know, the original Fly, I just realized would fit
(46:15):
in quite well with a of its metamorphoses. Right, It's
a story about a change in the body brought on
by Hubris. Oh man, that's perfect anyway. So back to
Perseus a Medusa. So Medusa is dead, head chopped off.
Perseus has got it, and he crams the head into
the bag into the Kivisus and now Medusa's Gorgon's sisters
thin Oh and your Reality. They are awakened, and of
(46:38):
course they become enraged because they see their sister dead,
and they give chase, trying to kill the boy. But
fortunately Perseus still has some gear. He uses the helm
of invisibility and the winged Sandals to escape them. Now
Medusa is dead, and the story is far from over.
On the journey home with the Gorgon's head in the sack,
(46:58):
Perseus stops to take part in several other adventures. A
major one that we're not going to get into in
depth is uh this part of the story where he
rescues a princess named Andromeda from a dragon and ends
up marrying her, but also as part of the story
where where the head of Medusa becomes very relevant. Perseus
comes across Atlas Atlas is of course a a Titan.
(47:21):
You know, he was one of the original race of
Titans that were defeated in a war by the gods
led by Zeus, and so now he's the sort of
like defeated prisoner of war type figure who is tortured
after losing this war by the gods by being forced
to hold up the sky for eternity. And when Perseus
arrives in Atlas's lands, Atlas is obviously not a fan
(47:44):
of course. First of all, Atlas is suffering after his
people lost this war to Zeus, and Perseus claims Zeus
is his father. Second, like, who is this kid with
a bloody leather bag? But uh so, because he feels
not welcomed by Atlas, Perseus pulls the severed head of
Medusa out of the bag and shows it to Atlas.
Atlas looks on the head and he turns to stone,
(48:06):
and in this form, Atlas becomes a mountain range that
holds up the sky. Then, when Percy has finally arrives
back home with his bride Andromeda, he uses Medusa's head
to turn the wicked king Polydectes and his servants into stone,
and he sets his mother free. So really, Percy's is
just going on a freaking rampage with the Gorgon's head,
(48:28):
just petrifying anyone he likes, even a Titan before finally, uh,
you know, eventually handing it back, in which we'll get
to uh fun fact um. Atlas shows up in that
Hintson adaptation and played by none other than Pat Roach.
Oh yeah, Pat Pat Roach of course played the bald
Nazi that Indiana Jones fights uh in front of the
(48:51):
uh the airplane and Greater the Lost Art gets turned
into propeller soup. Yeah, yeah, he plays uh. Oh, he's
in like Conan the Barberry and well no, he's encoding
the Destroyer. Uh, he's in that. Um. He is also
in Clash of the Titan where he plays the Festus
and of course his background was British professional wrestling, so
he's quite an interesting fellow. Now in the hints And
(49:14):
version of the story, they change it so they don't
they don't make Percy is so vindictive, and they don't
make it like Petrofaction murder. Right. It's portrayed that Atlas
is weary of this. You know, he's tired from having
to hold up the sky and it's like, uh, Perseus
takes pity on him and turns him to stone to uh,
(49:34):
you know, I guess to save him his burden. Oh sweet,
it was. It was a mercy petrofaction. There was another
interesting fact that Limming mentions in his book, and that's
that the petrofaction of Polydectes and his followers might be
a type of ideological myth, the myth explaining, you know,
an origin or feature of something, and in this case,
it would be a known circle of standing stones on
(49:55):
the island of Seraphos. That you know, it's like, oh,
here's you know, Polydectes and his followers who were turned
to stone once. But anyway, at the end of the story,
here's where we get into some really interesting territory. Perseus
doesn't just like, you know, keep the head as a trophy.
He gives the head of Medusa to Athena and it
becomes the emblem of Athena's breastplate or shield. Now, of course,
(50:20):
in addition to being the goddess of wisdom, Athena was
sometimes styled to say goddess of warfare, and this, of
course becomes part of the very interesting tradition of the aegis,
the idea that both Athena and Zeus had this object
that's mentioned in ancient Greek literature all over the place,
but exactly what it is is sort of unclear. Now,
(50:43):
it's called an aegis. It's sometimes translated as a shield
or a breastplate or piece of armor, or some kind
of animal skin like a goat skin. Whatever it is,
it's it's some kind of protection device or some kind
of covering that the gods can hide behind or can
shield themselves with. And it has this power that's described
(51:07):
both as protective and as frightening, which is very interesting.
Like normally you might think of a weapon as terrifying,
but this is a terrifying shield or a terrifying covering
or piece of armor. And in many depictions, the central
visual feature of the aegis of Athena and of Zeus
(51:27):
becomes the head of Medusa, or at least the image
of the head of Medusa. Yeah, and this is really
one of those points where the story does seem to
just come back around to being all about Athena's rage
against Medusa, as as she accepts the whole head of
the gorgon and absorbs it into her shield or makes
her shield out of it. The less harsh interpretation of
(51:48):
this is that, you know, via the creation of the
Gorgon's Athena unleashed a powerful weapon on the world, and
now she has taken it back and claimed it as
her own. But I also can't help but think of
Medusa as is still being alive in some fashion, you know,
in the same way that the snakes continue to writhe
in the cinematic and artistic um depictions of Medusa's head.
(52:10):
So you know, it's there's even this idea that perhaps
the head is still alive as its essence is infused
into a thenis shield. And if so, it just seems
like another level of just you know, horrible God inflicted fate.
You know, speaking of fate as a coda to the story,
I should mention, of course, Perseus, Denny, and Andromeda eventually
(52:33):
do return to uh Denny and Perseus's home city of Argos.
And when Perseus shows back up, a Crisius remember him
from the beginning, the king didn't want to be murdered
by his grandson. Well he's just like dude, I am done,
and he just flees. He goes to another city to hide,
and later on in the city where the king goes
(52:53):
into hiding, Perseus just happens to show up and he
takes part in some funeral games or funeral games are
a feature of a lot of stories back then, remember
the funeral games at the death of Patroclus and the Iliad.
Funeral games include things like the throwing of the discuss.
So Perseus is like, yeah, I'll play. So he decides
to throw the discus and he accidentally hurls the discus
(53:15):
into his grandfather's head, killing him and proving the oracle's
prophecy true. And it has like nothing to do with
the the the adventure with the Gorgon or anything. He
just accidentally throws a disk and hits him, almost as
if someone said, storyteller, what about that that oracle and
(53:35):
the prophecy that you mentioned at the beginning. Oh, yeah,
he he threw a discus at a funeral game and
it hit hit him in the head. He died, after all,
he died, after all, we kid. But again, this guy's
come back to the you know, sort of the nature
of myth about like converging and uh in the absorption
of different stories and the continuing uh, you know, retinkering
(53:59):
of the tay ole in the myth as we as
we as we experience it. Uh So, you know, sometimes
I think there are elements like that where things don't
maybe completely come together. There's some little plot holes that
emerge that you know, sometimes other storytellers come around and
try to fill them or smooth and out. I feel
like it would be more conventional and make more sense
if like Perseus, I don't know he got out the
(54:21):
Medusa will say he still had the Medusa head. Maybe
he gets it out of the bag every now and
then to clean it or something, and you know, he
gets it out of the bag right at the moment
that a crisis accidentally walks into the room and sees
it and then turns to stone. You know that seems
like that would be more more connected in a holistic way. Yeah,
but you know, instead that would be nice and tragic,
would have an air of tragedy to it to a
(54:43):
certain extent. I mean, but then also not that much,
because the grandfather did lock his mother up in a prison,
and that's what he's a bad guy. Yeah, so yeah,
there's not you know, what what can you say is
the disc ascending supposed to be funny. Maybe it is maybe,
or you know it, it also kind of sounds like
(55:04):
to me, this is just me spitballing here. This is
nothing that lembiting argues. But it also has the smack of, say,
a story that originally didn't have any of that middle stuff. Like,
let me tell you the story about a king who
heard that his grandson would kill him. So he, uh,
he didn't let his daughter out of a box. She
had a son anyway, so he threw him in another box,
(55:25):
threw him in the ocean. They and they were lost
for years and years. Then they came back. He was
in a funeral game through a discus and he died.
I mean, it's not I'm not saying that's a great story,
but at least it's it gets to the end a
little quicker. But instead we have this whole additional story
that ends up sandwiched in the middle. You know, it
actually forms a very similar kind of bracket to the
(55:46):
bracketing in the narrative of Jason and the Argonauts, right
where like, you know, he goes on a journey in
the middle, but then comes back to the court situation
at the end, and and there's sort of you know,
vengeance happens or fate is delivered. Yeah, at any rate,
it does bring us to the end of this particular
mythological story, and it brings us to the end of
(56:08):
this episode, but not the end of our discussion of Medusa. Yeah,
it looks like we need to call part one here.
But next time we'll be able to come back and
explore so many more fascinating angles on this myth. Uh.
We'll get to talk about possible origins and aperture, pic magic, Uh,
sort of backwards development of myths that can sometimes happen.
(56:29):
We'll talk about reception history, you know, all throughout cultures
and in different time periods. We'll talk about art, we'll
talk about science. I'm very excited, absolutely all right. So
in the meantime, if you want to check out other
episodes of Stuff to Blow your mind, and we have
done quite a few episodes about monsters and myths over
the years, you can find us wherever you get your podcasts,
(56:51):
wherever that happens to be. Help us out by rating, reviewing,
and subscribing. Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio
producers Seth Nay Chillis Johnson. If you would like to
get in touch with us with feedback on this episode
or any other, to suggest a topic for the future,
or just to say hi. You can email us at
contact at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com.
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Robert Lamb
Joe McCormick
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