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in conclusion: my personal experience with medusa

When I was eighteen, I was sexually assaulted by my doctor. I was receiving care for the trauma of being molested at thirteen; after being assaulted by my doctor, I withdrew from the world. I cancelled my appointments. I became a shell of myself, afraid, unable to function. For weeks I could not eat, or sleep. 

Then I discovered Medusa. I knew about her before, but only vaguely, as most people do. She came to me on her own, it seems, and gave me her hand. Rather than being consumed by my own grief and terror, I was now consumed by her. I researched obsessively, wrote obsessively, and did not notice when exactly my sorrow turned to rage, but it did. And this allowed me to live. 

It took years to crawl out of the hole that doctor buried me in, but I did. I did. It took years but I did it. Medusa gave me the courage I needed. She taught me about my rage. How angry I was with the world, with men for hurting me, for not protecting me, the entire society and culture built around protecting the perpetrators and not people like me. Medusa showed me another method of protection. 

With her help, I found a new doctor. Female, this time. She listened to me. I told her that I had been assaulted and after that she always asked before she touched me. She told me what she had to do (listen to my heart, my lungs, take my blood pressure) and then asked if she could, and it was the asking that made me feel safe enough to say yes. Because of this, I received the care I needed, and my health improved. It took another year to find a medication that helped me but we did find it, and my anxiety lessened enough to be manageable. I could live again. 

I applied for college, I wrote a draft of a novel, I read more books than I was able to in years. I reached out for help and received it. I asked people to listen and they did. 

All of this, I would have been unable to do without Medusa. She was the first person who listened to me, who understood, who took me into her arms and said the words that set me free: you are allowed to grieve. you are allowed to mourn. and you are allowed to be angry. you do not need to forgive to heal. you do not need to forgive him in order to move on. 

And isn’t that revolutionary? I do not need to forgive. That doesn’t make me a bad survivor. It makes me, I think, just human.  

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medusa & witchcraft

As well as being an icon of female rage and power, Medusa has found her place in modern witchcraft. Some witches today call upon Medusa to protect them, aid their spellcraft, or to guide them. Medusa is considered a dark goddess, in the same vein as Lilith or the Morrigan; she represents dark feminine attributes.

Robin Corak writes, “By swallowing my fear and seeking to get to know Medusa beyond the confines of her myth, I have come to know her better. She does not suffer fools, and she demands honesty and courage. At the same time, she is fiercely protective and will fight endlessly for those who heed her call and are willing to be vulnerable in the name of truth and sovereignty. Perhaps it is therefore not surprising that her name means “guardian” and is said to come from the Greek verb “medein” which means “to protect”.

Working with Medusa can be intimidating, but it can also be transformative and healing. Her unwavering ability to reflect our deepest truths back to us can help us to identify areas in our lives where silence does not serve us and where we need to be more outspoken and honest.”

She can be called upon to cast curses on abusive men, to help heal sexual trauma, to recover one’s sense of freedom and wildness, etc. Witches find working with her to be empowering, the same way female poets and writers such as Emily Erwin Culpepper do. Medusa is a powerful figure that can bring strength and healing to women who work with her.

Regardless of one’s personal beliefs on witchcraft, the fact that Medusa helps to heal the women who work with her is something that deserves respect. The Medusa myth has been a source of controversy for as long as it’s existed; and while it’s still used as a misogynist tool against female politicians and other ‘nasty women,’ the amount of people who learn the truth about her grows every day. She is not a villainess as we’ve been led to believe; she is powerful, yes, but also nurturing and protective, as these witches can attest. Medusa deserves recognition and to be honored the same way we honor male mythical figures, and modern witches are doing their best to do so.

[Phoenix Rising: Reclaiming Medusa, Robin Corak]

[Medusa]

[Medusa Goddess & Gorgon: 7 Ways to Work With Her Fierce Energy]

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medusa and l'écriture feminine: i write this as a woman, toward women

Hélène Cixous’ 1976 essay The Laugh of the Medusa is one of the earliest things to form a connection between Medusa and feminism. The essay speaks about the importance of women’s writing and women allowing themselves to write. 

Cixious writes, “By writing herself, woman will return to the body which has been more than confiscated from her, which has been turned into the uncanny stranger on display – the ailing or dead figure, which so often turns out to be the nasty companion, the cause and location of inhibitions. Censor the body and you censor breath and speech at the same time.” Essentially, writing will restore Medusa’s head to her body. 

Emily Erwin Culpepper echoes this sentiment in her essay Ancient Gorgons: A Face for Contemporary Women’s Rage. After relating a failed sexual assault in which she frightened off her attacker by channeling the image of Medusa, she makes the same face in front of a mirror and realizes just what it was he had seen: A Gorgon. “I knew then why the attacker had become petrified,” she writes. “And knew with a great shuddering relief that I would win the fight against self-blame and claim my ability and right to write.” 

As Cixious said, “Who, surprised and horrified by the fantastic tumult of her drives […], hasn’t accused herself of being a monster?” Writing takes up space in a man’s world. It’s makes us akin to monsters, in their eyes; but perhaps that’s worth it. Perhaps we can give ourselves permission to be monstrous, if it means we get to be free. 

And it is Medusa who gives us this permission.  Medusa as woman-monster, Medusa as creatrix, Medusa as birth-woman-mother-monster who creates; and what she creates is dead men; and we, her descendants, her daughters, who want only to WRITE; and men say we are the same as her, that our writing is the same as killing them, and so maybe it is. Maybe it ought to be.

[The Laugh of the Medusa, Hélène Cixous]

[Ancient Gorgons: A Face for Contemporary Women’s Rage, Emily Erwin Culpepper, found in The Medusa Reader edited by Marjorie Garber & Nancy J. Vickers] 

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Harriet Hosmer’s Medusa

Harriet Hosmer was an artist when “less than 1 percent of women went to college.” She studied sculpture in Rome and favored strong female figures. According to the Minneapolis Institute of Art, her ���compassionate rendering shows Medusa’s transformation in progress, snakes intertwined with her lovely hair.”

Her Medusa is in the midst of maiden becoming monstress, snakes peeking out, and the viewer’s knowledge of the ultimate fate of Medusa lends it a tragic air.

“When the subject is someone who also has a demonic side, such as Medusa, Hosmer generally chose the moment of defeat, the moment when Medusa was being transformed from a beautiful woman into a woman with snakes writhing around her head and breasts, still touched with the aura of desirability but knowing that it is rapidly leaving her. The story continues with Medusa becoming capable of destroying men; we don’t see that here but if we know the story, we can imagine the eventually complete transformation. To the extent that viewers were captivated by the head, then Medusa had already begun to be a woman of dreaded power. We might wonder if Hosmer was making an ironic pun--Medusa, here depicted in marble by a female sculptor, was capable of turning men to stone.”

[Harriet Hosmer’s Medusa]

[Harriet Hosmer and the Triumph over Captivity]

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medusa with the head of perseus

This statue, created by Argentine-Italian sculptor Luciano Garbati, became a symbol of female rage. Its popularity coincided with the #metoo movement, leading to a second hashtag (though admittedly less popular), #me(dusa)too. 

Garbati, when creating this statue, had one thought in mind: “What would it look like, her victory, not his? How should that sculpture look?”

Recently, a bronze copy of the statue was installed outside the New York County Criminal Court, where Harvey Weinstein stood trial. The image of Medusa is a powerful one, seven feet tall and brandishing the head of a male attacker.

However, the statue was met with some controversy. Some women wondered, justifiably, why it was a sculpture by a male artist that was given so much focus and attention in the movement. Others wondered about Medusa’s noticeably bare genitals. Personally, I think the genitals don’t need to be more defined; the focus, on a statue of a rape survivor, shouldn’t be on her genitals at all. Garbati made the right choice when he chose not to make them defined or sexualized. 

The statue has been the victim of multiple counts of vandalism, at times even having her sword stolen. This seems a rather obvious way of attempting to silence her and steal her ability to defend herself, a symbolic attack. It was replaced each time, though; Medusa still stands. 

“I was thinking of Perseus, this man with all his gadgets, going there and having this victory,” said Garbati. “This difference between a masculine victory and a feminine one, that was central to my work. The representations of Perseus, he’s always showing the fact that he won, showing the head…if you look at my Medusas…she is determined, she had to do what she did because she was defending herself. It’s quite a tragic moment.”

[The story behind the Medusa statue that has become the perfect avatar for women’s rage]

[#MeToo Medusa Sculpture Met with Controversy Ahead of Unveiling in New York]

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the gorgon sisterhood

Medusa was not the only Gorgon. She had two sisters, Stheno and Euryale. Medusa was notably the only mortal of the three, while her sisters were immortal, which is the reason given for why Perseus targeted her specifically. 

The idea of a monstrous trio of sisters is not an uncommon one; witches often come in threes, from Shakespeare to Hocus Pocus, to the Graeae (who were also sisters of the Gorgons and were forced by Perseus to aid him in locating Medusa). 

Sisterhood is a personal topic for me, as my relationship with my sister is the deepest and most meaningful one in my life. We have both been through trauma like Medusa, and we supported one another as best we could. I can say in seriousness that without my sister I likely would not be alive today.

The Gorgons had a similar bond, it seems. Perseus was only barely able to escape with his life when Medusa’s sisters discovered her body. Their cries of grief inspired Athena to create the flute, which she threw away when she saw how playing it distended her cheeks, rendering her in appearance similar to the Gorgons. 

(The Death of Medusa by Edward Burne-Jones, (1888-1892). Source: Wikimedia Commons)

[Medusa and Her Sisters: The Gorgons, Cheryl Mackinnon] 

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devotionals of ugliness, part five: offensive v defensive

“(That girl on the news never invited that man to touch her. All I can think about is how I wish she had had something savage coursing through her skin.

God should have made girls lethal when he made monsters of men.)”

Elisabeth Hewer, from God Should Have Made Girls Lethal, in Wishing for Birds

There lies a certain sort of freedom in wanting to be monstrous. Not simply ugly, but monstrous, and thus powerful. A monstrous woman is so far beyond the realm of acceptable that none of the rules apply to her anymore. She’s ferocious, fierce, free, and most of all (best of all): untouchable. The monstrous woman doesn’t need to be afraid of men and male violence, which is why it’s such a romantic fantasy for women. 

Julia Armfield writes: “When Daphne transforms into a bay tree, the moment is one of both horror and deliverance. She is no longer what she once was, but the metamorphosis frees her from the unwanted attention of Apollo. This duality of horror and emancipation sits, I think, at the core of female transformation. Within the horror genre (and arguably everywhere else), bodies read as female are always subject to pain, and to the threat of violation. Becoming something else—a tree, a freak, a monster—preempts this pain and reduces the risk of harm. It may even, if the transformation is the right one, allow you to cause harm in return.” (Emphasis mine). 

Daphne and Medusa are two women in the Metamorphoses that are transformed either because of rape, or to escape rape. Daphne is transformed in the nick of time, but she becomes static, unable to escape the moment of terror that necessitated her transformation. And Medusa was not protected by her goddess, but rather punished, and said punishment made her a living weapon. Perseus had to wait until she slept to kill her, and he needed a goodie bag full of godly gifts to do it (not to mention that Athena guided his sword-hand). 

The freedom inherent in monstrosity is clear in many of today’s current horror literature by women. Julia Armfield, Carmen Maria Machado, and more all explore this theme. 

As does Hannah Williams, in her essay on the monstrous-feminine, which concludes thusly: “Sometimes, when I’m walking home on my own at night, I think about what it would be like to stalk silently behind men, my feet soft and easy on the pavement, quick flash of my shadow under the street lights. How I’d watch the whites of their eyes shine as they turned to look behind them – softly, quietly, can’t be too obvious – see the glisten of sweat on the back of their necks. I’d watch them quicken their pace with fear, recognise the measured gait – not wanting to run so as not to inspire a chase, keep calm, breathe deeply, act self-possessed but do not linger. I’d like to test it; to not be five-foot-four, soft-fleshed, short-sighted, to not think about the keys slotted between my fingers, the correct way to escape a chokehold. To not think, even in passing, of defence. Just once I’d like to think about attack: scaled wings, glinting incisors, long, yellowed claws. A pact with the devil that let me split concrete, burn with the touch of my finger.” (Emphasis mine). 

[Wishing for Birds, Elisabeth Hewer]

[On Body Horror and the Female Body, Julia Armfield] 

[The Resurgence of the Monstrous Feminine, Hannah Williams] 

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devotionals of ugliness, part four: female body hair

Hair as a site of rebellion is central to the Medusa myth. Modern women are held to the same standards as ancient women when it comes to their personal beauty. We must be perfectly groomed at all times, or we are failures as women.

Medusa, however, asks us this: what would happen if we let ourselves become wild again? If we permitted ourselves to be free? 

Shaving is a necessity for many of us. There is a powerful culture of shame around having any kind of body hair and most men find body hair repulsive. Even our pubic hair, which protects us in many different ways, is considered unnecessary and ugly. 

Men, though, aren’t held to the same standard. They’re allowed to be as hairy and unkempt as they please and they aren’t considered less human if they don’t shave; it’s normalized. Male body hair is free of stigma and shame. 

We as women will never attain the same freedom unless we rebel now. Medusa asks us to rebel, to throw away our razors, to allow ourselves to be as nature intended. Our body hair protects us. We don’t need to design our bodies around how attractive they are to men; we are not things to be used. We are human beings and deserve to be loved in our natural state, just the same way men are. 

I would like to suggest, too, that our body hair may be apotropaic in nature, as it wards away men who want us only if we fit their image of an Ideal Woman. We don’t need to adjust and alter our bodies to fit their desires; rather, we should ask why their hearts won’t expand to hold all of us, as we are. If they won’t expand then we will break them, and I will do so gladly. 

Consider, also: Medusa was repulsive to men, but to her sisters, Gorgons just like her, she was beautiful. 

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medusa & menstruation

It’s been suggested that Medusa is a goddess of menstruation, representing the dark female aspect of monthly cycles. According to Susan R. Bowers, one reason for being unable to look at Medusa directly was synonymous with the belief that “a menstruating woman’s look could turn a man to stone.” 

Medusa’s blood was considered highly potent: blood taken from her right side proved lethal, and blood from her left could heal all ails. Athena gifted this blood to Asclepius; it is from Medusa he gained his powers over life and death. There is also a version of the myth in which Medusa’s blood dripped from her severed head as Perseus flew, and when those drops hit the ground, they became snakes. This echoes the fact that snake venom can be used to poison or as an antidote. 

The stigma around menstruation has existed for centuries. Even today, women are considered unclean (and at times even dangerous) when they’re on their monthly cycle. The fact that menstruation is represented by a mythical woman who horrifies men to this day is no coincidence. 

(Perhaps it is also not a coincidence that she is not recorded as having turned any women to stone.) Women alone can look the Gorgon in the eyes and do joyously; maybe because the Gorgon is one aspect of themselves, one they have forgotten, or that society has demonized. The Gorgon is freedom and loving your female body, every aspect and feature of it. 

[Medusa and the Female Gaze, Susan R. Bowers]

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medusa & jellyfish

“Besides being the scientific name for swimming jellies, countries that speak Latin-based languages like Spanish, Italian, and French commonly call jellyfish medusa. It’s easy to see why. A swimming jelly looks like a decapitated head, sometimes strikingly so. Its many stinging tentacles have the bite of a snake. The neurotoxins in the animal’s stinging cells paralyze fish, so the legend could have stretched that ability to petrifying people too.” 

It has probably confused more than one person (including me) why jellyfish are named after Medusa, but this blog post explains it very well. You couldn’t look at Medusa and live; you can’t touch a jellyfish and move (if you’re a fish, at least). The comparison makes sense when thought about in this way. The tendrils of a jellyfish can also, at times, look a bit snaky, perhaps like snaky hair. 

Juli Berwald narrows down when jellyfish came to be associated with Medusa to “roughly the millennium between Pliny and the Renaissance. In 1735, the natural world collided with the Container Store that was Carl Linnaeus’s mind. He published the first organized classification of animals, plants, and minerals called Systema Naturae. The slim 13-page volume categorized four different types of jellyfish in a under the heading Medusa in a larger group called Zoophyta, or animal-plants, along with squid, sea urchins, sea stars, octopuses, and microorganisms.

By the time he published his 10th revision of Systema Naturae, Carl had become Sir Charles and he’d identified 43 different types of Medusae. In this final volume of classification, he concluded his description of the genus Medusa with these poetic words: “…and most of them shine with splendor in the water.”

Even the guy who officially bestowed jellyfish with the name of the monster was mesmerized by their inherent beauty.” 

[Juli Berwald’s blog post on Medusa and jellyfish]

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devotionals of ugliness, part three: defensive ugliness v.2

The word aposematism is the act of advertising to predators that one is not worth eating or attacking. It’s adopting a defensive or frightening exterior to ward off those who would do us harm. 

While there seems to be no research on this phenomenon in humans, or, as my focus is on, survivors of assault who want to appear to have fortified defenses, there is at least one woman who wrote about it. 

Madeleine Davies, in her essay Becoming Ugly, writes: “For the first time, I don’t know how to move past my boiling anger or laugh it away. Also for the first time, I have no desire to. Preferable, I now think, is to stop laughing, to become as repulsive as I can in an insult to these men—so many men—who hate women and the women who adulate them. Vanity keeps me from throwing away my makeup and sanity keeps me from, as I often feel the repugnant urge, breaking the mirror with the surface of my own face and leaving us both cracked open. But I also can’t deny my current impulse to become as ugly and unlikeable as I can, merely to serve as constant reminder of the ugliness inflicted upon us. We’ve been told time and time again that prettiness and likability will protect us from harm, that to be good women, we must play by these rules, but this is a lie. Nothing will protect us except for ourselves—and what’s more fortifying than a defensive exterior? There are days when all I want is to become a human road sign, a blinking hazard to any man misfortunate enough to cross my path: “I WANT TO OFFEND YOUR SIGHT. I WANT TO OFFEND YOUR EVERYTHING.”” (Emphasis mine). 

I think, too, there’s a common thread running through this and the men on twitter who claim that women dye their hair unnatural colors to ward away men. If blue or green hair was all it took - and actually worked - I think we’d all be sporting those colors. 

There are days when I want nothing more than to adopt the image of the Gorgon as my own image, not as a mask but my true body; imagine the safety with which we could move through the world if we were all Medusa, crowned with snakes and perfectly, violently free from the male gaze. 

[Becoming Ugly, Madeleine Davies] 

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the nature of becoming

We’ve all heard the rumor that our skin replaces itself every seven years. While that isn’t true, it paints a romantic picture: that one day, we might have bodies untouched. We believed that, almost like snakes molting, we would abandon our old bodies and become new. We would have skin that had never been harmed, had never felt an unwanted touch, skin with a clean, blank slate.

I have wondered if Medusa felt this when she was changed. Did her new body mourn the old? Did she have to relearn touch? Did she have affectionate touch? Her sisters, surely, were tender with her in a way that only sisters can be. It was my own sister who taught me what physical affection can be after trauma, and I helped her too when she experienced the same. 

So the rumor is untrue. What isn’t false, though, is that our bodies do change. Our cells are constantly replenishing themselves; we are, always, becoming new. The science might be complicated, but the gist is that, while the timelines differ for each type of cell (and some of them never regenerate), we do replace cells, including skin cells. But not as wholly as the rumor led us to believe. 

Medusa’s transformation might have erased the skin that had been the site of violence, but her new body was forever evidence of what she had survived. She became almost a living wound, permanent proof of what happened to her. It was two-way violence: body as history (and story) and body as weapon: no one would look at her and survive, no one would look at her and know what had happened to her because they could not see. Maybe, to her, that was a worthy trade. 

I think there lies value, though, in not forsaking the old. We want to forget, and maybe that helps some of us; but, for people like Medusa, whose wounds are what made her, remembering is important. Remembering what happened to our body so one day - easy as becoming stone - we can have the justice our wounds demand. 

[Does Your Body Really Replace Itself Every 7 Years?, Gerardo Sison]

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devotionals of ugliness, part two: defensive ugliness v.1

There’s debate about whether Saint Wilgefortis actually lived or not. However, the legend regarding her is as follows: “Wilgefortis was the teenage Christian daughter of a king in medieval Portugal. She had taken a vow of chastity, but her father ordered her to marry a pagan king. She resisted the unwelcome marriage by praying to be made repulsive to her fiancé. God answered her prayers when she grew a beard.” (Emphasis mine). 

The mythos of Medusa can be found everywhere. 

Just as ancient women adorned themselves with images of the Gorgon to protect themselves against the evil eye, modern (and not so modern) women invoke her legacy to protect themselves against a more pressing threat: men. 

Hair has always been something that women are expected to maintain and style. The styles may have changed, but the expectations haven’t. And women have always rebelled against this. Some women shave their heads, do away with hair entirely; some women refuse to shave, which is still a revolutionary act in today’s times. 

Medusa went a different route.

Her snaky hair is repulsive to men in a visceral way, from Freud to modern male artists who can’t imagine her as anything less than beautiful. Some say her hair is phallic in nature, others say it’s reminiscent of a woman’s pubic hair; either way, it repels. Both Medusa and Wilgefortis went the extreme route when desiring repulsiveness, but it worked: they repelled the male gaze just as effectively as a Gorgoneion repels the evil eye. 

[Saint Wilgefortis: Holy bearded woman fascinates for centuries, Kittredge Cherry]

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devotionals of ugliness, part one: beauty culture

Before Medusa was beautiful, she was ugly. It can seem like the reverse, given the popularity of the Ovid telling which has her beautiful and then becoming ugly. But she existed long before Ovid did, and she was ugly first, apotropaic. She was ugly enough to terrify before she was ugly enough to kill. 

Ugliness was where she made her territory. She lived in it, breathed it, exuded it, made it something uniquely hers until the entire culture knew: this is a Gorgon, and it terrifies. 

It is this ugliness that modern feminists find liberating. Beauty comes with a strict set of rules, one that differs between cultures and time periods, and seems to shift with every decade. Female beauty comes equipped with a required body type, too, one that doesn’t include snakes; no woman could be expected to keep up with such dramatic shifts in the current ideal, which can even require surgery to attain. And that is the point. Each shift of beauty ideals means the old are replaced and the new comes in, younger and younger women.

But ugliness doesn’t change. Nor does it require money, primping, pain, anything: all it asks is that you disobey. Disobey the culture, disobey the demands, the makeup, the shaving, the dieting, the uncomfortable clothing. 

Umberto Eco writes: “Are there universal ways in which people react to beauty? No, because beauty is detachment, absence of passion. Ugliness, by contrast, is passion.” (Emphasis mine). 

Medusa gives us permission to be ugly. She has outlived hundreds of different standards of beauty, a timeless horror, one that will never be replaced. Her iconic snakes, her ability to turn people (men, mostly) to stone; her myth has survived. She gives us permission to survive, too, and to say no. No to altering our bodies, to becoming something new to fit the ideals of others. No matter how much we try to change to suit the male gaze, it will never last forever. Beauty will betray you, will fade and grow old; but ugliness never will. 

[Considering the Relativity of Beauty in Human History, Umberto Eco]

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medusa’s misogynist appropriation

While the image of Medusa has been empowering to feminists, her image has been -- and still is -- used as a patriarchal weapon against women. Consider, for example, the anti-Clinton, pro-Trump political posters which put their faces onto a statue of Perseus brandishing the Gorgon’s head. An immediately recognizable symbol of female power, the very things that feminists find appealing about her (her rage, her ugliness, her power) are the tools used to demonize powerful women. 

Elizabeth Johnston puts it this way: “In Western culture, strong women have historically been imagined as threats requiring male conquest and control, and Medusa herself has long been the go-to figure for those seeking to demonize female authority.” 

One can go back centuries and find images of women in power portrayed as Medusa, from English queens to American politicians. These women are implied, then, to be something subhuman -- subhuman for more than being female, that is; they are subhuman for being un-beautiful and threatening. They are demonized for the things men are praised for. 

Equating women in power to Medusa also implies the beheading of Medusa, which says a lot about what the men who make these comparisons want to do to these women; that is, silence her. Mary Beard, in Women and Power: A Manifesto, writes: “What is extraordinary is that this beheading remains even now a cultural symbol of opposition to women’s power.” 

Medusa is thus a double-edged sword for women: she is our icon, and also symbolic of the very misogyny that we invoke her as protection from. We may hope that she haunts the nightmares of men who have threatened or harmed us, but she also haunts “Western imagination, materializing whenever male authority feels threatened by female agency” (Elizabeth Johnston). 

Despite decades of women trying to reclaim Medusa, the trend of using her as a weapon against women has never once faltered. Men editing female politicians’ faces onto the Gorgon’s head are not praising her power; they are calling for her beheading. It is violence and it is also unsurprising. We live every day in a society and culture that wants us dead if we step out of line; Medusa-women deserve it, these men are saying. They were too loud, too angry, too manhating, took up too much space, made a man cry once, etc. 

However, if it is inevitable that a woman will make a mistake once and therefore lose all male sympathy she may have had and end up with her face plastered on the head of a murdered mythical woman, then I for one intend to deserve it. I will not merely step out of line; I will erase the line entirely, make my own rules, set my own boundaries, and I will do it all as loudly as I wish. I will be Medusa, if Medusa is what we will all end up as. And I will not be silenced. 

[The Original ‘Nasty Woman,’ Elizabeth Johnston]

[Women and Power: A Manifesto, Mary Beard]

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athena’s protection

One thing regarding the myth of Medusa that has become more popular in recent years is the idea of Athena having transformed her as a blessing and not a punishment. This likely stems from survivors wishing that they had been given a magical gift that would prevent any man from ever touching them again -- or even looking at them. While I could not find the source of this myth, I found a few sources of women who interact with her myth in this way. 

This art, posted seven years ago, might have been what inspired this interpretation on tumblr, which then leaked into other websites and places. This version of the myth is more empowering to survivors, as it creates a nurturing and healing relationship between two women, replacing animosity. It also implies that what we are turned into due to our trauma -- whether we are angry, or vulnerable, prickly or frightened -- can be seen in a positive light. We can turn them into positives by trying to see our reactions themselves not as curses but as our brains trying to protect us, as Athena protected Medusa. 

Marissa Korbel, a sexual assault survivor writing about Medusa for The Rumpus, says this about the myth: “Medusa’s body became a monstrous weapon, undefeatable, untouchable. But the curse also made her unrapeable; a permanent virgin in the old sense of the word. Unownable, independent, alone on her island. In this way, Athena’s curse has a double edge: it is punishment, but also protection.

I’ve been thinking about the way the things that harm us can become strengths. Not that we should be harmed in the first place; of course I’d prefer a trauma-free world. But my narrative being taken from me at the age of sixteen is what drove me to write. My first book is a memoir about that experience and, while I’m sure I might have written another story for other reasons without my past, I don’t think I would go back and erase it if I could.”

This topic can be a difficult one, as being grateful for our inner Gorgon seems to imply that we are grateful for the things that necessitated becoming Gorgons. But, to put it one way: loving who and what we are does not mean loving what was done to us. We can love our survival without needing to forgive what turned us into survivors. Healing does not require forgiveness of our assailants. Medusa is proof of that: she made forgiveness an impossibility that lived within her very body. If Poseidon had come for her again, he would have been turned to stone, left to the elements and eroded by time, fading as slowly as our memories of violence do. 

But, as Korbel writes, “Without fire, steel is just iron and carbon, some strong but basic elements. It’s the forging, the crucible, the heat that gives steel its legendary strength. While I don’t believe in silver linings or that everything happens for a reason, it’s true that who I am now is the product of my experiences. Experiences that burned while they forged me into something magnificent. Maybe snake-headed or maybe just deadly sharp, the fire is what made me.” (Emphasis mine.) 

What is magnificent is that we lived. Maybe in pieces, maybe forever altered, but alive, even so; and isn’t that worth celebrating? 

[The Thread: Forged in Fire, Marissa Korbel]