Where Does the Myth of Medusa Come From?

Medusa is one of the most fascinating figures in classical mythology and one who bears a deep contemporary resonance. Indeed, just yesterday, it was announced that a controversial statue of her would be installed in Collect Pond Park in New York City. In order to understand this statue and the controversy surrounding it, we need to talk about the bizarre and fascinating history of how the Medusa myth has evolved over the past 2,800 years or so.

The story about Medusa that most people today are familiar with holds that she was once an extraordinarily beautiful mortal woman, but then she was raped by the god Poseidon in the temple of the goddess Athena. Athena was disgusted by the desecration of her temple, so she cursed Medusa, giving her snakes for hair and making it so that anyone who saw her face would be instantly turned to stone. Then, eventually, the hero Perseus came along and beheaded her.

This story, however, is actually radically different from the story the ancient Greeks were familiar with. In the oldest surviving sources for the Medusa myth, she is seemingly born a Gorgon with the ability to turn people to stone at a glance, she is never raped by Poseidon, and she is never cursed by Athena. Oh, and she apparently also had the four-legged lower body of a horse.

Hesiodos’s version of the story from the eighth century BCE

The story of Perseus and Medusa seems to have originated during the Early Iron Age (lasted c. 1200 – c. 800 BCE), before the invention of the Greek alphabet. It is unclear exactly how the story arose. The renowned British classical scholar Jane Ellen Harrison (lived 1850 – 1928) argues in her book Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion, which was originally published in 1903, that the head of Medusa was originally an apotropaic symbol meant to ward off evil and that the story of Perseus and Medusa was only invented to explain the symbol later on.

Harrison may be correct. As I will discuss in a moment, it is certainly true that the ancient Greeks did use Medusa’s head as an apotropaic symbol, but it is hard to say which came first: the symbol or the story behind it. All we can really do is speculate. One thing we do know for certain, though, is that the oldest surviving version of the story of Perseus and Medusa comes from the poem Theogonia, which was composed in around the eighth century BCE by the Greek poet Hesiodos of Askre.

In Hesiodos’s version of the story, Medusa and her two sisters are the offspring of the primordial sea deities Keto and Phorkys. No explanation is given for why they are the way they are and it is implied that they were all simply born that way. Hesiodos remarks that Medusa’s sisters Sthenno and Euryale were both immortal, but she was born mortal for some reason. Here is what he says in his Theogonia, lines 270–286, as translated by Hugh G. Evelyn-White:

“And again, Keto bare to Phorkys the fair-cheeked Graiai, sisters grey from their birth: and both deathless gods and men who walk on earth call them Graiai, Pemphredo well-clad, and saffron-robed Enyo, and the Gorgons who dwell beyond glorious Ocean in the frontier land towards Night where are the clear-voiced Hesperides, Sthenno, and Euryale, and Medusa who suffered a woeful fate: she was mortal, but the two were undying and grew not old.”

“With her lay the Dark-haired One [i.e., Poseidon] in a soft meadow amid spring flowers. And when Perseus cut off her head, there sprang forth great Chrysaor and the horse Pegasos who is so called because he was born near the springs [pegai] of Okeanos; and that other, because he held a golden blade [aor] in his hands. Now Pegasus flew away and left the earth, the mother of flocks, and came to the deathless gods: and he dwells in the house of Zeus and brings to wise Zeus the thunder and lightning.”

Notice that Hesiodos says that Medusa had sexual intercourse with the god Poseidon, but he says that it happened in “a soft meadow amid spring flowers”—not in the temple of Athena—and he never says anything about it being a rape. As far as Hesiodos is concerned, everything that happened between Medusa and Poseidon was perfectly consensual.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of the so-called “Pseudo-Seneca,” a bronze portrait head dating to the late first century CE discovered in the Villa of the Papyri in Herculaneum, believed to be an imaginative representation of Hesiod. (No one knows what Hesiod really looked like.)

An very early surviving depiction of Medusa

Hesiodos says nothing whatsoever about what Medusa actually looked like. We can, however, gather some vague impression of what he may have been imagining by looking at near-contemporary depictions of her in Greek art.

The earliest surviving identifiable depiction of Medusa in art is a bas-relief from a pithos—a kind of large storage jar—from one of the Kykladic Islands dated to the early seventh century BCE. The relief shows Perseus grasping Medusa by the hair as he holds his sword to her neck in preparation to chop her head off.

Perseus is wearing winged sandals, he has a purse around his neck, and he is turning his face away from Medusa to avoid her deadly gaze. Medusa has bulging eyes and fangs. Her hair is not discernably made of snakes, but, oddly enough, she has the lower body of a horse, with four legs like a centaur.

ABOVE: Early seventh-century BCE pithos from the Kykladic Islands showing Perseus about to chop Medusa’s head off. Oddly enough, she has the body of a horse.

The birth of the canonical Medusa

In later Greek art, Medusa starts to be portrayed in a manner that is more recognizable to us. The Greeks began to depict her all over the place in their art because her face in particular was seen as an apotropaic symbol and her hideous appearance was thought to frighten away evil.

In most Greek representations from around the sixth century BCE until at least the fourth century BCE, Medusa’s appearance diverges drastically from conventional Greek ideas about what women were supposed to look like. She is normally shown with a hideous face with a beard, bulging eyes, puffy cheeks, an enormous tongue hanging out of her mouth, huge boar-like tusks, and serpents entwined in her hair. On her back, she usually has a set of wings. Around her waist, she often wears either a single serpent or a pair of intertwined serpents as a belt.

Apotropaic symbols such as this one were extremely common in the ancient world. For instance, the ancient Egyptians used depictions of the hideous dwarf-god Bes to ward off evil spirits and the ancient Mesopotamians used depictions of the terrifying demon Pazuzu to ward against other demons. To some extent, Medusa can be thought of as the Greek equivalent of Bes and Pazuzu; she is dangerous, but also protective.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of an archaic Greek relief carving of Medusa from the west pediment of the Temple of Artemis on the Greek island of Korkyra (modern-day Corfu)

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of a Greek terra-cotta plaque of Medusa running, dated to between c. 620 and c. 600 BCE, currently on display in the Archaeological Museum of Syracuse

ABOVE: Tondo from an Attic black-figure kylix dated to the late sixth century BCE depicting the face of a Gorgon

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of a Greek terra-cotta antefix bearing the face of Medusa, dated to around the fourth century BCE, now on display in the Pushkin Museum

The way Medusa and her sisters are depicted in Greek art lines up well with how they are described in Greek literature. One classic description of them is given by the Titan Prometheus in the tragedy Prometheus Bound, which is traditionally attributed to the ancient Athenian tragic playwright Aischylos (lived c. 525 – c. 455 BCE). In the play, Prometheus warns the princess Io, as translated by James Romm:

“Near them are their three sisters, winged creatures,
the Gorgons, snaky-haired, reviled by mortals;
no one who looks upon them still draws breath.
Guard against these as you would a hostile army.”

Medusa and her sisters continued to be seen as hideous, inhuman monsters until the Hellenistic Period (lasted c. 323 – c. 30 BCE). During this period, Greek artists began to depict monsters of all types as more human-like in appearance. For instance, as I discuss in this article from May 2019, throughout the Archaic and Classical Periods, Sirens were consistently shown in Greek art as birds with the heads of women, but, during the Hellenistic Period, they started to be portrayed as full-bodied women with only the legs and wings of birds.

Something similar seems to have happened with Medusa. In Hellenistic art, Medusa loses her massive boar tusks, her wings, and her massive tongue. She begins to look increasingly like a normal, human woman with snakes entwined in her hair. By the time we get to the Roman era, the transformation is complete and Medusa is far more of a woman than a monster.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of a first-century CE Roman door decoration of the head of Medusa from the city of Pompeii

ABOVE: Roman mosaic of the head of Medusa from a tepidarium Tunisia dating to the late second century CE

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of a Roman relief carving of the head of Medusa dating to the second or third century CE

Ovid’s radical reimagining of Medusa’s backstory

Medusa was not done transforming, though. In around the year 8 CE, the Roman poet Publius Ovidius Naso (lived 43 BCE – c. 17 CE)—who is better known in English as simply “Ovid”—wrote a long narrative poem in Latin titled Metamorphoses, in which he radically reimagined the whole story of Medusa, inventing for her a whole new origin story.

In Ovid’s retelling of the story, Medusa is not born with snakes for hair; instead, Ovid says that she was once extraordinarily beautiful and renowned for her amazing hair, but then she was raped by the god Neptune (i.e., the god the Romans identified with the Greek god Poseidon) in the temple of the goddess Minerva (i.e., the goddess the Romans identified with the Greek goddess Athena) and Minerva was so horrified by the sight that she cursed Medusa by giving her serpents for hair. Here is what Ovid portrays the hero Perseus as saying in his Metamorphoses 4.794–804, as translated by Horace Gregory:

“That too is a good story,
and here it is: Once she was beautiful,
pursued by many lovers, and best of beauties,
she had glorious hair, as I heard said by one
who claimed to know her. As the story goes,
Neptune had raped her in Minerva’s temple,
a scene that shocked the nerves of Jove’s pure daughter,
who held her breastplate up to shield her eyes;
as if to warn the girl of carelessness
she turned her hair to snakes. Today Minerva
to keep bold strangers at a proper distance
wears snakes on the gold shield across her breast.”

This story is not attested in any source before Ovid. It therefore seems highly probable that Ovid invented the whole backstory of Medusa himself.

Ovid was fascinated by stories involving physical transformations and the poem that he tells this story in was, after all, titled Metamorphoses, so it makes sense that he would invent a backstory for Medusa involving transformation. It is also possible that Ovid may have been trying to get his readers to feel some modicum of sympathy for Medusa—to see the humanity behind the monstrosity.

ABOVE: Frontispiece illustration for an edition of Ovid’s Metamorphoses printed in 1731 in Leipzig, showing what the illustrator imagined Ovid might have looked like. (No one knows what he actually looked like.)

Greek sources after Ovid

Ovid’s reinterpretation of the Medusa story does not seem to have really caught on the Greek world. The Bibliotheke of Pseudo-Apollodoros, a Greek mythographic composition that was most likely written in around the second century CE or thereabouts, nearly two hundred years after Ovid, tells a version of the Medusa story that far more closely resembles the version told by Hesiodos than the version told by Ovid.

The Bibliotheke states that there were three Gorgons, that their names were Stheno, Euryale, and Medusa, that they were the daughters of Phorkys and Keto, and that Medusa was the only one who was mortal. It even gives a very traditional description of what they looked like. Here is what it says, as translated by Stephen M. Trzaskoma:

“The Gorgons had heads with serpents’ coils spiraling around them, large tusks like boars’, bronze arms, and gold wings with which they could fly. They turned whoever saw them into stone, so Perseus came to them as they slept.”

Like Hesiodos and Aischylos, Pseudo-Apollodoros says nothing about Medusa being raped by Poseidon in Athena’s temple or about her being cursed by Athena.

Ovid’s popularity in the Middle Ages and Renaissance

Ovid’s story may not have taken off in the Greek-speaking east, but it did eventually take off in the Latin-speaking west. Knowledge of the Greek language became extremely rare in western Europe during the Early Middle Ages (lasted c. 475 – c. 800 CE). Consequently, people in western Europe became less aware of the original Greek sources for the Medusa myth. Knowledge of Latin, however, remained widespread among the educated elites.

Thus, western Europeans found themselves getting most of their knowledge of classical mythology from Latin writers. Ovid was especially admired among Latin writers during the Middle Ages. As a result of this, Ovid’s revisionist retelling of Medusa’s origin became seen as canonical.

Ovid’s Metamorphoses remained wildly popular during the Renaissance, especially among Latin humanist scholars. Consequently, Renaissance artists adapted many scenes from it into works of art. Between 1545 and 1554, the Italian Mannerist sculptor Benvenuto Cellini created a bronze sculpture of the hero Perseus standing totally nude atop Medusa’s headless corpse, holding up her severed head in his left hand, with blood and gore dripping from the stump of her neck.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of Benvenuto Cellini’s statue of Perseus with the head of Medusa

Feminist reclamation of Medusa in the twentieth century

Medusa’s next transformation may come to some people as a bit of a surprise. One thing that is apparent to anyone who has read anything about Greek mythology is that it is generally very sexist. This is a result of the fact that the stories have been passed down to us through works written predominantly by men, many of whom were explicit misogynists. This is the reason why, for instance, monsters in Greek myths are usually female and heroes are usually male.

In the twentieth century, though, feminists began to reexamine the myth of Medusa and reinterpret it. Where pre-modern authors had seen a monster, twentieth-century feminists saw a powerful woman who had been raped and abused by a man and was consequently filled with righteous anger at the patriarchal establishment.

The feminist writer Emily Erwin Culpepper writes in an article titled “Gorgons: A Face for Contemporary Women’s Rage,” published in the fall 1986 issue of the magazine Women of Power:

“The Amazon Gorgon face is female fury personified. The Gorgon/Medusa image has been rapidly adopted by large numbers of feminists who recognize her as one face of our own rage.”

Medusa has taken on an especially strong resonance since the 2016 election. On 6 November 2016, The Atlantic published an article by Elizabeth Johnston, an associate professor of English at Monroe Community College, titled “The Original ‘Nasty Woman’” in which she offers a similar reinterpretation of Medusa as a powerful woman who has been unfairly demonized. She writes:

“A Gorgon from classical mythology, Medusa is widely known as a monstrous creature with snakes in her hair whose gaze turns men to stone. Through the lens of theology, film, art, and feminist literature, my students and I map how her meaning has shifted over time and across cultures. In so doing, we unravel a familiar narrative thread: 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.”

Thus, Medusa has become something of a feminist icon.

Luciano Garbati’s Medusa with the Head of Perseus

It is in this context of the feminist reinterpretation of the Medusa myth that, in 2008, the Argentine-Italian sculptor Luciano Garbati created his sculpture Medusa with the Head of Perseus as a direct riposte to Benvenuto Cellini’s Perseus with the Head of Medusa. The statue depicts the Gorgon Medusa standing nude with a defiant stare on her face, holding a sword in her left hand and the severed head of Perseus in her right hand.

On 9 October 2020, it was officially announced that a seven-foot-tall bronze copy of Garbati’s statue would be installed in Collect Pond Park in New York City—directly across from the New York County Criminal Court where the notorious sexual abuser and rapist Harvey Weinstein was sentenced. It will remain outside the courthouse for six months.

I personally rather like Garbati’s statue as an example of how artists can creatively reinterpret classical mythology to send a contemporary political message. Nonetheless, I do have a few problems with it. One problem is that he chose to depict Medusa in a way that aligns very well with conventional twenty-first-century American ideas about beauty; she portrayed as young, tall, and extremely thin, without any trace of fat or body hair, and, for some reason, her genitals seem to be entirely missing.

Not only does this image not comport with how the classical Greeks imagined Medusa, it doesn’t even align with how the Greeks imagined goddesses. All you have to do is look at any Greek statue of Aphrodite to see that the ancient Greeks imagined her as a lot more voluptuous than the Medusa we see in Garbati’s statue.

I don’t know if it’s necessarily a bad thing that the sculptor chose to depict her in this particular way, but it definitely makes the message behind the sculpture seem a lot less radical. It doesn’t seem entirely fitting to me that, even when she is committing the ultimate act of defiance against the patriarchy, Medusa is for some reason still conforming to patriarchal norms of physical appearance.

ABOVE: Image showing the statue Medusa with the Head of Perseus from in front and from behind

Another problem I have is that, in Ovid’s telling of the story, Perseus is not the man who rapes Medusa; Neptune is the one who does that. Perseus is just a mortal pawn who is sent to decapitate her. If you want to use the statue as a commentary on the Me Too movement, it would be a lot more fitting if Medusa were holding the severed head of Neptune, rather than the head of Perseus. It’s not right for a male rapist in a position of power to get away with everything while a man in a much lower position takes all the blame.

I understand that the statue was originally made back in 2008 and it was not originally intended as a commentary on the Me Too movement, but, if you put the statue in front of the courthouse where Harvey Weinstein was sentenced, that’s inevitably how people are going to interpret it.

Finally, to me at least, it seems like it’s maybe not such a good idea to have a statue of a grisly beheading of any sort directly outside a courthouse. I understand the message that they’re trying to send about how the world is changing and men who rape and abuse women are going to start facing justice, but, in order to understand the piece, you really need to know the background about Ovid’s version of the Medusa myth, Benvenuto Cellini’s statue of Perseus, and the feminist rehabilitation of Medusa in the twentieth century.

People who don’t know the complex history behind the sculpture are going to inevitably interpret it as nothing more than a glorification of violence. For this reason, I think that the statue really needs to be contextualized and it is better suited to a museum than the outside of a courthouse.