Weah, Hello

Most of the time you see an artists rendition of the mythical Gorgon Medusa, you are looking more into the soul of the artist than you are at a realistic depiction of the face of sheer terror. Way too often, the depiction is lacking in horror. In fact, the woman will seem plain, if not outright feminine, possibly even attractive, at times even beautiful. Perhaps her face will exude an aura of menace, of evil, but just as often she might seem sad, morose, angry, or even herself fearful-sometimes she might appear comic. In full figured representations you find yourself gazing on the form of a beautiful model, who merely happens to have the unfortunate characteristic of snakes growing out of her head where there should instead be hair. As many times as not, even this seems to add to her attractiveness.

Now, thanks to the Greek artist Oekaki, I am able to present to you what I have always wanted to see, an actual legitimately artistic representation of everything Medusa should be. Sheer, unadulterated terror.

After all, in myth, this entity was born when, after the castration of Uranus by his son Cronus, the latter flung the severed genitals of his father into the ocean, which resulted in several drops of blood splatterred upon the ground. One of these splatters of blood upon the earth formed the wild winged horse Pegasus. From the other, Medusa was born. Yet, in later myth, Medusa was depicted as one of three of the Gorgons, and was described as the mortal one of the three, due possibly to her symbolic birth from the soil of the earth.

I think it was the poet Robert Graves who postulated that the myth of the Medusa was probably based on the use of prophylactic masks in certain goddess cults of Mychaenaean times, specifically singling out the cults of Athene and Hera, who may have used these masks to ward off evil and to frighten away the intruders and curious. This is possible, but I have as yet been made aware of no archaeological or otherwise recorded discoveries that attest to the truth of this. Until such time, we have no way of knowing whether Medusa predated the Hellenic peoples of Classical Greece among the Mychaenaeans, or, for that matter, whether she was adapted from them. Nor can we be sure whether or not she was previously seen in the same manner as she came to be seen by the latter day Greeks with whom we are much more familiar.

Whatever the case, the terrible aspect and ideal of Medusa represents a work of genius of the ancient imagination. She is the face of mortals’ most dreaded fears. To look into her face is to be confronted with, and paralyzed by, all of those fears, all of those that are both personal to the observer, and are unconscous and racial to all mankind. All of those of which we are conscously aware, and at the same time those which reside in the darkest recesses of the unconscous mind.

After all, she was born from the act of castration, itself an innate fear of all men, and so fitting that she should be represented as a female figure, by a culture who itself seems to have taken an untrustworthy view of the feminine sex. Yet, in addition, every snake which protrudes from the Medusas’ head can rightfully be seen as potentially an individual fear, a fear of something-

Poverty, disease, guilt, pain, sufferring, death, loneliness, isolation, humiliation, betrayal-all of those things which have plaqued mankind and turned us all into a global village of neurotic idiots.

This, then, is the accurrate face of Medusa. Look well upon her visage, and thank the artist Oekaki for his vision, and perhaps also for having the kindness for not having her looking directly our way. That may have been too much for us. It may, in fact, have been too much for him. On the other hand, as FDR himself once said-

“The only thing we have to fear is fear itself”. That, and maybe an angry woman with a sharp knife.