Updated 11 September 2026
Through Medusa and Sedna, this essay considers female rage as a response to violated boundaries and broken relations—and asks when its destructive force becomes protective, even life-serving.
If you really want to hear about it, you’ll probably want to know that before she spent a lousy two millennia (at least) sealed in stone at her most pissed off, Medusa was a sensational mortal woman who spent her days offering prayers in flowers and song at the feet of the one who would immortalize her. But Medusa has been in transformation, shedding her worn-out skin for a coat more suited to today’s shifting climate. Although her transformation has become especially visible over the past two decades, its serpentine trace reaches further back. When it comes to Medusa, we’ve been living under a rock.
Medusa after Perseus: Beauty, Violation and Rage
Medusa has never belonged to a single story. Across centuries, her image has carried terror and protection, beauty and violation, destruction and sovereignty. Ss the world around her changes, she has gathered new meanings without entirely shedding the old.
For centuries, Medusa’s story has been told through the blade of Perseus—the hero who beheads her—while she appears as the cold, monstrous Gorgon witch whose gaze entombs whoever dares look at her. But in recent decades, she has found a new home in the passionata of feminist thought. In Ovid’s late Roman telling, Neptune violates Medusa in Minerva’s temple, after which Minerva transforms her hair into snakes. Earlier Greek traditions do not tell the same story and often present the Gorgons as monstrous from birth. The familiar sequence of beauty, sexual violation and punishment is therefore not Medusa’s single or original story, but one of the myth’s own transformations. Read through a feminist lens, it raises a sharper question: what appears when we meet Medusa where the story has left her? A decapitated female head, writhing snake hair, fierce eyes and furious. Does she feel trapped to you? Perhaps. We should be careful not to rescue Medusa too quickly from her monstrosity. There is something genuinely terrifying about her, something capable of destruction, and this too belongs to her image. Perhaps her power lies precisely in this ambiguity: she can protect and she can destroy, and we cannot always know where one becomes the other.
Medusa as a Protective Image: Sicily and Istanbul
One place where Medusa’s meaning changes is Sicily, an island poised like a football at the tip of Italy’s toe and at a meeting point of Mediterranean routes. Centuries of exchange and conquest made it a meeting ground for Greek, Roman, Byzantine, Arab and Norman cultures, a social crucible where diversified ideas could slow cook. During the Sicilian Vespers of 1282, islanders rose against Angevin rule. Within weeks they slaughtered and expelled the French. According to a later tradition, the uprising began after a French soldier harassed a Sicilian woman; streets filled with the angry and armed, decrying ‘moranu li Francisi’!, carrying the Sicilian trinacria.
While the trinacria—three bent legs turning around a central Gorgoneion, or Medusa-head—has much older roots in Sicily and appears on ancient coinage, its later political uses bound the emblem to Sicilian identity; a modern version now occupies the centre of the regional flag, accompanied by wings, snakes and ears of wheat. Rather than assigning it one fixed historical meaning, this Sicilian Medusa can be read as a guardian. Her petrifying gaze becomes protective directed outward rather than back at herself. Here she is no longer only the monster defeated by a hero, but an island’s winged witness to protection, fertility and cultural identity.
Across the Ionian Sea, beneath the streets of Istanbul, lies a more secretive Medusa. Deep within the damp, cavernous Basilica Cistern, built in the sixth century to supply water to the Byzantine capital, hundreds of marble columns rise from the darkness. At the far end, two enormous stone heads of Medusa support the bases of two columns. One lies sideways, the other upside down. Their original purpose, and the reason for their unusual positions, remain uncertain. Yet there is something extraordinary about finding Medusa here, deep beneath the city, bearing its weight in a place devoted to the preservation of water. Here, far beneath the city, Medusa bears the weight of a place devoted to preserving water. The figure whose gaze could turn living bodies to stone now rests beneath the columns of a reservoir. What might she have to say to us, after all these centuries in the dark?
from left to right - Medusa at the Basilica Cistern, Benvenuto Cellini's 'Perseus with the Head of Medusa ', Medusa stone, Raja Ravi Varma's Kali, Carvaggio's Medusa, Luciano Garbati's Medusa with the head of Perseus
What Does Female Rage Protect? Sedna and Kali
Further north, a different figure appears: Sedna, known under several names and through distinct oral traditions across the Inuit Arctic. In many tellings, she becomes a powerful being of the sea world upon whom access to marine animals depends. In some tellings, when relations between human beings, sea animals and Sedna have been disturbed, an angakkuq (an Inuit ritual specialist,) descends to her and combs her tangled hair. As the knots are released, the animals become available to the hunters again. The episode concerns more than a generalized idea of “balance with nature”: it belongs to a particular world of obligations between human, animal and spiritual life.
In another group of tellings, Sedna is cast from a boat by her father, who cuts off her fingers as she clings to its side. Her severed fingers become seals, whales and other marine animals; Sedna sinks into the sea and becomes a powerful being of its depths. Violence and transformation are inseparable in this narrative.
These figures emerge from very different religious and cultural worlds, each with its own meanings and obligations. Yet, placed alongside one another, they invite a question that reaches beyond any single story: when might a destructive force arise in defence of life?
Contemporary feminist readings often find in Medusa the rage that follows sexual violation and punishment. In several Inuit traditions, Sedna's anger is bound to ruptures in the obligations between human beings, animals and the sea. Kali enters a different cosmological field again: in the Devī Māhātmya, her destructive force confronts powers that threaten the order of life.
What these figures allow us to consider, each in her own way, is whether destruction can serve preservation. Anger may become a boundary-making No: a force that declares where relation has been violated, where something living demands protection.
Medusa by Lotte Hauss @ Lotte Hauss & Maison Douce
Medusa and a Woman’s Right to Say No
The stories of Medusa and Sedna suggest that beneath the image lies a woman of flesh and blood whose authority is not always welcomed. Mary Beard has placed contemporary leaders including Theresa May and Angela Merkel within a much longer history of the suspicion directed at women who exercise public authority. During the 2016 American election, the connection became brutally literal: Hillary Clinton was repeatedly recast as Medusa, her severed head held aloft by a triumphant Perseus. Theresa May was recast as “Maydusa” in a 2017 political comic and during her period as Home Secretary, a Police Federation magazine reportedly called her “the Medusa of Maidenhead.”
Medusa’s archetypal image may be conspicuous in public life, but as often she is less visible. She may be the artist whose work alters how others see, or the mother whose clear presence interrupts an inherited pattern. Medusa is not only the woman made monstrous by projection; she is also the woman one might want to sit beside, to discover what knowledge anger carries.
For a woman who has learned to remain composed, useful or accommodating, anger may first appear indirectly: as exhaustion, withdrawal, recurrent conflict, bodily tension, or a dream that refuses to be interpreted away. In analysis, the question is neither how to unleash this anger nor how to suppress it, but what relation it bears to injury, boundary, desire and care.
And if we were to sit beside Medusa, rather than reach for Perseus's sword, what would we recognize of ourselves in those terrible eyes?
Anger does not always know what it serves. It can become indiscriminate, fastening itself to old injuries and finding enemies where none exist. What begins as a defence of life may come to diminish it. Rage left unconscious may petrify; rage attended to can become discrimination—the capacity to know what must stop, what must be protected, and what kind of life can no longer be lived.
To encounter Medusa is also to recognise our own capacity for destruction. There is no guarantee that what emerges from the depths will be wise or benevolent. It asks us to hold our instinctual nature in relation to consciousness, and to take responsibility for what we do with its power.
Rage left unconscious may petrify, but rage attended to can become discrimination—the capacity to know what must stop, what must be protected, and what kind of life can no longer be lived. To encounter Medusa, then, is also to recognize our own capacity for destruction. While there is no guarantee that what emerges from the depths will be wise or benevolent, it asks us to become adepts at the difficult work of holding our instinctual nature in relation to consciousness, and taking responsibility for what we do with its power.
Yet the life we seek to protect extends far beyond our individual existence. Joanna Macy, whose work brings Buddhist thought and systems theory into conversation with ecological activism, understands our grief and outrage at the destruction of the natural world as expressions of our profound interconnectedness with it. In her practice of honouring our pain for the world, sorrow, fear and anger become ways of recognising what is at stake in the web of life to which we belong. Such feelings may be appropriate responses to a world whose relationships have been disturbed, whose forests, waters, creatures and communities are being diminished. To feel their loss is also to feel our participation in their lives. And anger, when attended to, may awaken the courage to defend what is threatened and to take responsibility for the conditions that allow life to flourish.
To follow one's own way within the connective tissue of this painfully beautiful life is also to meet opposing forces. At their most damaging, these encounters may turn us into stone. The experience hardens into fear, repetition, or a life organised around what once happened. Yet in turning towards what has hardened, something may begin to move again.
Such attention adds water to stone.
We get to give Medusa back her wings, her body, her movement and her voice. We allow what was arrested there to enter life again.
My writing follows the psychological life of myth, ecology, dreams and the feminine. You can subscribe to my essays or read about my work in Jungian analysis, online and in person.
Suzanne Schreve is a Jungian psychoanalyst and writer based in the Netherlands. She works with men and women, with a focus on women who are driven by a deeper urge to discover, connect and expand from the roots up.
Sources used:
Ovid’s account of Medusa’s violation and transformationOvid, Metamorphoses, Book IV, approximately lines 790–803. The University of Virginia Ovid Collection provides access to several translations.
Archetypes and their culturally formed representations C. G. Jung, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, Collected Works, vol. 9, part 1.
The Gorgoneion as a protective or apotropaic image The Metropolitan Museum of Art, “Medusa in Ancient Greek Art”.
The Sicilian Vespers and the later tradition concerning the assaulted woman Steven Runciman, The Sicilian Vespers: A History of the Mediterranean World in the Later Thirteenth Century (Cambridge University Press, 1958). Book record.
Ancient Sicilian coin imagery British Museum, Catalogue of the Greek Coins in the British Museum: Sicily, vol. 2. Digitised catalogue.
Basilica Cistern and the reused Medusa column bases John Freely and Ahmet S. Çakmak, Byzantine Monuments of Istanbul (Cambridge University Press, 2004), alongside the official Basilica Cistern museum.
Multiple Inuit traditions surrounding Sedna/NuliajukQaumajuq Winnipeg Art Gallery, “Nuliajuk’s Story”; Louise Flaherty and Neil Christopher, Kappianaqtut: Strange Creatures and Fantastic Beings from Inuit Myths and Legends (Inhabit Media).
Kali and the Devī Māhātmya Thomas B. Coburn, Encountering the Goddess: A Translation of the Devī-Māhātmya and a Study of Its Interpretation (SUNY Press, 1991). Book record.
Joanna Macy and “honouring our pain for the world”Joanna Macy and Molly Young Brown, Coming Back to Life: The Updated Guide to the Work That Reconnects.
Medusa in contemporary representations of powerful women Mary Beard, Women & Power: A Manifesto; Natalie Haynes, “If looks could kill: how Medusa became a potent political meme”.