Having tea with Medusa and other feral females
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. While it has been visible in the last twenty years, her process leaves the serpentine trace of a movement long underway before it is seen. When it comes to Medusa, we’ve been been living under a rock.
Demystifying Medusa
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. Retracing her just a few steps into earlier strata of the myth—as preserved in Ovid’s Metamorphose - reveals Medusa as once being a mortal woman of such mesmerizing beauty, Poseidon himself arose from the ocean’s depths to woo her in typical Greek fashion - he raped her. A jealous Athena cursed Medusa into the ‘monster’ we’ve been taught to fear. Acknowledging feminist discourse on mythical rape as patriarchal abuse and Athena as complicit in victim-blaming, what emerges when we accept Medusa right where she is? A decapitated female head, writhing snake hair, fierce eyes and furious. Does she feel trapped to you? Perhaps. It often serves our culturally framed minds well to look overseas because images travel in space and time. C.G. Jung called them universal, archetypes carried in the unconscious current of our collectivity, meaning they are shared images alive in all people, varying in subtle appearance and narrative. Perhaps there is more to her story.
Like a football at the tip of Italy’s toe lies Sicily. On one side the island merges with the Mediterranean, stretched out into the waters of southern Africa and the Middle East, and on the other side the island diffuses into the Tyrrhenian Sea. Sicily’s placement as a natural bridge between the continents created a social crucible where diversified ideas could slow cook. In this exotic concoction, Medusa would come to fulfill a very different role for the Sicilians in 1282. During this time, known as the Sicilian Vespers, the islanders led a successful people’s rebellion against the French Angevin rulers. In some accounts, the uprising was sparked by a French soldier harrassing a Sicilian woman. Streets filled with the angry and armed, decrying ‘moranu li Francisi’! Within weeks they slaughtered and expelled the French. A liberated Sicily appointed Medusa as main image to their flag with her head at the center of a triskelion – three bent legs radiate outward, often accompanied by wings and hair curling as snakes with golden ears of wheat emphasizing wisdom and the rich fertility of Sicilian soil. While the symbol itself predates the revolt, its continued use suggests a shift in meaning. By adopting Medusa’s capability of turning men into stone as an act of freedom and reclamation central to their flag, her power transformed into something sacred. Medusa became the island’s winged warrior and witness, a revered symbol of protection, strength and cultural identity.
Across the Ionian sea east of Italy, Turkey’s Istanbul shields a more secretive Medusa. Beneath the city’s streets lies the damp cavernous territory of the Basilica Cistern. The cistern is an underground water reservoir built in the sixth century during the reign of the Byzantine Emperor Justinian I. Constructed to supply water to the Great Palace and surrounding buildings, the cistern could hold nearly 80,000 cubic meters of water supported by marble columns, many of them taken from older Roman temples and monuments.
At the far end of the cistern sit two large stone Medusa heads used as bases beneath two columns. One lies sideways, the other upside down. Archaeologists believe the sculptures likely originated from a Roman building dating to the second or third century CE and were dragged overseas for repurposing. Their unusual positioning has inspired centuries of speculation, but regardless of why she is there, the physicality of her placement is difficult to dismiss. Deep underground, beneath the weight of the city, Medusa literally supports the architecture above her. Removed from the heroic narrative of Perseus and stripped of her role as monster alone, she becomes part of the foundation of the cistern tasked with the preservation of life-giving water.
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
Rage in the face of ecocide
In the far northern hemisphere we find another feral female figure, her torrential hair shaped by the current of arctic waters. Sedna, in Inuit cosmology, is the Mother of the Sea, ruling marine life from the underworld—often called Adlivun. She can withhold or release the animals hunters depend upon. In one widely told version of her story, the Inuit risk starvation, unable to catch any sea life. They ask an old grandmother shaman to check on Sedna. She travels to the underworld and finds a giant, furious woman spitting seaweed. The spirits instruct her to tangle herself in Sedna’s hair and hold on tight, for Sedna will try to kill her. After a long struggle, Sedna relents and asks to have her hair combed. The shaman does so dutifully, pulling from it all manner of debris cast into the ocean by her own people. As Sedna’s hair slowly untangles, sea life releases from her silken strands. In return, she asks that the people be reminded of their place in the world, and how to live in balance with nature.
Like Medusa, Sedna begins as a woman caught within a framework of violence and constraint. Her earthly story begins with a marriage she doesn’t really want and ends with her father sacrificing her to a fuming ocean to save himself and the rest of the family. He hacks off Sedna’s fingers while she tries to hold onto the boat. Sedna sinks into the black waters, but her resilience and virginal heart attract the spirits of nature who facilitate a descent into divinity. Both Medusa and Sedna are transformed, displaced, and yet come to hold power over life itself.
Where feminist thought finds in Medusa the reflection of righteous female rage, Sedna’s story aligns further down into ecofeminism, linking patriarchal abuse to the abuse of nature and the anger it evokes. Joanna Macy, famed Buddhist and deep ecologist, viewed anger ‘as a natural and potentially beneficial expression of our innate connection with and capacity to care for the larger world.’ She points to the underlying despair as arising in relation to something larger than individuals or personal circumstances. A similar pattern appears in the Hindu goddess Kali, who emerges in the Devi Mahatmya to confront evil that endangers the world, forces that destroy life for the sake of destruction itself. While Kali’s story is far too big to digest in just a few lines, she gives us another element these feminine figures share – they come into a power of destruction that works as compost – a destruction that serves preservation, that feeds new life. The anger that arises from the capacity to care beyond oneself is a boundary defining ‘No’ meant to guide those who strayed back into right relationship. It is a No preserved especially for Medusa witch like creatures, hags and crones, Kali’s and Sedna’s, because they have lived through layers of pain and agony while staying connected to something true. Their giving and their No is not something they own, but part of the fabric of life.
Medusa by Lotte Hauss @ Lotte Hauss & Maison Douce
The Woman behind the Image
The stories of Sedna and Medusa also suggest that beneath the image lies a woman of flesh and blood who tries to walk her unique path in a world that might not be ready for her yet. In a world that doesn’t want her. A woman who wields authority through authenticity, expressed in beauty, assertion, creativity, in connection to an animate land and the values that arise from that connection. Even now, Medusa endures as a figure of fear projected onto women in positions of authority: Theresa May became “Maydusa,” Hillary Clinton had to be “tamed,” and Angela Merkel has been recast in countless AI-generated Medusa’s. It’s not difficult to find Medusa in a woman who stands in the spotlight, set to remake the world at large, but she is as much present in the woman who goes unnoticed even though her art changes the way people see, or the mother whose clear nurturing presence with her children shifts the course of intergenerational patterns, and she can as easily be found in the bruised teenager who steps fresh into love’s courage. She’s the woman you want to have a cup of tea with, to digest wisdom in anger. She shows us that when we try to find our own way, when we dare to live within the connective tissue of this painfully beautiful life, we will be met with opposing forces. These forces will try to deter us and in worst case scenario, seek to imprison us within the traumatic experience of meeting with these forces. They might turn us into stone. New movement then, might be in the tending of our wounded parts with the same gusto Joanna Macy speaks of; to view brokenness as our natural innate connection to life, but to not accept the way we have been broken - some lines should not be crossed. When we show up to the outer world to create change where it is needed and show up to our broken parts in a way that doesn’t seek to change anything, we come with a life force that adds water to stone. We get to mold Medusa her wings, legs, a body, a voice, and stand to earn her seal as a badge of honour.
Sources used:
https://www.personaltransformation.com/joanna_macy.html
https://www.excursionssicily.com/trinacria-symbol-of-sicily/