Who is medusa

Fatality

Who may be Medusa?

Many regions of the myth recommend, through their basic obscurity, the tragic nature of Medusa. However the gifts that Medusa was handed was the present from Athena to Asclepius of two drops of Gorgons blood. One of the drops has the power to cure and in many cases resurrect, as the other can be poison. Yet , it is pertaining to literature and the arts to expose the close marriage between opposites and the purity of the victim. In this respect, the myth of Medusa is revealing. In his study The Reflect of Medusa (1983), Tobin Siebers features identified the value of two elements, i actually. e. the rivalry between Athena plus the Gorgon, and the mirror theme. According to Ovid (Metamorphoses, IV. 779ff), the reason for the dispute lay down in Poseidons rape of Medusa within the temple of the virgin goddess.

The goddess should certainly have reprimanded Medusa by transforming her face, which usually therefore produced Medusa a great innocent patient for the other time. However , another tradition, used by Mallarme in Les Dieux antiques (1880), stressed a more personal rivalry: Medusa had featured that she was even more beautiful than Athena. Everything points to the eye that the empress found that necessary to set herself apart from her bad double to be able to assert her own id. Common features are several. For example , snakes are the feature of Athena, as illustrated by the well-known statue of Phidias and indicated simply by certain Orphic poems which refer to her as la Serpentine.

Moreover, the hypnotic look is one of the features of the goddess with blue-green eyes, whose bird is the owl, portrayed with a great unblinking look. Finally, mainly because she has attached Medusas head to her safeguard, in battle or in anger the girl assumes the terrifying presence of the huge. Thus, inside the Aeneid (11, 171), the girl expresses her wrath by making flames capture forth coming from her eye. These findings are intended to present that Athena and Medusa are the two indissociable areas of the same almost holy power. The same claim could be made in admiration of Perseus, who retains traces of his affiliation with his gigantic double, Medusa. Using her decapitated go to turn his enemies to stone, he spreads loss of life around him. And when he flies above Africa together with his trophy within a bag, through some sort of negligence, drops of bloodstream fall to earth and are also changed into poisonous snakes which usually reduce Medusas lethal electric power (Ovid, operative. cit., 4. 618).

Two well-known paintings demonstrate this close connection between hero as well as the monster. Cellinis Perseus is similar to the head he is holding in his hand (as demonstrated by Siebers) and Paul Klees L’esprit a combattu votre mal (1904) portrays a total reversal of roles Perseus is painted full deal with with a terrible countenance, when Medusa turns aside. With this interplay of doubles, the theme of reflection is critical. It clarifies the process of victimization to which Medusa was subjected, and which falls in the province of the superstition of the evil eye. The way to respond to the nasty eye is either to use a third eye one that Perseus plonked at the Graiae or to deflect the wicked spell by using a mirror. Ovid, in particular, burdened the significance in the shield through which Perseus could see the Gorgon without being looked to stone, and which was given to him by Athena. Almost everything indicates the mirror was your real system. It was construed thus simply by Calderón and Prevelakis, and in addition by Roger Caillois in Meduse ainsi que Cie (1960).

Ovid was in charge of establishing the hyperlink with Narcissus, a fable that selection famous. It would appear that the same means of victimization reaches work in this article. The individual is considered to have recently been the sufferer of his own reflection, which absolves the victimizer (Perseus, the group) from all blame. This affiliation of the two myths (and also the intention of apportioning blame) appears within a passage in Desportes Amours d’Hyppolite (1573) where the poet tells his lady that she is in danger of seeing himself changed into a few hard ordinary by her Medusas eyesight. Even more uncovering is Gautiers story Jettatura (1857) where the hero, accused of having the evil eye, eventually feels it to get true and watches the monstrous change of his face inside the mirror: Picture Medusa taking a look at her terrible, hypnotic confront in the lurid reflection from the bronze defend.

Medusas head is definitely both a mirror and a mask. It is the mirror of collective violence which leaves the Devils mark within the individual, and being the image of loss of life for those who look at it. Both these designs violence delivered sacred and death simply by petrifaction are simply in Das Corgonenhaupt (Berlin, 1972), a work by Walter Krüger about the indivisible threat. Nevertheless , when considered in terms of archetypal structures, Medusas mask still retains its secret. What is the reason for the viperine locks, the wide-open mouth with all the lolling tongue, and, in particular, why is Medusa female? What relationship perhaps there is between violence, holy dread and female?