JPG: Stories: Photo Essay: Medusa

Medusa

By Edd Scorpio

15 May 2009

This was a shoot undertaken to showcase the brilliant handmade leather Medusa mask made by my good friend (& modeling by) Ro The Knife. It however goes further than that...

Against the backdrop of the rocks and water of Medusa's island, this shows the strength, grace and presence of the Goddess. The strange visage of myth and the underlying beauty.

One must study all aspects to truly understand the nature of any being - to see beyond the surface, the common stories, to that which holds the beauty that is in all life.

Historically, the three Gorgon sisters — Medusa, Stheno, and Euryale — were children of the ancient marine deities Phorcys and his sister Ceto, or sometimes, Typhon and Echidna, in each case chthonic monsters from an archaic world.

While ancient Greek vase-painters and relief carvers imagined Medusa and her sisters as beings born of monstrous form, sculptors and vase-painters of the fifth century began to envisage her as a being both beautiful as well as terrifying. In an ode written in 490 BC Pindar already speaks of "fair-cheeked Medusa". In a late version of the Medusa myth, related by the Roman poet Ovid (Metamorphoses 4.770), Medusa was originally a beautiful maiden, "the jealous aspiration of many suitors," priestess in Athena's temple, but when she was raped by the "Lord of the Sea" Poseidon in Athena's temple, the enraged goddess transformed her beautiful hair to serpents and she made her face so terrible to behold that the mere sight of it would turn a man to stone. In Ovid's telling, Perseus describes Medusa's punishment by Athena as just and well-deserved.