Medusa The Serpent Goddess: April 2009

Medusa The Greek Goddess, with her golden hairlocks turned into serpents.
There are many beautiful illustrations of this Greek goddess on the Internet. I was particularly fascinated by everything about her and started collecting anything interesting i could find about her. All the collection lies here on this page. All of it is stolen from other sites and nothing here is my original but the most beautiful ones are put together here on one page. Hope nobody takes offence on this.

What fascinated me most about Medusa was the idea of a head carrying so many serpents wispering something into her ears. I feel most of us have heads or surroundings like that with so many conflicting ideas going on at the same time. Maybe the key to right decision making is to ignore all that these serpents wisper into our ears and still staying calm enough, not to provoke them to bite us. We cannot get rid of them because they are within us, a part of us and our surroundings yet we need to learn to live with them, accept them and still not let them influence us.

With all those serpents on her head, Medusa is still regarded as the symbol of 'sovereign female wisdom'. Well there are many interpretations, but i will go with this one. Medusa means "sovereign female wisdom," in Sanskrit it's Medha, Greek Metis, Egyptian Met or Maat.

Medusa was the only mortal among the three Gorgon sisters. Daughter of the sea gods Phorcys and Ceto, she was once a beautiful maiden but was turned into a snake-haired monster by Athena for sleeping with (or being ravaged by) Poseidon in Athena's temple. Men who looked at Medusa turned to stone. The hero Perseus later killed Medusa at her home on an island off Libya by cutting off her head with a harpa (sickle), a scene depicted on some coins, finding her by looking at her reflection in a shield given to him by Athena to avoid being turned to stone himself. From Medusa's gaping neck sprang forth the winged horse Pegasus and the giant Chrysaor, her children by Poseidon. Perseus, chased by Medusa's hissing sisters, Stheno and Euryale, escaped with Medusa's disembodied head, giving it to Athena, who placed it in the center of her aegis. The dead head had the same power of turning to stone those who looked at it.

Medusa may have originally been an Amazonian serpent-goddess who symbolized the female mysteries and the untamable forces of nature. At that time, Medusa was an aspect of the Amazonian Athena (Athene), but the Greeks according to this theory separated the two and made them enemies.