anyway how to explain the whole Medusa Athena Poseidon deal to a beginner polytheist without them hating the gods and understanding the situation? i'm not good at this kinda stuff but i want to help
Black-figured olpe (jug); Perseus, Medusa, and Hermes. Attributed to The Amassis Painter, circa 550BC-530BCE, Attica, Greece. Collection of the British Museum, London, England. (X) License: CC BY-NC-SA 4.0
The earliest stories we have about the Gorgons are from Hesiod, around the 8th-7th centuries BCE. The Gorgons were daughters of the monsterous sea-gods Phorcys and Keto. Their other sisters were the Graeae, three monsters with one eye and one tooth between them; Scylla, a monster who devoured sea-farers in The Odyssey,;Ladon, a hundred-headed monster; and Echidna, the half-snake/half-woman monster who married the monster-god Typhon. It’s spelled out very clearly: the Gorgons were monsters, from a family of monsters. They were Bad News.
Hesiod, writing around 750-650 BCE, says:
“…the Gorgons who, beyond the famous stream of Okeanos (Oceanus), live in the utmost place toward night, by the singing Hesperides : they are Sthenno, Euryale, and Medousa (Medusa), whose fate is a sad one, for she was mortal, but the other two immortal and ageless both alike. Poseidon, he of the dark hair, lay with one of these, in a soft meadow and among spring flowers.” (X)
Hesiod doesn’t describe Medusa’s appearance, mention the temple of Athena, or say that Athena cursed her.
Ovid, writing six or seven hundred years later, tended to sensationalize everything for his (primarily male) audience. He wrote:
Beyond all others shewas famed for beauty, and the envious hopeof many suitors. Words would fail to tellthe glory of her hair, most wonderfulof all her charms—A friend declared to mehe saw its lovely splendour. Fame declaresthe Sovereign of the Sea attained her lovein chaste Minerva’s temple. While enragedshe turned her head away and held her shieldbefore her eyes. To punish that great crimeMinerva changed the Gorgon’s splendid hairto serpents horrible. (X)
Who knows what was going on in Ovid’s mind when he wrote this? He may have been thinking about Poseidon’s known rivalry with Athena to become the patron deity of Athens, which Athena won, and may have intended the incident to be read as Poseidon’s revenge on Athena by desecrating her temple through having sex there with Medusa. Athena was understandably angry, and it sounds like she made Medusa look like her sisters. Was Athena’s vengeance directed solely at the mortal monster from a family of immortal monsters? Are we supposed to believe that Poseidon, god of the sea, was horrified to learn that his beautiful inamorata was actually a Gorgon, the daughter of the god of sea-monsters? Or, maybe he did know, and thought that bringing a monster to Athena’s temple would be a special insult to goddess? Was he implying, “You were born from your father’s head, you’re a monster, too?” Or is this just a modern person over-thinking Ovid’s tale?
Speaking of which, there is NO story from Antiquity in which Medusa was a priestess of Athena, sworn to celibacy. That is a modern version of the myth which, as far as I can determine, originated with a comment made by Robert Graves in The White Goddess:
“Peeping from his bag there is now a Gorgon’s head, which is merely an ugly mask assumed by priestesses on ceremonial occasions to frighten away trespassers; at the same time they made hissing noises, which accounts for Medusa’s snake locks.” (From Chapter 13)
The story of Medusa-as-priestess falls apart on other grounds as well. In ancient Greece, priests and priestesses were from respected families; no one would appoint a maiden from a family of monsters to a priesthood. And no one in their right mind would have had sex in a temple, when even having sex at home with one’s spouse incurred ritual pollution which required purification before one could visit a temple.
To conclude, I strongly suggest that new polytheists avoid modern sources of myths, such as those by Thomas Bullfinch (yes, 1855 counts as modern), Edith Hamilton (1942), and Robert Graves (1955). There are two thousand years of Christian cultural bias, sometimes with atheistic bias on top of it, between us and Antiquity. I don’t even advise reading Ovid; in my opinion, though he provides good information on Roman festivals in his Fasti, his Metamorphosis is basically pervy fanfic, not a reliable source about the characters of the gods. This is also why learning Latin and Greek is still important: translations aren’t always accurate, and a single word used incorrectly changes a story of consensual sex into one of sexual assault.
I encourage beginner polytheists to read good articles about understanding myths, such as those found in A Companion to Greek Mythology edited by Ken Dowden and Niall Livingstone (2011). I also recommend reading Hesiod and the Homeric Hymns, some scholarly works about ancient Greek religious practices, such as Greek Religion by Walter Burkert (1987), consulting a scholarly dictionary of mythology, and visiting accurate websites, such as theoi.com, to learn the traits and epithets of the gods, so as to know them as did their ancient worshipers.
In short, readers need to understand who wrote a version of a myth, and whether they had a bias or an agenda in writing it. Look for scholarly books; they’re usually written by someone with academic credentials in Classical studies, published by a university press, with lots of notes, and a lengthy bibliography with solid primary sources and reliable secondary sources. Check the Bryn Mawr Classical Review to make sure a modern work is based on sound scholarship, and isn’t a study of archetypes or written to promote an ideology.
Remember, kids: if you read something about the gods that makes you angry, chances are that it’s NOT an historically accurate depiction of what ancient people believed about that deity.
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