What does the myth of Medusa mean?
Medusa is not easy to talk about because she is not a single thing. Instead hers is a long, thin shape that worms its way through time. Once she was one thing, then this was repeatedly modulated by the various people to whom she has meant something.
The oldest form of the myth has her as one in a set of monstrous triplets, the product of incest between a titan and his sister. In this myth Medusa is virtually as old as the world itself and was born a monster to sea monster parents. Much, much later, in what they call the Archaic period of Greek history (800-480BCE) Medusa was promoted to having once been beautiful, but cursed by Athena for an unspecified insult. Eight years into the common era this strand was taken up in Rome by Ovid, just before his mysterious banishment to a town on the Black Sea.
Ovid makes the version of the myth that has become canonical. Medusa was a beautiful woman with fair hair who had taken a vow of celibacy. This sexual unavailability attracted the sea god Poseidon, who rapes Medusa in a temple to the goddess of wisdom. The virgin Athena, no stranger to violence, is so horrified at the sight of her home being defiled that she actually covers her eyes. The goddess then punishes Medusa for Poseidon's crime by making her hair a nest of snakes and her gaze capable of turning flesh into stone.
At this point an illegitimate son of Zeus called Perseus enters the story. By a complicated chain of events Perseus and his mother Danaë are sealed in a box and tossed into the sea by her father, Akrisius, the king of Argos. Zeus asks Poseidon to save his lover and son, which Poseidon does by making the ocean as glass and gently delivering the box to Seriphos, a hundred miles away. Here Perseus is adopted by the local king, Polydektes, as an opening gambit in the king's designs on Perseus' mother. Danaë spurns the king. Perseus, being the son of Zeus, is not thrilled by the prospect of her marriage to a mortal stepfather either.
Polydektes hatches a plan to kill Perseus and marry his mother without offending Olympus. The king announces a fake marriage to a noblewoman as an excuse to extract congratulatory gifts from everyone he knows. In his attempt to be clever, Polydektes demands the head of Medusa from Perseus. In response, Zeus recruits most of the Olympic pantheon to equip Perseus with magical armament, including Athena's own shield. Perseus uses these advantages to find and behead Medusa, approaching her by watching her reflection in the polished inner surface of the goddess' shield. Perseus then defends his mother's right to choose a spouse by turning Polydektes and his entire court into stone after they ask to see Medusa's head.
Back at the stump of Medusa's neck two "grandchildren" of Poseidon wriggle out of her body and into the world. The first is the famous winged horse Pegasus and the second is a human infant called Khrysaor, born holding a golden sword in his hand. Reflecting Medusa's original purity as well her curse, these offspring lead radically different lives. Pegasus gives long and devoted service to Olympus while Khrysaor's fate is to be the progenitor of most of the monsters that populate Greek mythology.
According to Hesiod's Theogony, Khrysaor sleeps with a sea nymph who then gives birth to a three-headed son named Geryon and a daughter called Echidna. That daughter is "half a nymph with glancing eyes and fair cheeks, and half again a huge snake, great and awful, with speckled skin, eating raw flesh beneath the secret parts of the holy earth." Echidna in turn has children by "the terrible, outrageous and lawless" serpent called Typhon.
This union first produces a hound named Orthus for her uncle Geryon. Orthus is soon joined by another brother, also a dog, the fifty-headed Kerberus who ends up guarding Hades. The third child of Echidna, Hydra, also has a huge surplus of heads. The fourth is Chimera and the fifth is actually the product of Echidna having sex with her first son, Orthus. That incest creates the Sphinx, who takes the suppression of the city of Thebes as his life's purpose, as well as the Nemean Lion, who does something similar on the peninsula that would become Sparta.
In thinking about the rape of Medusa by the sea god and her punishment for his transgression it would be easy to rattle off things like,
"Don't rule out spite. Poseidon made it extremely personal when he forced Medusa in Athena's home—and not just home, the place where Athena is fed. You can imagine for yourself the additional layers of disgust and violation you might feel to find your home not just broken into and robbed but used to stage a sexual assault."
"Medusa's particular curse makes sense to me as a punishment, but only as a punishment of Poseidon. It takes her off that god's roster for good, then mocks him by ensuring that Medusa is forever untouchable—forever "his", and never another's. If there is a rapist's punishment in the myth, this is where it is."
And then to remark, grimly,
"You get all too clear an image of Mycenaean Greece through this keyhole."
But there's a good deal to think through before I could take seriously anything this concrete. After all, what wisdom is being expressed when Athena punishes a woman for having been raped? And what does the first version of the myth mean, where Medusa is a survivor from an era of monsters?
There are endless ways to play cat's cradle with the Greek myths until they have whatever shape you like. In one sense that sort of constrained mental fiddling is the purpose of any comprehensive mythological system—To provide a brake on revolutionary thought by denying this thought the one thing it must have to proceed: a vantage point from without to properly view the social contradictions that give it rise. You could argue that having such a vantage was what made Jesus a revolutionary compared to say the Maccabees, whose vantage on Judea was firmly rooted in an imagined past.
This brake gives the society that labors under it a special intellectual and cultural stability, a stability for which we have no real reference nowadays. I think you can see it very hard at work in that letter Ptolemy wrote for his patron Syrus, with which he opens his astronomy textbook, the Almagest. The one where Ptolemy implies that astronomy is a tool of moral self-cultivation even more than it is an attempt to depict reality from an independent point of view. Even the most advanced astronomical textbook ever written could not then be completely separated from the ends of piety, or for that matter the requirement to flatter your patron. (It goes without saying that "exegetic meaning" and the rest of the Straussian decoder ring project stems from a craving for the various stabilities [political, cultural, intellectual] granted a society with such a mythological system at its core.) That is to say, when you're interested in an individual myth I think it's helpful to imagine the conditions under which its first patterns were woven.
It is extremely important to remember that the Greek myths—and even the religious pantheon itself—are a Bayeux Tapestry. I mean that they were made for one set of people by another, who had established themselves hierarchically above the first. If the Greek myths are a shared cultural heritage covering everyone from Thrace to Crete, then the real heritage is the slightly more ancient domination that united them all in the first place.
What we call Greek mythology and its pantheon date to a thousand formative years. These are the years between the Indo-European conquest of the Aegean and the beginning of a Mycenaean world, that is, 3000-2000BCE. This was the millennium when at least three waves of invaders on horseback permanently disrupted the Neolithic farmers who had occupied the Aegean.
The entry of the Indo-Europeans—and their decision to stay—set in motion a series of events that culminated for our purposes with horse-riding, Indo-European-speaking invaders from the North (the Greeks) storming the Aegean peninsula. Their invasions set off a thousand years of tribal warfare, and the final wave of Dorians triggered a cultural dark age that lasted another twelve hundred years, until 800BCE. These invasions shifted the egalitarian indigenous social arrangement into something far more hierarchical, and eventually centralized.
Greek mythology and its pantheon are processed remains. They're all that's left of the indigenous Neolithic culture. The Greeks later called the people they overran the Pelasgoi. The name has no known origin and if it comes from anywhere it's probably like Basque or Etruscan—a relict of the Neolithic Europe that was all but erased by the horsemen and their language in the 2000's BCE.
The actual Pelasgoi were an egalitarian (and probably matrilineal) group of agriculturalists. They lived on the Aegean peninsula as the Indo-European invasion reverberated through their corner of late-Neolithic Europe. They'd probably been thereabouts for 10,000 years. The Greeks conquered and then settled among (or rather, "above") the locals. This dominion created a successor culture to that of both the local Neolithic and the invasive, Indo-European-derived Greeks.
As far as the Greek pantheon and its myths are concerned, this successor culture was Mycenaean (c. 2600-1177BCE). You can think of it as a Neolithic culture that has been digested to suit the requirements of pacifying and administering a particular group of conquered people. This much goes a long way to explaining why Agamemnon (c. 1700BCE) was still notable as a giant prick for Homer one thousand years later.
You could go even further if you wanted to, and see the martial fate of the Peloponnesus itself as a kind of runaway-refinement of the obsessive hierarchy, domination and paranoia depended on by every conquerer. At the very least you should think of Classical slavery, and Spartan slavery in particular as direct consequences of the Indo-European invasion.
Slavery is something like the culture of conquest itself and is not attested in the Aegean by low-status burials before the Greeks invaded. Further, you don't have to be a sociologist to see Sparta's secret police (the Krypteia) and their annual war on the enslaved Helots as a kind of domestic, institutionalized conquest. I realize there are 2,300 years separating the Indo-European invasion of Greece from the reforms of Lycurgus in Sparta; I'm only noting that there was a 10,000 year old, egalitarian Neolithic social fabric, that it was utterly destroyed by the men on horses and then replaced in waves by something far more violent. A process that terminated, in the case of Sparta, with something you could call ur-fascism without the slightest fear of anachronism.
There is a quality of succession (as opposed to "fusion") in Greek mythology. This comes from its absorption of a previous vision of the world. The easiest way to see how Greek mythology is the result of one thing consuming another is the genealogical rat's nest of its early denizens. There are primordial versions for almost all of the Olympian gods. There are even duplicates of these primordial gods: two sea gods, Pontus and Poseidon, two sky gods, Ouranos and Aether, and so on. There's also an extremely unclear line of succession connecting them all to the Olympic pantheon—the foundation of which, we are told, hinges on Zeus' rebellion against his father, Kronos, himself a usurper of his own father. This is all very strange for someone used to the forever-supremacy of a Judeo-Christian deity. To me, it reflects a requirement to absorb an indigenous culture for the purpose of administering "civilization" to its members.
Succession is also a feature of the history internal to Greek myth. Overt fertility imagery, something that certainly animates indigenous Neolithic agriculturalists, is banished to a world that was ancient even to the people telling the myths. Among other things, this is why Ouranos gets to spray cum left, right and center as he populates the primordial world but the origins of Theban aristocracy lie in Kadmus sowing dragon's teeth.
Medusa and her sisters take part in this successional process too. Each, we are told, is descended from the titans whom Zeus overthrew. As everyone knows, all three sisters have euphemisms instead of proper names: the Greek name Medusa means "the Protector", Euryale is "the Far Ranger" and Stheno is "the Robust." These are probably the epithets of pre-Greek female deities, reused as euphemisms once the women they named were demonized in the strict sense.
This is something that also happened to Pazuzu, the Babylonian demon who was the ultimate antagonist of "The Exorcist." Pazuzu was probably a god of fair weather out of the Neolithic world that was overrun by the earliest civilizations of Mesopotamia. The mythology of that area is complex and successional in a way that recalls what I've been saying about the Greeks. Tellingly, Pazuzu is the brother of Humbaba (another demonizee) whom the notable avatar of civilization, Gilgamesh disposed of in the wilds of Lebanon. The upshot is that nobody knows what Pazuzu's real name is because he was so thoroughly euphemized by his culture's successor as to have been rechristened. This is likely also the case for many of the things that get called monsters in Greek mythology.
It seems important to note that the collective term for Medusa and her sisters, "Gorgons," is an Indo-European word meaning "those with grim gazes." This is to say that if Medusa and her sisters do represent pre-Greek deities then it was certainly the Greeks who renamed them. The use of gorgons as protective architectural features right up into the Classical period also strongly reflects the original and benevolent forms taken by Medusa and her sisters. Forms bent to Greek purposes after subjugation to the new, Olympian order.
It's also important not to go overboard when it comes to Medusa's original form. Trying to recover the original nature of feminine deities is an extremely large and sticky trap for modern people. Ever since the beginning of the Modern era there has been an intense desire to see prior societies as somehow antidotes to the way our own has developed. The prospect of ancient matriarchies excites this desire. For example JJ Bachofen and his Der Mutterrecht (1861), or Otto Gross and his idea that the Freudian superego is identical with patriarchy.
Gross said explicitly what many women (and a few men) still feel: that my self-consciousness, the means by which I regulate my desires and impulses by measuring them against what is "expected of me," is where patriarchy lives and my awareness of "what is expected" is the means of patriarchy's transmission through time. Gross thought the organization of the human mind not only changed though history but that its present organization recorded this history in the same way as ocean sediments. Gross believed that the unconscious was the psychological correlate to life under matriarchy and the superego its comparatively recent lid—a lid that covers our collective memory of what it was like to live in a society modeled on the benevolent dominion of child by mother. Gross' determination to remove this lid in himself through a rigorous program of polyamory and cocaine was a mixed success. The close association of patriarchy with a zealously applied, regulatory self-consciousness (the type required when one has a specified place in a male-dominated, urban hierarchy) is much more difficult to dismiss.
I said before that Medusa was probably a pre-Greek deity before she was "demonized in the strict sense," but this is not quite right. Greece didn't have demons, only monsters. I find this fascinating. I would never refer to the Gorgons, and much less Scylla or Charybdis or Python, as "demons," no matter how much their appearance or behavior fit the term. Why is this? Is it just because of the rehabilitation performed on ancient Greek culture by everything from the Renaissance to the D'Aulaires? Or is it a real distinction?
In Greek myth monsters seem to be checks on progress or development because they impede notable figures from completing their stories (Oedipus, Herakles, Kadmus etc.) On the face of it this is very different from a demon's purpose, which is to reassert the Natural or Divine order for the benefit of anyone foolish enough to challenge it. Is it just that monsters are alive, i.e., mortal, in a way demons are not? Is a monster just a demon who can be killed? Even if that's true (and mortality is a trait that basically every single monster in Greek mythology shares) what does it mean that creatures who would be eternal menaces in any other culture are, in Greek mythology, seemingly there to be vanquished?
Unlike demons, each monster in Greek myth is a holdover from the primordial world. Nobody says that Mephistopheles or an Oni is an isolated renegade from some prior era. Even if both are extremely ancient they each have an obvious and divinely ratified dominion over their corner of the present world: You see it in their respective licenses to tempt Faust and eat Buddhist pilgrims. But it is exactly a questionable dominion over the world and a loss of divine ratification that unite all the monsters of Greek myth.
One way to understand this is to say that a monster is a demon who has had its spiritual existence scraped out. The result is not just mortality but exile to the same plane of reality that humans inhabit. Monsters can be killed—and their deaths serve as capstones to heroic acts of faith—in a way that even the fight against a demon will never yield. Demons have an intact spiritual existence, granted them by divine ratification. This gives them the ability, or rather, the right to escape attack via their non-physical form (as Pazuzu does at the end of "The Exorcist.") That "right of spiritual escape" is the substance of a demon's immortality, and its loss in the case of monsters is sometimes the only obvious difference between the two. This is best seen in the fact that Greek monsters cease to exist once killed, and their shades are never encountered in Hades. When a monster loses the right to escape via a spiritual existence they acquire their other major distinction from demons: unnaturalness.
A demon can certainly be terrifying, but the terror it causes is embedded in, indeed terrifies on behalf of the Natural order. This is to say that demons terrify, but that this terror is not personal. Humans, the variety of soul indigenous to this plane of reality, are terrorized as a class by demons, not as individuals. In fact one could argue a direct connection between this and, for example, the millions of ticketholders who made "The Exorcist" such a fabulous box office success.
On this understanding, demonic terror is felt not by individuals but by their bodies, the thing all humans have in common with each other. This terror is each body reminding its occupant of the order of things. That's the nature of the enforcement performed by a demon's fearsomeness. This is easier to see in the pre-scientific account of altitude sickness: the way you feel the higher you climb is a direct experience of your assigned place in the hierarchy of Nature. Altitude sickness is your very body speaking to you, saying, in the voice of Nature, "You aren't supposed to be here dummy; This is for the gods." Every hair raised by a demon retrenches a hierarchy to remind humans that they are not at its summit.
When a demon (or for that matter a god) "loses its license" and must become a monster, unnaturalness and a type of criminality is what follows. The terror created by the Theban dragon or the Sphinx was chaotic. It served no purpose except to constrain human destiny, by keeping Kadmus from founding Thebes or Oedipus from ruling it. What does it mean that Ancient Greece had a disordered spiritual landscape filled with monsters who live only to thwart the aims of destiny and Nature?
It's very tempting to think that this is because the rule for what was 'Natural' and what went against 'Nature' had been recently changed—namely by the Greeks, their gods and the new order. You could call Greek monsters "heretics under polytheism"—recently-mortal refugees from a divine war, shorn of immortality but with their actual coups-de-grace left as tests of faith for the most pious and violent humans. The heroes (in Greek the word means the same thing as Medusa, "protector.") Hence the ensouled champions of Olympus slaughter the soul-less and unnatural monsters. This slaughter concludes a monster's demotion from the spiritual realm and it then enters the least permanent plane of existence, that of corpses and human memory. This is the fate of all casualties in a war of mythological succession.
The hero in the story of Medusa is successional in several ways. Perseus has a mandate to kill monsters from the ancient world, and so recreate (in acceptable miniature) his own father's rebellion against the titans. This may only be a fancier way of saying that Perseus is a minor son of Zeus and is assigned a mopping up operation at the tail-end of his dad's throne war.
But there's also a successional quality in the way Perseus is made heroic. Perseus is heroic because he is the very tip of Olympus' will: he is sired by them, clothed by them, armed by them and disguised by them. The hero is a human, composited into semidivinity by the gifts of the pantheon. Any which way Perseus presents himself, whether visibly or not, he's a reflection of Olympus. And this is to say nothing of his shield, whose literal reflection of Perseus is presumably the only place Medusa ever sees her killer's eyes.
Perseus is not only protected by Athena's shield: his face appears inside it. Medusa's head is later put on the outside of the shield. This is a little parable about fucking with Athena: "There are two sides to this goddess, an inside where you are defended from apparently invincible enemies and an outside, where Athena becomes an invincible enemy herself." That may be the the full extent of the "wisdom" on display in the Medusa myth, which is really an Athena myth: the wise live long because they don't screw with Athena. (The fact that Perseus defeats the barbaric Medusa through his powers of reflection, and in the name of the goddess of wisdom, is a cerebral valence the story probably acquired later on, in Roman times.)
You can also think of Medusa's death in the light of succession. The stump of her neck yields two "grandchildren" of Poseidon, Pegasus and Khrysaor. One is a giant man born holding a golden sword and the other is a domesticated animal who conquers the air. Pegasus becomes a kind of mercenary in Olympus' war against the primordial past, as when Athena lends Pegasus out to Bellerophon so they can wax Chimera (who is in fact the grand-nephew of the flying horse Bellerophon uses to kill him.) Khrysaor's real legacy is of course as donor of the human phenotypes that add another layer of monstrousness and perversity to the creatures Herakles must dispatch during his labors. It is intriguing that the human component of Medusa's existence finds expression in Khrysaor, progenitor of a dozen mythological monsters, while everything noble in her body comes out as a beast of fabulous utility.
In a word, the Olympian order mandates divine violence against the remaining chaos-monsters. Further, these monsters are refined by that violence into something that benefits mankind. Seen from this angle, Medusa's death at Perseus' hands (or the dragon's at those of Kadmus) is something close to a sales pitch for a Greek world: "We're getting rid of those monsters. We're harnessing their primordial energy for the benefit of the city-founding horse-lords!"
When you look at it this way the early version of the myth shows Medusa as a bridge to the chaotic, primordial world. In fact it is precisely her status as a monster of the ancient world that provokes Polydektes into selecting Medusa as a challenge. Polydektes thinks he's being extremely clever by asking Perseus for Medusa's head. He imagines he's dooming an irritating rival by telling him to go tete a tete with the daughter of a titan. But his turns out to be exactly the kind of backward, even heretical thinking that doesn't understand how overmatched the primordial, barbaric world is when it squares off against Olympus. It's worth remembering that by the end of the myth Polydektes and his entire court become all too firm believers in what can be achieved with Olympus' backing.
Like almost all the great monsters of Greek mythology Medusa's existence symbolized an intolerable check on the progress of Hellenization. Olympus therefore facilitates her murder. The easy answer as to why Medusa was the sister chosen for death is that she was, for some reason, the only mortal one among the three. But this seems extremely post-hoc to me, like the rest of the Ovidian interpretation. To my mind Medusa was always a gorgon, because she was always a Neolithic deity; Ovid was the person who could translate her Bronze Age fate into more urban, even modern terms.
I think you can see what I'm getting at here: the Medusa story is a single battle in a much longer-running war between what Olympus represented and the indigenous world of chaos-monsters it aimed to replace. This had enormous consequences for the Western world.
That replacement occurred along an axis which had never before existed in Mycenaean society: The axis with "Barbarian" at one end and "Greek" at the other. Their whole mythology is a snapshot of this process of replacement. This probably dates, as I said, to the beginning of the Mycenaean world. And as the Mycenaean world became more centralized and urban you can see something of the mechanism that produced this "successional" mythology:
The foundation of cities is a major consequence of killing monsters in Greek myths. Perseus founds Mycenae after killing Medusa. Agamemnon only has a city to lord over because Atreus inherited it from the line of Perseus, to say nothing of the case of Thebes, its dragon or the Sphinx.
This new axis was a force majeure opposition between Greek things and Barbarian things. When laid over the imperative to found cities, this axis set up a kind of cultural siphon. Under this mechanism all the things emphasizing order and what we would call centralized government eventually became "Greek" (whatever their actual origin). On the other hand, the uncivilizable elements of human life were mythologically deported to a barbaric past, the one that preceded the conquest and domination of "Greek" religion by Olympus.
It's important to point out that this was a synthetic process. I mean that the things which facilitated hierarchical, settled civilization were drawn from both Greek and "Pelasgian" sources, while those that did not became associated with a primordial world whose successor was at hand. This is how barbaric Greek raiders of the 2nd millennium BCE went from unwashed nomads of Thrace to the first word in philosophy. In fact it is one of the ways cultures do what they call "schismogenesis," the sociological equivalent of speciation.
Of course, human beings are not perfectly suited to civilization, and this mechanism could only proceed (indeed, has only proceeded) so far. Perhaps reflecting this, the Barbarian-Greek axis had become the Irrational-Rational axis by the time philosophy first got written down. Nevertheless, right into the Classical period it's easy to see an uncivilizable residue lending its ineradicable tint to Greek life. Sophocles' Bacchae is more or less solely concerned with this tint, and is one of the biggest milestones on the road to a Western idea of "humanity." That is, "humanity" as something not only shot thru with irrational, Bacchic chaos, but "humanity" as this way by nature. It can be a very crooked path to get to a concept as obvious to us as the "Natural."
Or at least this is one of journeys I take myself on to imagine the birth of our concept of "irrationality." To recap this journey's stages,
A. Settled Neolithic agriculturalists are dominated by barbaric horse-riding invaders & their patriarchal deities.
B. Settled Greeks and their contempt for anything that stands in the way of centralized, hierarchical power.
C. The mental tendencies of life under civil order gathered into a concept of 'rationality.'
D. And finally the conversion of civil order's antagonist from 'barbarism,' the thing outside the city walls, to 'irrationality,' the barbaric element latent within each human.
(I should say that seeing the intellectual dynamism of Classical Greece as rooted in, or even kicked off by, an invader's mentality toward their conquered subjects is a whole other can of worms.)
Perhaps the idea that Medusa is "mainly" a casualty of Olympus' war on the barbaric past is disappointing to you. I would also like Greek mythology to have a level of internal consistency such that you can turn the crank of thought and arrive at an internally consistent explanation (a "lesson.") But Greek mythology is the collision of at least two cultural systems—a collision that reflects an agricultural, matriarchal, and egalitarian way of life complexly overlaid by another, whose sources lie with nomadic, horse-riding raiders from the North.
Medusa's story seems to me one that straddles the interface between those two, often-incompatible systems of cultural understanding. Hers is a story about how the fight for mythological supremacy takes place along the fault line separating—depending on which era of the myth's development (ABCD) you find most eyecatching—subject from master, heresy from piety, barbarians from Greeks, chaos from order and, in its final form, irrationality from thinking as we "ought to."
Many of the Greek myths are an account of cultural conflict transposed to a mythological plane. The ahistorical "moment" from which most of these stories are told dates to some point after the outcome of this conflict, and the victory of Olympus became a foregone conclusion. But the arrangement of forces in this conflict continued (continues!) to reflect something long, long after the thing it originally reflected—the conquest of Neolithic farmers by horse raiders from Asia—had passed from view. The Greek concept of irrationality is still utterly essential to us and still contains within it the coiled historical elements outlined above.
I realize that arguments from history are often only another kind of argument from myth, and sometimes even easier to puppeteer. Even so I think we all have to live in hope that Al Hirschman is right when he says the most we can expect from History, and from the History of Ideas in particular, is not the retirement of issues but only a raising of the level of debate.
Having thought through all of this, and with the qualification that I don't think any of what follows is historically justified, I do have a few thoughts about the particular myth of Medusa. These are what you might call literary observations on her story as we get it from Ovid and the Romans. Their version of the myth shifts focus away from the, by that point long-settled question of mythological supremacy. The Roman myth of Medusa is far more social, more urbane and even what I would call humanistic. It's about a particular woman being raped in a particular place and how these facts and their consequences dominate the rest of her life—indeed, collude to end it.
Medusa's petrifying gaze is much more complicated than I thought as a kid. For example, Medusa does not have the equivalent of laser beams shooting out of her eyes. That is, getting turned into stone by Medusa is something that occurs essentially by the victim's choice. In order to become a stone of yourself you must: 1) look directly at Medusa while 2) she directly meets your elective gaze. I think we can deduce this much from the story of the polished shield. In other words her "petrifying gaze" is really an automatic and unstoppable consequence of choosing to look at Medusa and of then receiving her eye contact. There is something close to a supercultural (that is, "humanistic") understanding of us at work here: we are the animal that can't not look.
Formerly, the beautiful Medusa was subjected to many more gazes than she could personally meet. That's what it is to be a beautiful person among others. In a certain type of society, which, for Ovid, Greek mythology was taken to represent, a woman's role among others is to be the object of those gazes. From a public perspective a woman is someone who cannot return every gaze that falls on her, in fact modesty decrees she shouldn't even try.
What would it mean to use this state of affairs as the basis for a curse? First, the obvious ironic reversals and perversions. Medusa goes from a woman (whose status as a woman—and again this is Ovid's world—is predicated on her inability to return every gaze that finds her) to a monster who compulsively seeks out the gaze of anyone she comes across. There's also an obvious gender reversal, whereby the cursed Medusa becomes both the pursuer in and the victor of non-consensual encounters with men. But also a more subtle reversal, aimed at somebody's idea of feminine pride, whereby once-beautiful Medusa becomes famous, indeed pursued, for her ugliness.
This gender reversal shades into the punitive "blessings" built into Medusa's curse. First among these is of course the petrifying gaze that "protects" Medusa from ever being raped again. (The snakes presumably defend against kisses from the blind.) Eye contact often betrays a man's intention towards a woman. This is one of the reasons modesty discourages it. And so what was once the place and moment where a woman understood her vulnerability, and a man his power, becomes an instant of unpleasant surprise for Medusa's victim.
You could go further with this and say that the rocks of men Medusa leaves behind are in fact statues. And that each models the same man in a parody of arousal. A parody of the moment when a man, and you have to imagine a Roman man here, first sees a gorgeous woman: wide eyes, slack jaw, ah-wooogacus forming on his lips and so on. The fact that the visage of lust is identical to that of terror probably says more than you'd like to know about Roman sexuality.
There is also a quality of being damned-to-fame in Medusa's curse. This goes beyond her famous ugliness. Medusa leaves a trail of sterile human pillars behind her. It mocks the way she once made men hard—an overtone I don't think would have been lost on a Roman audience. Medusa is the nightmare of a certain idea of female modesty.
In that vein, I think there is also a message about the Roman conception of men and women latent in Medusa's hideousness. This, Ovid is saying, this is what would be needed to protect a woman from the way men are. Only by permanently immobilizing him and covering your face with snake venom for good measure could any woman have stopped a man from raping her. The fact that Medusa's curse is presumably an effective defense against future encounters with Poseidon is probably beside the point. What matters is that Medusa's terrible, bestial appearance shows how much women would have to change to end the phenomenon of rape. There's a dark and inverted humanism at work here, one that is very much still with us. One that sees rape as a supercultural phenomenon descending from a male's presumed helplessness when it comes to looking at certain things.
This is to say that Medusa, by being presented as a woman who is finally safe from rape, telegraphs the inevitability of men raping any woman who is less ugly than the ugliest woman who has ever existed. In the world this myth was meant to service the kind of woman who won't get raped is the kind who can't even be looked at in the first place, let alone approached.
Living out this inversion of holiness is also part of Medusa's curse. As is her soullessness, and the mocking, second virginity Athena forces on her. Medusa being made too ugly to rape probably had ironic overtones to a Roman audience, who would have seen Athena as having metaphorically abducted Medusa to keep as a temple virgin ("raped" as in Sabines.)
In the way of all literary analysis you can keep cats-cradelling away with this myth and its history, but I am unsure as to how helpful these somewhat facile reflections are to a person trying to think deeply about Medusa and her story.
Gorgons were often carved on temples, where their petrifying gazes drove home a very practical theological doctrine: behave in this place or become part of it. The myth of Medusa explodes this arrangement with a floridness typical of pre-Christian ideas about divinity. Medusa walks the earth as Athena's involuntary virgin and leaves statues behind her everywhere she goes. Each pillar that used to be a person is another monument raised to Athena, or at least to the wisdom of not testing her where she eats.
