Discover Top Posts Tagged with #medusa

Anthologies

The writer is Lizzie Stoddart

"Discover the original stories of nine magical women as we celebrate the witch in her truest form: a feminist icon."

These aren't the original stories

Witches weren't supposed to be feminist icons

Not sure if the Grey Sisters count as witches

"shifting the men into the wild beasts their greed-fuelled hearts resemble. Circe endures a firce testament to the undeniable strength of women, and the defenses they have been forced to conjure throughout history."

I had no idea that a woodpecker was a wild beast and that Picus was greedy 😑

"Too cruel? Did I choose them what they are? or change them from themselves by poisonous charms?"

"But any draught, pure water, natural wine, out of my cup, revealed them to themselves and to each other. Change? there was no change; only disguise gone from them unawares: and had there been one right true man of them

he would have drunk the draught as I had drunk, and stood unchanged, and looked me in the eyes, abashing me before him."

Yeah, yeah, yeah 🙄

"Nothing has been invented except the silences the old poets left: the long evening in the temple before the god arrives, the inside of the labyrinth, the centuries a guardian spent at its post before any hero set out."

Trust me, a LOT of things were invented

"Many of them were not born monstrous — they were made so, usually by a god, usually unfairly"

Turn out that the majority of the examples in this book were born monsters

The Introduction segment of this called Arachne a martyr. Which is... a choice

"He says she was the loveliest woman in the country — that men traveled from distant cities to look at her, that they forgot why they had come."

...See? Told you things were invented

And whoever wrote this just gave up trying to put how the priestesses worked in ancient Greece

No, you don't get chosen and you don't just throw your daughter at the temple because you're too poor to deal with possible suitors

What a surprise...

She's super dedicated to her job, she's very popular and she's sooo humble about her appearence 🙄

"Poseidon did not announce himself the way the poets later claimed."

I don't remember any poet claiming the god appeared in a dramatic way

So here she can turn water into stone, but not sea water. And for some reason she tried to sleep on a hay grass bed but it was petrified by the morning

Pegasus wasn't described as white

Ps: her sisters were removed from the narrative

The writer is JP Cesaro

Some of the contents of this book are:

Medusa, Heracles, the Labyrinth, the Amazons, Daedalus and Icarus, Atlantis

There are more but the chapter titles weren't descriptive enough for me to identity

"Behind the monstrous image of Medusa is a more complex and disturbing human story."

Medusa is one of the least complex characters in mythology

"For women dedicated to a goddess, especially a virgin deity like Athena, chastity was not just symbolic. It was absolute. A priestess's body even was seen as an extension of the sacred space itself. Any violation of that purity, whether real of perceived, was not a private matter. It became a public crisis."

Honestly the myth of Triteia should be the litimus test to see if the person ever bothered to do research on the priestesses of Athena

Pausanias, Description of Greece 7. 22. 8 (trans. Jones) (Greek travelogue C2nd A.D.) :"Ares mated with Triteia the daughter of Triton, that this maiden was priestess to Athena, and that Melanippos (Melanippus), the son of Ares and Triteia, founded the city [of Triteia in Akhaia] when he grew up, naming it after his mother."

"She lives alone. She does not seek out victims; they come her. There is something nearly defensive in how she is portrayed, as if the monstruous traits ascribed to her are less about inherent evil and more how others see and approach her."

Of course her sisters Stheno and Euryale were removed

According to this author, the origins of the mythology around Heracles is most likely based on a random mercenary? 🤨

The sample ends at this point but considering the atrocious Medusa segment, there's no chance the Heracles chapter will be well made

#circe #ulysses #medusa #heracles #greek myth retellings #greek mythology retelling #greek mythology retellings

I remember seeing a post around these parts complaining about the depiction of Medusa as "beautiful". That in the original myth, she was a grotesque monster, and the sight of her ugliness was the curse that turned people to stone. It's a sort of complaint I'm sympathetic to—that women (even as villains) aren't allowed to be present unless they're attractive, or that a woman must be beautiful before her suffering is treated as sympathetic.

That said, it turns out they've been prettifying Medusa for over 2,500 years. The Greeks were the first to do it! Discourse over whether the monster girls aren't monstrous enough is likely older than most world religions.

I'm also learning that her hair being completely replaced by snakes is a fairly modern invention, from around the Renaissance. Between the modern head-of-snakes version and the ancient orc-like version (who often had full wings!), you have 2,000 years where she frequently had these goofy little head winglets:

#Medusa #I strongly suspect a lot of these middle-era Medusa depictions were an excuse #for the artist to flex their ability at sculpting or illustrating hair #Look at that stuff #They're all like that!