Who really was Medusa, The Gorgons and the Amazon Women
Posted: Sun Jul 05, 2015 7:27 pm
I have been a curious seeker of truth for some long time now and have found much to ponder when studying the various mythologies that have survived through the ages. I sometimes receive information during my times of reflection and meditation that seem to be at odds with what I have learned by more traditional methods. If you ask the average person who Medusa was you would probably hear the often told Greek version that she was a monster with snakes for hair and her gaze would turn people to stone.
So it may come as a surprise to find that the story is much older and has went through many revisions and much obscuration over time. So to begin with I want to just post a few of the versions I have found in my internet search as a starting point with hopes that even more will be revealed along the way.
https://sites.google.com/site/phsmendoz ... dusafigure
Is the snake goddess really an early manifestation of the Greek Medusa figure
MEDUSA AND THE GORGONS
The organization of the Amazon tribes in North Africa, the devastating effect of invasions, and the aims of patriarchal elites have almost completely obscured the identity of the Gorgons and their Goddess Medusa. The most well known portrayals of them in stone, pottery, and paper do nothing but record the confusion. Clarity begins in the distant past, wending its way through Mesopotamia and Egypt, before passing through pre-Mykenaean Krete and beyond.
The earliest known appearance of a female head with bulging eyes, lolling tongue, and wild hair was identified by Dr. Marija Gimbutas among the artifacts of people she called Old Europeans, because they preceded the Indo-Europeans in the area. The picture dates from the 5th millennium BCE, and then the gorgon reappears independently in Southern Rumania roughly five hundred years later. The people of ancient Mesopotamia knew the gorgons too, except they called them lahamas, and they were kindly sea creatures reminiscent of mermaids. The Egyptians derived the uraeus headdress from her, usually worn by their Cat Goddess Bast (Pasht), who was crowned with serpents themselves crowned with solar disks. Otherwise, she wore an asp, the other sacred snake of Egyptian queens, on her forehead. Eventually these ideas coalesced in the Goddess Medusa, Queen of the Gorgons, at once beautiful and frightening.
First and foremost, Medusa was a Sun Goddess and representative of women's genital mysteries. Snakes are generally connected to the Sun in mythology; obviously as in Egypt, or more subtly as the guardian of the solar apples of the Hesperides. Just as Athena would later, Medusa ruled the ocean, ships, and all the skills and arts dealing with them. Her petrifying gaze was the contradictory Sun and the keen vision of the ship's pilot. The snakes standing erect over her forehead are often her favoured blue cobras, looking like the headdress later worn by Bast, or like dreadlocked hair.
The Atlas Mountains were Medusa's first creations, so she was called 'mountain mother' like Cybele. The navel of the world was once said to be Medusa herself in the form of a mountain. In semi-human form, her body was covered, not with reptilian scales as one might expect, but with fish scales. These were always carefully drawn to make a pattern of meanders (), a sacred symbol for water dating back to the Palaeolithic. Since she inhabited the sky as well as the sea, Medusa always had wings which were able to double as fins. This combination of oceanic connections seems to have helped inspire a shift in meaning for the word 'gorgon' in modern versus ancient Greek; in modern Greek, the word now means 'mermaid.' A fascinating change, especially in view of the fact that mermaid lore records them as being especially dangerous to foolish or malicious men, living in an underworld realm without men of any sort, 'mer' or otherwise.
During the day, when she may have been titled 'Hippo' for her skill with the horses of her solar chariot. Medusa travelled across the sky, watching over children and guiding schools of fish, symbolic of unborn souls. At night she sailed in a stone boat across the ocean, from where it covered the upper Earth to the Underworld. There Medusa heated thermal springs and imbued them with healing power, according to Goodrich her keen gaze went on twinkling in the sky as the star now known to be an eclipsing binary and called by the Arabic name Algol 'serpent's eye.' Only the very fortunate saw Medusa's sacred island, home of mermaids, enclosed in willows, representing her genital centre.
Medusa's priestesses were as fierce and frightening, beautiful and kind as her. They wore their hair long, in dreadlocks or just matted into rough strings. It was imperative never to cut or interfere with the growth of this hair, because it symbolized their shamanic power, which the priestesses demonstrated by walking across burning coals in bare feet without injury. Often they had extensive knowledge of herbs to compliment their spiritual practice, including contraceptives like the seeds of poplars and willows, silphium from the giant fennel, or laurel berries. These powerful women formed the basis of the Amazon tribe later called 'the Gorgons.' The Gorgon high priestess presided over North Africa and Amazon colonies in Italy and Spain.
Some of the Amazon Gorgons seem to have come from lands far from Africa. The mythical Gorgons were painted in two main styles by the time Greek tribes finished taking over the Southern European peninsula: Kretan and Mainland. On Krete, Gorgons were shown with thick, curling hair, fangs, lolling tongue, and wings. On the mainland, Gorgons were shown with snakes for hair that stood out from the head, other features being the same. The Mainland style suggests dreadlocked Libyan Amazons, while the Kretan style contains hints of Anatolian or Indian Amazons, especially when the Gorgon was a Lady of the Beasts.
Indian Amazons were worshippers of Uma, driven from the subcontinent by invaders and probably climate change. The Kali-like nature of Medusa may have been emphasized by their input. Kali destroyed various demons in the form of animals in the tales told by the invaders, suggesting she too began as a benign ruler of the wilds. Her headdress was often made of or decorated with snakes and flames. To this day, there are Indian women who feel called to let their hair grow long and matted, prophesy, and walk barefoot across hot coals, doing so without injury. They answer the call by leaving the men they live with if any, refusing to sleep with them, and moving away to establish themselves in homes apart from their former villages.
Anatolian Amazons carved four-winged Gorgons at Delphi and Ephesus to suggest the swift moving wings of bees, a reference to Medusa as a chthonic Goddess, because honey and beeswax were used in embalming.
Like Artemis, who may have partially absorbed her in some parts of Greece, Medusa was worshipped over an extensive geographical area, carried there by Amazons. The Etruscans knew her as Metusa and dedicated the island of Gorgo on the Tyrrhenian Sea to her. Iran, Afghanistan, Russia, Tibet, and ancient Anatolia are dotted with mountains named 'Gorgon' for her. The name began to mutate, becoming 'Urgo,' 'Orkhon,' and eventually 'Gargantua' as the Amazons spread through Scandinavian and Celtic lands.
The Romans and the Greeks translated the names of the Triple Gorgons into their own languages with telling results. Among the Greeks they were the daughters of the Moon, Sun, and Sea Goddess: Strength, Universality, and Wisdom, Stheino, Euryale, and Medusa in order of decreasing age. The Romans called them Valeria 'valourous,' Lativolva 'far flyer,' and Guturna 'ocean pilot' instead.
The Greeks also seemed to believe the Gorgonian Amazons worshipped Athena, the Sun in her death bringing aspect. Then the other aspects of the Sun were Wisdom and the Maiden, Medusa and Akantha 'burning Sun,' a name often carried by Athena's Greek priestesses. The idea seems to come from confusion of the Amazon Goddess with Anatha, a Goddess Athena either absorbed or is descended from.
The Gorgons were not the only North African Amazons. Their sister tribe was the Tritoni, long ago forced onto the mainland by the loss of their island off the west coast of North Africa in a volcanic explosion. It was the Tritoni who worshipped a Goddess of Moon and Sea, called Sipylene. Eventually the two tribes united, to the complete bewilderment of Greek storytellers, who were already lost in thealogical mazes.
The legend of Medusa's murder is no older than the 5th century BCE. Argive and Samian worshippers of Hera always remembered her as an Amazon queen named for a Goddess who was murdered by the combined efforts of Athenian and Southern Greek warlords. Their curious insistence that Medusa's head was buried in front of Hera's great temple seems to be because they had forgotten Hera was herself a Snake Goddess. Athena's role is a late addition, as is the name 'Athens' which was renamed after the recodification of Greek religion following the Dark Age. Even the sacred burning mirrors of the Goddess were turned against her, recast as Perseus' shield. In the 6th century century BCE, the Gorgons were still commonly viewed as an Amazon tribe rather than mythical beings, although Queen Medusa had begun to be rendered as a centaur, as mentioned previously.
The Graea, later guardians of the Gorgons descend from the war priestesses and warriors of the Amazons, who often had grey hair. The Sarmatians, Scythians, and Celts placed such women at the head of their armies to cast victory spells and terrify the enemy, a likely Amazon practice. Jessica A. Salmonson has also noted that at first, Amazon armies probably consisted mostly of older women, including younger women only much later.
Tritonian Medusa gave the Sun its moniker of 'Gorgon's Head,' and the gorgon mask always symbolized women's mysteries. Given Medusa's connections to various contraceptives, those mysteries must have included methods to encourage or discourage conception. The snake, Moon, and menstrual cycle were interrelated symbols of women and rebirth in these mysteries, and were remembered as such long enough to spawn wild superstitions. These included the belief that menstrual blood buried in the Earth under the Full Moon's light bred serpents or basilisks, or that a menstruating woman's gaze could turn men to stone, like the gaze of Medusa herself.
After Medusa and Athena had their places switched... at least in Greek perceptions... Athena always bore a gorgoneum on her breastplate or shield and was accompanied by a snake. Medusa's petrifying gaze, the keen heat of the Sun or the wary gaze of the ship's pilot became better known as a piercer of untruth and vehicle of death. She had been a funerary and Bee Goddess before, but now Medusa's balancing aspects of Mother, Creator, and Purveyor of Justice were gone. Medusa was now only the reminder of the inevitability of death, when people were buried beneath tombstones or memorialized by pillars. Circles of standing stones were originally sacred memorials set up by funerary priestesses in honour of the dead, of those 'turned to stone.'
Later threads suggest more similarities to Kali, who dealt death with her right hand and resurrection with her left. Medusa's blood dealt life or death depending which side of her body it was taken from. Her youngest children, born at her death from her blood symbolized the same thing, Pegasus from her left representing resurrection, and Chrysaor from her right representing death. In one portrayal of Kali, she is shown beheaded, her head sitting to one side, expression peaceful. No enemy is anywhere in the picture, but there is a shakti standing on either side of her, drinking the blood that comes from her neck, a curious parallel.
The Gorgon Goddess had a festival which was eventually fixed on September 9th, although it was probably once set on the autumn equinox. Where does this date come from? The christian church, which once included a Saint Gorgon in its canon.
So it may come as a surprise to find that the story is much older and has went through many revisions and much obscuration over time. So to begin with I want to just post a few of the versions I have found in my internet search as a starting point with hopes that even more will be revealed along the way.
https://sites.google.com/site/phsmendoz ... dusafigure
Is the snake goddess really an early manifestation of the Greek Medusa figure
MEDUSA AND THE GORGONS
The organization of the Amazon tribes in North Africa, the devastating effect of invasions, and the aims of patriarchal elites have almost completely obscured the identity of the Gorgons and their Goddess Medusa. The most well known portrayals of them in stone, pottery, and paper do nothing but record the confusion. Clarity begins in the distant past, wending its way through Mesopotamia and Egypt, before passing through pre-Mykenaean Krete and beyond.
The earliest known appearance of a female head with bulging eyes, lolling tongue, and wild hair was identified by Dr. Marija Gimbutas among the artifacts of people she called Old Europeans, because they preceded the Indo-Europeans in the area. The picture dates from the 5th millennium BCE, and then the gorgon reappears independently in Southern Rumania roughly five hundred years later. The people of ancient Mesopotamia knew the gorgons too, except they called them lahamas, and they were kindly sea creatures reminiscent of mermaids. The Egyptians derived the uraeus headdress from her, usually worn by their Cat Goddess Bast (Pasht), who was crowned with serpents themselves crowned with solar disks. Otherwise, she wore an asp, the other sacred snake of Egyptian queens, on her forehead. Eventually these ideas coalesced in the Goddess Medusa, Queen of the Gorgons, at once beautiful and frightening.
First and foremost, Medusa was a Sun Goddess and representative of women's genital mysteries. Snakes are generally connected to the Sun in mythology; obviously as in Egypt, or more subtly as the guardian of the solar apples of the Hesperides. Just as Athena would later, Medusa ruled the ocean, ships, and all the skills and arts dealing with them. Her petrifying gaze was the contradictory Sun and the keen vision of the ship's pilot. The snakes standing erect over her forehead are often her favoured blue cobras, looking like the headdress later worn by Bast, or like dreadlocked hair.
The Atlas Mountains were Medusa's first creations, so she was called 'mountain mother' like Cybele. The navel of the world was once said to be Medusa herself in the form of a mountain. In semi-human form, her body was covered, not with reptilian scales as one might expect, but with fish scales. These were always carefully drawn to make a pattern of meanders (), a sacred symbol for water dating back to the Palaeolithic. Since she inhabited the sky as well as the sea, Medusa always had wings which were able to double as fins. This combination of oceanic connections seems to have helped inspire a shift in meaning for the word 'gorgon' in modern versus ancient Greek; in modern Greek, the word now means 'mermaid.' A fascinating change, especially in view of the fact that mermaid lore records them as being especially dangerous to foolish or malicious men, living in an underworld realm without men of any sort, 'mer' or otherwise.
During the day, when she may have been titled 'Hippo' for her skill with the horses of her solar chariot. Medusa travelled across the sky, watching over children and guiding schools of fish, symbolic of unborn souls. At night she sailed in a stone boat across the ocean, from where it covered the upper Earth to the Underworld. There Medusa heated thermal springs and imbued them with healing power, according to Goodrich her keen gaze went on twinkling in the sky as the star now known to be an eclipsing binary and called by the Arabic name Algol 'serpent's eye.' Only the very fortunate saw Medusa's sacred island, home of mermaids, enclosed in willows, representing her genital centre.
Medusa's priestesses were as fierce and frightening, beautiful and kind as her. They wore their hair long, in dreadlocks or just matted into rough strings. It was imperative never to cut or interfere with the growth of this hair, because it symbolized their shamanic power, which the priestesses demonstrated by walking across burning coals in bare feet without injury. Often they had extensive knowledge of herbs to compliment their spiritual practice, including contraceptives like the seeds of poplars and willows, silphium from the giant fennel, or laurel berries. These powerful women formed the basis of the Amazon tribe later called 'the Gorgons.' The Gorgon high priestess presided over North Africa and Amazon colonies in Italy and Spain.
Some of the Amazon Gorgons seem to have come from lands far from Africa. The mythical Gorgons were painted in two main styles by the time Greek tribes finished taking over the Southern European peninsula: Kretan and Mainland. On Krete, Gorgons were shown with thick, curling hair, fangs, lolling tongue, and wings. On the mainland, Gorgons were shown with snakes for hair that stood out from the head, other features being the same. The Mainland style suggests dreadlocked Libyan Amazons, while the Kretan style contains hints of Anatolian or Indian Amazons, especially when the Gorgon was a Lady of the Beasts.
Indian Amazons were worshippers of Uma, driven from the subcontinent by invaders and probably climate change. The Kali-like nature of Medusa may have been emphasized by their input. Kali destroyed various demons in the form of animals in the tales told by the invaders, suggesting she too began as a benign ruler of the wilds. Her headdress was often made of or decorated with snakes and flames. To this day, there are Indian women who feel called to let their hair grow long and matted, prophesy, and walk barefoot across hot coals, doing so without injury. They answer the call by leaving the men they live with if any, refusing to sleep with them, and moving away to establish themselves in homes apart from their former villages.
Anatolian Amazons carved four-winged Gorgons at Delphi and Ephesus to suggest the swift moving wings of bees, a reference to Medusa as a chthonic Goddess, because honey and beeswax were used in embalming.
Like Artemis, who may have partially absorbed her in some parts of Greece, Medusa was worshipped over an extensive geographical area, carried there by Amazons. The Etruscans knew her as Metusa and dedicated the island of Gorgo on the Tyrrhenian Sea to her. Iran, Afghanistan, Russia, Tibet, and ancient Anatolia are dotted with mountains named 'Gorgon' for her. The name began to mutate, becoming 'Urgo,' 'Orkhon,' and eventually 'Gargantua' as the Amazons spread through Scandinavian and Celtic lands.
The Romans and the Greeks translated the names of the Triple Gorgons into their own languages with telling results. Among the Greeks they were the daughters of the Moon, Sun, and Sea Goddess: Strength, Universality, and Wisdom, Stheino, Euryale, and Medusa in order of decreasing age. The Romans called them Valeria 'valourous,' Lativolva 'far flyer,' and Guturna 'ocean pilot' instead.
The Greeks also seemed to believe the Gorgonian Amazons worshipped Athena, the Sun in her death bringing aspect. Then the other aspects of the Sun were Wisdom and the Maiden, Medusa and Akantha 'burning Sun,' a name often carried by Athena's Greek priestesses. The idea seems to come from confusion of the Amazon Goddess with Anatha, a Goddess Athena either absorbed or is descended from.
The Gorgons were not the only North African Amazons. Their sister tribe was the Tritoni, long ago forced onto the mainland by the loss of their island off the west coast of North Africa in a volcanic explosion. It was the Tritoni who worshipped a Goddess of Moon and Sea, called Sipylene. Eventually the two tribes united, to the complete bewilderment of Greek storytellers, who were already lost in thealogical mazes.
The legend of Medusa's murder is no older than the 5th century BCE. Argive and Samian worshippers of Hera always remembered her as an Amazon queen named for a Goddess who was murdered by the combined efforts of Athenian and Southern Greek warlords. Their curious insistence that Medusa's head was buried in front of Hera's great temple seems to be because they had forgotten Hera was herself a Snake Goddess. Athena's role is a late addition, as is the name 'Athens' which was renamed after the recodification of Greek religion following the Dark Age. Even the sacred burning mirrors of the Goddess were turned against her, recast as Perseus' shield. In the 6th century century BCE, the Gorgons were still commonly viewed as an Amazon tribe rather than mythical beings, although Queen Medusa had begun to be rendered as a centaur, as mentioned previously.
The Graea, later guardians of the Gorgons descend from the war priestesses and warriors of the Amazons, who often had grey hair. The Sarmatians, Scythians, and Celts placed such women at the head of their armies to cast victory spells and terrify the enemy, a likely Amazon practice. Jessica A. Salmonson has also noted that at first, Amazon armies probably consisted mostly of older women, including younger women only much later.
Tritonian Medusa gave the Sun its moniker of 'Gorgon's Head,' and the gorgon mask always symbolized women's mysteries. Given Medusa's connections to various contraceptives, those mysteries must have included methods to encourage or discourage conception. The snake, Moon, and menstrual cycle were interrelated symbols of women and rebirth in these mysteries, and were remembered as such long enough to spawn wild superstitions. These included the belief that menstrual blood buried in the Earth under the Full Moon's light bred serpents or basilisks, or that a menstruating woman's gaze could turn men to stone, like the gaze of Medusa herself.
After Medusa and Athena had their places switched... at least in Greek perceptions... Athena always bore a gorgoneum on her breastplate or shield and was accompanied by a snake. Medusa's petrifying gaze, the keen heat of the Sun or the wary gaze of the ship's pilot became better known as a piercer of untruth and vehicle of death. She had been a funerary and Bee Goddess before, but now Medusa's balancing aspects of Mother, Creator, and Purveyor of Justice were gone. Medusa was now only the reminder of the inevitability of death, when people were buried beneath tombstones or memorialized by pillars. Circles of standing stones were originally sacred memorials set up by funerary priestesses in honour of the dead, of those 'turned to stone.'
Later threads suggest more similarities to Kali, who dealt death with her right hand and resurrection with her left. Medusa's blood dealt life or death depending which side of her body it was taken from. Her youngest children, born at her death from her blood symbolized the same thing, Pegasus from her left representing resurrection, and Chrysaor from her right representing death. In one portrayal of Kali, she is shown beheaded, her head sitting to one side, expression peaceful. No enemy is anywhere in the picture, but there is a shakti standing on either side of her, drinking the blood that comes from her neck, a curious parallel.
The Gorgon Goddess had a festival which was eventually fixed on September 9th, although it was probably once set on the autumn equinox. Where does this date come from? The christian church, which once included a Saint Gorgon in its canon.