The Goddess Project
Gorgons: Ugly and Free
I know that some of you have been watching the videos and feeling like, "No, I just saw you, Karla. I see you all the time." Wonderful, that's a great thing about YouTube. But for me, I feel like I haven't seen you all, or talked to you all, in so, so long. So hello, hello, good morning, good evening, good afternoon, wherever you're watching this episode, or whenever you're watching this episode, hello. A couple of things that I wanted to do before we begin diving into the gorgons, which I cannot even tell you how excited I am. A couple of things that we should talk about first, my hair is down, and that's because I had it up, but the way that Zoom has made this, I don't know, the way it's seeing me, it's just seeing my head, and none of my beautiful, hornened pigtails. So throughout this season, you may see different hairstyles, because I'm going to try playing with the Zoom and see if I could still have my horned pigtails and for them to be captured instead of just like a head, you know, well, that's just technology. So right now, you're going to see me with my hair down, woohoo, Karla with her hair down, which is how most of you see me anyways on social media, so that's number one. Number two, some updates. I have been traveling all over the world. So some of you were supporting me on Patreon, for which I'm forever grateful, thank you. And some of you who are just on my social media on TikTok and Instagram, especially, although Instagram, I mean, TikTok, we don't know how long that's going to last in the US, so I'll have to find something else. But on TikTok and on Instagram, if you're following along with my journey, especially the mapping journey of the temples of Artemis, you know that I've been traveling a lot. I'm also working on, I'm almost done, I should be done at the end of this month, the book Artemis of Ephesus. And I hope to be done soon, a recording of She Who Hunts, which is my first book on Artemis. So if you're new and that doesn't sound familiar to you, please check the description below. I'll put all the links in there so you have access to all of that. Traveling so much has done two things. Number one, it has not given me a lot of time to make these podcasts, but it has given me so many things to talk about you guys. So it's like, I have a whole list in my notes of all the things I want to do episodes on. And so I'm very, very excited to share that with you all. I'm starting with Gorgons for a couple of reasons which I'll share with you in a minute. I hope to have 20 episodes per season, as I had mentioned before in season two, which was almost 20, maybe 12, 15, not even. And I hope to post them biweekly. So what I'm going to do is include a couple of goddess talks. I'm inviting Laura Perry to come back and join us again because I want to talk about the Minotaur so much. And I assist and some very exciting things I want to talk to her about. So I hope to have them all up biweekly so every other Friday, to do that, I'm recording them in advance. So I'm recording several at a time when I have a gap. So I'm going to try my very best to stay disciplined and stay with you guys. In addition to that, I also have a ton of video at the actual sites of the Artemis temples that are just blank videos of the sites. And that in my mind, I had planned to put together with, you know, my own sort of voice over and some music and take you on this journey, this virtual journey of the temple sites. I have that. It's just a lot of work to make content. It's a lot of work to sit down and put together these videos to write the script, to find the music, to put it all together. So but it's in, it's in the back of my mind. I've also started a sub-stack. So it's called in search of Artemis. So if you're on sub-stack, I've also started that. Just this morning, I wrote a story. So this sub-stack is going to be a combination of my discoveries at the different temple sites. And sometimes some interesting pieces that I might find, but it will also have some stories about my travels because I've had some moments on these travels, you guys. I just sent my dear friend, Sarita Desde, who I'm hoping will be here for a goddess talk with us this season, a story, like the longest text you've ever seen in your life, about this experience I've had with Dionysus a couple of days ago. And so I'm going to save that for, because one of the episodes this season will be on Dionysus as the bull and the horn god. And there's just so much to say about it. But in short, as a little teaser, I'm going to say, I caught it such a weird thing to say. He showed up, he came to me in a super powerful way for a couple of days, where I could not shake this connection with this god. Now I feel like he's gone again for a bit. Anyways, I wrote it to Sarita because, well, she's part of this whole Hekatee priestess. She is a priestess of Hekatee, an actual, a very powerful one. And I just feel like she's someone who would understand this experience that I've had for two, three days, and that it just felt like what is going on. So my rational brain and my heart brain were fighting each other. So, anyways, I sent it to her first, but I have a collection of some of these stories and others and some poetry and things like that. Some of you who support me on Patreon have already had some of these experiences shared because sometimes when something happens to me, especially on a mountain, I will just write it out. And then I'll submit it to Patreon because I feel like that's my little personal circle. And so I will submit poetry and I'll submit some of these moments and things like that on there. But eventually I'd like to put some of that in a book, the first book of In Search of Artemis, and I have a feeling there may be other books in Search of Artemis, maybe Volume One and Volume Two, because as I go on the temple mapping expeditions, there are experiences that just continue to just continue to happen. And the temple expedition is going to take me a few years to complete funding for one, but also time for another because when Sandra and I, you may know my partner Sandra, my mapping project partner Sandra, as images of antiquities on Instagram, when we go out through Greece or Turkey or we're going to head to Italy as well, to do the temple mapping. It's so intense, but you can only do it at that level of intensity for so long. So we usually like to do a month in the spring and a month in the fall. So those are the expedition times. So, there's lots and lots and lots coming and there's lots and lots happening. And so I just wanted to give you a little taste before we get into the gorgans. The other thing that's happening is I'm running an online course, an eight-week online course for women. This is a women's course this time, although I hope to have co-ed courses in the future. It's a women's course because we're dealing with women's experiences around wintering, winter rituals and winter goddesses in the ancient world. But I will also do some podcasts for some episodes on some of these goddesses of health and healing and transformation, for example. So two of the season is going to be on Hijia, the goddess of healing. And we're going to look at the way that she was removed and placed as the daughter of Esclepius. Although I have nothing against Esclepius in some ways, but we have an eight-week course. So if you're interested in goddesses and goddess lore, again, there's stuff in the description below with links on how to take a course with me and my other teaching partner, Cornelia. It was a wonderful, wonderful energy, intuitive and energy therapist. And she really balances out my cerebral presentations, yes? So I do the lectures and the academic knowledge, and she does the application. How do we apply that? Now, just really wonderful. So if you're interested in stuff like that, check below as well. And what else? Yeah, there's more stuff below that's not coming to me right now. So are you ready to get into goddesses? For those of you that are new and this may be your first time that you see me, I don't edit these. So I don't edit my videos and I don't edit the recordings unless there's something like I have a coughing fit or something very disturbing in the sense of like for your ears or for your, for your viewing, you don't want to see me cough hacking for five minutes. But otherwise, I leave them like natural lectures. And so prepare yourself for a lot of prepare yourself to come along with me as I will actually I have to pull up my notes. And yeah, I just I want them to be as natural as possible. And I want you to feel like we're talking. Like we're just talking, you know, so if you're listening on Spotify or if you're watching on Spotify, because I just realized that you can post up videos now on Spotify, welcome. And this is also on YouTube. So if you're watching me on YouTube, you can see the images. I'm a visual learner. And so I really, really like images, but also as a historian, symbology, imagery, artifacts are key to my research. And so I think it's very, very important that I share with you some of the images of what has inspired me to put together this podcast. I'm used also. I use a lot of primary source. So I will quote it for you here and I will let you know who said what. But everything that I'm telling you is available online. So there's no secrets or in a book. So if there's anything that you hear me say where you're like, oh, I can't find that online Carla or whatever, feel free to message me either through the Artemis Center, which is ArtemisCenter.com or the ArtemisCenter.com or anywhere on social media. And I will do my best to reply and give you some of my references for this. So without further ado, let us talk about gorgons. I called this episode the truth about gorgons because I posted on TikTok and Instagram a video of the Medusa that is in the Basilica sister and Istanbul. So we were in Turkey, Sandra and I mapping the temples of Artemis and Turkey in November. And one of the places I wanted to stop that I've been wanting to see since I was a graduate student. I don't know if it's just the heartbreak of it all that I want to see or just stuck with me. So when I was a graduate student, I saw the two keystones, two Medusa keystones that are in the Basilica sisters, you know, online because you could just Google them and find images. It's very popular site, but one is placed on its side as I'll show you when one is placed upside down and we'll talk about them. So when I was there, I was deeply touched by this and by many other keystones. Everywhere we went, we saw keystones of Medusa. You could see an image of what a keystone looks here, this is from the Apollo temple and the Titima in Turkey as well. Under several of these, there's many of these keystones, which is sort of these large massive rocks with the heads of Medusa on them. And when I posted that video, first of all, they went viral, it just blew up, like people just went, they really loved it or they really connected with it or they felt very sympathetic towards that. And the commentary back and forth. So once something goes viral, right, you kind of take your hands off of it. In the beginning, I comment, but then when it goes, like people are just starting to have debates and just starting to have comments back and forth, you're like, okay, okay, this is no longer mine. You guys are going at it, okay. But one of the things that it sparked for me is, number one, the story of Medusa, yes, I have a whole episode on Medusa, so if you'd like to see that, I encourage you to go watch that, which is much more detailed. But this one is about Gorgon's. And of course, a little bit about Medusa, of course, because she's the most famous of Gorgon's. And I'm, I feel really cold to have this discussion and to make these clarifications based on the commentary online about Gorgon's, yeah, I think that's as clear as I can put it. I feel truly cold to make these, to have these discussions about Gorgon's and a little bit about Medusa and, and create a public space where we could talk and discuss some of these issues. So let's begin with another experience that I had, I'm just going to move myself over here. Yeah. Let me move myself over here, make myself just a little bit smaller. So this is the Gorgon pediment in Corfu at the Temple of Artemis. This is a moment that I had that was, so again, another, so I think, now that I'm talking to you guys, I'm thinking, I've been dreaming about Gorgon's for a long time, because I was just going to say, this is another Gorgon that I wanted to see since I was a graduate student. So this is a pediment for the Temple of Artemis. There's a massive Temple of Artemis in Corfu, there was. And this is the pediment at the entrance of the temple. I saw it, you know, again, as a graduate student. And I remember thinking, man, one day I'm going to get to Corfu. And then that became less and less likely as I, you know, raised the kids, had the family and worked and worked and worked and worked. And about a year and a half ago, as you all know, when I got divorced and I started traveling more and then started the Artemis mapping project. So this has been a process. I met someone that was super wonderful that had a home on the island of Corfu. And that said to me, you know, Carla, if you ever want to use it, it's empty. So feel free to use it. And her kindness is like everything. So I said yes, and I stayed in Corfu for the month of July. And I went to go visit, of course, the Temple site and the museum. And this is in the museum, this is my own picture. And this Gorgon Medusa, Gorgon slash Medusa, because we're talking about Gorgons and Medusa. But this Gorgon, just like she just continues to mystify me. And I stood in front of this pediment, I don't know, for a very, very long time long enough that the security was kind of like, is everything all right? Are you okay? We're probably used to, especially women, but many people standing in front of this Gorgon, because she's just so powerfully massive. But I just couldn't, I just, I was just shocked. So she is quite, quite massive. Let me tell you a little bit about this pediment. The Temple itself was constructed around 580 BCE, so before the common era. This Gorgon is monumental, okay? And often people call it Gorgon Medusa. Again, unclear whether this is just a Gorgon or Gorgon Medusa, but we'll talk about that. And it is one of the earliest examples of the work architecture. Now, some scholars, many scholars say that this pediment is Medusa. And she's depicted in this dynamic, kneeling, running pose. This is very much a Gorgon pose, flanked by two Panthers, as you see here. This is a motif called Nilov, it's a motif called Nilov that symbolizes rapid movement. So she's running here, she's supposed to be running here. And Medusa is accompanied by her offspring, Pegasus and Chryosaur, okay? So Pegasus, let me see, yes, okay, sorry, I just thought I was in the way, Pegasus is at the top corner here by her arm on the left hand side of your screen. And you can see a kind of a horse, and by the Panther, you see the wings of the horse. And here you see Chryosaur, Chryosaur looks like a human, right? So this is Chryosaur is a half human, hold on, my head is in the way, yeah, right here. These are her two children that popped out of, that came out of her neck when she was beheaded by Perseus. Now Gorgons and particularly Medusa, as you know, if you've watched that episode that I did on her, are often interpreted as a protective symbol. So they ward off evil. This is called Apotropaic imagery. And of course, this aligns with Artemis' role as a guardian deity, particularly of wild animals and the wild and of children and of women, et cetera. So the fierce depiction of Medusa here complements Artemis' protective and fierce aspect. So I'm not surprised that Artemis has a Gorgon on this pediment at this particular temple. There's lots of debate about why, why. And people talk about it symbolic, of course, which is what I think it is, or it makes this temple a protective space. The Gorgon itself, the Gorgon itself is a symbol that has become, unfortunately, associated with monstrosity. And in fact, I took this image to someone in Corfu, who I was having dinner with. And I said, "Isn't she just stunning? Isn't she stunning?" And he looked at it and he goes, "Well, you know, she's a monster, right?" And I said, "No, she's not a monster, no. She's just beautiful. She's just beautiful, beautiful, stunning." And so I want us to talk a little bit about the interpretation of the Gorgon and the way that it's been manipulated. What do primary sources tell us? Well, unfortunately, primary sources don't tell us too much. So I also want to give you two primary sources, which is, of course, Homer and Hesiod. So a couple of things about primary sources. Number one, primary sources are not the end-all and be-all of everything. They are only the writings that survived either because they were very popular, which means people really liked them, or somehow somebody hid them somewhere and we were able to find them. The writers like Homer and Hesiod that I'm using here got their information from other people, from their own communities, from their own culture from other people. But there's no way to verify that information, okay? So they weren't concerned. Hesiod, he says, he wants to write down history, but it wasn't concerned with copyright laws, with referencing, with all that kind of stuff. So they tell the stories that are in their culture. They tell the stories as they want to tell them, and they edit freely. They're also dudes, sorry, gentlemen, but they're dudes, and they have limited access to things. So there are men who are educated enough to write, wealthy enough to have time to write. Homer, as some of you know, was probably not a real person himself, is probably a collection of poets and poetry and blah, blah, blah. So there's lots of controversy around primary sources, and I want you to be free to be critical to some degree. So critical of the source, like Homer and Hesiod, what is their intention? The source is there. So we do have to, it is evidence as an academic, right? So there's this kind of weird balance between, here's a source in front of me, I have to accept this source as the truth of this individual who wrote it, and his experiences in the world that he was living in. So it's very important in that way, tells us a lot about what at least one Greek at this time, or two Greeks, or five Greeks at this time, thought, okay? Or saw, or understood, or the language they used, or the description they had, or et cetera. So it's very valuable in that way, it's a piece of text from that time. But we have to understand that there are biases as well, okay? So you'll see me going back and forth. I like primary source because of that value. I like it because it uses the language of the time, but I'm sometimes a little cautious in reading it because I understand that this is one male perspective of the language at the time. And particularly when we talk about women's issues like goddesses, gorgans, medusas, temples of Artemis, places where men may not have been allowed to go, rituals, performances, assumptions, et cetera. What we're then getting even in primary source is second-hand accounts, or third-hand accounts. So we have to be very, very careful. So I'm going to read to you Homer. So in Homer, Homer is really actually interested in the gorgan only as it protects Athena, okay? So he says about Athena, he's describing Athena's egeus, and if you've ever seen Athena, she is always wearing the gorgan head, or the medusa head, on her chest. And she's wearing that as protection, okay? So she's wearing that in an apotropaic or evil averting way. And Homer says about Athena, and about her shoulders, she flung the taseled egeus, fraught with terror, and therein is the head of the dread monster, the gorgan, a thing of fear and horror, horror, he says, in the Iliad. This is his interpretation of the gorgan. This is about the 8th century BCE, so 800 years before zero, so almost 3,000 years ago. Not the earliest understanding of the gorgan, in fact, this is quite late. Some sources argue that gorgans and gorgan worship came way, way, way, way before, maybe 1,000, 2,000, even 3,000 years before. But we don't have as much written primary text, if any. And so then it's harder for us to figure that out. Hesiod in his Theogony actually mentions the gorgans as daughters of forces and Cito, and he still associates them with primal and fearsome aspects. Hesiod, who's at the same is a contemporary of Homer's, says, and to forces, forces is the male, Cito bore the gray with fair faces and gray hair from their birth. The gorgans, who dwell beyond glorious ocean, Stano, Uriel, and Medusa. So Hesiod gives us the birth of these three gorgans. Again, there's lots of debate that may have been my other gorgans, but certainly we have three. And I'm going to talk about forces in Cito in a minute, because they are a couple that give birth to a bunch of trinities. Pausanias, who writes 600 years, no, sorry, a thousand years later, because he's writing in the 2nd century CE, he also talks about the gorgans. He also talks about the gorgans as protective symbols, particularly in Greek art and architecture, although he doesn't really say much about core food, which is unfortunate. But he says the gorgans head is used on shields and armor, not only for its terror, but because it turns back evil. So a thousand years, at least according to these two sources. So you have to give it another thousand years, certainly in this way, before the common era. I was going to go, you've got to go a thousand years this way, but then we enter into Christianity, the Dark Ages, blah, blah, blah, so no. So we have the thousand years between Hesiod Homer and Pausanias, where the gorgan is fearsome, but a protective symbol. Then we have Herodotus, who writes in the 5th century BCE, so he's somewhere in the middle, and he's important because he actually places the gorgans in the regions of Libya, so we're going to talk a little bit about that. Why do the gorgans come from Libya, perhaps? And he says the gorgans and other marvels are set to dwell in the farthest reaches of Libya. So we're going to talk a little bit about how the Greeks created the sense that the unknown or that the foreigner may be monstrous. One of my favorite gorgans, moving on now, to the gorgan of Peros, one of my favorite gorgans is the gorgan of Peros. She is just stunning, absolutely stunning. She is, what's the word I'm looking for, winged, which I find really fascinating. And she, I think she has the most interpretive face, if that makes sense. So you can see that her face, I think she, the reason why, I'm trying to think of words right now, the reason why I think she's so fascinating to me is because I think she looks like what Medusa would have looked like when Poseidon is attracted to her. And I want to talk a little bit about the attraction of gods. You know, Poseidon is a divinity of the ocean, of course, and, or the ocean. And his attraction to Medusa as a gorgan may have been a very natural one. What I mean by that is, later on, as we'll see, all Ovid tells a story that Medusa was one of the beautiful ones of the three sisters, that the other two sisters were really ugly gorgans kind of like this, and that Medusa was super good looking and super beautiful one. That's why Poseidon not only tries to seduce her, but actually assaults her in the Temple of Athena. This is a later story, a thousand years later. This is a fiction, okay, but we'll talk about what makes somebody make a fiction like this. The gorgan of Peros, I think, is the most, if we were to make Medusa a person, a character, a divinity, and her own right, a demon, as the Greeks would say. And we were to depict her, I think the gorgan of Peros, the island of Peros, is the most accurate. So, because here she has a gorgan face, she's got the snake hair, right? But here, as you can see, the hair is also crimped in a way. So people have debated of whether this is sort of a North African hairstyle, or if these are dreadlocks, there's been lots of discussions around whether or not these might have been ancient dreadlocks, or if this hairstyle is unique to certain areas, perhaps like Libya, and indigenous Libyan culture. So I find that fascinating, and we'll touch on that again. She's got her wings. So Medusa has wings, which tells us she's a demon. Demons are the messenger gods, the messenger divinities between gods and humans. I know today we talk about them as demons, which is silly, but some much later fiction. But demons were really the transmitters, or these supernatural beings that were neither good nor bad, you know, they were just living beings, and they usually had wings. Over time, the gorgans and Medusa lose their wings, and actually many of the gods lose their wings too, and their depictions as we move forward through time. So here we've got Medusa with her original wings, with her original hair, with her original gorgon face, and of course, wearing a snake agaius, a snake dress, which later on we see Athena wearing, and she's holding on to a snake. And my argument to you, and this is a theory, but my argument to you is that this is exactly what attracted Poseidon. That Poseidon saw this as beautiful, because Hisia, in the 8th century BCE, tells us only that Poseidon and Medusa hooked up. He tells us only that they were a couple, but there's no assault, there's no sex in Athena's temple, there's no punishment for Medusa, Athena doesn't come back and there's none of that. In the 8th century, there's none of that. It's just basically, he tells us two lines, and he says, you know, where am I? Let me read to you what Hisia says and his Theogony about Medusa. He says, I don't want to read the whole thing, so Medusa is the third of the gorgon sisters, who suffers a woeful fate, because she was mortal. This doesn't mean she was human, it just means that she was a mortal gorgon, which means the other two gorgons are immortal. But the two others were undying, and they grew not old, says Hisia. With her lay the dark-haired one, which is Poseidon, in a soft meadow amid spring flowers, so they hooked up. And when Perseus got off her head, they're sprang forth, great Creosaur and the horse Pegasus, who is so-called, because he was born near the spring of ocean. And then we go on to the story about Pegasus and Creosaur. So that is the only two lines that we have, that the dark-haired one, which is Poseidon, slept with her, or lay with her in a soft meadow among spring flowers. And that later at some point, it says, and when Perseus cut off her head. So this is the original story, and actually, when Perseus cut off her head, the two offspring, Creosaur and Pegasus are Poseidon's children. We're told that Pegasus flew away and left the earth, the mother of flocks, and came to the deathless gods, and he dwells in the house of Zeus, and brings to why Zeus, the thunder and lightning, that's what we're told Pegasus does. The Creosaur was joined in love by Cali Rohai, the daughter of glorious ocean Poseidon, and we got three-headed Garyans. So she had her and Creosaur had another monstrous figure, who was slain by the mighty Heracles, okay, and was killed. So we see this long-standing family, this long family of snake-based creatures, okay? And also the flying Pegasus. So there's horses, of course, Poseidon is the god of horses, god of the ocean. So there's lots of this overlap that happens here, but my favorite thing that I want you to think about is that Poseidon and Medusa, the mortal gorgon, lay in a spring of flowers, and that was it. And that later Perseus comes to kill her is perhaps a consequence of the fact that he wants to use her head for his own, you know, power, and of course he wants to prove himself a hero. But it has nothing to do with punishment, it has nothing to do with that. And Medusa doesn't tell us anything about that. And so I thought that I would share with you this piece of art here that is a sort of beautiful gorgon, right? So the idea that gorgons were beautiful, especially to gods, is not new. Now to us, as humans, we've been taught that gorgons are ugly. And what you see here, especially in the background, these three images which I photographed at the Temple of Hera in past and Italy, these were also on the pediment, although they're much smaller, they're about a foot tall. So they were placed on the pediment and there were many, many of these. So the gorgons have always been a protective figure. And I think because we see them in this monstrous way, we think of them as monsters. We can't wrap our minds around how the gods may have seen that as attractive. So I thought I'd share with you this image of this gorgon by lack host 85, who is both beautiful and gorgonous. So let's talk a little bit about Forces and Sito and also Libya. So Forces and Sito are the parents of the gorgons. And they're these primordial figures in Greek mythology, which really embody the perilous sea. So it's a perilous nature of seas. And they have, there are the offspring actually, both of them, of Pontus, who's the sea and Gaia, who's the earth. And they belong to the earliest generations of divine beings in Greek cosmogony, okay? So Forces and Sito. And they really personify this untamed, mysterious aspect of the marine world. So it's not a surprise that from them comes all of these so-called monster figures, right? And we've seen how Hesiod describes them and how Homer talks about the two of them mingling together. And then that the sea also mingles with Poseidon, right? So Forces is the sea ancient, he's the lord of the Salty and then he mingles with Poseidon. There's lots of this overlap. And I mentioned to you earlier that they had several children. So the gray eye, for example, are the three sisters, Dino, Anion, and Pemfreddo, who share that one eye and the tooth between them, right? And they are described as gray haired from birth. So they have silver hair from birth and they're the guardians of critical knowledge, such as the location of the gorgons, okay? So Hesiod tells us that they knew where the gorgons sisters lived. So they had three of the gray eye. Sometimes those gray eye, we see them depicted in film as three ugly old women who share one eye and a tooth and whatever. So they were not ugly. They had silver hair and they did share one eye and a tooth, but they were not ugly, according to the earlier sources. Then we have the gorgons. So they had these three sisters, Steno, Irielli, and Adusa. And Steno and Irielli are immortal, but Adusa seems to be mortal. Again, not human, she's not human, she's still a gorgon, she just can't be killed. They also have Echidna, Echidna, Echidna, I've done a whole episode on Snake Women and Snake Goddesses. Echidna is one of them, she's a half woman, half serpent. She is magnificent. She's known as the mother of all monsters. She has, one of her children is the Chimera, also Syreborus and the Hydra. So she is the daughter of forces and Sito. Also Ladan, the serpent dragon, Ladan, is the son of forces and Sito. And so therefore the brothers, these are all the brothers and sisters of Medusa. All of the brothers and sisters, Fusa is also a sea nymph who becomes a mother of the cyclops with Poseidon. I'm not surprised that many of these are Poseidon's lovers. And Skila, of course, Skila's also the daughter of forces and Sito. So all of these are generations of brothers and sisters of Medusa. So they have this continuous hybrid nature of offspring. Okay. But where, where do they live? What do they do? Where did it come from? Well, Diadoras tells us in the first century BCE, so a hundred years before zero, that the Gorgons come from Libya, okay, and others corroborate the story. So this is what Diadoras Cyclus says. "Now there have been in Libya a number of races of women who were warlike and greatly admired for their manly vigor. For instance, tradition tells us of the race of the Gorgons against whom, as the account is given, Perseus made war, a race distinguished for its valor. For the fact that it was the son of Zeus, the mightiest Greek of his day, who accomplished the campaign against these women, and that this was his greatest labor, may be taken by any man as proof of both the preeminence and the power of the women we have mentioned." Okay. Furthermore, Diadoras says, the manly prowess of those of whom we are now about to write the Gorgons in Libya presupposes an amazing preeminence when compared with the nature of the women of our day. Okay. So Diadoras then goes on to describe a legendary tribe of Libyan Amazonian women. Now, Libyan Amazon is a whole other story, and I have an episode on the Amazon's as well. But what's really fascinating here for Diadoras and for us is that these Libyan warrior women were also called Gorgons. Now, this is first century BCE, so it's 700, 800 years after Hisiog. And so it wouldn't surprise us that the Greeks would have associated perhaps aggressive warrior-like powerful women with the word Gorgon, right? And so you want to, we may ask ourselves why Libya, okay? Why do they pick Libya? Why does he pick Libya? Well, some scholars, for example, even Hesiod will say that Libya had a dramatic and arid landscape, and that there's a harshness and a danger to the landscape itself that connects somehow for the Greeks with the Association of Mythical Creatures. And so for him, saying that for Hesiod, for example, and for Diadoras, saying that these Gorgons, these creatures came from the far, this reaches of Libya. For them is a place that is sort of outside the imagination. It's a place where mystery and wonder, but also fearsome things happen. So there's this kind of idea that the geographical space itself is vast, vast. It's the edge of the world, the edge of the known world for the Greeks, and they don't know what's there, right? But for the Greeks, Libya is not just Libya itself, the modern country, but it's broadly the continent of Africa, beyond Egypt, okay? So imagine this is the unknown world, right? And so they saw this, there's this association with Gorgons and Amazons and serpents, and even Ladan, the dragon, everything comes out of what is beyond Egypt, right? So there's this idea that beyond the known world is where there's mystical allure, okay? Now the Greek colonization of North Africa, which is around 630 BCE, they encountered, when they colonized that, these parts of Africa, particularly North Africa, they encountered like local fauna, local meds, local traditions, of course, local people. And sometimes, if not often, the Greeks could be quite chudgy, right? So they go into these places and they're like, oh my God, these people look strange and they eat strange fruit, or they smell strange, or they're hair strange, or they're faces, or whatever. And so they created these stories in which they associated Libyan characteristics, okay? And of course, they also connected with the Berbers. So the Berbers are an indigenous culture of North Africa. Many of them are now in places like Morocco, et cetera, continuing their heritage, but they have a long line of warrior queens, several in their history. And so you could imagine this connection for the Greeks between the tension of the indigenous community, the cultural differences with the indigenous community, and this idea of other nests. So Libya, for example, for the Greeks, but also Egypt and other and Berbers and Libyan mythology, were designated as foreign, or as other, or outside of the norm, or even worse, as uncivilized, barbarians, foreigners. All of that creates a mood in which one can interpret whatever they fear, particularly the unknown, whatever they fear in that way, as monstrous, as unfamiliar. And so in Libya, for example, there's this famous arch that has what we would call cherub gorgon faces. So what I've put here in this image here, the brown figure is the ugly monstrous gorgon face, which is the big two sort of vampiric teeth are like horned teeth. Now what's the word? Like a rhinoceros is horned teeth, and then the tongue sticking out, that's the more traditional gorgon face. But what you see here in the columns of leftist magna and Libya are what we call the cherub gorgon, which is the more cuter of gorgon style. So the face is more human, but then the hair has snakes and around their neck, they're snakes. And this is a very, very popular motif, which the Romans really adapted and really, really enjoyed. Here again, you see another cherub motif of the gorgon. Some people call this medusa, some people call this the sympathetic medusa, but this is at the temple of Apollo and the demon. Apollo actually has numerous, numerous gorgon keystones around his temples. This one is quite famous. And again, it's this cherub style, so you can see she's got the wings actually in her head, which became a popular motif for the Romans. So that she keeps the wings in some way, but they're kind of up here in her head. And her hair seems sort of normal, by that I mean, it's not snake-like, but then you can kind of see around her neck that there are snakes tied in this twist. Very, very popular motif all over Anatolia, certainly in many places in Greece and all over Italy. Anywhere that the Romans went where they built the temple, they attached a gorgon. Again, the gorgon here is serving as protector. So I hope that once you've listened to this episode or watched this episode, whenever someone says gorgon and medusa, I would really love it if the first thing that comes to mind for you is protector. Because that is their original purpose. They served as protection. And we see it over and over and over again. As a historian, I think I really take it for granted. And every now and then people go, oh, but didn't she a monster? Not a monster, a protector who looks different than the traditional European appearance, okay? That doesn't necessarily mean that they're monsters. Like I said, Poseidon falls in love with that original gorgon face. That's what they termed beautiful. Hesiod, which is our earliest source, doesn't tell us that she looked human. He just says she was a gorgon and Poseidon was attracted to her. So I just want to, sorry if I keep driving that home. And so we see this depiction then, as I said, associated with the Amazons and you are not surprised. Pausanias, which comes a couple of centuries after Diadoras, also tells us. So this tradition continues, right? So let me tell you what Pausanias tells us about gorgons as warriors. He says in the marketplace of Argos in Greece, is a mound of earth in which they say lies the head of the gorgon Medusa inside this mound of earth. I omit the miraculous, but give the rational parts of the story about her. Okay, so Pausanias is saying, I'm going to try my best to keep it real and not give you mythology, but okay. And he says, after the death of her father, Forkis, horses, she rained over those living around Lake Tritanis, Medusa, okay? Going out hunting and leading the Libyans to battle. On one such occasion, when she was encamped with an army over against the forces of Perseus, who was followed by picked groups from the Peloponnesus, she was assassinated by night. Perseus admiring her beauty even in death out of her head and carried it to show the Greeks. But Proclies, the son of Euchratis, a Carthaginian, thought a different account more plausible than the preceding. And he said, so another person told him another story. Among the incredible monsters to be found in the Libyan desert are wild men and wild women. Broclies confirms for me that he had seen a man from them who had been brought to Rome. So he guessed that a woman from them reached Lake Tritanis and harried the neighbors or bothered the neighbors until Perseus killed her. Athena was supposed to help him in this exploit because the people who lived around Lake Tritanis are sacred to her. So Perseus is giving us the tea, my friends. Perseus is giving us the true tea. So Perseus, for those of you who may not know, is the earliest travel blogger that we know. So basically he was an ex-soldier, he's a Roman, he spends, sorry, he's an ex-soldier. He spends a lot of time traveling through Greece, he's a Greek, a Roman. And he writes down everything that people tell him, everything that he sees, he's really the very first travel blogger. He's got long, long volumes and much of our archaeological discoveries are based on his descriptions of where he was and what he saw and that way we can kind of measure. So Perseus much, much later than his yacht to be fair a thousand years later because he's in the second century sea. He tells us about what he's hearing, especially at Argos. So he says, there's a story that in the center of Argos inside this mound, there's this head of Medusa. But then he tells us about who she might have been. So she's seduced or falls in love with or whatever, has an affair, not an affair that's the wrong word, has a hookup with Poseidon, then she goes on to live her life, okay? So remember that his yacht said he has a hookup, she has a hookup with Poseidon and then Perseus kills her, but we don't know what actually happens in between. And people fill in those gaps or maybe his yacht just didn't care. So that information might have been available to him, he just didn't care to write it down. We don't know. Osenius though, like I said, much later says, I've heard some stories about this and he says that she, after her father died, rained over the people that were living along around this lake and that she was a warrior queen, a Libyan warrior queen who was actually battling with Perseus who was trying to take over this region. And in fact, Perseus snuck in the middle of the night and killed her. And then he admired her, he thought she was so beautiful that he cut off her head and carried it to show the Greeks. I mean, Perseus is so gross, he's so gross. He says, hey, and I also met this guy named Proclies, who's the son of Yucritees, who's a Carthaginian. And he told me this other kind of story, he said basically that the Libyans, the wild men and women from Libya came from the desert and came in this area and settled in. And that one of the women was bothering as they were coming to settle in this area, was bothering everybody. And so they asked Perseus to go and kill her, the neighbors told Perseus that she was her because she was so wild, you know. But think about this as the alternative stories to what we have been profusely told over and over again, which is a sort of nonsensical story that Medusa lives in the cave. And that Athena helps Perseus take off her head and that she was usually she was a beautiful woman that was then given snakes or as a punishment by Athena. All of that is so much fiction that's not even in the primary source, not even in the primary source, you know. Let me tell you what Hesiod says about Perseus because he's just so gross, okay. Actually, am I in that section? Oh, I've got so much primary source for you guys, but that's going to take us hours, okay. Okay, let me tell you what at least Hesiod says about Perseus. Hmm, okay. On Perseus's feet were the flying sandals of Hermes and across his shoulders was slung the black bound sword suspended in a sword belt of bronze. And he hovered like a thought in the mind and all his back was covered with the head of the monster to dreaded Gorgon Medusa. The bag floated about it, a wonder to look at, done in silver, but the shining tassels fluttered and they were gold and the temple of Lord Perseus were hooded over by the war cap of Hades, which confers terrible darkness. Perseus himself sped onward like one who goes in haste or terror. As meanwhile, the rest of the Gorgon's sisters humbled along behind him, unapproachable, indescribable, straining to catch and grab him and on the green of the steel surface giver the sound of their feet, on the shield running with sharp high noise and on the belts of the Gorgons of Paris snakes were suspended, but they reared and bent their heads forward and flickered with their tongues, their teeth for their rage were made jagged and their staring fierce and over the dreaded heads of the Gorgons, a great panic shivering. So this is a story that Hesia tells us that after he kills Medusa, he tries to run away with her head and the two Gorgon sisters hunt them down. But of course, since Perseus is a so-called hero, they never catch up to him. But they're fearsome and they're angry and of course they're devastated that Perseus knock into their home and kill their sister. Then I have a ton and ton of primary source of that same story, but let us move forward. The implication that the Gorgons are apertured pig, which is protective. We see repeatedly, repeatedly on the shield of warriors. So remember I said Athena wears her always on the Aegeus. It's one of the ways that we recognize all the Athenian statues and Athena anywhere. But also soldiers or Greek soldiers in particular wore them on her shield. And here we see an image of Leonidas, the king of Sparta, a statue in which he is wearing he has a shield and on the shield is a Gorgon head. Again, the idea is that this is a protective, a protective being. That the very nature of what we term ugly today is the very fearsome thing that would have been protective of others. And so that we have a ton of evidence that Medusa and the Gorgons are protective figures. Whether we think they're ugly protective figures, you know, I mean it's funny because we think angels are protective figures and they're supposed to be beautiful. And then there are stories that interpret the angels as these sort of dark fearsome creatures that human beings can't even look upon because we will be so frightened. So I want us to think about like what do we determine as ugly and what we might think as ugly or foreign or strange. But and that's up to the individual on the eye of the beholder, but there is no doubt whatsoever that the Gorgons are protective figures. They don't attack anyone, they don't kill anyone. Medusa actually never hurts anyone except the people that are coming for her. As a warrior or Libyan warrior or whether as the so-called monster of Ovid's myth later on, she never turns anyone to stone except people that come into her house to hurt her. And to be fair, that is always men. So she never turns women into stone. We see here another image of Leonidas in a bigger shield. Early images, in fact, there's an image too of, it's not Leonidas, it's a Heracles. I'm trying to think in Corfu, no, it's Achilles, sorry, it's Achilles. In Corfu, there is the massive villa and in the middle of the garden, there is a statue of Achilles. And on the shield of Achilles, we see the face of the Gorgon. And of course, we see the repetitive image, which the Greeks really love, but later on so that the Europeans of Perseus is cutting off the head of Medusa. This one that you see here is a more traditional Greek image because it has the actual Gorgon face, you are familiar with numerous replicas of the European, of the later European art in which both Perseus and Medusa appear to have human faces. And again, this is a subject of great repetition. So there was something in the patriarchal Greeks that enjoyed repeating the story of Perseus, a man slaying Medusa, a Gorgon female, yeah, the only mortal Gorgon of them all. And I think we all know that there is something insidious here. Not only is it male violence against women, because it is, but it is also the defeat of the foreigner, the killing of the other, the conquest of the indigenous. There is just so much implied here for the Greeks who would have walked around and seen these pediments or this release or these statues, they would have seen them everywhere. And sort of the sort of propaganda repeated over and over of we have conquered the enemy. We have conquered the thing we fear. We have conquered those we have conquered, but we will put that head on our own shields or on our own bodies to protect us in battle with more others. You see what I mean? It's very insidious. It has deeper meaning than I think it has a more violent meaning than I think we normally associate. For me, every time I see this imagery of Perseus killing Medusa, I roll my eyes and I'm like, "Ugh, Perseus." Like, Perseus is the most horrible hero of all time. He's just such a douche, okay, such a douche. In so many ways, in so many ways, him and Theseus are two dudes that we could spend hours talking about how terrible they are, but they really are highly unlikely that they were real figures. Perhaps they may have been king of one of the towns or Theseus case, maybe Athens, et cetera, but they embody the heroic propaganda of male Greeks about themselves. We don't actually know if male Greeks were like this, because again, people tell stories about heroes in an extravagant way, and I'm not saying that they weren't like this. Of course, there's room for that, but I just want you to imagine the stories that they told themselves about themselves, and this is one of them, and Perseus is just like that. We also see a movement that called this moving from ugly to pretty. We also see a movement from Medusa the Gorgon to Medusa the more pretty. These are two pieces that I saw at the Corfu Museum. These are my own pieces that are about 200 years apart. One is a Gorgon face, the traditional Gorgon face. The other one is the more pretty Medusa figure. This more pretty Medusa figure, you can see some snakes in her hair, but her face is much more human-like, certainly much more European-like, and her hair is much more European-like. Everything's a lot more European. We start to see this figure on ships later on for Europeans. We start to see it in art later on for Europeans, and of course, we see it in the Versace symbol and the Sicilian flag. The more acceptable pretty Medusa is the one that becomes the more popular Medusa, even though her story is still so violent and disturbing, this more pretty version continues to play a key role in European consciousness. The Gorgon though remains in the past, and she remains the monster, and I think this is why I feel so called or inspired to do this particular episode on the Gorgons, because what we see is monstrous, may not be what everyone sees as monstrous in the world. In fact, some may see that as attractive, like Poseidon. Who thought she was beautiful? Again, this is the more standard European depiction. You can see the two little wings on her head, which fascinate me because there's this, again, this association with her Daymonic, the idea that she is more than human, but she's not really a god, but she's more than human, and then we also see the snakes. And I really think that even though this face is quite, quite European, and you see the snakes around her neck, it's very much that cherub-induced style or a Gorgon style, this actually is really a contradiction of human consciousness, that is that the wings and the snakes are together within this one persona. And so I see Medusa as this complete aspect of the divine, that the divine is neither good nor bad, neither monstrous nor beautiful, that it is this sort of complex amalgamation. And I think that's probably what fascinated many of the artists of the past and what continues to fascinate us about Medusa. For me, particularly, I find the Gorgon the most comforting of all protective figures I've ever seen. And I was raised Catholic, so you can imagine how many angels and how many Virgin Mary's and how many other things I've seen in my life. But the Gorgon, I find, I understand why people put the Gorgon head on their shields because I feel like if I'm wearing the Gorgon in front of me, on me, as a shield, as a dress, as the entrance to my house, because the Gorgon heads used to be put right on the front of doors or on the walls outside the house to protect the house from evil spirits, I can see how that would protect me. If I put this face on my house, I think that would just be cute, you know, or sad in the case of this particular image. But the Gorgon, the Gorgon I feel would certainly bring me the piece that I'm looking for. And so this brings us to our last slide and discussion, which brings us back full circle to the beginning, the Basilica keystones. So here I've given you my images of both of the keystones. So these are called the Medusa keystones, they're in the Basilica cistern in Istanbul. Anyone can go see them. They were repurposed from earlier Roman structures and integrated into this massive underground reservoir of water during the reign of Emperor Justinian I in the 6th century common era. So about 1400 years ago, Justinian I took these from an old Roman temple, we think. And place them like this inside this underground reservoir. So a cistern is a massive reservoir of water. So they would have been underwater, which is so fitting if you think about it. But also so again, so sinister, because Medusa is the creator of water figures, right? And now she's placed in the water, which she would have been comfortable with. But the keystones are placed upside down. So the stones are made of prokinesian marble. So this is widely used in the Roman and Byzantine architecture. But they're purposely placed, one is placed sideways and then the column that holds up the cistern wall. And the other one is placed upside down with the column going up that holds up the cistern walls. And so there is lots of questions about why they're placed upside down or sideways. Why they're inverted, why they wouldn't have been so in the temples, they would have just been placed straight up. And there's a couple of debates and these are the debates that I think struck a chord with many people. The first one, of course, is that when the cistern drains of water, so water would be collected in the cisterns and then, of course, at some point it would drain during the dry season and the hot season and then it would fill with water during the winter. So it's not constantly underwater. So there's these sort of two things. There's this knowing that the Medusa keystones are there and the water upside down. But then there's also this visual possibility where people in the dry season could go and see because they could walk around the cisterns and the cisterns are stunningly massive and beautiful. They look like a cathedral, which is why they're called the Basilica cisterns. Of course, some of it has been rebuilt over time. But they could see this when the water was down, when the water was low. Now today, it's never filled with water, so the water is always low and people always can go anytime. Like I went to go visit in November, you can go visit anytime of the year because now this is preserved. And the entire cistern system is beautiful. I highly recommend that you go see it. But there's this great debate that actually, this was the way that the emperor, for example, Justinian who is Justinian the first who did this, who was of course by this time a Christian. This was one of the ways in which they dominated or they showed dominance or conquering or subordinated, I don't know if that's a word, pagan imagery, so that there is something purposely done to, that this is something purposely done, to subjugate the pagans, to make them see their protective symbols as lost, to show dominance, show conquering. What's really ironic about the whole thing though is that today in Istanbul, these are two of the most visited, the basilica cistern itself is one of the most visited sites in Istanbul. Now today, you know, Istanbul is not ruled by Christians, it's no longer Constantinople. So perhaps what the Christians had intended originally has actually kind of come back to bite them because people go to see these two pieces now in Istanbul and feel sympathetic and feel angry and feel disrespected in many ways. But also, as you see, there's coins all around them, now wherever there's a water fountain, people tend to throw coins to make wishes, which is again something that fascinates me about us as humans, we love the story of making a wish in water. But there's also a story that if you touch them, especially this one on the side, the one that's upside down because it's a large, this one is very, very large, this one that's on its side is a little bit smaller. But if you touch them, that this brings you good luck. So while I did not throw a coin in the water, I did touch this one for good luck. So in a way, these keystones have gained back their power in the fact that so many humans globally now travel to see them and that people leave coins for them and sometimes touch them for good luck. And so the story of Medusa actually is made popular by the very act that Justinian I, for example, tried to diminish as fascinating and it's wonderful. And like I said, this is perhaps why the why those videos went so viral in the sense that people really relate to this figure, this figure that really did nothing wrong ever. She was living her life, she may have hooked up with Poseidon and then she was killed. She may have been a warrior or a warrior goddess, but then she was killed and then used by those who had destroyed her for their own protection and their own gain. So I think that there's something in that story that speaks to all of us and it certainly speaks to me in a very powerful, powerful way. So that is it for our podcast for today. Yay, for the first premiere of my past of episode one of season three. I'm now going to record the after the podcast. So as some of you know, I do like a 20 minute short video episode that's called after the podcast that I put on Patreon, which you can go on there on Patreon and just purchase just the, just the episode itself. So you don't have to do a monthly Patreon to watch this, but I do do it because I am trying to raise funds for the next expedition, which is happening in May. And I've been, this is one of the ways that I raised funds through Patreon for the expeditions that I've had previously. So I'm going to record that. And if you would like to see it, I will put a link below for you to go and see this and if you're already a Patreon member, then it's already going to be up there for you to watch. And one of the things that I'm going to discuss that has really like shook me is the gorgons and the seraphim. So the seraphims are these angelic beings within the Christian church and I saw a picture that Sandra, my travel partner, took when she went to Hagia Tariada when she, Hagia Sophia when she was an Istanbul. When I was an Istanbul, I didn't go to Hagia Sophia. The lineup was too much and too long and it was a little bit, whatever, but she had gone in and she had seen these seraphim that hadn't been covered for many, many, many years. And one of them is now uncovered and she took pictures and I thought, oh my God. And then I saw, I had remembered an image of the gorgon with four wings in the Istanbul Museum and I said, my God, these guys look exactly the same. And that, my friends, maybe go down this rabbit hole of seraphim traditions and mythology. So these angelic creatures and gorgons. So for after the podcast, I'm going to show you some images and I'm going to discuss that shortly. So if you're going to go see it or if you'd like to see it, please go through the Patreon link below. Otherwise, thank you so much for joining me. Thank you for subscribing. Thank you for commenting. Thank you for liking. Please feel free to share with your friends to share with anyone who might enjoy this podcast who might enjoy my work. As you know, I am a traveling academic and yeah, this is my passion and I hope to continue traveling, continue bringing you as much real, real, real life data, real life images and videos of the places that are rarely seen or videoed and also interesting artifacts and hopefully more interesting episodes. In two weeks, we're going to look at Hijia, the Goddess of Healing and we're going to talk a little bit about Asclepius. Again, thank you so much for joining me. I hope that you've enjoyed this as much as I have and I will see you all in two weeks. Have a fantastic, fantastic day.