From the Vault: Medusa, Part 2

We all know snake-haired Medusa, the gorgon of Greek myth whose very gaze turns mortals and titans alike to stone. But where does this iconic monster come from and why has she lingered so very long in our art, minds and culture? In this Stuff to Blow Your Mind two-parter, Robert and Joe venture to the Gorgade isles in search of answers. (4/30/2020)

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:05):
Hey, you welcome to Stuff to blow your mind. My
name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and we're
bringing you a vault episode today since we're out this week.
This is part two of our series on MEDUSA. That's right.
These were super fun episodes to put together, just trying
to to untangle the myth, uh, to understand what what
the myth is? You know, talking about everything from from

(00:28):
ancient works of literature to modern horror fantasy films. So
let's go ahead and enter the Gorgon's lair, and from
a stone beside, a poisonous fft peeps idly into those
Gorgonian eyes, wilst in the air a ghastly bat, bereft
of sense, has flitted with a mad surprise out of

(00:49):
the cave. This hideous light had cleft, and he comes
hastening like a moth that highs after a taper, and
the midnight sky flares a light more dread an obscurity
tis the tempestuous loveliness of terror. For from the serpent's
gleams of brazen glare, kindled by that inextricable error, which

(01:11):
makes a thrilling vapor of the air become a blank
and ever shifting mirror of all the beauty and the terror.
There a woman's countenance with serpent locks, gazing in death
on heaven from those wet rocks. Welcome to Stuff to
Blow Your Mind production of My Heart Radio. Hey you

(01:40):
welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name is
Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and we're back with
part two of our series on the Gorgon Medusa. That's right.
In the last episode, we largely just recounted what can
roughly be thought of as the canonical myth of Medusa
as it emerged from the classical era, based on a
few popular tellings of the myth from those days. Now

(02:03):
it's time to get into possible origins of the myth,
as well as various interpretations of the meaning behind it.
Some of the meanings we've attributed it over time, but
they're you know, there are also these cases where for
the underlying power of myth that just keeps us coming
back to reinterpret it. You know, there's just something about

(02:23):
mythology in general, but especially with the Gorgon. There's something
about the Gorgon myth that just keeps bringing us back
keeps forcing us to reevaluate it. Yeah, it absolutely cannot
be ignored. I mean, maybe it's because you can't look
at it without dying, that people can't stop looking at it.
It's like being told not to think about a taboo subject. Uh.

(02:43):
And so, uh, it's clearly the image of Medusa is
one of the most obsessed over and revisited images from
all of Greek mythology. Yeah, and we're gonna explore a
number of the different threads there. I think one of
the great things about it is that all of the interpretations,
I think pretty much all the interpretations were going to

(03:03):
discuss here, they certainly have uh you know, a strong
air of truth to them, like it feels right, and
yet none of them feel like they explain it completely.
There's always this sense of darkness and mystery uh, to
Medusa that we can't quite grasp, you know, And and
that's part of the this this part of the enigma

(03:24):
of it. Well, yeah, exactly. I think that's really the
appeal of these ancient archetypes, these archetypal stories and monsters. Uh,
it's that they don't mean one thing. Instead, there's something
that the kind of you know, there are a box
that can be opened twenty different ways, and depending on
you know which part of it you open, you you uh,

(03:45):
you unlock different treasures from within. Yeah. Absolutely, And I
want to remind everybody that one of one of our
key sources in this these episodes was a book by
David A. Lemming that's L. E. E. M. I n G.
Titled Medusa in the Mirror Time from eighteen. So we'll
refer back to that a few different times here, but
we we also just recommend that book for anyone who

(04:07):
wants a deeper dive into the nature of Medusa. Now
we've got a really cool etymological lesson from your son,
I believe. In between recording these two episodes. Yeah, yeah,
this was really interesting. So I mentioned that he was
reading a lot about mythology, uh. And I also mentioned
a cool comic book series that he was really into

(04:28):
titled The Olympians, And I neglected to mention the author
last time, but it's George O'Connor. He's written eleven of these,
each of them themed around a different god or goddess,
and book to Athena concerns Medusa. I highly recommend those
to anyone who just wants, you know, a nice uh
visual representation of these myths for for a young reader
or just for them themselves. But another series that my

(04:51):
son was reading, these are all things like checked out
of the library digitally, uh, during this quarantine period. There's
a series called Science Comics, and he was reading one
titled Science Comics Dinosaurs, Fossils and Feathers. And the book
points out that one of the three um Gray sisters
we referred to in the last episode is dino. That's

(05:13):
d e i n O or d i n o,
which can be translated as dread. So. In eighteen forty two,
paleontologists Sir Richard Owen coined the term dinosaur, derived from
the ancient Greek uh dinos, meaning terrible, potent or fearfully great,
along with sauros, meaning lizard or reptile. Now, I don't

(05:35):
think there's a stronger connection between the myth and the term,
but Science Comics took the opportunity to include an image
of the three Gray sisters in this book about dinosaurs,
which was pretty awesome, uh, And I salute especially since
it brought you these two subjects and my son is
super into together in one book. Yeah, I never made

(05:55):
that connection. Even when I saw the name translated at
Dano or dina, however you say it it as meaning
like terror or dread, I didn't. I didn't make the
connection to the dread lizard. Yeah, so I I thought
when he first told me about it, I didn't believe
and I was like, what are you sure? And then
he showed me the page and yet there they are
just popping up in in in dinosaur books now, so

(06:18):
you know, good for them. Well, I say, let's jump
right back into uh to the head of the gore
gun and pick up where we left off last time.
So the last time you mentioned that we basically gave
the outline of the myth. We talked about some of
its major variations. Um, but one thing that I think
we alluded to a little bit last time was the
idea that there have been attempts to sort of route

(06:39):
the myth in history to say, like, you know, there's
some magical elements to this myth, but basically it really
came from this actual historical event that happened. But I'll
just I'll just make up right now. Yeah, Learning points
out in his book that's several noted individuals throughout history,
notably um Uh, Pla, fatus Uh, Diodorus of Sicily, Hosanias Uh, etcetera,

(07:05):
have attempted to sort out the historical quote unquote truth
of the myth. And this is kind of like geo mythology,
the geomethology approach that we've discussed on the show before,
you know, wondering what a particular myth really is about
by seeking a literal version of the affairs of history.
With geomethology, it tends to break down to looking at

(07:26):
fossils for the answer, dinosaur fossils in forming the shape
of a dragon, that sort of thing. Now, digego mythology
is certainly a fascinating field, and we've discussed some wonderful
ideas concerning the origins of various myths and monsters, but
we also point out that it's often unbalanced to depend
entirely upon geomethology, because myths and monsters, you know, certainly

(07:46):
they can be borne out of you know, actual extent
or extinct animals whose remains or uh, you know, description
one has come across. But we also have to factor
in human belief, human fears, human creativity, and just the
layer upon layer of human culture that often builds these things. Yeah,
I would say, I mean. The thing about explanations like

(08:09):
this that try to seek a rational, real world inspiration
for some kind of mythological story or element we have,
is I mean, for one thing, it's it's usually going
to be highly speculative. You're you're just trying to find
a story that could fit the evidence. Rarely do we
have a case where, like from ancient history, we know that,
oh we we believe this mythical dragon existed because we

(08:33):
found bones buried in the ground or something like that
that would give you a really strong clue what the
actual inspiration was. The simple way I'd put it is,
don't undersell human imagination, right, Like the fact that a
strange creature or character or sequence of events happens in
a myth doesn't mean that creature or character whatever has
to be based on, uh, the storyteller having once seen

(08:55):
something in the real world that shared this or that quality.
A lot of times we just make stuff up, like
we dream up weird things. We you know, the mind
mutates variations of things we've experienced in life. Naturally, it
happens in dreams without us ever having seen you know,
like a bat with human teeth or whatever it is
that scared us in a dream. And so I think

(09:15):
we don't. Uh. While it's fun to speculate about this
kind of thing, we don't have to assume that myths
and all that are are based directly on anything that
happened in reality or that somebody saw. Yeah, I mean,
and certainly there are plenty of examples where the geo
mythological approach or that purely historical approach can be very informative.
Monsters based on again previously extant species or specimens, descriptions

(09:40):
that make their way from distant lands. Um. And of
course many mythic exploits do have a basis, even a
primary one, in actual kings and queens and in heroes
that at one point in history may have been actual
mortal people before you know, the mythology and legend took over.
But but Living cautions that the rationalist approach quote provides

(10:03):
one sort of explanation of the meaning of the Medusa's story,
but tends to ignore the power of the mythic elements. Yes,
so examples of this would include, like you know, ancient
historians saying, ah, so the story of Perseus and Medusa
really comes from Perseus being like, imagine there was this
guy named Perseus, and he was a pirate, and he

(10:23):
was trying to go to these islands in the Atlantic.
One was that were each ruled by these queens who
were the gore Gun sisters, uh and and so forth
like that. I would say one problem with the rationalist
historical approach is that very often it seems to me
to just be making things up. So like, how to
simply making up a non magical fictional origin story for

(10:46):
a monster or character improve on the existing magical mythology? Yeah, exactly.
And and ultimately is learning argues the power of myth
is deeper than history, and and we can follow that
in a couple of different actions. But first I thought
we might discuss the origin of Medusa. That is perhaps
most fascinating. And Lemmings book that of the disembodied head

(11:10):
of Medusa and the idea that it predates Medusa's body.
And I realized that sounds like some causality wrecking weirdness there,
which you know you can certainly encounter in in mythology.
But the more you think about this angle, I think
the more it makes perfect sense. And here's the basic premise.
The moment that really caps off the story of Medusa,

(11:32):
as we recounted in the previous episode, is Athena's incorporating
of her petrifying head into her own shield. Uh. That
that Gorgonian face becoming part of her own emblem. And
we know that Medusa's head and the Gorgonian head itself,
these were common motifs on vice's sculptures and helmets, shields, etcetera.

(11:53):
Were pieces of armor and uh, and not only for
mythic heroes, but for common soldiers as well. And what's more,
this practice of utilizing the Gorgon's head pre dates the
more evolved versions of the Medusa myth. You know that
the real story shaped elements that we refer back to
again and again. Yeah, I think that's right. I mean,
I think it's hard to know for sure, but it seems,

(12:16):
based on the evidence we have that before the fully
formed story of Medusa existed, there was simply the Gorgonian,
the magical image a protective amulet bearing this terrifying monstrous
head with grinding teeth and a lolling tongue often tusks uh,
sometimes kind of gender fluid. It could be it could

(12:38):
be female, could be male with a beard, could incorporate
some kind of snake imagery in the hair, but often not.
It's just generally this terrifying face. So before there was
the character, there was the ritual magical image. Even in
Homer's Iliad, you know, one of the great literary sources
giving us access to early information about Greek myths, you
don't get the full Medusa story, you don't get a

(12:59):
full ledged character. Instead, you just get this image, recurring
the image of the disembodied head of the gorgon, which
Homer describes as a thing grim and awful to behold. Yeah. So,
so basically the idea is that Medusa pre existed is
a terrifying, petrifying disembodied head um. Like you said, sometimes

(13:21):
the gorgon was even bearded, and sometimes it was male. Uh,
and it was a common decoration. And then the persea
smith comes along, at least in part to provide a
backstory for the monster, to to literally flesh her out,
to give her a body so as to explain the
absence of a body. So if this origin is correct,
you know you can imagine cases where you have like

(13:42):
soldiers hanging around the campfire and they've all got this
terrifying head on their shields, and somebody's looking at the
shields and being like, I wonder, I wonder who that is. Yeah,
I mean it's easy to imagine how a lot of
these things come come around. You know. Storyteller is just
sort of coming up with some thing to explain it,
incorporating it into some other story they heard. Uh, and

(14:04):
that monster was the Medusa, the very face on your shield,
that sort of thing, or it's or you could also
compare it to what we do in the modern era
with we have say a terrifying we'll say, certainly a
more fleshed out intoday, but we have something like say
Hannibal Lecter, and people are like, oh, this character is great. Uh,
I want to learn more about him? What's his backstory?

(14:26):
Where do you come from? Can we have a whole
book that just explains where we came from? And? Uh?
You know so and you can. You can look at
examples of that numerous works, you know, and you make
something that appeals to people, people want to keep tugging
on that threat. Well, that's that's something I think a
lot of times gets out of hand and is can
be very unsatisfying because a lot of times people don't

(14:47):
realize that the scarcity of a beloved element in a
narrative is exactly what makes it so beloved. Like, you know,
Hannibal Lecter in the original Silence of the Lamb's movie,
I know it's not he was a character and other
stuff before that, but and you know the Jonathan Demmi movie,
I would say he's especially effective as a character because

(15:08):
he's in the movie so little. He's you know, he's
got less than twenty minutes of screen time or whatever. Yeah,
I would agree, yeah, and certainly in in both both
the Book's Red Dragon and Silence of the Lambs. It's
very that's very much the case. He's a key character,
but he's not your primary character. You're not spending just
oodles of time with him. The mystery remains. And so yeah,

(15:28):
you say, oh, I want a whole book about Hannibal Lector,
I want to know his whole backstory because he's so cool,
is so interesting, so mysterious, And then you get that
and it's like, Okay, I mean the same thing that
people are like, I want a Boba Fette movie, Like
is that going to be as good as you think
it is, yeah, exactly, but to bring it back to Medusa.
So I think this idea that the the image of

(15:51):
Medusa's severed head could in fact pre date the fully
formed myth of Medusa's life and and you know her
origins and uh and her role in the Perseus story. UH.
Like that ordering is is interesting to consider because again
it's something that's difficult to prove conclusively, but it does

(16:11):
appear to be going on with a number of things
in the history of myth and religion around the world.
This was a point often made by the people known
as the Cambridge Ritualists. In Lemming's book, he identifies specifically
the scholar Jane Harrison as one pushing this idea that
many myths that we have access to today very likely

(16:32):
emerge as a response to rituals and practices rather than
as the cause of them. And of course this would
match up pretty well with the ordering of evidence that
we have in the history of Medusa. Not that there
was like a myth of Perseus and Medusa which gave
rise to the use of Medusa emblems on shields and
armor and money and stuff, but exactly the inverse, that

(16:55):
there was a tradition of displaying a fearsome gorgon head
on objects as a kind of ritual protective magic, and
you know, to scare away the bad demons, to frighten
your enemies, and so forth. And over time, these rituals,
the art, the spells gave rise to a myth to
explain it, Who is this scary head? We keep stamping

(17:16):
on things? Where did she come from? And then as
the myth changes, grows more complex and develops along with
the cultural values and interests over time. So in that
the myth of the gorgon's head is so ancient that
Liming points out that it's its origins likely reside outside
of Greece entirely. Now we should remind ourselves that that

(17:38):
this is quite common in myth and religion. An idea
or a deity from one culture grows into or is
absorbed by another. For instance, gray eyed Athena is said
to have sprung from Zeus's head, but we can be
sure that she did not emerge wholesale from the Greek imagination.
Is is her roots seemed to go back through the
various powerful goddesses of Proto into Indo Europeans sumere in culture.

(18:01):
Living gives the specific example of Aphrodite uh and her
likely connection to a nana and ishtar in ancient Sumerian Babylon,
and Leming points out a few different traditions of Gorgonian
heads that predate Medusa. Heads that gaze out at us
with the steel faces and petrifying eyes. Uh. There reminds

(18:23):
me a lot of the kind of lion face one
makes in in yoga. But also you see similar faces
that are made snarling faces that are made in various
forms of dance or you know, bodily performance. As a scholar,
Tobin Cibers described it, that's the emblem of of the
stupefying look and and some of the examples that Leming

(18:45):
points out. There's the Mesopotamian demon whom Baba uh quote,
when he looks at someone, it is the look of death. Yeah.
And I think with whom Baba you get a similar
dynamic to Medusa, where there's this tradition of ritual imagery.
It's this kind of like emon head that has some
kind of ritual magical power and as as displayed on objects.

(19:05):
But also, of course Himbaba appears as a character in
the mythology shows up in the epic of Gilgamesh as
as a villain that must be destroyed, right, and destroying
they do. They in fact, they decapitate the monster, which
is key in all of this as well. There's also
the God Best of Egypt household protector God with possible
sub Saharan origins, and despite the Egyptian dependency on side

(19:29):
profile imagery, Bess is always depicted facing out towards the viewer.
I want to come back to that. And additionally, some
early Greek versions of the bodied Medusa apparently have the
look of a pre existing head motif having been basically
stamped onto a body, like you know, kind of kind
of coming back to this idea of like let's let's
just let's match this up, let's let's let's provide a

(19:50):
body for this, and it's just kind of like almost
like the ancient Greek version of very rough photoshop that
one might encounter. Yes, some of the ancient Greek Medusa
imagery almost seems like, you know when people do that
like bad on purpose ms paint drawing of something, where
they like like take a square of somebody's head and
pasted onto a weird stick figure. Yeah. Yeah, And but

(20:11):
I think it also kind of speaks to the idea
that these things were too like the head of the
Gorgonian head was like a distinct image, a distinct pre
existing image, and therefore the incorporation of it with the
body would would be inherently rough and imperfect, and you
would only get a true joining of the two later on.
But but I want to come back to this idea

(20:32):
of of the Gorgonian head staring directly at the viewer
of the art. But but in in modern like cinematic interpretations,
we see this as well. In fact, we see it
fantastically in Ray Ray Harryhausen's Medusa that we encounter in
the original Clash of the Titans. There is at least

(20:53):
I think there's there are a couple of sequences, but
there's one scene in particular where she breaks the fourth
wall and stares to rectly at the audience. Yeah, it's
like the Great Train Robbery, you know, Yeah, or like
Good Fellows when Joe Pesci shoots the gun at the camera. Yeah.
Like I think, all you know, those are examples of
of things that are in the tradition of the Gorgonian
head as well. Yeah, but I feel like Harry Howsing

(21:14):
in particular with with Clash eighty one. Yeah, you know,
he and he and or the filmmakers. I think they
realize that it's not a gorgon unless it breaks the
fourth wall and does look directly at the audience. And
this is key because the Gorgonian head is in all
of these examples pure apotropaic magic. Yeah, totally. I mean
apotropaic magic is one of the most interesting subjects to me.

(21:38):
I I love thinking about this stuff. So apotropaic magic
means magic that is used to ward off evil or
threats or something like that. Uh. You know a classic
example that we'll get to more later. You know the
types of talisman's that you could have to ward off
the evil eye. That will come up more in a
bit here. But yeah, I love this idea. Lemming brings

(21:59):
this up human and the idea that in ancient art
if you look at a lot of the representations of
humanoid figures, humans and gods and stuff from the ancient
Near East in the Mesopotamian region, a whole lot of
it has UH figures depicted in profile facing to the side.
Think about ancient Egyptian artwork, and a lot of ancient

(22:20):
Greek artwork that you're gonna have heads facing to the side.
The Medusa figure and the other apotropic monster figures such
as Humbaba are going to be depicted in defiance of
this art that often looks directly at you. And it's
almost as if the art is seeing you back. You know,
you're looking at it and it's looking at you. And

(22:42):
I think that the weirdness of this may have to
do with these ancient taboos about the evil eye, about
being looked at. That like having a piece of art
that stares directly into your face as you look at
it is in a way inherently threatening, whether the creature
depicted as monsters or not, all the more so if
it is monstrous. So I was reading a bit about

(23:02):
this in an essay by a met Museum curator to
accompany an exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art on
Medusa and Hybrid Monsters and art history. Her name is
Kiki Carriglu, and the essay was called Dangerous Beauty, Medusa
and Classical Art and the way she describes it as
so she's talking about the the archaic gorgon face, the

(23:24):
face of the gorgon before we get the later derived
versions that are associated with the full fledged a myth.
She writes, quote, the archaic gorgon is always full face moreover,
glaring directly at the viewer. This combination of frontality and
monstrosity and a single immediately recognizable figure is what makes

(23:46):
the Greek gorgon such an original, invocative image of radical
difference of the absolute other. Uh. And so she talks
about some of the the apotropaic uses of the gorgon
face that, you know, you go back in history, a
lot of the things that would have the gorgon on
it would be not just shields used in battle, but
but for example, funerary monuments, you know, so the gorgon's

(24:09):
face on the funeral or the tomb door or something
is an apotropaic emblem to protect the tomb from evil.
But also this was really interesting to me. Carrolu talks
about how there is a transition from archaic Greek art
to classical Greek art, wherein the classical period Medusa was
quote progressively transformed into an attractive young woman. So, beginning

(24:34):
around the fifth century b C, art representing Medusa began
to transform from mainly terrifying be steel heads with tusks
and poor sign features and stuff like that into increasingly humanoid,
feminine and beautiful, and Caroglu points out that this transition
in representation over time applies actually not just to Medusa,

(24:58):
but is is sort of character ristic of a an
overall trend in Greek art in how it depicts mythical
female monsters and hybrids, including sphinxes like the sphinx story
that you get in the Legend of Oedipus, but also
sirens and the sea monster Skilla. You've got these archaic
depictions in which they are monstrous in human, gross and

(25:21):
all that, and then around the fifth century b C.
These monsters become more notably feminine and beautiful. Yeah, it's
an interesting transformation and one that is going to be
key to a number of these different interpretations that we're
going to be discussing and the way that Medusa was
utilized by subsequent cultures. Absolutely, should we take a break. Yeah,

(25:44):
let's take a quick break, but we will be right
back with more of the Gorgon's Thank alright, we're back.
So we started the episode today by reading from a poem.
That poem was a poem by Percy Shelley. It's called
on the Medusa of Leonardo da Vinci in the Florentine Gallery.

(26:05):
And there's a funny thing about this poem. Uh. There
is no painting of Medusa by Leonardo da Vinci, at
least not that we have right this this painting or
or in all likelihood a pair of paintings are lost works, which,
especially when you're talking about Leonardo da Vinci, there's just
something endlessly fascinating about that, right, the idea that there

(26:25):
were there are these works that he created that you know,
other people saw in an attest to existing that are
just no longer with us. Um. But I think I
think even Shelley was not actually looking at a Da
Vinci painting. He was mistaken, right right right, there were
um so, there were at least two early paintings that
were described in I think in a Life of Leonardo

(26:48):
da Vinci. Uh this would have been um uh georgo
Vasari's biography of the artist. But then later there's a
six painting by a Flemish painter that has at times
been wrongfully wrongfully attributed as the work of Da Vinci.
It's still, you know, wonderful to behold, but it is.
It is not authentically da Vinci um. But yeah, this

(27:09):
painting would go on to inspire Percy Shelley in the
writing of this poem. Now, one of the things about
the sort of lore surrounding Da Vinci's painting is that
is that this painting or pair of paintings they they
supposedly like, really captured uh you know, the beautiful terror
really captured the magic of the Gorgonian head in a

(27:31):
way that like unsettled people when they saw it. So
that just makes the this, uh, this these particular lost
works even more amazing to think about. Yeah, I believe
I read. I can't remember in which of our sources
it was. It might have been in the liming, but
one of the sources we were looking at talked about
how it might have been Da Vinci's painting that was

(27:52):
actually the first to show Medusa not just with snakes
entwined in her hair, but with snakes as her hair
that hurt. That's all the hair she's got. Yeah. Interesting,
and and I I can't help but take the spectative
leap too and try to imagine, oh, well, maybe maybe
these paintings are lost because da Vinci, with his great

(28:13):
art was able to legitimately capture the power of Medusa's gaze,
and these paintings actually petrified people, actually turned people to stone,
and so they had to be in a locked away
or destroyed, right like a Renaissance van helsing yea, yeah,
as far as I know, they haven't been utilized in
horror fiction, uh that way, but it seems like a

(28:36):
given like somebody and it hasn't been done already. Somebody
should do that totally, alright. So we talked a little
bit earlier about apotrepeg magic and the evil eye. Let's
let's come back to the evil eye. Yeah, so so
letting points out that that, uh, you know, this is
all of course connected to this concept of the evil eye.
Medusa's gaze has the power to petrify, and certainly the

(28:57):
face is key to the aforementioned um apotropaic magic. But
as with other evil eyes and myths such one of
my favorites is Ballor of the Baleful Eye and Irish mythology,
whose his eye is this terrifying beam of death but
is covered by his long mutated brow. Uh you know.

(29:20):
You see this in other various cultures as well, where
in some form or another there is an eye that
curses whatever it looks at, and oftentimes it is disembodied,
which is what we see with the Gray Sisters. Oh yeah,
the Gray Sisters. Uh, they share one eye between them
and Perseus snatches it in order to to you know,
muscle them to get information out. One thing that's funny though,

(29:42):
is I can't remember if we talked about this in
the last episode or not. Um, what's going on with
the tooth? Like, what does the tooth do? Does the
tooth do anything? I don't know. The tooth feels a
lot of the tooth, for one thing, is often abandoned
by by in reinterpretations, you know, uh, just people. Yeah,
they don't know quite what to do with the tooth,

(30:03):
and the tooth to me anyway, feels like it's just
part of a hag joke, you know, like, oh, they're
old and they have you know, they don't have any teeth.
In fact, they have only one teeth that they all
have to share. It has a you know, absurd, like
susical kind of sense to it. I think you're right
about that. Yeah, it must just be like it was.

(30:24):
It was a detail added for color that then nobody
could really figure out what to do with it? Yeah,
or certainly it's uh, you know, the import has been
lost over time, Like you can't chow with one tooth,
You've got to have at least two. Yeah, what are
you gonna do with it? So anyway, we end up
focusing more on the eye. So the general belief is

(30:44):
that the concept of the evil eye arises from the
universal dislike of being stared at or of being stared down.
And there's there's also something more to this, as discussed
by Jean Paul Satra in Being and Thingness. So Sarta
considered this key to the meaning of the medusa myth.

(31:05):
Medusa represents the objectifying gaze of the other, which robs
one of the self. So basically, you know, we're all
just bobbing about in the world, self obsessed. It's all
about us, it's our story and how we're interacting with
the world. But then there's this stare from another, this
petrifying stare, and Sartra wrote that if one looks at something,

(31:27):
the one who looks is the center of consciousness. The
one who looks controls the world. But if another looks
back at the looker, if the looker knows that they
are looked upon, they become an objectified self in the
eyes of another. And so the staring other in this case,
say the Gorgonian head or the evil eye, the staring

(31:49):
other is the thief of consciousness. This is interesting and
I think this there's some truth to this that goes
beyond just you know, so Sarta is trying to apply
this to his view of um uh, you know, absurdity
and and chasing after the idea of the meaning of life,
which might be illusory, but uh, there's something to this

(32:09):
in our basic primal fears, like as soon as as
soon as you realize you are being looked at, you
feel amazingly vulnerable. Being looked at in a way reminds
you that you yourself are a not just a subject
but an object, That you are impermanent, that your death
is inevitable, that you are subject to forces outside your control.

(32:31):
Being looked at and realizing you're being looked at is
in many ways the ultimate sort of like uh, terror
and loss of control, I mean why is why is
one of the most terrifying things to people, like public
speaking or public appearances, you know, being up on a
stage in front of an audience of people looking at
them is horrifying. And it goes beyond just being afraid

(32:52):
that you're gonna say the wrong thing or something. There's
like this deep dread to it. It feels like it
gets down to something very basic and very threatening that
you can't even look at. Almost as if it's the
image of Medusa. Yeah, yeah, and certainly if you were
you know, there's sort of the casual objectification of everybody
and everything in the world. Again, that goes back to
just the way that we think about ourselves and our narrative.

(33:13):
But then also if you're if you're actively engaging in
objectification and and the objectified individual looks back at you,
you know that it it has a powerful effect. Like
I think back to the Wrong Frick film from Baraka
and some of the other subsequent works like this, with
in which you have these lengthy they're not images, they're

(33:36):
like lengthy film portraits of individual staring directly back at
the camera. You know, And of course you see this
in portraiture as well, like the idea that that the
the subject is meeting your gaze. You can have this
profound effect, you know, you um, you can feel uncomfortable
at times, even so I think there is. There's a

(33:58):
lot of truth to what he is saying here. Now,
all this stuff we're talking about is at the level
of like human consciousness. You know, what kinds of things
we with our conscious minds realize about our own nature.
When we suddenly feel looked at, you know, doesn't make
you realize you're an object? Does it make you realize
your impermanent, you're going to die and all that. But
I would say even at the level of you know, animals,

(34:18):
without that level of consciousness, probably there's there's more practical
reality to the threat of being looked at. Right, Yeah,
we see something like this in the natural world. You know,
the idea of the evil eye. It reminds one of
eye spots, adaptations of or accidental pattern formation artifacts in

(34:39):
a species that serve to either deceive potential predators or prey,
or to draw a predator's attention away from more vulnerable
parts of an animal. Now, with predators in particularly, uh,
nothing beats a sure thing, right or a near sure thing.
If an attack does not go exactly as planned, a
number of consequences can occur. Prey might get away, in

(35:01):
which case energy and time is wasted. Other prey might
be alerted and frightened away as well, we're still an
alert prey animal could have the chance to counterattack and
inflict damage, and such an injury can prove deadly. Cheetahs,
for instance, rarely go after something like an ostrich because
while the payoff for a successful hunt is really good,
injury can mean starvation when your kills depend on high

(35:24):
speed attacks. Yeah, I mean for a lot of predation
in the natural world, especially of like large land animals,
you're not gonna be going after healthy adults most of
the time. That's a that's a dangerous game. You want
to pick off like juveniles or the sick and infirm
if you can, right and uh. And if you're going
to pick something off, it's better if it doesn't have
its full attention on you, right uh. So you know,

(35:47):
keeping an eye on your enemy at all times is
a great tactic, though that's that's quite a resource drain.
So fooling your enemy into thinking it's being watched at
all times that's an even better tactic. And we see
this incount us examples of ey spot evolution. Now, to
be clear, not all eye spots are there to mimic
watching eyes sometimes they're there to to fool a predator

(36:08):
again into attacking a less vulnerable part of the animal,
or they play into mate selection, et cetera. But in
some cases, yes, eye spots seem to serve as anti
predator adaptations. And we also see examples of this strategy's
effectiveness outside of natural adaptation. So, for instance, individuals who
happened to work in Bengal tiger country have long reported

(36:30):
success with backwards wooden masks masks of of a human
face that they wear in the back of their heads
in an attempt to ward off ambush attacks. Plus, various
animal species evolved eye spots that in many cases may
serve to protect them from creeping predators like this. Um.
One really cool story of in which one uses eyes

(36:51):
like this involves Australian conservation biologist Dr Neil Jordan's who
has been experimenting with the use of painted on eye
spots to protect grazing cattle from lion attacks. Uh. This
is basically just eyes painted on the rumps of cattle
and this is all in an effort to cut down
on lion human interactions that can be harmful or deadly

(37:15):
on both sides. You know, basically, since lions are ambush hunters,
they depend on surprise attacks and if they think they've
been had, they'll abandon the hunt. Or at least that's
the theory that they're still uh working on. Now, if
that works, that's not just the protection for the cattle,
that's obviously a protection for the lions or you know,
the conservation object here, because what like, if a lion

(37:37):
attacks cattle, they are at risk of being severely retaliated
against by farmers and ranchers. Exactly. Yeah, it's it's it's
all an effort and this was through the Botswana Predator
of Conservation Trust. This is the Jordan is involved with here,
and yeah, it's about ultimately trying to cut down on
the conflict between the lions and the farmers and ultimately

(37:58):
trying to protect both their triss. But of course, direct
eye contact with your with your with this particular species
is not always good. Um. You know, just as direct
eye contact with an animal that sees you as prey
might deter attack, such eye contact might encourage aggression from
a creature that sees who was a potential threat. Um.
We see this with dogs for instance. And then of

(38:19):
course there are plenty of known examples with with primates,
particularly guerrillas. Uh. In fact, in one case back in
two thousand seven, the Rotterdam Zoo engaged in this wonderful
reversal of those tiger fooling masks. They were, uh, these
these eye shades that look like averted eyes, that make
you look like with cartoon eyes, like you're looking to

(38:40):
the side. Uh. And they did this to cut down
on cases of gorillas responding violently to human eye contact. Oh,
that's interesting. That makes me wonder to be in the
guerrilla enclosures there. If you're like a status concerned gorilla
and like just people are constantly walking up staring directly
at you all day, that must be stressful. Yeah, I mean,

(39:00):
staring is powerful stuff. I mean, I think even those
of us with domestic pets in our house can attest
to just you know how powerful a stair can be.
If you just start staring at say your cat or
your dog. I'm not you know, it's not going to
result in chaos, but you're gonna get it. You're gonna
get a rise out of them. They're gonna realize I'm
being stared at? Why am I being stared at? And
then likewise they'll also turn that around on you at times.

(39:23):
Oh yeah, I mean, Charlie knows when he's being looked at.
If I'm looking at something else in the room and
then I suddenly look at him, he will often just
start wagging his tail as soon as my eyes go
to him. So when we're when we're dealing with with staring,
you know, we're you know, we're not dealing with a
trivial or even purely human uh conundrum, though certainly the

(39:45):
human experience makes it all the more complicated. But yeah,
we're getting into into something deep that deals with who
we are and how we interact with the world around us. Absolutely.
I mean, it's not actually surprising to me the more
that I think about it, that the idea of a
stare was infused with malevolent magical power throughout the ancient world.

(40:08):
The idea of that the evil eye that you know,
you could certain people could look at you in a
certain way that would curse you or make you sick
or you know, bring harm magical harm in some way.
It's the kind of belief that if you don't grow
up in a culture with that, you know, the belief
something like that It can feel weird at first until
you start to think about it. Then it just starts,

(40:29):
almost as if you know, coming up from some ancient instinct.
It's just starts to feel more and more true and
real the more you think about it. Yeah, absolutely, at
least for me. All Right, we're gonna take one more break,
but we'll be right back. Thank alright, we're back. So
at this point, let's turn to Uh, the section that

(40:50):
we're thinking of is the underlying darkness, getting digging into
the meat behind the head of the Medusa, getting into
this idea of what what is there, what keeps drawing
us in? And what are we what are we contemplating
when we contemplate this image or this myth. So Living
spends a fair amount of time in the book looking

(41:11):
at both the varying ways that the myth has been
interpreted and reinterpreted throughout history, and the idea that there
is something deeply intriguing behind the myth quote a shadow
being an archetypical figure who speaks meaningfully to us all.
As we said right at the beginning, I mean Medusa
has been obsessed over and and reinterpreted basically in every

(41:33):
generation of humans. I mean It is interesting how essentially
the the the dominant cultural values of every age find
a new way to say what the Medusa myth means. Yeah,
it's we just keep exploring it and re exploring it
as a potential metaphor for cultural ideas. You know, it's
just counterintuitive enough. It has all these different hooks that

(41:57):
we can latch onto. It involves several tropes that resonate
throughout global culture. The animate head, the beheading of a monster,
a female monster with wild you know, primordial roots, a
male hero who must overcome her. And in this last example,
Lemming argues that Perseus and Medusa is essentially Marduk and
Tiamatt all over again. Yeah, and if you're not familiar,

(42:20):
Marduk and Tiamatt are key to the enemy a leish
the Babylonian Hmspotamian myth in which Tiamat is this, you know,
primordial being of the sea, much like Medusa's father Pontus
was this primordial being of the sea. And then Tiamatt
gives birth to all the gods, and the gods end
up in the kind of rebellion war, and she turns

(42:42):
into this dragon sea monster type creature, and she has
to be slain by a hero from the civilization, by Marduke,
who represents the you know, the city of Babylon and
the order, the new order of the new gods. Right,
and of course the gender aspects of of the Perseus
and Medusa that they're very difficult to ignore, and it
makes sense that they would be later explored in ways

(43:04):
that this simply we're not part of the patriarchal ancient
Greek worldview, right, but there's still something essential concerning male
female interaction. Here. Lemming argues an ancient feminine power is
destroyed by a new masculine one, specifically the destruction of
a matriarchal triple goddess concept, which is actually reflected twice

(43:25):
in the myth, you know, both with the three Gorgons
and the three Gray Sisters. So uh. In this, he argues,
Meduces based on the lineage of a matriarchal Gaia, while
Perseus is the offspring of the male Zeus. Later retellings
by rationalists such as Diodorus would build on this as well. Yeah,
I think a really salient way of interpreting this myth

(43:48):
is uh. This is something that Lemming points out specifically
in the context of of the recurring motif of decapitation
in so many different myths, the chopping off of the
head of the monster that it very often happens. It's
accomplished by a hero who represents some kind of like
a new order of the gods, that is, that is

(44:10):
more orderly and civilized against some kind of primordial earthly
old religion or old type of divine being. And there
are a ton of examples. You know, there's like David
decapitating Goliath in the epic of Gilgamesh. Gilgamesh and Inky
do decapitate this forest monster humbaba uh. In the story

(44:32):
of Sir Gawain and the Green Knights, or Gawen decapitates
the Green Knight, and the Green Knight I think is
often taken to embody some kind of like the old
religions of the land, like the pre Christianized land. Yeah,
he's very much the Green man Um of course. Uh, Joe,
have you seen the film sort of The Valuant? No?
I haven't. Oh, it's wonderful because you have Miles o'keith

(44:56):
is Sir Gawin, and then you have Sean Connery himself
as the Green Night, and it's a great scene where
his head is lopped off and then he picks his
head back up, puts it on his body and starts
talking again. That's great. I mean that also kind of
mirrors Medusa, right because like the head still is able
to act even after it's been cut off, Like the
Medusa head is still a weapon that can be used. Yeah, yeah,

(45:18):
the disembodied head is this uh this trope as well,
but yeah, anyway to bring it back. So, of course, uh,
you've got the two sides. Like Medusa here represents the
old order. The guy INDs the creatures that are from
the Earth and original and kind of monstrous and chaotic
and untamed. Whereas the the Olympians, represented by Zeus and Athena. Uh,

(45:41):
they give rise to Perseus, and Perseus is their human hero.
He fights for the Olympian order, the new gods, the people,
you know, the new kids in town who are in charge. Now. Yeah,
now there's this other notion to the and this is
heavily built upon during the medieval period. The Medusa is
also an embodied even of feminine danger. In the medieval tradition.

(46:03):
This all ties in with concepts of courtly love and
and so forth. From medieval commentators. Letting tells us that
Medusa did not seem to really be a sexual being
to the ancient Greeks, though though certainly there is this
trend to make her more and more feminine that we
already alluded to. But medieval authors made her into this
embodiment of feminine danger, a true film vitel in the

(46:26):
proper sense of the term. Uh. This this this force
that could lure you away from the righteous path. And
and this makes even more sense when you consider Athena
as her opposite, a paragon of what a patriarchal society
wants women to be and and approves of them being. So.
Athena is strong, but she's also chased. She's bashful, uh

(46:52):
as when description put it, and she is unemotional. Yeah.
Lemmings shows example after example of how you see this
throughout medieval rights. When medusas imagined she is, she is
the threat of sexual attraction to women, which you know,
a lot this was a strong theme and a lot
of especially like medieval Christian writing. You know can trace

(47:13):
this back to St. Augustine. Really that most writings about
righteousness seemed to be addressed to men, and they characterize
women as basically, is this this this unaccountable force of
danger that will tempt you away from righteousness. Yeah, so
it should come as no surprise that a lot of
these themes end up being re explored, re examined, and

(47:34):
sometimes you know, twisted around and reuteralized by by feminist
authors and commentators that would come later. Absolutely, Yeah, and
also even some other trends as well. Um, but I
want to touch on some other interpretations that leming Uh
discusses in the book, and he points out that seventeenth
century philosopher Francis Bacon saw the medusa myth, or at

(47:55):
least like to use it as a solid metaphor for
the proper rules of war. Okay, so choose a winnable fight,
attack when unexpected. Yeah, I love how one of the
rules of war here is sneak up on your enemy
while they're sleeping. Yes, very cool, Bacon. Uh. Karl Marks
saw the gorgon head as a symbol of capitalism and

(48:16):
all of its evils. Fredrik Nicie saw it as a
symbol of Appollonian struggle against rampant dionyson is um Uh,
So order and discipline versus chaos and hedonism. Now for
for my money, the psychoanalytical views of Medusa are are
really quite interesting though, And uh we see these from
the likes of Sigmund Freud, Carl Young and others. Yeah.

(48:39):
One guess, if you're not already familiar what Freud thinks
Medusa is related to. Yeah, yeah, it's it's gonna involve sex.
So um advisory. If you're not ready for a big
old slice of Freud, then you might want to skip
this next part. But you know, I think if you're game,
then this is interesting. So in n Freud wrote an

(48:59):
s a titled Medusa's Head or dos medusan Hat, which
was published in after his death. Um, so it all,
you know, basically comes down to sex and development. In particular,
he saw the Medusa as an embodiment of male castration fears.
I alluded to this in our last episode. We were

(49:20):
discussing the snakes hanging from belts of the Gorgons in
ancient depictions, and I think one of the reasons I
found them a little disturbing, or at least, you know,
one of the reasons I found them disturbing is that
there is this sort of castration anxiety inherent in the
imagery and and this is key to Freud's view of
the monster. So Freud considered castration fear to be a

(49:41):
prime immobilizing factor in a male's life, originating in a
boy's first view of his mother naked. The absence of
a penis and the unavoidable realization that the penis can
certainly not exist on a human has an effect. Uh.
It's they realize it can be lost. Uh. Freud continued.
It also that decapitation is a symbol for castration. And

(50:04):
I think this makes sense, honestly, because no matter how
many horror films you watch, you don't really see anyone
going around without a head all that often it's hard
to relate to that kind of a uh, you know,
fatal injury. Um. But you do encounter people all the
time that presumably do not have a penis. Females are all,
in the mind of the Freud envisioned may of old

(50:25):
child here castrated individuals. Um. Furthermore, there's this knowledge that
one can live without the member in question, and plenty
of people born with it have managed this. Now it
goes without saying obviously, like a lot of Freud, this
is a very male centric way of interpreting the myth
right that like, he imagines that the young boys sees

(50:46):
the world in these in these uh strange gender terms
and sort of views women as men who are lacking
something and has this psycho sexual terror about it. Yeah. Yeah,
and definitely we're not We're not saying this is the
way to view the world, but this is this is
what Freud wrote and uh uh. He also further argued

(51:06):
that snakes or phallic symbols, all right, and uh that
a plethora of phallic symbols also translates to castration fears.
And this actually this reminded me of something um that
I had read about previously. I believe this was in
Walter Stephen's book Demon Lovers, Witchcraft, Sex in the Crisis
of Belief, where he was discussing castration anxiety myths of

(51:30):
penis theff by witches um that was common during the
era of European witchcraft persecution. The idea was that witches
would go around stealing penises from men and then collect
them in birds nests high in trees. Again, we see
a grouping a plethora of phallic emblems that is involved
in a in a myth or a story that embodies

(51:51):
castration fears of of men during this particular era. Now,
Freud's not done here. He also contends that an erection
is a reminder that once has a penis, So the
petrification aspects of the of Medusa Smith tie in here,
and he argues that the the the apatropeic power of
the gorgon's head emblem is the emblem of female genitalia

(52:14):
and male castration anxiety. You know, I would say, when
you see it all laid out like this, at least
to me, Freud's take seems kind of ridiculous, like the
Medusa represents like castration anxiety and the young man's psycho
sexual horror at female anatomy as as Freud imagines it um.
But then also the severing of the head represents castion

(52:37):
castration anxiety. I think this is one of those cases
where Freud probably sounds more convincing if you're reading him
build his own case rather than seeing it all presented
and disinterested summary. Yeah, but probably so. And it's one
of those things where it's like it's really interesting to read,
and i'd and I'd be willing to entertain that that
that there is something to this you know in the

(52:58):
you know, the shadow archetypepe of of Medusa as we
encounter it. But you know, I, as with these other things,
as would say geo mythology. You know, I'm not gonna
put all my eggs in this one basket. Yeah. I
mean I think a lot of what what Freud talks
about it you could in a way think of as
a kind of psycho mythology. He's like, Uh, the stuff

(53:20):
he's saying is not like based on controlled experiments or anything.
He's he's sort of like weaving a story that makes
sense to him about you know, how anxiety is about
sex and how people think about sex and death and
stuff pervades all of the imagery that we come up with. Now.
Other thinkers, though, would echo at least some aspects of

(53:42):
Freud's take here, uh, including a French feminist critic Sarah Kaufman,
who wrote of the mixed horror and pleasure that women's
genitals arousing men now. Carl Jung, for his part, his
interpretation was less sexual, but it's still can concern the
power of the unconscious. He saw Medusa as a chaotic
element tied to create civity and destruction, and in general,

(54:02):
Medusa and Athena as archetypes connected to how women are viewed.
And speaking of how women are viewed, there there's, of
course a lot of feminist consideration of Medusa, including Kaufman,
who we just mentioned. One example that Lemon brings up
is that of New York University law professor Amy Adler,
author of Medusa A Glimpse of the Woman in First

(54:24):
Amendment Law. Oh this part was interesting, Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So Adler touches on the fact that the U. S.
Supreme Court considers live nude dancing unprotected by the First Amendment,
while pornographic film is protected, and so the the idea here,
uh is Adler lays it out, is that live female
nudity is is still too threatening to petrifying for the

(54:49):
male observer. But just as the mirrored shield of Athena
allows percy Us to gaze upon Medusa without being turned
to stone, so too does the medium of film allow
the male to consider female nudity without fear. The mirrored
shield of Athena is the male gaze itself. It tams

(55:09):
the female body, making it passive and quote removing its
power to return the male viewers gaze. Yeah, I thought
that was a really interesting read on this. Yeah, I
did too, And again it gets back to the power
of being stared back out by the thing that is
objectified by the person that is objectified. And of course,
in addition to this, I mean Lemon chronicles that there

(55:31):
are a ton of ways that Medusa has been sort
of recaptured by feminists thought, especially throughout the second half
of the twentieth century, basically just as as a figure
to be sympathized with and celebrated rather than as like
the monster of the storied. You know, to recognize that
like Medusa is if we take the story literally the
wronged party. And in a way this all comes back

(55:54):
to it's very similar to the Romantic take because so
in the Romantic period we there was a lot of
rethinking of the Medusa story that sympathized with Medusa. And
I think the Percy Shelley poem that we started by
reading today is one of those works of literature. Absolutely
in the same way that say, Percy Shelley and Prometheus
Unbound would show you know, his and his generations large

(56:18):
sympathies with sort of the rebel parties or the characters
who might have been considered villains and previous tellings of
stories uh that you know the story of Prometheus Unbound
as a play in which the Prometheus, who defies the gods, uh,
is sort of like he and his allies are the
heroes and and Jove, the king of the gods, is

(56:38):
the villain and he gets slapped down by the demogorgan,
you know, something previously imagined as a demon, but which
Shelley imagined instead as this kind of like potency or
void of potential. And now a fairly recent twist on
on Medusa imagery is that is a sculpture that I

(56:58):
think you've seen. I think it was on the stuff
to remind discussion module at some point. Uh. It was
by a Luciano god body um a an Argentine Argentine
Italian artist based in Buenos Aires, and basically he did
a reversal of the of the classic statue of of
Perseus holding the head of Medusa, but in his statue

(57:21):
it is Medusa holding the decapitated head of Percy. I
like it, yeah, because you know, we've touched on on
all the problematic aspects of of Medusa. Her character, you know,
is this this victimized uh woman who is made into
a monster that is further victimized and ultimately, uh, you know,

(57:42):
violently murdered by a male hero. And this at least
turns that around and allows her to get the upper hand.
And so that just there's something refreshing about this particular statue.
You know. I like art like this because I think
a lot of times we're we're faced with a dilemma
and the you know, comes up a lot when we're
dealing with ancient myths, where you have a story that

(58:04):
you want to be able to sort of retell and
re explore and celebrate in a way. But of course,
you know, like most ancient myths, it it has some
kind of either explicit or implicit values that are really
not our values anymore. And uh, and so like what
do you do with that? Do you do you try
to like change the myth? Do you do you try

(58:26):
to like ignore parts of it that that feel icky today?
And I think my take is that, like you let
the myth be the myth, and and that's what it is.
But you also create complementary art, right, Like you don't
try to change the story of Perseus and Medusa, but
you can also write a novel in which Medusa kills
Perseus or make an awesome statue in which she's got

(58:47):
his head by the hair. Yeah. Absolutely, And as we've
discussed in the first episode on Medusa, like, this is
how mythology works. This is how the telling and the
retelling these stories has always worked. So you totally have
license to do this. Plus public domain, right, oh public domain?
Is hessy it gonna come and sue you? Well, no, no,

(59:10):
I do want to know what happens after this, because
there were several things depending on on Perseus after the encounter.
So does Medusa go from here and like help out
Danny and uh you know all that stuff? Or is
that just left on its own? Now? Yeah, that's that's
what's kind of beautiful about this, right, this could be
the very beginning of a story. You could have a

(59:30):
novel or at least, you know, a short story or
novella of Medusa that begins with her defeating Perseus. M
because then what happens because certainly Athena is still in play,
still presumably more than happy to work against Medusa. Um.
And then yeah, basically, yeah, if somebody write this so
I can read it, this sounds great Athena is like

(59:50):
the terminator. It can she cannot be bargained with, She
cannot be reasoned with, and will not stop until you
are dead unless you go to Mount Olympus and you
get her first. That's true. Yeah, after all, the Goregonian
head is a ultimately a God created power. It works
on titans, why not on the gods themselves? All right?
So I wanted to end today just by real quickly

(01:00:12):
jumping off to a couple of other things that are
really only tangentially related to Medusa. They don't have to
do so much with the myth, but are just scientific
concepts that have been related to it in various ways.
So last year, which would be twenty nineteen, there was
a new finding published in the Journal of Virology about
a recently discovered so called giant virus. Now, giant viruses

(01:00:37):
in general are are very interesting subject. For a long time,
pretty much all the viruses that we knew about were
sub microscopic, you know, extremely small, very simple compared even
to single celled organisms like bacteria. Viruses in general are
not thought usually to be alive. I guess it depends
on how you define alive, but they're generally not thought

(01:00:58):
to be alive, because what they do is that they
contain packages of genetic material that can take over a
host cell and sort of turn that cell into a
factory for making more viruses. But they don't have the
machinery to survive and reproduce on their own. They can't eat,
they can't breathe, they can't reproduce without a host cell.

(01:01:20):
In a way, a biological virus is a lot like
a computer virus. As a good point of comparison, it
can't spread if it's just burned onto a CD sitting
on your desk, right. It needs to be planted into
active hardware, needs to be on a machine that is
running and connected to something in order to spread. But
in recent years, we've discovered that there are some viruses

(01:01:41):
that are bigger and hardier and more complex than previously
known viruses, and these are now usually referred to as
giant viruses. Uh. There there are a lot larger than
normal viruses, sometimes even larger as large as or larger
than bacteria. And uh sometimes they look kind of like
furry d twenties. Like I've got a picture here for

(01:02:02):
you to look at, Robert. This is a picture of
the one I'm gonna get to in just a minute.
But yeah, it's like got all these spikes all over,
but it looks basically like you could roll it for
a critical hit. Yeah. Yeah, when, especially when it's illustrated
in bright yellow and red, it looks like a natural twenty.
Uh So, whereas a normal virus might have numbers of
genes and the single digits, you know, some viruses might

(01:02:25):
have like five genes or nine genes, giant viruses can
have hundreds of genes or a thousand genes. And in
two thousand three, researchers in France published a description of
the Acanthamba polyphaga mimi virus, a relatively huge virus that
prays on amba which I believe this virus was discovered

(01:02:46):
in a water cooling tower. I'm not sure about that,
but I think so. Um many of the other giant
viruses that have been discovered since then, we're found in
these weird, extreme places. I was reading an article in
the Atlantic by Sarah Jong from March twenty nineteen, and
it mentioned that, uh, these things had also turned up
in an Austrian sewage plant, as well as water off

(01:03:08):
the Chilean coast. And you may have heard this one
in thirty thousand year old Siberian permafrost. Uh. The strain
from this permafrost was a giant virus called Pithovirus subericum.
And even after being trapped in ice for tens of
thousands of years, this giant virus was still infectious when
they yeah, they thought it out, and they set some

(01:03:30):
amibas out as bait next to it, and the pith
of virus apparently went to work. The ambas died off
and then their dead bodies contained fragments of this giant virus.
And the story. I mean, I've seen some researchers kind
of poo poo this to say, like this is not
the main thing to worry about with climate change, but uh,
they may be right, but it does just make me

(01:03:50):
wonder what kind of goodies we're gonna release as we
keep thawing stuff that's been frozen for tens of thousands
of years through climate change. Um. And I believe this
was this actually was the premise of a horror movie
by Larry Peasenden. What was the name of that? I was, Oh,
I don't think I know this one. It was called
The Last Winter, Uh, and it had it starred Ron Perlman. Oh. Yeah,

(01:04:14):
Fessenden did a He did a killer catfish movie called Beneath.
I mean, you should watch you Beneath. It's it's I
don't want to spoil too much. I mean, I think
it's kind of satirical. But there's one part where these
characters are trapped on a boat as this like google
eyed catfish is picking them off one by one and

(01:04:36):
at one point one of them screams of the catfish,
like what do you want from us? Oh? Nice? But anyway,
So that Sarah's Young article I mentioned, it's primarily focused
on the this virus that was newly described in twenty
nineteen by Japanese researchers in the Journal of Virology and
um So. Apparently, this giant virus came from a sample

(01:04:57):
of mud that was taken from a hot spring some
in Japan, and here's how it ties back in. The
new virus has been named the Medusa virus. It's named
after a response it elicits from Amiba's when it attacks. So.
A researcher named Massa Haru Takamura at the Tokyo University
of Science noticed that when he observed this giant virus

(01:05:19):
attacking ambas of the species A can't the Meba Casta castellani.
Some of the amibas would get infected and they would
burst open and spill their contents everywhere when they died,
But some of the amibas would instead shrink down and
basically turned to stone. They would form a type of
hard mineral shell known as a cyst. So the giant

(01:05:39):
virus can in some cases petrify the host the Medusa
effect in action. Uh. And I should mention that Jong's
article shows a picture of Takamura where he's got his
computer desktop in the background, and the background of the
desktop is Rubens painting of Medusa's severed head. I don't
know if that was posed on purpose us or if

(01:06:00):
he just happened to have that there anyway, Um, he's
a little bit obsessed with this myth or something. But anyway,
this viral discovery was mainly interesting because of some complex
features of the virus itself. So that this virus, the
Medusa virus, had his stones, which are these protein features
usually found in more complex eukaryotic cells cells like plants

(01:06:21):
and animals and amibas, and it's used for coiling and
organizing DNA to make it compact when you've got a
lot of DNA in a cell nucleus. Normally a virus
doesn't need something like this. Also, there was repeated there
was evidence of repeated gene transfer throughout history between this
giant virus and it's Amiba host. The Amiba genome had

(01:06:42):
genes originally from the virus, the virus genome had genes
originally from the amiba. And then there was also a
gene coding for DNA polymerase, which is used in complex
living cells to synthesize d N A and the researchers
believe that this d A polymerase gene could tell us
really interesting things potentially about the history of eukaryotic life

(01:07:06):
and its relationship to viruses. To quote from Takamorrow, don't
know if he's right, but what he says is quote.
Genomics research of the giant virus indicates that there is
likely a relationship between the Medusa virus and the origin
of eukaryotic life. And another one of the researchers, Dr
Ginkia Yoshiqua from Kyoto University, says that that our DNA polymerase,

(01:07:31):
the DNA polymerase of eukaryotes. Quote probably originated from Medusa
virus or one of its relatives. Now that's their take.
But that's a very interesting possibility that like this key
feature of the cells that form more complex life on
Earth could have come from viruses. Oh wow. And if
we turned back to the myth, which again is has

(01:07:53):
just been applied to this discovery. Uh, you know, but
once one can't help but think about the connections here
to this idea of of Medusa as this guy in entity, right,
I mean that this would mean we we are all
children of Medusa. Hail Medusa. All right. So there you
have it, Medusa in two parts. Uh. Here on stuff

(01:08:15):
to Blow your mind, obviously, we'd love to hear from
everybody out there. Um, how you interpret the myth of
Medusa and Perseus. How some of this information we've presented
altars or backs up your interpretation, changes your interpretation? What
are your favorite Meduces from art, uh, from cinema, from
comic books, etcetera. We'd love to to hear from you

(01:08:37):
about all of that. In the meantime, if you want
to check out other episodes of Stuff to Blow your Mind,
you can find us wherever you get your podcasts and
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will help support the show huge thanks as always to
our excellent audio producer Seth Nicholas Johnson. If you would

(01:08:57):
like to get in touch with us with feedback about
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(01:09:18):
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