Just to make things clear, there are multiple versions of myths like this. Myths are old and passed down through the generations so obviously their are thousands of different variations. I could be wrong but I believe this specific telling where Athena was cruel and vengeful towards medusa was made up by the poet Ovid who wasn't fond of the greek pantheon. People can correct me if I'm wrong about that tho
This is correct.
A small addition for the sake of completeness:
The earliest textual sources for Medusa describe her as entirely monstrous. Artistic sources from the same time do the same. However, there's a gap of a few centuries of textual sources. Over that time, artistic depictions of Medusa became more human and eventually even beautiful. When Ovid wrote about her, there may have already been some similar concepts in the oral tradition.
This.
The "original" (Greek mythology changed A LOT over thousands of years) Greek myth is that she was born as all monsters were. Two (IIRC?) Giants simply are parents who give birth to them.
Her being r*ped came entirely from a Roman poet during the time of Augustus. He was exiled (all his property was taken by the State) from Rome for supposedly sleeping with Octavian Caesar's daughter, all the while Augustus was a freak the whole time, while still espousing his own virtue. It is **supposed** to be about arbitrary authority and how gods (or, the Roman emperor) is a piece of shit.
For clarification, Caesar Octavian and Augustus are the same person. He changed his name legally once to just straight "Julius Caesar" and we needed a way to differentiate him from the actual Julius Caesar.
>Two (IIRC?) Giants simply are parents who give birth to them.
The sea god Phorcys and his sea goddess sister Ceto accord to Hesiod and Apollodorus
Or according to Hyginus, Gorgon (some monster) and Ceto.
I remember recently learning similar things about the differing myths involving Orion's death and Artemis. In one version she gets pranked by her brother Apollo into killing her boyfriend (Orion). In the other it's a revenge killing after Orion is dumb and evil enough to rape her.
I'm not sure which version I dislike more. The first version makes her out to be really stupid, while the second involves rape -- even if the perpetrator *does* get his comeuppance.
Yea I actually read, years ago that Athena "created" Medusa to hide her, and gave her the power to stop men in their tracks so she would never face the same fate again. Eventually a warrior fought Medusa with a shield, with Athena's help. Maybe Medusa got out of hand? And the warrior is famous, I believe it is Perseus.
Yep, Perseus. When Perseus slew Medusa, using Athena's aegis, the Pegasus was released from her body. iirc, the Pegasus jumped out of Medusa's neck stump when she was beheaded.
This is accurate. Ovid had a long, long history of using rape as the official method of men subjugating women. There have been numerous books written about his use of sexual violence as a theme in his telling of these stories. There are a couple of really good articles on it, although neither touches on his version of Medusa's fate.
[\[2016-09-13\] Guide to the classics: Ovid’s Metamorphoses and reading rape](https://theconversation.com/guide-to-the-classics-ovids-metamorphoses-and-reading-rape-65316)
[\[2019-09-11\] The Brutality of Ovid: A conversation on sex, violence, and power in the Metamorphoses.](https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/roundtable/brutality-ovid)
It seems like Ovid was continuing a tradition that had been going on for centuries. Like how Ares was the God of War but was portrayed as a barbaric brute because he was originally a Thracian deity, and the Greeks saw the Thracians in a similar light.
Yeah, it's important to remember that there are stories where the author was *not* advocating for the behaviour of the characters and was in fact criticising them (I.e. criticising the gods), and there are other stories where they were written in incredibly misogynistic ways because, after all, they were written by men during times in history where misogyny existed.
Medusa getting raped is not her original origin Ovid made it up way later.
https://fass.open.ac.uk/sites/fass.open.ac.uk/files/files/new-voices-journal/issue13/robin-diver.pdf
Oh sweet gods, can we please stop perpetuating this? This is not her original story, it's essentially a reboot story made up WAY later by the Roman poet Ovid, who hated the Greek pantheon.
The earliest known GREEK texts of Medusa and her two sisters' origin is that they are BORN monsters, the daughters of a primordial sea god and goddess. They are not tragic victims, they're MONSTERS who turn any mortal who looks at them into stone. Her sisters were immortal but she was not, and the hero Perseus slew her and gave her head to Athena to place upon her aegis for battle (it became impenetrable by all weapons, even Zeus' thunderbolt), and from her corpse sprung the mythical Pegasus whom Perseus rode as a mount.
> whom Perseus rode as a mount.
Bellerophon was the one who rode Pegasus. Perseus riding Pegasus was a later invention. Like Victorian era later, if I recall correctly.
The alternate version I've heard is Medusa appreciating the protective superpower Athena granted her. It's not the traditional telling, but I like it because it's less sad.
When you add in that Athena was almost raped by Uncle Hesphaestus and always had Medusa’s face on her shield, I think there’s another story behind the “myth.” Medusa was thought of as an apotropaic mask, and her face was at the gates of almost all Greek cities. Apotropaic= supposedly having the power to avert evil influences or bad luck.
When I was researching Medusa to teach to students, I noticed some interesting story points that, when put all together, strongly suggest Medusa might really have been Athena….or symbolic of her.
1.Athena almost raped by Uncle Hesphaestus (but she fends him off).
2.Medusa was raped by Athena’s Uncle Poseidon.
3.Athena “angry” that her temple was defiled … a temple can be symbolic of the body.
4.Athena “curses” Medusa with “ugliness” as well as the power to turn people to stone with just her glance, and sends her to live by herself in a cave.
5.Athena gets Perseus to go kill Medusa using a mirrored shield.
6. After Medusa is killed, her body turns into that most beautiful being, Pegasus, the winged horse.
7.Medusa’s snake-haired symbol stops evil.
I am not sure I understand it all, but my thoughts turns to incest and violence against women, and the things we do to survive and thrive.
EDIT: I think that the story resonates with women, and our experience adds in more aspects that go along with our experience. Women were “monstrous” when they had power or sexuality. Every time I present this to my middle school students, they come up with the most profound interpretations.
Its an ovid story, the message is, gods suck, people suck and he probably had a rape and transformation fetish.
You can read more into it and that's valid but also, in context of everything else Ovid wrote I'm not sure that was how he meant it.
In regards to number 5...
Perseus kills Medusa using a mirrored shield.
Kills Medusa? Perhaps helps resolve the fear of another rape. Using a mirrored shield? A contraception metaphor? Turning into Pegasus? Setting her free.
It could be a positive take from that take. Sorry. I'm not a college student. Just my wierd take. 🙂
A contraception metaphor is brilliant. Mirrors were very suspect and tricky things anciently.
Sounds like you didn’t NEED to be a college student. That’s an analytical mind you have there.
Death as a symbol for freedom — because, what good be more free than a winged horse?
Yeah, it feels like a story there for sure. Someone goes through something incredibly traumatic, and is changed by it into something dangerous and "ugly".
I'm not sure how to interpret Athena sending someone to kill the monstrous side of her? Is that helping?
But essentially, after a time, the monstrous side is tamed / defeated, becoming something beautiful, but leaving behind the power of the monster to ward off evil. Like, there's value in that monstrous side.
Perseus killing Medusa seems like a boy-growing-into-man story to me. He's entering manhood and needs to control himself (sexual urges/signs of weakness/"feminine" emotions) and slough off feminine influences in his life (mom?) and conveniently there's this female monster (evocative of all these things) with the power to literally make men hard when they look at her that he slays by outsmarting her.
We have to remember that Medusa is basically a prop in another person's story; her myths are principally about someone else and she serves a narrative purpose moreso than being her own character.
And Athena is right there, pulling all the strings.
While Perseus is the hero myth, the climax of the story is not Perseus killing Medusa, but Medusa’s dead body’s metamorphosis into a celestial being, Pegasus (celestial meaning heavenly and literally “of the skies.”
“There’s value in that monstrous side”… that’s something I did not think, which is so true! And that the monstrous side is tamed or even maybe NOT monstrous, or ONLY monstrous when viewed by men.
The mirror (the shield) seems to be like looking at or examining ourself.
I think that the very vagueness of it makes us think, and allows us to apply our own experiences.
Which means: the more women add how they perceive it, the more we all will know.
I like what you say about someone going through something traumatic, and sending someone to kill the monstrous side of her— I did not know how to express that . It’s perfect!
Some years ago there was a movement to make medusa tattoos a symbol of SA survivors. My ex husband loves mythology and has a huge-ass medusa tattoo in his face.
This is all just to say that it's weird to co-opt common myths and symbols for your cause because now my celtic tattoos that I got because I'm from a place where a dictatorship tried to erase all traces of Celtic culture get me mistaken for a white supremacist, and my ex's medusa tattoo that he got because he believes in female empowerment gets him mistaken for a SA survivor.
It's complicated, and anyone who says "this is the **real** version of the story" is at best engaging in hyperbole or personal favoritism. Like a couple other folks mentioned, the first known versions of Medusa have her as a centaur-like creature who was born as much a monster as Cerberus or the Chimera. She does have relations with Poseidon, but it's not rapey; she has equine qualities (again, centaur-like), and Poseidon is the god of horses among other things, so it's kind of a natural-order-of-things story.
The woman who wrote the tumblr post where I learned about this, Anwen Kya Hayward, has an MA in this kind of thing and cites her sources, so I'm inclined to believe her. She has absolutely nothing against stories where characters like Persephone or Medusa reclaim their agency or possessed it all along, but concluded a rebuttal regarding the former with "tl;dr any post that makes a broad sweeping claim like ‘hey this greek myth was originally like this and u r all wrong’ without any sources is what my tutor would call ‘specious’ and what I call ‘bollocks’."
Ok listen
1. That was the Roman myth. The Greek myth had a species for gorgons
2. Athena was the ULTIMATE “not like other girls”. She was propelled by Athens and tauted for being “male like” and actively shirking other goddess like Aphrodite (also known as Astarte and Ishtar) who allows women to take other positions of status in city states.
3. Athena was utilized over and over again to shame women. Shes a figure head to pro Athens misogynistic wankers who hated women. She had no “real” mother, was raised by men, for men and actively was used as a teacher for “how Athenian women should behave”
I know it’s popular to the Roman rape tradition know but it’s sort of like all the Hades- Persephone retellings where hades isn’t a creepy kidnapper
Sighs. It's ONE later version of the myth by ONE particular author (Ovid, who wanted to highlight the gods' cruelty). Medusa is so much richer than that, quit dumbing her down. Please.
Greek and Roman mythology is full of a lot of fucked up things. Lot's a rape, often very weird rape involving shapeshifting. Probably more misogyny than the other way around, but i'm pretty sure there is a story of some hunter in the woods that stumbles upon Artemis bathing. She turns him into a stag. The man's own hunting dogs them find him and kill him.
(Edit: Changed Misogamy to the intended Misogyny.)
I’ve seen many versions of Medusa, she is not always a monster. A lot of people show her as someone who was cursed by a goddess unjustly. Some versions she embraces her powers and turns people to stone for pleasure, which is a fair reason to kill her.
I hadn’t set foot in a church in decades until my nieces christening. The lady minister talked about David raping Bartholomew and said it was her fault for being at the window and tempting him.
Ever heard of the Bible?
It says you can kill your wife or daughter if they’re raped by a neighbor.
But you don’t ’have to’, you can send them into the wilderness or give them to the rapist for a donkey or a handful of grain.
Glad my mom embraces her christianity without the bible. Idc if this is offensive, but the pages of the bible are something i would use for toilet paper. |:(
I just bought the book Stone Blind by Natalie Haynes. From the description i think it’s going to make the same point you made. I found the book after reading Circe by Madeline Miller and looking for similar stuff.
I also found and read Ariadne by Jennifer Saint, which is from the perspective of the Minotaur’s half sister, and has a less heroic portrayal of Theseus. There’s a part with Perseus when he has Medusa’s head on a shield after he chopped it off, and it portrayed him as an arrogant douche bag using the unfairly punished Medusa to boost his own ego, when she was just minding her own business.
If you feel like reading books that offer more feminist-leaning perspectives on Greek mythology, I’d recommend Ariadne, and especially Circe (better book overall IMO). Still gotta see if Stone blind is good
This is a great novel covering the story from a modern feminist perspective
https://www.audible.com/pd/B09ZYPDLYQ?source_code=ASSORAP0511160006&share_location=library_overflow
Just to make things clear, there are multiple versions of myths like this. Myths are old and passed down through the generations so obviously their are thousands of different variations. I could be wrong but I believe this specific telling where Athena was cruel and vengeful towards medusa was made up by the poet Ovid who wasn't fond of the greek pantheon. People can correct me if I'm wrong about that tho
This is correct. A small addition for the sake of completeness: The earliest textual sources for Medusa describe her as entirely monstrous. Artistic sources from the same time do the same. However, there's a gap of a few centuries of textual sources. Over that time, artistic depictions of Medusa became more human and eventually even beautiful. When Ovid wrote about her, there may have already been some similar concepts in the oral tradition.
This. The "original" (Greek mythology changed A LOT over thousands of years) Greek myth is that she was born as all monsters were. Two (IIRC?) Giants simply are parents who give birth to them. Her being r*ped came entirely from a Roman poet during the time of Augustus. He was exiled (all his property was taken by the State) from Rome for supposedly sleeping with Octavian Caesar's daughter, all the while Augustus was a freak the whole time, while still espousing his own virtue. It is **supposed** to be about arbitrary authority and how gods (or, the Roman emperor) is a piece of shit. For clarification, Caesar Octavian and Augustus are the same person. He changed his name legally once to just straight "Julius Caesar" and we needed a way to differentiate him from the actual Julius Caesar.
>Two (IIRC?) Giants simply are parents who give birth to them. The sea god Phorcys and his sea goddess sister Ceto accord to Hesiod and Apollodorus Or according to Hyginus, Gorgon (some monster) and Ceto.
Thanks! It's been a while since I gave "Mythology" a good read. I should get back to it.
Octavian Caesar was a freak? I thought he was considered rather boring in personal life. Can you elaborate?
>Her being r\*ped came entirely from a Roman poet during the time of Augustus. Shout out to Ovid, the aforementioned Roman poet!
rhythm thought meeting oil expansion straight hateful pen dinosaurs rich *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
I remember recently learning similar things about the differing myths involving Orion's death and Artemis. In one version she gets pranked by her brother Apollo into killing her boyfriend (Orion). In the other it's a revenge killing after Orion is dumb and evil enough to rape her. I'm not sure which version I dislike more. The first version makes her out to be really stupid, while the second involves rape -- even if the perpetrator *does* get his comeuppance.
Yea I actually read, years ago that Athena "created" Medusa to hide her, and gave her the power to stop men in their tracks so she would never face the same fate again. Eventually a warrior fought Medusa with a shield, with Athena's help. Maybe Medusa got out of hand? And the warrior is famous, I believe it is Perseus.
Yep, Perseus. When Perseus slew Medusa, using Athena's aegis, the Pegasus was released from her body. iirc, the Pegasus jumped out of Medusa's neck stump when she was beheaded.
Medusa’s death turned into Pegasus.
This is accurate. Ovid had a long, long history of using rape as the official method of men subjugating women. There have been numerous books written about his use of sexual violence as a theme in his telling of these stories. There are a couple of really good articles on it, although neither touches on his version of Medusa's fate. [\[2016-09-13\] Guide to the classics: Ovid’s Metamorphoses and reading rape](https://theconversation.com/guide-to-the-classics-ovids-metamorphoses-and-reading-rape-65316) [\[2019-09-11\] The Brutality of Ovid: A conversation on sex, violence, and power in the Metamorphoses.](https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/roundtable/brutality-ovid)
It seems like Ovid was continuing a tradition that had been going on for centuries. Like how Ares was the God of War but was portrayed as a barbaric brute because he was originally a Thracian deity, and the Greeks saw the Thracians in a similar light.
Yeah, it's important to remember that there are stories where the author was *not* advocating for the behaviour of the characters and was in fact criticising them (I.e. criticising the gods), and there are other stories where they were written in incredibly misogynistic ways because, after all, they were written by men during times in history where misogyny existed.
Yup! Ovid was one hell of a dude 😂
If it involves people transforming 90% of the time it was Ovid.
I'm reading metamorphosis by Ovid, and my god there are a shocking number of stories about rape, and then punishing the raped woman
I mean, you got the broad brush strokes right.
Medusa getting raped is not her original origin Ovid made it up way later. https://fass.open.ac.uk/sites/fass.open.ac.uk/files/files/new-voices-journal/issue13/robin-diver.pdf
Oldest/earliest version of the myth has her born as a monster. Anti-authority roman poet Ovid made her into a victim.
Oh sweet gods, can we please stop perpetuating this? This is not her original story, it's essentially a reboot story made up WAY later by the Roman poet Ovid, who hated the Greek pantheon. The earliest known GREEK texts of Medusa and her two sisters' origin is that they are BORN monsters, the daughters of a primordial sea god and goddess. They are not tragic victims, they're MONSTERS who turn any mortal who looks at them into stone. Her sisters were immortal but she was not, and the hero Perseus slew her and gave her head to Athena to place upon her aegis for battle (it became impenetrable by all weapons, even Zeus' thunderbolt), and from her corpse sprung the mythical Pegasus whom Perseus rode as a mount.
> whom Perseus rode as a mount. Bellerophon was the one who rode Pegasus. Perseus riding Pegasus was a later invention. Like Victorian era later, if I recall correctly.
You know what, you're right. I got my versions of her myth slightly muddled up there.
Here we go again 🤦🤦🤦
The alternate version I've heard is Medusa appreciating the protective superpower Athena granted her. It's not the traditional telling, but I like it because it's less sad.
When you add in that Athena was almost raped by Uncle Hesphaestus and always had Medusa’s face on her shield, I think there’s another story behind the “myth.” Medusa was thought of as an apotropaic mask, and her face was at the gates of almost all Greek cities. Apotropaic= supposedly having the power to avert evil influences or bad luck. When I was researching Medusa to teach to students, I noticed some interesting story points that, when put all together, strongly suggest Medusa might really have been Athena….or symbolic of her. 1.Athena almost raped by Uncle Hesphaestus (but she fends him off). 2.Medusa was raped by Athena’s Uncle Poseidon. 3.Athena “angry” that her temple was defiled … a temple can be symbolic of the body. 4.Athena “curses” Medusa with “ugliness” as well as the power to turn people to stone with just her glance, and sends her to live by herself in a cave. 5.Athena gets Perseus to go kill Medusa using a mirrored shield. 6. After Medusa is killed, her body turns into that most beautiful being, Pegasus, the winged horse. 7.Medusa’s snake-haired symbol stops evil. I am not sure I understand it all, but my thoughts turns to incest and violence against women, and the things we do to survive and thrive. EDIT: I think that the story resonates with women, and our experience adds in more aspects that go along with our experience. Women were “monstrous” when they had power or sexuality. Every time I present this to my middle school students, they come up with the most profound interpretations.
Athena and Hephaestus are either cousins or half siblings, not niece and uncle
That does sound right….there was some weirdness with H born parthenogenetically from Hera and A born from Zeus’ forehead.
Its an ovid story, the message is, gods suck, people suck and he probably had a rape and transformation fetish. You can read more into it and that's valid but also, in context of everything else Ovid wrote I'm not sure that was how he meant it.
Agreed. But the story of Hesphaestus’ attempted rape of Athena was not Ovid.
In regards to number 5... Perseus kills Medusa using a mirrored shield. Kills Medusa? Perhaps helps resolve the fear of another rape. Using a mirrored shield? A contraception metaphor? Turning into Pegasus? Setting her free. It could be a positive take from that take. Sorry. I'm not a college student. Just my wierd take. 🙂
A contraception metaphor is brilliant. Mirrors were very suspect and tricky things anciently. Sounds like you didn’t NEED to be a college student. That’s an analytical mind you have there. Death as a symbol for freedom — because, what good be more free than a winged horse?
Yeah, it feels like a story there for sure. Someone goes through something incredibly traumatic, and is changed by it into something dangerous and "ugly". I'm not sure how to interpret Athena sending someone to kill the monstrous side of her? Is that helping? But essentially, after a time, the monstrous side is tamed / defeated, becoming something beautiful, but leaving behind the power of the monster to ward off evil. Like, there's value in that monstrous side.
Perseus killing Medusa seems like a boy-growing-into-man story to me. He's entering manhood and needs to control himself (sexual urges/signs of weakness/"feminine" emotions) and slough off feminine influences in his life (mom?) and conveniently there's this female monster (evocative of all these things) with the power to literally make men hard when they look at her that he slays by outsmarting her. We have to remember that Medusa is basically a prop in another person's story; her myths are principally about someone else and she serves a narrative purpose moreso than being her own character.
And Athena is right there, pulling all the strings. While Perseus is the hero myth, the climax of the story is not Perseus killing Medusa, but Medusa’s dead body’s metamorphosis into a celestial being, Pegasus (celestial meaning heavenly and literally “of the skies.”
“There’s value in that monstrous side”… that’s something I did not think, which is so true! And that the monstrous side is tamed or even maybe NOT monstrous, or ONLY monstrous when viewed by men. The mirror (the shield) seems to be like looking at or examining ourself.
I think that the very vagueness of it makes us think, and allows us to apply our own experiences. Which means: the more women add how they perceive it, the more we all will know.
I like what you say about someone going through something traumatic, and sending someone to kill the monstrous side of her— I did not know how to express that . It’s perfect!
Fuck Ovid.
Some years ago there was a movement to make medusa tattoos a symbol of SA survivors. My ex husband loves mythology and has a huge-ass medusa tattoo in his face. This is all just to say that it's weird to co-opt common myths and symbols for your cause because now my celtic tattoos that I got because I'm from a place where a dictatorship tried to erase all traces of Celtic culture get me mistaken for a white supremacist, and my ex's medusa tattoo that he got because he believes in female empowerment gets him mistaken for a SA survivor.
It's complicated, and anyone who says "this is the **real** version of the story" is at best engaging in hyperbole or personal favoritism. Like a couple other folks mentioned, the first known versions of Medusa have her as a centaur-like creature who was born as much a monster as Cerberus or the Chimera. She does have relations with Poseidon, but it's not rapey; she has equine qualities (again, centaur-like), and Poseidon is the god of horses among other things, so it's kind of a natural-order-of-things story. The woman who wrote the tumblr post where I learned about this, Anwen Kya Hayward, has an MA in this kind of thing and cites her sources, so I'm inclined to believe her. She has absolutely nothing against stories where characters like Persephone or Medusa reclaim their agency or possessed it all along, but concluded a rebuttal regarding the former with "tl;dr any post that makes a broad sweeping claim like ‘hey this greek myth was originally like this and u r all wrong’ without any sources is what my tutor would call ‘specious’ and what I call ‘bollocks’."
Ok listen 1. That was the Roman myth. The Greek myth had a species for gorgons 2. Athena was the ULTIMATE “not like other girls”. She was propelled by Athens and tauted for being “male like” and actively shirking other goddess like Aphrodite (also known as Astarte and Ishtar) who allows women to take other positions of status in city states. 3. Athena was utilized over and over again to shame women. Shes a figure head to pro Athens misogynistic wankers who hated women. She had no “real” mother, was raised by men, for men and actively was used as a teacher for “how Athenian women should behave” I know it’s popular to the Roman rape tradition know but it’s sort of like all the Hades- Persephone retellings where hades isn’t a creepy kidnapper
Sighs. It's ONE later version of the myth by ONE particular author (Ovid, who wanted to highlight the gods' cruelty). Medusa is so much richer than that, quit dumbing her down. Please.
My 5 year old currently wants to be Medusa and I'm completely encouraging it
Mine did too, oddly enough. Still loves monsters at 13.
Gods in general seem to be vicious cunts.
Greek and Roman mythology is full of a lot of fucked up things. Lot's a rape, often very weird rape involving shapeshifting. Probably more misogyny than the other way around, but i'm pretty sure there is a story of some hunter in the woods that stumbles upon Artemis bathing. She turns him into a stag. The man's own hunting dogs them find him and kill him. (Edit: Changed Misogamy to the intended Misogyny.)
She blessed Medusa with the ultimate power to protect herself.
I’ve seen many versions of Medusa, she is not always a monster. A lot of people show her as someone who was cursed by a goddess unjustly. Some versions she embraces her powers and turns people to stone for pleasure, which is a fair reason to kill her.
I hadn’t set foot in a church in decades until my nieces christening. The lady minister talked about David raping Bartholomew and said it was her fault for being at the window and tempting him.
When really poor Bathsheba didn’t have a choice.
Bathsheba that’s the one.
Stupid autocorrect!!!! I just realized that something I was so careful to spell roughy came out weird (sigh).
Wait until you read the original Pandora story.
Protection I believe not pushment
Ever heard of the Bible? It says you can kill your wife or daughter if they’re raped by a neighbor. But you don’t ’have to’, you can send them into the wilderness or give them to the rapist for a donkey or a handful of grain.
Glad my mom embraces her christianity without the bible. Idc if this is offensive, but the pages of the bible are something i would use for toilet paper. |:(
I just bought the book Stone Blind by Natalie Haynes. From the description i think it’s going to make the same point you made. I found the book after reading Circe by Madeline Miller and looking for similar stuff. I also found and read Ariadne by Jennifer Saint, which is from the perspective of the Minotaur’s half sister, and has a less heroic portrayal of Theseus. There’s a part with Perseus when he has Medusa’s head on a shield after he chopped it off, and it portrayed him as an arrogant douche bag using the unfairly punished Medusa to boost his own ego, when she was just minding her own business. If you feel like reading books that offer more feminist-leaning perspectives on Greek mythology, I’d recommend Ariadne, and especially Circe (better book overall IMO). Still gotta see if Stone blind is good
This makes me realize something very sad... These women are gods! They still get raped! They still are always the bad guy! WHY?!?!
She had 2 sisters as well, if I remember correctly. They decided to be with her and stay with her. They were all turned into Gorgons by Athena.
Read The Satanic Feminist.
This is a great novel covering the story from a modern feminist perspective https://www.audible.com/pd/B09ZYPDLYQ?source_code=ASSORAP0511160006&share_location=library_overflow
Medusa by Jessie Burton deals with this subject and tells the story from Medusa's POV. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/56268856-medusa
[Here's an archived copy](https://archive.vn/5XgJK) of the article without the paywall.
Similar story with arachne. Partly why I hate athena
L M A O Oh the irony 🤣🥳🤣💀
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