notes, aspecta medusa: Andromeda, by Perseus sav'd and wed, Hanker'd each day to see the Gorgon's head: Till o'er a fount he held it, bade her lean, And mirror'd in the wave was safely seen That death she liv'd by. Let not thine eyes know Any forbidden thing itself, although It once should save as well as kill: but be Its shadow upon life enough for thee.~DGRossetti's poem. which is to say, in platonic-speak...  The Medusa, one of three sisters originally... beautiful, a priestess in the Temple of Athena; that is, a beautiful mortal in the sacred sphere -- a temple being the eye of the polis -- of Wisdom. And Beauty is the direct apprehension of the Good, the pure Being of the stillpoint; an aspect, or rather a reflection of the perfect, the divine, the One: Things that can "exist" only outside of time. Things Eternal, timeless -- and thus, dangerous to look at directly... Not something that can belong to a mortal. So of course the earth shaker comes to shakes things up: Poseidon, a god who goes back before Homer. And he rapes the priestess right there in the temple.  And the goddess of Wisdom punishes her. Was it her fault, being a carrier of things outside of time? She, a virgin priestess, servant of that wisdom? No, not her fault any more than it is ours to be vessels of consciousness who apprehend the immortal, a thing we cannot have (which in platonic-speak summons eros: desire, mover of "the sun and all the stars"). Medusa suffers the loss of her beauty as we must suffer death. She becomes a creature no mortal can look upon -- the mysteries as they truly are: eternal, belonging outside of time. To violate this is to be an abomination, and that is her face with the snakes for hair, snakes that crawl in and out of darkness, writhing and unnatural in the world of time and space, one end in the light and the other in the dark unconscious. She, a symbol, a creature of our most profound pity. She, our own self, each of us, forced to live with the knowledge that we will suffer death. And so Perseus comes as a resolution. Again, he is each of us, taught and armed by the psychopomp Hermes, slicing off Medusa's head without directly looking at her, precipitating the higher birth of Pegasus -- imagination. Pegasus who soars, tended by muses, pawing the earth and setting the deep springs to flow: art itself. Pegasus, winged horse, beloved, an eros who moved it all from the beginning. reaching back beyond all this, see http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/classes/finALp.html , http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/bmcr/2007/2007-04-61.html ...