Mary vs. Medusa
the revered and the reviled in iconic womanhood
As a girl trying to become a woman in a man’s world, I had no concept of a feminine divinity. No; I had no concept of an acceptable feminine divinity. Growing up is a process of finding out who you are by first discovering that you aren’t your parents, which can take years—particularly if your parents do not encourage a healthy separation of your identity and theirs. As a cis-gender girl (meaning that the doctor said “girl” when I was born and I’ve never disagreed) I naturally looked to my parents: my mother for comparison and my father for contrast, to figure out exactly what that meant. By the time I was old enough to do that my family had moved from California to Ohio, joined a Messianic Jewish synagogue, left the synagogue with a group of people who didn’t like being controlled by the perpetually angry rabbi and his power-hungry wife, and joined instead the home fellowship group that we would remain part of until it dissolved the year after my marriage. This meant, among other things, a shift from the unschooling philosophy of the largely hippie homeschool community in Northern California where we had lived, to the almost entirely conservative Christian homeschool community in Ohio. My mother learned to disguise her inborn passion and fire beneath a smiling mask of serene submission; my father learned to drape his insecurities in a mantle of spiritual leadership.
All this to explain why I had no concept of a feminine divine: God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit made up their own private, holy boy’s club; women were not admitted (unless you were Catholic, but we weren’t). Men were created in the image of God, women were created in the image of men, always one step behind…so they could pick up anything Adam dropped. A good wife and mother (which is what I was destined to become if I trained hard enough) existed solely for the support, nurturance, and spiritual edification of her husband and children. The feminine ideal I was handed was of a kind of fairytale princess with long, flowing hair and a long, flowing dress (that somehow managed to look very feminine while obscuring all particularly feminine body parts) holding up a shield for her mounted knight who is about to ride off into battle. Men go and women stay; but the men will only be successful if their women are successfully supporting their success (translation: men are all-powerful and image-of-God-like, but also helpless without a woman to prop them up, so you gotta train hard to be a good prop or your man will be a failure because you failed him).
Unsurprisingly, I became obsessed with goddesses in my teens. Always fascinated by history and mythology, I spent hours tracing the evolution of a particular goddess through the ages by comparing specific attributes of goddesses worshipped by different cultures. I was particularly interested in how Catholicism’s Virgin Mary became endowed by many of those goddess attributes as early Christianity spread across the known world (such as the title Queen of Heaven, which is certainly not a Biblical description of Mary of Nazareth). So important did Mary become to some sects of Christianity—and still is—that she was practically raised to the level of divinity by popular vote. As noted by Father Richard Rohr, the Vatican took a poll in 1950 to find out how many Catholics believed that Mary the mother of Christ had ascended into heaven like Christ himself. The belief was so widespread that it was decreed official church doctrine—possibly the only time in church history that a popular belief was officially sanctioned in such a way. Father Richard also quotes Carl Jung as declaring that move on the part of the Vatican to be “‘the most significant theological development of the twentieth century’ because it proclaimed that a woman’s body permanently exists in the eternal realms!”1 In his book, The Universal Christ, Father Richard attempts to explain this mass fascination with Mother Mary:
In the mythic imagination, I think Mary intuitively symbolizes the first Incarnation—or Mother Earth, if you will allow me. (I am not saying Mary is the first incarnation, only that she became the natural archetype and symbol for it)…I believe that Mary is the major feminine archetype for the Christ Mystery. This archetype had already shown herself as Sophia or Holy Wisdom (see Proverbs 8:1ff., Wisdom 7:7ff.), and again in the book of Revelation (12:1-17) in the cosmic symbol of “a Woman clothed with the sun and standing on the moon.” Neither Sophia nor the Woman of Revelation is precisely Mary of Nazareth, yet in so many ways, both are—and each broadens our understanding of the Divine Feminine2.
Mary, Father Richard believes, is popular simply because she is human, not God. So popular, in fact, that the Madonna is still the most painted subject in Western art.
In the many images of Mary, humans see our own feminine soul. We needed to see ourselves in her, and say with her “God has looked upon me in my lowliness. From now on, all generations will call me blessed” (Luke 1:48)3
All of this sounds beautiful and almost completely true. However, as a young girl, I felt intuitively uncomfortable with this Divine Virgin figure (besides the fact that I, as a good Protestant, was properly scandalized by the Catholic “worship” of anyone who wasn’t God). Towards the middle of the section about Mary in The Universal Christ I came upon a passage that made me understand why. Father Richard sincerely believes that, “the more macho and patriarchal a culture, the greater its devotion to Mary,” and states that he “once counted eleven images of Mary in a single Catholic church in Texas cowboy country.” This passionate embracing of Mary is, he believes, evidence of “a culture trying unconsciously, and often not very successfully, to balance itself out,” particularly by giving Catholic women “a dominant feminine image to counterbalance all the males parading around up front!”
A dominant feminine image. Yes, women need to see ourselves reflected in our theology in order for us to develop a healthy relationship with the divine. But is Mary, believed to have been an eternal virgin (despite apparently having multiple children), the RIGHT dominant feminine image to be parading around up front with the Holy-Man-Times-Three? The version of Mary lovingly described by Father Richard is all too familiar to me: she is the eternal, feminine yes, submission incarnate, the very image of “Feminine Receptivity” as he puts it. And that message still makes me feel very small inside. Is that all there is for women? Are we to be eternal “yeses”? Is our only glory to be in our children, and in the one who put those children in us? Is it possible that the real reason the Mary ideal is so popular in patriarchal cultures is because she is passive and easy to control? Is there an enduring icon for the woman who looks at that version of ideal femininity and does not see herself reflected in it?
Actually, there is; and unsurprisingly, it’s not nearly as pretty.
Her name was Medusa, and before she was a legendary monster she was a regular girl, prettier than most, and perhaps a little more vain. Poet and professor of women’s studies, Elizabeth Johnston (Ambrose), tells it like this:
Bits of Medusa’s story date back to at least Homer’s Iliad, but it’s with Ovid’s Metamorphoses that her story emerges most fully. A closer read of her tale may surprise those who only know her vaguely from popular culture. In Ovid’s story, the god Neptune sees Medusa, desires her, and decides that, because he is a god, he is entitled to her body (sound familiar?). He rapes her in Minerva’s temple, and Minerva, incensed that her temple has been defiled, punishes the victim rather than the perpetrator (again, sound familiar?). Minerva transforms Medusa into a snake-haired monster who now, instead of inspiring men’s desire, literally petrifies them. Later, Minerva gives her shield to Perseus to help him kill Medusa; he uses it as a mirror, deflecting Medusa’s curse. He beheads her while she sleeps and then carries her head in a bag, a trophy he pulls out as needed to destroy enemies4.
This is not at all the story I imagined would be behind this icon of what some might call anti-femininity. I had this vague idea that Medusa became a monster because she wasn’t pretty or something, and not being desirable made her so bitter that she grew snakes instead of hair and started turning men into stone with her eyes until she was stopped by a valiant (and gorgeously Greek) hero. Cringe. Why yes, I was raised in a VERY patriarchal society. Why do you ask? This was the version of the myth that I had absorbed because it is EXACTLY the version that the patriarchy has been telling for thousands of years. As Elizabeth Johnston (Ambrose) notes, “In Western culture, strong women have historically been imagined as threats requiring male conquest and control, and Medusa herself has long been the go-to figure for those seeking to demonize female authority.” Just about every modern powerful woman has been given snaky hair at some point, most notably Hilary Clinton during the 2016 presidential election cycle, during which pro-Republican merchandise could be found “emblazoned with an image of a stoic Trump raising the severed head of a bug-eyed Clinton, her mouth agape in silent protest—an allusion to a sculpture by the Italian Renaissance artist Benvenuto Cellini.”
Such dehumanizing of women who dare to defy the accepted boundaries allotted to women by a traditionally masochistic society is nothing new. Ms. Johnston (Ambrose) quotes first-wave feminist activist Susan B. Anthony as saying (of the lack of female voices in print in the 19th century), “‘Women … must echo the sentiment of these men. And if they do not do that, their heads are cut off.’” She in her pre-election article for The Atlantic, titled “The Original ‘Nasty Woman,’” Elizabeth Johnston (Ambrose) invites the reader to do an internet search linking the name of any popular woman leader and the word “medusa.” “These women infringed upon the domain of men,” she states. “The only response, as suggested by their Medusa-fied images? To cut their heads off; to silence them.” What woman has not been silenced for speaking up in the face of male authority? However, it is the underlying ties to rape culture that make the use of the monstrous Medusa particularly insidious. And that is why second-wave feminists have decided to take her back.
During the last fifty years feminist poets, writers, activities, artists and dancers have lifted Medusa’s ravaged story out of the dung heap of patriarchal mythology and made it our own. “With this context,” writes Elizabeth Johnston (Ambrose), “my students look anew on art like Cellini’s sculpture. Now, they can see that Perseus is the aggressor, not a hero but a symbolic rapist standing astride the body of his victim, her bloodied head held high in victory. Medusa’s closed eyes and lips speak volumes about both the history of women’s oppression and the submersion of women’s histories.” Medusa’s story of rape and injustice has become particularly important to the #MeToo movement, as memorialized by artist Judy Takács who created “#Me(dusa)too,” a stunning set of three portraits dedicated to giving Medusa back her dignity.
“For my painting,” writes Takács in her blog, “Chicks with Balls,” “I have re-imagined the hideous gorgon and restored Medusa’s youthful beauty and innocence.” Poet Marissa Ahmadkhani channels this same spirit in her poem “For Medusa5”
I like to think that she asked for snakes. That, sick of foreign fingers running through her hair, she approached Athena Rather than misplaced punishment, it was prerogative. Because, really, I need to believe that even I could seek that reckless strength. That I too could turn any unwanted touch into stone.
Writer Jessie Burton reimagines Medusa's story for a young adult audience in Medusa: A 'beautiful and Profound Retelling' of Medusa’s Story, published earlier this year. In her book, a recently ravaged, cursed, and banished Medusa laments, “Outrageous reality: I’d never known a change that wasn’t monstrous. And here was another truth: I was lonely and I was angry, and rage and loneliness can end up tasting the same6.”
This reclamation of Medusa’s story is a source of power to women. Now, when I become truly, righteously angry I imagine that I can feel my hair lifting and writhing around my head, like Nnedi Okorafor’s Binti7. It is as if the spirit of Medusa can be drawn upon by, and lend power to, wronged and wrathful women everywhere. It is a truer ideal, but not yet complete.
I have tried to become the eternal virgin, submission incarnate…and doing so sunk me into a cycle of perpetual shame and unworthiness, because it is an impossible ideal to achieve (and frankly, my sacred virginity was a treasure I was eager to trade in for something far more carnal at the earliest permissible opportunity).
I have been Medusa, enraged by a system that treats women as commodities and makes us want to look pretty enough to buy so we will stop feeling valueless.
I am no longer a gender-role-confused teenager in search of a Goddess to call her own, but I still need something more in a true Divine Feminine.
I need the trinity reimagined, balanced.
I need an all-powerful Mother, able to answer every childlike cry for help with a cosmic loving embrace.
And I think I might have finally found Her.
Rohr, Richard. The Universal Christ: How a Forgotten Reality Can Change Everything We See, Hope For, and Believe. Convergent Books. New York, NY. 2019.
Rohr, Richard. The Universal Christ. 2019.
Rohr, Richard. The Universal Christ. 2019.
Johnston, Elizabeth. “The Original Nasty Woman.” The Atlantic. November 6, 2016. https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2016/11/the-original-nasty-woman-of-classical-myth/506591/
Ahmadkhani, Marissa. “For Medusa.” MacGuffin, vol. 37, no. 1, Winter 2021, pp. 96–100. EBSCOhost, https://search-ebscohost-com.oh0130.oplin.org/login.aspx?direct=true&db=lfh&AN=150029836&site=ehost-live.
Burton, Jessie. Medusa: A 'beautiful and Profound Retelling' of Medusa’s Story. United States, Bloomsbury Publishing, 2022.
Okorafor, Nnedi. Binti: The Complete Trilogy. United States, DAW, 2019. I highly recommend this trilogy!