PICTURES OF MEDUSA SKIN

Perhaps this is the reason why, as Ludolf Malten points out, the accent in Greek literature always lies on the horse and not on the rider, not even on the god that takes its shape. In fact, it is only when this symbiosis exists that the rider not only is carried by the horse, but truly rides it and the horse not only pulls the chariot, but the charioteer and horse work together, the horse sacrificing to the human part some of its own power and freedom. Horses are among the few animals that allow us to enter in symbiosis with them. Well, all his advantages I combine in myself as a horseman. Now the creature that I have envied most is, I think, the Centaur (if any such being ever existed), able to reason with a man’s intelligence and to manufacture with his hands what he needed, while he possessed the fleetness and strength of a horse so as to overtake whatever ran before him and to knock down whatever stood in his way. Growing older I lost this feeling, but I recognize it in the description that Xenophon makes, in the fourth century BC: Growing up continuously stumbling and falling over my own feet, continuously being told to be quiet and stop making faces I didn’t know I was making, the freedom and strenght I felt being the horse and its rider was indescribable.

I was contemporaneously the strong, swift horse and the rider using her intelligence, will and emphathy to make the horse obey. I remember my own exhilarating feelings when one summer I played at being horse and rider. This may be the reason why children project much of their emotions of fear, awe and love on the horse. Aniela Jaffé points out that when animals appear in myths, sagas and dreams they seem to be our dormant instincts trying to return to consciousness and recreate a lost wholeness. To understand a little of the emotions that inspired the archaic feelings about centaurs let us look at the horse. Strength, power and beauty flows from the image. Flowers are growing below him and a flowering tree stands in front of him. A quiver hangs on his back and he is galloping so fast that the tail is blowing with the wind and at the same time he shoots an unfeathered arrow from his bow.

PICTURES OF MEDUSA SKIN

The centaur has small wings is dressed in a shirt with tassels on the sleeves and has a spotted skin knotted round the waist and draped over the horse’s back. It is dated in the middle of the fourteenth century BC, that is, contemporaneously with the Mycenaean civilization in Greece. The seal cylinder with a centaur from the Babylonian Nippur below is a good example.

The image came to Greece from the Near East where centaurs were close to the gods. Medusa is the only Greek female centaur the others are all men/stallions. If it had been her wish she could easily have overpowered the boy.

Her horse legs are posed in the same warrior stance that Perseus keeps (in yoga called Virabhadrasana), implying readiness for battle. She is a goddess who has taken human shape and she is also a centaur. Medusa’s human figure stands in the same position as the earliest cult statues, the xoana, made of wood. He is rendered in profile turning his head away from Medusa, while gripping her hair with his left hand so hard that her lips are drawn back because of the strain, and holding the sword to her throat with his right hand. Here we have an instance when the image influenced a poet.Īs in the description, Perseus is depicted as a beardless adolescent wearing a short tunic, the “ invisibility” hat, a “ sword with black sheath across his shoulders” and a “ silver bag” hanging from his neck. The interesting fact is that, although the Shield of Herakles was written in the eighth century, the description of Perseus was added at least one hundred years later. The beautiful stylized image on the vase depicts the killing of Medusa by Perseus, and we easily recognize the myth because the picture of Perseus follows closely the description in the Shield of Herakles, supposedly written by the great poet Hesiod. Two of her amphoras in Thebes survived the centuries buried in a tomb, and one of them is now preserved in the Louvre. She must have been a quite famous artist at the time, because some of her large vases were exported as far as Thebes in Boeotia and the island of Mykonos. In the early seventh century BC, when Thebes, Corinth, Sparta and some of the Greek islands were culturally more advanced than Athens, there was a woman potter on the island of Tenos who began retelling myths in her art.

Pictures of medusa