The Greek Islands Read Online Free PDF

several versions of it exist. It is somehow appropriate that in her story we should come upon the name of Perseus, who performed a ritual murder on her, shearing off her head with a scimitar provided by Hermes. It was, in fact, a murder performed with the full complicity of the Olympians; the equipment for such a dangerous task (one glance and he would have been marmorealized) consisted of a helmet of invisibility (courtesy of Hades), winged sandals for speed (the Graiae daughters) and a sack for the severed head. However, it is with Perseus that the confusion of the myths begins and the traveller starts swearing at the unrelieved prolixity of the material, its vagueness, and indeed its incomprehensibility.
    Two factors come into play here which are very Greek. The richness and incoherence of Greek myth arise because successive waves of invaders brought new versions, or even different grafts, with them to enrich a composite already extremely old, which had filtered by slow osmosis from places as far away as India, perhaps even China: a vast palimpsest of myths and tales to which real people had become attached, in which real figures had become entangled. Men became kings, and then gods even in their own lifetimes (Caesar, Alexander, for example). When Pausanias came on the scene – already terribly late in the day (the second century AD ) – he was shown the tomb of the Medusa’s head in Argos and assured that she had been a realqueen famous for her beauty. She had opposed Perseus and … he cut off her head to show the troops. In Apollodorus’s version , however, she upset the touchy Athena, who organized the revengeful killing out of spite – and also because she wanted the powerful, spine-chilling head for her own purposes. Perseus (Athena was almost as affectionate towards him as towards Odysseus) skinned the Medusa as well, and grafted the horrid relic of the insane mask to the shield of Athena. This is a different story.
    There are several other episodes among the different biographies of our Gorgon. In Hesiod’s poem, she fell in love with the rippling blue hair of Poseidon and gave herself to him in the depths of the sea. The trouble started there. Of the two children born, one was Pegasus, who afterwards flew to Olympus to live on at the side of Zeus – a symbol of aesthetic fancy, creative invention. However, in the Hesiod version too Athena guided the hand that performed the deed; Perseus turned away his face for fear of the eyes, letting Medusa’s head mirror itself in the shield he had been given.
    The prolixity and apparently basic inconsistency of so much polytheistic material is exasperating, and tends to give travellers in Greece a kind of vertigo. Prolix without precision, self-contradictory more often than not, these gods and goddesses simply confuse one. When monotheism came into being and imposed the rigid rules of its beliefs upon this chaos, much of the old religion went underground, only to re-emerge in new forms. Far from conquering paganism, the new dispensation only succeeded in shoring up the old tattered and patched fabric of the ancient beliefs. Looking at the Corfu Medusa and reflecting on her Greek origins (she is dated 570 BC ) one is inclined to think that she would be better interpreted in terms of Indian yogic thought than in any other way. It is not necessary to ask if some new, free interpretation like this is valid – inthis domain it is every man for himself. Increasingly one is forced to read one’s own fair meanings into all this stratified jumble of myths.
    The belt of snakes Medusa wears is significant and would provide the yogic interpretation with a point of departure – for they are bearded, and look like sacred hamadryad king-cobras – a symbol of the ancient yogas of the highest grade, Raja Yoga. This path to the perfected consciousness was known and expounded long before the Medusa came. To the Indian sages, the source of this perfected consciousness lay slumbering,