The Greek Islands Read Online Free PDF Page B

coiled like a spring at the root of the spine in the vestigial and obsolete bone called the os coccyx . (Curious that in the Jewish holy books the same bone is described as the bone of prophesy.) Anyway, the art of yoga is to awake this slumbering snake and let it rise, like mercury in a thermometer, to the skull, where it realizes the alchemically perfect consciousness – the highest consciousness of which man is capable. The two snakes of man’s basic (even genetic) dichotomy spiral round the central column and pass the holy influence up through a number of stations. (Perhaps the Stations of the Cross in Catholicism descend from here?) Yoga means yoke, and the two primordial forces are yoked and, when perfectly married, reach simultaneously the ultimate experience – the blinding zenith of Nirvana. Our modern medicine still retains the symbol of the caduceus, though the meaning has long since been forgotten. (The pine cone which tops the white wand in Greece once represented the all-seeing pineal eye.) But where the devil is Medusa in all this Jungian rigmarole?
    Not far to seek. All the sacred writings emphasize how delicate and how dangerous this procedure is. When it fails, as perhaps it has done very often in the past, because the stress on human nerves is too great, or the techniques perhaps faulty – the result must have been madness. On the distorted face of theGorgon we see something like an attack of acute schizophrenia. (She foundered in the ocean of the subconscious as symbolized by her love affair with Poseidon.) The hissing hair symbolizes a short circuit, a discharge of electricity – ideas which have overwhelmed her mind. In fact the mask of Medusa is something to propitiate, to conjure away, a dreadful failure of this yogic process . The scared boy hero, Perseus, head turned away, performs a clumsy act of exorcism; today they try electro-convulsion therapy for such terrifying hypomanias. But the old fear of madness is still there, still rivets us; the glare of a lunatic still turns us to stone. Can we see her then as something like our modern charms against the Evil Eye – the blue beads we find affixed to the dashboards of taxis or the prams of small children? It is suggestive too that in Medusa’s case Athena received not only the head and skin, but also two drops of blood – one of which caused instant death, and the other of which was life-giving . The latter found its way into the hands of Aesculapius the healer, and with it he performed wonders, even raising the dead. We see then that certain notes are struck which chime with the ideas of duality, and healing. The old Gorgon reminds us of the ancient methods men chose to perfect themselves, and of the dangers which must be faced in order to achieve full selfhood.
    Weighed down with these thoughts and quite unprovable theories, one sits in the little museum and allows the emanations of the Gorgon to sweep over one. The first shock of the insane grin is over. She is there not to cause madness but to avert it. And in the greyness of the approaching evening her smile hangs upon the wall full of tragic resonance. The severed head found its place on the shield of Athena, and was used in battle to shock and dazzle the foe. The skin, like the skin of the snake in all ancient beliefs, was a symbol of renewal after death, a symbol of immortality.
    There are other good things in the little museum but nothing which has such a strong vibration; Medusa is indeed the second warden of Corfu, and her existence provides an insight into the nature of the ancient Greek world which one continues to encounter as one journeys on among the islands. In all the various extant versions, her attributes are rather stylized – there are versions of the head in Sicily (from the temple of Selinus) and also among the sculptures of the Acropolis. The little horse, Pegasus, the winged fancy of the creative spirit, was the only creature to escape the general carnage and take