Medusa: The Monster We Fear, the Monster We Need – Beneath the Work Podcast

podcast

Oct 16

Watch or listen to the Transmute Tapes podcast.

What if the monster we fear is also the one we need to protect us?

More than 2,500 years ago, visitors approaching the Temple of Artemis on the Greek island of Corfu would have encountered an extraordinary sight. High above the temple entrance, an enormous stone Gorgon stared down at them. Her eyes were wide, her mouth filled with sharp teeth, snakes twisted around her body, and two powerful wild cats flanked her on either side.

This was Medusa. Not the beautiful, tragic woman familiar from later retellings, but a terrifying creature whose image was intended to protect. The ancient Greeks placed such figures on temples, shields, armor and everyday objects. These apotropaic images were believed to ward off evil by confronting danger with something even more frightening.

Medusa was a monster employed to frighten away other monsters. It is a remarkable contradiction. The very creature people feared was also the one they trusted to keep them safe. And perhaps this contradiction explains why Medusa has never really disappeared.

A Monster with Many Faces

In the earliest Greek traditions, Medusa was one of three Gorgon sisters and the only one who could die. The hero Perseus eventually severed her head, yet even after her death, her gaze retained its petrifying power. Athena, goddess of wisdom and warfare, carried the Gorgon's image on her armor. Medusa had been defeated, but her power remained valuable.

Centuries later, the Roman poet Ovid told a different story. In his version, Medusa was once a beautiful young woman who was violated by Poseidon in Athena's temple. Her hair was subsequently transformed into snakes.

The victim became the monster. These different versions of Medusa are not simply variations on the same story. They reveal how myths change as societies reinterpret the figures they inherit. The monstrous guardian, the dangerous woman, the punished victim and the symbol of resistance do not comfortably fit into a single identity. Perhaps that is precisely why Medusa continues to fascinate us. She resists being understood once and for all.

From Ancient Temples to Contemporary Culture

Few mythological figures have traveled as far through visual culture as Medusa.

Caravaggio painted her severed head on a shield, capturing the instant of horror and death. In 1975, the French writer Hélène Cixous published The Laugh of the Medusa, transforming the Gorgon into a powerful figure within feminist thought.

Her image has since moved through fashion, music, literature, film and contemporary art. Versace made Medusa the emblem of a luxury fashion house. Annie Lennox named an album after her. Singer Kailee Morgue revisited her story from the monster's perspective. In the television adaptation of Percy Jackson and the Olympians, Medusa is once again given a voice and a perspective of her own.

Across these different interpretations, she becomes a symbol of female anger, survival, resistance, seduction and power. But reducing Medusa to a straightforward feminist heroine risks losing something essential about her. She is not simply a misunderstood woman waiting to be redeemed. Nor is she only a monster to be defeated. She is both threatening and protective, vulnerable and dangerous, beautiful and grotesque. Her image contains contradictions that cannot easily be resolved. And those contradictions are where things become interesting.

Looking into Medusa: A Psychological Perspective

What happens when we approach Medusa not only as a mythological character, but as an image of our inner lives?

For this episode, we invited Suzanne Schreve, a Jungian psychoanalyst based in the Netherlands, to explore Medusa through the lens of depth psychology. Suzanne's work brings together Jungian psychology, behavioral neuroscience, ecology and mythology. She is a candidate at CG Jung Institute in Zurich, also a writer and co-founder of BlackSalt, a creative platform connecting art, storytelling and psychology.

Our conversation explores the psychological dimensions of Medusa and the questions her image continues to raise. What does it mean to possess a gaze that turns others to stone? Could petrification be understood as an image of psychological paralysis, fear or emotional overwhelm? What might the snakes suggest about instinct, transformation and the forces that lie beneath conscious awareness? And what happens when aspects of ourselves become so frightening or unacceptable that we begin to experience them as something monstrous?

In Jungian psychology, the shadow describes those aspects of the psyche that remain outside our conscious self-image. These may include qualities we reject or fear, but also energies and capacities we have never learned to recognize as our own. Medusa offers a compelling image through which to approach such questions. Rather than assigning her one fixed psychological meaning, we wanted to explore what her contradictions might reveal about fear, power, vulnerability and the relationship between what we reject and what we need.

Medusa as an Artistic Encounter

For us at Maison Douce, mythology is not simply a collection of ancient stories waiting to be illustrated.

Myths offer images through which we can approach experiences that are difficult to articulate directly. They carry centuries of interpretation, but remain open to transformation. Medusa became the starting point for two artworks: a flag and a portrait. Although both draw on the same mythological figure, they approach her through different visual forms. A flag is never entirely neutral. Throughout history, flags and banners have marked territories, gathered communities, accompanied armies and processions, and given visible form to collective identities and beliefs.

What happens when Medusa occupies such a surface? Who might gather beneath her image? What would it mean to carry her through the world? Could the monster who once guarded a Greek temple become a guardian again, this time for something we have yet to name?

The portrait introduces a different kind of encounter. Here, Medusa is no longer simply an emblem to be carried or a figure from a distant story. She becomes someone we face. Her gaze is central to the myth, but looking at her also raises questions about our own position as viewers.

Are we confronting something dangerous, or are we being confronted ourselves? What do we project onto a face before us? When does fascination become fear? And who decides what makes someone monstrous?

These questions connect Medusa to a wider constellation of figures in Lotte's artistic practice: women, saints, outsiders and mythological beings who exist between beauty and violence, holiness and transgression, the human and the otherworldly. Across painting, textiles and objects, familiar symbols are taken out of their original contexts and brought into new relationships. Materials and images become part of a visual language in which the sacred, the unsettling and the everyday can coexist. The aim is not necessarily to provide a new, definitive interpretation of an ancient figure.

It is to create an encounter in which something remains open.

Beneath the Work: Where the Stories Begin

With Beneath the Work, we are introducing a new format within our podcast Transmute Tapes. The series takes a closer look at the stories, research, symbols and artistic decisions behind our work. Rather than presenting artworks as finished objects with fixed meanings, we want to explore the questions that lead to their creation: the images that stay with us, the histories we return to, the materials we choose and the unexpected connections that emerge along the way.

Medusa is an ideal figure with which to begin. Her story reaches from ancient Greek sanctuaries to contemporary debates about gender, power and representation. She exists in mythology, psychology, art history and popular culture, yet remains impossible to reduce to a single meaning.

In this episode, Marc T. Suess traces Medusa's journey through history and visual culture. Together, we explore her symbolism and psychological dimensions with Suzanne Schreve, before Lotte turns to the Medusa artworks and the artistic practice behind them.

What interests us most is not finding the correct interpretation of Medusa. It is understanding why we continue to need her.
The monster we fear. The monster we need. And perhaps, the monster we create.