Lilith & Medusa Have It Out with History

mixed-media collage

Medusa
- Frieda Hughes

She is the gypsy
Whose young have rooted
In the very flesh of her scalp.
Her eyes are drill-holes where
Your senses spin, and you are stone
Even as you stand before her.
She opens her lips to speak,
And have you believe.
She has more tongues to deceive
Than you can deafen your ears to.
If you could look away, the voices
From the heads of her vipers
Would be hard to argue.
If you could look away,
The pedestals of your feet might move.
If you could look away,
The song from the cathedral of her mouth
Would fall to the floor like a lie.

In one form or another, Lilith and Medousa have been a presence from the beginning of human existence: goddess, virgin, mother, crone, whore, prophet, healer, witch. Through the centuries, both were initially revered, then appropriated, revisioned, maligned, ignored, and their original form forgotten. Lilith was Adam's first wife, made from the same clay, and banished from The Garden for refusing to be submissive, and therefore trouble. She was also a figure in the Summerian version of the Garden of Eden, and again, in this version she was trouble from the beginning. Medousa was a Lybian goddess revered by a snake-worshipping culture. Fast forward to Greek mythology: Medousa was once a beautiful maiden that incurred the wrath of Athena, one for being more beautiful than the goddess, knowing it, and bragging about it, two, for getting raped by mighty Posiedon before the altar of Athena's temple. Sacriledge, and not to be tolerated, especially since Athena always took the guy's side in a squabble, but a little back story on Athena: Metis, first wife of Zeus, and mother of Athena, was pregnant and it appears Zeus swallowed her to avoid being dethroned by the son she was predicted to have, plus Metis had a serious mind of her own and had power all her own. Soon after Zeus dissappeared his wife, Athena, emerged fully grown from her father's head and got to work defending the patriarchy.

I'm not a mythology scholar by any stretch, so I may have my information and timeline off a few degrees, (hence the links), but here's the question I've been asking for a very, very long time: How is it that a goddess can fall so far that she is no longer remembered or is relegated to a consort, or is transformed into a scold, a flesh-eating screech owl, a seductress, a dutiful wife, a snaky-haired terrorizing mortal that can turn a man to stone with a look? Memory is short, Time is long, and coupled with seismic cultural shifts, these three are the culprits. Well, and of course the Indo-European invasions, the paradigm shift to monotheism, and, the Medieval Period officially pounding the nail in the matriarchy's coffin: women were no longer sacred, they were either Madonna or Whore. The more research I come across, the more I'm beginning to believe that Lilith and Medousa were the original blueprint of the first god/dess, and to mix my metaphors, the seed from which the monomyth every religion and belief system bloomed. Joseph Campbell, in (Un)like Subjects: Women, Theory, Fiction, by Gerardine Meaney, "identifies the Medousa as a 'Great Mother' goddess...'She is the womb and the tomb of the world: the primal one and only ultimate reality of nature' (25-6).

Myth as inspiration: Very late the eve of November 1, 2007, after numerous fights with myself and an inability to gel the Isis/Osiris myth into a workable storyline, I finally relented to the insistent voice that the Medousa myth should be my subject. I decided that I would write a modern adaptation which blended Persephone and Medousa with a character named Kora, (Kore is Persephone's name). I also decided I would use lines from random poetry found on poets.org as prompts. I've shared excerpts of this novel with a handful of people, mainly, I've posted excerpts over on Zoetrope in friends' private offices. My writing mantra is, Your visions gain power when you don't talk about them. I absolutely believe that silence is the rule in the early stages of creativity. It's so easy to talk the energy right out of the work and then there's nothing to write.

I wrote this novel in exactly one month during NaNoWriMo - National Novel Writing Month - gained twenty pounds in exactly thirty days, became obsessed with reaching the daily NaNo word count even though I HAVE to edit as I write, which made making the daily word count nearly impossible unless I wrote for hours on end; I wept continuously until wearing makeup became irrelevant and I looked something akin to a bag lady surviving on potato chips, Cheetos, Coke and coffee, I neglected my normal routine, duties, responsibilities. Fill-in-the blank here, and I neglected it. I did shower, brush my teeth, and go to work every day, but I spent my lunch hour holed up in my room writing until colleagues cautiously asked if "everything" was okay, probably because my eyes were red-rimmed and swollen, or perhaps because I'd worn the same outfit more than once that week, wasn't wearing makeup, and had tied my hair up in a yet another messy ponytail. I know I drove my daughter to distraction with my typing late nights at the computer desk outside her room, (You're typing, AGAIN?; It's time to go to bed!; Are you seriously crying, AGAIN?; What are you eating out there? Stop typing so loud, Mom!)

I have a laptop now, and it's much quieter, plus I can set up on the couch, the swing out back, the deck, whereever, and type away and it 's nobody's business.

A disclaimer that should cover about everything that can be disclaimed: The novel is very dark: lots of turning over stones to see what's underneath, lots of substance abuse, much swearing, lots of bad behavior. The novel employs the myth of Persephone's abduction to the underworld and her rape by Hades, and the myth of Medousa's descent from goddess to mortal, to tell the story of Kora, a young girl who is raped at a very young age by a neighbor, subsequently develops depersonalization disorder, initially, dissociative, and then as she matures, fugue, in which she internalizes Medousa, (in an abstract way similar to how Zeus swallows his pregant wife Metis, except there's no cracking of skulls or Athena emerging ready for war in Kora's story). Kora periodically self-destructs, disappears and remerges without explanation, gets tattoed at every important juncture, becomes an addict, tries and fails at therapy, quits, becomes a confessonal artist with her life as subject matter, and finally emerges from the Underworld, with chocolate cake! See, a happy ending! All the bad guys are satyrs, so goats really take it on the chin in this novel. Zeus is also a bad guy, (the reasons for this pretty much go without saying). I don't have a title for the novel yet. I plan to spend NaNo 2009 adding and reworking to the novel - it's missing a root, and I don't know which one, but will discover it when I throw myself headlong back into Kora/Medousa's life.

What I've learned is that how I write is that I become all the characters and live thier lives, hear thier thoughts, feel every emotion, see the world unfold through them. I suppose it's a form of method acting or more likely, a mild psychophrenia. Whatever is happening in the writing feels real when I'm writing it and it's very hard to disengage from the characters or the story.

A disclaimer I almost forgot: Just so you know, I do not have an axe to grind with any one religion or mythology, the ones I chose just happened to make themselves available and were expedient to tell this particular story. Oh, and before I forget: The novel is told in a series of flash fiction vignettes. I took the excerpt post down, but once it's published I'll repost all the drafts it took to get a final draft.