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Speaker 1: Hey, you welcome to Stuff to blow your mind. My

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Speaker 1: name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and we're

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Speaker 1: bringing you a vault episode today since we're out this week.

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Speaker 1: This is part two of our series on MEDUSA. That's right.

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Speaker 1: These were super fun episodes to put together, just trying

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Speaker 1: to to untangle the myth, uh, to understand what what

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Speaker 1: the myth is? You know, talking about everything from from

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Speaker 1: ancient works of literature to modern horror fantasy films. So

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Speaker 1: let's go ahead and enter the Gorgon's lair, and from

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Speaker 1: a stone beside, a poisonous fft peeps idly into those

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Speaker 1: Gorgonian eyes, wilst in the air a ghastly bat, bereft

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Speaker 1: of sense, has flitted with a mad surprise out of

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Speaker 1: the cave. This hideous light had cleft, and he comes

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Speaker 1: hastening like a moth that highs after a taper, and

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Speaker 1: the midnight sky flares a light more dread an obscurity

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Speaker 1: tis the tempestuous loveliness of terror. For from the serpent's

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Speaker 1: gleams of brazen glare, kindled by that inextricable error, which

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Speaker 1: makes a thrilling vapor of the air become a blank

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Speaker 1: and ever shifting mirror of all the beauty and the terror.

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Speaker 1: There a woman's countenance with serpent locks, gazing in death

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Speaker 1: on heaven from those wet rocks. Welcome to Stuff to

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Speaker 1: Blow Your Mind production of My Heart Radio. Hey you

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Speaker 1: welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name is

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Speaker 1: Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and we're back with

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Speaker 1: part two of our series on the Gorgon Medusa. That's right.

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Speaker 1: In the last episode, we largely just recounted what can

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Speaker 1: roughly be thought of as the canonical myth of Medusa

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Speaker 1: as it emerged from the classical era, based on a

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Speaker 1: few popular tellings of the myth from those days. Now

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Speaker 1: it's time to get into possible origins of the myth,

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Speaker 1: as well as various interpretations of the meaning behind it.

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Speaker 1: Some of the meanings we've attributed it over time, but

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Speaker 1: they're you know, there are also these cases where for

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Speaker 1: the underlying power of myth that just keeps us coming

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Speaker 1: back to reinterpret it. You know, there's just something about

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Speaker 1: mythology in general, but especially with the Gorgon. There's something

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Speaker 1: about the Gorgon myth that just keeps bringing us back

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Speaker 1: keeps forcing us to reevaluate it. Yeah, it absolutely cannot

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Speaker 1: be ignored. I mean, maybe it's because you can't look

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Speaker 1: at it without dying, that people can't stop looking at it.

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Speaker 1: It's like being told not to think about a taboo subject. Uh.

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Speaker 1: And so, uh, it's clearly the image of Medusa is

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Speaker 1: one of the most obsessed over and revisited images from

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Speaker 1: all of Greek mythology. Yeah, and we're gonna explore a

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Speaker 1: number of the different threads there. I think one of

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Speaker 1: the great things about it is that all of the interpretations,

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Speaker 1: I think pretty much all the interpretations were going to

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Speaker 1: discuss here, they certainly have uh you know, a strong

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Speaker 1: air of truth to them, like it feels right, and

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Speaker 1: yet none of them feel like they explain it completely.

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Speaker 1: There's always this sense of darkness and mystery uh, to

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Speaker 1: Medusa that we can't quite grasp, you know, And and

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Speaker 1: that's part of the this this part of the enigma

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Speaker 1: of it. Well, yeah, exactly. I think that's really the

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Speaker 1: appeal of these ancient archetypes, these archetypal stories and monsters. Uh,

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Speaker 1: it's that they don't mean one thing. Instead, there's something

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Speaker 1: that the kind of you know, there are a box

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Speaker 1: that can be opened twenty different ways, and depending on

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Speaker 1: you know which part of it you open, you you uh,

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Speaker 1: you unlock different treasures from within. Yeah. Absolutely, And I

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Speaker 1: want to remind everybody that one of one of our

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Speaker 1: key sources in this these episodes was a book by

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Speaker 1: David A. Lemming that's L. E. E. M. I n G.

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Speaker 1: Titled Medusa in the Mirror Time from eighteen. So we'll

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Speaker 1: refer back to that a few different times here, but

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Speaker 1: we we also just recommend that book for anyone who

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Speaker 1: wants a deeper dive into the nature of Medusa. Now

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Speaker 1: we've got a really cool etymological lesson from your son,

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Speaker 1: I believe. In between recording these two episodes. Yeah, yeah,

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Speaker 1: this was really interesting. So I mentioned that he was

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Speaker 1: reading a lot about mythology, uh. And I also mentioned

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Speaker 1: a cool comic book series that he was really into

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Speaker 1: titled The Olympians, And I neglected to mention the author

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Speaker 1: last time, but it's George O'Connor. He's written eleven of these,

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Speaker 1: each of them themed around a different god or goddess,

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Speaker 1: and book to Athena concerns Medusa. I highly recommend those

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Speaker 1: to anyone who just wants, you know, a nice uh

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Speaker 1: visual representation of these myths for for a young reader

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Speaker 1: or just for them themselves. But another series that my

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Speaker 1: son was reading, these are all things like checked out

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Speaker 1: of the library digitally, uh, during this quarantine period. There's

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Speaker 1: a series called Science Comics, and he was reading one

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Speaker 1: titled Science Comics Dinosaurs, Fossils and Feathers. And the book

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Speaker 1: points out that one of the three um Gray sisters

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Speaker 1: we referred to in the last episode is dino. That's

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Speaker 1: d e i n O or d i n o,

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Speaker 1: which can be translated as dread. So. In eighteen forty two,

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Speaker 1: paleontologists Sir Richard Owen coined the term dinosaur, derived from

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Speaker 1: the ancient Greek uh dinos, meaning terrible, potent or fearfully great,

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Speaker 1: along with sauros, meaning lizard or reptile. Now, I don't

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Speaker 1: think there's a stronger connection between the myth and the term,

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Speaker 1: but Science Comics took the opportunity to include an image

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Speaker 1: of the three Gray sisters in this book about dinosaurs,

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Speaker 1: which was pretty awesome, uh, And I salute especially since

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Speaker 1: it brought you these two subjects and my son is

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Speaker 1: super into together in one book. Yeah, I never made

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Speaker 1: that connection. Even when I saw the name translated at

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Speaker 1: Dano or dina, however you say it it as meaning

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Speaker 1: like terror or dread, I didn't. I didn't make the

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Speaker 1: connection to the dread lizard. Yeah, so I I thought

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Speaker 1: when he first told me about it, I didn't believe

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Speaker 1: and I was like, what are you sure? And then

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Speaker 1: he showed me the page and yet there they are

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Speaker 1: just popping up in in in dinosaur books now, so

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Speaker 1: you know, good for them. Well, I say, let's jump

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Speaker 1: right back into uh to the head of the gore

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Speaker 1: gun and pick up where we left off last time.

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Speaker 1: So the last time you mentioned that we basically gave

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Speaker 1: the outline of the myth. We talked about some of

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Speaker 1: its major variations. Um, but one thing that I think

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Speaker 1: we alluded to a little bit last time was the

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Speaker 1: idea that there have been attempts to sort of route

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Speaker 1: the myth in history to say, like, you know, there's

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Speaker 1: some magical elements to this myth, but basically it really

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Speaker 1: came from this actual historical event that happened. But I'll

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Speaker 1: just I'll just make up right now. Yeah, Learning points

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Speaker 1: out in his book that's several noted individuals throughout history,

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Speaker 1: notably um Uh, Pla, fatus Uh, Diodorus of Sicily, Hosanias Uh, etcetera,

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Speaker 1: have attempted to sort out the historical quote unquote truth

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Speaker 1: of the myth. And this is kind of like geo mythology,

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Speaker 1: the geomethology approach that we've discussed on the show before,

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Speaker 1: you know, wondering what a particular myth really is about

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Speaker 1: by seeking a literal version of the affairs of history.

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Speaker 1: With geomethology, it tends to break down to looking at

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Speaker 1: fossils for the answer, dinosaur fossils in forming the shape

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Speaker 1: of a dragon, that sort of thing. Now, digego mythology

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Speaker 1: is certainly a fascinating field, and we've discussed some wonderful

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Speaker 1: ideas concerning the origins of various myths and monsters, but

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Speaker 1: we also point out that it's often unbalanced to depend

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Speaker 1: entirely upon geomethology, because myths and monsters, you know, certainly

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Speaker 1: they can be borne out of you know, actual extent

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Speaker 1: or extinct animals whose remains or uh, you know, description

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Speaker 1: one has come across. But we also have to factor

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Speaker 1: in human belief, human fears, human creativity, and just the

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Speaker 1: layer upon layer of human culture that often builds these things. Yeah,

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Speaker 1: I would say, I mean. The thing about explanations like

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Speaker 1: this that try to seek a rational, real world inspiration

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Speaker 1: for some kind of mythological story or element we have,

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Speaker 1: is I mean, for one thing, it's it's usually going

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Speaker 1: to be highly speculative. You're you're just trying to find

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Speaker 1: a story that could fit the evidence. Rarely do we

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Speaker 1: have a case where, like from ancient history, we know that,

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Speaker 1: oh we we believe this mythical dragon existed because we

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Speaker 1: found bones buried in the ground or something like that

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Speaker 1: that would give you a really strong clue what the

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Speaker 1: actual inspiration was. The simple way I'd put it is,

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Speaker 1: don't undersell human imagination, right, Like the fact that a

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Speaker 1: strange creature or character or sequence of events happens in

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Speaker 1: a myth doesn't mean that creature or character whatever has

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Speaker 1: to be based on, uh, the storyteller having once seen

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Speaker 1: something in the real world that shared this or that quality.

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Speaker 1: A lot of times we just make stuff up, like

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Speaker 1: we dream up weird things. We you know, the mind

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Speaker 1: mutates variations of things we've experienced in life. Naturally, it

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Speaker 1: happens in dreams without us ever having seen you know,

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Speaker 1: like a bat with human teeth or whatever it is

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Speaker 1: that scared us in a dream. And so I think

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Speaker 1: we don't. Uh. While it's fun to speculate about this

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Speaker 1: kind of thing, we don't have to assume that myths

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Speaker 1: and all that are are based directly on anything that

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Speaker 1: happened in reality or that somebody saw. Yeah, I mean,

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Speaker 1: and certainly there are plenty of examples where the geo

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Speaker 1: mythological approach or that purely historical approach can be very informative.

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Speaker 1: Monsters based on again previously extant species or specimens, descriptions

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Speaker 1: that make their way from distant lands. Um. And of

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Speaker 1: course many mythic exploits do have a basis, even a

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Speaker 1: primary one, in actual kings and queens and in heroes

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Speaker 1: that at one point in history may have been actual

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Speaker 1: mortal people before you know, the mythology and legend took over.

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Speaker 1: But but Living cautions that the rationalist approach quote provides

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Speaker 1: one sort of explanation of the meaning of the Medusa's story,

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Speaker 1: but tends to ignore the power of the mythic elements. Yes,

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Speaker 1: so examples of this would include, like you know, ancient

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Speaker 1: historians saying, ah, so the story of Perseus and Medusa

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Speaker 1: really comes from Perseus being like, imagine there was this

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Speaker 1: guy named Perseus, and he was a pirate, and he

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Speaker 1: was trying to go to these islands in the Atlantic.

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Speaker 1: One was that were each ruled by these queens who

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Speaker 1: were the gore Gun sisters, uh and and so forth

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Speaker 1: like that. I would say one problem with the rationalist

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Speaker 1: historical approach is that very often it seems to me

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Speaker 1: to just be making things up. So like, how to

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Speaker 1: simply making up a non magical fictional origin story for

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Speaker 1: a monster or character improve on the existing magical mythology? Yeah, exactly.

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Speaker 1: And and ultimately is learning argues the power of myth

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Speaker 1: is deeper than history, and and we can follow that

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Speaker 1: in a couple of different actions. But first I thought

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Speaker 1: we might discuss the origin of Medusa. That is perhaps

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Speaker 1: most fascinating. And Lemmings book that of the disembodied head

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Speaker 1: of Medusa and the idea that it predates Medusa's body.

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Speaker 1: And I realized that sounds like some causality wrecking weirdness there,

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Speaker 1: which you know you can certainly encounter in in mythology.

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Speaker 1: But the more you think about this angle, I think

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Speaker 1: the more it makes perfect sense. And here's the basic premise.

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Speaker 1: The moment that really caps off the story of Medusa,

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Speaker 1: as we recounted in the previous episode, is Athena's incorporating

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Speaker 1: of her petrifying head into her own shield. Uh. That

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Speaker 1: that Gorgonian face becoming part of her own emblem. And

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Speaker 1: we know that Medusa's head and the Gorgonian head itself,

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Speaker 1: these were common motifs on vice's sculptures and helmets, shields, etcetera.

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Speaker 1: Were pieces of armor and uh, and not only for

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Speaker 1: mythic heroes, but for common soldiers as well. And what's more,

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Speaker 1: this practice of utilizing the Gorgon's head pre dates the

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Speaker 1: more evolved versions of the Medusa myth. You know that

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Speaker 1: the real story shaped elements that we refer back to

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Speaker 1: again and again. Yeah, I think that's right. I mean,

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Speaker 1: I think it's hard to know for sure, but it seems,

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Speaker 1: based on the evidence we have that before the fully

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Speaker 1: formed story of Medusa existed, there was simply the Gorgonian,

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Speaker 1: the magical image a protective amulet bearing this terrifying monstrous

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Speaker 1: head with grinding teeth and a lolling tongue often tusks uh,

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Speaker 1: sometimes kind of gender fluid. It could be it could

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Speaker 1: be female, could be male with a beard, could incorporate

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Speaker 1: some kind of snake imagery in the hair, but often not.

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Speaker 1: It's just generally this terrifying face. So before there was

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Speaker 1: the character, there was the ritual magical image. Even in

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Speaker 1: Homer's Iliad, you know, one of the great literary sources

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Speaker 1: giving us access to early information about Greek myths, you

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Speaker 1: don't get the full Medusa story, you don't get a

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Speaker 1: full ledged character. Instead, you just get this image, recurring

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Speaker 1: the image of the disembodied head of the gorgon, which

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Speaker 1: Homer describes as a thing grim and awful to behold. Yeah. So,

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Speaker 1: so basically the idea is that Medusa pre existed is

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Speaker 1: a terrifying, petrifying disembodied head um. Like you said, sometimes

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Speaker 1: the gorgon was even bearded, and sometimes it was male. Uh,

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Speaker 1: and it was a common decoration. And then the persea

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Speaker 1: smith comes along, at least in part to provide a

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Speaker 1: backstory for the monster, to to literally flesh her out,

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Speaker 1: to give her a body so as to explain the

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Speaker 1: absence of a body. So if this origin is correct,

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Speaker 1: you know you can imagine cases where you have like

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Speaker 1: soldiers hanging around the campfire and they've all got this

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Speaker 1: terrifying head on their shields, and somebody's looking at the

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Speaker 1: shields and being like, I wonder, I wonder who that is. Yeah,

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Speaker 1: I mean it's easy to imagine how a lot of

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Speaker 1: these things come come around. You know. Storyteller is just

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Speaker 1: sort of coming up with some thing to explain it,

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Speaker 1: incorporating it into some other story they heard. Uh, and

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Speaker 1: that monster was the Medusa, the very face on your shield,

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Speaker 1: that sort of thing, or it's or you could also

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Speaker 1: compare it to what we do in the modern era

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Speaker 1: with we have say a terrifying we'll say, certainly a

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Speaker 1: more fleshed out intoday, but we have something like say

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Speaker 1: Hannibal Lecter, and people are like, oh, this character is great. Uh,

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Speaker 1: I want to learn more about him? What's his backstory?

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Speaker 1: Where do you come from? Can we have a whole

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Speaker 1: book that just explains where we came from? And? Uh?

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Speaker 1: You know so and you can. You can look at

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Speaker 1: examples of that numerous works, you know, and you make

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Speaker 1: something that appeals to people, people want to keep tugging

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Speaker 1: on that threat. Well, that's that's something I think a

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Speaker 1: lot of times gets out of hand and is can

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Speaker 1: be very unsatisfying because a lot of times people don't

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Speaker 1: realize that the scarcity of a beloved element in a

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Speaker 1: narrative is exactly what makes it so beloved. Like, you know,

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Speaker 1: Hannibal Lecter in the original Silence of the Lamb's movie,

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Speaker 1: I know it's not he was a character and other

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Speaker 1: stuff before that, but and you know the Jonathan Demmi movie,

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Speaker 1: I would say he's especially effective as a character because

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Speaker 1: he's in the movie so little. He's you know, he's

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Speaker 1: got less than twenty minutes of screen time or whatever. Yeah,

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Speaker 1: I would agree, yeah, and certainly in in both both

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Speaker 1: the Book's Red Dragon and Silence of the Lambs. It's

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Speaker 1: very that's very much the case. He's a key character,

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Speaker 1: but he's not your primary character. You're not spending just

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Speaker 1: oodles of time with him. The mystery remains. And so yeah,

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Speaker 1: you say, oh, I want a whole book about Hannibal Lector,

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Speaker 1: I want to know his whole backstory because he's so cool,

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Speaker 1: is so interesting, so mysterious, And then you get that

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Speaker 1: and it's like, Okay, I mean the same thing that

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Speaker 1: people are like, I want a Boba Fette movie, Like

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Speaker 1: is that going to be as good as you think

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Speaker 1: it is, yeah, exactly, but to bring it back to Medusa.

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Speaker 1: So I think this idea that the the image of

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Speaker 1: Medusa's severed head could in fact pre date the fully

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Speaker 1: formed myth of Medusa's life and and you know her

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Speaker 1: origins and uh and her role in the Perseus story. UH.

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Speaker 1: Like that ordering is is interesting to consider because again

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Speaker 1: it's something that's difficult to prove conclusively, but it does

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Speaker 1: appear to be going on with a number of things

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Speaker 1: in the history of myth and religion around the world.

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Speaker 1: This was a point often made by the people known

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Speaker 1: as the Cambridge Ritualists. In Lemming's book, he identifies specifically

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Speaker 1: the scholar Jane Harrison as one pushing this idea that

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Speaker 1: many myths that we have access to today very likely

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Speaker 1: emerge as a response to rituals and practices rather than

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Speaker 1: as the cause of them. And of course this would

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Speaker 1: match up pretty well with the ordering of evidence that

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Speaker 1: we have in the history of Medusa. Not that there

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Speaker 1: was like a myth of Perseus and Medusa which gave

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Speaker 1: rise to the use of Medusa emblems on shields and

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Speaker 1: armor and money and stuff, but exactly the inverse, that

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Speaker 1: there was a tradition of displaying a fearsome gorgon head

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Speaker 1: on objects as a kind of ritual protective magic, and

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Speaker 1: you know, to scare away the bad demons, to frighten

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Speaker 1: your enemies, and so forth. And over time, these rituals,

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Speaker 1: the art, the spells gave rise to a myth to

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Speaker 1: explain it, Who is this scary head? We keep stamping

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Speaker 1: on things? Where did she come from? And then as

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Speaker 1: the myth changes, grows more complex and develops along with

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Speaker 1: the cultural values and interests over time. So in that

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Speaker 1: the myth of the gorgon's head is so ancient that

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Speaker 1: Liming points out that it's its origins likely reside outside

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Speaker 1: of Greece entirely. Now we should remind ourselves that that

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Speaker 1: this is quite common in myth and religion. An idea

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Speaker 1: or a deity from one culture grows into or is

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Speaker 1: absorbed by another. For instance, gray eyed Athena is said

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Speaker 1: to have sprung from Zeus's head, but we can be

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Speaker 1: sure that she did not emerge wholesale from the Greek imagination.

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Speaker 1: Is is her roots seemed to go back through the

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Speaker 1: various powerful goddesses of Proto into Indo Europeans sumere in culture.

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Speaker 1: Living gives the specific example of Aphrodite uh and her

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Speaker 1: likely connection to a nana and ishtar in ancient Sumerian Babylon,

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Speaker 1: and Leming points out a few different traditions of Gorgonian

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Speaker 1: heads that predate Medusa. Heads that gaze out at us

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Speaker 1: with the steel faces and petrifying eyes. Uh. There reminds

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Speaker 1: me a lot of the kind of lion face one

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Speaker 1: makes in in yoga. But also you see similar faces

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Speaker 1: that are made snarling faces that are made in various

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Speaker 1: forms of dance or you know, bodily performance. As a scholar,

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Speaker 1: Tobin Cibers described it, that's the emblem of of the

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Speaker 1: stupefying look and and some of the examples that Leming

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Speaker 1: points out. There's the Mesopotamian demon whom Baba uh quote,

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Speaker 1: when he looks at someone, it is the look of death. Yeah.

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Speaker 1: And I think with whom Baba you get a similar

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Speaker 1: dynamic to Medusa, where there's this tradition of ritual imagery.

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Speaker 1: It's this kind of like emon head that has some

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Speaker 1: kind of ritual magical power and as as displayed on objects.

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Speaker 1: But also, of course Himbaba appears as a character in

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Speaker 1: the mythology shows up in the epic of Gilgamesh as

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Speaker 1: as a villain that must be destroyed, right, and destroying

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Speaker 1: they do. They in fact, they decapitate the monster, which

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Speaker 1: is key in all of this as well. There's also

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Speaker 1: the God Best of Egypt household protector God with possible

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Speaker 1: sub Saharan origins, and despite the Egyptian dependency on side

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Speaker 1: profile imagery, Bess is always depicted facing out towards the viewer.

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Speaker 1: I want to come back to that. And additionally, some

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Speaker 1: early Greek versions of the bodied Medusa apparently have the

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Speaker 1: look of a pre existing head motif having been basically

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Speaker 1: stamped onto a body, like you know, kind of kind

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Speaker 1: of coming back to this idea of like let's let's

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Speaker 1: just let's match this up, let's let's let's provide a

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Speaker 1: body for this, and it's just kind of like almost

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Speaker 1: like the ancient Greek version of very rough photoshop that

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Speaker 1: one might encounter. Yes, some of the ancient Greek Medusa

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Speaker 1: imagery almost seems like, you know when people do that

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Speaker 1: like bad on purpose ms paint drawing of something, where

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Speaker 1: they like like take a square of somebody's head and

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Speaker 1: pasted onto a weird stick figure. Yeah. Yeah, And but

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Speaker 1: I think it also kind of speaks to the idea

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Speaker 1: that these things were too like the head of the

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Speaker 1: Gorgonian head was like a distinct image, a distinct pre

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Speaker 1: existing image, and therefore the incorporation of it with the

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Speaker 1: body would would be inherently rough and imperfect, and you

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Speaker 1: would only get a true joining of the two later on.

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Speaker 1: But but I want to come back to this idea

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Speaker 1: of of the Gorgonian head staring directly at the viewer

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Speaker 1: of the art. But but in in modern like cinematic interpretations,

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Speaker 1: we see this as well. In fact, we see it

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Speaker 1: fantastically in Ray Ray Harryhausen's Medusa that we encounter in

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Speaker 1: the original Clash of the Titans. There is at least

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Speaker 1: I think there's there are a couple of sequences, but

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Speaker 1: there's one scene in particular where she breaks the fourth

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Speaker 1: wall and stares to rectly at the audience. Yeah, it's

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Speaker 1: like the Great Train Robbery, you know, Yeah, or like

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Speaker 1: Good Fellows when Joe Pesci shoots the gun at the camera. Yeah.

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Speaker 1: Like I think, all you know, those are examples of

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Speaker 1: of things that are in the tradition of the Gorgonian

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Speaker 1: head as well. Yeah, but I feel like Harry Howsing

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Speaker 1: in particular with with Clash eighty one. Yeah, you know,

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Speaker 1: he and he and or the filmmakers. I think they

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Speaker 1: realize that it's not a gorgon unless it breaks the

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Speaker 1: fourth wall and does look directly at the audience. And

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Speaker 1: this is key because the Gorgonian head is in all

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Speaker 1: of these examples pure apotropaic magic. Yeah, totally. I mean

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Speaker 1: apotropaic magic is one of the most interesting subjects to me.

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Speaker 1: I I love thinking about this stuff. So apotropaic magic

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Speaker 1: means magic that is used to ward off evil or

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Speaker 1: threats or something like that. Uh. You know a classic

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Speaker 1: example that we'll get to more later. You know the

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Speaker 1: types of talisman's that you could have to ward off

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Speaker 1: the evil eye. That will come up more in a

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Speaker 1: bit here. But yeah, I love this idea. Lemming brings

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Speaker 1: this up human and the idea that in ancient art

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Speaker 1: if you look at a lot of the representations of

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Speaker 1: humanoid figures, humans and gods and stuff from the ancient

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Speaker 1: Near East in the Mesopotamian region, a whole lot of

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Speaker 1: it has UH figures depicted in profile facing to the side.

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Speaker 1: Think about ancient Egyptian artwork, and a lot of ancient

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Speaker 1: Greek artwork that you're gonna have heads facing to the side.

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Speaker 1: The Medusa figure and the other apotropic monster figures such

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Speaker 1: as Humbaba are going to be depicted in defiance of

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Speaker 1: this art that often looks directly at you. And it's

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Speaker 1: almost as if the art is seeing you back. You know,

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Speaker 1: you're looking at it and it's looking at you. And

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Speaker 1: I think that the weirdness of this may have to

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Speaker 1: do with these ancient taboos about the evil eye, about

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Speaker 1: being looked at. That like having a piece of art

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Speaker 1: that stares directly into your face as you look at

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Speaker 1: it is in a way inherently threatening, whether the creature

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Speaker 1: depicted as monsters or not, all the more so if

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Speaker 1: it is monstrous. So I was reading a bit about

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Speaker 1: this in an essay by a met Museum curator to

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Speaker 1: accompany an exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art on

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Speaker 1: Medusa and Hybrid Monsters and art history. Her name is

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Speaker 1: Kiki Carriglu, and the essay was called Dangerous Beauty, Medusa

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Speaker 1: and Classical Art and the way she describes it as

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Speaker 1: so she's talking about the the archaic gorgon face, the

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Speaker 1: face of the gorgon before we get the later derived

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Speaker 1: versions that are associated with the full fledged a myth.

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Speaker 1: She writes, quote, the archaic gorgon is always full face moreover,

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Speaker 1: glaring directly at the viewer. This combination of frontality and

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Speaker 1: monstrosity and a single immediately recognizable figure is what makes

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Speaker 1: the Greek gorgon such an original, invocative image of radical

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Speaker 1: difference of the absolute other. Uh. And so she talks

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Speaker 1: about some of the the apotropaic uses of the gorgon

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Speaker 1: face that, you know, you go back in history, a

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Speaker 1: lot of the things that would have the gorgon on

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Speaker 1: it would be not just shields used in battle, but

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Speaker 1: but for example, funerary monuments, you know, so the gorgon's

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Speaker 1: face on the funeral or the tomb door or something

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Speaker 1: is an apotropaic emblem to protect the tomb from evil.

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Speaker 1: But also this was really interesting to me. Carrolu talks

424
00:24:19,800 --> 00:24:24,040
Speaker 1: about how there is a transition from archaic Greek art

425
00:24:24,200 --> 00:24:28,520
Speaker 1: to classical Greek art, wherein the classical period Medusa was

426
00:24:28,600 --> 00:24:34,280
Speaker 1: quote progressively transformed into an attractive young woman. So, beginning

427
00:24:34,280 --> 00:24:38,119
Speaker 1: around the fifth century b C, art representing Medusa began

428
00:24:38,160 --> 00:24:43,080
Speaker 1: to transform from mainly terrifying be steel heads with tusks

429
00:24:43,160 --> 00:24:48,640
Speaker 1: and poor sign features and stuff like that into increasingly humanoid,

430
00:24:49,119 --> 00:24:53,800
Speaker 1: feminine and beautiful, and Caroglu points out that this transition

431
00:24:53,960 --> 00:24:58,040
Speaker 1: in representation over time applies actually not just to Medusa,

432
00:24:58,160 --> 00:25:01,520
Speaker 1: but is is sort of character ristic of a an

433
00:25:01,560 --> 00:25:04,960
Speaker 1: overall trend in Greek art in how it depicts mythical

434
00:25:05,200 --> 00:25:10,240
Speaker 1: female monsters and hybrids, including sphinxes like the sphinx story

435
00:25:10,280 --> 00:25:13,119
Speaker 1: that you get in the Legend of Oedipus, but also

436
00:25:13,240 --> 00:25:17,240
Speaker 1: sirens and the sea monster Skilla. You've got these archaic

437
00:25:17,320 --> 00:25:21,480
Speaker 1: depictions in which they are monstrous in human, gross and

438
00:25:21,520 --> 00:25:24,359
Speaker 1: all that, and then around the fifth century b C.

439
00:25:25,200 --> 00:25:31,160
Speaker 1: These monsters become more notably feminine and beautiful. Yeah, it's

440
00:25:31,160 --> 00:25:34,280
Speaker 1: an interesting transformation and one that is going to be

441
00:25:34,400 --> 00:25:37,239
Speaker 1: key to a number of these different interpretations that we're

442
00:25:37,240 --> 00:25:39,639
Speaker 1: going to be discussing and the way that Medusa was

443
00:25:39,840 --> 00:25:44,240
Speaker 1: utilized by subsequent cultures. Absolutely, should we take a break. Yeah,

444
00:25:44,359 --> 00:25:46,600
Speaker 1: let's take a quick break, but we will be right

445
00:25:46,640 --> 00:25:53,600
Speaker 1: back with more of the Gorgon's Thank alright, we're back.

446
00:25:54,000 --> 00:25:56,840
Speaker 1: So we started the episode today by reading from a poem.

447
00:25:56,920 --> 00:26:01,160
Speaker 1: That poem was a poem by Percy Shelley. It's called

448
00:26:01,240 --> 00:26:04,959
Speaker 1: on the Medusa of Leonardo da Vinci in the Florentine Gallery.

449
00:26:05,040 --> 00:26:07,920
Speaker 1: And there's a funny thing about this poem. Uh. There

450
00:26:08,080 --> 00:26:10,720
Speaker 1: is no painting of Medusa by Leonardo da Vinci, at

451
00:26:10,760 --> 00:26:14,480
Speaker 1: least not that we have right this this painting or

452
00:26:14,680 --> 00:26:18,960
Speaker 1: or in all likelihood a pair of paintings are lost works, which,

453
00:26:19,040 --> 00:26:21,439
Speaker 1: especially when you're talking about Leonardo da Vinci, there's just

454
00:26:21,480 --> 00:26:25,080
Speaker 1: something endlessly fascinating about that, right, the idea that there

455
00:26:25,119 --> 00:26:27,720
Speaker 1: were there are these works that he created that you know,

456
00:26:27,760 --> 00:26:30,800
Speaker 1: other people saw in an attest to existing that are

457
00:26:30,840 --> 00:26:34,320
Speaker 1: just no longer with us. Um. But I think I

458
00:26:34,359 --> 00:26:36,960
Speaker 1: think even Shelley was not actually looking at a Da

459
00:26:37,000 --> 00:26:41,520
Speaker 1: Vinci painting. He was mistaken, right right right, there were

460
00:26:41,640 --> 00:26:44,760
Speaker 1: um so, there were at least two early paintings that

461
00:26:44,800 --> 00:26:48,280
Speaker 1: were described in I think in a Life of Leonardo

462
00:26:48,359 --> 00:26:51,960
Speaker 1: da Vinci. Uh this would have been um uh georgo

463
00:26:52,240 --> 00:26:56,199
Speaker 1: Vasari's biography of the artist. But then later there's a

464
00:26:56,240 --> 00:26:59,560
Speaker 1: six painting by a Flemish painter that has at times

465
00:26:59,560 --> 00:27:03,480
Speaker 1: been wrongfully wrongfully attributed as the work of Da Vinci.

466
00:27:03,520 --> 00:27:06,000
Speaker 1: It's still, you know, wonderful to behold, but it is.

467
00:27:06,119 --> 00:27:09,359
Speaker 1: It is not authentically da Vinci um. But yeah, this

468
00:27:09,400 --> 00:27:12,159
Speaker 1: painting would go on to inspire Percy Shelley in the

469
00:27:12,200 --> 00:27:14,760
Speaker 1: writing of this poem. Now, one of the things about

470
00:27:15,200 --> 00:27:18,000
Speaker 1: the sort of lore surrounding Da Vinci's painting is that

471
00:27:18,440 --> 00:27:22,520
Speaker 1: is that this painting or pair of paintings they they

472
00:27:22,520 --> 00:27:27,280
Speaker 1: supposedly like, really captured uh you know, the beautiful terror

473
00:27:27,440 --> 00:27:31,399
Speaker 1: really captured the magic of the Gorgonian head in a

474
00:27:31,440 --> 00:27:34,560
Speaker 1: way that like unsettled people when they saw it. So

475
00:27:34,640 --> 00:27:37,960
Speaker 1: that just makes the this, uh, this these particular lost

476
00:27:38,080 --> 00:27:41,520
Speaker 1: works even more amazing to think about. Yeah, I believe

477
00:27:41,640 --> 00:27:44,080
Speaker 1: I read. I can't remember in which of our sources

478
00:27:44,080 --> 00:27:45,600
Speaker 1: it was. It might have been in the liming, but

479
00:27:45,880 --> 00:27:47,800
Speaker 1: one of the sources we were looking at talked about

480
00:27:47,800 --> 00:27:52,199
Speaker 1: how it might have been Da Vinci's painting that was

481
00:27:52,240 --> 00:27:55,880
Speaker 1: actually the first to show Medusa not just with snakes

482
00:27:56,160 --> 00:27:59,600
Speaker 1: entwined in her hair, but with snakes as her hair

483
00:27:59,800 --> 00:28:03,440
Speaker 1: that hurt. That's all the hair she's got. Yeah. Interesting,

484
00:28:03,800 --> 00:28:06,159
Speaker 1: and and I I can't help but take the spectative

485
00:28:06,280 --> 00:28:09,320
Speaker 1: leap too and try to imagine, oh, well, maybe maybe

486
00:28:09,359 --> 00:28:13,359
Speaker 1: these paintings are lost because da Vinci, with his great

487
00:28:13,480 --> 00:28:17,359
Speaker 1: art was able to legitimately capture the power of Medusa's gaze,

488
00:28:17,600 --> 00:28:21,800
Speaker 1: and these paintings actually petrified people, actually turned people to stone,

489
00:28:22,119 --> 00:28:23,600
Speaker 1: and so they had to be in a locked away

490
00:28:23,720 --> 00:28:30,040
Speaker 1: or destroyed, right like a Renaissance van helsing yea, yeah,

491
00:28:30,040 --> 00:28:32,399
Speaker 1: as far as I know, they haven't been utilized in

492
00:28:32,560 --> 00:28:36,240
Speaker 1: horror fiction, uh that way, but it seems like a

493
00:28:36,280 --> 00:28:38,800
Speaker 1: given like somebody and it hasn't been done already. Somebody

494
00:28:38,800 --> 00:28:41,680
Speaker 1: should do that totally, alright. So we talked a little

495
00:28:41,720 --> 00:28:45,040
Speaker 1: bit earlier about apotrepeg magic and the evil eye. Let's

496
00:28:45,080 --> 00:28:47,600
Speaker 1: let's come back to the evil eye. Yeah, so so

497
00:28:47,720 --> 00:28:50,320
Speaker 1: letting points out that that, uh, you know, this is

498
00:28:50,360 --> 00:28:53,000
Speaker 1: all of course connected to this concept of the evil eye.

499
00:28:53,680 --> 00:28:57,400
Speaker 1: Medusa's gaze has the power to petrify, and certainly the

500
00:28:57,480 --> 00:29:02,240
Speaker 1: face is key to the aforementioned um apotropaic magic. But

501
00:29:02,320 --> 00:29:05,000
Speaker 1: as with other evil eyes and myths such one of

502
00:29:05,000 --> 00:29:09,320
Speaker 1: my favorites is Ballor of the Baleful Eye and Irish mythology,

503
00:29:09,360 --> 00:29:13,000
Speaker 1: whose his eye is this terrifying beam of death but

504
00:29:13,200 --> 00:29:20,320
Speaker 1: is covered by his long mutated brow. Uh you know.

505
00:29:20,360 --> 00:29:22,480
Speaker 1: You see this in other various cultures as well, where

506
00:29:22,600 --> 00:29:25,200
Speaker 1: in some form or another there is an eye that

507
00:29:25,320 --> 00:29:28,720
Speaker 1: curses whatever it looks at, and oftentimes it is disembodied,

508
00:29:29,280 --> 00:29:32,120
Speaker 1: which is what we see with the Gray Sisters. Oh yeah,

509
00:29:32,160 --> 00:29:35,160
Speaker 1: the Gray Sisters. Uh, they share one eye between them

510
00:29:35,200 --> 00:29:38,880
Speaker 1: and Perseus snatches it in order to to you know,

511
00:29:39,040 --> 00:29:42,640
Speaker 1: muscle them to get information out. One thing that's funny though,

512
00:29:42,720 --> 00:29:44,440
Speaker 1: is I can't remember if we talked about this in

513
00:29:44,440 --> 00:29:47,480
Speaker 1: the last episode or not. Um, what's going on with

514
00:29:47,520 --> 00:29:51,080
Speaker 1: the tooth? Like, what does the tooth do? Does the

515
00:29:51,120 --> 00:29:53,719
Speaker 1: tooth do anything? I don't know. The tooth feels a

516
00:29:53,720 --> 00:29:56,400
Speaker 1: lot of the tooth, for one thing, is often abandoned

517
00:29:56,440 --> 00:30:01,880
Speaker 1: by by in reinterpretations, you know, uh, just people. Yeah,

518
00:30:01,880 --> 00:30:03,640
Speaker 1: they don't know quite what to do with the tooth,

519
00:30:03,760 --> 00:30:07,640
Speaker 1: and the tooth to me anyway, feels like it's just

520
00:30:07,720 --> 00:30:09,960
Speaker 1: part of a hag joke, you know, like, oh, they're

521
00:30:10,000 --> 00:30:12,680
Speaker 1: old and they have you know, they don't have any teeth.

522
00:30:12,720 --> 00:30:15,200
Speaker 1: In fact, they have only one teeth that they all

523
00:30:15,240 --> 00:30:18,400
Speaker 1: have to share. It has a you know, absurd, like

524
00:30:18,480 --> 00:30:22,000
Speaker 1: susical kind of sense to it. I think you're right

525
00:30:22,000 --> 00:30:23,920
Speaker 1: about that. Yeah, it must just be like it was.

526
00:30:24,040 --> 00:30:27,080
Speaker 1: It was a detail added for color that then nobody

527
00:30:27,120 --> 00:30:29,000
Speaker 1: could really figure out what to do with it? Yeah,

528
00:30:29,160 --> 00:30:32,040
Speaker 1: or certainly it's uh, you know, the import has been

529
00:30:32,080 --> 00:30:35,640
Speaker 1: lost over time, Like you can't chow with one tooth,

530
00:30:35,720 --> 00:30:37,760
Speaker 1: You've got to have at least two. Yeah, what are

531
00:30:37,760 --> 00:30:40,479
Speaker 1: you gonna do with it? So anyway, we end up

532
00:30:40,520 --> 00:30:44,360
Speaker 1: focusing more on the eye. So the general belief is

533
00:30:44,400 --> 00:30:47,000
Speaker 1: that the concept of the evil eye arises from the

534
00:30:47,120 --> 00:30:51,400
Speaker 1: universal dislike of being stared at or of being stared down.

535
00:30:52,440 --> 00:30:55,520
Speaker 1: And there's there's also something more to this, as discussed

536
00:30:55,520 --> 00:31:01,560
Speaker 1: by Jean Paul Satra in Being and Thingness. So Sarta

537
00:31:01,720 --> 00:31:05,000
Speaker 1: considered this key to the meaning of the medusa myth.

538
00:31:05,320 --> 00:31:10,280
Speaker 1: Medusa represents the objectifying gaze of the other, which robs

539
00:31:10,400 --> 00:31:13,720
Speaker 1: one of the self. So basically, you know, we're all

540
00:31:13,760 --> 00:31:16,400
Speaker 1: just bobbing about in the world, self obsessed. It's all

541
00:31:16,400 --> 00:31:18,800
Speaker 1: about us, it's our story and how we're interacting with

542
00:31:18,840 --> 00:31:21,760
Speaker 1: the world. But then there's this stare from another, this

543
00:31:21,960 --> 00:31:27,200
Speaker 1: petrifying stare, and Sartra wrote that if one looks at something,

544
00:31:27,680 --> 00:31:30,680
Speaker 1: the one who looks is the center of consciousness. The

545
00:31:30,720 --> 00:31:34,960
Speaker 1: one who looks controls the world. But if another looks

546
00:31:35,120 --> 00:31:38,520
Speaker 1: back at the looker, if the looker knows that they

547
00:31:38,520 --> 00:31:42,360
Speaker 1: are looked upon, they become an objectified self in the

548
00:31:42,400 --> 00:31:46,160
Speaker 1: eyes of another. And so the staring other in this case,

549
00:31:46,200 --> 00:31:49,480
Speaker 1: say the Gorgonian head or the evil eye, the staring

550
00:31:49,640 --> 00:31:53,600
Speaker 1: other is the thief of consciousness. This is interesting and

551
00:31:53,640 --> 00:31:56,240
Speaker 1: I think this there's some truth to this that goes

552
00:31:56,320 --> 00:31:59,840
Speaker 1: beyond just you know, so Sarta is trying to apply

553
00:32:00,080 --> 00:32:03,560
Speaker 1: this to his view of um uh, you know, absurdity

554
00:32:03,680 --> 00:32:06,440
Speaker 1: and and chasing after the idea of the meaning of life,

555
00:32:06,480 --> 00:32:09,880
Speaker 1: which might be illusory, but uh, there's something to this

556
00:32:09,960 --> 00:32:12,800
Speaker 1: in our basic primal fears, like as soon as as

557
00:32:12,880 --> 00:32:16,000
Speaker 1: soon as you realize you are being looked at, you

558
00:32:16,040 --> 00:32:20,240
Speaker 1: feel amazingly vulnerable. Being looked at in a way reminds

559
00:32:20,280 --> 00:32:23,520
Speaker 1: you that you yourself are a not just a subject

560
00:32:23,600 --> 00:32:27,120
Speaker 1: but an object, That you are impermanent, that your death

561
00:32:27,240 --> 00:32:30,960
Speaker 1: is inevitable, that you are subject to forces outside your control.

562
00:32:31,520 --> 00:32:34,480
Speaker 1: Being looked at and realizing you're being looked at is

563
00:32:34,640 --> 00:32:38,000
Speaker 1: in many ways the ultimate sort of like uh, terror

564
00:32:38,000 --> 00:32:40,320
Speaker 1: and loss of control, I mean why is why is

565
00:32:40,360 --> 00:32:43,120
Speaker 1: one of the most terrifying things to people, like public

566
00:32:43,160 --> 00:32:46,400
Speaker 1: speaking or public appearances, you know, being up on a

567
00:32:46,480 --> 00:32:48,920
Speaker 1: stage in front of an audience of people looking at

568
00:32:48,960 --> 00:32:52,400
Speaker 1: them is horrifying. And it goes beyond just being afraid

569
00:32:52,440 --> 00:32:55,200
Speaker 1: that you're gonna say the wrong thing or something. There's

570
00:32:55,360 --> 00:32:57,560
Speaker 1: like this deep dread to it. It feels like it

571
00:32:57,560 --> 00:33:00,760
Speaker 1: gets down to something very basic and very threatening that

572
00:33:00,840 --> 00:33:02,640
Speaker 1: you can't even look at. Almost as if it's the

573
00:33:02,680 --> 00:33:05,520
Speaker 1: image of Medusa. Yeah, yeah, and certainly if you were

574
00:33:05,960 --> 00:33:08,800
Speaker 1: you know, there's sort of the casual objectification of everybody

575
00:33:08,800 --> 00:33:11,160
Speaker 1: and everything in the world. Again, that goes back to

576
00:33:11,240 --> 00:33:13,640
Speaker 1: just the way that we think about ourselves and our narrative.

577
00:33:13,840 --> 00:33:16,400
Speaker 1: But then also if you're if you're actively engaging in

578
00:33:16,480 --> 00:33:21,880
Speaker 1: objectification and and the objectified individual looks back at you,

579
00:33:21,880 --> 00:33:24,880
Speaker 1: you know that it it has a powerful effect. Like

580
00:33:24,920 --> 00:33:29,600
Speaker 1: I think back to the Wrong Frick film from Baraka

581
00:33:29,880 --> 00:33:32,640
Speaker 1: and some of the other subsequent works like this, with

582
00:33:33,120 --> 00:33:36,880
Speaker 1: in which you have these lengthy they're not images, they're

583
00:33:36,920 --> 00:33:42,560
Speaker 1: like lengthy film portraits of individual staring directly back at

584
00:33:42,560 --> 00:33:45,080
Speaker 1: the camera. You know, And of course you see this

585
00:33:45,120 --> 00:33:48,960
Speaker 1: in portraiture as well, like the idea that that the

586
00:33:48,960 --> 00:33:51,200
Speaker 1: the subject is meeting your gaze. You can have this

587
00:33:51,240 --> 00:33:55,000
Speaker 1: profound effect, you know, you um, you can feel uncomfortable

588
00:33:55,640 --> 00:33:58,080
Speaker 1: at times, even so I think there is. There's a

589
00:33:58,080 --> 00:34:00,840
Speaker 1: lot of truth to what he is saying here. Now,

590
00:34:00,880 --> 00:34:02,840
Speaker 1: all this stuff we're talking about is at the level

591
00:34:02,840 --> 00:34:05,320
Speaker 1: of like human consciousness. You know, what kinds of things

592
00:34:05,360 --> 00:34:08,480
Speaker 1: we with our conscious minds realize about our own nature.

593
00:34:08,600 --> 00:34:11,120
Speaker 1: When we suddenly feel looked at, you know, doesn't make

594
00:34:11,120 --> 00:34:13,640
Speaker 1: you realize you're an object? Does it make you realize

595
00:34:13,640 --> 00:34:15,880
Speaker 1: your impermanent, you're going to die and all that. But

596
00:34:15,920 --> 00:34:18,680
Speaker 1: I would say even at the level of you know, animals,

597
00:34:18,719 --> 00:34:23,320
Speaker 1: without that level of consciousness, probably there's there's more practical

598
00:34:23,440 --> 00:34:26,840
Speaker 1: reality to the threat of being looked at. Right, Yeah,

599
00:34:27,280 --> 00:34:30,719
Speaker 1: we see something like this in the natural world. You know,

600
00:34:30,760 --> 00:34:33,640
Speaker 1: the idea of the evil eye. It reminds one of

601
00:34:33,680 --> 00:34:39,680
Speaker 1: eye spots, adaptations of or accidental pattern formation artifacts in

602
00:34:39,760 --> 00:34:44,360
Speaker 1: a species that serve to either deceive potential predators or prey,

603
00:34:44,480 --> 00:34:48,160
Speaker 1: or to draw a predator's attention away from more vulnerable

604
00:34:48,200 --> 00:34:51,920
Speaker 1: parts of an animal. Now, with predators in particularly, uh,

605
00:34:52,120 --> 00:34:54,920
Speaker 1: nothing beats a sure thing, right or a near sure thing.

606
00:34:54,960 --> 00:34:57,800
Speaker 1: If an attack does not go exactly as planned, a

607
00:34:57,920 --> 00:35:01,319
Speaker 1: number of consequences can occur. Prey might get away, in

608
00:35:01,360 --> 00:35:04,520
Speaker 1: which case energy and time is wasted. Other prey might

609
00:35:04,520 --> 00:35:07,759
Speaker 1: be alerted and frightened away as well, we're still an

610
00:35:07,800 --> 00:35:10,680
Speaker 1: alert prey animal could have the chance to counterattack and

611
00:35:10,760 --> 00:35:14,640
Speaker 1: inflict damage, and such an injury can prove deadly. Cheetahs,

612
00:35:14,680 --> 00:35:17,520
Speaker 1: for instance, rarely go after something like an ostrich because

613
00:35:17,520 --> 00:35:20,640
Speaker 1: while the payoff for a successful hunt is really good,

614
00:35:21,000 --> 00:35:24,919
Speaker 1: injury can mean starvation when your kills depend on high

615
00:35:24,920 --> 00:35:27,640
Speaker 1: speed attacks. Yeah, I mean for a lot of predation

616
00:35:27,680 --> 00:35:30,680
Speaker 1: in the natural world, especially of like large land animals,

617
00:35:30,680 --> 00:35:33,880
Speaker 1: you're not gonna be going after healthy adults most of

618
00:35:33,880 --> 00:35:36,560
Speaker 1: the time. That's a that's a dangerous game. You want

619
00:35:36,560 --> 00:35:39,560
Speaker 1: to pick off like juveniles or the sick and infirm

620
00:35:39,640 --> 00:35:42,040
Speaker 1: if you can, right and uh. And if you're going

621
00:35:42,120 --> 00:35:44,200
Speaker 1: to pick something off, it's better if it doesn't have

622
00:35:44,239 --> 00:35:46,960
Speaker 1: its full attention on you, right uh. So you know,

623
00:35:47,080 --> 00:35:49,920
Speaker 1: keeping an eye on your enemy at all times is

624
00:35:49,960 --> 00:35:52,879
Speaker 1: a great tactic, though that's that's quite a resource drain.

625
00:35:52,960 --> 00:35:56,440
Speaker 1: So fooling your enemy into thinking it's being watched at

626
00:35:56,440 --> 00:35:59,040
Speaker 1: all times that's an even better tactic. And we see

627
00:35:59,040 --> 00:36:02,800
Speaker 1: this incount us examples of ey spot evolution. Now, to

628
00:36:02,840 --> 00:36:05,280
Speaker 1: be clear, not all eye spots are there to mimic

629
00:36:05,360 --> 00:36:08,520
Speaker 1: watching eyes sometimes they're there to to fool a predator

630
00:36:08,560 --> 00:36:10,800
Speaker 1: again into attacking a less vulnerable part of the animal,

631
00:36:10,920 --> 00:36:13,680
Speaker 1: or they play into mate selection, et cetera. But in

632
00:36:13,719 --> 00:36:16,840
Speaker 1: some cases, yes, eye spots seem to serve as anti

633
00:36:16,880 --> 00:36:20,920
Speaker 1: predator adaptations. And we also see examples of this strategy's

634
00:36:20,920 --> 00:36:26,719
Speaker 1: effectiveness outside of natural adaptation. So, for instance, individuals who

635
00:36:26,719 --> 00:36:30,000
Speaker 1: happened to work in Bengal tiger country have long reported

636
00:36:30,040 --> 00:36:34,560
Speaker 1: success with backwards wooden masks masks of of a human

637
00:36:34,560 --> 00:36:36,320
Speaker 1: face that they wear in the back of their heads

638
00:36:36,560 --> 00:36:40,440
Speaker 1: in an attempt to ward off ambush attacks. Plus, various

639
00:36:40,480 --> 00:36:43,880
Speaker 1: animal species evolved eye spots that in many cases may

640
00:36:43,880 --> 00:36:47,040
Speaker 1: serve to protect them from creeping predators like this. Um.

641
00:36:47,680 --> 00:36:51,840
Speaker 1: One really cool story of in which one uses eyes

642
00:36:51,920 --> 00:36:56,960
Speaker 1: like this involves Australian conservation biologist Dr Neil Jordan's who

643
00:36:57,000 --> 00:36:59,399
Speaker 1: has been experimenting with the use of painted on eye

644
00:36:59,440 --> 00:37:04,160
Speaker 1: spots to protect grazing cattle from lion attacks. Uh. This

645
00:37:04,239 --> 00:37:09,240
Speaker 1: is basically just eyes painted on the rumps of cattle

646
00:37:09,760 --> 00:37:11,680
Speaker 1: and this is all in an effort to cut down

647
00:37:11,680 --> 00:37:15,320
Speaker 1: on lion human interactions that can be harmful or deadly

648
00:37:15,400 --> 00:37:19,520
Speaker 1: on both sides. You know, basically, since lions are ambush hunters,

649
00:37:19,640 --> 00:37:21,959
Speaker 1: they depend on surprise attacks and if they think they've

650
00:37:21,960 --> 00:37:24,640
Speaker 1: been had, they'll abandon the hunt. Or at least that's

651
00:37:24,680 --> 00:37:27,920
Speaker 1: the theory that they're still uh working on. Now, if

652
00:37:27,960 --> 00:37:30,520
Speaker 1: that works, that's not just the protection for the cattle,

653
00:37:30,600 --> 00:37:33,279
Speaker 1: that's obviously a protection for the lions or you know,

654
00:37:33,360 --> 00:37:37,560
Speaker 1: the conservation object here, because what like, if a lion

655
00:37:37,640 --> 00:37:41,719
Speaker 1: attacks cattle, they are at risk of being severely retaliated

656
00:37:41,719 --> 00:37:45,040
Speaker 1: against by farmers and ranchers. Exactly. Yeah, it's it's it's

657
00:37:45,080 --> 00:37:47,920
Speaker 1: all an effort and this was through the Botswana Predator

658
00:37:47,920 --> 00:37:51,480
Speaker 1: of Conservation Trust. This is the Jordan is involved with here,

659
00:37:51,920 --> 00:37:54,200
Speaker 1: and yeah, it's about ultimately trying to cut down on

660
00:37:54,239 --> 00:37:58,719
Speaker 1: the conflict between the lions and the farmers and ultimately

661
00:37:58,719 --> 00:38:01,720
Speaker 1: trying to protect both their triss. But of course, direct

662
00:38:01,719 --> 00:38:04,320
Speaker 1: eye contact with your with your with this particular species

663
00:38:04,400 --> 00:38:07,320
Speaker 1: is not always good. Um. You know, just as direct

664
00:38:07,320 --> 00:38:09,359
Speaker 1: eye contact with an animal that sees you as prey

665
00:38:09,520 --> 00:38:13,120
Speaker 1: might deter attack, such eye contact might encourage aggression from

666
00:38:13,120 --> 00:38:15,560
Speaker 1: a creature that sees who was a potential threat. Um.

667
00:38:15,920 --> 00:38:19,200
Speaker 1: We see this with dogs for instance. And then of

668
00:38:19,200 --> 00:38:22,560
Speaker 1: course there are plenty of known examples with with primates,

669
00:38:22,920 --> 00:38:26,360
Speaker 1: particularly guerrillas. Uh. In fact, in one case back in

670
00:38:26,400 --> 00:38:30,440
Speaker 1: two thousand seven, the Rotterdam Zoo engaged in this wonderful

671
00:38:30,520 --> 00:38:34,480
Speaker 1: reversal of those tiger fooling masks. They were, uh, these

672
00:38:34,640 --> 00:38:37,920
Speaker 1: these eye shades that look like averted eyes, that make

673
00:38:37,960 --> 00:38:40,440
Speaker 1: you look like with cartoon eyes, like you're looking to

674
00:38:40,480 --> 00:38:42,839
Speaker 1: the side. Uh. And they did this to cut down

675
00:38:43,080 --> 00:38:47,480
Speaker 1: on cases of gorillas responding violently to human eye contact. Oh,

676
00:38:47,600 --> 00:38:50,759
Speaker 1: that's interesting. That makes me wonder to be in the

677
00:38:50,800 --> 00:38:54,800
Speaker 1: guerrilla enclosures there. If you're like a status concerned gorilla

678
00:38:54,880 --> 00:38:58,000
Speaker 1: and like just people are constantly walking up staring directly

679
00:38:58,080 --> 00:39:00,799
Speaker 1: at you all day, that must be stressful. Yeah, I mean,

680
00:39:00,880 --> 00:39:03,839
Speaker 1: staring is powerful stuff. I mean, I think even those

681
00:39:03,840 --> 00:39:06,480
Speaker 1: of us with domestic pets in our house can attest

682
00:39:06,560 --> 00:39:09,120
Speaker 1: to just you know how powerful a stair can be.

683
00:39:09,239 --> 00:39:11,600
Speaker 1: If you just start staring at say your cat or

684
00:39:11,640 --> 00:39:13,400
Speaker 1: your dog. I'm not you know, it's not going to

685
00:39:13,480 --> 00:39:16,080
Speaker 1: result in chaos, but you're gonna get it. You're gonna

686
00:39:16,120 --> 00:39:17,960
Speaker 1: get a rise out of them. They're gonna realize I'm

687
00:39:18,000 --> 00:39:20,000
Speaker 1: being stared at? Why am I being stared at? And

688
00:39:20,000 --> 00:39:23,280
Speaker 1: then likewise they'll also turn that around on you at times.

689
00:39:23,640 --> 00:39:27,440
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, I mean, Charlie knows when he's being looked at.

690
00:39:27,480 --> 00:39:29,560
Speaker 1: If I'm looking at something else in the room and

691
00:39:29,600 --> 00:39:31,759
Speaker 1: then I suddenly look at him, he will often just

692
00:39:31,800 --> 00:39:34,279
Speaker 1: start wagging his tail as soon as my eyes go

693
00:39:34,360 --> 00:39:37,320
Speaker 1: to him. So when we're when we're dealing with with staring,

694
00:39:37,440 --> 00:39:39,800
Speaker 1: you know, we're you know, we're not dealing with a

695
00:39:39,880 --> 00:39:45,880
Speaker 1: trivial or even purely human uh conundrum, though certainly the

696
00:39:45,960 --> 00:39:50,000
Speaker 1: human experience makes it all the more complicated. But yeah,

697
00:39:50,040 --> 00:39:53,200
Speaker 1: we're getting into into something deep that deals with who

698
00:39:53,239 --> 00:39:56,759
Speaker 1: we are and how we interact with the world around us. Absolutely.

699
00:39:56,800 --> 00:39:59,680
Speaker 1: I mean, it's not actually surprising to me the more

700
00:39:59,719 --> 00:40:02,360
Speaker 1: that I think about it, that the idea of a

701
00:40:02,520 --> 00:40:08,200
Speaker 1: stare was infused with malevolent magical power throughout the ancient world.

702
00:40:08,360 --> 00:40:10,719
Speaker 1: The idea of that the evil eye that you know,

703
00:40:10,840 --> 00:40:13,319
Speaker 1: you could certain people could look at you in a

704
00:40:13,320 --> 00:40:15,880
Speaker 1: certain way that would curse you or make you sick

705
00:40:16,040 --> 00:40:18,640
Speaker 1: or you know, bring harm magical harm in some way.

706
00:40:19,360 --> 00:40:21,480
Speaker 1: It's the kind of belief that if you don't grow

707
00:40:21,520 --> 00:40:23,920
Speaker 1: up in a culture with that, you know, the belief

708
00:40:24,040 --> 00:40:26,480
Speaker 1: something like that It can feel weird at first until

709
00:40:26,560 --> 00:40:28,640
Speaker 1: you start to think about it. Then it just starts,

710
00:40:29,000 --> 00:40:32,080
Speaker 1: almost as if you know, coming up from some ancient instinct.

711
00:40:32,200 --> 00:40:34,840
Speaker 1: It's just starts to feel more and more true and

712
00:40:35,040 --> 00:40:38,440
Speaker 1: real the more you think about it. Yeah, absolutely, at

713
00:40:38,480 --> 00:40:40,719
Speaker 1: least for me. All Right, we're gonna take one more break,

714
00:40:40,719 --> 00:40:46,400
Speaker 1: but we'll be right back. Thank alright, we're back. So

715
00:40:46,440 --> 00:40:50,239
Speaker 1: at this point, let's turn to Uh, the section that

716
00:40:50,280 --> 00:40:55,080
Speaker 1: we're thinking of is the underlying darkness, getting digging into

717
00:40:55,160 --> 00:40:58,640
Speaker 1: the meat behind the head of the Medusa, getting into

718
00:40:58,680 --> 00:41:02,680
Speaker 1: this idea of what what is there, what keeps drawing

719
00:41:02,760 --> 00:41:05,480
Speaker 1: us in? And what are we what are we contemplating

720
00:41:05,480 --> 00:41:09,040
Speaker 1: when we contemplate this image or this myth. So Living

721
00:41:09,080 --> 00:41:11,040
Speaker 1: spends a fair amount of time in the book looking

722
00:41:11,080 --> 00:41:13,040
Speaker 1: at both the varying ways that the myth has been

723
00:41:13,040 --> 00:41:17,160
Speaker 1: interpreted and reinterpreted throughout history, and the idea that there

724
00:41:17,239 --> 00:41:21,240
Speaker 1: is something deeply intriguing behind the myth quote a shadow

725
00:41:21,320 --> 00:41:25,600
Speaker 1: being an archetypical figure who speaks meaningfully to us all.

726
00:41:26,000 --> 00:41:28,320
Speaker 1: As we said right at the beginning, I mean Medusa

727
00:41:28,400 --> 00:41:33,760
Speaker 1: has been obsessed over and and reinterpreted basically in every

728
00:41:33,840 --> 00:41:38,600
Speaker 1: generation of humans. I mean It is interesting how essentially

729
00:41:38,640 --> 00:41:43,080
Speaker 1: the the the dominant cultural values of every age find

730
00:41:43,120 --> 00:41:46,799
Speaker 1: a new way to say what the Medusa myth means. Yeah,

731
00:41:46,880 --> 00:41:49,640
Speaker 1: it's we just keep exploring it and re exploring it

732
00:41:49,760 --> 00:41:52,919
Speaker 1: as a potential metaphor for cultural ideas. You know, it's

733
00:41:53,000 --> 00:41:57,640
Speaker 1: just counterintuitive enough. It has all these different hooks that

734
00:41:57,680 --> 00:42:01,000
Speaker 1: we can latch onto. It involves several tropes that resonate

735
00:42:01,080 --> 00:42:05,440
Speaker 1: throughout global culture. The animate head, the beheading of a monster,

736
00:42:05,800 --> 00:42:09,960
Speaker 1: a female monster with wild you know, primordial roots, a

737
00:42:10,000 --> 00:42:13,560
Speaker 1: male hero who must overcome her. And in this last example,

738
00:42:13,800 --> 00:42:17,400
Speaker 1: Lemming argues that Perseus and Medusa is essentially Marduk and

739
00:42:17,440 --> 00:42:20,440
Speaker 1: Tiamatt all over again. Yeah, and if you're not familiar,

740
00:42:20,480 --> 00:42:23,760
Speaker 1: Marduk and Tiamatt are key to the enemy a leish

741
00:42:23,800 --> 00:42:28,920
Speaker 1: the Babylonian Hmspotamian myth in which Tiamat is this, you know,

742
00:42:29,040 --> 00:42:33,560
Speaker 1: primordial being of the sea, much like Medusa's father Pontus

743
00:42:33,680 --> 00:42:36,960
Speaker 1: was this primordial being of the sea. And then Tiamatt

744
00:42:37,040 --> 00:42:39,759
Speaker 1: gives birth to all the gods, and the gods end

745
00:42:39,840 --> 00:42:42,040
Speaker 1: up in the kind of rebellion war, and she turns

746
00:42:42,040 --> 00:42:45,279
Speaker 1: into this dragon sea monster type creature, and she has

747
00:42:45,320 --> 00:42:49,400
Speaker 1: to be slain by a hero from the civilization, by Marduke,

748
00:42:49,480 --> 00:42:52,600
Speaker 1: who represents the you know, the city of Babylon and

749
00:42:52,680 --> 00:42:56,359
Speaker 1: the order, the new order of the new gods. Right,

750
00:42:56,600 --> 00:42:59,520
Speaker 1: and of course the gender aspects of of the Perseus

751
00:42:59,520 --> 00:43:01,960
Speaker 1: and Medusa that they're very difficult to ignore, and it

752
00:43:02,040 --> 00:43:04,720
Speaker 1: makes sense that they would be later explored in ways

753
00:43:04,760 --> 00:43:07,640
Speaker 1: that this simply we're not part of the patriarchal ancient

754
00:43:07,680 --> 00:43:12,200
Speaker 1: Greek worldview, right, but there's still something essential concerning male

755
00:43:12,280 --> 00:43:16,840
Speaker 1: female interaction. Here. Lemming argues an ancient feminine power is

756
00:43:16,920 --> 00:43:21,200
Speaker 1: destroyed by a new masculine one, specifically the destruction of

757
00:43:21,239 --> 00:43:25,440
Speaker 1: a matriarchal triple goddess concept, which is actually reflected twice

758
00:43:25,480 --> 00:43:28,160
Speaker 1: in the myth, you know, both with the three Gorgons

759
00:43:28,160 --> 00:43:33,040
Speaker 1: and the three Gray Sisters. So uh. In this, he argues,

760
00:43:33,040 --> 00:43:36,439
Speaker 1: Meduces based on the lineage of a matriarchal Gaia, while

761
00:43:36,480 --> 00:43:40,880
Speaker 1: Perseus is the offspring of the male Zeus. Later retellings

762
00:43:40,880 --> 00:43:44,879
Speaker 1: by rationalists such as Diodorus would build on this as well. Yeah,

763
00:43:44,920 --> 00:43:47,879
Speaker 1: I think a really salient way of interpreting this myth

764
00:43:48,760 --> 00:43:51,560
Speaker 1: is uh. This is something that Lemming points out specifically

765
00:43:51,600 --> 00:43:56,280
Speaker 1: in the context of of the recurring motif of decapitation

766
00:43:56,400 --> 00:43:58,920
Speaker 1: in so many different myths, the chopping off of the

767
00:43:58,960 --> 00:44:03,040
Speaker 1: head of the monster that it very often happens. It's

768
00:44:03,080 --> 00:44:06,680
Speaker 1: accomplished by a hero who represents some kind of like

769
00:44:06,760 --> 00:44:10,120
Speaker 1: a new order of the gods, that is, that is

770
00:44:10,160 --> 00:44:15,600
Speaker 1: more orderly and civilized against some kind of primordial earthly

771
00:44:15,840 --> 00:44:20,799
Speaker 1: old religion or old type of divine being. And there

772
00:44:20,800 --> 00:44:23,360
Speaker 1: are a ton of examples. You know, there's like David

773
00:44:23,400 --> 00:44:27,840
Speaker 1: decapitating Goliath in the epic of Gilgamesh. Gilgamesh and Inky

774
00:44:27,920 --> 00:44:32,920
Speaker 1: do decapitate this forest monster humbaba uh. In the story

775
00:44:32,920 --> 00:44:35,480
Speaker 1: of Sir Gawain and the Green Knights, or Gawen decapitates

776
00:44:35,520 --> 00:44:37,239
Speaker 1: the Green Knight, and the Green Knight I think is

777
00:44:37,280 --> 00:44:41,200
Speaker 1: often taken to embody some kind of like the old

778
00:44:41,320 --> 00:44:44,919
Speaker 1: religions of the land, like the pre Christianized land. Yeah,

779
00:44:45,000 --> 00:44:48,879
Speaker 1: he's very much the Green man Um of course. Uh, Joe,

780
00:44:48,920 --> 00:44:52,040
Speaker 1: have you seen the film sort of The Valuant? No?

781
00:44:52,160 --> 00:44:56,400
Speaker 1: I haven't. Oh, it's wonderful because you have Miles o'keith

782
00:44:56,520 --> 00:44:59,480
Speaker 1: is Sir Gawin, and then you have Sean Connery himself

783
00:44:59,560 --> 00:45:01,439
Speaker 1: as the Green Night, and it's a great scene where

784
00:45:01,440 --> 00:45:03,080
Speaker 1: his head is lopped off and then he picks his

785
00:45:03,120 --> 00:45:05,400
Speaker 1: head back up, puts it on his body and starts

786
00:45:05,440 --> 00:45:08,200
Speaker 1: talking again. That's great. I mean that also kind of

787
00:45:08,600 --> 00:45:11,440
Speaker 1: mirrors Medusa, right because like the head still is able

788
00:45:11,480 --> 00:45:13,719
Speaker 1: to act even after it's been cut off, Like the

789
00:45:13,719 --> 00:45:17,480
Speaker 1: Medusa head is still a weapon that can be used. Yeah, yeah,

790
00:45:18,320 --> 00:45:22,720
Speaker 1: the disembodied head is this uh this trope as well,

791
00:45:22,880 --> 00:45:25,480
Speaker 1: but yeah, anyway to bring it back. So, of course, uh,

792
00:45:25,880 --> 00:45:29,120
Speaker 1: you've got the two sides. Like Medusa here represents the

793
00:45:29,200 --> 00:45:32,879
Speaker 1: old order. The guy INDs the creatures that are from

794
00:45:32,920 --> 00:45:36,160
Speaker 1: the Earth and original and kind of monstrous and chaotic

795
00:45:36,200 --> 00:45:41,399
Speaker 1: and untamed. Whereas the the Olympians, represented by Zeus and Athena. Uh,

796
00:45:41,440 --> 00:45:44,839
Speaker 1: they give rise to Perseus, and Perseus is their human hero.

797
00:45:45,080 --> 00:45:48,480
Speaker 1: He fights for the Olympian order, the new gods, the people,

798
00:45:48,520 --> 00:45:51,920
Speaker 1: you know, the new kids in town who are in charge. Now. Yeah,

799
00:45:52,000 --> 00:45:55,120
Speaker 1: now there's this other notion to the and this is

800
00:45:55,120 --> 00:45:59,080
Speaker 1: heavily built upon during the medieval period. The Medusa is

801
00:45:59,120 --> 00:46:03,240
Speaker 1: also an embodied even of feminine danger. In the medieval tradition.

802
00:46:03,280 --> 00:46:06,279
Speaker 1: This all ties in with concepts of courtly love and

803
00:46:06,280 --> 00:46:10,120
Speaker 1: and so forth. From medieval commentators. Letting tells us that

804
00:46:10,160 --> 00:46:13,120
Speaker 1: Medusa did not seem to really be a sexual being

805
00:46:13,320 --> 00:46:16,440
Speaker 1: to the ancient Greeks, though though certainly there is this

806
00:46:16,520 --> 00:46:18,680
Speaker 1: trend to make her more and more feminine that we

807
00:46:18,680 --> 00:46:22,839
Speaker 1: already alluded to. But medieval authors made her into this

808
00:46:23,040 --> 00:46:26,840
Speaker 1: embodiment of feminine danger, a true film vitel in the

809
00:46:26,920 --> 00:46:30,520
Speaker 1: proper sense of the term. Uh. This this this force

810
00:46:30,600 --> 00:46:33,960
Speaker 1: that could lure you away from the righteous path. And

811
00:46:33,960 --> 00:46:37,160
Speaker 1: and this makes even more sense when you consider Athena

812
00:46:37,200 --> 00:46:41,480
Speaker 1: as her opposite, a paragon of what a patriarchal society

813
00:46:41,920 --> 00:46:46,160
Speaker 1: wants women to be and and approves of them being. So.

814
00:46:46,520 --> 00:46:51,440
Speaker 1: Athena is strong, but she's also chased. She's bashful, uh

815
00:46:52,280 --> 00:46:56,000
Speaker 1: as when description put it, and she is unemotional. Yeah.

816
00:46:56,120 --> 00:46:58,680
Speaker 1: Lemmings shows example after example of how you see this

817
00:46:58,800 --> 00:47:03,279
Speaker 1: throughout medieval rights. When medusas imagined she is, she is

818
00:47:03,360 --> 00:47:07,360
Speaker 1: the threat of sexual attraction to women, which you know,

819
00:47:07,400 --> 00:47:10,080
Speaker 1: a lot this was a strong theme and a lot

820
00:47:10,120 --> 00:47:13,279
Speaker 1: of especially like medieval Christian writing. You know can trace

821
00:47:13,400 --> 00:47:17,360
Speaker 1: this back to St. Augustine. Really that most writings about

822
00:47:17,440 --> 00:47:21,000
Speaker 1: righteousness seemed to be addressed to men, and they characterize

823
00:47:21,040 --> 00:47:25,480
Speaker 1: women as basically, is this this this unaccountable force of

824
00:47:25,600 --> 00:47:29,560
Speaker 1: danger that will tempt you away from righteousness. Yeah, so

825
00:47:29,719 --> 00:47:31,600
Speaker 1: it should come as no surprise that a lot of

826
00:47:31,640 --> 00:47:34,440
Speaker 1: these themes end up being re explored, re examined, and

827
00:47:34,480 --> 00:47:39,440
Speaker 1: sometimes you know, twisted around and reuteralized by by feminist

828
00:47:39,640 --> 00:47:43,160
Speaker 1: authors and commentators that would come later. Absolutely, Yeah, and

829
00:47:43,200 --> 00:47:46,600
Speaker 1: also even some other trends as well. Um, but I

830
00:47:46,600 --> 00:47:49,319
Speaker 1: want to touch on some other interpretations that leming Uh

831
00:47:49,719 --> 00:47:52,160
Speaker 1: discusses in the book, and he points out that seventeenth

832
00:47:52,160 --> 00:47:55,880
Speaker 1: century philosopher Francis Bacon saw the medusa myth, or at

833
00:47:55,960 --> 00:47:58,680
Speaker 1: least like to use it as a solid metaphor for

834
00:47:58,680 --> 00:48:03,399
Speaker 1: the proper rules of war. Okay, so choose a winnable fight,

835
00:48:03,719 --> 00:48:06,239
Speaker 1: attack when unexpected. Yeah, I love how one of the

836
00:48:06,320 --> 00:48:08,680
Speaker 1: rules of war here is sneak up on your enemy

837
00:48:08,680 --> 00:48:13,520
Speaker 1: while they're sleeping. Yes, very cool, Bacon. Uh. Karl Marks

838
00:48:13,600 --> 00:48:16,319
Speaker 1: saw the gorgon head as a symbol of capitalism and

839
00:48:16,360 --> 00:48:19,319
Speaker 1: all of its evils. Fredrik Nicie saw it as a

840
00:48:19,320 --> 00:48:23,839
Speaker 1: symbol of Appollonian struggle against rampant dionyson is um Uh,

841
00:48:23,840 --> 00:48:28,640
Speaker 1: So order and discipline versus chaos and hedonism. Now for

842
00:48:28,640 --> 00:48:32,399
Speaker 1: for my money, the psychoanalytical views of Medusa are are

843
00:48:32,400 --> 00:48:35,000
Speaker 1: really quite interesting though, And uh we see these from

844
00:48:35,000 --> 00:48:39,239
Speaker 1: the likes of Sigmund Freud, Carl Young and others. Yeah.

845
00:48:39,520 --> 00:48:42,720
Speaker 1: One guess, if you're not already familiar what Freud thinks

846
00:48:42,760 --> 00:48:47,200
Speaker 1: Medusa is related to. Yeah, yeah, it's it's gonna involve sex.

847
00:48:47,560 --> 00:48:50,319
Speaker 1: So um advisory. If you're not ready for a big

848
00:48:50,320 --> 00:48:53,120
Speaker 1: old slice of Freud, then you might want to skip

849
00:48:53,120 --> 00:48:55,600
Speaker 1: this next part. But you know, I think if you're game,

850
00:48:55,680 --> 00:48:59,759
Speaker 1: then this is interesting. So in n Freud wrote an

851
00:48:59,840 --> 00:49:04,680
Speaker 1: s a titled Medusa's Head or dos medusan Hat, which

852
00:49:05,000 --> 00:49:09,839
Speaker 1: was published in after his death. Um, so it all,

853
00:49:10,280 --> 00:49:13,560
Speaker 1: you know, basically comes down to sex and development. In particular,

854
00:49:13,600 --> 00:49:17,800
Speaker 1: he saw the Medusa as an embodiment of male castration fears.

855
00:49:18,760 --> 00:49:20,919
Speaker 1: I alluded to this in our last episode. We were

856
00:49:20,920 --> 00:49:24,080
Speaker 1: discussing the snakes hanging from belts of the Gorgons in

857
00:49:24,160 --> 00:49:26,640
Speaker 1: ancient depictions, and I think one of the reasons I

858
00:49:26,680 --> 00:49:29,319
Speaker 1: found them a little disturbing, or at least, you know,

859
00:49:29,600 --> 00:49:31,600
Speaker 1: one of the reasons I found them disturbing is that

860
00:49:31,680 --> 00:49:34,680
Speaker 1: there is this sort of castration anxiety inherent in the

861
00:49:34,719 --> 00:49:37,759
Speaker 1: imagery and and this is key to Freud's view of

862
00:49:37,800 --> 00:49:41,480
Speaker 1: the monster. So Freud considered castration fear to be a

863
00:49:41,520 --> 00:49:45,600
Speaker 1: prime immobilizing factor in a male's life, originating in a

864
00:49:45,640 --> 00:49:49,000
Speaker 1: boy's first view of his mother naked. The absence of

865
00:49:49,000 --> 00:49:52,560
Speaker 1: a penis and the unavoidable realization that the penis can

866
00:49:52,600 --> 00:49:56,479
Speaker 1: certainly not exist on a human has an effect. Uh.

867
00:49:56,480 --> 00:50:00,000
Speaker 1: It's they realize it can be lost. Uh. Freud continued.

868
00:50:00,040 --> 00:50:03,960
Speaker 1: It also that decapitation is a symbol for castration. And

869
00:50:04,000 --> 00:50:06,400
Speaker 1: I think this makes sense, honestly, because no matter how

870
00:50:06,480 --> 00:50:09,360
Speaker 1: many horror films you watch, you don't really see anyone

871
00:50:09,400 --> 00:50:12,279
Speaker 1: going around without a head all that often it's hard

872
00:50:12,280 --> 00:50:14,799
Speaker 1: to relate to that kind of a uh, you know,

873
00:50:14,880 --> 00:50:18,840
Speaker 1: fatal injury. Um. But you do encounter people all the

874
00:50:18,880 --> 00:50:22,920
Speaker 1: time that presumably do not have a penis. Females are all,

875
00:50:22,960 --> 00:50:25,719
Speaker 1: in the mind of the Freud envisioned may of old

876
00:50:25,800 --> 00:50:31,000
Speaker 1: child here castrated individuals. Um. Furthermore, there's this knowledge that

877
00:50:31,160 --> 00:50:34,640
Speaker 1: one can live without the member in question, and plenty

878
00:50:34,640 --> 00:50:37,320
Speaker 1: of people born with it have managed this. Now it

879
00:50:37,360 --> 00:50:40,160
Speaker 1: goes without saying obviously, like a lot of Freud, this

880
00:50:40,200 --> 00:50:42,879
Speaker 1: is a very male centric way of interpreting the myth

881
00:50:43,000 --> 00:50:46,400
Speaker 1: right that like, he imagines that the young boys sees

882
00:50:46,520 --> 00:50:50,360
Speaker 1: the world in these in these uh strange gender terms

883
00:50:50,680 --> 00:50:53,640
Speaker 1: and sort of views women as men who are lacking

884
00:50:53,760 --> 00:50:57,879
Speaker 1: something and has this psycho sexual terror about it. Yeah. Yeah,

885
00:50:58,000 --> 00:50:59,759
Speaker 1: and definitely we're not We're not saying this is the

886
00:50:59,760 --> 00:51:02,400
Speaker 1: way to view the world, but this is this is

887
00:51:02,400 --> 00:51:06,680
Speaker 1: what Freud wrote and uh uh. He also further argued

888
00:51:06,719 --> 00:51:10,640
Speaker 1: that snakes or phallic symbols, all right, and uh that

889
00:51:10,760 --> 00:51:15,440
Speaker 1: a plethora of phallic symbols also translates to castration fears.

890
00:51:16,160 --> 00:51:19,160
Speaker 1: And this actually this reminded me of something um that

891
00:51:19,360 --> 00:51:22,880
Speaker 1: I had read about previously. I believe this was in

892
00:51:22,960 --> 00:51:26,560
Speaker 1: Walter Stephen's book Demon Lovers, Witchcraft, Sex in the Crisis

893
00:51:26,640 --> 00:51:30,040
Speaker 1: of Belief, where he was discussing castration anxiety myths of

894
00:51:30,160 --> 00:51:33,920
Speaker 1: penis theff by witches um that was common during the

895
00:51:34,000 --> 00:51:37,680
Speaker 1: era of European witchcraft persecution. The idea was that witches

896
00:51:37,719 --> 00:51:40,960
Speaker 1: would go around stealing penises from men and then collect

897
00:51:41,000 --> 00:51:44,359
Speaker 1: them in birds nests high in trees. Again, we see

898
00:51:44,360 --> 00:51:48,440
Speaker 1: a grouping a plethora of phallic emblems that is involved

899
00:51:48,440 --> 00:51:51,360
Speaker 1: in a in a myth or a story that embodies

900
00:51:51,440 --> 00:51:55,799
Speaker 1: castration fears of of men during this particular era. Now,

901
00:51:55,840 --> 00:51:58,680
Speaker 1: Freud's not done here. He also contends that an erection

902
00:51:58,840 --> 00:52:01,239
Speaker 1: is a reminder that once has a penis, So the

903
00:52:01,280 --> 00:52:05,959
Speaker 1: petrification aspects of the of Medusa Smith tie in here,

904
00:52:06,440 --> 00:52:10,640
Speaker 1: and he argues that the the the apatropeic power of

905
00:52:10,680 --> 00:52:14,200
Speaker 1: the gorgon's head emblem is the emblem of female genitalia

906
00:52:14,480 --> 00:52:18,920
Speaker 1: and male castration anxiety. You know, I would say, when

907
00:52:18,920 --> 00:52:20,759
Speaker 1: you see it all laid out like this, at least

908
00:52:20,760 --> 00:52:24,239
Speaker 1: to me, Freud's take seems kind of ridiculous, like the

909
00:52:24,280 --> 00:52:28,760
Speaker 1: Medusa represents like castration anxiety and the young man's psycho

910
00:52:28,800 --> 00:52:33,320
Speaker 1: sexual horror at female anatomy as as Freud imagines it um.

911
00:52:33,360 --> 00:52:37,080
Speaker 1: But then also the severing of the head represents castion

912
00:52:37,160 --> 00:52:39,920
Speaker 1: castration anxiety. I think this is one of those cases

913
00:52:39,920 --> 00:52:43,520
Speaker 1: where Freud probably sounds more convincing if you're reading him

914
00:52:43,560 --> 00:52:46,400
Speaker 1: build his own case rather than seeing it all presented

915
00:52:46,440 --> 00:52:50,480
Speaker 1: and disinterested summary. Yeah, but probably so. And it's one

916
00:52:50,480 --> 00:52:52,560
Speaker 1: of those things where it's like it's really interesting to read,

917
00:52:52,640 --> 00:52:55,840
Speaker 1: and i'd and I'd be willing to entertain that that

918
00:52:55,840 --> 00:52:58,680
Speaker 1: that there is something to this you know in the

919
00:52:58,719 --> 00:53:02,680
Speaker 1: you know, the shadow archetypepe of of Medusa as we

920
00:53:02,760 --> 00:53:06,399
Speaker 1: encounter it. But you know, I, as with these other things,

921
00:53:06,400 --> 00:53:08,719
Speaker 1: as would say geo mythology. You know, I'm not gonna

922
00:53:08,760 --> 00:53:11,279
Speaker 1: put all my eggs in this one basket. Yeah. I

923
00:53:11,320 --> 00:53:14,000
Speaker 1: mean I think a lot of what what Freud talks

924
00:53:14,000 --> 00:53:16,040
Speaker 1: about it you could in a way think of as

925
00:53:16,080 --> 00:53:19,960
Speaker 1: a kind of psycho mythology. He's like, Uh, the stuff

926
00:53:20,000 --> 00:53:23,560
Speaker 1: he's saying is not like based on controlled experiments or anything.

927
00:53:23,680 --> 00:53:26,759
Speaker 1: He's he's sort of like weaving a story that makes

928
00:53:26,800 --> 00:53:30,080
Speaker 1: sense to him about you know, how anxiety is about

929
00:53:30,160 --> 00:53:33,040
Speaker 1: sex and how people think about sex and death and

930
00:53:33,080 --> 00:53:38,200
Speaker 1: stuff pervades all of the imagery that we come up with. Now.

931
00:53:38,520 --> 00:53:42,040
Speaker 1: Other thinkers, though, would echo at least some aspects of

932
00:53:42,040 --> 00:53:46,560
Speaker 1: Freud's take here, uh, including a French feminist critic Sarah Kaufman,

933
00:53:46,800 --> 00:53:49,480
Speaker 1: who wrote of the mixed horror and pleasure that women's

934
00:53:49,480 --> 00:53:53,160
Speaker 1: genitals arousing men now. Carl Jung, for his part, his

935
00:53:53,200 --> 00:53:56,000
Speaker 1: interpretation was less sexual, but it's still can concern the

936
00:53:56,040 --> 00:53:58,800
Speaker 1: power of the unconscious. He saw Medusa as a chaotic

937
00:53:58,840 --> 00:54:02,000
Speaker 1: element tied to create civity and destruction, and in general,

938
00:54:02,200 --> 00:54:07,200
Speaker 1: Medusa and Athena as archetypes connected to how women are viewed.

939
00:54:07,800 --> 00:54:09,680
Speaker 1: And speaking of how women are viewed, there there's, of

940
00:54:09,680 --> 00:54:13,160
Speaker 1: course a lot of feminist consideration of Medusa, including Kaufman,

941
00:54:13,160 --> 00:54:16,440
Speaker 1: who we just mentioned. One example that Lemon brings up

942
00:54:16,719 --> 00:54:20,160
Speaker 1: is that of New York University law professor Amy Adler,

943
00:54:20,520 --> 00:54:24,000
Speaker 1: author of Medusa A Glimpse of the Woman in First

944
00:54:24,000 --> 00:54:27,440
Speaker 1: Amendment Law. Oh this part was interesting, Yeah, yeah, yeah.

945
00:54:27,600 --> 00:54:30,279
Speaker 1: So Adler touches on the fact that the U. S.

946
00:54:30,280 --> 00:54:34,960
Speaker 1: Supreme Court considers live nude dancing unprotected by the First Amendment,

947
00:54:35,320 --> 00:54:39,919
Speaker 1: while pornographic film is protected, and so the the idea here,

948
00:54:40,480 --> 00:54:43,720
Speaker 1: uh is Adler lays it out, is that live female

949
00:54:43,840 --> 00:54:49,200
Speaker 1: nudity is is still too threatening to petrifying for the

950
00:54:49,239 --> 00:54:53,280
Speaker 1: male observer. But just as the mirrored shield of Athena

951
00:54:53,360 --> 00:54:56,920
Speaker 1: allows percy Us to gaze upon Medusa without being turned

952
00:54:56,920 --> 00:55:00,760
Speaker 1: to stone, so too does the medium of film allow

953
00:55:00,840 --> 00:55:05,560
Speaker 1: the male to consider female nudity without fear. The mirrored

954
00:55:05,640 --> 00:55:09,600
Speaker 1: shield of Athena is the male gaze itself. It tams

955
00:55:09,640 --> 00:55:13,480
Speaker 1: the female body, making it passive and quote removing its

956
00:55:13,520 --> 00:55:17,879
Speaker 1: power to return the male viewers gaze. Yeah, I thought

957
00:55:17,920 --> 00:55:20,520
Speaker 1: that was a really interesting read on this. Yeah, I

958
00:55:20,560 --> 00:55:23,080
Speaker 1: did too, And again it gets back to the power

959
00:55:23,120 --> 00:55:25,759
Speaker 1: of being stared back out by the thing that is

960
00:55:25,800 --> 00:55:29,160
Speaker 1: objectified by the person that is objectified. And of course,

961
00:55:29,200 --> 00:55:31,840
Speaker 1: in addition to this, I mean Lemon chronicles that there

962
00:55:31,880 --> 00:55:34,399
Speaker 1: are a ton of ways that Medusa has been sort

963
00:55:34,440 --> 00:55:38,279
Speaker 1: of recaptured by feminists thought, especially throughout the second half

964
00:55:38,280 --> 00:55:41,600
Speaker 1: of the twentieth century, basically just as as a figure

965
00:55:41,640 --> 00:55:44,960
Speaker 1: to be sympathized with and celebrated rather than as like

966
00:55:45,000 --> 00:55:47,640
Speaker 1: the monster of the storied. You know, to recognize that

967
00:55:47,719 --> 00:55:51,520
Speaker 1: like Medusa is if we take the story literally the

968
00:55:51,560 --> 00:55:54,640
Speaker 1: wronged party. And in a way this all comes back

969
00:55:54,680 --> 00:55:58,040
Speaker 1: to it's very similar to the Romantic take because so

970
00:55:58,440 --> 00:56:01,239
Speaker 1: in the Romantic period we there was a lot of

971
00:56:01,440 --> 00:56:05,480
Speaker 1: rethinking of the Medusa story that sympathized with Medusa. And

972
00:56:05,480 --> 00:56:07,560
Speaker 1: I think the Percy Shelley poem that we started by

973
00:56:07,560 --> 00:56:10,400
Speaker 1: reading today is one of those works of literature. Absolutely

974
00:56:10,719 --> 00:56:13,400
Speaker 1: in the same way that say, Percy Shelley and Prometheus

975
00:56:13,480 --> 00:56:18,000
Speaker 1: Unbound would show you know, his and his generations large

976
00:56:18,040 --> 00:56:21,760
Speaker 1: sympathies with sort of the rebel parties or the characters

977
00:56:21,800 --> 00:56:24,480
Speaker 1: who might have been considered villains and previous tellings of

978
00:56:24,520 --> 00:56:28,240
Speaker 1: stories uh that you know the story of Prometheus Unbound

979
00:56:28,239 --> 00:56:32,399
Speaker 1: as a play in which the Prometheus, who defies the gods, uh,

980
00:56:32,560 --> 00:56:35,400
Speaker 1: is sort of like he and his allies are the

981
00:56:35,440 --> 00:56:37,920
Speaker 1: heroes and and Jove, the king of the gods, is

982
00:56:38,440 --> 00:56:41,399
Speaker 1: the villain and he gets slapped down by the demogorgan,

983
00:56:41,640 --> 00:56:44,359
Speaker 1: you know, something previously imagined as a demon, but which

984
00:56:44,360 --> 00:56:48,040
Speaker 1: Shelley imagined instead as this kind of like potency or

985
00:56:48,480 --> 00:56:55,000
Speaker 1: void of potential. And now a fairly recent twist on

986
00:56:55,000 --> 00:56:58,799
Speaker 1: on Medusa imagery is that is a sculpture that I

987
00:56:58,840 --> 00:57:00,600
Speaker 1: think you've seen. I think it was on the stuff

988
00:57:00,600 --> 00:57:03,319
Speaker 1: to remind discussion module at some point. Uh. It was

989
00:57:03,400 --> 00:57:08,400
Speaker 1: by a Luciano god body um a an Argentine Argentine

990
00:57:08,600 --> 00:57:12,120
Speaker 1: Italian artist based in Buenos Aires, and basically he did

991
00:57:12,160 --> 00:57:16,880
Speaker 1: a reversal of the of the classic statue of of

992
00:57:17,000 --> 00:57:20,960
Speaker 1: Perseus holding the head of Medusa, but in his statue

993
00:57:21,040 --> 00:57:24,760
Speaker 1: it is Medusa holding the decapitated head of Percy. I

994
00:57:24,960 --> 00:57:29,960
Speaker 1: like it, yeah, because you know, we've touched on on

995
00:57:30,000 --> 00:57:34,880
Speaker 1: all the problematic aspects of of Medusa. Her character, you know,

996
00:57:35,000 --> 00:57:39,040
Speaker 1: is this this victimized uh woman who is made into

997
00:57:39,040 --> 00:57:42,720
Speaker 1: a monster that is further victimized and ultimately, uh, you know,

998
00:57:42,800 --> 00:57:46,480
Speaker 1: violently murdered by a male hero. And this at least

999
00:57:47,040 --> 00:57:50,240
Speaker 1: turns that around and allows her to get the upper hand.

1000
00:57:50,240 --> 00:57:53,360
Speaker 1: And so that just there's something refreshing about this particular statue.

1001
00:57:53,760 --> 00:57:56,320
Speaker 1: You know. I like art like this because I think

1002
00:57:56,320 --> 00:57:58,800
Speaker 1: a lot of times we're we're faced with a dilemma

1003
00:57:59,080 --> 00:58:01,040
Speaker 1: and the you know, comes up a lot when we're

1004
00:58:01,080 --> 00:58:04,400
Speaker 1: dealing with ancient myths, where you have a story that

1005
00:58:04,480 --> 00:58:07,760
Speaker 1: you want to be able to sort of retell and

1006
00:58:07,840 --> 00:58:10,760
Speaker 1: re explore and celebrate in a way. But of course,

1007
00:58:10,840 --> 00:58:13,280
Speaker 1: you know, like most ancient myths, it it has some

1008
00:58:13,400 --> 00:58:17,720
Speaker 1: kind of either explicit or implicit values that are really

1009
00:58:17,760 --> 00:58:21,800
Speaker 1: not our values anymore. And uh, and so like what

1010
00:58:21,840 --> 00:58:23,280
Speaker 1: do you do with that? Do you do you try

1011
00:58:23,320 --> 00:58:26,240
Speaker 1: to like change the myth? Do you do you try

1012
00:58:26,280 --> 00:58:30,280
Speaker 1: to like ignore parts of it that that feel icky today?

1013
00:58:30,360 --> 00:58:33,200
Speaker 1: And I think my take is that, like you let

1014
00:58:33,240 --> 00:58:36,360
Speaker 1: the myth be the myth, and and that's what it is.

1015
00:58:36,400 --> 00:58:39,480
Speaker 1: But you also create complementary art, right, Like you don't

1016
00:58:39,480 --> 00:58:42,480
Speaker 1: try to change the story of Perseus and Medusa, but

1017
00:58:42,560 --> 00:58:45,080
Speaker 1: you can also write a novel in which Medusa kills

1018
00:58:45,080 --> 00:58:47,720
Speaker 1: Perseus or make an awesome statue in which she's got

1019
00:58:47,720 --> 00:58:50,600
Speaker 1: his head by the hair. Yeah. Absolutely, And as we've

1020
00:58:50,640 --> 00:58:53,400
Speaker 1: discussed in the first episode on Medusa, like, this is

1021
00:58:53,400 --> 00:58:56,160
Speaker 1: how mythology works. This is how the telling and the

1022
00:58:56,200 --> 00:59:00,120
Speaker 1: retelling these stories has always worked. So you totally have

1023
00:59:00,240 --> 00:59:05,640
Speaker 1: license to do this. Plus public domain, right, oh public domain?

1024
00:59:06,400 --> 00:59:10,000
Speaker 1: Is hessy it gonna come and sue you? Well, no, no,

1025
00:59:10,160 --> 00:59:12,280
Speaker 1: I do want to know what happens after this, because

1026
00:59:12,440 --> 00:59:16,440
Speaker 1: there were several things depending on on Perseus after the encounter.

1027
00:59:16,720 --> 00:59:19,680
Speaker 1: So does Medusa go from here and like help out

1028
00:59:19,720 --> 00:59:22,760
Speaker 1: Danny and uh you know all that stuff? Or is

1029
00:59:23,160 --> 00:59:25,760
Speaker 1: that just left on its own? Now? Yeah, that's that's

1030
00:59:25,760 --> 00:59:27,480
Speaker 1: what's kind of beautiful about this, right, this could be

1031
00:59:27,560 --> 00:59:30,240
Speaker 1: the very beginning of a story. You could have a

1032
00:59:30,320 --> 00:59:32,080
Speaker 1: novel or at least, you know, a short story or

1033
00:59:32,160 --> 00:59:36,760
Speaker 1: novella of Medusa that begins with her defeating Perseus. M

1034
00:59:37,160 --> 00:59:40,320
Speaker 1: because then what happens because certainly Athena is still in play,

1035
00:59:40,920 --> 00:59:45,000
Speaker 1: still presumably more than happy to work against Medusa. Um.

1036
00:59:45,080 --> 00:59:48,000
Speaker 1: And then yeah, basically, yeah, if somebody write this so

1037
00:59:48,040 --> 00:59:50,440
Speaker 1: I can read it, this sounds great Athena is like

1038
00:59:50,480 --> 00:59:53,320
Speaker 1: the terminator. It can she cannot be bargained with, She

1039
00:59:53,360 --> 00:59:55,960
Speaker 1: cannot be reasoned with, and will not stop until you

1040
00:59:56,000 --> 00:59:58,640
Speaker 1: are dead unless you go to Mount Olympus and you

1041
00:59:58,680 --> 01:00:02,280
Speaker 1: get her first. That's true. Yeah, after all, the Goregonian

1042
01:00:02,320 --> 01:00:06,760
Speaker 1: head is a ultimately a God created power. It works

1043
01:00:06,800 --> 01:00:09,960
Speaker 1: on titans, why not on the gods themselves? All right?

1044
01:00:10,000 --> 01:00:12,120
Speaker 1: So I wanted to end today just by real quickly

1045
01:00:12,880 --> 01:00:15,200
Speaker 1: jumping off to a couple of other things that are

1046
01:00:15,240 --> 01:00:18,000
Speaker 1: really only tangentially related to Medusa. They don't have to

1047
01:00:18,000 --> 01:00:20,920
Speaker 1: do so much with the myth, but are just scientific

1048
01:00:20,960 --> 01:00:24,280
Speaker 1: concepts that have been related to it in various ways.

1049
01:00:24,360 --> 01:00:28,200
Speaker 1: So last year, which would be twenty nineteen, there was

1050
01:00:28,240 --> 01:00:31,360
Speaker 1: a new finding published in the Journal of Virology about

1051
01:00:31,440 --> 01:00:37,120
Speaker 1: a recently discovered so called giant virus. Now, giant viruses

1052
01:00:37,160 --> 01:00:40,080
Speaker 1: in general are are very interesting subject. For a long time,

1053
01:00:40,120 --> 01:00:43,160
Speaker 1: pretty much all the viruses that we knew about were

1054
01:00:43,320 --> 01:00:48,120
Speaker 1: sub microscopic, you know, extremely small, very simple compared even

1055
01:00:48,120 --> 01:00:52,200
Speaker 1: to single celled organisms like bacteria. Viruses in general are

1056
01:00:52,280 --> 01:00:55,840
Speaker 1: not thought usually to be alive. I guess it depends

1057
01:00:55,840 --> 01:00:58,360
Speaker 1: on how you define alive, but they're generally not thought

1058
01:00:58,360 --> 01:01:01,040
Speaker 1: to be alive, because what they do is that they

1059
01:01:01,080 --> 01:01:05,680
Speaker 1: contain packages of genetic material that can take over a

1060
01:01:05,760 --> 01:01:08,640
Speaker 1: host cell and sort of turn that cell into a

1061
01:01:08,720 --> 01:01:12,360
Speaker 1: factory for making more viruses. But they don't have the

1062
01:01:12,480 --> 01:01:15,640
Speaker 1: machinery to survive and reproduce on their own. They can't eat,

1063
01:01:15,760 --> 01:01:19,480
Speaker 1: they can't breathe, they can't reproduce without a host cell.

1064
01:01:20,040 --> 01:01:22,360
Speaker 1: In a way, a biological virus is a lot like

1065
01:01:22,400 --> 01:01:25,280
Speaker 1: a computer virus. As a good point of comparison, it

1066
01:01:25,400 --> 01:01:28,080
Speaker 1: can't spread if it's just burned onto a CD sitting

1067
01:01:28,120 --> 01:01:31,120
Speaker 1: on your desk, right. It needs to be planted into

1068
01:01:31,600 --> 01:01:34,840
Speaker 1: active hardware, needs to be on a machine that is

1069
01:01:34,960 --> 01:01:38,400
Speaker 1: running and connected to something in order to spread. But

1070
01:01:38,560 --> 01:01:41,240
Speaker 1: in recent years, we've discovered that there are some viruses

1071
01:01:41,280 --> 01:01:44,880
Speaker 1: that are bigger and hardier and more complex than previously

1072
01:01:44,960 --> 01:01:47,680
Speaker 1: known viruses, and these are now usually referred to as

1073
01:01:47,760 --> 01:01:50,840
Speaker 1: giant viruses. Uh. There there are a lot larger than

1074
01:01:50,880 --> 01:01:54,560
Speaker 1: normal viruses, sometimes even larger as large as or larger

1075
01:01:54,560 --> 01:01:58,080
Speaker 1: than bacteria. And uh sometimes they look kind of like

1076
01:01:58,200 --> 01:02:02,720
Speaker 1: furry d twenties. Like I've got a picture here for

1077
01:02:02,760 --> 01:02:04,400
Speaker 1: you to look at, Robert. This is a picture of

1078
01:02:04,440 --> 01:02:06,640
Speaker 1: the one I'm gonna get to in just a minute.

1079
01:02:06,640 --> 01:02:08,959
Speaker 1: But yeah, it's like got all these spikes all over,

1080
01:02:09,440 --> 01:02:11,400
Speaker 1: but it looks basically like you could roll it for

1081
01:02:11,440 --> 01:02:15,760
Speaker 1: a critical hit. Yeah. Yeah, when, especially when it's illustrated

1082
01:02:15,800 --> 01:02:19,160
Speaker 1: in bright yellow and red, it looks like a natural twenty.

1083
01:02:19,520 --> 01:02:22,240
Speaker 1: Uh So, whereas a normal virus might have numbers of

1084
01:02:22,320 --> 01:02:25,160
Speaker 1: genes and the single digits, you know, some viruses might

1085
01:02:25,200 --> 01:02:28,880
Speaker 1: have like five genes or nine genes, giant viruses can

1086
01:02:28,920 --> 01:02:32,840
Speaker 1: have hundreds of genes or a thousand genes. And in

1087
01:02:33,160 --> 01:02:37,120
Speaker 1: two thousand three, researchers in France published a description of

1088
01:02:37,160 --> 01:02:43,280
Speaker 1: the Acanthamba polyphaga mimi virus, a relatively huge virus that

1089
01:02:43,360 --> 01:02:46,960
Speaker 1: prays on amba which I believe this virus was discovered

1090
01:02:46,960 --> 01:02:49,560
Speaker 1: in a water cooling tower. I'm not sure about that,

1091
01:02:49,600 --> 01:02:52,080
Speaker 1: but I think so. Um many of the other giant

1092
01:02:52,160 --> 01:02:54,840
Speaker 1: viruses that have been discovered since then, we're found in

1093
01:02:54,880 --> 01:02:58,160
Speaker 1: these weird, extreme places. I was reading an article in

1094
01:02:58,200 --> 01:03:02,360
Speaker 1: the Atlantic by Sarah Jong from March twenty nineteen, and

1095
01:03:02,400 --> 01:03:05,400
Speaker 1: it mentioned that, uh, these things had also turned up

1096
01:03:05,400 --> 01:03:08,920
Speaker 1: in an Austrian sewage plant, as well as water off

1097
01:03:08,960 --> 01:03:11,360
Speaker 1: the Chilean coast. And you may have heard this one

1098
01:03:11,800 --> 01:03:16,640
Speaker 1: in thirty thousand year old Siberian permafrost. Uh. The strain

1099
01:03:16,720 --> 01:03:21,240
Speaker 1: from this permafrost was a giant virus called Pithovirus subericum.

1100
01:03:21,320 --> 01:03:23,920
Speaker 1: And even after being trapped in ice for tens of

1101
01:03:23,960 --> 01:03:28,160
Speaker 1: thousands of years, this giant virus was still infectious when

1102
01:03:28,200 --> 01:03:30,520
Speaker 1: they yeah, they thought it out, and they set some

1103
01:03:30,600 --> 01:03:33,480
Speaker 1: amibas out as bait next to it, and the pith

1104
01:03:33,560 --> 01:03:36,720
Speaker 1: of virus apparently went to work. The ambas died off

1105
01:03:37,080 --> 01:03:40,800
Speaker 1: and then their dead bodies contained fragments of this giant virus.

1106
01:03:40,840 --> 01:03:43,640
Speaker 1: And the story. I mean, I've seen some researchers kind

1107
01:03:43,640 --> 01:03:45,800
Speaker 1: of poo poo this to say, like this is not

1108
01:03:45,960 --> 01:03:49,040
Speaker 1: the main thing to worry about with climate change, but uh,

1109
01:03:49,320 --> 01:03:50,920
Speaker 1: they may be right, but it does just make me

1110
01:03:50,960 --> 01:03:53,200
Speaker 1: wonder what kind of goodies we're gonna release as we

1111
01:03:53,280 --> 01:03:56,160
Speaker 1: keep thawing stuff that's been frozen for tens of thousands

1112
01:03:56,160 --> 01:04:00,040
Speaker 1: of years through climate change. Um. And I believe this

1113
01:03:59,880 --> 01:04:02,720
Speaker 1: was this actually was the premise of a horror movie

1114
01:04:02,880 --> 01:04:08,800
Speaker 1: by Larry Peasenden. What was the name of that? I was, Oh,

1115
01:04:08,840 --> 01:04:10,640
Speaker 1: I don't think I know this one. It was called

1116
01:04:10,640 --> 01:04:14,520
Speaker 1: The Last Winter, Uh, and it had it starred Ron Perlman. Oh. Yeah,

1117
01:04:14,560 --> 01:04:19,000
Speaker 1: Fessenden did a He did a killer catfish movie called Beneath.

1118
01:04:19,600 --> 01:04:24,840
Speaker 1: I mean, you should watch you Beneath. It's it's I

1119
01:04:24,880 --> 01:04:26,640
Speaker 1: don't want to spoil too much. I mean, I think

1120
01:04:26,640 --> 01:04:30,880
Speaker 1: it's kind of satirical. But there's one part where these

1121
01:04:30,960 --> 01:04:33,440
Speaker 1: characters are trapped on a boat as this like google

1122
01:04:33,560 --> 01:04:36,480
Speaker 1: eyed catfish is picking them off one by one and

1123
01:04:36,520 --> 01:04:39,080
Speaker 1: at one point one of them screams of the catfish,

1124
01:04:39,160 --> 01:04:44,280
Speaker 1: like what do you want from us? Oh? Nice? But anyway,

1125
01:04:44,480 --> 01:04:47,160
Speaker 1: So that Sarah's Young article I mentioned, it's primarily focused

1126
01:04:47,200 --> 01:04:50,240
Speaker 1: on the this virus that was newly described in twenty

1127
01:04:50,400 --> 01:04:53,840
Speaker 1: nineteen by Japanese researchers in the Journal of Virology and

1128
01:04:54,040 --> 01:04:57,440
Speaker 1: um So. Apparently, this giant virus came from a sample

1129
01:04:57,480 --> 01:04:59,800
Speaker 1: of mud that was taken from a hot spring some

1130
01:05:00,080 --> 01:05:03,000
Speaker 1: in Japan, and here's how it ties back in. The

1131
01:05:03,040 --> 01:05:06,440
Speaker 1: new virus has been named the Medusa virus. It's named

1132
01:05:06,480 --> 01:05:11,000
Speaker 1: after a response it elicits from Amiba's when it attacks. So.

1133
01:05:11,080 --> 01:05:15,680
Speaker 1: A researcher named Massa Haru Takamura at the Tokyo University

1134
01:05:15,720 --> 01:05:19,080
Speaker 1: of Science noticed that when he observed this giant virus

1135
01:05:19,120 --> 01:05:23,480
Speaker 1: attacking ambas of the species A can't the Meba Casta castellani.

1136
01:05:24,200 --> 01:05:26,479
Speaker 1: Some of the amibas would get infected and they would

1137
01:05:26,520 --> 01:05:29,240
Speaker 1: burst open and spill their contents everywhere when they died,

1138
01:05:29,600 --> 01:05:33,480
Speaker 1: But some of the amibas would instead shrink down and

1139
01:05:33,520 --> 01:05:36,000
Speaker 1: basically turned to stone. They would form a type of

1140
01:05:36,080 --> 01:05:39,880
Speaker 1: hard mineral shell known as a cyst. So the giant

1141
01:05:39,960 --> 01:05:44,800
Speaker 1: virus can in some cases petrify the host the Medusa

1142
01:05:44,840 --> 01:05:49,320
Speaker 1: effect in action. Uh. And I should mention that Jong's

1143
01:05:49,400 --> 01:05:51,920
Speaker 1: article shows a picture of Takamura where he's got his

1144
01:05:51,960 --> 01:05:55,480
Speaker 1: computer desktop in the background, and the background of the

1145
01:05:55,520 --> 01:05:58,760
Speaker 1: desktop is Rubens painting of Medusa's severed head. I don't

1146
01:05:58,760 --> 01:06:00,400
Speaker 1: know if that was posed on purpose us or if

1147
01:06:00,440 --> 01:06:03,280
Speaker 1: he just happened to have that there anyway, Um, he's

1148
01:06:03,320 --> 01:06:06,320
Speaker 1: a little bit obsessed with this myth or something. But anyway,

1149
01:06:06,520 --> 01:06:09,880
Speaker 1: this viral discovery was mainly interesting because of some complex

1150
01:06:09,920 --> 01:06:13,080
Speaker 1: features of the virus itself. So that this virus, the

1151
01:06:13,080 --> 01:06:17,560
Speaker 1: Medusa virus, had his stones, which are these protein features

1152
01:06:18,000 --> 01:06:21,840
Speaker 1: usually found in more complex eukaryotic cells cells like plants

1153
01:06:21,840 --> 01:06:25,600
Speaker 1: and animals and amibas, and it's used for coiling and

1154
01:06:25,720 --> 01:06:28,600
Speaker 1: organizing DNA to make it compact when you've got a

1155
01:06:28,600 --> 01:06:31,160
Speaker 1: lot of DNA in a cell nucleus. Normally a virus

1156
01:06:31,200 --> 01:06:34,760
Speaker 1: doesn't need something like this. Also, there was repeated there

1157
01:06:34,800 --> 01:06:38,480
Speaker 1: was evidence of repeated gene transfer throughout history between this

1158
01:06:38,600 --> 01:06:42,800
Speaker 1: giant virus and it's Amiba host. The Amiba genome had

1159
01:06:42,880 --> 01:06:46,760
Speaker 1: genes originally from the virus, the virus genome had genes

1160
01:06:46,760 --> 01:06:50,320
Speaker 1: originally from the amiba. And then there was also a

1161
01:06:50,440 --> 01:06:55,200
Speaker 1: gene coding for DNA polymerase, which is used in complex

1162
01:06:55,280 --> 01:06:59,120
Speaker 1: living cells to synthesize d N A and the researchers

1163
01:06:59,120 --> 01:07:02,000
Speaker 1: believe that this d A polymerase gene could tell us

1164
01:07:02,320 --> 01:07:06,960
Speaker 1: really interesting things potentially about the history of eukaryotic life

1165
01:07:06,960 --> 01:07:10,360
Speaker 1: and its relationship to viruses. To quote from Takamorrow, don't

1166
01:07:10,360 --> 01:07:13,440
Speaker 1: know if he's right, but what he says is quote.

1167
01:07:13,520 --> 01:07:16,600
Speaker 1: Genomics research of the giant virus indicates that there is

1168
01:07:16,680 --> 01:07:20,440
Speaker 1: likely a relationship between the Medusa virus and the origin

1169
01:07:20,640 --> 01:07:24,600
Speaker 1: of eukaryotic life. And another one of the researchers, Dr

1170
01:07:24,680 --> 01:07:31,360
Speaker 1: Ginkia Yoshiqua from Kyoto University, says that that our DNA polymerase,

1171
01:07:31,440 --> 01:07:36,080
Speaker 1: the DNA polymerase of eukaryotes. Quote probably originated from Medusa

1172
01:07:36,160 --> 01:07:39,160
Speaker 1: virus or one of its relatives. Now that's their take.

1173
01:07:39,240 --> 01:07:42,959
Speaker 1: But that's a very interesting possibility that like this key

1174
01:07:43,040 --> 01:07:46,360
Speaker 1: feature of the cells that form more complex life on

1175
01:07:46,400 --> 01:07:50,560
Speaker 1: Earth could have come from viruses. Oh wow. And if

1176
01:07:50,560 --> 01:07:53,520
Speaker 1: we turned back to the myth, which again is has

1177
01:07:53,560 --> 01:07:57,320
Speaker 1: just been applied to this discovery. Uh, you know, but

1178
01:07:57,360 --> 01:08:00,000
Speaker 1: once one can't help but think about the connections here

1179
01:08:00,680 --> 01:08:04,560
Speaker 1: to this idea of of Medusa as this guy in entity, right,

1180
01:08:04,840 --> 01:08:06,400
Speaker 1: I mean that this would mean we we are all

1181
01:08:06,480 --> 01:08:10,720
Speaker 1: children of Medusa. Hail Medusa. All right. So there you

1182
01:08:10,760 --> 01:08:15,080
Speaker 1: have it, Medusa in two parts. Uh. Here on stuff

1183
01:08:15,120 --> 01:08:17,559
Speaker 1: to Blow your mind, obviously, we'd love to hear from

1184
01:08:17,560 --> 01:08:21,640
Speaker 1: everybody out there. Um, how you interpret the myth of

1185
01:08:21,760 --> 01:08:25,959
Speaker 1: Medusa and Perseus. How some of this information we've presented

1186
01:08:26,320 --> 01:08:30,240
Speaker 1: altars or backs up your interpretation, changes your interpretation? What

1187
01:08:30,280 --> 01:08:34,320
Speaker 1: are your favorite Meduces from art, uh, from cinema, from

1188
01:08:34,560 --> 01:08:37,120
Speaker 1: comic books, etcetera. We'd love to to hear from you

1189
01:08:37,160 --> 01:08:39,920
Speaker 1: about all of that. In the meantime, if you want

1190
01:08:39,920 --> 01:08:41,760
Speaker 1: to check out other episodes of Stuff to Blow your Mind,

1191
01:08:41,800 --> 01:08:44,720
Speaker 1: you can find us wherever you get your podcasts and

1192
01:08:44,760 --> 01:08:48,120
Speaker 1: wherever that happens to be, just make sure that you rate, review,

1193
01:08:48,160 --> 01:08:51,400
Speaker 1: and subscribe. Those are the things you can do that

1194
01:08:51,400 --> 01:08:53,840
Speaker 1: will help support the show huge thanks as always to

1195
01:08:53,880 --> 01:08:57,280
Speaker 1: our excellent audio producer Seth Nicholas Johnson. If you would

1196
01:08:57,320 --> 01:08:59,439
Speaker 1: like to get in touch with us with feedback about

1197
01:08:59,439 --> 01:09:02,280
Speaker 1: this episode or any other, to suggest topic for the future,

1198
01:09:02,720 --> 01:09:04,639
Speaker 1: or just to say hi, you can email us at

1199
01:09:04,800 --> 01:09:15,559
Speaker 1: contact at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. Stuff

1200
01:09:15,600 --> 01:09:17,759
Speaker 1: to Blow Your Mind is production of I Heart Radio.

1201
01:09:18,120 --> 01:09:20,160
Speaker 1: For more podcasts for my heart Radio, this is the

1202
01:09:20,160 --> 01:09:23,040
Speaker 1: i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you're listening

1203
01:09:23,080 --> 01:09:32,800
Speaker 1: to your favorite shows.