26/11/2023
A Moment In History:
Medusa
Medusa, a real woman, was the Afrikan serpent-goddess said to have worn a pouch around her waist containing live snakes that represented wisdom and renewal. She was said to have carried the original Gorgon mask to frighten off the unskilled, and it was painted red to symbolize the power of menstrual blood with “gruesome glaring eyes, bared fanged teeth and, like the Hindu Goddess Kali, a protruding tongue” Goddess Inspired. Her name derived from Egyptian Maat (Truth) “which also gives us the words medicine, mathematics, and Sanskrit medha (female wisdom)”. “The Gorgons were a trinity whose names were Medusa, Stheino, and Eurayle- or Wisdom, Strength, and Universality”. Blacked Out through White Wash
Afrikan cultures were unfamiliar to the people known as Europeans, and many of the Greek mythological creatures originate from Afrikan civilizations. The snake hair assessment, assuming these people(Greeks) did not know the name of the hairstyle, referred to it as snake hair later creating classic myths depicting a goddess that actually represented truth and was not a villain, into a monster, taught in schools as Greek mythology.
Snake hair and Dreadlocks?
The original, real life Medusa, supposedly had dreads and the origin of dreads through ancient discoveries existed before the fictional Medusa character was recreated. She was the snake Goddess which is how Europeans formed their version of a monster with hair of snakes, with a face that would turn any man to stone because of fear, which developed from the Gorgon mask she carried with her.
The ancient, classical, Greek version of Medusa may go back even further and be based on a folk tradition that dates to the Mycenaean Period. The historical King Perseus founded a new dynasty in Mycenae in 1290 BC. At the time that North Africa’s moon goddesses were usurped by the patriarchy of Greek invaders.
Medusa was a serpent goddess in African. Tales say she wore a pouch around her waist that heldlive snakes representing wisdom andrenewal. The Gorgon mask was supposed to frighten off invaders uneducated in the ways of the area. She reportedly had “gruesome glaring eyes, bared fanged teeth and, like the Hindu Goddess Kali, a protruding tongue.”
The Sahara desert in western Africa at the time was green but drying, leading to mass migrations of the people. When the Hellenes overran the goddess shrines, they stripped the priestesses of their Gorgon masks, which may have fed the myth or the beheading.
The name Medusa comes from the Egyptian word for truth: Maat and the Sanskrit word for female wisdom: medha.
Reports of Medusa’s horrible face, serpent hair and the ability to turn people into stone along with her magical blood, correlate with the ancient taboo of menstrual blood. Ancient people believed that a menstrual blood was the source of life and death and if a menstruating woman looked a man, he could turn to stone.
According to AP Art History, “Medusa was a Sun Goddess and representative of women’s ge***al mysteries. Snakes are generally connected to the Sun in mythology; obviously as in Egypt, or more subtly as the guardian of the solar apples of the Hesperides. Just as Athena would later, Medusa ruled the ocean, ships, and all the skills and arts dealing with them. Her petrifying gaze was the contradictory Sun and the keen vision of the ship’s pilot. The snakes standing erect over her forehead are often her favoured blue cobras, looking like the headdress later worn by Bast, or like dreadlocked hair.”
The serpent hair, described by the Greeks, could have been dreadlocks. Athena, another character who appears to have emigrated to Greek culture from Africa, was also depicted as black before undergoing the evolution of cultural change.
