- 2 months ago
- #clashofthegods
- #documentary
- #medusa
Documentary, History Channel - Clash of the Gods - S01E05 Medusa
#ClashoftheGods #Documentary #Medusa
#ClashoftheGods #Documentary #Medusa
Category
😹
FunTranscript
00:00If looks could kill, you would be dead.
00:06Turned to stone with just one glance.
00:09This is the myth of Medusa.
00:12A monstrous female, feared by all men.
00:17On the battlefield and beyond.
00:20But she will be challenged by a surprising enemy.
00:25Behind the story lurks a stunning reality.
00:29Is Greece's most famous monster inspired by a human corpse?
00:35And is her story based on actual science, as seen in our night sky?
00:41Discover the hidden meaning behind one of the greatest stories ever told.
00:47The hunt for the head of Medusa.
00:59This was once a garden.
01:09Now, it is a graveyard littered with dead bodies.
01:15Each face frozen in a moment of terror.
01:19The fatal moment when it gazed upon...
01:23Medusa.
01:25Her gaze penetrates right into your inner being and petrifies you from the inside out.
01:31The myth of Medusa has captivated us for almost 3,000 years.
01:37Today, her image still commands instant recognition around the world.
01:41The Medusa that we often see depicted on vases features a woman with boars, tusks, snakes curling around her head instead of hair.
01:53Sometimes she is bearded.
01:55Very often she's grimacing, facing us directly with her tongue lolling out of her mouth and her eyes staring straight at you.
02:02In ancient Greece, myths made sense of a confusing world.
02:09Their stories recorded history, explained nature, and dictated how people should live.
02:16The Medusa myth was no exception.
02:20They teach lessons to the society and help them organize things.
02:23And I think the Medusa story gives us a window into just certain kinds of values in ancient Greek society.
02:30It surely gives a sense of kind of a rich portrait of men's experience insofar as they may well have felt at some point in their lives completely under the spell of some bewitching type of woman.
02:42Medusa can crush a man with a single penetrating look.
02:47It is a power that makes her nearly invincible.
02:51The Medusa myth awakens a number of fears in people, especially men.
02:57This image of the all-powerful woman whose gaze can't be averted, whose gaze can see right through you to expose everything inside of you.
03:06That can freeze you in your tracks and somehow devour you and consume you.
03:11And I think men in particular are very afraid of this sort of strong woman.
03:16To the ancient Greeks, Medusa's deadly image was one of the most terrifying in all of mythology.
03:28But she was not always a monster.
03:35According to the myth, Medusa was once a ravishing woman.
03:39Every man in Greece wanted to possess her.
03:42What she's described as is she's a beautiful woman with long flowing locks of hair.
03:47Every suitor wants to marry her.
03:49She causes envy among everyone.
03:51But Medusa can't get married.
03:56She is a priestess of Athena, the goddess of war.
04:01And bound by an eternal vow of chastity.
04:04Athena is the patron goddess of the great city of ancient Athens.
04:09She's also a virgin goddess.
04:11Sex is not a part of her world.
04:13She's actually beyond the reach of any male desire.
04:17The servants in her temple would have been expected to be virginal.
04:23So they could devote their energies not to domestic issues and child rearing,
04:27but to the goddess's service.
04:31Medusa, the hideous image of evil, starts out as a symbol of purity.
04:38This is the story.
04:39But could it be based on reality?
04:42Athena's temple is no myth.
04:49It still stands today high atop the Acropolis in Athens.
04:55The Parthenon.
04:57In Greek it means place of the virgin.
05:01When it was completed in 430 BC, it towered over the city of Athens.
05:07Any great city should have a great temple.
05:11It would be like any city in America having some kind of great sports stadium.
05:16So Athens, being the most prominent city in ancient Greece,
05:20wanted to have also a temple that befitted its magnificence.
05:23And so they created the Parthenon.
05:26At the center of the temple stood a colossal statue of Athena,
05:30nearly 40 feet high, carved out of ivory and gold.
05:35It was one of the most impressive sights in the ancient world.
05:39In the myth, this is where Medusa's tragic fate unfolds.
05:47Medusa's beauty is off limits.
05:49Locked away in service to Athena.
05:52But one suitor will not let her vow of chastity stand in his way.
05:59Poseidon, god of the sea.
06:02Poseidon is his sort of very prominent masculine power.
06:07He is a god of the sea and a god of storms and a god of earthquakes.
06:10Earthquakes don't sort of just creep up on you.
06:12They hit you very hard.
06:14If he was angered, even just a little bit, he could explode violently
06:18and really do harm to you.
06:20In a fit of raw lust, Poseidon makes his move.
06:31And ravages the virgin priestess.
06:33He raped her inside of Athena's temple, a sacrilegious act.
06:45He stole from her, her virginity.
06:48Certainly, this would be a crime in any time of the world.
06:52Medusa is devastated.
06:55Her innocence has been stolen.
06:57Her life changed forever.
07:00She was a rape victim, and so she was no longer eligible for ordinary marriage,
07:06according to the mores of Greek times.
07:08And she's no longer a virgin either, so she wasn't able to be devoted to service to a goddess.
07:14For certain religious rites, you had to purify yourself from intercourse,
07:19so actually having intercourse in the temple is desecrating that space,
07:25hence Athena's anger.
07:27And Athena is furious.
07:29But not with Poseidon.
07:31As a powerful male god, this is expected of him.
07:36In the eyes of Athena, it is Medusa who deserves to be punished.
07:40The victim is about to become the accused.
07:45Athena's one of the guys, so she has this role that places her in the kind of male camp.
07:52She's going to side with the men.
07:55In a way, it reflects a society where they consider women more as property value.
08:00They recognize at some point that rape is necessarily harmful to the woman,
08:04but it doesn't seem in most of these myths that there's any sympathy at all.
08:07And frequently, the female figure who is raped is the one who's punished.
08:12Athena will impose a devastating sentence on her shattered priestess.
08:17She will transform Medusa from a beauty into a beast.
08:23Her new look will bear a terrifying resemblance to a frequent and real sight in ancient Greece.
08:30Human corpses.
08:37Medusa, mythology's heinous snake-haired beast, can turn her enemies to stone with a single glance.
08:45Once, she was Greece's greatest beauty, desired by both men and gods.
08:53But after Poseidon raped her, Medusa's world changed forever.
09:00The Medusa story is a tragedy, because she wasn't even the perpetrator of the deed.
09:08It was Poseidon who raped her in Athena's temple.
09:11But she's then turned into a hideous monster.
09:14In the myth, the goddess Athena curses Medusa without warning.
09:20She begins an agonizing transformation.
09:23Clawing desperately at her face.
09:26Her skin cracks and withers.
09:32And her long silken hair becomes a writhing mass of poisonous snakes.
09:43Medusa's horrific transformation is almost complete.
09:54But there's one more twist.
09:57She's now going to have to undergo the most powerful and most gut-wrenching of all the aspects of her curse.
10:05She'll have to be now a person whose very sight turns the looker into stone.
10:11It's now going to isolate her from all of human society.
10:14Medusa is now no longer going to have any interactions with anyone else.
10:19So what Athena has effectively done is consign this poor girl to a kind of solitary confinement for the rest of her life.
10:25For the tragic crime of being raped, Medusa has lost her status.
10:32Her beauty.
10:34And her ability to look at anyone without killing them.
10:39Now, the final blow.
10:42She is banished to a remote and desolate island for life.
10:48Medusa is now going to live out this curse for eternity.
10:51And for all eternity things don't really change.
10:53All that matters is that her stone garden grows by one every time someone tries to come close to her.
11:02In the myth, Medusa has become a type of monster called a gorgon.
11:08A name that comes from the ancient Greek word for terrible.
11:12The gorgon is this horrible monster.
11:14It's got scaly skin, huge staring eyes, and it can turn you to stone by looking at you.
11:21The earliest traditions that we have of gorgons mention Medusa.
11:24Medusa becomes first a human being who is then transformed into one of these nasty beasts.
11:29In Greek myth, gorgons represent the physical embodiment of death.
11:37In fact, death is what inspired them.
11:41The broad, wide open eyes, the marks on the face, the bloated face itself, the pulled back skin showing the teeth and the tongue protruding,
11:50was inspired by the sight of a dead body.
11:53In the days after dying, the skin of a human corpse begins to shrink around the various parts of the body.
12:04The face becomes grotesquely bloated.
12:07The eyes expand out of their sockets.
12:10And the tongue swells pushing itself out of the mouth.
12:14Gradually, the corpse morphs from man to monster.
12:17On photographs of dead bodies, you can see all of these changes that are characteristic of the gorgon taking place.
12:24This is one of the things that people today aren't so familiar with.
12:27We get separated from death very early.
12:30We have specialists to take care of dead bodies.
12:32But the truth is that in ancient times, you wouldn't be insulated from this.
12:37People would see this sort of thing.
12:39Death was everywhere in the ancient world.
12:42In fact, many other historical monsters are modeled on corpses.
12:48In the middle of the Aztec calendar, you find exactly the same features.
12:53You've got exactly the same oversized eyes.
12:55You've got the broad nose.
12:57You've got the rictus grin.
12:58You have the protruding tongue.
13:00You find it in base in Egypt.
13:02In India, you find many of the same features on Rahul, the demon responsible for the eclipse.
13:06In Southeast Asia, Rangda, the demon that kidnaps children, also has huge Popeyes and a very, very long tongue scrolling out of her mouth.
13:16The prominence of this gorgon symbol in many different spots in the ancient world gives us a real sense of just how widespread these myths were.
13:25In the story, Medusa is now a gorgon, the mythical face of death.
13:36But her physical transformation is only the beginning of her punishment.
13:41Her hideous looks will make her an outcast.
13:43But her petrifying power will make her a target.
13:49Because the warrior who beheads Medusa will possess the ultimate battlefield advantage.
13:55Her severed head will still turn men to stone.
14:01Men from all over the Mediterranean set out to slay Medusa and claim that power for themselves.
14:07One of them has more than glory at stake.
14:11His name is Perseus.
14:16And his hunt for Medusa's head is one of mythology's greatest adventures.
14:26The story of Perseus begins in Argos, a real region of southern Greece.
14:31In antiquity, a lot of myths were actually situated in specific locations.
14:37Now, this was important for the people who lived in those places.
14:42They could actually claim connection to one of these divine heroes.
14:47In the myth, Argos is ruled by a tyrant named Acresius.
14:53The king has a problem.
14:55He has no male heir.
14:57The Greek world tried to retain property in families.
15:03And the way you retain it in families is you leave it to the firstborn son.
15:08Or the eldest male heir.
15:13Acresius' only child is a daughter.
15:16Danae.
15:18She has no children of her own.
15:20So the king consults a prophetess to ask if she will ever bear him a grandson.
15:30Acresius is told in prophecy that if his daughter ever had a child, that child would rise up and kill him.
15:39He finds out that the son of his daughter is in fact going to kill him.
15:43He sort of freaks out and decides that he needs to prevent her from ever having a child to begin with.
15:48This fear of generational shift, this fear of losing your power to the next generation, was real.
15:57If you had a kid and you had something worth taking, at some point you needed to keep an eye on the kid.
16:03Overcome by terror, the king hatches a plan to save his own skin.
16:08Acresius had his daughter Danae walled up inside of a tower where no one could see her.
16:16It was a pretty miserable existence.
16:18Danae is trapped with no fresh air and barely any food.
16:24It is the king's way of killing her without getting blood on his hands.
16:28The king kept waiting for news that his daughter had died and was very surprised that he never received news that she had died of starvation or thirst.
16:42After a while, they began to see lights on and hear noise and sound coming from the tower, and so Acresius went to see what his daughter was up to.
16:51The king enters his daughter's chamber, and discovers to his horror that Danae is not only still alive, she's a mother, to a son, Perseus.
17:05Acresius is stunned that someone accessed the secure tower and impregnated his daughter.
17:13But the baby's father isn't a mortal man.
17:17He is king of the Greek gods.
17:20Mythology's most prolific womanizer.
17:24Zeus.
17:25Zeus, who seduced so many women in so many myths, sees Danae through the grating and falls in love with her.
17:35And so he comes down to her in about the only shape that could come through the bars, which is a shower of gold.
17:43He took the form of a cascade of gold and poured himself into the room and then was able to make love to her in that way.
17:49Zeus's shower of gold may have been inspired by a real natural phenomenon.
17:56One named after Perseus.
17:59Probably the most impressive and the most visible meteorite shower in the sky is the Perseus meteorite shower.
18:07Certainly it looks like a shower of gold coming down if you've ever stopped and watched it in August.
18:12You can see the individual streaks with a yellowish color to them.
18:17In mythologies around the world, women can be impregnated by various natural forces.
18:23It's not just a shower of gold that we have in the legend of Perseus.
18:27We have women and animals sometimes being impregnated by the wind.
18:32Or in various mythologies, women become pregnant by the sun.
18:37Perseus is born both divine and mortal.
18:40A type of hero known as a demigod.
18:45So this demigod idea means that this person has some features that are very godly, some divine powers, but at the same time he is mortal, he can die.
18:58I suspect that the Greeks invented this idea of a demigod because they wanted to reach the gods as much as possible.
19:04To create images of themselves that are closer and closer to the gods.
19:10To fulfill his destiny as a demigod, Perseus must first survive his grandfather's wrath.
19:16King Acrisius fears the boy will fulfill the prophecy he dreads and grow up to kill him.
19:24His first impulse is to murder both mother and child.
19:28But he fears Zeus' revenge.
19:30So he devises a plan to let nature do the killing for him.
19:34Acrisius decided to put both the mother and the child into a boat-like construction and throw them into the sea.
19:46Danae and Perseus have been left for dead with no food, no direction, and no protection from the dangers of the sea.
19:58Meanwhile, on a dismal island beyond the waves, Medusa is adding statues to her garden of death.
20:11Warriors turn to stone trying to capture her head.
20:15She possesses a power every conqueror desires.
20:19Even real conquerors, like Alexander the Great.
20:28Medusa's power to turn men to stone may have spawned the famous phrase,
20:33Looks that kill.
20:35But the ancient Greeks believed her power could be used for good as well as evil.
20:41In their language, the name Medusa actually had a positive connotation.
20:46It meant guardian.
20:49Her image was often used to ward off danger.
20:53She even appeared on the armor of some of the world's most feared warriors.
20:58Evidence of this can be found in one of the time capsules of the ancient world.
21:03Pompeii.
21:05When they were excavating the city in the 1830s, archaeologists found a very large mosaic,
21:11which depicts a battle between Alexander the Great and the Persian king Darius.
21:18And on Alexander's breastplate is an image of Medusa.
21:21The battlefield wasn't the only place where Medusa's powers were sought.
21:28She was also used to scare children.
21:34The idea was that you would put the symbol on the outside of your stove,
21:40and this would prevent children from opening up the oven door.
21:43Now the Medusa was something that Greek parents used to use in order to scare the kids in order to eat their food.
21:53Say, eat your food or I'll ask the Medusa to get you.
21:56So it was something that was very horrendous, very horrible, very mesmerizing, very frightening.
22:01In the myth, Medusa has a price on her head.
22:10Warriors from across the Greek world travel to her remote island,
22:15seeking to steal it and use its petrifying power as a weapon against their enemies.
22:20So far, all who have tried have made the same fatal mistake.
22:26They looked at her first.
22:32The ancient sources are relatively silent on what Medusa must have thought
22:36as she's just sitting there living out her life amid a huge panoply of stone corpses.
22:42You can imagine that it would have been a very kind of strange situation.
22:45You've got little stalagmites of people all over the place, and there she is all alone,
22:50but never had the satisfaction of actually being able to engage with anybody.
22:55So you can imagine Medusa living out her life,
22:58kind of waiting for the next person to waft into her purview and get turned into stone.
23:04But one hero is determined to break her spell.
23:08As Medusa languishes among her statues,
23:11Perseus is coming of age across the sea.
23:16When he was a baby, he and his mother, Danae,
23:20were cast out to sea by his grandfather, King Acrisius.
23:25Mother and son were expected to die.
23:28But Perseus's divine father, Zeus, protected them.
23:34They washed up on an island called Seraphos and settled there.
23:38He grows up into a nice strapping young lad, as it were, very strong and also very strong-willed and very protective of his mother.
23:47Perseus has a very good reason to feel protective.
23:51The ruler of Seraphos has plans for his mother.
23:54The king of Seraphos was not enthusiastic about having Perseus around, partly because he had his eye on Danae, who is still a young woman and beautiful and he wanted to marry her.
24:07The king hatches a plan to take Perseus out of the picture.
24:12He demands an expensive gift from all of his subjects and vows to banish any who don't comply.
24:20He knows that Perseus is poor and won't be able to deliver.
24:25Perseus, being a young man without a father and really without a family, if you didn't have a father in ancient Greece, it meant that you were really very much a kind of social outcast, didn't have any gift to bring to the king.
24:39Perseus is cornered. If he is exiled, his mother will be forced into an unwanted marriage and be separated from him forever.
24:50He makes an impulsive decision with deadly ramifications.
24:55Perseus says, well, I may not be able to buy a great gift because I'm poor, but I'm going to do something that no one else has been able to do.
25:01I will bring you the head of Medusa.
25:04It's a suicide mission.
25:06No one has ever returned from Medusa's island alive.
25:12But for Perseus, there's no turning back.
25:16It's a matter of honor. He can't get out of it. He has to bring the head of the Gorgon.
25:25If Perseus succeeds, he will return home a hero with a stature to challenge the king and protect his mother.
25:32But if he fails, he'll be turned to stone.
25:42In Greek mythology, the names Perseus and Medusa are forever linked.
25:48The consummate hero and the ultimate monster.
25:52It is a story that began here among these ruins.
25:59This is ancient Mycenae.
26:04According to legend, this once great civilization was founded by Perseus himself.
26:09Mycenae was the greatest of the ancient city-states back in the Bronze Age.
26:15And it ruled sway over a large swath of ancient Greece.
26:20For millennia, it was thought that Mycenae, just like Perseus and Medusa, was a myth.
26:25The only surviving reference to it was in Homer's epic story, the Iliad.
26:32But in the late 19th century, a lost civilization was rediscovered.
26:38Using Homer's epic poems as a guide, archaeologists in the 19th century were actually able to locate these great ancient citadels.
26:46And what an amazing adventure it must have been to find out that not only was Homer talking about something that really existed, but now they themselves were in contact with it as well.
26:57Mycenae lies near Argos, the city where Perseus was born in the myth.
27:03Its ruins are a window into the people who invented the story of Perseus and Medusa, ancient Greeks who used mythology to explain life's mysteries.
27:13The city's structures were so massive, later generations of Greeks believed they were built by gods.
27:21They would look at the ruins of those palaces and see monumental masonry.
27:28This was a kind of feat that they couldn't imagine themselves doing.
27:32It seemed like something that only heroes could do.
27:35It was from these ruins that the story of Perseus sprang.
27:39The hero remembered for building the city and taking on Medusa.
27:46It is the ultimate challenge.
27:51Perseus confronts it with the bravado of a boy who is eager to prove himself a man.
27:57But he is woefully unprepared for the task at hand.
28:00Perseus has no weapons, no experience, and no idea how to kill his target.
28:10Another piece that makes Medusa so terrifying is that they wouldn't have had a real sense of exactly what she looked like.
28:16Anyone who had seen her before Perseus would not have lived to tell the tale.
28:19So all he knew about was that there was this monster that was so hideous that if you ever caught eyes on her, you would be frozen and turned to stone.
28:26He stalked off and began this adventure.
28:32And it wasn't long before he realized that he had no idea where he was going.
28:37But as heroes often do, and especially heroes whose fathers are gods, he soon gets supernatural aid.
28:45Lost in the wilderness, Perseus does what many ancient Greeks would have done under the same circumstances.
28:54He prays.
28:56And the gods hear him.
28:58His father Zeus sends down a divine messenger, Hermes, who gives Perseus the jump start he needs.
29:06A pair of winged sandals.
29:08One of the things that Perseus has to do is travel long distances very fast.
29:15And being an era without airplanes, here comes Hermes to offer a solution, those sandals with wings that he himself as a messenger of the gods uses.
29:24So he gives them to Perseus.
29:26So Perseus wears them and he can fly through continents at the speed of a, well, faster than a jet.
29:32Now that Perseus has a set of wings, what he really needs is a set of weapons.
29:39Perseus has got everything going for him.
29:42I mean, he has divine blood.
29:44He's got great powers.
29:46He's been brought up to just on the cusp of manhood.
29:50He's ready to take on these nasty beasts.
29:52But he needs more.
29:53He's got to have technology.
29:57Hermes offers Perseus an inside tip.
29:59He advises him to locate the Stygian nymphs.
30:05Beautiful women who possess the magical weapons he needs to kill Medusa.
30:11The nymphs are these female divinities who are associated with natural elements.
30:19And they inhabit them.
30:20So they are in springs, they're in mountains, they're in trees.
30:25They're typically the objects of deep and powerful sexual desire.
30:30And from this we get the idea of a nymphomaniac.
30:35The whereabouts of these nymphs are a mystery.
30:38Only three hideous women know how to find them.
30:42The Grey East sisters.
30:43They have been old, withered hags since the day they were born.
30:48And they don't like visitors.
30:51Perseus must get them to talk.
30:54So he can save his mother and survive his face-off with Medusa.
30:58It's a battle we can still see in today's night skies.
31:04If we look closely.
31:09Medusa, a deadly Gorgon, has turned countless warriors into stone.
31:14But someone is still stalking her.
31:19Perseus.
31:21And he wants her head.
31:24His success will require more than boyish bravado.
31:30Perseus will need a powerful set of weapons to slay Medusa.
31:35To get them, he must find the Stygian nymphs.
31:38But only three wretched old women know where they live.
31:43The Grey East sisters.
31:49They are very strange.
31:51None of them have eyes except this one that they pass between each other.
31:55Whenever one wants to try to have a look at something.
31:59So they need to share it.
32:00That eye is very precious to them.
32:02The island of the Grey East sisters is a dark realm.
32:10Where even the moon does not shine.
32:13Perseus uses his trusty winged sandals to get there.
32:18Perseus is also not just, you know, a hothead and brawny.
32:22But he's also pretty clever.
32:24When he gets to the island, he realizes he should do some reconnaissance
32:27and find out what their weaknesses might be before he proceeds.
32:32When he realizes they all have the one eye and they're blind while they don't have it,
32:39he steals the eye from them as they're passing it around.
32:43The sisters fly into a blind panic.
32:49They're in a very abject position.
32:52It's like a beggar having his last farthing stolen from him.
32:55They're falling all over each other trying to get that eye back from him.
32:58Perseus has the upper hand.
33:03He demands the location of the nymphs.
33:07The Grey sisters reveal that they live on the river Styx.
33:11The waterway that separates the land of the living from the land of the dead.
33:16Perseus has what he came for.
33:20He tosses the eye onto the sand and takes to the skies.
33:25This is the myth, but how does it connect to reality?
33:30This story, like many others in Greek mythology, may literally have fallen from the sky.
33:40Since the dawn of civilization, mankind has looked to the heavens to explain the past, present and future.
33:49An awful lot of storytelling revolved around the things that you saw in the sky, the constellations that you see.
34:01Certainly we know that an awful lot of myths were tied to the constellations.
34:05We have in the 5th century Greeks naming the constellations by the names of mythical beings.
34:12And at that time, people not only saw those mythical creatures up in the sky as symbols, as mere representations,
34:20but they actually believed that the constellations were divine.
34:22One especially curious pattern exists in the heavens.
34:28A hero holding a curved sword and the head of a gorgon.
34:33This is the constellation known as Perseus.
34:37A celestial blueprint for the myth.
34:41But there may be more to this cluster of stars.
34:44It may also reveal how the story of the Grey sisters originated.
34:49The constellations themselves did things that inspired portions of the myth.
34:57The second brightest star in the constellation of Perseus is Algol.
35:01Now, Algol is a very peculiar star.
35:04In the Perseus constellation, Algol forms a point on Medusa's head.
35:09It is known as an eclipsing binary star.
35:13It appears as a single point of light in the sky,
35:15but it's actually two stars that orbit around one another.
35:20As they go, they eclipse each other's light,
35:23making Algol appear to dim and then get bright again.
35:28It is a three-day cycle that may have inspired the story of the three Grey sisters.
35:34Algol is very bright for a while, and then it goes out further rapidly every third day.
35:39This represents the stealing of the Eye of the Grey Eye by Perseus.
35:46As it tries to pass to the third Grey Eye, Perseus is in there among them, and he steals the eye.
35:52And when he takes the eye, you can see it go out.
35:54Well, if you're a good storyteller, and you've kept track of this,
35:57you know when the star is going to disappear.
35:59So you can start telling your story when the star is still bright.
36:02Then when you get to the part of the story where Perseus has stolen the eye,
36:06you can point up in the sky and say, look, it's gone.
36:09Algol's impact on the myth may not end with the Grey sisters.
36:14Some experts believe it also inspired the climax of the story.
36:19Medusa's gruesome demise.
36:22The myth continues.
36:32Perseus is on a collision course with Medusa.
36:36The odds are stacked against him.
36:39To take on the monster, he needs the right battle gear.
36:43He finds it along the river Styx,
36:46the gateway to Hades,
36:49where he encounters the Stygian nymphs.
36:52They present Perseus with three weapons essential to his survival.
36:59The Sword of Zeus.
37:01The Shield of Athena.
37:03And the Helmet of Hades,
37:06God of the Dead.
37:08It reminds them irresistibly of James Bond
37:11getting all the fabulous devices from Q.
37:13Not only because he gets all these things to carry out his mission,
37:15but because they also have magical properties to them.
37:18Now, Perseus is ready to fulfill his destiny.
37:23And not a moment too soon.
37:25Back home on the island of Seraphos,
37:28a royal wedding is in the works.
37:30And Perseus' mother is the unwilling bride.
37:34Will her son slay Medusa and bring back her head before it's too late?
37:39And how can he succeed where so many others before him have failed?
37:43The secret lies in his shield.
37:44Perseus' dangerous quest for the head of Medusa has taken him on a journey over thousands of miles.
38:01Now his moment of truth has arrived.
38:10He stands at the threshold of Medusa's deadly lair.
38:14The gods helped him get here, but the rest is up to him.
38:18All this around Medusa is rocks, very hard things, anything that would have been living would have been turned to stone.
38:28So it must have been a very bleak and desolate place.
38:31Perseus is frightened as he takes the first steps toward his fate.
38:36But they are not steps forward.
38:40The young hero is slowly creeping backwards.
38:44Perseus is very smart, and he realizes that trying to attack Medusa head-on would be his own undoing.
38:52He'd be turned to stone.
38:53So what he does instead is get his shield, turn it round, and actually approach her from behind.
38:58And he walks up to her backwards, looking at her in his shield so that he's safe.
39:02You can imagine the tension building as he gets closer and closer.
39:06As far as he knows, the shield will protect him, but he must not have really known for sure.
39:15Perseus cautiously makes his way through the lair, eyes locked on his shield.
39:24The slightest misstep will prove fatal.
39:32At last, Perseus locks onto his target.
39:41Closes his eyes.
39:46And swings his sword.
39:48With one clean stroke, the head of Medusa rolls to the floor.
39:56Her years of torment and isolation are finally over.
40:01There would have been great fascination for Medusa among ancient audiences.
40:05And whether they were rooting for her or rooting against her, there would have been a great kind of sympathy for this poor, poor person.
40:11I mean, think about what she'd been through and all that she'd lost and the horrible life she was fated to live.
40:16And then her end point is to have a hero chop her head off.
40:19It is a tragic end for a tragic figure.
40:24But Medusa's story doesn't end here.
40:28One of the remarkable things about Medusa's head is even after she is dead, even after it's been removed and stuffed in a bag, it still has the power to transform anyone who looks on it to stone.
40:42Medusa is unstoppable and terrifying.
40:45But those forces can also be harnessed and Perseus's story talks about that.
40:49When the head is inside the bag, then it becomes a weapon that could be used for good as well as evil.
40:55Perseus is now the owner of the most dangerous weapon on earth.
41:00He can turn anyone to stone.
41:03And he has a few targets in mind.
41:05His mother, Danae, has been left with no one to protect her from the lecherous king of Seraphos.
41:14She's about to be made a queen against her will.
41:19For Perseus, it is a race against time.
41:23As the hero flies home, it becomes clear just how powerful Medusa's head still is.
41:37As Perseus is flying with his winged sandals back across to get to Greece, drops from her blood drop into the sand.
41:46And from this spring up hundreds and hundreds of poisonous snakes.
41:49Some nasty monsters in antiquity are so mean and so awful that their blood actually produces other monsters.
41:58Medusa is one of those that have such powerful blood.
42:02The dripping blood from her head as Perseus was flying away was thought in later tellings of the story to have given rise to all the snakes that ancient Romans knew to exist in North Africa.
42:12In the myth, the royal wedding day has arrived.
42:21The father of the bride has come from Argos.
42:24Perseus' own grandfather, King Acrisius.
42:29He has long feared the prophecy that his grandson would kill him.
42:34Perseus arrives just as the wedding ceremony is getting underway.
42:40When Perseus returns to Seraphos and sees that his mother is about to marry the king, he becomes very angry.
42:50So he lifts up the head of Medusa and says, King, I have brought you your gift.
42:57One glance turns the king to stone, his face frozen in an eternal scream.
43:07But he's not the only king who gets caught looking.
43:10Acrisius is also petrified.
43:23Danae has been saved by her son.
43:26And Perseus has earned his place as one of mythology's bravest heroes.
43:31His death-defying journey has transformed him from a boy into a man.
43:40Perseus is particularly relatable among the ancient heroes.
43:43He's cast out at different points along the way.
43:46And only because of the extra love of his mother is he able to make his way through some very difficult times.
43:51He makes his mark in the world and he grows into his own.
43:53He becomes a real, true, powerful hero, someone that the Greeks can look up to.
44:02After he saves his mother, Perseus presents Medusa's head as a tribute to Athena, the goddess who created the monster.
44:10In the end, it is Medusa's original punisher who inherits her power.
44:15There's a poetic quality to the ending of this story as Medusa's head becomes the icon on the breastplate of Athena.
44:24After all, this poor young girl started off this great misadventure by running afoul of that goddess.
44:30Athena has the first and the last laugh.
44:36Medusa's story has come full circle.
44:39Our myth ends where it began, in ancient Greece's greatest temple, the Parthenon.
44:49Above it, she and the man who took her life are forever linked in the night sky.
Recommended
44:51
|
Up next
44:50
45:00
45:00
44:53
44:50
44:53
45:02
45:01
44:52
44:51
44:50
44:51
44:51
Be the first to comment