Herodotus makes mention of the Gorgon in Book 2, Chapter 91 of the Histories. Although disputed by classicists in pithy summations, some attribute to Herodotus the inception of history as we might understand it today (a welcome displacement to the Enlightenment canonisation of Gibbon), and so there is a sense in which it is unclear what Herodotus is getting at, by presenting a decapitated and bedraggled head of a mythical beast, in his attempt to accurately chronicle past events. Naturally there are theories about this, for instance the idea that the head of the Gorgon is symbolic and must depict the sublimated memory of an actual invasion, or as Jane Ellen Harrison writes in 1908 (in the second edition of her Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion) that this is ‘a ritual mask misunderstood’ (p. 186) to which she adds in a footnote, ‘admirable specimens of savage dancing masks with Medusa-like tongue and tusks are exhibited in the Berlin Museum’ (although what is Medusa-like about a tusk remains unremarked).
The Gorgon’s head that Herodotus says Perseus removes from Libya as a trophy, to where it perhaps still rests in a Theban district, can only by logical deduction, be the sister Medusa, since Gorgon is the collective for all three, but two are immortal, and I suppose there is no decapitation that would stick with those other two (whose names you and I have rarely heard and which I cannot call to mind without aid). Human fascination lies most, afterall, in the cracks of things (where you can get in), and speculations on the mortal remain of far greater interest – like a nail driving through the sole of your boot until there is a welt recalling the stigmata – than on the impregnable constancy of Stheno and Euryale.
It is presumably why Harrison attributes to Medusa the superlative designation of ‘most evil’ and for which reason she observes (quite insightfully I think) that ‘her potency only begins when her head is severed, and that potency resides in the head’ (my emphasis). It is perhaps an unfortunate coincidence that the relative who calls this creature to mind is etched into my memory with a swathe of curls better described as coils around her head, and which is probably another reason, in an associative sense, for comparing her to the Gorgon (so as you can perhaps see, the comparison, if not entirely baseless, is not wholly substantiated either). And it is owing also to this that I exercise caution (I hope) in drawing such corporeal and liminal things together, though to my recollection I encountered this relative not above a handful of times in her life; nor am I likely to encounter her descendants more than another handful of times in what (one nevertheless hopes) may be long lives. And this yet again demonstrates the duty of care one owes (in a relational sense) to another, although this brings me to another question worth examining, the problem of what it means to be outside and what it takes to be gathered in.
While it would be no exaggeration to say that this relative caused her future siblings-in-law certain grief (of which Exodus forms but a passing example, or likewise a dream) and in all the ordinary and unremarkable ways in which one life bears on another, was said to have caused my grandmother some heartbreak, it would be both specifically dishonest, and a general disservice to women, not to acknowledge that it is women who are most often prevailed upon to inhabit such delicate, and frankly quite awkward, positions in families.
It is after all women, who, owing to the accretion of laws around questions of lineage and property, have been obliged to marry out and not in, and in which sense they are (from a certain perspective) always seen to be marginal on a spectrum ranging from amateur genealogist to tenured historian. And while it is certainly not my expertise, this question of women, it is an intimately related theme to the question of family or that of identity (and one I hope you will indulge me in, as a minor inquiry which intersects with an ontology of what it means to belong and which, for a diasporic Palestinian, seems ineluctable, bordering at times on the obsessive).
It is already evident to the amateur genealogist that on the question of women, the memory of who they are and where they came from is extinguished by the death of what is known as living memory. Take my family, though speckled by a recurrence of heritage names, but lacking anything that could be rightly described as systematic in the bestowal of taxonomic titles to women, (unlike the serial and intergenerational succession of names, once removed, among first-born sons). And yet there is no lack of love in this otherwise erratic conferral of names and even in the ad hoc, we can salvage some patterns: sometimes a first born is named with a feminisation just in case there should be no future sons; or sometimes girls are given the middle name of a grandmother or favoured aunt. And then again there are times when a mother, who remember has come from out and not in, is struck by the fancy of some other name, (like a passing acquaintance), she just names her daughter with a word that lacks the weight of a lineage or history, this often happens.
And what I am getting at here is that women are quite often lost, both to families and history, and it is precisely when something is lost that it is also malleable to the impregnation of meaning (pun, I suppose, intended) such as when Harrison writes: ‘the ritual object comes first; then the monster is begotten to account for it’.
