Medusa thus continued to pay the price for men’s actions. ”Įventually Perseus, a son of Zeus known as the slayer of monsters, chopped off Medusa’s head and used it as a weapon against his enemies. She took her beauty and made Medusa’s face so terrible that it would turn onlookers to stone. “Athena struck Medusa’s hair and crowned her instead with living snakes.

Who gets punished for all that? Why the woman of course: Medusa, whose beauty drew people to the temple (much to Athena’s chagrin) was raped by Poseidon (a recurring villain in this story) right in Athena’s temple, thus defiling the temple as well as Medusa. Then her handmaiden Eirene told her the real story of Medusa, originally a virgin priestess in Athena’s temple. At first Ariadne knew of Medusa only as a monster with a head full of snakes who turned anyone who looked at her to stone. Besides the story of what happened to her mother, she was particularly affected by the tale of Medusa. Moreover, as Ariadne observed, when gods want to punish a man’s actions, they come for the women. The Minotaur, a ferocious creature that was half man and half bull, preferred a diet of human beings.Īs Ariadne learned, “What the gods liked was ferocity, savagery, the snarl and the bite and the fear. Out of this unholy union between Pasiphae (Ariadne’s mother) and the bull, the Minotaur was born. Poseidon retaliated by afflicting Minos’s wife Pasiphae with a bizarre passion for the bull Poseidon had sent, such that she even mated with it. Minos wanted to keep that very fine bull for himself, so he sacrificed a different, and inferior, creature. Poseidon, the powerful god of the sea, had sent a magnificent bull to King Minos to sacrifice to Poseidon, acts of sacrifice and praise being very important to the gods, even if they have to provide assists.

In Greek mythology, Ariadne was a princess of Crete, daughter of King Minos and brother of the Minotaur. It seeks to redress the ways in which these stories have traditionally been told from the male point of view, and focuses on “the price paid for the resentment, the lust and the greed of arrogant men.” This book turns the tale of Ariadne into a “herstory.” Ariadne is another retelling of Greek myths, this one from the perspective of the women involved in the stories.

Ariadne jennifer saint