fear of angels

Here's what the Victorian Web says of Rossetti's Medusa:
http://www.victorianweb.org/painting/dgr/drawings/4.html
Commentary by Christopher Newall

"In Greek mythology Medusa was the monstrous daughter of a sea god. Her appearance was horrific; her hair consisted of waving snakes and she was capable of reducing people to stone by looking at them. She was loved by Poseidon with whom she lived in the mythic west. However Perseus came in search of her and slew her. At the moment of her death she gave birth to Pegasus and Chrysaor. The blood from her body was taken by Asclepius; blood from one vein was capable of reviving the dead, whereas that from another served as a lethal dose.
In the history of art the subject of Perseus slaying Medusa is often taken, and the single head of Medusa is also portrayed. From an early time Medusa was represented as a beautiful girl, if with horrible attributes, in contradiction of the accounts of her exceeding ugliness in Greek mythology.

Rossetti wrote poetry which took as its theme Perseus's treatment of the Medusa:

'Andromeda, by Perseus saved and wed,
Hankered each day to see the Gorgon's head:
Till o'er a fount he held it, bade her lean,
And mirrored in the wave was safely seen That death she lived by.
Let not thine eyes know
Any forbidden thing itself, although
It once should save as well as kill; but be
Its shadow upon life enough for thee.'

Virginia Surtees has given an account of the commissioning of this subject, as an oil painting, by C. P. Mathews, in 1867 (I, 107). Mathews was to pay 1500 guineas for the work but in the event rejected the final design on the grounds that he disliked the severed head. The present drawing is a version of the drawing shown to C. P. Mathews, which is in the Birmingham City Museum and Art Gallery."

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The beautiful woman as the Medusa in the old myths: Why? What did that mean, Beauty? Parts of the myth lost and garbled

Here's what I'm dealing with re Rossetti. That Beauty is the direct encounter with the (Platonic, though Rossetti is distinctly neo-Platonic) Forms, & thus a violation for one who is in timespace (Medusa's crime: Beauty; she as temple priestess to Athena paid dearly for her aberration; the rape by Poseidon, the curse by Athena... and conquered by the hero, bleeds out a Pegasus, Pegasus flying off to be tended by Muses, pawing the earth and setting the deep springs to flow: art itself) unless he/she is a true philosopher, standing at the stillpoint where eternity meets/is one with timespace. (A stillpoint -- the great marriage, lingham and yoni, Yin/Yang, balance; the central point of a spinning sphere -- its essential magical spirituality was cast out when yahweh was left to bachelor it in the holy of holies along about the 6-7 c bce: dig in the strata beneath that time and there are as many clay Asherah and Baals as Yahweh... but none of that dirty menstewrel blood, thank you. The light of the dark wing. Heap her outside with the shellfish, shells, on which Plotius, and later, Botticelli, have earthly Venus arrive, and later used to carve the very flesh from Hypatia ) --

I digress, will weep--

-- but that's what symbols do... Virgins point and women cover their hair for fear of angels.

As I learn a bit more and see the outlines a bit better, I retrace my steps through it. I understand a bit. And so can suspect sources of things that yield.

All, a map of the psyche.

(Later cribbed and embedded in Ezra Pound's Cantos.)

I can imagine Rossetti envisioning the painting as the actual Medusa in her living paradox of mortal Beauty in the moment of grasping the meaning of her fate... she, held in control by male passion, which is to say, his subduing her is the only self control he can manage... a psychological revelation. Rossetti painting sirens for rich industrialists to masturbate to -- in their own allowed way, natch. Potboiler. All held captive by questions of bread and cheese.

And so their world. 

Now ours: Imagine a place of mindless toil that goes home to live someone else's imagined life. 

How do we climb back into our being?

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"In a living portraiture, the motive forces of evolution do not reside solely in the artist; for there is an intimate contact between the portrayer and the portrayed."

~Aby Warburg



note:


For Pallas is Sophia or Wisdom, who carries health in her right hand and riches in her left, providing at the same time both for man's ease and plenty. To Her Perseus brought the head of Medusa which turned all thinges into Stone, and was horrid in its appearance with serpents and vipers instead of Hairs; which she afterwards placed in her shield to use it against her Enemyes, that is to say Rude and Barbarous people who are therefore to be turned into Stones. And in truth Wisdom or Naturall Philosophye renders its incredulous and envious condemners quite stupid and void of sense and understanding by the means of that same thinge, from whence Chrysaor was borne who was the father of Geryon who had three bodyes. That is by the means of the Lapiditick Gorgonian blood, which is nothing else but the Tincture of the Philosophick Stone. ~ Atalanta fugiens, emblem 23



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