Medusa

Christopher Columbus once stared at Medusa, and Medusa turned to stone.

Medusa turned a man into a stone with her stare.

Medusa had the power to turn someone to stone.

Lance Mitchell is an interesting character. He's a hair colorist by trade, who lives with his wife in a fairly typical suburban apartment complex just outside Washington, D.C. He has tattoos on both arms and rings in both ears. He enjoys bicycling, and exploring caves, and says he was raised by Druids, practitioners of an ancient Celtic religion that emphasizes the connection between humans and other animals. That upbringing is one of the reasons Lance Mitchell feels so passionately about his snakes, one-meter and three-meter-long pythons, Georgie and Bert, and his two-meter-long boa constrictor, Medusa.

Perseus killed Medusa and rescued Andromeda.

Medusa petrified me!

1895, Adolf Furtwängler, Eugenie Strong (editor and translator), Masterpieces of Greek Sculpture: A Series of Essays on the History of Art, 2010, →ISBN, page 201, On an Attic vase of the middle of the fifth century the head of Medusa in the hand of Perseus is represented as that of a beautiful woman free from any distortion. This led us to conclude (supra, p. 158) that Medusa must have been so represented at Athens in the greater arts even previous to this vase, for the vase-painters never invent such bold novelties for themselves.

It will be suggested here that the myth of Perseus, involving the decapitation of Medusa, is a narrative version of ritual.

But their depictions of Perseus are remarkably different and demonstrate the ambiguity of Medusa that was seeping into Victorian iconography. In later, Roman versions of the myth, for example Ovid's Metamorphoses, Perseus slays the sea monster with his sword instead of using Medusa’s head to petrify the monster.

Typically, what we think of as the jellyfish, the medusa, reproduces sexually, spawning sperm and eggs which, once fertilised, turn into sea anemone-like polyps, which attach themselves to the jellyfish’s bottom or other surfaces.