Gorgoneia

In Ancient Greece, the Gorgoneion (Greek: Γοργόνειον) was a special apotropaic amulet showing the Gorgon head, used most famously by the Olympian deities Athena and Zeus: both are said to have worn the gorgoneion as a protective pendant. It was assumed, among other godlike attributes, as a royal aegis to imply divine birth or protection, by rulers of the Hellenistic age, as shown, for instance, on the Alexander Mosaic and the Gonzaga Cameo.

According to Marija Gimbutas, gorgoneia represent certain aspects of the Mother Goddess cult associated with "dynamic life energy" and asserts that the images may be related to a cultural continuity persisting since Neolithic examples. She defined the gorgoneion as a quintessentially European image. Jane Ellen Harrison, on the other hand, claims that many primitive cultures use similar ritual masks in order to scare the owner from doing something wrong, or, as she terms it, to make an ugly face at the owner: "The ritual object comes first; then the monster is begotten to account for it; then the hero is supplied to account for the slaying of the monster".

Homer refers to the Gorgon on four occasions, each time alluding to the head alone, as if she had no body.Jane Ellen Harrison notes that "Medusa is a head and nothing more... a mask with a body later appended". Prior to the fifth century BC, she was depicted as particularly ugly, with a protruding tongue, boar tusks, puffy cheeks, her eyeballs staring fixedly on the viewer and the snakes twisting all around her.

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