Hi everyone. I'm Josh, and this is The Emerald, Currants and Trends Through a Mythic Lens,

the podcast where we explore an ever-changing world and our lives in it through the lens of myth,

story, and imagination.

The Emerald.

All that's happening on this green jewel in space.

Who Who remembers Medusa? You know, hair of snakes, gaze that can turn to stone, beheaded by Perseus, that Medusa.

She's inspired delight and dread and passion for a very long time. The 16th century

poet Kaspari Mertola wrote of Caravaggio's painting of her, quote, flee for if your eyes are

petrified in amazement, she will turn you to stone. And Percy Shelley wrote, quote, and from its head,

as from one body grow, as grass out of a watery rock,

hairs which are vipers and they curl and flow,

and their long tangles in each other lock,

and with unending involutions show their mailed radiance.

Thank you. show their mailed radiance. She's had numerous iterations in pop culture, as Vice Magazine reported in 2018, quote,

from a tight-suited villain in the Powerpuff Girls to a scathing metaphor for UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in

UB40's hit song Madame Medusa, The Myth of Medusa Endures. For the past two decades, the character

has continually resurfaced in cinema, mostly in an alluring form. Natalia Vodianova lent serious

supermodel power to the 2010 remake of Clash of the Titans,

while Uma Thurman cut a particularly seductive figure in Percy Jackson and the Olympians,

The Lightning Thief. Even the house of Versace found inspiration in the Gorgon, placing her at the

heart of its iconic logo, end quote. And then there's feminist Medusa, since her story, in some tellings, involves assault at

the hands of a male god and having her head cut off by a male protagonist.

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