Archetype theory offers an alternative, and more benign, explanation for the prevalence of rape myths, the persistence of gender power differentials, and for the perpetuation of ancient stereotypes. Prior research has placed rape and other sexual assaults within a patriarchal framework, presuming strategic male hegemony. Latent content results were analyzed and framed within the context of Jungian theory. A qualitative content analysis was done to compare these myths to modern day sexual assaults. The current paper examines three ancient Greek myths involving rapes committed by gods.

Medusa’s rape was the most popular myth concerning the tale of the gorgon with snakes for a hair, and her gaze can turn any mortal to stone. As usual, Rossetti wrote a little poem for this work to explicates the subject in conceptual terms.Rape was a prominent theme in Greek mythology and has recently re-emerged in the media spotlight due to the #MeToo and #TimesUp movements as well as celebrity-involved cases of sexual assault and sexual harassment (i.e., Bill Cosby and Harvey Weinstein). Aside from that encounter of creating horses for the city of Athens, Poseidon also committed the crime of raping Medusa in the steps of Athena’s temple. As Dante Gabriel Rossetti, he feels empathy for the inner drama of the woman, and he expressed it in his work Aspecta Medusa of which we do not know if it represents the Medusa before its decapitation or of Andromeda looking at the reflection of the Medusa in the water. Instead of repulsion, it is the empathy that guided artists that treat the theme of Medusa.

She was not assaulted, just born a gorgon and before you guys say 'original myth isn't possible The myths evolved' I'm talking about the first mention of Medusa. Cyrene raped by Apollo, in the form of a wolf. So, first of all, in the original myth, Medusa was born a gorgon. Cassiopeia raped by Zeus in the form of her husband Phoenix. Cassandra raped by Ajax the Lesser during the Sack of Troy. Callisto raped by Zeus in the form of Artemis or Apollo. We then discovered that, in the account of Poseidon’s rape of Medusa, it was the rape victim and not the rapist, who was punished by Athena, thus inaugurating a long tradition of tendentious justice. Aura raped by Dionysus while she was drunk. On the other hand, a rehabilitation movement developed with the Pre-Raphaelite school in England, which presents Medusa as a victim. He was fascinated with the darkest aspects of Greek mythology and in many of his paintings he depicted the dread of the female sex as an instrument of man’s castration. In painting, Henry Fuseli is one of the first romantic painters to get interested in this theme. But then, they developed the theme giving to Medusa some features of the femme fatale. The fascination with Medusa is a commonplace among the poets of 19 th century. There is no medieval iconography of the myth. Due to the association that Christianity makes between sexuality and sin, the Church changed the aspect of Medusa, she was a femme fatale instead of the monster of classical antiquity. an actual historic rupture, a sort of sociological trauma, which has been registered in this myth, much as what Freud terms the latent content of a neurosis is registered in the manifest content of a dream: registered yet hidden, registered in the unconscious yet unknown or misconstrued by the conscious mind.”ĭuring the Middle Age the myth of Medusa acquired other meaning. Is it Pandora, the Eve character of Greek myth, who opens her box and lets out all the evils of. That is to say, there occurred in the early thirteenth century B.C. Is it Helen, called a bitch in one translation of the Odyssey, who leaves her husband Menelaus for Paris of Troy, her face thus supposedly launching a thousand ships and a 10-year-long, bloody war Nope. The legend of Perseus beheading Medusa means, specifically, that “the Hellenes overran the goddess’s chief shrines” and “stripped her priestesses of their Gorgon masks”, the latter being apotropaic faces worn to frighten away the profane. According to the professor Joseph Campbell: Many early scholars have interpreted the myth as based on or reconstructed from a real event, custom…in the past. The myth of Medusa has been an object of several interpretations over the years. Medusa by Caravaggio (c.1600 – Uffizi Gallery)

Did poseidon rape medusa