Gorgon

AUTHOR’S NOTES

Many readers ask me about the science in my novels — is it real or fiction? Where do I get the situations, equipment, characters or their expertise from, and just how much of any legend has a basis in fact? In the case of the Gorgon, there are numerous mythological and religious stories, some dating back to the Neolithic Age, of men being turned to stone, of snake goddesses, and hideous monsters living in an underworld.

The word ‘gorgon’ derives from the ancient Greek word γοργός, meaning ‘fierce, terrible and grim’. Another derivation is from the Greek word gorgos, which means ‘dreadful’. So it is an ancient word, as old as Zeus himself.

One of the earliest images of a Gorgoneia — a figure depicting a Gorgon head — dates from nearly 3000 years ago, and appears on a coin made of electrum (a natural alloy of gold, silver and other metals) discovered during excavations at Parium. Images with a Gorgon head were also found in the Knossos palace on Crete, dating from a thousand years earlier. A Lithuanian — American archeologist, Marija Gimbutas, argued that the Gorgon mythology extended back to at least 6000 BC, citing a ceramic mask from the Sesklo culture as proof. In her book Language of the Goddess, she also identified the genesis of the Gorgoneion in Neolithic art and jewelry.

Minoan jewelry found on the island of Mochlos in Crete shows the figure of a female goddess with a monstrous writhing head; while other Gorgons are portrayed with clawed feet, wings, fangs, tusks, flashing eyes, large teeth, and sometimes a protruding snake-like tongue. In Virgil’s Aeneid, written between 29 and 19 BC, Gorgons are said to live at the entrance to the Underworld, dwelling in eternal darkness. In more modern times, the Gorgon’s likeness has been immortalized by artists including Leonardo da Vinci, Peter Paul Rubens, Pablo Picasso, Auguste Rodin, and Benvenuto Cellini.

Medusa is the most famous of the Gorgon creatures. She, along with her sisters Stheno and Euryale, were the daughters of the sea Titans Phorcys and Ceto.

Many versions of the myth have Medusa, the youngest sister, as a beautiful maiden with long silky hair, said to be extremely wise but very vain. She and her sisters all served as priestesses to the virgin goddess of wisdom, Athena. However, the sea god, Poseidon (Neptune), desperately desired Medusa and raped her inside Athena's temple. Athena blamed Medusa for Poseidon’s attack and for defiling her place of worship. As punishment, she transformed the three sisters into hideous beasts with scaly skin, dragon wings, and hair formed of dozens of coiling snakes. As further retribution, the Gorgons were so horrifying that any man who beheld them was instantly turned to stone.

Medusa and her sisters grew to become vicious monsters that took great pleasure in torturing their victims. Perseus was given gifts by the gods — winged sandals from Hermes, a helmet of invisibility provided by Hades, and Athena’s silver shield — to help him kill Medusa. Perseus crept up on the sleeping Medusa by looking at her reflection in his shield, cut off her head, and presented it to Athena, who placed it in the center of her aegis, the protective shield she wore over her breastplate. Perseus escaped Medusa’s enraged sisters thanks to the winged sandals of Hermes, and by wearing Hades’ helmet of invisibility.

The Medusa tale reaches back even further than classical Greece. She also appears in Libyan images, with her hair sometimes resembling dreadlocks, and was worshiped by the Libyan Amazons as their serpent goddess. Her name there is derived from the Sanskrit word medha, and Egyptian met or maat, meaning ‘wisdom’.

Medusa’s face is usually shown screaming, or staring with unblinking eyes. Her tongue sometimes protrudes like a snake’s and her head is often surrounded by a halo of coiling snakes. The Medusa image was frequently used to guard and protect, up until the Christian era. Even after that, her face continued to appear on columns, doorways and gateways, signifying her role as the guardian of the threshold between the realms of the living and the dead, between the temporal world and the Underworld.

The Medusa is an ancient icon that remains one of the most popular and enduring figures of Greek mythology. She continues to be recreated in pop culture and art today. Her face is carved into a rock at the popular Red Beach in Matala, Crete; is used as the logo for the famous fashion brand Versace; and even appears in some Greek bank vaults as a talisman for luck and protection.

The Basilica Cistern, or Sunken Palace, is the largest of several hundred ancient cisterns that lie beneath the Turkish city of Istanbul (formerly Constantinople, and before that, Byzantium). The Basilica Cistern is located 500 feet south-west of the Hagia Sophia on the historical peninsula of Sarayburnu. The name derives from a large public square on the First Hill of Constantinople, the Stoa Basilica, beneath which it was originally constructed. The Great Basilica was built between the third and fourth centuries during the Early Roman Age as a commercial, legal, and artistic center. Ancient texts indicated that the Basilica had gardens surrounded by a colonnade and facing Hagia Sophia. According to ancient historians, Emperor Constantine created the original structure, which was later rebuilt and enlarged by Emperor Justinian after the Nika riots of 532 AD, which devastated the city.

The underground structure is enormous, even by today’s standards, and historical texts claim that 7000 slaves were involved in building it. The cathedral-sized cistern is an underground chamber of approximately 105,000 square feet, capable of holding nearly 3 million cubic feet of water. The ceiling is supported by a forest of over 300 marble columns, each thirty feet high. The Basilica Cistern has undergone several restorations since its original construction, the most recent in 1985, when 50,000 tons of mud was removed, and a platform built to replace the boats that once used to take tourists through it.

In 1963, before the platform was built, the Basilica Cistern was used as a location for the James Bond film From Russia With Love.

Located in the north-west corner of the cistern are two columns that stand on blocks carved with the Medusa’s face. The origin of the carvings is unknown, though it’s been suggested the blocks might have been brought to the cistern after being removed from a building of the late Roman period. Architects believe the blocks were placed sideways and upside down to form the best support for the columns; however, legend has it that the blocks are oriented sideways and inverted in order to negate the power of the Gorgons’ gaze. Many Byzantium-era sword handles and small pedestal columns were engraved with the Gorgon’s head upside down, to deflect the power of her gaze while still enjoying its protection.

Hell is viewed by many religions as a place of torment, often for eternity. However, religions with a cyclic history often depict hell as an intermediary state between incarnations, such as between life, death, resurrection or reincarnation. It is usually located in another dimension, above or below us, and sometimes entered through a volcano’s crater, a cave, or even below the sea. It is sometimes portrayed as crawling with demons that torment those who live there, and ruled by a supreme being, a god of death, such as Nergal, Hel, Enma, Satan, or Hades.

The Greeks had a rich mythological underworld — a place where souls went after death — described variously as being at the far ends of the ocean or beneath the depths or ends of the earth. It was considered the counterpart to Mount Olympus, and filled with darkness in opposition to the kingdom of the gods, which was filled with light.

In Homer’s Iliad, the underworld, Hades, is a dark, damp and moldy place buried inside the depths of the earth. The dead cross a river to get there, must pass through gates guarded by the monstrous many-headed hound Cerberus, and present themselves for judgement before King Hades. In the Odyssey (a sequel to the Iliad), Hades is described in even greater detail, and is now located at the end of the Earth, on the far western shore of the massive dark river Okeanos, beyond the gates of the sun and the land of dreams.

Hesiod’s Theogony describes Hades as lying at the end of the flat disc of the Earth, beyond the River Okeanos and the land of evening. Hesiod also introduces the Islands of the Blessed, a paradise realm reserved for the great mythological heroes.

Charon, the ferryman of the dead, first appears in the epic poem the Minyad (attributed to Prodicus the Phocaean, date unknown), punting souls across the Akherousian Lake in a skiff. Here, the dead are often described roaming across fields of asphodel (a pale-gray plant that is edible but virtually tasteless, regarded by the ancients as a food of last resort).

In most versions, life in the underworld is full of shadows, without sunlight or hope; a joyless place, where the souls of the dead eventually fade into nothingness. Few mortals escape back to the land of the living, with two notable exceptions — Hercules descended to Hades to rescue Theseus (and also capture the giant hound Cerberus). But in Greek mythology, there were few mortals like Hercules. It takes an exceptional person to undertake exceptional adventures — such as Captain Alex Hunter, the Arcadian.

The Sarmatians or Sauromatians were an Iranian people whose territory covered the western part of greater Scythia (modern southern Russia, Ukraine, and the eastern Balkans) from about the fifth century BC to the fourth century AD.

Archeological evidence suggests that Scythian — Sarmatian cultures may have given rise to the myth of the Amazons. Graves of women have been found in southern Ukraine and Russia, with the women dressed for battle. Their bones showed signs of deep wounds, meaning these woman didn’t just dress for battle, they also fought.

The Greek name Sarmatai derives from the shortening of Sauromatai, which is associated with the word ‘lizard’ (sauros). The Greeks compared the Sauromatians to lizards because of their reptile-like scale armor, created by slicing horses’ hooves into discs and lashing them together. They also carried dragon standards, and had sharp teeth and small, lively eyes.

The Sauromatians started to decline in the third century, finally disappearing in the fourth century due to the incursions of the Huns, Goths, and Turks.

How does someone turn to stone; become a living statue? The condition is still largely a mystery today, so it is any wonder that the ancient Greeks, Cretans, Minoans, Iranians, and dozens of other races came up with all manner of legends to account for this bizarre affliction?

In the seventeenth century the French physician Charles Patin described a case of a woman who was ‘turning to wood’, which was actually the uncontrolled growth of bone. The woman had an incredibly rare condition that caused her flesh, cartilage, tendons, and organs to slowly ossify. In 1736, British physician John Freke described a youth with strange rock-hard swellings all over his back. The disease was named myositis ossificans progressiva, which means ‘muscle turns to bone’. The name was officially changed to fibrodysplasia ossificans progressiva (FOP) in the 1970s.

Though fibrodysplasia ossificans progressiva is the medical term, the condition is commonly referred to as stone man syndrome. It is extremely rare, affecting one in two million people. A mutation of the body's repair mechanism causes tissue to become ossified when damaged. In many cases, injury causes a joint to become permanently frozen by rapid new bone creation. When the new bone is surgically removed, the body replaces it with even more bone, and the more rapidly the disease progresses.

The best-known case is that of Harry Eastlack (1933–1973), whose condition began at the age of ten. By the time of his death from pneumonia shortly before his fortieth birthday his body had completely ossified, and he was only able to move his lips. Eastlack donated his body to science, in the hope that scientists might find a cure for this little-understood, terrible disease. His preserved skeleton is kept at the Mütter Museum in Philadelphia, and has been an invaluable source of information in the study of FOP.

Why does a healthy person’s body turn on itself like this? Evolutionary biologists have theorized that higher mutation rates are beneficial in some situations, because they enable organisms to adapt more quickly to their environments. For example, bacteria that is repeatedly exposed to antibiotics can have a much higher mutation rate than the original population, developing into a stronger strain. However, there doesn’t seem to be a logical explanation for FOP. It’s believed to be caused by a molecular misfire, a major system error in the human body. Something causes the body’s wound repair system to malfunction, gradually converting tendons, ligaments, and skeletal muscle into sheets of armor plating. The sufferer becomes a prisoner in his or her own body.

Stone man syndrome is one of the rarest conditions known to humankind, and one of the body’s enduring mysteries.