Miriam Robbins Dexter > Quotes

“Medusa reminds us that we must not take the female “monster” at face value; that we must not only weigh her beneficent against her maleficent attributes but also take into consideration the worldview and sociopolitical stance of the patriarchal cultures which create her, fashioning the demonic female as scapegoat for the benefit and comfort of the male members of their societies.”
― Miriam Robbins Dexter, Re-visioning Medusa: from Monster to Divine Wisdom

“Any autonomous woman is a candidate for the 'fear-inspiring goddess.' Whether maiden or crone, the autonomous woman is feared as one who can emasculate men verbally as surely as Circe transformed unlucky men into lions and wolves with a tap of her wand. The rigid patriarch seems to fear that autonomous women will transform men into mice.”
― Miriam Robbins Dexter, Whence the Goddesses: A Source Book

“Throughout history, there have been, in the folktales and myths of many cultures various sorts of witches, young and old, described by male mythopoets as evil and not so evil. But they all possessed one characteristic in common: they were autonomous; they possessed powers which were not controlled by men. They were thus, in one way, a projection of men's fears, fears of energies which they did not control. Whereas virgins and matrons have been tied to the patriarchal culture, and have given energy in some form to man, the witch, whether old, depleted woman or simply woman who has reserved her powers for herself, has not been possessed by the patriarchy. Patriarchal men have always feared powerful women.”
― Miriam Robbins Dexter, Whence the Goddesses: A Source Book

“The bird/snake Goddess represents the continuum of birth, death, and re-birth. The realms of the bird and snake cover all of the worlds. Birds soar in the heavens while some birds also occupy the waters; snakes live on the earth and in the Underworld, and likewise, water snakes occupy the waters. Both bird and snake embody graphic depictions of birth, since both are oviparous. Both creatures represent regeneration as well, since birds molt and snakes shed their skin.
In Neolithic Europe, death and rebirth were tied together in the tomb which served as a ritual place for rebirth: the tomb could also represent the womb. In her death aspect, a Goddess such as Medusa turns people to stone—a form of death, since all human activity ceases for those thus ossified.
Read against iconographies of the bird/snake goddesses, one can identify ways in which the Underworld Goddess, the Goddess of death, gives birth to life. Like Ereshkigal, with her leeky hair, Medusa, with her snaky hair, is also a birth-giver. But in Medusa’s case, she gives birth as she is dying, whereas in the earlier, Sumerian myth, the process of death led to regeneration; the Goddess of the Underworld did not have to die in the process of giving birth; she who presided over death presided over rebirth. The winged snake Goddess, before Perseus severs her head, is whole; in prehistory, she would have been a Goddess of all worldly realms. When Medusa’s head is severed, she becomes disembodied. Disembodied wisdom is very dangerous. Hence, she becomes monstrous.
It is her chthonic self which the classical world acknowledges: Medusa becomes the snaky-haired severed head, a warning to all women to hide their powers, their totalities. This fearsome aspect goes two ways: she can destroy, but she also brings protection.
In patriarchal societies, the conception of life and death is often perceived as linear rather than circular.”
― Miriam Robbins Dexter

“In patriarchal societies, the conception of life and death is often seen to be linear rather than circular. Because of a societal fear of death, death figures in patriarchal Indo-European cultures became horrific. Further, in these societies both the feminine divine and the mortal female became subjugated to the males and devalued. Many Indo-European female monsters carry bird and snake iconography. Baltic witches, raganas, take the shape of crows, and they have snakes in their hair. The Roman poet Vergil, in the Aeneid, gives snaky associations to Furies, Dirae, Sirens, and Harpies. Many of these fearsome figures are winged as well. Medusa was one of many monstrous figures who received this iconography.”
― Miriam Robbins Dexter, Re-visioning Medusa: from Monster to Divine Wisdom

“Many women have identified with the grimace and the rage of Medusa. May Sarton identifies the Medusa-face as the face of her own frozen rage. Emily Culpepper speaks out of her own experience: “The Gorgon has much vital, literally life-saving information to teach women about anger, rage, power, and the release of the determined aggressiveness sometimes needed for survival.” Patricia Klindienst Joplin tells us why the artist is drawn to Medusa: “Behind the victim’s head that turns men to stone may lie the victim stoned to death by men... if Medusa has become a central figure for the woman artist to struggle with, it is because, herself a silenced woman, she has been used to silence other women.” Many artists have identified with the rage of Medusa. The Italian scholar and artist, Cristina Biaggi, who now works in the United States, incorporated her studies of prehistory and ancient history and myth into a powerful fiberglass sculpture, “Raging Medusa” (2000). The sculpture is 5.5 feet in diameter and weighs 98 pounds.”
― Miriam Robbins Dexter, Re-visioning Medusa: from Monster to Divine Wisdom

“Throughout the past few millennia there have been great advances in technology which have raised standards of living in many areas of the world. At the same time, we have reduced our standard of life: our quality of air, purity of rivers and oceans, wellness of the land; and we have increased world hunger, extinction of whole species of animals, depletion of natural resources. Improved technology is not leading to greater peace and harmony among nations, between individuals, even within the self. The patriarchal world is out of balance. The worship of the male energy has led to rape of our natural resources and poisoning of our environment. What is missing, particularly in Western culture, is respect for an energy which makes things whole, an energy which honors life.

The goddesses provide a clue how we must restructure our world if it is to survive, a clue both to our past and to our future. The fact that there were powerful goddesses disproves the claim that woman has ‘always’ been powerless and secondary, and that this ‘second rank’ is thus a natural phenomenon. This frees us to move into a balancing.”
― Miriam Robbins Dexter, Whence the Goddesses: A Source Book

“Thus the focal points of the Hebrew Paradise story, the woman, the man, the serpent, and the tree, were mostly likely re-interpretations of earlier Near Eastern iconography and mythology. An original myth and icon, which consisted of goddess, sacred snake, sacred tree, and male consort, perhaps the one who aroused the wrath of the goddess by eating her sacred fruit, become re-interpreted, among the Hebrews, into a story involving a foolish woman; a tree bearing fruit which must not be plucked but was plucked nonetheless by the foolish woman; a seductive snake; and a man who gave birth to a female. The Hebrew story not only changes the roles of the main characters in the story; it even shifts the birth process.

The Hebrew myth, then, was not the earliest word on the status of women. The antecedents of the Hebrew myth show quite clearly that at least the idealized woman, the goddess, held high status in early Near Eastern societies. This early status was considerably altered later in time by the Hebrews. The Near Eastern goddess, among the Hebrews, degenerated into a mortal scapegoat, one responsible for the ‘greatly multiplied sorrow,’ and the subservience of women in the ensuing centuries.”
― Miriam Robbins Dexter

“Increasing numbers of women are recognizing their power, and their autonomy, but men's fear of this power is a projection of their own world-view. Women do not use their power to dominate or to subordinate, as is typical of a dominator society. Rather, women use their power to increase the well-being of their environment. Men who fear women's strength fear a matriarchy, the inverse of a patriarchal society, and they do not wish to be subordinates in such a society. But there is no evidence that a matriarchal dominate-subordinate society has ever existed. What my indeed have existed is partnership societies in which women and men held equally valuable roles.”
― Miriam Robbins Dexter, Whence the Goddesses: A Source Book

“Medusa continues to be viewed as protective and apotropaic—warding off evil, warding off the enemy—and even healing in the Greek tradition, but she has also lost her power. It is thus important to pay attention to her beneficent aspects: the fact that half of her blood is healing, and that images of her head are used to protect buildings of multiple functions within the Greco-Roman sphere; so protective is she considered to be that her head was buried near the Argive market-place. Medusa is magical. She reminds us that we must not take the female “monster” at face value; that we must weigh not only her beneficent against her maleficent attributes, but we must also take into consideration the world view and the sociopolitical stance of the cultures which create her, fashioning the demonic female as scapegoat for the benefit and comfort of the patriarchal members of their societies.”
― Miriam Robbins Dexter, Re-visioning Medusa: from Monster to Divine Wisdom

“Philologically, the name Medusa means the “ruling one.” But by the time of the earliest Greek texts which contain myth, those of Homer, Medusa was not a ruler but a monster, associated with the land of Hades. In the poetry of Hesiod, Medusa became the only mortal among three Gorgon sisters. The adjective gorgos (γοργός) means “terrible,” “fierce,” and “frightful.” That is, she was considered to be monstrous. However, as we will learn from the Classical texts, it is important to see all facets of what male-centered cultures have labeled a “feminine monster.” Medusa was viewed very ambivalently, and she was very deeply faceted.”
― Miriam Robbins Dexter, Re-visioning Medusa: from Monster to Divine Wisdom

“The wings and snakes may have been late additions to the portrayal of Medusa, but they are nonetheless a natural concomitant of the ferocious death Goddess. Wings were added to Medusa’s iconography ca. 800 BCE, by the Greeks; later on, she was described as winged in text as well. In the portrayal of the Medusa from Miletus, Medusa is associated with snakes but she is not snaky herself. Nonetheless, she accrued the iconography of the Neolithic bird and snake Goddess, the Great Goddess of birth, death, and regeneration.”
― Miriam Robbins Dexter, Re-visioning Medusa: from Monster to Divine Wisdom

“Eve may indeed have been a powerful goddess. In fact, Eve’s tradition may have been borrowed, at least in part from Sumerian mythology.”
― Miriam Robbins Dexter, Whence the Goddesses: A Source Book

“As goddess of life, Inanna was also goddess of life, fertility and sexuality. That is, she had charge over whether or not those qualities existed in a given society… Therefore, neither love nor procreation can take place where Inanna is not worshipped.”
― Miriam Robbins Dexter, Whence the Goddesses: A Source Book

“The divine energy which we worship in goddesses and gods is in all of us, and we have the ability to use that energy to begin our healing.”
― Miriam Robbins Dexter, Whence the Goddesses: A Source Book

“In the Neolithic period, throughout Europe and the Near East, there appear figurines which represent bird/women, snake/women, and bird/snake/woman hybrids. Since Goddesses with bird and snake iconography appear in early historic religions, such as those of Egypt and Mesopotamia, it has been theorized that the figurines represent powerful divine female figures in the Neolithic cultures of Europe and the Near East. The “stiff white nude” figures of the Cyclades, Anatolia, and the Balkans may be death figures, but a pregnant Cycladic figure demonstrates that the Goddess serves regeneration as well as death. Early historic textual evidence of this may be found in the Sumerian Descent of Inanna, where the Underworld Goddess and Goddess of death, Ereshkigal, is in the process of giving birth. Just as the more ancient figures, Medusa too is winged, and she has snaky hair: that is, she embodies both the serpentine and the avian aspects of the Neolithic bird/snake Goddess, even though she does not have these characteristics in her earliest depictions.

The bird/snake Goddess represents the continuum of birth, life, death, rebirth. The realms of the bird and snake cover all of the worlds; the realm of the bird is the heavens, while waterbirds also occupy the waters. That of the snake is the earth and Underworld, and likewise water snakes occupy the waters. Both bird and snake embody graphic depictions of birth, since both are oviparous. Both creatures are graphic depictions of regeneration as well, since birds molt and snakes shed their skin. In Neolithic Europe, death and rebirth were tied together in the tomb which served as a ritual place for rebirth: the tomb was also the womb. In her death aspect, a Goddess such as Medusa turns people to stone—a form of death, since all human activity ceases for those thus ossified. 

Read against the iconographies of the bird/snake goddesses, one can identify ways in which the Underworld Goddess, the death Goddess, gives birth to life. Like Ereshkigal, with her leeky hair, Medusa with her snaky hair is also a birth-giver. But in Medusa’s case, she gives birth as she is dying, whereas in the earlier, Sumerian myth the process of death led to regeneration; the Goddess of the Underworld did not have to die in the process of giving birth; she who presided over death presided over rebirth. The winged snake Goddess, before her head is severed by Perseus, is whole; in prehistory she would have been a Goddess of all of the worldly realms. When Medusa’s head is severed, she becomes disembodied. Disembodied wisdom is very dangerous. Hence, she becomes monstrous. It is her chthonic self which the Classical world acknowledges: Medusa becomes the snaky-haired severed head, a warning to all women to hide their powers, their totalities. This fearsome aspect goes two ways: she can destroy, but she also brings protection.”
― Miriam Robbins Dexter, Re-visioning Medusa: from Monster to Divine Wisdom

“Thus, there is an ambivalence here about the death-aspect of the Goddess. Clearly, she represents regeneration as well as death.  Indeed, the venom of a snake can be both poison and antitoxin. As I will discuss on the pages that follow, Medusa holds here the functions of the prehistoric Goddess of the life continuum: birth, death, and then regeneration. She is multifunctional and multidimensional and she should be viewed in all of her complexity, through a non-patriarchal lens.”
― Miriam Robbins Dexter, Re-visioning Medusa: from Monster to Divine Wisdom

“We have re-examined the goddesses through several millennia, and we have seen a radical change in how the divine feminine has been viewed, first by the goddess-centered societies of the Neolithic, then by the assimilated societies made up of male-centered Indo-Europeans and the more equalitarian folk whom they conquered; and finally by modern societies, many of which worship no personification of the feminine at all. There is a lack of balance in much of modern religion, an imbalance of the character of the divine. This imbalance reflects upon the wellness, in all of its aspects, of our world.”
― Miriam Robbins Dexter, Whence the Goddesses: A Source Book

“Although Medusa may be of use to modern feminists, providing an ancient locus for modern rage, it is important to see that the raging head of Medusa has lost the fullness of the original powers of the Neolithic Goddess of the Life Continuum. The Greek Medusa is different from her sisters across time and space.  Whereas the Neolithic Goddess is a powerful arbiter of birth, death, and rebirth, she has been transformed in Greek from a Goddess of the life continuum to a dead head.”
― Miriam Robbins Dexter, Re-visioning Medusa: from Monster to Divine Wisdom

“Modern Western culture has tended to dwell too much on the character of her “anger.” For example, a misogynist trend in psychoanalysis focuses upon her paralyzing qualities, viewing her as a deflator of masculine strength, while curiously, at other times, seeing her snaky persona as phallic. Radical feminists also often dwell upon her anger, identifying it with a fiercely liberating women’s rage. That surely helps many women, but it doesn't effectively disrupt the misogyny involved in labeling a female figure as “monstrous.” Thus, a historical and cross-cultural exploration of Medusa can contribute to a feminist effort to honor and articulate the complexity of the divine female.”
― Miriam Robbins Dexter, Re-visioning Medusa: from Monster to Divine Wisdom