I've always been interested in mythology. I own several copies of Edith Hamilton's and of Thomas Bulfinch's mythology. Both of my copies have the head of Medusa on the cover. Through the years I have bought and read many other books on mythology, going deeper in Greek and Roman mythology, and covering mythologies of other cultures. But, perhaps because of those book covers, I've always been interested in the myth of Perseus and Medusa in particular.

The interest crystallized when MIT professor Jerome Lettvin published an article called "The Gorgon's Eye" in the December 1977 issue of Technology Review (it was later reprinted in Astronomy of the Ancients in 1979). Lettvin drew connections between the Evil Eye of Medusa and the variable star Algol, and also with the Perseid meteor shower. He also drew connections between elements of the myth and the behavior of octopus and squid, arguing in particular that the severed head of Medusa, with its writhing snakes, strongly resembled a cephalopod.

I was very impressed with the article, and, through my years of graduate school and then during my working career, I would visit libraries and ferret out articles on Medusa and Gorgons from classical journals, art journals, and books.
In the 1990s, I had published an article on the artistic representations of thnderbolts in the ancient world in Parabola magazine, and wanted to cover another topic. I thought that Medusa would be a good topic, especially with all the information I had gathered. I discovered that I had material that went far beyond what Professor Lettvin had written years before. There were visible variable stars, for instance, in several constellations associated with the myth of Perseus and Medusa, which seemed unlikely to be due to coincidence, and there were details of both the variable stars and the Perseid shower that fit very neatly with the myth but had not, as far as I knew, been pointed out previously.

Furthermore, I was surprised to find that about a dozen articles had made the connection between Medusa and cephalopods, all of them independently. But I had myself become dissatisfied with this interpretation. In part, it was because the motif of the gorgon head seemed to have parallels all over the world, and that these were often used in exactly the same functions. Gorgon faces adorned the clay tiles (called "antefixes")lining the edges of Greek and Roman roofs. But similar antefixes with similar faces were used in China and Japan, and similar faces were carved or painted over doorways or on roofs elsewhere in the world. Green shiels often were decoated with medusa faces (in Greek vase paintings, the shield of Achilles is so identified with this feature that it can be used to identify him). Yet almost exactly the same face appears on shields used by the Classic Maya in central America thousands of years later. Similar faces are used on shields made by the Iatmul living along the Sepik river in New guinea to this day.
What could account for these similarity of motifs used for the same purpose in such diverse places, separated by gulfs of nboth distance and time? Surely they could not be the result of cultural diffusion. And how did this relate to cephalopods, and to the astronomical roots of the legend?
I thought that I had come up with a series of explanations that accounted for it all, but it was not something that could be simply stated in a brief article. It was also interdisciplinary, and that demanded a venue that was not restricted to one subject. I published brief articles in Double Star Observer and in a couple of issues of the Journal of the American Association of Variable Star Observers, and gave lectures at the AAVSO annual meeting and at the annual meeting of the Classical Association of New England, but I needed to set all of my arguments and suppositions down in one place. So I wrote a book.

I gave it to my wife, Jill, to read. Jill is my first and best critic, and she vets everything I write. In this case, her judgment was unequivocal. "Nobody is going to read this," she said. "It reads like a thesis."

So I threw it out and started over again, writing in a freer, more colloquial style, writing the sort of book I myself like to read. And I wrote from start to finish in one go, not working on chapters out to order. This would, I hoped, improve the flow.

This time she liked it (although she had plenty of comments). After it was polished, I sent it to various agents, hoping to find one who was interested. I had no luck. Finally, I decided to send it directly to the publisher myself. Oxford University Press had a reputation for published scholarly works by first-time writers, and they had published at least one similar book, David Ulansey's "Origins of the Mithraic Mysteries", which sought to explain much of the ancient Roman religion by referencing its allusions to astronomy. To my shock and delight, they accepted the book, without revisions. It was first published in hardcover in 2000, and several years later in paperback.

Over the years I have come across new information that I wanted to add. I eventually gathered this new material into an article, which I sent out to various magazines, mostly classical magazines, but without success. Recently, though, it has been approved for publication in the journal Classical World, although no publication date has been set. The article is to be called "The Scarecrow of Os" ("Os" is a latin word for "face". An "Oscilla" is a "little face" that was made of stone or ceramic, and may originally have been made of bark and hung in trees. They are mentioned by Vergil in his Georgics, for instance. The swinging mottion of these masks give us the english word "oscillation". The title is also a pun on L. Frank Baum's book "The Scarecrow of Oz")