I really like female demons in mythologies - they rarely have uninteresting stories. Childhood Love - Medusa Gorgon.
How my disappointment with the artists grew with each new portrait of her! Every picture is an alcoholic with a twisted face. Blatant bad taste.
Everyone knows about Medusa that she is from Ancient Greece, wore not hair, but a snake and turned into stone with her eyes. And that there was such a cowardly fool who ruined a chiseled neck out of the most banal, vulgar motives. And then he found himself some kind of girl chained to a rock and Medusa's last look turned at her, and the girl did not even stay with him - and it’s right to stay with him, but they say she gave birth to sons. But neither mother, nor father, could not get rid of Andromeda for Perseus: why would he be so cowardly and inconspicuous, with bad taste and lack of humor.
What they know less about is that Medusa is not an ancient Greek, but a pre-Hellenic deity. And that there were three gorgons, Medusa is translated as "guard", and there were also Steino and Euryala - powerful and jumping. And that, alas, today it is no longer known what could have been guarded by these three sisters, who, by the way, were relatives of the guardians of the golden apples of youth to the Hesperides and the guardians of fate - the Moiras.
In general, the deeper you go into the centuries, the more serpentine deities there are.
Medusa, by the way, can be translated as "sovereign".
Her sisters are immortal, and only Medusa, the most beautiful of them, could be killed. It is significant that people destroy only beauty. Beauty is unbearable to them. It burns and cuts. The Hellenes even specially invented a myth for Medusa in order to make it wider, more understandable for themselves.
Promotional video:
She became an ordinary priestess of Athena, too arrogant to look at men and desire men - Poseidon refused. The petty Hellenic god, and all the Hellenic gods are animal and petty, like the Pharisee merchants, he was infuriated by refusal, he was offended and decided to force Medusa not just somewhere, but in the sanctuary of Athena, which the virgin goddess, of course, could not forgive the priestess. Athena has long been gnawed by a worm - how can it be that a mortal and prettier. Or maybe the goddess herself has long been hunting Poseidon, and he doesn't look at her. Here he did not like big women in shields and helmets. In general, with the grief of her uselessness, Athena cursed Medusa, exiling her to a distant rocky island and growing snakes on her head.
The girl on the island lived, suffered, learned to look to turn living things into stone and flew to practice.
Such a petty version, simplified, but suitable for people.
And yet, whoever Medusa is - any immortal life - it is very sad and unbearably long, that on a deserted island, that - and especially - among people. I believe that she looked at the stone not because she was scary or spiteful, but because people are afraid of any emotions. Any experience, any living - they are afraid. Knowledge does not fit into them, but you can protect yourself from words by deafness, but from the gaze of Medusa that people for hundreds and hundreds of years of information were forced to live, the human brain did not know protection. From cowardice they turned to stone, from an overabundance of everything from which they fled.
And after all, all alcoholics are painted.
This is more usual.