Introducing Medusa!
In this article I wanted to bring together two texts and allow them to speak to one another across genre and form: a piece of mythological analysis from Gods, Heroes and Us (chapter 5) and a dramatic episode from HellWard, Canto V. They meet, I think, quite naturally, because both are consciously written in the long shadow of Dante Alighieri—and because Dante himself never hesitated to draw deeply on Greek myth in order to articulate moral and spiritual danger.
One of the quiet misunderstandings about Dante is that he is somehow “purely Christian” in source. In fact, The Divine Comedy is crowded with figures from classical mythology: Minos, Charon, the Furies, Centaurs, Harpies—and Medusa herself, stationed at the walls of Dis. Dante understood something that modern readers sometimes forget: myth is not a rival to theology but one of its most powerful symbolic allies. Myth gives shape to experiences that are otherwise too overwhelming, too paralysing, or too terrifying to approach directly.
In Gods, Heroes and Us, my treatment of Medusa focuses precisely on this quality of terror. Medusa does not merely threaten bodily harm; she represents a kind of fear that clouds perception itself. To look directly is to be undone. Vision collapses into paralysis. The myth of Perseus, read this way, becomes a myth of maturation: the passage into adulthood requires facing what is darkest without becoming it. That is why Perseus’ most important weapon is not the sword but the shield—polished, reflective, distancing. The shield allows him to see without incorporation, to understand without absorption. It reframes terror so that it can be approached, mastered, and finally destroyed in a single, decisive act.
This is not far from the logic of warfare, or indeed moral struggle more generally. Foresight, timing, concealment, precision, the avoidance of collateral damage—these are not merely tactical principles but ethical ones. The wrong kind of looking, the wrong kind of engagement, produces pyrrhic victories at best and petrification at worst. Fear that is stared at head-on becomes internalised; it lodges itself in the heart, where movement ceases.
When I came to write HellWard, I was consciously following Dante’s example in allowing Greek myth to erupt inside a Christian moral landscape. In Canto V, the Medusa figure does not appear as a monster from antiquity but as something far more unsettling: a false friend, a betrayed intimacy, a truth denied. Ginty’s transformation is not physical at first; it is moral. The moment of denial—“Who cares for poetry? It’s nothing here”—is the moment the temperature rises, the mercury hits red, and something irreversible occurs.
Crucially, the danger is again visual. “On this you cannot look,” Dante warns within the poem. The reader is placed in exactly the position Perseus once occupied. To look directly at the betrayal, at the full horror of inverted values and deadened truth, would be to risk petrification. And so the same solution reappears: reflection. The brooch on Dante’s cloak, “absorbing silver and mirror polished,” becomes the shield. Ginty is seen reversed, mediated, reframed. Only in that inversion can the truth be grasped without destroying the one who sees it.
What follows is devastating but necessary. The Medusa does not merely petrify; she reveals. Ginty’s howl, his clutching at “a heart that wasn’t there,” shows that the true horror is not inflicted from without but exposed from within. The stone he becomes is the logical end of a long moral process. Hell, in Dante’s vision and in mine, is never arbitrary punishment; it is the freezing of what has already chosen to stop loving truth.
The final movement of the canto is equally important. Dante does not permit contemplation. “Run,” he says. Knowledge, once gained, must lead to action. Reflection is a means, not an end. The shield protects so that movement remains possible. Without it, fear fixes us in place; with it, even terror can be passed through without owning us.
In binding these two texts together, I am doing nothing more—or less—than following Dante’s lead. He reached back to Greek myth not out of nostalgia, but because myth carries perennial truths about the human condition: how fear works, how vision can fail, how betrayal wounds more deeply than violence, and how wisdom often consists in knowing how to look, not simply what to see. Medusa endures because she names a danger that has not gone away. And Perseus’ shield endures because it reminds us that courage is not blindness, but rightly framed sight.
Extract from Chapter 5 of Gods, Heroes and Us
The above list for mastering terror is also a menu for warfare against evil: is our cause just? What about our timing? Speed stuns. Cloak yourself, your intentions, your movements in secrecy. Know your enemy and their whereabouts. Avoid collateral damage in order to pre-empt pyrrhic victories. Have weapons that are really effective and lethal. Perhaps this doesn’t include all 12 or 13 principles of war, but it certainly vividly demonstrates some of their most important aspects.
Medusa represents a kind of terror that not only clouds the mind, but also the vision: one cannot look on her without being overcome. In one sense the myth of Perseus is a myth of maturation. To become adults, we have to face the darkest aspects of our existence and not fall under the spell of its petrifying negativity. And to do this we need the final weapon, the reflecting shield. We have to look, we have to see, which means to understand – but to do so in a way in which we do not partake of its reality. If we remember the Garden of Eden problem: the eating of the fruit of good and evil meant not just that they ‘knew’ good and evil academically, but that they became evil as a direct experiential result of the eating. So here: to directly look at the physical ‘thing’ itself is to incorporate it into one’s own being, and is to become terror or fear itself. At that point, the heart stops and we become stone. However, the shield reflects, and through it we can see an inversion of what ‘is’ – like studying a photograph of an atrocity; but knowing it’s not real means we are not caught up in its horror. It creates a distance between us and the ‘thing’ – the petrifying ‘thing’. In this way Perseus can move towards fear and destroy her with one, decisive blow.
Thus, dealing with fear requires foresight, preparation and decisive action. Another way of expressing the final action, of course, is what we now might call ‘re-framing’ the fear. The shield reframes what we are seeing, and in this way enables us to deal with it because it protects us – as shields should do.
Extract from Canto 5, HellWard
As that thought struck, another quality
Re-masked Ginty’s face, this time a jeer:
‘Does Dante know I’m now an O.B.E.?
Who cares for poetry? It’s nothing here.’
And as he said those very words, deep down 140
Something changed – like some thermometer’s
Rising mercury hitting red; Ginty’s frown
I can’t forget, and Dante’s arm about
My shoulder, hugging me like his true son;
And Marlene’s hair, once red, now growing shoots
Of flecked and flecking grey, like fine, foamed froth,
Spun off from her head, as some snake might spit.
‘Turn,’ my mentor said. ‘He has denied truth;
On this you cannot look, but see my chest?’
He pointed, and there I saw his cloak’s brooch 150
Absorbing silver and mirror polished;
And so I came to see Ginty, reversed
In image, friend as was, on Dante’s breast:
Medusa petrifying one she cursed,
All serpents of hell alive in her stare,
Withering, tense as a bladder to burst;
He howled once, clutched a heart that wasn’t there,
Rolled backwards, helpless, like a dropped stone
Till stopped in his own horror’s frozen fear.
‘Run’, Dante said, ‘run! Flee Medusa’s zone.’ 160
With that, his hands snapped tight as shielding screens
Across my eyes and swung, then shoved me down
The way, so that my head swayed, lost it means
Of balance in trying to run; almost
I fell, but Dante’s strength held me – a beam
Upon which I depended, though a ghost.
How could that be? And too, how could a friend
Betray all we stood for, and our shared past?
James Sale
The English Cantos 