Greek mythology is full of female monsters: the Sphinx, Medusa, Lamia, Chimera, and more. This wasn’t always the case, however.
The Venus of Willendorf, dating back 30,000 to 20,000 years, appears to be a fertility totem with her exaggerated breasts and belly. Other such figures have been discovered from Paleolithic Europe and continue through archaeological history. The Lady of Lemba figurine from 3500 BC, found in Cyprus, possesses a vulva and a phallus head, adding the male element. These images are ‘monsters’ only in the sense of not being representational, but so are other devotional figures from early eras. Human minds created them in ancient days because, as we speculate, fertility was essential to life on the human scale as well as the natural. The plants and later beasts humanity survived on too must be blessed with fertility through storms, droughts, earthquakes, wild fires. People lived close to Nature and its threats, praying to and through these images for survival.
From 3000 BC on, as times became more turbulent, fierce warrior goddess images appear. The Mother destroys as well as creates—but these figures do not suggest nurturing or fertility. As Bettany Hughes says in her book about Aphrodite, people in the eastern Mediterranean ‘generated in their minds a sex-and-violence deity to explain the tempestuous and desirous nature of human behavior.’
A short leap and we have the female monsters and the beginning of the stereotype of the dangerous woman. Medusa may be the prime example, but female monsters abound in Greek archeological sites and, with literacy, since Homer’s Odyssey, reflecting the ambiguous place of female powers in early patriarchal societies.
Women’s bodies are enticing and their role traditionally focused on loving support, but they can be threatening. Like Scylla and Charybdis confronting Odysseus, they can also represent a force of nature as, with Charybdis, the whirlpool at the Straits of Messina.
Medusa, the beautiful mortal gorgon raped by Poseidon in Athena’s temple, is the one Athena punishes, her luxurious curls turned into snakes and her beauty so horrifying that a man who glimpses her face turns to stone. Overcoming female monsters becomes part of the hero tale of Odysseus, who manages to sail safely past Scylla and Charybdis, and Perseus, who slays Medusa.