Return the head to the body:

What Medusa is teaching us about our relationship to nature

Medusa, the mortal gorgon— known for her ability to turn anyone who looks upon her to stone. 

So they cut off her head and displayed it for all to see! 

We can find Medusa’s head all over the world as this bulged-eyed, tongue out, ferocious woman, frightening all those that dare to stare too long. Her head—rarely ever portrayed with her body— often in the hand of Perseus or on Athena’s shield, becomes a relic, representing conquest and ownership. We’ve seen this type of disfigurement before; Sara Venus Baartman, anyone?

The story of how Medusa became Medusa, begins when she was removed from her body. 

I remember growing up, Medusa’s iconography often perpetuated a woman, bodiless and deformed, with snakes for hair. Frozen in time, her very power became her demise as she is now but a stone head.

One morning, I sat in meditation, and there, a shallow glimpse of Medusa’s head appeared. The next day and the day after that, she appeared again, and each time she sat with me. I thought about the body, her body and where it ended up. What became of Medusa remains? I then saw my plants begin to spread all over the room, engulfing me with their gaze. Their roots pushing through their pots, billowing over and becoming new grounds. Without any words, I knew this was how she spoke to me.

What if Medusa's body became the land? Decomposed and decayed back to the roots of the earth? Asking us to return to re-member what it feels like to be whole, to be connected, mind, body, home? 

Natoya Hall, Mother of Starkeeping Mystery School(MOSK), speaks about the body as a place. Considering that, the body as place, as location, as topography and form. Figuratively, the body becomes the place which it stands. It extends beyond the wall of your skin, as territory, enmeshes back to the earth. The body: interspecies, involving more than just blood and bones. It involves fungal, supernatural and metamorphic abilities. Medusa represents the protector, the feminine, a symbol of transformation. And she comes with a message as we shift into a New paradigm. We must recall what it feels to feel our body. 

 Imagine you could expand your understanding of what it feels like to be part of something as yourself. To expand your body to feel the peripheries of grass, of the dirt, and the trees. To perceive your connection as a feeling that you can go to, while still being a part of. The body as a place reveals the beauty the natural world beholds.  

Medusa arrives with the energy of the full moon and to know her is to reclaim your roots to the divine feminine— that which is nature thy self. To reclaim your roots in the living world outside and inside of you, and to the collective web connecting us all, as we are entangled into this matrix. Her arrival is not laden with guilt, regret or disappointment, instead it is an invitation to fall into the mouth of Medusa and discover the body.  Believe that the ants and birds that live outside the doorstep are indeed a part of the experience of living on Earth. For too long, the anthropocentric timeline that centralizes humans, has shaped our world, leaving all other apotropaic symbols and animistic models as tales, myths and fantasy. 

Like Medusa, the human head has been detached from the body and she comes to tell us it’s time to return it. And so must come new medicine designed to support us. You are the that medicine.