Female Symbols

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Painting on a plate, from Kameiros on the Island of Rhodes, dating to about 600 B.C., now in the British Museum, London. The image shows a winged goddess, with the head of a Gorgon, holding two birds with both her hands, in the typical way of the iconography of the “Lady of the Animals”, an epithet which was attributed in the Archaic and Classical Age to Artemis. In Classic mythology, the Gorgons were three fearful female figures, generally represented with protruding jaws from their mouth and snakes instead of hair, whose glance could petrify. It is well-known the story of Perseus, who killed the Gorgon Medusa, the only mortal one of the three, thanks to the help of Athena. The Gorgon’s severed head was put in the centre of the goddess’s shield and became a specific attribute of the war goddess Athena. The “monstrous” characteristics of the Gorgon are amenable to her nature, as a being inhabiting the woodlands, sharing her daily abode with wild beasts, dwelling on the borders of the world inhabited by humans, and showing the most disquieting and fearful aspects of the “wild”.

[Source: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Gorgon_Kameiros_BM_GR1860.4-4.2.jpg]