Medea - The (r)Evolution of a Goddess
Sorceress. Witch. Murderer.
These are some of the first words that often come to mind when people are asked to describe Medea, the Colchian priestess of Hekate. What the average person fails to recognize is Medea’s divine nature, and how her mythology has shifted throughout the first millennium BCE, lowering her status from a divine being, to a powerful sorceress and priestess who does not shed her family’s blood without legitimate reason, to a witch who kills without compulsion.
The earliest mentions of Medea in the written record include the author Hesiod in the seventh century BCE. In his Theogony, he details that Medea is of divine lineage, and lists her in the catalogue of deities as being descended from Helios, the sun god. Medea’s father was the son of Helios, and both Medea’s mother and grandmother were Oceanids, daughters of the Titans Oceanus and Tethys. These figures – Helios, Oceanus, and Tethys – were among the most primordial of the gods in Greece. How and why, the, are her actions of retribution condemned so harshly, when such actions of other deities (such as Zeus and Hera) were seen as just?
One reason can be attributed to Medea’s perceived foreignness. Her mythology places her in Colchis, located near the Black Sea in Asia Minor. In earlier mythology, this foreignness was not stressed, and she was depicted in Greek clothing in Greek art. By the fifth century BCE, this had shifted; she was depicted as having dark hair, in contrast to the ideal blonde hair coveted by the Greeks; she was depicted in eastern styled clothing, including a Phrygian hat. Her foreign, ‘barbaric’ nature was stressed by Jason, in addition to her feminine irrationality, when arguing with her in Euripides’ play Medea, written in 431 BCE. The foreignness is compounded by the fact that Medea belongs to the oldest generation of gods. She is descended from Helios and the Titans – opponents of the Olympic pantheon. Helios was seen as a minor deity[1] in the Greek pantheon outside of Rhodes and Corinth, and by the time Euripides was writing, was largely conflated with Apollo.
Prior to Euripides, the murder of Medea’s children was not even attributed to Medea. The poet Creophylus of Samos, a contemporary of Homer, attributed the death of Medea’s children to the people of Corinth, who killed them in retribution for the deaths of King Creon and his daughter Glauce. Alternatively, Eumelus of Corinth, who lived in the late 7th century BCE, stated in his Korinthiaka that Medea killed her children by accident, burying them alive in the Temple of Hera in an attempt to make them immortal.[2]
According to multiple scholars on Euripides, the playwright altered the death of Medea’s children, even accepting a bribe of between five and twenty silver talents for the alteration. The prevailing myth at the time Euripides was writing was that the people of Corinth were responsible for the death of the children at the temple of Hera Akraia; as a result of this miasma, annual sacrifices were instituted to honor Hera. However, Euripides altered the myth to have Medea kill her own children to spite Jason – a move that proved unpopular with the audiences at the City Dionysia.
But even Euripides could not fully remove Medea’s divine nature. In the last scene of Medea, she appears onstage in a chariot drawn by dragons – a gift from her grandfather Helios, fulfilling a deus ex machina and alluding to her divinity. Although Jason calls Medea ‘most hateful to gods and men,’ it is clear by this gift that Medea still has the favor of the gods.
Given that Euripides was one of the prominent competitors of the City Dionysia that year, his version of the myth was what was available to later playwrights and poets. Unfortunately, the damage to Medea was done. However, the damage was not permanent.
Medea’s Sorcery
Medea's sorcery has evolved just as she has. She has always been an expert in herbalism, particularly the poison path, and her use of poisons has been portrayed extensively through her myths. When Jason was tasked with retrieving the Golden Fleece from Colchis, he was assigned several ‘impossible tasks:’ he had to yoke fire breathing bulls and sow a field with dragon’s teeth, then fight the men that sprung from the seeds. Finally, Jason had to take the fleece from the possession of a dragon. Without Medea’s knowledge of potions these tasks could not have been completed. Medea supplied Jason with an unguent to cover himself in to protect himself from the fire breathing bulls and had him throw a stone to confuse the fighting men into fighting one another, allowing Jason to escape unharmed. Finally, she created a sleeping potion to put the dragon guarding the fleece to sleep, allowing Jason to retrieve the fleece.
Medea showed proficiency in the art of rejuvenation. When Jason and Medea arrived in Jason’s kingdom of Iolcus, Medea rejuvenated Jason’s father by placing him, along with rejuvenating herbs, into a cauldron. When Pelias’ daughters wanted to perform the same rite for their father, Medea assisted them – but neglected to provide the herbs. As a result of Pelias’ death, Jason and Medea had to flee Iolcus, and her herb bag tore open, causing the magic herbs to scatter across the fields of Thessaly. As a result, the region of Thessaly was known as the 'land of the witches.' Based on the fact that the women of Thessaly were renowned for both herbal magic and witchcraft, she is thought to introduced woman’s herbal knowledge from Asia Minor into Greece. In the Thracian Orphic tradition, Medea alone served as priestess to Orpheus. In the Orphic Argonautica, Medea and Orpheus served as theurgists, summoning the Erinyes and other spirits.
In the Argonautica, Medea used herbs and potions to disable the bronze giant Talos at the island of Crete. Talos had one vein running from his neck to his ankle, held closed by one bronze nail. Medea summoned keres (female death spirits), which drove Talos mad, leading him to dislodge the bronze nail and exsanguinating himself. Ironically, in some versions of the myth, Medea tricked Talos into dislodging the bronze nail by telling him it would make him immortal.
Working with Medea
While Medea was portrayed as a sorceress and murderer, her myth nevertheless fascinated artists and authors as her story was rediscovered, beginning in the 1600s. She has featured prominently in art, opera, and theatre. There were no less than nine operas dedicated to Medea during the period of the French Revolution, and it has been stated that Medea represented the spirit of the French Revolution itself. Playwrights debated whether Medea killed her children out of spite or to save them from a worse fate, not realizing that there were earlier versions of the myth in which she did not kill her children.
Images of Medea flourished with the Pre-Raphaelites in the 1800s. Historians theorize that part of the reason for Medea’s popularity during this time had to do with the prevalence of public debates about divorce laws and women’s rights occurring around the same time. Thus, Medea became an icon for proto-feminists in this time period, and for feminism in the twentieth century with the onset of women’s suffrage and the civil rights movement.
Medea was the first goddess that made herself known to me, when I was about 19. Perhaps it was because we were both betrayed by men named Jason. When she made herself known, I was unaware of her innate divinity, as I was still very much a newbie. I felt a very strong kinship with her. This kinship grew as I continued practicing. When I first encountered Medea, no one was working with her. There were little to no resources available for me, outside of the works of Euripides and the neo-pagan books of the 1990’s.
In 2007, when I was healing from an abusive relationship, I was drawn to direct an adaptation of Euripides’ Medea for my senior theatre project. I utilized strong pagan archetypes in my adaptation. The chorus of fifteen Corinthian women was reduced to three, and called ‘Maiden, Mother, and Crone’ – different aspects of Medea’s consciousness. As a goddess, Medea manifests in different ways, and these aspects represented some of these manifestations – innocent and independent; maternal; and vengeful, powerful deity. As the line in Euripides’ play states – ‘As a woman, we must look to one alone.’ But that isn’t a bad thing. As women – as human beings containing a divine spark within ourselves – we have the power within ourselves to overcome what seems like overwhelming obstacles.
The following summer, I had the opportunity to spend the summer working in Greece. I spent the first few days in Athens and spent my first afternoon at the Acropolis. At the Theatre of Dionysus, I had a very spiritual experience; I sat in one of the seats and saw the shades of actors performing Medea. As I sat there enthralled, I no longer noticed the sun beating down on my shoulders or saw the ruins of the skene; I saw the full stage and actors coming up the hill. At that time I had not yet been contacted by Dionysus, another one of my patrons, so I am unsure whether this was Medea or Dionysus reaching out to me, or both.
Medea has taught me a lot about pharmakia, or the use of herbs. She has revealed to me the secrets of her cauldron of rejuvenation, which I have used to resurrect and summon spirits. She also served as an introduction to working with Hekate, whom I began working with a few years ago and am now a priestess of. Medea is excellent for empowering women and strengthening magical abilities, particularly the use of herbs. Should you need to go on the magical offensive for any reason, she is a strong ally. She can assist in clairvoyance and divination, as well as healing.
Since my summer in the Athenian sun, more magicians have been working with Medea and giving her the honor she is due. Cyndi Brannan, in her Keeping Her Keys online coven, devotes a sabbat ritual partially to Medea, recognizing Medea’s divinity. Jason Miller includes Medea in part two of his Hekate class. Jack Grayle includes rituals to Medea in his book The Hekataeon. All these examples show that Medea’s spirit is still strong, still speaking to us from the shadows. She has used her cauldron of rejuvenation on herself, and is asking us to do the same to ourselves.
Works Cited
Clauss, James and Sarah Iles Johnston (ed). Medea: Essays on Medea in Myth, Literature, Philosophy and Art. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997.
Euripides. Medea and Other Plays. Translated by James Morewood. Oxford University Press, 2009.
Griffiths, Emma. Medea. London: Routledge Taylor and Francis Group, 2005.
Powell, Arron (ed). Euripides, Women and Sexuality. London: Routledge Taylor and Francis Group, 1990.
Pucci, Pietro. The Violence of Pity in Euripides’ Medea. Ithaca: Cornell Univerity Press, 1980.
[1] While Helios was considered a minor deity, nevertheless he was one of the deities called upon as a protector against witchcraft and sorcery in sources such as the Greek Magical Papyri. This could be due to Helios’ conflation with the Egyptian sun god, as well as his ties to Medea.
[2] One is reminded of the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, where Demeter placed the infant Demophon into the hearth fire nightly after anointing him with ambrosia to burn off his mortal spirit and grant him immortality, as well as Achilles being dipped into the River Styx by Thetis for the same reason. It appears that the use of the elements were seen as a key part of immortality granting rites to the ancient Greeks, and bear further exploration.