It's Good to Be Ugly
Long before anyone spoke of Perseus and the snake-haired Medusa, the Gorgon’s face already watched over the ancient world. Early temples and shields bore her bulging eyes and lolling tongue centuries before poets gave her a name. Carved high on pediments, Gorgons glared outward to scare evil from the sacred space within, their apotropaic power believed to turn harm away. In Images of Myths in Classical Antiquity (2003), Susan Woodford argued that the image came first and the myth followed. She traced the Gorgon’s grimace to Egyptian guardians like Bes, whose fierce stare repelled harm. T. H. Carpenter’s Art and Myth in Ancient Greece (2021) later showed how Greek artists transformed that borrowed charm into something uniquely their own. In both art and faith, ugliness defended beauty.
Gorgon from the Temple of Artemis, Corfu, c. 580 BCE. Public domain.