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| | EUROPE: Western / Ancient Greece /Medusa, Gorgons, Pegasus, Perseus et al. |
 | | Medusa was, as Neil Hertz has shown, a popular emblem of Jacobinism and was often displayed (figure B) as a figure of "French Liberty" in opposition to "English Liberty," personified by Athena, the mythological adversary of Medusa. |
 | | To conservatives, Medusa was a perfect image of alien, subhuman monstrosity--dangerous, perverse, hideous, and sexually ambiguous: Medusa's serpentine locks made her the perfect type of the castrating, phallic woman, a potent and manageable emblem of the political Other. |
 | | As soon as Medusa is beheaded, Perseus is rewarded with a winged and glorious white horse, who leaps from the Gorgon's spilled blood like a kind of jubilant phallic trophy. |
| www.mythinglinks.org /euro~west~greece~Medusa.html (3934 words) |
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