Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 14, 1903.djvu/262

 236 represents the body of a lobster, claws and all, but terminating, like a centaur, in the naked body of a man, armed with a sword and in the act of fighting. What he is fighting with is destroyed and a blank, but round the neck of the man, and coming from the destroyed portion, is the very distinct and unmistakeable tentacle of an octopus. This fresco, I submit, conclusively establishes what I have tried to prove—that Medusa was an octopus and Perseus a lobster.

There is, I believe, some evidence that "once upon a time" there was a great lobster in the Libyan Seas (the habitat, according to some classic authors, of the Gorgons) known as Perseus. Ælian associates a crustacean with Perseus (see Hartland's Legend of Perseus, vol. iii.,p. 154). Lucian also records that Perseus made use of the Medusa's head to enable him to slay the dragon and to rescue Andromeda. The latter exploit is, of course, the origin of the story of St. George and the Dragon. Two reliefs representing this legend are known to myself, one in the Louvre and one in the Museum at Palermo. In both cases (of about the same date, seventeenth century), St. George is attacking a sea-monster, with a lady in the dress of the period (not nude) in a beseeching attitude upon a rock in the background. The lady in modern clothes can be no other than Andromeda, and St. George in plate-armour is Perseus. These two representations are apt object lessons in the growth and embellishment of old-world myths, and it is no part of my duty, nor is it possible, to reconcile the inconsistencies of the old story-tellers.

Although I have spoken of the Gorgon Myth as belonging to a limited area, I mentioned evidence of it as forthcoming from another hemisphere; and it is no less strange than true, that certain traits found in distant Polynesia and the West Coast of South America bear so strong a resemblance to the Old World Medusa, that with all diffidence I call attention to it, and suggest the possibility