I’m happy to announce the recent publication of my article Not Set in Stone: Medusa’s Evolving Myth, Part 1 in the latest edition of Mythology Magazine!

This is a great new magazine that celebrates world cultures by discussing historical and modern mythological beliefs and exploring folklore, folk custom, and traditional legends from world cultures.

Here’s a short excerpt of my recent article:

Myths are essential to human culture, past, present, and future. They help form the basis of our personal and cultural identities. Freud and Jung, widely acknowledged as the founders of modern psychology, drew on mythology to help better understand human nature. Mythologies contain fragments of a culture’s history and help to preserve the essence of what has been meaningful to them. Through the exploration of myths we can connect and relate to archetypal patterns of human behavior as well as to the cultural heritage that has, in part, helped form our modern society.

The battle between good and evil is an age-old theme in world mythology, and for good reason. It’s a paradox we live with every day in the “real” world, one that can be hard to understand and reconcile. Although setting up dichotomies can be an orderly way to organize and classify phenomena, in reality, the question of who is right and who is wrong, what is good and what is evil, is never quite so black and white. In mythology, we see these same complexities. Though the hero is usually cast as the good guy and the monster as the bad, when we scratch below the surface, we find the picture to be much more complicated. When we dig back into the origins of a myth, we can find shards of cultural, social, and perhaps political history that start to blur the boundaries between the conquering hero and the conquered beast.

You can get the latest issue, and read the rest of Part 1 (of this 2 part article) here