ABSTRACT
In Ovid's version of the Perseus myth, Medusa appears as the beautiful young girl who was raped by Poseidon in Minerva's temple. This act caused the fury of the goddess, who punished Medusa by changing her marvellous hair into horrible snakes. Medusa is usually represented frontally, and her destructive power is exerted when she faces her victims directly. When a man confronts Medusa's gaze, he is caught by her mask, which does not reflect man's look, but rather sends him back an image of radical otherness, with which man identifies himself, and is consequently turned into stone. By opening up the myth to make it enclose all other alien myths, the postmodern myth-maker transforms the absolute dread of what is unnameable and unthinkable, which is the core of Medusa's petrifying gaze, into something different. Caught in a metamorphic process of continuous reflections and inversions, Medusa's gaze loses its absolute strength to become a cross-cultural object.
