I tend to think of lamia as serpent women who eat humans rather than turn them to stone.
My point was that, before the web, I never saw an image purported to be that of a gorgon which featured a lower body.
You know what I think of when I hear “Gorgon”?
The old commercial for the Atari 2600 game Atlantis:
The second thing I think of is the image of Medusa from the board game By Jove. According to Cal Meacham this image is very close to ancient depictions of the gorgons.
What he said.
Clash of the Titans was from 1981, and that’s where I got the image.
The D&D gorgon. Also what I think of when I hear the word.
Never saw it. I don’t watch movies with Harry Hamlin in them. This rule has served me for many moons and I see no reason to change it. 
You’re really missing out on this one. Harryhausen is a genius! Dynamation!
This also, for me has been the standard for Gorgons. Also the similar Medusa from “The 7 Faces of Dr. Lao”. Tony Randall made an … interesting … looking woman.
I have seen a movie with Harry Hamlin in it and lived to tell the tale. Not been turned to stone, though I am a bit achey from time to time.
Not really Ernest of course, it was Jack Worthing (since he was in town when he said it). But this was the first thing that came to my mind, too. Wilde lives!
Anyway, to the point of some earlier posts, Medusa was a Gorgon, but not the only one. Although apparently they all looked pretty much the same:
[QUOTE=Wikipedia]
…the term commonly refers to any of three sisters who had hair of living, venomous snakes, and a horrifying visage that turned those who beheld it to stone,
[/QUOTE]
Nothing in there about scaly skin, and I think that would be confusing the snaky hair with a snaky body.
Roddy
My ex-girlfriend.
You’ve got it backwards: Jack in the country and, Ernest in town. That, my dear boy, is the whole truth plain and simple.
I believe I have read arguments that in the earliest versions of the myth, Medusa actually was the only one, and Stheno and Euryale were added due to a general tendency toward making female mythological figures into trines. They certainly seem to be afterthoughts to the story, from being transformed because they stood by Medusa when she was punished to unsuccessfully pursuing Perseus. Maybe CalMeacham can shed some light on the matter if he pops in.
Stheno hasn’t gone entirely without attention, though–in City of Heroes, the leader and mother-goddess of a faction of semi-anthropomorphic snake people is an ancient Incarnate named Stheno. She is implied to be the original.
As an aside, I would have thought the Gorgons would be kind of a touchy subject for Skald…
Well, please yourself, it’s still the first thing I thought of, but you shouldn’t skew your data set if you want results that you can use.
Oh, and BTW, Bonobo’s don’t intimidate me.
First… Harryhausen’s Clash of the Titans Medusa. Second, Gorgonic Greek Coins… saw some of them in a museum once.
Well, I’m prejudiced, you know, ince I have a Dog in this fight. Or a Gorgon in this fight.
Some thoughts:
1.) The Classical (i.e, really old) image of the Gorgon does NOT have snakes for hair. Sometimes it’ll have snakes in its hair, but usually not.
2.) its defining characteristics are oversized staring eyes, a very round face, a broad, painful-looking grin, and, very often, a beard. Like on the cover of my book (taken from a red-figure dish in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City):
3.) All of which suggests that that iconic face might not really be the Gorgon of Perseus fame, but might be some other face. I suggest possible alternatives in the book, two of which are Deimos and Phobos, Hades’ minions, which we don’t really have pictures of, but which probably didn’t look like this:
http://images.search.yahoo.com/images/view;_ylt=A0PDoS15Ak9OwUoAi8KJzbkF;_ylu=X3oDMTA3cnMybzJvBHNsawNpbWc-?back=http%3A%2F%2Fimages.search.yahoo.com%2Fsearch%2Fimages%3Fp%3DDisney%2BPanic%2BFear%2BPictures%26n%3D30%26ei%3Dutf-8%26fr%3Dyfp-t-701%26b%3D1%26tab%3Dorganic&w=349&h=260&imgurl=images.wikia.com%2Ffanfiction%2Fimages%2F9%2F9a%2FPain_%2526_Panic.PNG&rurl=http%3A%2F%2Ffanfiction.wikia.com%2Fwiki%2FPain_and_Panic&size=104.2+KB&name=Pain+and+Panic+-+Fan+Fiction+Wiki+-+You+can+write+and+show+your+own+...&p=Disney+Panic+Fear+Pictures&oid=1f78caff1fd78eb916d7eefaa581bb9f&fr2=&fr=yfp-t-701&tt=Pain+and+Panic+-+Fan+Fiction+Wiki+-+You+can+write+and+show+your+own+...&b=0&ni=30&no=1&tab=organic&sigr=11facr5ed&sigb=13keatldt&sigi=11qjfco2n&.crumb=.cVAJm9jvbC
As I say, there are a lot of other candidates for what those jheads might mean to represent, including the Erinyes/Eumenides.Furies, the Fates, the Graiae, the Praxidikae, and Hecate. See Chapter 4 in my book.
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Although Apollodorus tells us that there were three Gorgons, Stheno, Euryale, and Medusa, and that Perseus slew one, other sources suggest that Zeus slew a gorgon, or that Athena slew one. In one vase painting of the Birth of Athena, Ares is carrying a shield with a Gorgon’s head on it, suggesting that neither Perseus nor Athena slew a Gorgon.
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All of which says that there’s no complete consistency among all the myths. I think of Apollodoris as a comic=-book Geek who tries to set and maintain a consistency among all the myths, but it’s impossible to be completely consistent. Greek mythology really needed a Crisis on Earth Greek, even before Apollodorus.
5.) Apollodorus, who got the information from a fragment called The Shield of Herakles (supposed by many to be by Hesiod, but almost certainly not), described them as having wings, boar’s tusks, and bristly hair. But gorgon images are a grab-bag. Besides the riound-faces-with-big-eyes-and gritted teeth I describe above, there are gorgons with the bodies of horses, like centaurs, and gorgons with the bodies of birds. Later on in Greek art (and especially in Hellenistic art), Gorgons of the “Beautiful” type were popular, with plump but good-looking female faces, no broad grin, and a pathetic look in their eyes. Sometimes they had, in their hair, wings instead of snakes. Versace uses this kind of gorgon in their logo:
6.) The scaly-faced gorgon and the gorgon with the snake for a body seem to originate with Ray Harryhausen’s original Clash of the Titans. He’d already done an exotic dancer with a snake body in The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad, so this wasn’t much of a stretch.
10.) Although you find examples of gorgons with snakes in place of hair in Classical literature and art, they’re rare. (Hercukles had a vial with Gorgon Hair in it, and it wasn’t snakes) Even in the early Renaissance, Gorgons tended to have snakes *in [i/] their hair. Gorgons invariable pictured with heads of snakes-only is really relatively recent. (And it hasn’t been good for the film industry – their pre-CGI gorgons looked pretty unconvincing, except for Harryhausen’s. Look at the gorgon’s in hammer’s The Gorgon, or in The Seven Faces of Doctor Lao.
11.) Then there are the really weird gorgons, that don’t fall into any category. By a historical accident, bestiaries talked about a northg African creature called the Catoblepas, which supposed to be the same as the Gorgon. The icture of it in Edward Topsell’s The History of Four-Footed Beasts looks appropriately weird:
Then there’s the Gorgon as imagined by Carlo Rambaldi for the Italian film Perseus Against the Gorgon (Released in the US as Son of Hercules Vs. the Gorgon, which is seriously messed up, since Hercules was Perseus’ fifth-generation grandchild). Rambaldi is the guy who did the King Kong hands for the 1976 version of King Kong, and the head for the original 1979 Alien, the alien at the end of Close Encounters, and E.T. huimself, among other things – a genius with hydraulic technology. His Gorgon looks like an evil tree with a single big eye. If you look close, the “branches” seem to bifurcate into mouths, like snakes. In the close-up shot where Perseus puts out its eye (instead of beheading it – it has no head) you can see a slit pupil:
http://galeon.com/traditionalfx/makeup-monsters/Perseo-Medusa.html
The bottom line is that, although there’s a sort of “baseline” gorgon myth and appearance from Apollodorus and standard Greek Pottery art, even in ythe ancient world there was a lot of variation (I haven’t been at all exhaustive), and since the Renaissance, peope have felt free to re-interpreet the image in all sorts of ways. I’ve seen Gorgons with Tentacles for hair, or with penises, or with many different kinds of snakes. Beautiful Gorgons and ugly gorgons, Gorgons with smooth skin and with scaly skin.
I think specifically of the Tony Randall Medusa also. Though a close second would be the Inhuman whose introductory appearance in Fantastic Four #44 was also the debut of Joe Sinnott as inker, whose tintinnabulatin’ talents ushered in a whole new era of that magnificent Marvel magic…! [If this be annoyance, make the most of it.]
In his time, the great 19th century French novelist Émile Zola was so famous, and so celebrated for his sharp wit, that many people became petrified with nerves upon being introduced him. He was the Big Cheese of French literature.
So, Cal… what’s the coinage, the money connection? Is there some antipodean reasoning here, that isn’t so obvious to our current mythology? I know we generally put historical leaders and signs of deities of fortune or good fortune on our modern coins… Some other mythological figures and symbols like lady liberty. Is the Gorgon a signifier of some sort of fortuitousness or deity (Apollonian/Nike) myth on greek money. Is it a good or bad omen?