BURGEONING LADS OF SCIENCE

Mythursday Returns: Perseus, Part 2: Shaft in Africa: This Time, It’s Not Thursday

When last we left our hero, he had just beheaded the dread Medusa and escaped from that scrape with the help of his friend, an ape named Ape. magical items from benevolent gods.

One might imagine he would immediately fly back with his prize to rescue his mother from marrying a king, but in fact he skirts the coast of darkest most fictional Africa.

As he flies, blood from Medusa’s head drips into the ocean, turning plants in the Red Sea to stone, inventing coral the world over! Amazing! He flies over the Libyan desert, and dripping blood turns sand into stone poisonous snakes for some reason! He encounters the Titan Atlas, holding up the sky at the edge of the world, and feeling pity for him, turns him to stone with the Gorgon’s head, simultaneously creating the Atlas mountains and huge problems for Herakles continuity!

And as he’s flying this ridiculously Family Circus-style circuitous route around Africa, he makes his way to Ethiopia, where there is a princess…IN TROUBLE!

Cassiopeia, queen of Ethiopia and wife of Cepheus, had dared to say she was more beautiful than the Nereids, the mermaid attendants of Poseidon. Here is a mythological tip: do not ever say out loud “I am Xer than Y” where X is anything even remotely positive and Y is a figure with magical powers or someone who might be giving tugjobs thereto.

Because Poseidon sent a giant-ass monster to destroy Ethiopia and I think we can all agree they are still feeling the effects even today. An oracle told Cepheus that the monster could only be appeased if Cepheus chained his daughter Andromeda to a rock as a sacrifice. Which he does.

The good news is, there’s a hero with a bag full of magic powers doing doughnuts around the Cape of Good Hope who is not willing to let a hot naked princess get eaten (I hope was the intention?) by a whale. Look, the point of the story is this: Perseus kills the monster and now everyone who was part of this story gets turned into stars. This is true; look at the sky, they’re there.

At any rate, you would think Perseus would now go back and save his mother. No. He stays to marry the princess. The bad news is, Andromeda was supposed to marry her evil uncle Phineus. You would think this engagement would have been voided by the whole blood sacrifice to a monster thing, but apparently not.

So Phineus and his cronies attack Perseus and Andromeda at their wedding. But Perseus doesn’t even give a shit. He grabs Medusa’s head from his bag, gets his stone on, gets his bone on, and flies back with his new wife to Seriphos, leaving the castle in Ethiopia with some new uncle-themed statues.

At this point, who even knows how long Perseus has been gone? I don’t. Long enough that he’s just in time to stop his mother from getting force-married to Polydectes! It was very much like the final scene of a modern romantic comedy, except instead of Hugh Grant making an impassioned speech to the bride, it was Perseus murdering the groom with a magical monster head.

Look, what I’m trying to say is that Dictys is the Fisherman King of Seriphos now.

Perseus and Andromeda went on to Tiryns, where they founded Mycenae, which is kind of a big deal. They also had hella children, who a few generations later produced Herakles, of whom you may have heard. Perseus returned all his magic weapons to the gods and gave Medusa’s head to Athena in appreciation for her help. She subsequently put the head on the aegis, her magical goatskin breastplate (or shield sometimes). So that’s good.

One last thing: after his adventures, Perseus took part in funeral games for a friend and threw a discus just, like, WAY too hard. It flew into the crowd and killed the shit out of an old man who was sitting there. That man: Acrisius, Perseus’s grandfather, killed by Danaë’s son, as foretold.

MORAL: Oracles ain’t nothin to fuck with.