Binary Log Book

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Kalliope

Not much is really known of the eldest girl with the sultry voice and the ink-stained fingers; whether she was a decent dancer like her other sisters; whether she could truly hold a tune in her throat or her belly, or perhaps she just moaned the forms. Was she tightly frog-faced, or just splendidly beautiful? Did she dress clumsy in ash-stained rags or the richest silks, or simply in cotton? But it seems she still snared her share of would be admirers: her classicism, those clean white marble images, professions of dying and undying love; rhythms and rhymes: she had it all.
Kalliope
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Delphi in Winter

parnassus under snow

Socrates and his students are on a break from the Agora. They’re dressed warmly in boots and woollen robes; they’re spending their time snowboarding on the slopes of the Parnassus. Despite Socrates best encouragement and advice, his pupils keep falling over. He despairs; at this rate, how will he ever manage to teach them proper balance in all things?

Halfway down the hill in the Nefeli Pension, Sappho sits wrapped in a sheep skin by the fire. She pauses her reading of a good scroll to inspect her newly cuniformed nails, then reaches carefully for her bowl of heated wine. The copper lamps suspended from the ceiling have been lit, and the atrium is growing dark. She wonders when her dear girls will be home.

Old Homer is not a great one for sports now. He has spent the day rugged up in the corner of the taverna with a particularly fine jug of Ionian brandy. He has been revising The Iliad, yet again. Hesiod is propped at the bar: all afternoon he has been grumbling and musing about the Gods, his spendthrift brother, and his winter fields.

At the Temple Hospital, Asclepius’ surgery has been overrun throughout the morning: a new strain of Persian flu has become epidemic in the outlying demes.  At the end of his day now, thankfully he only has his tablets to complete. He pauses to consider the options: should it be the sharp lemons and then honey, or perhaps just prayers and dreams?

The Polis Council workers are still out: they are digging the snow away from the Athenian Treasury and scattering the Sacred Way with salt. They are glad tomorrow’s planned performance of The Frogs has been cancelled: the Oracle has predicted further inclement weather.

The Pitho Rooms Pensione, Delphi, October 2010.

Notes

Socrates, Sappho and Homer need no introduction. Hesiod is a near contemporary of Homer. His two greatest works are Theogony, and Works and Days.  The former tells the story of the Gods from woe to go:  the latter is a pastoral primer on the running of country estates. It’s filled with endless complaints levelled at his spendthrift younger brother who Hesiod felt was deficient  in his management of their family’s lands.

Asclepius was the first Greek doctor we have knowledge of and was transfigured at a later date as the God of Medicine. His temple in the Argolid at Epidaurus was renowned as the first “hospital” in history. It specialised in palliative care. As old age was not curable, its patients were more often than not, simply dosed with poppy and left to their dreams. We still do pretty much the same thing today. 

The Frogs is a play by the comic author Aristophanes. The Pythian Oracle sits on her tripod in the Temple of Apollo where she prophesies about the likelihood of  further snow in Delphi this Winter …

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Parnassus the Horse, the Wheel and Language

If you’d like to tackle a book that will keep your head spinning, The Horse, the Wheel and Language by David Anthony is the one to go for.

Initially I thought it would be a nice, easy kind of read with lots of pleasant illustrations of dug up things; but in fact it is a large, complex tome full of facts and figures that describe various completely mind-boggling studies by a host of different archeologists in search of dates for the advent of the Wheel, the domestication of the Horse,  the first use of the Cart,  and so on.

Maybe you’re old enough to remember the famous Highlander movies series where Connor Macleod (aka Christopher Lambert) tries to keep his head while reluctantly removing the heads of others ? It came complete with a Freddy Mercury theme song called Princes of the Universe and a tag line of There can be only one.

In first and classic screenplay, Connor’s scary adversary is known as “The Kurgan” (played by one Clancy Brown), a kind of conanesque bronze age swordsman with a very bad attitude toward most things, including Connor himself.

Enter Anthony’s book, where you’ll discover that “The Kurgan” is a real, academically concocted name for the Aryan uber-culture, the original speakers of indo-European. Between these mythical speakers and modern times lies a bewildering host of other cultures, mainly in and around the Black Sea, that have been rigorously documented and catalogued as part of the effort to  stump up the dates of the title.

During the course of your journey you’ll also run across some quite unnerving facts.  Stallions can only be definitively identified because they have canine teeth?

That maybe suggests why Diomedes flesh-eating horses, the ones that Herakles was forced to deal with, might actually have come to be?

Also,  high-caste female burials give ample evidence of the practice of human sacrifice:  perhaps not a comfortable thought in our day and age with its very active Women’s Rights movements. Ever heard of “SCUM”? (Society for the Cutting Up of Men).

Anyway, despite its difficulty (I doubt the book would pass the Flesch test for easy readability – but that seems a positive virtue to me),  The Horse, the Wheel and Language, is worth its price. Certainly it’s better than being subjected to a bolt of lightning while binge-watching Highlander – or at least, that’s my opinion for the present.

 

The Horse, the Wheel  and Language; David W. Anthony; Princeton University Press 2007

Excerpt diagram — the language tree

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Nowhere in Particular

Three hundred or so dusty red kilometres up the Western Highway from the coast, and about five kilometres from the turn off to Lizard Drinking, lies the small outback settlement of Yakult.  It’s only claim to fame is that it was named by some exhausted minor German explorer who camped there for a few nights while ostensibly searching for the fabled Australian inland sea. Eager perhaps to leave at least some sign that his expedition had passed that way, on departing he reportedly nailed a small commemorative pewter plate to a large gum. “Frederick Grossendum, Yakult, 1863”.

“Call me Jim”, said the barman, as he laid the paperback he had been reading face down on the counter and slipped off the stool to stand behind his bar:  “What will you have?” On the wall behind him, tacked in among the dusty spirit bottles, a large yellowing piece of card announced prices for the available fare.

Mike inspected it carefully before he answered: “seeing its eleven am in the morning, we thought we might be able to get some breakfast?”

“Surely” says Jim, “not a problem. It’s not as if we’re too rushed at the present anyway”. He reached down beneath the taps and retrieved what looked like a child’s toy walkie-talkie. He put it next to his ear; there was a sharp click and a crackle and then he began speaking: “Ma, Ma, are yer there?”

Stay tuned — there will be more …

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The God of Vegetation

We had cause to visit Glebe Point Road for the first time in a long while this Wednesday past. The occasion was a book launch, upstairs at Glee Books, starring the lovely Judy Beveridge. After the event, needing to find something to browse in the way of dinner, we opted for burgers and chips at a rather unique joint on the strip – a Vegetarian Diner (the name of which is withheld to protect, well, me) …

Adonis gets ripped in the side or ritually murdered. Which is it? I can’t quite remember.

Time to dust off my copy of The Golden Bough and maybe get a definitive answer. One thing about it, he must have been a thin and emaciated kind of chap if he was relying on burgers from this place.  The fare: a brioche bun quaintly decorated with “plant-based beef” and the usual salad bits: not even a fried egg to boost the flavour.

They do however fabricate a really good chocolate milkshake. I’d be inclined to revisit just for that; but otherwise, well, they can keep their ideas about the God of Vegetation …

In Greek mythology, Adonis was the god of beauty and desire. Originally, he was a god worshipped in the area of Phoenicia (modern – day Lebanon), but was later adopted by the Greeks. According to the most popular belief, he was the son of Theias, king of Syria, and Myrrha (also known as Smyrna), Theias’ daughter.

 

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The Return

For what might have been a month, after passing through the gates of Horn with their intricate filigrees of beasts and battles, they camped at the foot of the mountain. There in what they thought was a true heart-wood glade, they pitched their tents and tethered their tired horses. 

With charcoal from the fire and sticks of finely pressed colour that they had carried with them, they covered every part of their shelters in what they could remember of the language of their intentions. And yet, despite those careful efforts, each night outside the circle of the fire that which was unknown still moved among the trees, seemingly intent on testing, then breaching the camp’s boundaries. 

In the repetition of those dark hours, their ability to rest also became elusive. Instead, there were drifting fragments and patterns that plagued the corners of their unfocused eyes: then often, having reached an almost feverish point of exhaustion, each would suffer sudden agonising spasms in the muscles of their legs or at their throats; and all, apparently, without clear reason. 

Time itself did not move there properly either. If they could have caught its passing in some tangible form, it would have been as a sketch of a bird with damaged wings that rising up from the page, would slowly drag itself across the clearing, finally to hide somewhere deep among the discoloured bracken and detritus of the forest floor.

 

She had been working on the idea for some time now; insofar as time could be determined. It was about the appropriate forms, a choice of intricate rituals with which they might manage to honour their dead. He had been an older man than the others but still he seemed  in good health. When he collapsed on the strand by the river that sunlit morning they were all surprised; and even more so as despite all they could do, he coughed and choked and shook his way toward a final end. 

They found they could not bury his body there: the strand itself was rocky and the sand beneath far too hard and compact for digging. Instead they contrived a kind of litter from an old blanket and some hastily cut timber; and dragging behind his horse he had made the first part of that journey back with them.

Someone had found a jar of pale honey in their saddle bags. At the edge of the clearing there grew a large clumps of bitter smelling herb or weed. They tore off handfuls of the plant and mixed the two with some of their now brackish water, then soaked the blanket and tightly wrapped the body. Then they hoisted it to their shoulders and gently carried it to the western edge of the glade. There they laid it down in a drift of leaves where the shadows of the wood would always deny a passage for the sun.

When they returned, she was hunched on a flat stone by the fire; and without moving, she called out to all of them quite clearly: 

“He deserves to be farewelled: but I think that somehow, at all costs he must be kept from the gates of Ivory”.

“What are you suggesting? He cannot return”, Roland replied from where he now stood,  just behind her: ”there is no resurrection of the body in its last corruption”.

“How can we really know?”, she said: “here in this place of so many edges, even that might just become possible”.

Without replying, Roland turned on his own boot heel and left her there alone. Having no obvious thought for any other occupation, she again began to pursue her own thoughts: and by that mental effort, she found the strength to make other,  more complicated additions to her drawings.

Finally,  having found nothing and understood nothing, they broke camp and left that forest on the side of the mountain by passing once more through those self-same gates of Horn.

Time is passing … and now had passed …

The clearing is empty, and sans their now cold fire pit, unchanged. A wind begins to blow: picking up speed it animates the drifts of leaves at the forest’s edges.

The drowsing corpse, having been uncovered, lifts itself up, and shaking off the blanket, rolls onto its side. Its eyes, fixed on the path that leads to the gates of Ivory, are wide open and unblinking:  it supports the weight of its pale head with one of its withered arms …

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Japanese Sky Children

The children have collected themselves
the children have boxed and wrapped themselves
the children are praying for a future.
They will climb this tower with their shoes
riding in temple approved plastic bags,
their split-toed socks will leave no dust:
nothing of them is left to chance …

The Infinite Monkey

 

This tower is the oldest wooden structure on earth
and so a proper focus for an outing of the children.

Japanese-Pagoda-1.jpg

 

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Ishtar’s Gate

 

Ishtar or Astarte was the seminal Mother goddess of the Mediterranean World.

Her gate in reconstruction is a permanent feature at the National Archeology Museum in Berlin and has been now for well nigh on a hundred years or more. The actual remains of the gate, less those parts looted by German privateer archeologists in the 19th century, lies today with the war torn boundaries of Iraq. Despite the passing of the endless years and the current rain of bombs on that country, it will remain there long past the demise of you and I, witnessing the strange, peculiar nature of the the human spirit down the ages.

Ishtar’s partner is Tammuz the Shepard or the God of Vegetation

Stories of Ishtar or Inanna and her husband-god Tammuz the Shepherd, are complex and endless. A selection can be found here

In the swirling tides of time that flow from her Gate (the womb of her birth),  Ishtar was Inanna; she became Lilith, Astaroth, Astarte, Aphrodite, Artemis, Athena; so many names; and with the birth of the Christ Child (a dying and resurrected God like Tammuz, the Goat in the Tree, and Osiris) she hides her self beneath the veil of Virgin Mary and is worshipped worldwide in our modern age today.

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Four Branches of the Mabinogi

The Four Branches of the Mabinogi or Pedair Cainc Y Mabinogi are the earliest prose stories in the literature of Britain. Originally written in Wales in Middle Welsh, but widely available in translations, the Mabinogi is generally agreed to be a single work in four parts, or “Branches.” The interrelated tales can be read as mythology, political themes, romances, or magical fantasies. They appeal to a wide range of readers, from young children to the most sophisticated adult. The tales are popular today in book format, as storytelling or theatre performances; they appear in recordings and on film, and continue to inspire many reinterpretations in artwork and modern fiction.

(The Mabinogi needs to be disentangled from The Mabinogion which is the modern name for a larger collection of British / Welsh mediaeval tales. Published versions of The Mabinogion[1] typically include the Mabinogi. The name The Mabinogion first appears in print 1795,[2] based on a single medieval mistake, but the name then became firmly established in modern usage for the larger collection.)

— Read more at on wikipedia …

then you can follow up with Alan Garner’s novel …

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The Blue Plastic Milk Crate

Roger spends most of his days seated on a blue plastic milk crate. Every morning, summer or winter, the sun wakes him in his rag nest, warming the cold concrete in the opening leading to the corner stairwell of the building car park. Only just awake, Roger slouches half upright on his right arm and leaning over, takes a drink. Then of course there are other actions he undertakes that do not bear polite description. The point however, on every other morning, is the grime crusted, bearded, hair-dirted figure that ultimately staggers upright to flop onto his blue throne.

Around the corner, in the bitumen open space between the back of the Newtown Centre and the newer block of town houses there is a large crowd of industrial rubbish bins. Above them on the roof top the Ibis also gather to meet the sun. It’s peculiar if you remember that these birds were characterised by the ancient Egyptians as representative of the deity Thoth, god of writing and knowledge. A more unlikely bunch of long-legged, moth eaten looking birds, greedily squawking out of the side of their black, scythe-like beaks at the  prospect of fresh garbage, is hard to imagine. Scribes without too many pennies in their pockets perhaps? Fallen on hard times and forced to the streets to get a living?  Maybe they’re just like Roger.

Roger, set back in his customary niche in the early light. His old grey army surplus blanket is now draped around his bony shoulders and his arms are crossed on his chest; one hand is keeping hold of a grimy corner; the other tightly surrounds his breakfast bottle of beer.

You might also see Roger on other occasions as he returns from the other end of King Street. He is staggering from side to side along the black bitumen and brick footpath; stumbling down past Newtown Station toward the side lane by the High School of Performing Arts, the location of his throne. 

These outings do not for the most part coincide with any mere necessity for the body’s sustenance: stale bread rolls or some mangled chicken or leftover fruit; perhaps a two day old litre of milk, all being thrown out by the Cafes and other businesses along the strip. Instead, they are pure journeys of a suff,ering soul, rendered down now to the need for another bottle of drink. On such occasions, if his luck is in, Roger has already managed to consume at least one full one and has another clasped against his chest. The result of this good fortune is the added drama of loud, incomprehensible yelling and other, quieter conversations with what you could only interpret as the shades of his past:  beings that Roger can see, but we, the other passers-by cannot. 

Maybe if the seemingly oracular words of these mad, alcohol sustained rants could be unpacked like the contents of old suitcases, you might find in them some clues as to the progress of Roger’s life: why it is that his existence  has been rendered down to this crumpled crouching on his plastic box. Such an investigation however might require a real conversation rather than the simple acknowledgement that many locals afford Roger as they pass. If anybody did succumb to a full scale engagement with him though, Roger would probably tell them that he lost the tickets and the keys for the said luggage a long, long time ago.

So Roger will simply lie down once again at the end of this day. His head rests on an old jumper and the blanket is pulled up almost to his nose. His arms are crossed once more. He has enough liquor in his system to feel suitably embalmed: his breathing becomes one with the velvet dark.

In the frail barque of his sleep Roger is adrift and blessedly forgetful; and through the underworld of our urban night, he is sailing now, slowly, toward yet another dawn. 

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Lorum Ipsum No. 1

But I must explain to you how all this mistaken idea of denouncing of a pleasure and praising pain was born and I will give you a complete account of the system, and expound the actual teachings of the great explorer of the truth, the master-builder of human happiness. No one rejects, dislikes, or avoids pleasure itself, because it is pleasure, but because those who do not know how to pursue pleasure rationally encounter consequences that are extremely painful. Nor again is there anyone who loves or pursues or desires to obtain pain of itself, because it is pain, but occasionally circumstances occur in which toil and pain can procure him some great pleasure. To take a trivial example, which of us ever undertakes laborious physical exercise, except to obtain some advantage from it? But who has any right to find fault with a man who chooses to enjoy a pleasure that has no annoying consequences, or one who avoids a pain that produces no resultant pleasure?

On the other hand, we denounce with righteous indignation and dislike men who are so beguiled and demoralised by the charms of pleasure of the moment, so blinded by desire, that they cannot foresee the pain and trouble that are bound to ensue; and equal blame belongs to those who fail in their duty through weakness of will, which is the same as saying through shrinking from toil and pain. These cases are perfectly simple and easy to distinguish. In a free hour, when our power of choice is untrammeled and when nothing prevents our being able to do what we like best, every pleasure is to be welcomed and every pain avoided. But in certain circumstances and owing to the claims of duty or the obligations of business it will frequently occur that pleasures have to be repudiated and annoyances accepted. The wise man therefore always holds in these matters to this principle of selection: he rejects pleasures to secure other greater pleasures, or else he endures pains to avoid worse.

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.

dolor  ipsum sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur.

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Imaginary Islands

I

Lying as it does just beyond
that dangerous reef so renowned
amongst the solipsists, the first
one being very close is almost
too geographically obvious.
For countless years the swells
have fumed like powdered glass
along its shores; or when stirred
up to ruin, in bitter throated waves,
have crashed down hard against
its stubborn granite cliffs and falls.
The storm-wrack of the place
has never offered up good kindling:
glass bottles lie half buried on
the tide mark; but when exhumed
they contain no messages. Above
the beach, the noise-crazed birds
twine their awkward necks in love,
then build untidy nests among
the hissing grasses: their spattered
feathers barely keep the shipwrecked
warm: but eaten raw, the carcasses
will almost serve to still the Island’s
special seeming brand of hunger.
 

II 

The second one is often deemed
to be, though crowded, far more
fortunate …

Do feel free leave some comments here for me, maybe with some suggestions as to where this should go: at present it takes me about six months to churn out around fifteen almost poems. That means I start say around sixty or so pieces of work each year. Many poems, sadly, during the working life of a poet, are simply still born. And after all, when all is said and done:

How much time do we have to labour
on the lathes of our brief lives to shape,
for all these children the images that are
a waking baptism? To craft for them true title
a waking baptism? to our naked, ungainly selves?
then, without fear or favour, to let them all crawl
awkwardly free …
 
The Infinite Monkey
 
For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives
In the valley of its making where executives
Would never want to tamper, flows on south
From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,
Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,
A way of happening, a mouth.
 
W. H. Auden – On the Death of W.B. Yeats
 
 
 
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Notes on Sarpedon

“In a late version of the Medusa myth, related by the Roman poet Ovid (Metamorphoses 4.770), Medusa was originally a ravishingly beautiful maiden, “the jealous aspiration of many suitors,” but because Poseidon had raped her in Athena‘s temple, the enraged Athena transformed Medusa’s beautiful hair to serpents and made her face so terrible to behold that the mere sight of it would turn onlookers to stone. In Ovid’s telling, Perseus describes Medusa’s punishment by Minerva (Athena) as just and well earned”.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medusa

The origin of my own story lies in my having read a description of the island where the Gorgon lived — Sarpedon. The island seems to have been conceived as being part of a chain. Another island in the group, “the Red Island”, was reputed to be the one along whose shores Odysseus sailed a generation later and where he encountered the Sirens (?).

In any case, this mythical chain of  islands was, according to various ancient sources, located somewhere to the west of Gibraltar in what today we know as the Atlantic Sea. As indicated, the trope of the young Medusa and her rape by Poseidon can be be found in Metamorphoses. Despite the non-consensual nature of rape, Medusa and her sisters are punished by their transformation into monsters. It is of course ironic that the Sea God is actually the Uncle of the Goddess who metes out their punishment.

I have made a more sympathetic Perseus as it fits better into the piece, and allows for the oblique acknowledgement of the Gorgons’ super-power of turning their victims to stone. The Perseus of the original myth, as opposed to the somewhat young, sensitive one who inhabits my own narrative, would just as likely have dealt with the young Medusa in a fashion not dissimilar to the God. Something of his nature in this respect is reflected in his pursuit of Andromeda later in his mythic progression.

Some more material from Wikipedia on Perseus and Medusa:

Graves, Robert (1955). The Greek Myths. Penguin Books. pp. 17, 244. ISBN0241952743. “A large part of Greek myth is politico-religious history. Bellerophon masters winged Pegasus and kills the Chimaera. Perseus, in a variant of the same legend, flies through the air and beheads Pegasus’s mother, the Gorgon Medusa; much as Marduk, a Babylonian hero, kills the she-monster Tiamat, Goddess of the Seal. Perseus’s name should properly be spelled Perseus, ‘the destroyer’; and he was not, as Professor Kerenyi has suggested, an archetypal Death-figure but, probably, represented the patriarchal Hellenes who invaded Greece and Asia Minor early in the second millennium BC, and challenged the power of the Triple-goddess. Pegasus had been sacred to her because the horse with its moon-shaped hooves figured in the rain-making ceremonies and the instalment of sacred kings; his wings were symbolical of a celestial nature, rather than speed.

Jane Harrison has pointed out (Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion) that Medusa was once the goddess herself, hiding behind a prophylactic Gorgon mask: a hideous face intended to warn the profane against trespassing on her Mysteries. Perseus beheads Medusa: that is, the Hellenes overran the goddess’s chief shrines, stripped her priestesses of their Gorgon masks, and took possession of the sacred horses—an early representation of the goddess with a Gorgon’s head and a mare’s body has been found in Boeotia. Bellerophon, Perseus’s double, kills the Lycian Chimaera: that is, the Hellenes annulled the ancient Medusan calendar, and replaced it with another.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medusa

The most interesting feature of Graves’ take on the myth is the rendering down of the story to an over-arching metaphor for the conquest and subjugation of the coastal Pelagasians (c.i.f Thucydides The Peloponnesian Wars for their actual historical existence) by the migratory tribes of the Achaeans and the Daanaids — literally the Mother worshippers vs. the Sky Horse clans. Given he is right in his analysis, any student of the myths as symbolic social history is left with a very particular problem: how is that Kore or Athena survived in her own city of that name, apparently untouched?

Finally, my young Medusa is really the tragic victim of my story.  Perseus will be forced by his circumstance to receive from her a heart of stone, the last thing he probably wants as a life long burden to the end of his days. I would think it is also the last thing Medusa really wants to bequeath to him after his kindnesses on the beach. But such it seems is the legacy left to both of them by a bitter Kore.

The full text of the Wikipedia article on Medusa and her sisters can be found here and my full text of Sarpedon is here …

Gorgona_pushkin
A “Gorgeion” – usually part of the architrave of buildings and temples – to ward off evil Spirits