Medusa Conjunct the Sun: Synchronicity and Archetypal Happenings in Istanbul

As we approach the full moon and partial lunar eclipse on Wednesday, my thoughts are with Medusa.

Asteroid Medusa is currently in conjunction with the Sun and has been for several days. At the time of the full moon eclipse, Medusa will be at 22 Virgo in a 3-degree orb with the Sun at 25 Virgo.

A recent synchronistic meeting with Medusa happened for me last Wednesday, 11^th September when I made a trip to Medusa’s underground temple in the heart of Istanbul. The actual name of the place is Basilica Cistern. It is an ancient subterranean cistern, about 150 metres southwest of Hagia Sophia Mosque.

The original church on the site of the Hagia Sophia is said to have been ordered to be built by Constantine 1 in 325 on the foundations of a pagan temple. Pagan temples were destroyed and their remains used in new Christian structures, and mosques. In Ephesus, some 300 miles from Istanbul, the great temple of Artemis, also known as the Temple of Diana, was destroyed by Herostratus, in 356 BCE.

I have yet to discover which deity was revered on the original site of Hagia Sophia, though intuitively I feel it was a moon goddess, possibly Artemis. Being that “Sophia” is a transliteration of the Greek noun meaning “wisdom”, and in the Old Testament, as well as and several apocryphal texts, wisdom is personified as a woman, Hagia Sophia was, and remains, a Temple to the Goddess.

For me, the underground Basilica Cistern, only a few feet away, is a Temple of Medusa.

It is not clear how Medusa came to be in the subterranean waterways of the Basilica Cistern, but there she is, at least her giant stone head serving as a base for 2 of the 336 marble pillars. The heads were thought to be removed from a building in the late Roman period, there is no evidence to suggest that the heads were previously used as pillar bases. Curiously, the heads today are turned upside down at to the side instead of upright. Legend has it that they were deliberately positioned this way to negate the awesome power of the gorgon’s gaze.

Right at the back of the cistern, at the far northwest corner, is a still pool of water where a modern sculpture of Medusa sits, eyes opened, defiantly daring the observer to look at her. Her crown of snakes is amplified and cast as foreboding shadows on a wall- a safer viewing option perhaps.

For me, it was deeply moving to be in that place with Medusa, I felt Her as an active presence, potent, and alive.

When I set out for Istanbul old town that morning, I had no idea I would have such a electrifying encounter. Mesmerised, I spent too long in Medusa’s cave before being moved on by a guard, but not before paying due homage and humbly taking a few pictures.

My intention had been to also visit Hagia Sophia, but I wanted to savour my Medusa encounter before moving onto another no doubt equally intense one.

Afterwards, I took the ferry back to the Asian side of Istanbul rather than the metro, just to remain in the waterways for a bit longer. Bridging the Bosphorus between Europe and Asia felt significant as Medusa was said to be born at sea in this region, Ancient Anatolia.

Back in my apartment I set to work with the dawning recognition that I was engaged in an archetypal event, or another way of saying it, a psychic quest. I pulled up the chart for the day: September 11^th, 2024, 1.20pm, Istanbul. Asteroid Medusa was at 19 Virgo 1’18, and the Sun was at 19 Virgo, 10’3. I checked my progressed chart: My progressed Sun was at 10 Pisces 57, and my natal Medusa is at 11 Pisces 13. Symbolically, my inner Sun was shining the light of consciousness onto my inner Medusa at the same time that the Sun was collectively in a union with Medusa- a microcosmic and macro cosmic event… something was afoot!

Excited but not too surprised, I recalled an eerily similar situation some years previously: When responding to a friend’s 50^th birthday invitation to “come as my divine self”, I dressed as Lilith, complete with beautiful black wings. It was only afterwards that I realised the archetypal world was speaking. When was that? I checked the chart: Sunday September 11^th, 2016, at 2.00 pm.

For a moment I was galvanised. Both events, so similar in nature, both concerning archetypal manifestations of the dark goddess, had happened on the same day, eight years apart on 9/11, not an insignificant date in our collective consciousness either!

After the party in 2016, I began to feel that the implications of being Lilith that day ran far deeper than mere fancy dress. I was a little slower in those days to follow the scent and checked the chart a week or two later; asteroid Lilith had been at 17 Capricorn 34’36, exactly conjunct my natal Sun at 17 Capricorn 34’17.

Around that time, I started to offer women’s moon lodge circles in Canterbury. The archetype of Lilith featured regularly, and even when I intended something else for the Lodge, She would still make a guest appearance. There was no escaping Her. Working with Lilith over the next several years provided a portal through which I explored a lot of psychic material relating to the archetypal feminine, and to my grandmother, and my mother-line. I wrote about my findings and impressions- you can still find these blogs by typing “Lilith” into the search bar of the gnosticwoman.com blog. I still work with the Lilith archetype, particularly in the astrology chart, and I am continually discovering more of Her mysteries.

But now Medusa…

I have also written about Medusa in my blog; She too was a regular guest at the Canterbury Moon Lodge, and now it seems She is calling me to understand something more, perhaps how she is constellated in me.

I knew this time in Istanbul was going to be significant. Since my mother’s death 6 months ago my life, through no conscious intention, has been a swirling vortex of change and movement. I left my home in Roslin and had a period of several months in which I was travelling around the northwest of Scotland where I spent 1 month of the holy island of Iona, connecting with the ancient priestess and the strong Mary energy there. One day soon I will write about that time, and maybe make a short film.

At this time, material from the unconscious rises and moves through me quickly. With a Jupiter Mercury conjunction at the Galactic centre, I suspect I also access information from elsewhere too; Mercury being the Divine Messenger… and the Trickster god. I have barley stood still for the past few months and there is still so much to process. I read somewhere that based on a study made in 2009, synchronicity tends to happen more in times of intense emotional charge, such as death. Since, my mother’s death in March, I have experienced a lot of psychic movement, and yes synchronicity. It is almost as if a huge amount of unconscious material that was related to my mother, my relationship with her, and our female lineage is being unearthed and excavated.

What does Medusa ask of me? I am still figuring it out though I would say it has something to do with releasing frozen energy that became blocked through trauma – mine, my mother’s, and my grandmother’s, and down through our matrilineal line.

Dare I look into the unblinking eye of Medusa?

I am getting a sense that the archetype of Medusa is connected to trauma complexes. Feelings, events, and emotions too powerful to be processed and brought to consciousness at a former time are now ready to be felt, understood, and integrated. With trauma, instincts and instinctual responses are inhibited and are only able to come on-line again once the trauma has been processed and felt. Trauma gets frozen in the body and for many people with a trauma complex, the body is an uncomfortable place to be, at least until the frozen energy is unblocked.

When our natural instincts are cut off, the only way to operate is from our mind, but it is a mind that has split from the body… our very own personal Cartesian split. As a priestess in the temple of Athena, Medusa was cut off from her instinctual and chthonic wisdom, as per the codes of the temple. It is only in a sexual merging with Poseidon, the sea god, that Medusa is returned to her original, primordial state- Medusa is the daughter of the early sea deities Phorcys and Ceto. Athena who was born from the head of her father, Zeus, and who doesn’t have a mother, is outraged at this transgression which occurred within her temple walls and She condemns Medusa to live out her days in a cave on the edge of the western world, somewhere between sleep and death.

Medusa’s hair, once beautiful and admired by suitors from far and wide is now a hissing nest of serpents, and should anyone gaze directly upon her, they are immediately turned to stone. The snakes are a symbol of Medusa’s chthonic, dark goddess power, so awesome that it cannot easily be withstood by mortal men. Only the hero Perseus aided and abetted by the gods themselves can slay Medusa’s head.

Primordial consciousness has over-taken the entirety of Medusa’s being eclipsing the possibility for the integration of rational thought. In her cave with her sisters, She exists in a primordial, ancient soup, born from the depths of the Poseidon’s kingdom where all is unified in oceanic, or amniotic consciousness, not yet differentiated or accessible to conscious thought.

It is the slaying of Medusa’s head that gives birth to the gifts of her union with Poseidon- the warrior Chrysaor with his golden, magical sword, and the winged horse Pegasus, icon of poetry and inspiration, or another way of saying the soul. It is the soul that is needed to heal the split between body, mind, and spirit. It is the solar warriors and heroes, Chrysaor and Perseus who through divine intervention can slay the ouroboric apron strings and release libido from the entrapment of the unconscious.

Medusa’s blood, a potent medicine of primordial power, like dark matter at the core of the galaxy, has the power to bring the dead back to life, and to magically heal, however it can also kill. It is with the greatest care, respect, and expertise that the blood of the Gorgon must be handled, and this authority is bequeathed to Asclepius, god of medicine. Medusa’s medicine is so potent that in the wrong hands or approached too directly by the limitations of the ego, one is petrified, or paralysed.

Having helped Perseus to slay the head of Medusa, Athena now wears the severed head on her breast plate as a talisman of protection. Medusa and Athena, different aspects of the same consciousness are now reintegrated. Instinctual wisdom is returned to consciousness and becomes an immensely powerful ally in navigating the demands of the material, rational world. Medusa/Athena is a true goddess of wisdom, fully functional and whole with access to ancient primordial wisdom and serpent medicine while at the same time fully functional and rational within the mental spheres and frontal cortex world. Spirit, matter, and mind have merged to create a powerful triad of human divine through the soul as Mercurial pathways bridging gods and mortals. In a  modern biological sense, we might say that left brain and right brain hemispheres are working together.

As human we are not entirely in control of these archetypal processes although we do have volition. When an archetype is alive in us, when it is time for that archetype to work on us (which we can see in the astrology chart), we are to an extent at their mercy. To become conscious of them, to pay attention to the synchronicities, and to ask to receive their message, enriches our experience and expands our consciousness beyond any doctrine, or second-hand dogma that cuts us off from our innate power. Directly experiencing an archetype is a pathway to gnosis.

I look forward to deepening into the mysteries of Medusa… humbly, respectfully, cautiously.

Karen Mullen Smith, Istanbul, September 14^th, 2024.