Eyes of the Gorgon: Endometriosis, Mythic Embodiment, and Freedom

Jaffa Frank transmutes her decades of suffering from endometriosis by engaging the mythic imagination to craft a narrative of hope and empowerment. Firmly grounded in the physical realities of the disease, she evokes its archetypal wisdom as a visitation of the Gorgon Medusa revealing healing and wisdom, even when medical cure is unavailable. Frank mythopoetically weaves together threads of endometriosis, Medusa, and Athene on the loom of her own lived experience of the disease, imaginative and embodied reflection the weft and warp of a life tapestry. By personifying endometriosis as Medusan, pathology is rendered sacred. By contemplating what it means to be human in embodied relationship with the divine, Frank provides a mythos of healing while living with chronic illness.

Eyes of the Gorgon will be of interest to anyone who has been touched by endometriosis and longs to expand the story of the disease beyond the limitations of socio-cultural taboos and the medical model. It will be illuminating reading for analytical, somatic, and depth psychologists; students of myth and mythopoesis; and medical professionals.

Eyes of the Gorgon is a revelatory, original and elegantly rendered story of a heroic journey [and] reveals an entirely new form of describing and defining illness through the mythic imagination.

Dennis Patrick Slattery, Ph.D., author of The Wounded Body: Remembering the Markings of Flesh and Riting Myth, Mythic Writing: Plotting your Personal Story.