One of my favourite things about the work I do at The Celestial Archive is how much research goes into learning about the stories that sit above our heads. If you’re looking at the constellations through the lens of Ancient Greece, you’ll encounter tales of heroes, monsters, and the complicate – and often brutal – relationships between gods and mortals. But dig a little deeper and you soon begin to realise those romanticised myths are laced with something much darker.

If mythology is famous for anything, it’s for its tales of betrayal, spiteful gods and tragedy. Most of us are familiar with the story of Orion, killed by the Earth goddess Gaia for boasting too loudly of his hunting skills, or poor Andromeda, chained to a rock by her own parents as a sacrifice to the sea monster Cetus. But perhaps the most tragic of them all is that of the gorgon Medusa. Throughout popular culture, Medusa was mostly portrayed as nothing more than a black-hearted monster, intent on destroying any living soul that entered her domain. Yet if we were to look at the why behind her terrible circumstances, we might see her as the greatest victim of all.