Gnostic Art

Athena, Goddess of War

Daughter of Zeus and one of the great Olympians, Athena (Minerva) represents the Divine Mother as diety of war against all that is false. Born from the brow of her father, she embodies the intelligence of God.

The serpent by her side is the Kundalini, the upright serpentine power (identical to the Bronze Serpent of Moses) which is awakened by her chaste servants.  A pure virgin, Athena demands purity of her subjects, and abhors fornication, an attribute represented in many of her myths.

A day can press down all human things, and a day can raise them up. But the gods embrace men of sense and abhor the evil. - Athena to Odysseus. Sophocles, Ajax 130

Generally represented with armor, shield and spear, she is the divine intelligence (Hebrew: Binah) who empowers the spiritual hero to conquer his own psychological defects, represented by the antithesis of Athena: Medusa, the hypnotic seductive power of the inverted serpent.

When Perseus was grown up Polydectes sent him to attempt the conquest of Medusa, a terrible monster who had laid waste the country. She was once a beautiful maiden whose hair was her chief glory (long hair is a symbol of Chastity: she was once the pure Consciousness in Chastity) but as she dared to vie in beauty with Minerva (Athena; here we see the birth of pride), the goddess deprived her of her charms and changed her beautiful ringlets into hissing serpents (Medusa became inverted: the lunar serpent, Eve, fell, creating the Klipoth). She became a cruel monster of so frightful an aspect that no living thing could behold her without being turned into stone. All around the cavern where she dwelt might be seen the stony figures of men and animals which had chanced to catch a glimpse of her and had been petrified with the sight (upon seeing her tenebrous beauty, they become identified with desire, which gives birth to the ego, a heavy and rigid mental formation that traps the Consciousness inside. This is the brute stone).

Perseus, favoured by Minerva (his Divine Mother Kundalini) and Mercury (Hermes, the sexual energy), the former of whom lent him her shield (Self-observation, Self-remembering, and Meditation) and the latter his winged shoes (Sexual Alchemy; the shoes we need to walk the path), approached Medusa while she slept (taking advantage of her mechanical nature) and taking care not to look directly at her (with the risk of becoming identified with desire), but guided by her image reflected in the bright shield (of the stabilized and clarified Consciousness through profound stillness of the mind in Shamata) which he bore (due to many patient years of practice), he cut off her head (the "I") and gave it to Minerva (Athena). - Bullfinch's Mythology