Medusa are parasitic Snake Kings.

What if I told you a rumour I heard?

Medusii are not, in fact, snake-haired gorgons, but human limbed snake kings.

Hear me out.
Rat Kings are ditch witch abomination comprised of seething hatred, bitter intelligence and potent magic taking the form of half-score or more rats tethered like the star of chaos around the knot of discord, thus bound and ritualised, a King is born, seven minds become one, in agony and confusion sapience, nay sentience is born and through the center binding magic may flow.
Rat King controls rats, Rat King hates those with hands, Rat King can channel magic.

What, WHAT!, does Rat King have to do with Medusa and her progeny?
A different witch in a different gutter, more tropical perhaps, more humid.
Imagine me seven snakes and one knot, a new binding.

But now, as sentience congeals, hear not the squealing bitter fear of the gutter rat, but the reptile-cold acceptance of a patient hunter.
Watch in horror, the confident control of arrogant predator. Biological survivalism that declared evolution obsolete a millennia past.
Reel back in fear, as seven heads dart in turn, and pause to taste new magic in the air.
Before venom reaches the heart, that medusa-core, a new queen, rips stone-form from the strands of the ether and flexes its new instinct.
Fall back in death, shatter, the first victim, the mother of monsters.

Not a medusa you say? Sure. A medusa wig perhaps, you may joke.
Have you ever seen seven snakes attempt to move in tandem? You haven't and you never will. Perhaps after millennia of smooth undulation, it is time for the snake to feel legs, the queen requires a chariot.

The answer! A human corpse easily acquired in this wild land, nerve toxin stills it, neither dead nor stone.
An eye socket slowly invaded, a skull cap wrenched free, a jerk of psychic linkage and muscular testing, some stumbling steps and now! Now, in mocking defiance of its creator we have a walking talking magic flinging queen of snakes and men- stony gaze and snapping hair. A thrall for a body and a knot for a core, all hail the queen snake, Medusa of the sweating jungle.

This is just a rumour, mind. No man nor snake could look a medusa in the eye and live to tell the tale of what he saw there, behind those lids does one see black glistening scales, or the glazed orbs of a human? Truly though, I cannot envisage a  human of any type that could house a head of snakes and not die to their fickle whims within a chickens fart of cock-crow. 

Clearly it is the snakes that hold sway- if you MUST look a Medusa in the eyes, look with pity for the thrall of the snake queen, and look with awe for the reptilian mind of an alien creature gifted human locomotion, and ask yourself.... will I be granite, or will I be marble?

Farewell stranger, but before you go, can I interest you in this fine mirror,  50% gorgon proof, or your sliver back, that's our guarantee!