Thank you for the deep dive down into the labyrinth — and the fate of the bull boy. To hear all sides of the character’s past story sheds a tiny ray of light in understanding the buried monster. Great read!
Thank you so much for this post, the psychological depth of this story makes one wonder if the ancients understood more about what makes us tick than we with our absorption in our screens.
The broader cultural pattern, of where these stories are told and who is telling them, taken over a longer time span, also feels particularly illuminating for the minotaur: we can trace the mythological and archetypal function of this story in relation to a society and its relationship to nature, the wild, reason and consciousness.
In a nutshell, the Greeks went through a long process involving suppressing the Dionysian, the wild, ecstatic, forest celebrations of nature, and reducing Pan, the horned god, to further and further corners of the wild, as they themselves became more urbane, rational, and sophisticated.
From this angle, the minotaur looks very much like an image of the horned god - the masculine archetype of wild fertility - who has been captured and hidden, pushed down into the unconscious earth for being too unruly, whose extravagant appetites, impulsive behaviour, and untameable power are impossible to integrate with the rules and demands of any civilised ('polite'?) society. It takes an extremely cunning labyrinth, perhaps the kind of maze only the mind can construct, to suppress something so instinctive and powerful.
And it takes a huge amount of energy to keep a force like that hidden in one's psyche - an energy equivalent only to the constant human sacrifice of youth and its vitality. It is a heavy price to pay.
No wonder the minotaur is so angry, and tears down the earth from within. I see this masculine rage everywhere today. The primal desire for the hunt, for the danger and excitement and the violence of the wild, is totally unavailable in modern culture, and it may be something that we all, and young men in particular actually need, if only to feel the limits of their bodies.
And if the wider culture doesnt provide it for them, they'll find and form cultures which do. Ritualised violence, partly as a release valve, has been a feature of many cultures - bullfighting an obvious example. We have team sports, football, and things like boxing and ufc, but in general the place of violence in our world is pushed as far away as we can afford, onto other people in countries as far away as possible. Power in our society is perhaps a measure of how far away from your own body you can push the threat of violence.
So perhaps Theseus, in this reading, is part of the creation myth of Athenian sophistication: he (supposedly) kills the deep troubling mythological power that takes all one's vitality to keep at bay, so that now the age of philosophy and democracy can begin. But has he really killed it? How much of civilised sophistication is a mask, a theatrical facade, a construction, and how much of our modern problems, psychological and cultural, are simply a result of us getting lost in these labyrinths we have to keep constructing in order to hide these wild and terrifying parts of ourselves, so we can continue to pretend they don't exist?
Yes, so much wisdom here—what can I say. Yes to the surrealists, and I hope you’re writing about your experiences as a human as well as your journey, it seems you’re traveling in the maze—as we all have our personal Minotaur to contend with, befriend, or simply understand. Or maybe it’s Pan, or Humbaba, or the Loch monster.
I read Campbell a long time ago, Hero with a Thousand Faces—maybe it’s time to undust that volume and re-read it.
I’m gonna start following you in case you start posting. Also, I recommend looking up the Horn Gate (or gates) here in Substack. He just started and seems he’s on this maze as well, you might like his writings.
Impressive! I appreciate the detailed and length of the response. So many themes come up—for one, as the most peripheral, I really like the king’s myth as you describe it. I heard it somewhere but I had forgotten it—as probably most people. Also, I’m working on 3 renditions of the Minotaur—one is a novel that follows the established structure and it’s a criticism of the imprisonment of modernity. However, another is a play from the perspective of the Minotaur—and Ariadne is in fact (at least in this rendition) that Ariadne you describe. I think is interesting that the primordial images are parallel.
On another point, I have the White Goddess book but like you have not finished it—but I often use his other book on mythology as a reference. And I read quite a bit of Jung —if you haven’t yet, I recommend alchemy of the soul, it’s really amazing—this is the bases from which Jung came up with active imagination, which you might be familiar with.
For the rest, I get you—the centrality of the Minotaur’s ordeal is not to be missed—and indeed that’s how it feel to be human these days.
Thank you! And interesting - I look forward to your work, I hope the gods of writing bless you. I think the stories will always be changing if they are still alive in any way. And now I'm more interested in this mischievous little girl again - she certainly has a lot of magic.
The minotaur has been a quite important character in my inner life over the last couple of years, so holds a lot of power for me. I guess on the most basic level, he feels like a missing step in the journey of the perhaps somewhat generic horned god (eg https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cernunnos ) underground, eventually becoming the Christian devil. And as such the minotaur is perhaps an easier place to start the work of reclaiming that huge energy which was forbidden to us. Or else we just continue living in infantile and disempowered binary opposition, projecting everything we don't like onto these figures (and onto the earth...). And the same forces that drove him underground also removed all access to the mythological dimension, and its vast power. I feel so much of the world's pain is trapped in its literalism. So freeing the minotaur becomes symbolically quite important. I hear people talking about renchanting the world, but not so much about this rather gnarly side of it which seems quite necessary.
The Surrealists - whose serious mission to liberate humanity from its rational slavery seems rarely understood these days - were also quite into it as a symbol, for perhaps the same reason... https://archive.org/details/minotaure-8
I don't think I've read alchemy of the soul, thanks, I'll have a look. I can't always remember. I would really recommend Joseph Campbell, the whole 4 volume Masks of God really helped me start to read myth in new and more creative ways.
Nice analysis of the “wild” self hidden in the labyrinth. I like how you connect repression with violence and bullfighting, sports, and so on. However, have you considered how Ariadne is part of the plot—have you connected her, or her thread, to this image of the retreating (or rather pushed away) wild god? I’m curious.
Thanks. Mostly I'm responding to the central image of the powerful masculine horned figure trapped underground, angry and needing sacrifice, much more so than with Theseus, the 'hero', or even any of the other parts of the story. Not all aspects of the story resonate in the same way.
And I often feel that myths come to us with a lot of layers, combining different images from other stories or contexts, often taking ancient stories from other cultures and changing them. Woven together in a good story, they make sense - fulfilling a mythological, psychological function for that culture at that time - but to my eyes they often could do with some critical unravelling, some reading between the lines, to unlock the power of those original archetypal images. I think this approach is roughly what Robert Graves' White Goddess was about, though I confess I've never actually finished it... with a fair bit of Jung thrown in. I dream a lot and the more i work with my dreams the more the logic of strong strange images in myth and story (and life...) make a different kind of sense. And a lot of the power of these images can be quite specific and personal - if there is anything universal to be found, then it comes first through the subjective and personal. Or the heart, or soul, one might say.
As another, not entirely unrelated example, it feels to me like the Grail King (wounded by a spear through his balls) is an echo of the Kings who in an earlier age were young men chosen for their fertility, whose service to the land was in fact as a sacrifice to the feminine in the earth. He should have been killed after a year - and perhaps the land is now a wasteland precisely because he has neglected his duty and held onto the power, instead of submitting to sacrifice and allowing his strength and fertility to flow back into the earth with his blood. But his figure comes to us in a story from a much later age when this practise was long forgotten.
All of which is perhaps a longwinded way to say, I don't really feel much particular connection between the aspects of the minotaur I've been resonating with, and Ariadne - at least in the story as it's told. She feels more part of Theseus' story, which feels like a separate one. That there are 2 quite different versions of her gift, one the clew of thread, the other a luminous crown, also makes me feel its not really that essential. Each of the images have power in their own right, but also kind of just piggyback on the most powerful part of the story (to me) - minotaur.
However: from my own personal experience of finding and working with the minotaur archetype in myself (which has involved building unicursal labyrinths for the purposes of geomantic meditation and healing), I have found a complementary power, that has come once the blind rage of the minotaur has been allowed room to express itself a certain amount.
It comes in the form of a little girl, curious, brave, and kind, who isn't scared of this beast, and whose energy is very helpful in taking him by the hand and leading him out of the labyrinth... Lewis Carroll's Alice feels very close.
So perhaps Ariadne is a distant memory of this original pairing, shunted into a supporting role by a later culture's need for a particular kind of male hero.
It's also mildly interesting that Ariadne later either marries Dionysus, or he orders her murder (by Artemis). As if she's a part of his domain (the wild) and always has been.
Thanks for another thought-provoking read. One part of the myth that I feel is never sufficiently addressed is that it is a woman who reveals the path through the maze. Without the help of Ariadne, Theseus would have never have escaped the maze. She is the link between two of the most powerful Classical nature symbols, Dionysus and the minotaur. Surely this cannot be coincidence. Brave, resourceful and compelling, there is probably more of her story to be discovered, buried in undiscovered work and untranslated literature.
Thanks for all of this imagination candy. Any mention of the Minotaur will always get my attention, thanks in part to some crazy, vivid dreams I had as a kid. This morning I was re-reading Edward Abbey's essay, Down the River with Henry Thoreau, and there it was: "Each Canyon resembles a winding labyrinth. We listen for the breathing of the Minotaur but find only cottonwoods glowing green and gold against the red rock ..."
Very interesting, and a great way of understanding the myth. My Centaur self enjoyed it.
Thank you for the deep dive down into the labyrinth — and the fate of the bull boy. To hear all sides of the character’s past story sheds a tiny ray of light in understanding the buried monster. Great read!
I’m so glad 🤍
Thank you so much for this post, the psychological depth of this story makes one wonder if the ancients understood more about what makes us tick than we with our absorption in our screens.
The broader cultural pattern, of where these stories are told and who is telling them, taken over a longer time span, also feels particularly illuminating for the minotaur: we can trace the mythological and archetypal function of this story in relation to a society and its relationship to nature, the wild, reason and consciousness.
In a nutshell, the Greeks went through a long process involving suppressing the Dionysian, the wild, ecstatic, forest celebrations of nature, and reducing Pan, the horned god, to further and further corners of the wild, as they themselves became more urbane, rational, and sophisticated.
From this angle, the minotaur looks very much like an image of the horned god - the masculine archetype of wild fertility - who has been captured and hidden, pushed down into the unconscious earth for being too unruly, whose extravagant appetites, impulsive behaviour, and untameable power are impossible to integrate with the rules and demands of any civilised ('polite'?) society. It takes an extremely cunning labyrinth, perhaps the kind of maze only the mind can construct, to suppress something so instinctive and powerful.
And it takes a huge amount of energy to keep a force like that hidden in one's psyche - an energy equivalent only to the constant human sacrifice of youth and its vitality. It is a heavy price to pay.
No wonder the minotaur is so angry, and tears down the earth from within. I see this masculine rage everywhere today. The primal desire for the hunt, for the danger and excitement and the violence of the wild, is totally unavailable in modern culture, and it may be something that we all, and young men in particular actually need, if only to feel the limits of their bodies.
And if the wider culture doesnt provide it for them, they'll find and form cultures which do. Ritualised violence, partly as a release valve, has been a feature of many cultures - bullfighting an obvious example. We have team sports, football, and things like boxing and ufc, but in general the place of violence in our world is pushed as far away as we can afford, onto other people in countries as far away as possible. Power in our society is perhaps a measure of how far away from your own body you can push the threat of violence.
So perhaps Theseus, in this reading, is part of the creation myth of Athenian sophistication: he (supposedly) kills the deep troubling mythological power that takes all one's vitality to keep at bay, so that now the age of philosophy and democracy can begin. But has he really killed it? How much of civilised sophistication is a mask, a theatrical facade, a construction, and how much of our modern problems, psychological and cultural, are simply a result of us getting lost in these labyrinths we have to keep constructing in order to hide these wild and terrifying parts of ourselves, so we can continue to pretend they don't exist?
Yes, so much wisdom here—what can I say. Yes to the surrealists, and I hope you’re writing about your experiences as a human as well as your journey, it seems you’re traveling in the maze—as we all have our personal Minotaur to contend with, befriend, or simply understand. Or maybe it’s Pan, or Humbaba, or the Loch monster.
I read Campbell a long time ago, Hero with a Thousand Faces—maybe it’s time to undust that volume and re-read it.
I’m gonna start following you in case you start posting. Also, I recommend looking up the Horn Gate (or gates) here in Substack. He just started and seems he’s on this maze as well, you might like his writings.
Impressive! I appreciate the detailed and length of the response. So many themes come up—for one, as the most peripheral, I really like the king’s myth as you describe it. I heard it somewhere but I had forgotten it—as probably most people. Also, I’m working on 3 renditions of the Minotaur—one is a novel that follows the established structure and it’s a criticism of the imprisonment of modernity. However, another is a play from the perspective of the Minotaur—and Ariadne is in fact (at least in this rendition) that Ariadne you describe. I think is interesting that the primordial images are parallel.
On another point, I have the White Goddess book but like you have not finished it—but I often use his other book on mythology as a reference. And I read quite a bit of Jung —if you haven’t yet, I recommend alchemy of the soul, it’s really amazing—this is the bases from which Jung came up with active imagination, which you might be familiar with.
For the rest, I get you—the centrality of the Minotaur’s ordeal is not to be missed—and indeed that’s how it feel to be human these days.
Thank you! And interesting - I look forward to your work, I hope the gods of writing bless you. I think the stories will always be changing if they are still alive in any way. And now I'm more interested in this mischievous little girl again - she certainly has a lot of magic.
The minotaur has been a quite important character in my inner life over the last couple of years, so holds a lot of power for me. I guess on the most basic level, he feels like a missing step in the journey of the perhaps somewhat generic horned god (eg https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cernunnos ) underground, eventually becoming the Christian devil. And as such the minotaur is perhaps an easier place to start the work of reclaiming that huge energy which was forbidden to us. Or else we just continue living in infantile and disempowered binary opposition, projecting everything we don't like onto these figures (and onto the earth...). And the same forces that drove him underground also removed all access to the mythological dimension, and its vast power. I feel so much of the world's pain is trapped in its literalism. So freeing the minotaur becomes symbolically quite important. I hear people talking about renchanting the world, but not so much about this rather gnarly side of it which seems quite necessary.
The Surrealists - whose serious mission to liberate humanity from its rational slavery seems rarely understood these days - were also quite into it as a symbol, for perhaps the same reason... https://archive.org/details/minotaure-8
I don't think I've read alchemy of the soul, thanks, I'll have a look. I can't always remember. I would really recommend Joseph Campbell, the whole 4 volume Masks of God really helped me start to read myth in new and more creative ways.
Nice analysis of the “wild” self hidden in the labyrinth. I like how you connect repression with violence and bullfighting, sports, and so on. However, have you considered how Ariadne is part of the plot—have you connected her, or her thread, to this image of the retreating (or rather pushed away) wild god? I’m curious.
Thanks. Mostly I'm responding to the central image of the powerful masculine horned figure trapped underground, angry and needing sacrifice, much more so than with Theseus, the 'hero', or even any of the other parts of the story. Not all aspects of the story resonate in the same way.
And I often feel that myths come to us with a lot of layers, combining different images from other stories or contexts, often taking ancient stories from other cultures and changing them. Woven together in a good story, they make sense - fulfilling a mythological, psychological function for that culture at that time - but to my eyes they often could do with some critical unravelling, some reading between the lines, to unlock the power of those original archetypal images. I think this approach is roughly what Robert Graves' White Goddess was about, though I confess I've never actually finished it... with a fair bit of Jung thrown in. I dream a lot and the more i work with my dreams the more the logic of strong strange images in myth and story (and life...) make a different kind of sense. And a lot of the power of these images can be quite specific and personal - if there is anything universal to be found, then it comes first through the subjective and personal. Or the heart, or soul, one might say.
As another, not entirely unrelated example, it feels to me like the Grail King (wounded by a spear through his balls) is an echo of the Kings who in an earlier age were young men chosen for their fertility, whose service to the land was in fact as a sacrifice to the feminine in the earth. He should have been killed after a year - and perhaps the land is now a wasteland precisely because he has neglected his duty and held onto the power, instead of submitting to sacrifice and allowing his strength and fertility to flow back into the earth with his blood. But his figure comes to us in a story from a much later age when this practise was long forgotten.
All of which is perhaps a longwinded way to say, I don't really feel much particular connection between the aspects of the minotaur I've been resonating with, and Ariadne - at least in the story as it's told. She feels more part of Theseus' story, which feels like a separate one. That there are 2 quite different versions of her gift, one the clew of thread, the other a luminous crown, also makes me feel its not really that essential. Each of the images have power in their own right, but also kind of just piggyback on the most powerful part of the story (to me) - minotaur.
However: from my own personal experience of finding and working with the minotaur archetype in myself (which has involved building unicursal labyrinths for the purposes of geomantic meditation and healing), I have found a complementary power, that has come once the blind rage of the minotaur has been allowed room to express itself a certain amount.
It comes in the form of a little girl, curious, brave, and kind, who isn't scared of this beast, and whose energy is very helpful in taking him by the hand and leading him out of the labyrinth... Lewis Carroll's Alice feels very close.
So perhaps Ariadne is a distant memory of this original pairing, shunted into a supporting role by a later culture's need for a particular kind of male hero.
It's also mildly interesting that Ariadne later either marries Dionysus, or he orders her murder (by Artemis). As if she's a part of his domain (the wild) and always has been.
Thanks for this—I’m working on a fictional story inspired by this myth—and it’s exciting to see the Minotaur surfacing here.
Thanks for another thought-provoking read. One part of the myth that I feel is never sufficiently addressed is that it is a woman who reveals the path through the maze. Without the help of Ariadne, Theseus would have never have escaped the maze. She is the link between two of the most powerful Classical nature symbols, Dionysus and the minotaur. Surely this cannot be coincidence. Brave, resourceful and compelling, there is probably more of her story to be discovered, buried in undiscovered work and untranslated literature.
Thanks for all of this imagination candy. Any mention of the Minotaur will always get my attention, thanks in part to some crazy, vivid dreams I had as a kid. This morning I was re-reading Edward Abbey's essay, Down the River with Henry Thoreau, and there it was: "Each Canyon resembles a winding labyrinth. We listen for the breathing of the Minotaur but find only cottonwoods glowing green and gold against the red rock ..."