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| Billie Silvey |
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| An eclectic website about Women, Christianity, History, Culture and the Arts--and anything else that comes to mind. |
| December 2011 |
| You creep around a corner, your heart beating wildly, your shoes crunching on the grisly remains of previous meals. Ahead you see nothing but shadows, but you know that around one of those corners, hidden in the shadowy depths of the Labyrinth, lurks a horrible, man-eating beast. It is the Minotaur, a half-bull, half-man monstrosity that feeds on human flesh. If you aren't able to kill him first, your remains will join the detritus on the floor of the Labyrinth. The Labyrinth was an elaborate maze-like construction designed by the architect Daedalus and his son Icarus on order of King Minos of Crete. He had it built to house the Minotaur, the offspring of a bull and Minos' wife Pasifai, which he fed every nine years on seven young men and seven young women from their enemy Athens. Once you entered the Labyrinth, it was impossible to get out. You were at the mercy of the half-crazed minotaur. Theseus, the son of Aegeus, king of Athens, volunteered to be one of the victims and left on a ship with a black sail, promising his father Aegeus to change the black sail for a white one as a sign if he were successful in slaying the beast. Minos' daughter Ariadne fell in love with Theseus and offered to help him escape from the Labyrinth. She gave him a ball of thread to unwind on his way through the maze. At the center, he killed the minotaur with his sword, then rewound the ball of thread to find the way out. When Theseus left for Athens with Ariadne, he failed to change the sail. His father, seeing the black sail, thought Theseus was dead and threw himself into the sea, which was named the Aegean in his honor. The ruins of Minos' palace at Knossos have been discovered, but the Labyrinth has not. The ruins have so many rooms, staircases and corridors that some archaeologists have suggested that it was the source of the tale of the Labyrinth. Others think the winding caves at Gortyan in southern Crete might have been the Labyrinth. Numerous works of art through the ages have celebrated the legend of Theseus slaying the Minotaur. I enjoyed this exchange between Gordianus and his daughter Diana from Steven Saylor's novel of ancient Rome, Catilina's Riddle: "Papa, what is a Minotaur?" "A Minotaur?" I laughed at the abrupt change of subject. "So far as I know, there was only one, the Minotaur. A terrible creature, the offspring of a woman and a bull; they say it had a bull's head and a man's body. It lived on a faraway island called Crete, where a wicked king kept it in a place called the Labyrinth, a great maze." "A maze?" "Yes, with walls like this." I wiped the tablet clean and set about drawing a maze. "Every year the king gave the Minotaur young boys and girls to eat. They would make the children enter here, you see, and the Minotaur would be waiting for them here. This went on for a very long time, until a hero named Theseus entered the Labyrinth and slew the Minotaur." "He killed it?" "Yes." "Are you sure?" "Quite." "Completely sure?" "Yes." "Good!" "Why do you ask about the Minotaur?" I said, anticipating the answer. "Because Meto has been saying that If I'm not good, you'll feed me to it. But you've just said that it's dead." "Ah, so it is." |
| LABYRINTH |
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| Theseus Slaying the Minotaur was a frequent subject of classical art, portrayed here in stone, in a Roman mosaic, on a Cretan coin with King Minos on one side and the Labyrinth on the other, and in a drawing by the PreRaphaelite Sir Edward Burne-Jones. |
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| A black-figure Greek vase painting from the J. Paul Getty Museum. |
| Labyrinths are interesting, not just as puzzles to be solved but for their continued fascination for people throughout history. They've appeared from classical times to the present in forms ranging from children's mazes to trace with pencils to pavement mazes for adults to walk as aids to prayer and meditation. There's an element of mystery to some labyrinths: which way to go? what's waiting around the next corner or curve? Other articles in the website include Medieval Meditation Labyrinths, 17th century hedge mazes and labyrinths in popular culture. I hope you'll enjoy all the twists and turns of this exploration of a legendary and historic phenomenon which today is creating new interest. Write me with your reactions at b.silvey@sbcglobal.net. |