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Ariadne's Thread and the Labyrinth in Classical Mythology
Ariadne was the daughter of King Minos of Crete. Minos had Daedalus build a Labyrinth, a house of winding passages, to house the bull-man, the Minotaur, the beast that his wife Pasiphae bore after having intercourse with a bull.
Minos required tribute from Athens in the form of young men and women to be sacrificed to the Minotaur.
Theseus, an Athenian, volunteered to accompany one of these groups of victims to deliver his country from the tribute to Minos. Ariadne fell in love with Theseus and gave him a thread which he let unwind through the Labyrinth so that he was able to kill the Minotaur and find his way back out again.
Ovid says that Daedalus built a house in which he confused the usual passages and deceived the eye with a conflicting maze of various wandering paths (Metamorphoses 8.161):
"so Daedalus made the innumerable paths of deception, and he was barely able to return to the entrance: so deceptive was the house."
Ariadne's Thread |
The dreaded Minotaur had the head of a bull and the body of a man, and was named, evocatively,
Asterion.
Actually walking a labyrinth for a time, as a spiritual practice, helped me to look back at my traumatic experiences in Christianity as a series of initiations, a "house of winding passages." This helped me to see myself less as a victim of Christianity, and to reclaim the Minotaur, monster Christianity, as Asterion, a star.
I believe that mythos and poetry are evolutionary advances in humankind.