Delving deeper into the Minos/Minotaur myth

I used one of my unstable windows of opportunity (while the internet is available) to look up King Minos and the Minotaur on Wikipedia, and it has far more information than I had found so far elsewhere. There’s even a part detailing the death of Minos that’s fascinating and that I had never heard of before.

But thinking through it all again has brought me to a couple of new ideas.

First, it struck me that Minos' punishment wasn’t simply to be himself transformed into a half-bull creature, but for his wife to fall hopelessly in love with the bull (the very one he had loved more than he loved Poseidon) and to engage in sexual intercourse with it and give birth to a deformed and beastly son.

It seems to be a more sophisticated form of punishment, and far more psychological, or maybe the term should be social. Not quite right yet, but what I mean is that it involves a great deal of humiliation and shame in the public eye and in his marriage and his own self-image. This is powerful stuff, and as I mentioned 2 entries back in the Minotaur analysis, shame and humiliation are the major tools of abusers because they’re the weapons we self-punish with. The gift that keeps on giving. Obviously this was well known in ancient Greece or even before, because this myth was already an old one.

I also looked deeper into Daedalus, creator of the labyrinth, Minos' wife Pasiphae, and his daughter Ariadne, who gave the string to Perseus and told him to unwind it as he went so he can trace the way back. It turns out Daedalus represents craftsmanship and the spirit of invention and creation in the artistic or constructive sense. In fact the Greek word for craftsmanship is derived from Daedalus (or the other way around?)

Daedalus is the one who gave Ariadne the idea of using string to find the way out. A much better solution than the one Hansel and Gretel tried in similar circumstances, because birds don’t eat string. It was also Daedalus that Minos' wife turned to when faced with her perplexing question, how a human woman can effectively mate with a bull. This part apparently was a later Greek addition, with all their rationality. He devised a sort of wooden saw horse (Saw bull? Or more properly I suppose a saw cow?) That she could be strapped onto that was covered with cow hide to make her resemble a sexy cow.

My favorite part is the last bit about Daedalus, which I was unfamiliar with. Apparently after he and his son Icarus escaped the labyrinth (Minos had imprisoned them as soon as construction was completed so nobody could tell the secrets of the maze or the identity of the Minotaur inside it) he flew on to another kingdom and was there taken in by a kindly and wise king. Mean old Minos wouldn’t settle for this so devised an ingenious plan to find the wily craftsman by putting out a riddle that only he could solve. Minos had a spiral seashell (a sort of maze in miniature) and said he would richly reward anyone who could get a string all the way through it without any cutting or drilling. Of course he knew it was the challenge itself that would snare Daedalus.

Daedalus tied a thread to an ant and put it in one end of the shell, with a drop of honey at the other to entice it. He knew how to use honey rather than the whip—a lesson Minos could have learned to his benefit.

Anyway, all that was to demonstrate the difference between Daedalus and Minos. Daed is a good soul, and good father who at least tried to help his son. He gave him wings and advised him not to fly too close to the sun, but of course impetuous youth won’t listen and wisdom can only be imparted to those receptive to it. Also important to note that Daedalus’ offspring was intelligent and healthy, free from deformation or wickedness, meaning that the father was free from hubristic sin against the inner Gods. Perhaps it was resentment and envy that drove Minos’ ongoing hatred. He undoubtedly projected his own intolerable attributes out onto his rival and decided to try to eliminate them by killing him. But of course that never works; it only compounds the crimes against Man and Gods.

Also it seems Minos learned the string trick indirectly from his hated rival, probably through his daughter’s teary-eyed admission of her part in the escape and the murder of the Minotaur.

But I want to return to the idea that Minos was punished via his offspring rather than by being transformed himself. It seems to me if he was made bull-headed himself he would become too stupid to appreciate his predicament. The stupid are too stupid to realize how stupid they are (a component of the Dunning/Kruger effect), so he would quite possibly have lived a dull happy existence eating human flesh and living a simple animal existence. That kind of punishment seems more suited as a warning to others rather than a real punishment that the person would have to contemplate and suffer from endlessly.

Another brilliant move was making his wife love the bull as he did, but sexually. Damn, that is genius level evil! It set in motion all the chain reactions that would destroy the King’s life and his rule over his kingdom. It began the constant repetition of the motif of the bull that would then haunt him forever. His wife made love to the bull. His child resembles the bull. His child exhibits attributes of the bull in his stubbornness, his strength, and stupidity etc. Everywhere he looks around him now in his life that damn bull echoes and resounds eternally, driving him mad. [How did I not see this before?! The labyrinth, being underneath the palace (most lavish and magnificent in all of the Cretan world) was a sort of caricature or exaggeration of the palace itself, so doubtless represents the unconscious. When Minos shoved his deformed son down there, and Daedalus and his healthy son (constant reminder of his own wickedness and lack), it means he was repressing what they represent, driving it down into the unconscious in order to hide it from sight. But things fester in there and grow stronger and eventually destroy you if you refuse to deal with them.]

And the power of it! That moment when the child is born and you see it doesn’t resemble you, but maybe it resembles the contractor who worked on the house 9 months ago, that your wife kept making eyes at. Damn! Powerful stuff by way of punishment.

Constantly having to see the half-bull creature that is your son, rather than simply being it means being confronted over and over with the symbol of your crime, especially since it means retaining complex human-level intelligence.

And the fact that it feeds on human flesh of course makes it a monster that begins to devour his kingdom little by little. It’s like the nursery rhyme or whatever it is that ends with ‘for want of a nail the kingdom was lost’— it’s the gradual piling up of incident on top of incident that eventually destroys your entire life. Compared to this being transformed into an animal seems tame by contrast. Well, if the transformation involves the head anyway, otherwise maybe not.

And symbolically, my thought is that it wasn’t a bull or a God that impregnated the queen. It must have actually been Minos himself, because the God is a component of his psyche and the bull a symbol of it. There was supposedly a real bull involved, but it obviously wasn’t given to him by Poseidon, unless the bull is something internal and psychological. So I think the real meaning is that Minos impregnated her while he was in bullish mode, after committing the crime of hubris. He was stupid and bullheaded, and thereafter that’s how all of his offspring came out. Offspring in this case meaning the fruit of his strivings rather than his loins. We talk about our stories as our children, we conceive them and nurture them and if we did well they grow strong and can go forth into the world and hopefully outlive us. All of our creative endeavors are like this—symbolically they are our issue, our progeny. So all of the king’s proclamations, all of his endeavors, his projects and his relations are in this sense his progeny, and they all come out malformed and stupid and turn against him. I think this is getting close to the original intent of the myth.

In doing this I'm trying to delve deep into these myths and see them as the people might have when they were new and completely relevant, when they weren’t dulled and diluted as they are for us. I’m trying to find the wisdom embedded in them that a literal reading or pure rationalism completely misses. And the key is in understanding that the gods represent psychic functions (I use the term in the way Freud and Jung did, before it was appropriated by the New Agers to refer to the supernatural) and that the symbolism refers to real interior states that we’re fully familiar with today just as they were then. Rationalism is the disease of our time (one of them anyway), and it’s cripplingly reductive. It diminishes everything down to provable statistics and mere factual data, which are inherently empty and meaningless except to scientists. Factual truth means nothing when compared to human truth—inner truth. Being transformed into a beast as punishment is ridiculous to the rationalist, but with an understanding of the meanings behind the symbols and of the psychology underlying it all, it becomes far more profoundly meaningful than mere truths like “When you do bad things you feel terrible and it messes up your life.”

It’s because the symbolic and the psychological (one and the same really) speak directly to and from our inner reality—to the right hemisphere, not to the logical and linguistic left. To emotional truth. The kind of truth reflected to us through our dreams if we know how to read them. Myth and dream speak the same language.

EDIT—new thoughts:
The labyrinth must represent the maze of lies and deceptions the king had to weave to cover up his treachery and evil. It's where he hid his deformed son, and where he tried to kill Daedalus and his (un-deformed) son, who knew his secrets, in order that the secret itself would devour them. Then Daedalus' string represents in some way the truth, or maybe honest investigation; the enemy of lies and deception, that can unravel their snarls and out the liar.

And the wife was also symbolic when she mated with the bull. Obviously, since the bull and the god were both symbols. Therefore the wife represents that inner aspect which is the source of the offspring. The creative faculty itself. If that turns against you, then all your 'children' will be deformed and wicked. Conceived within the maze of lies.

So perhaps mean old king Minos does represent some inner executive function of the mind, that turned dark and evil in hubristic selfishness and refused to listen to the counsel of the inner gods anymore.

It turns out to be a myth dealing with creativity or generation of ideas or product; the Issue that you send forth into the world. Daedalus, enemy of Minos, is the very spirit of creative invention, and Minos tried to imprison and murder him, and when he escaped hunted him down to try again.