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Myth of the Minotaur

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Gwen Parker
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« on: July 17, 2007, 12:51:17 am »



Minotaur locked in battle with Theseus,
bronze by Antoine-Louis Barye (Louvre.
Creature
 
Name: Minotaur
AKA: Minotaurus
Classification 
Grouping: Legendary creature
Data
Mythology: Greek
Region: Crete
Habitat: Labyrinth
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Gwen Parker
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« Reply #1 on: July 17, 2007, 12:52:04 am »

In Greek mythology, the Minotaur (Greek: Μινόταυρος, Minótauros) was a creature that was said to be part man and part bull.[1] It dwelt at the center of the Labyrinth, which was an elaborate maze-like construction built for King Minos of Crete and designed by the architect Daedalus to hold the Minotaur. He and his son Icarus were ordered to build it. The historical site of Knossos is usually identified as the site of the labyrinth. The Minotaur was eventually killed by Theseus.

"Minotaur" is Greek for "Bull of Minos". The bull was known in Crete as Asterion, a name shared with Minos's foster father.
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Gwen Parker
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« Reply #2 on: July 17, 2007, 12:53:16 am »



Minotaur bust, (National Archaeological Museum of Athens)
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Gwen Parker
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« Reply #3 on: July 17, 2007, 12:54:13 am »

Birth and appearance

The literary myth satisfied a Hellenic interpretation of Minoan myth and ritual. According to this, before Minos became king, he asked the Greek god Poseidon for a sign, to assure him that he, and not his brother, was to receive the throne (other accounts say that he boasted that the gods wanted him to be king). Poseidon agreed to send a white bull as a sign, on condition Minos would sacrifice the bull to the god in return. Indeed, a bull of unmatched beauty came out of the sea. King Minos, after seeing it, found it so beautiful that he instead sacrificed another bull, hoping that Poseidon would not notice. Poseidon was enraged when he realized what had been done, so he caused Minos's wife, Pasiphaë, to be overcome with a fit of madness in which she conceived a passion for the bull. Pasiphaë tried to seduce the bull without success, then she requested some help from Daedalus the greatest artificer from Crete. [Pasiphaë went to Daedalus for assistance, and Daedalus devised a way to satisfy her. He constructed a hollow wooden cow covered with cowhide for Pasiphaë to hide in and allow the bull to mount her. As a result of this union Pasiphaë gave birth to the Minotaur (the Bull of Minos), who some say bore the proper name Asterius (the "Starry One"). In some accounts, the white bull went on to become the Cretan Bull captured by Heracles as one of his labours.

The Minotaur, as the Greeks imagined him, had the body of a man and the head and tail of a bull.[2] Pasiphaë nursed him in his infancy, but he grew and became ferocious. Minos, after getting advice from the Oracle at Delphi, had Daedalus construct a gigantic labyrinth to hold the Minotaur. Its location was near Minos' palace in Knossos.

Nowhere has the essence of the myth been expressed more succinctly than in the Heroides attributed to Ovid, where Pasiphaë's daughter complains of the curse of her unrequited love: ""the bull's form disguised the god, Pasiphaë, my mother, a victim of the deluded bull, brought forth in travail her reproach and burden." Literalist and pruriently readings that emphasize the machinery of literal copulation may intentionally obscure the mystic marriage of the god in bull form, a Minoan mythos alien to the Greeks.

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Gwen Parker
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« Reply #4 on: July 17, 2007, 12:55:22 am »



Rhyton in the shape of a Bull's head at the Greek pavilion at Expo '88
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Gwen Parker
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« Reply #5 on: July 17, 2007, 12:56:05 am »

The price that brought Theseus

Now it happened that Androgeus, son of Minos, had been killed by the Athenians, who were jealous of the victories he had won at the Panathenaic festival. Others say he was killed at Marathon, Greece by the Cretan bull, his mother's former taurine lover, which Aegeus, king of Athens, had commanded him to slay. The common tradition is that Minos waged war to avenge the death of his son, and won. However, Catullus, in his account of the Minotaur's birth,[3] refers to another version in which Athens was "compelled by the cruel plague to pay penalties for the killing of Androgeon." In this version, the Athenians are made to ask Minos what they can do to stop a terrible plague that has come upon them, and he was thus given power to make demands of them. In either case, Minos required that seven Athenian youths and seven maidens, drawn by lots, be sent every ninth year (some accounts say every year) to be devoured by the Minotaur.

When the third sacrifice came round, Theseus volunteered to go to slay the monster. He promised to his father, Aegeus, that he would put up a white sail on his journey back home if he was successful. Ariadne, the daughter of Minos, fell in love with Theseus and helped him get out of the labyrinth. In most accounts she gives him a ball of thread, allowing him to retrace his path. Theseus killed the Minotaur and led the other Athenians back out of the labyrinth.[4]

Theseus took Ariadne with him from Crete, but abandoned her enroute to Athens (Generally this is said to happen on the island of Naxos). According to Homer, she was killed by Artemis upon the testimony of Dionysus. However, later sources report that Theseus abandoned her as she slept on the island of Naxos, and there became the bride of Dionysus. The epiphany of Dionysus to the sleeping Ariadne became a common theme in Greek and Roman art, and in some of these images Theseus is shown running away. This story is also recounted in Catullus.

On his return trip, Theseus forgot to change the black sails of mourning for white sails of success, so his father, overcome with grief, leapt off the clifftop from which he had kept watch for his son's return every day since Theseus had departed into the sea. The name of the "Aegean" sea is said to derive from this event.

Minos, angry that Theseus was able to escape, imprisoned Daedalus and his son Icarus in a tall tower. They were able to escape by building wings for themselves with the feathers of birds that flew by, but Icarus died during the escape as he flew too high (in hope of seeing Apollo in his sun chariot) and the wax that held the feathers in the wing melted in the heat of the sun.

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Gwen Parker
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« Reply #6 on: July 17, 2007, 12:57:14 am »

Interpretations

The contest between Theseus and the Minotaur was frequently represented in Greek art. A Knossian didrachm exhibits on one side the labyrinth, on the other the Minotaur surrounded by a semicircle of small balls, probably intended for stars; it is to be noted that one of the monster's names was Asterius.

The ruins of Minos' palace at Knossos have been found, but the labyrinth has not. The enormous number of rooms, staircases and corridors in the palace has led archaeologists to believe that the palace itself was the source of the labyrinth myth. Homer, describing the shield of Achilles, remarked that the labyrinth was Ariadne's ceremonial dancing ground.

Some modern mythologists regard the Minotaur as a solar personification and a Minoan adaptation of the Baal-Moloch of the Phoenicians. The slaying of the Minotaur by Theseus in that case indicates the breaking of Athenian tributary relations with Minoan Crete.

According to A.B. Cook, Minos and Minotaur are only different forms of the same personage, representing the sun-god of the Cretans, who depicted the sun as a bull. He and J. G. Frazer both explain Pasiphae's union with the bull as a sacred ceremony, at which the queen of Knossos was wedded to a bull-formed god, just as the wife of the Tyrant in Athens was wedded to Dionysus. E. Pottier, who does not dispute the historical personality of Minos, in view of the story of Phalaris, considers it probable that in Crete (where a bull-cult may have existed by the side of that of the double axe) victims were tortured by being shut up in the belly of a red-hot brazen bull. The story of Talos, the Cretan man of brass, who heated himself red-hot and clasped strangers in his embrace as soon as they landed on the island, is probably of similar origin.

A historical explanation of the myth refers to the time when Crete was the main political and cultural potency in the Aegean Sea. As the fledgling Athens (and probably other continental Greek cities) was under tribute to Crete, it can be assumed that such tribute included young men and women for sacrifice. This ceremony was performed by a priest disguised with a bull head or mask, thus explaining the imagery of the Minotaur. It may also be that this priest was son to Minos.

Once continental Greece was free from Crete's dominance, the myth of the Minotaur worked to distance the forming religious consciousness of the Hellene poleis from Minoan beliefs.

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Gwen Parker
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« Reply #7 on: July 17, 2007, 12:58:16 am »



Theseus fighting the Minotaur by Jean-Etienne Ramey, marble, 1826, Tuileries Gardens, Paris.
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Gwen Parker
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« Reply #8 on: July 17, 2007, 12:58:56 am »

Picasso and the Minotaur

No artist has returned so often to the theme of the Minotaur as Pablo Picasso.[5] André Masson, René Iché and Georges Bataille suggested to Albert Skira the title Le Minotaure for his art publication, which ran from 1933 until it was overtaken by war in 1939; it resurfaced in 1946 as Le Labyrinthe.

Jorge Luis Borges tells the story of the Minotaur with heart-wrenching succinctness in The House of Asterion in The Aleph.
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Gwen Parker
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« Reply #9 on: July 17, 2007, 01:08:33 am »



Theseus and Aethra, by Laurent de La Hyre
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Gwen Parker
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« Reply #10 on: July 17, 2007, 01:09:29 am »



Theseus and the Minotaur on 6th-century black-figure pottery
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unknown
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« Reply #11 on: July 17, 2007, 01:37:46 am »

The end of the age of Taurus...
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"There exists an agent, which is natural and divine, material and spiritual, a universal plastic mediator, a common receptical of the fluid vibrations of motion and the images of forms, a fluid, and a force, which can be called the Imagination of Nature..."
Elphias Levi
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