Last night I was considering the myth of the Minotaur. Surrounded by the labyrinth, darkness, down there in the cold; isn’t he a bit of a dragon after all? Flesheater? Unhuman? Half man half bull? If the bull is a divine creatures wouldn’t Pasiphae’s lust for it be a lust for a god, not bestiality? Why if they worshipped bulls would lust for the bull be “wrong”? Not the human thing, perhaps? But Zeus raped Leda in the form of swan; was that “wrong”? It seems it was wrong but more b/c of the terror of man joining with the divine. The bull is the divine power, potency, masculine strength. To “leap the bull” was the avoidance and flirtatious playing with that power; a power connected to the divinities of Orion and Taurus. Pasiphae’s lust for the bull and her subsequent hideous sexual union with the bull conceives a creature of both worlds; divine and human. But a monster. A cannibal that has ice for veins. He lives in the darkness and never gets out. So what is the myth saying? The labyrinth, though constructed by Deadalus to contain Minos’ monstrous bullchild, twists, turns, snakes about like the sinewy rills of the maze; the labyrinth of the mind; the gnomonic spiral of existence. So what? Do we not travel down that spiral in order to find truth? Spirallic structure is representative of the mind’s twists and turns in the search for the truth. What is the truth? That at the heart of things is a monster? Or is it that if we go searching in the darkness we might find a monster; a demo
n; some realization about ourselves as mortal/divine cannibals of each other which might not be easy to handle; a terror that threatens to consume us while we’re down there in the dark. And the only thing that gets us out is the thread of connection to the light; the clue laid down by one whom we love and who loves us. Ariadne’s concern for Theseus saves him from a cold and lonely death. Rosie’s love for Sam saves him from despairing at the loss of Frodo. We must come out from our dark and sinewy speculations on things and see the world in its wholeness through the prism of love; like in the last scene of the movie Pi; maybe there is no truth in the fragments of mathematics that make up the world; there is only truth in the wholeness of numbers together which walks the earth as incarnate man.
n; some realization about ourselves as mortal/divine cannibals of each other which might not be easy to handle; a terror that threatens to consume us while we’re down there in the dark. And the only thing that gets us out is the thread of connection to the light; the clue laid down by one whom we love and who loves us. Ariadne’s concern for Theseus saves him from a cold and lonely death. Rosie’s love for Sam saves him from despairing at the loss of Frodo. We must come out from our dark and sinewy speculations on things and see the world in its wholeness through the prism of love; like in the last scene of the movie Pi; maybe there is no truth in the fragments of mathematics that make up the world; there is only truth in the wholeness of numbers together which walks the earth as incarnate man.
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