Remember Ariadne, young Ariadne, daughter of Minos and Pasiphae, who was a daughter of Helios (the Sun). She did not scruple to befriend Theseus and save him in his hour of trial; and then, when Minos had relented, she left her home and sailed away with him. She was the darling of the gods and she has her emblem in the sky: all night a ring of stars called Ariadne’s Crown rolls on its way among the heavenly constellations.

Apollonius Rhodius, Argonautica 3. 997 ff (trans. Rieu): 3rd Century BC

Theseus and Ariadne

Theseus, the legendary hero of Athens, ventures into the labyrinth of Crete to slay the Minotaur, a monstrous creature with the body of a man and the head of a bull, the son of Pasiphaë and a white bull that was a gift from Poseidon to King Minos.

Ariadne, the daughter of King Minos and Paisiphae, befriends Theseus offers him assistance. Since she is the Minotaur’s half-sister, she knows the Minotaur’s ways well and can advise Theseus.

To help Theseus navigate the labyrinth and defeat the Minotaur, Ariadne provides him with a ball of thread, which he unravels as he ventures deeper into the maze. After slaying the Minotaur, Theseus follows the thread back out of the labyrinth, rescuing himself and the other Athenian youths who had been sacrificed to the beast.

Theseus tells Adriane he will marry her and takes Ariadne with him when he returns towards Athens. On their journey back, they make a stop on the island of Naxos. Theseus abandons Ariadne while she sleeps, either out of fickleness or because the god Dionysus instructed him to do so..

Commentary: Edward Edinger

Theseus made his way into the labyrinth with the help of Ariadne, who was the Minotaur’s half sister. It is as if she knew about him because she shared some of his qualities, and this reflects the characteristic theme of the anima linked with the monster in some way. Usually, the anima is held in bondage by a feminine monster, as in the myth of Perseus, but here we see a masculine monster that was not holding Ariadne in bondage but was associated with her; she was able to leave only upon his death. The Minotaur was successfully mastered with the help of the feminine, Ariadne providing a ball of thread, which was the essential guidance.

We can consider Ariadne’s thread as the thread of feeling; it is safe to confront one’s unregenerate wrath and lust and instinctuality providing one can hold onto the thread of feeling relatedness that gives orientation and prevents one from getting lost in the labyrinth of the unconscious.

We all have a minotaur in the labyrinth of the soul and until it is faced decisively it demands repeated sacrifices of human meanings and values. Thus, the principle of Eros or relatedness enabled Theseus to meet the Minotaur, and there is a parallel to this image in the medieval idea of the unicorn, that wild, irascible, and completely unmanageable creature that is tame only when in the lap of a virgin. It is an evocative image, the labyrinth with the Minotaur prowling it.

The implication of this particular myth is that at the stage in which Theseus negotiates the labyrinth there is a destructive aspect to the unconscious that requires a continuous tribute of human sacrifice—an intolerable state of affairs that cannot stop until the monster is overcome by a conscious encounter. Another way of looking at the myth is to see the Minotaur as a kind of guardian of the center.

Surely the labyrinth is a representation of the unconscious, since it is that place where there is danger of getting lost. One of the aspects of the labyrinth, according to mythology, is the presence at the center of something very precious. That precious thing is not specified in the Theseus story, but it is implied in the person of Ariadne.

Ariadne was the fruit that Theseus plucked from his experience with the labyrinth. Theseus found the Minotaur by throwing down Ariadne’s ball of thread, which rolled along unwinding itself, leading him to his destination—an image almost identical to one in an Irish fairy tale called “Conn-Eda,” in which the hero cast an iron ball in front of him and followed it as it rolled on its way, leading him to a city where his various adventures took place.

These are images of following the round object, the symbol of wholeness. The sphere is a prefiguration of the goal, the goal of totality. The ideas of wholeness and center are related to each other; they are part of the same symbolic nexus, so one might say that the round ball will automatically roll to the center. The fact that the sphere has an autonomous power to roll to the center suggests that it is also the path to individuation rolled up into a ball.

Theseus did as he was instructed by Ariadne and was able to overcome the Minotaur and find his way out of the labyrinth by means of the thread, the principle of relatedness. To understand what this motif could mean, one might imagine oneself in an agitated, enraged state, the Minotaur bellowing within. To confront one’s fury will be safer, given the thread—a sense of human rapport and relatedness—so that one will not get lost in the rage and fall into identification with it.

Theseus left Crete with Ariadne, but he broke his promise to marry her. On the way back to Athens they stopped at the island of Naxos, and there are different versions of what happened there (indicating multiple symbolic meanings). One version is that Theseus tired of Ariadne; after all, she wasn’t of any use to him anymore; he had achieved his purpose, and so he sailed off and left her. Another story is that the god Dionysus claimed her.

The basic meaning, however, remains the same—the connection between the heroic aspect of the ego, Theseus, and the helpful anima could not be maintained. We witnessed a similar fate in the case of Jason and Medea, and we may assume that it signifies something of the same sort in the Greek psyche of that time: a stable, conscious assimilation of the anima could not be sustained. Although Ariadne was separated from the baleful shadow of her monstrous brother, she must remain related to the gods, so to speak—Dionysus, in her case—and was not yet ready for full participation in the human conscious realm. She had to remain largely an unconscious entity.

Edward Edinger

The Eternal Drama: The Inner Meaning of Greek Mythology