[The myth of the Minotaur and the labyrinth is one of the most well known of the Greek myths: Jungians are particularly fond of talking about this myth. In this post, a translation of some of the Ovid’s narrative poem about the myth will be cited, the Minotaur story will be summarized, and several of Jung’s writings about the hero will be quoted.]

   

Ovid: Metamorphoses Book VIII 152-182

When Minos reached Cretan soil he paid his dues to Jove, with the sacrifice of a hundred bulls, and hung up his war trophies to adorn the palace. The scandal concerning his family grew, and the queen’s unnatural adultery was evident from the birth of a strange hybrid monster. Minos resolved to remove this shame, the Minotaur, from his house, and hide it away in a labyrinth with blind passageways. Daedalus, celebrated for his skill in architecture, laid out the design, and confused the clues to direction, and led the eye into a tortuous maze, by the windings of alternating paths. No differently from the way in which the watery Meander deludes the sight, flowing backwards and forwards in its changeable course, through the meadows of Phrygia, facing the running waves advancing to meet it, now directing its uncertain waters towards its source, now towards the open sea: so Daedalus made the endless pathways of the maze, and was scarcely able to recover the entrance himself: the building was as deceptive as that.

Summary of the Myth of the Minotaur

King Minos of Crete, after receiving a magnificent white bull from the sea god Poseidon, was supposed to sacrifice it to the gods. However, he chose to keep it, angering Poseidon. In retaliation, Poseidon made Minos’s wife, Pasiphae, fall in love with the bull. She had Daedalus, a skilled inventor, create a wooden cow disguise so she could mate with the bull. This union resulted in the birth of the Minotaur, a half-man, half-bull creature.

Minos, ashamed of the Minotaur, ordered Daedalus to construct a labyrinth to contain it. Minos then periodically sent seven Athenian youths and seven maidens as tribute to be devoured by the Minotaur.

Theseus, the Athenian hero, volunteered to be one of the youths sent to Crete to slay the Minotaur. Upon arrival, Ariadne, Minos’s daughter, fell in love with Theseus and decided to help him. She gave him a ball of thread (the famous “Ariadne’s thread”) to navigate the labyrinth and a sword to fight the Minotaur.

With Ariadne’s guidance, Theseus entered the labyrinth, slew the Minotaur, and led the other Athenian youths to safety. He then fled Crete with Ariadne and the other youths. However, Theseus abandoned Ariadne on the island of Naxos, either by accident or by decree of the gods.

Theseus returned to Athens as a hero but forgot to change the black sails on his ship to white, signaling his success to his father, King Aegeus. Seeing the black sails, Aegeus thought his son was dead and threw himself into the sea, which is why the Aegean Sea bears his name.

The hero’s main feat is to overcome the monster of darkness: it is the long-hoped-for and expected triumph of consciousness over the unconscious.

Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious

¶ 284

The fear of instinctuality is the eternal burden of the hero-myth and the theme of countless taboos. The closer one comes to the instinct-world, the more violent is the urge to shy away from it and to rescue the light of consciousness from the murks of the sultry abyss. Psychologically, however, the archetype as an image of instinct is a spiritual goal toward which the whole nature of man strives; it is the sea to which all rivers wend their way, the prize which the hero wrests from the fight with the dragon

CW8 ¶ 415

The hero is the ideal masculine type: leaving the mother, the source of life, behind him, he is driven by an unconscious desire to find her again, to return to her womb. Every obstacle that rises in his path and hampers his ascent wears the shadowy features of the Terrible Mother, who saps his strength with the poison of secret doubt and retrospective longing.

CW 5, ¶ 611.