Lovely, thank you, a lot of very valuable stuff here for me.
I think it's important to recognise that Minos only built the labyrinth as a prison for his monstrous son in the stories of the culture who conquered the Minoans. The Greeks had all sorts of reasons to find ways to assert the barbarity of those they usurped, and to demonise their culture and spirituality; there are many parallels with the denigration of the wild Dionysian rituals, and other strands of Greek development, away from the woods, into the cities... not least the pushing under the earth of powerful wild beings with horns, slowly turning them into what eventually becomes the Christian devil. To me this feels a lot like a process of subjugation and control of masculine desire. The foundations of the western worldview have in many places been very well hidden, often with a lot of violent trauma; it requires some very deep digging to uncover them, but if we want a good secure house this is unavoidable!
And if through this the labyrinth can revert from prison to a spiritual tool (which implies a pathway to liberation), then something in this mirrors the structure of the labyrinth itself...
Lovely, thank you, a lot of very valuable stuff here for me.
I think it's important to recognise that Minos only built the labyrinth as a prison for his monstrous son in the stories of the culture who conquered the Minoans. The Greeks had all sorts of reasons to find ways to assert the barbarity of those they usurped, and to demonise their culture and spirituality; there are many parallels with the denigration of the wild Dionysian rituals, and other strands of Greek development, away from the woods, into the cities... not least the pushing under the earth of powerful wild beings with horns, slowly turning them into what eventually becomes the Christian devil. To me this feels a lot like a process of subjugation and control of masculine desire. The foundations of the western worldview have in many places been very well hidden, often with a lot of violent trauma; it requires some very deep digging to uncover them, but if we want a good secure house this is unavoidable!
And if through this the labyrinth can revert from prison to a spiritual tool (which implies a pathway to liberation), then something in this mirrors the structure of the labyrinth itself...