How Does the Myth of the Minotaur Work?

The Minotaur -- a monstrous half man, half bull -- has raged through stories for millennia. But where did he and his labyrinth come from? Learn the ancient history and modern psychology behind both in today's episode of BrainStuff, based on this article: https://history.howstuffworks.com/history-vs-myth/minotaur.htm

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Brainstuff, a production of iHeartRadio, Hey Brainstuff Lauren Vogelbaum. Here,
the name minotaur summons the image of a man with
the head of a bull, a raging hybrid that serves
as a sort of stock creature in gains and films.
But to understand this creature, sometimes known as Asterion or Asterius,

(00:25):
we must confront him where he lives within the labyrinth
of mythology, history, and the human psyche. To start with,
let's remember the basic myth of the minotaur, as presented
in Hellenic tradition and works like Ovid's The Metamorphoses. The
story goes something like this. Once on the island of Crete,

(00:47):
a king by the name of Minus sought to secure
his rule. He prayed to Poseidon for a sacrificial beast
he might offer up, But when the sea gods sent
forth a white bull from the frothing Surfus found it
too beautiful to sacrifice. Instead, he sacrificed mortal bulls, and
thus incurred Poseidon's wrath. The sea god bewitched Minus's wife, Pacify,

(01:11):
to fall in love with the white bull, and she
soon gave birth to a monstrous hybrid, the Bull of
Minus or the minotaur. Nas Klein's translation of the Metamorphoses,
a first published in the year two thousand OVID, describes
the minotaur as a strange hybrid creature, and the creature

(01:32):
was strange, a twin form of bull and man that
emerged out of divine wrath and on natural love. It
embodied both shame and sacredness. Minus could only hope to hide,
but not kill, this terrifying creature. Thus he employed the
master craftsman Daedalus to construct the Labyrinth, a tortuous maze

(01:57):
that was practically impossible to leave. Here, he housed the
bellowing minotaur and feed it the blood of prisoners sent
to Crete as tribute by other nations. Yet all monsters
meet their slayer in the end. The Athenian hero Theseus
took the place of a tribute sent to Crete, but
he befriended Ariadne, the daughter of King Minus. She gave

(02:20):
him a ball of string to unwind behind him, and
details on the twists and turns that would lead him
to the beast at the labyrinth's heart. There he slayed
the minotaur and followed the string back to the surface.
That's the gist myths however, emerge from long traditions of
multiple tellings. Like the labyrinth itself, the origin of any

(02:44):
given myth becomes a tangled maze that defies easy solution.
Just when we think we've emerged from its trappings, we
find ourselves lost too. In the words of Ovid, the
windings of alternating paths. But let's not stand still less
the minotaur find us here. Instead, let's first consider the

(03:04):
historical significance of the myth. The story of the Minotaur
is intrinsically tied to Crete and the Bronze Age Minoan
civilization that thrived there. The early twentieth century British archaeologist
Sir Arthur Evans actually coined the term Minoan civilization as
a reference to the mythical King Minus. As such, a

(03:27):
myth continues to haunt our modern conceptions of these ancient peoples.
From their stories, you might assume the Greeks believed Crete
to be an evil land full of brutal kings and
profane monsters, but that's not the whole story. The creed
of Greek myth could be contradictory, with some treatments of
King Minus describing him as a wise Moses esque figure

(03:51):
and others depicting him as the head of a royal
household rife with murder, sacrilege, and betrayal. It's this latter
version of Minus that lingers in modern culture. It's an
example of what academic Joseph Campbell, who wrote extensively about mythology,
described as the figure of the tyrant monster, an archetype

(04:11):
of destructive, ego based disruption. In reality, the exact nature
of Minoan rule is much debated, and the political system
likely changed a few times over the course of the
two millennia long Minoan Age. Scholarly interpretations include both royal
rule and age ender balanced elite class that might be

(04:34):
compared to a council or corporation a specific king. Minus, however,
is not the only element of myth that's largely missing
from the actual discertible history of Bronze Age Crete. The
labyrinth is as well. For the article of this episode
is based on How Stuff Works. Spoke via email with

(04:54):
Nicoletta Momigliano, Professor of Agean Studies at the University of Bristol,
an author of the book In Search of the Labyrinth,
The Cultural Legacy of Minoan Crete. She said there is
no building in minowing crete that can be described as
a complicated maze, that is, a complicated system of paths
or hedges, designed as a puzzle through which one has

(05:16):
to find a way. But the ruins of Minoan palaces,
especially the largest one, Nassis, can have a labyrinthine appearance.
The aforementioned archaeologist Sir Arthur Evans was the excavator of Nassis.
He equated the structure there with the labyrinth. However, a

(05:38):
much of Evans's interpretation arrests on the linguistic connection between
the word labyris meaning a double axe, with the prevalence
of this motif appearing in the masonry. He was defining
Labyrinth as the house of the double axe. Momic Leano said.
One should note, however, that the connection between labyrinth and

(05:59):
labyrinth appears to be much more tenuous than Evans suggested.
Apart from the linguistic difficulties and relating the two words
pointed out by several philologists, one may also observe that
while Mason's marks in the shape of a double axe
do appear most frequently at Nassis, they are not exclusive
to this site, and other signs are also very common. Okay,

(06:24):
but what about our monster of the hour, the minataur itself.
While no one expects to find literal beast men amid
the Minoan ruins, you might reasonably expect to find images
of the creature so associated with the island. But while
bulls do appear quite frequently in Minoan art, including depictions
of humans leaping over the backs of charging bulls, the

(06:46):
minotaur is another story, Mimicleano said. Interestingly, and contrastingly, depictions
of minotaur images, that is, of a creature that is
half man and half bull, are very rare and relatively
late in Minoan crete, and one may also wonder whether
these may be stylized representations of bull leaping, since they

(07:08):
appear on tiny seal stones or seal impressions. We should
also note here that animal human hybrid figures do factor
into multiple traditional and ancient cultures, and Minoan crete is
no exception, Mimigliano said, But there is no prevalence of
bulls in these cases. They tend to involve other animals

(07:31):
such as birds and goats. So how exactly one got
from Minoan bulls to later Greek representations of the minotaur
is not entirely clear. Some writers have proposed that accounts
of the minotaur's subterranean bellowing might have been a way
for ancient peoples to explain actual seismic rumblings. This idea

(07:54):
is an exercise in what's known as geo mythology, which
is the study of alleged references to geological events in mythology. However,
this remains an open question, and Mimicliano cautions that it
gets us no closer to unraveling the mystery of the minotaur.
She said, while there are plenty of bulls in minoing

(08:15):
crete and earthquakes, minotaur images are conspicuous by their almost
total absence. The minotaur myth likely took many winding, alternating
paths to reach its most popular form, and the monster
has endured long beyond the empires that birthed it. Mamigliano said,

(08:37):
of course, the minotaur would have had more specific associations
for the ancient Greeks as an example of punishment for
not keeping one's promises to the gods. But the story
of the minotaur, like many other ancient Greek narratives, and
not just Greek narratives, can be and has been endlessly
reimagined to address different aspects of the human condition at

(08:59):
different times and in different contexts. The Minotaur, in various
forms and reinterpretations, has indeed appeared in Dante's Inferno and
Picasso's art, in the Chronicles of Narnia and House of Leaves,
in operas and schlocky horror television and Dungeons and Dragons.

(09:20):
We just can't seem to get enough of this mythic beast.
After all, the minotaur is a collision of the human
and the beastial, a symbol of the oft pondered dual
nature of man. He is both victim and tormentor. He's
the punisher and yet a punishment himself, imprisoned in what
Joseph Campbell dubbed is Minus's house of death, a labyrinth

(09:43):
of Cyclopean walls to hide from him his monster. Sigmund
Freud equated the labyrinth of the minotaur with the darkness
of the unconscious mind. For theseus, it's the monster hidden
and pursued. For Minus, its shame secreted away, and for
the minotaur himself it's an exercise and cruel and inescapable circumstance.

(10:10):
These days, we often casually compare the labyrinth to other
complex and often unpleasant systems like healthcare or criminal justice. Likewise,
we can look to many examples in contemporary horror as
further re interactions. Of the minotaur in his labyrinth, think
of the chainsaw wielding Leatherface in his rural Texas deathhouse,

(10:33):
or of Pennywise the clown in its sewers, or even
of jaws in its ocean. They are all terrifying entities,
made more terrifying by the environment they call home. In
the words of or Hey Luis Borges in the Book
of Imaginary Beings translated by Andrew Hurley, quote, Indeed, the

(10:55):
image of the labyrinth and the image of the minotaur
seem to go together. Is fitting that at the center
of a monstrous house there should live a monstrous inhabitant.
Today's episode is based on the article The Myth of
the Minotaur, the Legendary Beast We Can't Forget on HowStuffWorks

(11:16):
dot Com, written by Robert Lamb. To hear more from Rob,
check out his podcast stuff to Blow Your Mind. Brain
Stuff is a production of iHeartRadio in partnership with how
Stuffworks dot Com and is produced by Tyler Klang. Four
more podcasts from iHeartRadio visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.