WEBVTT - How Does the Myth of the Minotaur Work? 0:00:01.840 --> 0:00:08.719 Welcome to Brainstuff, a production of iHeartRadio, Hey Brainstuff Lauren Vogelbaum. Here, 0:00:10.520 --> 0:00:13.600 the name minotaur summons the image of a man with 0:00:13.680 --> 0:00:16.760 the head of a bull, a raging hybrid that serves 0:00:16.800 --> 0:00:19.720 as a sort of stock creature in gains and films. 0:00:20.800 --> 0:00:25.400 But to understand this creature, sometimes known as Asterion or Asterius, 0:00:25.840 --> 0:00:29.600 we must confront him where he lives within the labyrinth 0:00:29.640 --> 0:00:34.479 of mythology, history, and the human psyche. To start with, 0:00:34.760 --> 0:00:38.080 let's remember the basic myth of the minotaur, as presented 0:00:38.080 --> 0:00:42.720 in Hellenic tradition and works like Ovid's The Metamorphoses. The 0:00:42.800 --> 0:00:47.519 story goes something like this. Once on the island of Crete, 0:00:47.640 --> 0:00:50.320 a king by the name of Minus sought to secure 0:00:50.360 --> 0:00:54.120 his rule. He prayed to Poseidon for a sacrificial beast 0:00:54.160 --> 0:00:56.960 he might offer up, But when the sea gods sent 0:00:57.040 --> 0:01:00.840 forth a white bull from the frothing Surfus found it 0:01:00.920 --> 0:01:06.120 too beautiful to sacrifice. Instead, he sacrificed mortal bulls, and 0:01:06.280 --> 0:01:11.720 thus incurred Poseidon's wrath. The sea god bewitched Minus's wife, Pacify, 0:01:11.840 --> 0:01:14.160 to fall in love with the white bull, and she 0:01:14.240 --> 0:01:17.360 soon gave birth to a monstrous hybrid, the Bull of 0:01:17.440 --> 0:01:24.600 Minus or the minotaur. Nas Klein's translation of the Metamorphoses, 0:01:24.680 --> 0:01:27.839 a first published in the year two thousand OVID, describes 0:01:27.880 --> 0:01:32.680 the minotaur as a strange hybrid creature, and the creature 0:01:32.840 --> 0:01:36.399 was strange, a twin form of bull and man that 0:01:36.560 --> 0:01:40.679 emerged out of divine wrath and on natural love. It 0:01:40.720 --> 0:01:47.480 embodied both shame and sacredness. Minus could only hope to hide, 0:01:47.640 --> 0:01:52.240 but not kill, this terrifying creature. Thus he employed the 0:01:52.280 --> 0:01:57.080 master craftsman Daedalus to construct the Labyrinth, a tortuous maze 0:01:57.160 --> 0:02:01.360 that was practically impossible to leave. Here, he housed the 0:02:01.360 --> 0:02:04.640 bellowing minotaur and feed it the blood of prisoners sent 0:02:04.720 --> 0:02:09.760 to Crete as tribute by other nations. Yet all monsters 0:02:09.840 --> 0:02:13.959 meet their slayer in the end. The Athenian hero Theseus 0:02:13.960 --> 0:02:16.440 took the place of a tribute sent to Crete, but 0:02:16.639 --> 0:02:20.880 he befriended Ariadne, the daughter of King Minus. She gave 0:02:20.919 --> 0:02:23.760 him a ball of string to unwind behind him, and 0:02:23.880 --> 0:02:26.600 details on the twists and turns that would lead him 0:02:26.639 --> 0:02:30.160 to the beast at the labyrinth's heart. There he slayed 0:02:30.160 --> 0:02:33.280 the minotaur and followed the string back to the surface. 0:02:35.160 --> 0:02:39.840 That's the gist myths however, emerge from long traditions of 0:02:39.960 --> 0:02:43.959 multiple tellings. Like the labyrinth itself, the origin of any 0:02:44.000 --> 0:02:47.840 given myth becomes a tangled maze that defies easy solution. 0:02:48.720 --> 0:02:51.160 Just when we think we've emerged from its trappings, we 0:02:51.200 --> 0:02:54.440 find ourselves lost too. In the words of Ovid, the 0:02:54.480 --> 0:03:00.080 windings of alternating paths. But let's not stand still less 0:03:00.080 --> 0:03:04.359 the minotaur find us here. Instead, let's first consider the 0:03:04.440 --> 0:03:09.359 historical significance of the myth. The story of the Minotaur 0:03:09.560 --> 0:03:13.160 is intrinsically tied to Crete and the Bronze Age Minoan 0:03:13.200 --> 0:03:18.760 civilization that thrived there. The early twentieth century British archaeologist 0:03:18.840 --> 0:03:23.200 Sir Arthur Evans actually coined the term Minoan civilization as 0:03:23.240 --> 0:03:27.240 a reference to the mythical King Minus. As such, a 0:03:27.280 --> 0:03:32.120 myth continues to haunt our modern conceptions of these ancient peoples. 0:03:32.960 --> 0:03:35.960 From their stories, you might assume the Greeks believed Crete 0:03:35.960 --> 0:03:38.920 to be an evil land full of brutal kings and 0:03:39.000 --> 0:03:43.720 profane monsters, but that's not the whole story. The creed 0:03:43.800 --> 0:03:47.080 of Greek myth could be contradictory, with some treatments of 0:03:47.160 --> 0:03:50.680 King Minus describing him as a wise Moses esque figure 0:03:51.080 --> 0:03:53.480 and others depicting him as the head of a royal 0:03:53.520 --> 0:03:59.000 household rife with murder, sacrilege, and betrayal. It's this latter 0:03:59.080 --> 0:04:02.360 version of Minus that lingers in modern culture. It's an 0:04:02.360 --> 0:04:06.440 example of what academic Joseph Campbell, who wrote extensively about mythology, 0:04:06.760 --> 0:04:11.600 described as the figure of the tyrant monster, an archetype 0:04:11.640 --> 0:04:18.640 of destructive, ego based disruption. In reality, the exact nature 0:04:18.720 --> 0:04:22.440 of Minoan rule is much debated, and the political system 0:04:22.640 --> 0:04:25.000 likely changed a few times over the course of the 0:04:25.080 --> 0:04:30.400 two millennia long Minoan Age. Scholarly interpretations include both royal 0:04:30.520 --> 0:04:34.159 rule and age ender balanced elite class that might be 0:04:34.200 --> 0:04:39.880 compared to a council or corporation a specific king. Minus, however, 0:04:40.279 --> 0:04:43.239 is not the only element of myth that's largely missing 0:04:43.320 --> 0:04:47.800 from the actual discertible history of Bronze Age Crete. The 0:04:47.880 --> 0:04:51.880 labyrinth is as well. For the article of this episode 0:04:51.960 --> 0:04:54.320 is based on How Stuff Works. Spoke via email with 0:04:54.400 --> 0:04:58.520 Nicoletta Momigliano, Professor of Agean Studies at the University of Bristol, 0:04:58.760 --> 0:05:01.320 an author of the book In Search of the Labyrinth, 0:05:01.440 --> 0:05:06.200 The Cultural Legacy of Minoan Crete. She said there is 0:05:06.320 --> 0:05:09.400 no building in minowing crete that can be described as 0:05:09.440 --> 0:05:13.760 a complicated maze, that is, a complicated system of paths 0:05:13.880 --> 0:05:16.560 or hedges, designed as a puzzle through which one has 0:05:16.600 --> 0:05:20.640 to find a way. But the ruins of Minoan palaces, 0:05:20.920 --> 0:05:25.560 especially the largest one, Nassis, can have a labyrinthine appearance. 0:05:27.920 --> 0:05:32.520 The aforementioned archaeologist Sir Arthur Evans was the excavator of Nassis. 0:05:33.360 --> 0:05:38.000 He equated the structure there with the labyrinth. However, a 0:05:38.080 --> 0:05:42.040 much of Evans's interpretation arrests on the linguistic connection between 0:05:42.080 --> 0:05:46.320 the word labyris meaning a double axe, with the prevalence 0:05:46.520 --> 0:05:50.800 of this motif appearing in the masonry. He was defining 0:05:51.040 --> 0:05:56.000 Labyrinth as the house of the double axe. Momic Leano said. 0:05:56.680 --> 0:05:59.600 One should note, however, that the connection between labyrinth and 0:05:59.680 --> 0:06:03.520 labyrinth appears to be much more tenuous than Evans suggested. 0:06:04.480 --> 0:06:07.600 Apart from the linguistic difficulties and relating the two words 0:06:07.640 --> 0:06:11.360 pointed out by several philologists, one may also observe that 0:06:11.880 --> 0:06:14.400 while Mason's marks in the shape of a double axe 0:06:14.440 --> 0:06:18.159 do appear most frequently at Nassis, they are not exclusive 0:06:18.200 --> 0:06:23.760 to this site, and other signs are also very common. Okay, 0:06:24.160 --> 0:06:27.440 but what about our monster of the hour, the minataur itself. 0:06:28.480 --> 0:06:31.440 While no one expects to find literal beast men amid 0:06:31.440 --> 0:06:35.120 the Minoan ruins, you might reasonably expect to find images 0:06:35.160 --> 0:06:39.000 of the creature so associated with the island. But while 0:06:39.040 --> 0:06:43.320 bulls do appear quite frequently in Minoan art, including depictions 0:06:43.320 --> 0:06:46.760 of humans leaping over the backs of charging bulls, the 0:06:46.800 --> 0:06:54.159 minotaur is another story, Mimicleano said. Interestingly, and contrastingly, depictions 0:06:54.160 --> 0:06:57.440 of minotaur images, that is, of a creature that is 0:06:57.520 --> 0:07:00.839 half man and half bull, are very rare and relatively 0:07:00.920 --> 0:07:04.520 late in Minoan crete, and one may also wonder whether 0:07:04.560 --> 0:07:08.840 these may be stylized representations of bull leaping, since they 0:07:08.880 --> 0:07:14.559 appear on tiny seal stones or seal impressions. We should 0:07:14.560 --> 0:07:18.000 also note here that animal human hybrid figures do factor 0:07:18.200 --> 0:07:22.200 into multiple traditional and ancient cultures, and Minoan crete is 0:07:22.200 --> 0:07:27.320 no exception, Mimigliano said, But there is no prevalence of 0:07:27.400 --> 0:07:31.000 bulls in these cases. They tend to involve other animals 0:07:31.040 --> 0:07:35.440 such as birds and goats. So how exactly one got 0:07:35.480 --> 0:07:39.320 from Minoan bulls to later Greek representations of the minotaur 0:07:39.720 --> 0:07:45.360 is not entirely clear. Some writers have proposed that accounts 0:07:45.400 --> 0:07:48.440 of the minotaur's subterranean bellowing might have been a way 0:07:48.480 --> 0:07:54.440 for ancient peoples to explain actual seismic rumblings. This idea 0:07:54.520 --> 0:07:58.000 is an exercise in what's known as geo mythology, which 0:07:58.040 --> 0:08:03.679 is the study of alleged references to geological events in mythology. However, 0:08:04.120 --> 0:08:07.880 this remains an open question, and Mimicliano cautions that it 0:08:07.920 --> 0:08:11.000 gets us no closer to unraveling the mystery of the minotaur. 0:08:12.000 --> 0:08:15.440 She said, while there are plenty of bulls in minoing 0:08:15.480 --> 0:08:20.720 crete and earthquakes, minotaur images are conspicuous by their almost 0:08:20.880 --> 0:08:27.960 total absence. The minotaur myth likely took many winding, alternating 0:08:28.000 --> 0:08:31.720 paths to reach its most popular form, and the monster 0:08:31.800 --> 0:08:36.680 has endured long beyond the empires that birthed it. Mamigliano said, 0:08:37.160 --> 0:08:40.640 of course, the minotaur would have had more specific associations 0:08:40.679 --> 0:08:44.240 for the ancient Greeks as an example of punishment for 0:08:44.320 --> 0:08:47.920 not keeping one's promises to the gods. But the story 0:08:47.960 --> 0:08:51.480 of the minotaur, like many other ancient Greek narratives, and 0:08:51.720 --> 0:08:56.000 not just Greek narratives, can be and has been endlessly 0:08:56.120 --> 0:08:59.560 reimagined to address different aspects of the human condition at 0:08:59.600 --> 0:09:05.640 different times and in different contexts. The Minotaur, in various 0:09:05.679 --> 0:09:10.480 forms and reinterpretations, has indeed appeared in Dante's Inferno and 0:09:10.600 --> 0:09:15.320 Picasso's art, in the Chronicles of Narnia and House of Leaves, 0:09:15.360 --> 0:09:19.439 in operas and schlocky horror television and Dungeons and Dragons. 0:09:20.040 --> 0:09:22.920 We just can't seem to get enough of this mythic beast. 0:09:24.160 --> 0:09:27.440 After all, the minotaur is a collision of the human 0:09:27.559 --> 0:09:31.240 and the beastial, a symbol of the oft pondered dual 0:09:31.360 --> 0:09:35.880 nature of man. He is both victim and tormentor. He's 0:09:35.960 --> 0:09:39.680 the punisher and yet a punishment himself, imprisoned in what 0:09:39.920 --> 0:09:43.800 Joseph Campbell dubbed is Minus's house of death, a labyrinth 0:09:43.840 --> 0:09:49.600 of Cyclopean walls to hide from him his monster. Sigmund 0:09:49.640 --> 0:09:52.560 Freud equated the labyrinth of the minotaur with the darkness 0:09:52.640 --> 0:09:57.120 of the unconscious mind. For theseus, it's the monster hidden 0:09:57.320 --> 0:10:03.120 and pursued. For Minus, its shame secreted away, and for 0:10:03.200 --> 0:10:08.680 the minotaur himself it's an exercise and cruel and inescapable circumstance. 0:10:10.600 --> 0:10:14.040 These days, we often casually compare the labyrinth to other 0:10:14.160 --> 0:10:20.920 complex and often unpleasant systems like healthcare or criminal justice. Likewise, 0:10:21.160 --> 0:10:24.520 we can look to many examples in contemporary horror as 0:10:24.760 --> 0:10:29.120 further re interactions. Of the minotaur in his labyrinth, think 0:10:29.160 --> 0:10:33.160 of the chainsaw wielding Leatherface in his rural Texas deathhouse, 0:10:33.600 --> 0:10:37.320 or of Pennywise the clown in its sewers, or even 0:10:37.320 --> 0:10:41.800 of jaws in its ocean. They are all terrifying entities, 0:10:42.000 --> 0:10:46.840 made more terrifying by the environment they call home. In 0:10:46.960 --> 0:10:50.000 the words of or Hey Luis Borges in the Book 0:10:50.040 --> 0:10:55.360 of Imaginary Beings translated by Andrew Hurley, quote, Indeed, the 0:10:55.440 --> 0:10:57.920 image of the labyrinth and the image of the minotaur 0:10:58.080 --> 0:11:01.680 seem to go together. Is fitting that at the center 0:11:01.840 --> 0:11:05.680 of a monstrous house there should live a monstrous inhabitant. 0:11:10.480 --> 0:11:12.880 Today's episode is based on the article The Myth of 0:11:12.920 --> 0:11:16.559 the Minotaur, the Legendary Beast We Can't Forget on HowStuffWorks 0:11:16.559 --> 0:11:19.600 dot Com, written by Robert Lamb. To hear more from Rob, 0:11:19.720 --> 0:11:22.560 check out his podcast stuff to Blow Your Mind. Brain 0:11:22.559 --> 0:11:24.960 Stuff is a production of iHeartRadio in partnership with how 0:11:24.960 --> 0:11:28.240 Stuffworks dot Com and is produced by Tyler Klang. Four 0:11:28.320 --> 0:11:32.480 more podcasts from iHeartRadio visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, 0:11:32.640 --> 0:11:34.559 or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.