Asterion, the star in the center of the Labyrinth, the elaborate maze built by Daedalus, is usually understood to have been a reference to none other than the Minotaur himself.
While both Asterion and Androgeos were born by queen Pasiphae, only the second was fathered by king Minoas. Asterion was the offspring of Pasiphae with a white bull, the revenge of Poseidon on Minoas for the attempt to fool him and not stand by his word to sacrifice that bull to the god of the sea who had granted him to Minoas as a sign that he should be the king of Crete and not his brother.
The Minotaur ended up in the labyrinth, and was fed every nine years by seven young men and seven young women who got thrown inside the labyrinth as part of the tribute archaic Athens had to pay to Crete. The tribute was the result of the murder of the son of Minoas, Androgeos, while he was in Athens and achieved fame as a winner in some of the Panathenean events. Upon news of his murder, Minoas declared war on Athens, defeated it and imposed the tribute, from which only Theseus would manage to liberate it from, by killing the Minotaur with the help of Ariadne.
Borges, the argentinian writer, once wrote that there is no meaning in a labyrinth, if it does not have a minotaur in its very center. Surely it is one thing to wander lost inside a complicated structure whose form you cannot grasp from your perpetual hindered viewpoint. It is quite another to also feel the fear that every new step might be leading you straight into the minotaur.
I find this to have some similarity to the famous ninth chapter of the Odyssey, where the polytropos finds himself along with his men in the island of the Cyclopai. The Cyclops Polyphemos only makes his appearence after the men have wondered at their strange surroundings, in the cave of the yet unseen monster. Although the island is small, it is in a way the center of the labyrinth as well, a bit like the fabled Atlantis having in its epicenter a small island, surrounded by water.
A similar idea, or an echo of it, seems to appear in several stories of H.P. Lovecraft. The environment one finds himself in often is unknown, a once sunken island, raised by a volcanic eruption after endless aeons of decay below the waves, or the cave of the Mammoth, where one wanders by mistake in nameless paths and gets lost. In the latter the narrator accounts how the mere thought that he would remain in that darkness for the rest of his days was one he had to manage to accept, however in reality what remained there was not a monotonous and slow demise, but the confrontation with an older presence of the labyrinth.
In conclusion it can be noted that perhaps the labyrinth symbolizes more than anything else the discovery of a center, a center of life, defined by the fear of annihilation. And as the short story by Borges about Asterion goes, "everything else is many times, fourteen times, only two things are singular: high above, the incomprehensible Sun; below, Asterion".
While both Asterion and Androgeos were born by queen Pasiphae, only the second was fathered by king Minoas. Asterion was the offspring of Pasiphae with a white bull, the revenge of Poseidon on Minoas for the attempt to fool him and not stand by his word to sacrifice that bull to the god of the sea who had granted him to Minoas as a sign that he should be the king of Crete and not his brother.
The Minotaur ended up in the labyrinth, and was fed every nine years by seven young men and seven young women who got thrown inside the labyrinth as part of the tribute archaic Athens had to pay to Crete. The tribute was the result of the murder of the son of Minoas, Androgeos, while he was in Athens and achieved fame as a winner in some of the Panathenean events. Upon news of his murder, Minoas declared war on Athens, defeated it and imposed the tribute, from which only Theseus would manage to liberate it from, by killing the Minotaur with the help of Ariadne.
Borges, the argentinian writer, once wrote that there is no meaning in a labyrinth, if it does not have a minotaur in its very center. Surely it is one thing to wander lost inside a complicated structure whose form you cannot grasp from your perpetual hindered viewpoint. It is quite another to also feel the fear that every new step might be leading you straight into the minotaur.
I find this to have some similarity to the famous ninth chapter of the Odyssey, where the polytropos finds himself along with his men in the island of the Cyclopai. The Cyclops Polyphemos only makes his appearence after the men have wondered at their strange surroundings, in the cave of the yet unseen monster. Although the island is small, it is in a way the center of the labyrinth as well, a bit like the fabled Atlantis having in its epicenter a small island, surrounded by water.
A similar idea, or an echo of it, seems to appear in several stories of H.P. Lovecraft. The environment one finds himself in often is unknown, a once sunken island, raised by a volcanic eruption after endless aeons of decay below the waves, or the cave of the Mammoth, where one wanders by mistake in nameless paths and gets lost. In the latter the narrator accounts how the mere thought that he would remain in that darkness for the rest of his days was one he had to manage to accept, however in reality what remained there was not a monotonous and slow demise, but the confrontation with an older presence of the labyrinth.
In conclusion it can be noted that perhaps the labyrinth symbolizes more than anything else the discovery of a center, a center of life, defined by the fear of annihilation. And as the short story by Borges about Asterion goes, "everything else is many times, fourteen times, only two things are singular: high above, the incomprehensible Sun; below, Asterion".
(although most probably there was some hidden attack there which one should have seen the film to understand :/ )
