The Mirrored Palaces

In Lyn Webster Wilde’s book, Becoming the Enchanter, her encounter with the Spiral Castle is in a room full of mirrors, and she associates this castle with the Castle of Arianrhod, and the house she enters representing it is one disconcerting and nearly deceiving with its dizzying pattern of mirrors, and here in the story of Minos we see the also see mirrors, for what happens above reflects what happens below.

            Before this story begins there is another tale, that of Zeus coming as a white bull to a princess called Europa. As a bull he seduces her and carries her from her homeland in the Middle East, and carries her to the island of Crete. There she bears him several children, one of whom is Minos. Zeus also creates a robot called Talos. This robot protects the people of Crete from other nations, but at the same time it prevents them from leaving the island, turning Crete into a prison. It will not be until Daedalus arrives that the Talos is killed, and a normal life with all of is possibilities of freedom and danger can begin.

            It is Daedalus who not only builds the underground labyrinth, but makes it possible for Queen Pasipahe to seduce a bull, a mirror of the bull Zeus who seduced her mother in law, and become pregnant with Aristaion. But wait, because Aristaion is not only a name applied to the Minotaur, but to the king. Minos is also identified with the bull, bull and man,. He is the son of a woman and a bull. The king above is a mirror of the monster below, the monster who is king of the subterranean land.

            There are several who look at the story of Theseus and the Minotaur, and see in it some distant memory of Cretan power over mainland Greece. The whole reason Theseus shows up is because Crete is exacting a tax of human lives every seven years from Athens. When Theseus destroys the Minotaur, that tax is over. There are a few ways to look at this, and they are not necessarily exclusive. The Cretans, freed of imprisonment from Talos by Daedalus, and from the terror of the Minotaur by Theseus, now no longer care about the tax they exacted from the Athenians.

            But all stories, including myths and fairy tales, possess an internal logic, and that reading is not logical. Minos could have killed this monster, should have killed this monster. Instead he furnishes a home for it and gives it human sacrifices at a regular time. The monster and Minos are one. It seems that in defeating the monster, Theseus has defeated or changed Minos.

            In just this brief encounter with the palace of Knossos, one of the oldest images of the Spiral Castle, we are always left with several people and several scenarios to explore, Daedalus the builder, Minos the King, this mother Europa and his father Zeus, Pasiphae the Sun Bride, the princess Ariadne and her hero and eventual betrayer, Theseus. All of these are encountering the maze of Knossos in different ways, as do we all.