Ariadne's Thread and the Black Sail (or, the "True" Story of the Labyrinth)

In late Greco-Roman antiquity, marble coffins grew a funerary luxury fashion. Although usually unknown to us, their sculptors were clever in depicting stories on their outer, limited surfaces. Not seldom, those legends were ancient, popular myths. For instance, that of the Athenian prince Theseus and the Cretan princess Ariadne. The fable is well known: periodically, seven boys and so many girls had to be sent from Athens to the isle of Crete, to be devoured by the Minotaur, part-man and part-bull caged in the Labyrinth created by the architect Daedalus. Once upon a time, Theseus volunteered to kill the monster, in order to stop such a horror. Thus, he took the place of one of the youths.

Ariadne was daughter to king Minos, who had put her in charge of the Labyrinth, probably as priestess of a barbarian cult. Moreover, she was half-sister to the Minotaur. Nevertheless, she fell in love with the young Theseus. The princess helped him in his undertaking, by giving him a ball of thread, so that he could find his way out after defeating the monster and rescuing the doomed sacrificial victims. Then, she eloped on board of his ship, but the ungrateful hero abandoned her in the island of Naxos, while she was asleep.

The image above is a detail of a Roman sarcophagus, dating to 130-150 CE and now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, at New York. The scene represents a full dressed Ariadne, in the very moment when she gives a nude Theseus her providential and proverbial clew, at the entrance of the Labyrinth. We cannot see the fine thread, but can just imagine it. Visible in the background though, the door of the Labyrinth seems to be already and slightly disclosed. Given the funeral context, this may well have symbolized the access to an afterlife or underworld, but we might also try to update an interpretation like that.

A modern beholder could observe that the subliminal dimension, which the hero was going to penetrate, closely resembles or can work as a metaphor for the psyche. Not yet – or no longer, depending on circumstances and points of view –, a proper individual self. Rather, a virtual area, where it communicates with a collective unconscious, or borders with a possible natural one. There, the way to a future realization, but also some archaic danger, might be hidden. That is what the psychological analyst Carl Gustav Jung called process of individuation, in his dynamic perception of the development of our personalities.

In an original Freudian sense and with special – albeit non-exclusive – reference to a relevant culture, myths work like collective dreams, waiting for being interpreted in the context of times and places, when and where our existences occur to be cast into. As well, mythology is a kind of archaeology of the mind. Conventionally, even if other components have contributed to its complex evolution, Greek culture is considered the cradle of European or Western civilization. So, let us step back to our Hellenistic sarcophagus.

In the front relief of it, a skillful anonymous artist has condensed the visual narration into pregnant scenes. In the first of them, we have seen the episode of Ariadne giving Theseus her clew. In the second (see above), he himself slaying the Minotaur is illustrated, at the centre of the Labyrinth. Borrowing Jungian terms and psychological concepts, we could comment, in the former case the archetypal relationship between Anima and Animus is concerned. In the latter, instead, other archetypes are evoked and involved: the Persona and its Shadow. Reliably, and respectively, a collaborative couple and an antagonist pair.

Actually, no character better than Ariadne can represent the Jungian Anima, Latin name standing for “soul”, idealized feminine figure and positive force at once. As well, none better than the generous Theseus can impersonate her potential male partner, defined Animus by C. G. Jung. According to him, albeit in different measures depending not only on genders, both components are present and active in the human psyche. They should be complementary to one another. Yet, above all, the role of Theseus in the Labyrinth is akin to that of an ego searching for his true self. As such, he is going to wear his mask of hero.

The Latin word, meaning “mask”, was persona. The Jungian archetype called Persona is an ambivalent concept, expressing the ideas of a person and of a mask at the same time. Or else, if we prefer, of a personage wearing a mask, which is his or her social and cultural role. In the process of individuation, or realization of a mature and open identity, early or late an individual happens to meet with the Shadow, which is expression of an introvert, primitive or beastly, substratum of our personalities. The conflictual encounter with this negative projection of a selfish ego may be decisive, in the evolution of personality itself.

In the Greek myth, nobody as a hybrid Minotaur appears so suited to play the part of the Shadow, which the subject has to challenge, if he or she wishes to grow an autonomous person and even cast off the more or less heroic mask. Fortunately, rarely in the psychic reality such a contrast is as traumatic or mortal, as in the folklore fiction. Above, we can enyoy another fabulous, and nearly comical, illustration – by Edward Burne-Jones, in 1861 – of an imminent rendez-vous of Theseus with the Minotaur inside the Labyrinth. There, the former holds a medieval sword in one hand, the coil of Ariadne's thread in the other.

In a letter to Karl Kerenyi, on 10 March 1941, Jung so argued: “The labyrinth is indeed a primordial image which one encounters in psychology, mostly in the form of the fantasy of a descent to the underworld. [...] With an almost uncanny sureness of intuition you have touched on a central problem of the unconscious, which seems to me exceedingly difficult to handle.” In his essays Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious (1933-55), the Swiss psychiatrist wrote, otherwise: ?If the encounter with the Shadow is the “apprentice-piece” in the individual's development, then, that with the Anima is the “masterpiece”?.

Evidently enough, Theseus would have not been of the same opinion, if we reread the afore summarized tale. It is true, after his exploit he fled from Crete by sea, together with his magnanimous benefactress. Yet, along the route back to Athens, he marooned her sleeping on a shore of the island of Naxos. At her awakening, she could just discern his boat, sailing away in the distance. Approximately, this is the third and last episode evoked on the mentioned sarcophagus today in New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art (see above; and, below, Ariadne in Naxos painted by the female artist Evelyn De Morgan, in 1877).

With varying details, depending on if Ariadne is portrayed asleep or awakening, such a scene will be reproduced hundred times in the history of European fine arts. As well, the theme of the lament of Ariadne abandoned will echo as a song, in the lyric poetry or in the musical opera. No wonder, if at this point the old mythological sources disagree, about an end of her story. Some tell that the god Dionysus, accidentally, sailed to Naxos and was moved to pity, or fell in love with her. So much, as to make her his immortal spouse. A less pitiful, more realist tradition is that Ariadne committed suicide, hanging herself on a tree.

In his Dialogues with Leuco, first published in 1947, the Italian novelist and poet Cesare Pavese made both Ariadne and Theseus speak separately, in two dialogues respectively entitled “The Vineyard” and “The Bull”. If in the former all the loneliness and despair of Ariadne in Naxos is reflected, here the latter may sound no less interesting, for there the hero strives to explain why he deserted her; and how the shadow of the Minotaur, whom he believed to have defeated also thanks to Ariadne's complicity, in reality has haunted him. In the dark magic Labyrinth at least, “We become what has been killed”: thus, Theseus tries to justify himself, while his ship has arrived in sight of the fatherland.

Even Ariadne's clew, as a symbolic instrument of liberation, has revealed to be a dangerous illusion. The Athenian prince feels to have grown monstrous he himself, but cannot stop acting as such. At the departure for his Cretan adventure, he had hoisted a mournful sail, promising his father to change it from black to white, if he will survive. Of course, this should have been also a signal, that he was successful in his brave mission.

Now, Theseus delays, as if forgetful or hesitant to give his crew the relevant order. Watching from afar, meanwhile the old king sees the boat, with its black sail on the horizon. Deceived by the detail, Aegeus commits suicide, jumping off a cliff into the sea. By law, his son is granted the title of next king of Athens. Actually, Theseus' life was scanned by suicides, last but not least that of Phaedra, Ariadne's sister he will merry in nostalgic albeit tardy memory of her. About this subject matter, Euripides will compose his famous tragedy Hippolytus. All that is what Greeks were used to define nemesis, or revenge of the fate.

Above, a partial view of Theseus and the Minotaur, painting by the Master of the Cassoni Campana (Musée du Petit Palais, Avignon, France; 1510s), where some elements of the antique myth are gathered: in the background, Theseus' ship with its black sail; in the middle, he himself fighting the Minotaur at the centre of the Labyrinth. Curiously, Theseus wears a Renaissance armour and the two halves of the Minotaur are inverted, with respect to a traditional iconography. However, in the foreground, the main detail is Ariadne pictured together with her sister Phaedra, awaiting the Athenian hero by the exit of the maze.

Thus, we can better rediscover or verify how the Cretan princess was not the only maiden, in the vicissitudes of the whole story. This is a circumstance which the play Qui n'a pas son Minotaure? (translated into English as To Each His Minotaur; 1963), by Marguerite Yourcenar, is especially focused on. The Belgian writer was inspired by ancient Latin poets as Catullus and Ovid, but her version of the fable is decidedly up-to-date and bitterly disenchanted. Its bottom line is that – more or less – a shadow of the brutish Minotaur persists inside each of us, male or female, sensual or spiritual, pragmatic or idealist.

That is just waiting for favourable conditions, in order to revive or wake out of a subconscious, labyrinthic psyche. In a suspicious way, was not Phaedra too on board of Theseus' ship, when he forsook her sister in the wilderness? Ariadne asleep in Naxos, her emblematic extraneousness to a modern alienating word, is also the favourite subject in a series of artworks by the Italian painter Giorgio de Chirico, inspired by classic sculptures. In particular, below on the left, Sleeping Ariadne, Roman copy of a Hellenistic statue (Uffizi, Florence; 3rd cent. CE); on the right, De Chirico, Ariadne (detail: MET, New York; 1913).

Either Cesare Pavese or Marguerite Yourcenar had their good reasons in their mythologizing pessimism, since coming out of the experience of the World War II, which had shown the worst historical horrors in an alleged period of advanced civilization. The mythic Minotaur could well work as an allegory of all the inner monsters of humankind; Theseus, Phaedra and even Ariadne, of an existential incapability to master instincts or passions; the Labyrinth, of the deep ambiguity of a personal and collective unconscious, which no Ariadne's string might neutralize, be it rational knowledge or intuitive wisdom.

Furthermore, we may occur to be as forgetful as Theseus, letting black sails free to plough the waves of the future. Anyhow, here we have neglected considering one character more in the archetypal legend, and he is the divine Dionysus, what indeed poets and artists did not disregard so easily. Mainly, the latter depicted the scene of the god discovering Ariadne forsaken by Theseus in Naxos, and going to console her; or the next triumphal wedding of Dionysus and Ariadne, promoted to be goddess-like she herself. A pair of artworks by the Baroque Caravaggist Paulus Bor are more disconcerting, even disquieting or enigmatic: Ariadne and Bacchus, both of them housed in the Muzeum Narodowe at Poznań, Poland, and dating to 1630-35 (see below, respectively on the left and on the right).

In the first picture, Ariadne is portrayed bare-breasted, seated down and still holding one end of her twine in a hand. She gazes up seriously at a standing Theseus, of whom almost only the shadow is visible. Strangely, the scene is similar to that of the Theban Sphinx before Oedipus, in another renowned Hellenic myth. In the other painting, a nude Bacchus/Dionysus is sitting against a dark, vegetal background. Near his feet on the ground, a mysterious detail is what appears to be a ball of yarn, as well. The author of the double work was the most intellectual and philosophical, among the Dutch painters of his times.

In Greek religiosity, Dionysus was a deity of wine and inebration, of ecstasy and of tragedy; in other words, of everything irrational according to our prevailing criterion. As well, in modern revisitations at least, not even the figure of the Minotaur has been always regarded in a full negative light. Surrealist artists adopted it as a kind of badge (see below, an illustration by René Magritte). The partly autobiographic novel Seduction of the Minotaur by the Cuban-American writer Ana?s Nin, first entitled Solar Barque but revised with the new title in 1961, is a pertinent example, where Jungian psychology is explicitly the referential theory.

Indeed, an auroral idea for her future novel was already born in the second volume of The Journals of Ana?s Nin, 1934-1939. Reflecting on the war just broken out in September 1939, in fact there she noted how “the modern hero was the one who would master his own neurosis so that it would not become universal, who would struggle with his myths, who would know that he himself created them, who would enter the labyrinth and fight the monster. This monster who sleeps at the bottom of his own brain.” In a retrospective way, twenty years later the author has grown more compehensive, not more indulgent though:

“And one day we open our eyes and there we are, repeating the same story. How could it be otherwise? The design comes from within us. It is internal. It is what the old mystics described as karma, repeated until the spiritual or emotional experience was understood, liquidated, achieved.” Compulsion to repetition – of errors, and sometimes even of horrors – is the real monstrosity, then, along with a difficulty in understanding, liquidating, achieving. The “banality of evil”, so defined by Hannah Arendt, was not so much inside the Labyrinth, as rather on board of the ship with the black veil, which Theseus was too late to change.