man, and God. It can be noted in general, when one talks about the Minotaur, one thinks of it as a hybrid of man and animal, but it also happens to be a god. First, because the white bull that possessed Pasiphae, Minos's wife, had been sent to this mission by Poseidon, god of the seas, and who soon became an important Cretan divinity; but also, because Pasiphae herself was the daughter of Helios, the god of the sun, and, therefore, she had the blood of gods running through her veins. Thus, the Minotaur is a monstrous combination of the three classes of beings inhabiting the universe: animal, man, and God.14 Mythology of the time features pairings of men and gods, with its offspring, the demigods, or of men and animals, from which gracious mythological figures such as centaurs and sirens were born. However, the combination of the three is a monstrosity and for this outrageous unique being there must be a space with equally singular characteristics, such as the labyrinth. Nikos Kazantzakis especially depicts the divine nature of the Minotaur and, thus, makes Minos say:
I have made too much haste in ascending to the light to conquer the world. And the more I dominated the world, the more I forgot the god, the god who bayed at my feet, always a slave.15
And later, when Theseus has already accomplished his mission of slaying the monster, Minos complains:
You have snatched him from us…Now people will no longer hear the god mooing under the earth, they will lose all fear and will raise their heads with insolence…And they will sink in anarchy. Come, barbarian, and impose order with your new god. [TES 817]
Ariadne, in turn, and despite helping Theseus to find his way out of the labyrinth, laments later with the hero, referring to the Minotaur as her god:
For you I have betrayed my father, my native land and my god. [TES 822]
Its monstrosity, its character of a total, human, divine,
14 BG, color insert between pp. 120-1, Case 34, fig. 78. © Sammlung Prinzhorn, Universitätsklinikum Heidelberg.
15 Nikos Kazantzakis, "Teseo," in Obras Selectas II: Novelas–Teatro–Viajes, Barcelona, SP: Editorial Planeta 1962, pp. 733-826, here p. 810, my translation. [Henceforth cited as TES]
and animal being, rather than the lust of its mother, is what condemns it to remain locked in the depths, in a space without possible exit, without even a reference toward or hope for another space than itself.
The Labyrinthine Space andthe Myth of the Minotaur
The attempt to make a phenomenology of the labyrinthine space led us to the proximities of the myth, it is now almost crying out for us to propose a plausible interpretation. In my view, the Minotaur represents the human condition. There is no doubt that human beings' access to words and to an intuitiveness regarding spirit has made us partly abandon the animal condition and to get access to the world of the gods, by way of words and by music. Humans are the conscience of the universe; we have a historical sense, knowledge of death (although solely of others' and not one's own), and an incontrollable aspiration to the transcendent and to the eternal. Animals do not know about death and neither do gods, in the sense that, even when they are conscious of it, they do not suffer it, since, like Rainer Maria Rilke's angels, they live "in the rush of their return to themselves" (2nd Elegy).16 Only we humans feel the "terrible trident" of the "Neptune of the blood" (3rd Elegy, DE 57), that is, all the strength of instinct and of bestiality, and at the same time, "we have conscience at the same time of flowering and of fading" (4th Elegy, DE 71) and "only we see it (death)" (8th Elegy, DE 129); but we are also able to listen to "the blowing, the incessant message formed from the silence" and we begin "to lose the habit of the earthly, as one is tenderly weaned off one's mother's breast" (1st Elegy, DE 33), that is, humans have access to the world of the gods. Both animals and gods are identical to themselves and live in harmony with their environment, with things other than themselves. Humans, however, break all order and are a pure contradiction and, like the Minotaur, humans are simultaneously beastly and tender, conscious and unconscious, culpable and innocent. Fortunately, humans are not only that, we are also openness and vocation of transcendence. Yet to realize our vocation we need, indeed, to be saved
16 Rainer Maria Rilke, Las elegías del Duino y otros poemas, ed. and transl. Otto Dörr Zegers, Santiago, CL: Editorial Universitaria 2000, p. 45, my translation. [Henceforth cited as DE]
