“You have a skeptical look on your face.” The old librarian paused her story at the sight of the student’s quizzical squint.
“The story I read didn’t say anything about Medea. It just had Theseus promising to go to fight the Minotaur to save all the other kids from getting sacrificed. And you’re saying the Athenians wanted to send their kids to Crete? That doesn’t make any sense.”
“It doesn’t have to make sense to you. Just to the people doing it. People will go to great lengths to accomplish goals that mystify both those better and worse than them. Men spend years and fortunes to die climbing mountains; your peers huff glue in the bathroom across the hall. Only middling people make sense all the time to everyone. But as it happens, these were very middling people doing something quite selfish and evil to maintain their very boring lives, lives of ease and comfort purchased with the blood of their own children. It made terrible sense.”
He still seemed to doubt it, less because of its plausibility than its emotional import. “And where does it say Medea was there?”
“It’s a myth. There are many written versions of the story, and by now I’m sure you’ve realized that as perspectives change, so do narratives.” She walked to the shelf and retrieved a very old-looking book as she spoke.
“But what’s the real version? What actually happened? Or is it just all made up?”
“You have to work backwards from what you have to what might have been. This, for example, is an original edition of Marsilio Ficino’s Iamblichus. It relates part of the story I’m telling you.”
He marveled at the old paper, the smell of the ink, and the curious words. “What language is that?”
“Latin, translated by Ficino from Greek, though it was originally written in Aramaic.”
“You can read all that?”
“I’m a librarian. And this is the only copy of this book on earth. Most don’t even know it exists. Much has been forgotten. Nowhere else does that story appear.”
“So you’re saying this stuff really happened?”
“It still does.”
If Athens had been a degenerate marvel, Knossos, the main city of Krete, was the very hub of a decayed kosmos. It was simply impossible to take in, even far out to sea, and upon arriving at the docks what had been a great expanse of buildings encompassing the whole periphery of his vision now loomed around him as a claustrophobic tangle of structures. There were no streets to speak of, no open areas, just warehouses with spaces between them for walking. The personal guard of Minos was on hand to guide them, along with a cohort of priestesses in their sheer dresses that left them bare-breasted save for what their long black hair could conceal. The warriors shoved the populace from their path as the women danced and sang their strange songs, and Theseus and the other thirteen young people were led as though they were honored guests down winding corridors through sunless alleys, past homes and shops and temples, all interconnected and indistinct, up to the great palace.
The others seemed oblivious to their purpose here, and in the conversation that he had overheard they seemed as one to believe they were to live as guest-friends in Minos’ care until they would be summoned back home. Theseus had not disabused them of these notions. Soft creatures of ease that they were, they promised to be of little help to him in his mission, and would fain believe their real purpose on Krete even were he to tell them. They would probably betray him given the chance. Better to fight his battle and save them despite themselves, should that prove possible.
At last they entered the palace, or so it seemed, given that they stopped in an antechamber of some kind. On the doors lay the image of two double-headed axes, along with strange markings that he took to be their writing. They were stripped to their loincloths and doused in perfume and sparkling dust. The others, male and female alike, marveled at Theseus, tanned, scarred, and sinewy as he was, and he noticed the priestesses and guards having a surprised and intense conversation. They looked concerned. There were whispers and fingers pointed surreptitiously at spears.
Theseus acted quickly. He didn’t know where the Minotaur was but he could sense they meant to let him nowhere near him. They feared what he might do, and rightly so. The guard nearest him had removed his helmet in the heat; Theseus decked him with a fast right hand and snached the helm from his grip before it could hit the ground. He swung it in a wide arc into the head of another guard, who in turn dropped a spear into the prince’s grip. Spinning it around, he drove the butt spike into the stomach of the guard running up behind him, folding him up as the fool was hoping to catch Theseus unawares. And then he ran.
“So did Minos’ wife really do it with a bull?” For all his love of books he was still a boy. The librarian was nonplussed.
“They say that the gods gave Minos a great bull he was meant to sacrifice, that he refused, and that in punishment the gods drove his queen Pasiphae mad and she mated with the bull and birthed the Minotaur.”
“Is that what happened?”
“Of course not. That’s not how monsters happen. Not quite anyway.”
“So what did happen?”
The librarian retrieved yet another book, this one made of leather, judging by the smell. “Liber Lucis Mithrae . . . these pages were scrolls once, bound up later by some unknown scholar in the Dark Ages. Worlds are made from sacrifices, and remade by them, renewed by the offering of blood and flesh. This is an ancient truth. Minos should have known better, should have returned what he’d been given. There’s a cycle to things, birth and death, and the one to whom things are given passes them on and passes them back and thus the universe moves in its harmony. A sort of . . . eternal return, as it were. But Minos imagined that he didn’t need anything but cleverness to keep his world going. Oh how wrong he was.”
“So where did the Minotaur come from?
“A different kind of perversion.”
Theseus ran through the halls, not knowing where he was going, not even the direction in which he was headed. He didn’t fear the Minotaur, but he did fear getting lost here and missing his chance to face the monster. He had been running for an hour at least it seemed, but in these the high-ceilinged halls, all so similar to one another, who could tell? He heard no noises behind him so perhaps at least he’d shaken his pursuers. Finally, he slowed to get his bearings. Rounding a corner, finally able to pay closer attention, he noticed a door that looked a bit unique, with that same double axe motif and glyphs, but smaller and more delicate than the great ones from the room he’d escaped. He shoved it open and entered.
The room was lit by multiple oil lamps all casting their dim yellow glow against frescoed walls. It was a bedchamber, complete with a great four-poster bed, and furnished with chests and seats and all sorts of decorations- statues and paintings and ornaments from places beyond his ken. Great ceramic jars stood along one wall, taller than a man; he’d seen them all over in the city and in what he assumed was the palace proper, but these were glazed and adorned with scenes of stories of the gods, of Prometheus shaping men and giving them fire, of his brother and his ill-starred bride Pandora. And next to the colossal jars, sitting at a table, was a young woman, combing her long, wavy black hair as she stared into a great bronze mirror. Her back was to him, but she stopped moving when he came barging in.
“Do you speak my tongue,” he demanded roughly. Who are you, and where am I?”
She didn’t turn. “I speak your language, Athenian. You are in the House of the Labrus- the double-headed axe in my tongue- and I am its mistress, Ariadne, daughter of Minos and high priestess.”
“I have come to slay the monster who dwells within this place. Take me to him, or I’ll have your head.”
She giggled and turned toward him. She was short and plump and lovely, after the manner of an easterner, her dress doing little to hide her charms. “Will you be biting it off, naked champion?”
He’d dropped his spear some time before, he realized, not that he figured he would need it against this slight, curvy maiden. “I’ve bested human fiends with my bare hands and I’ve not come to banter.”
“I know why you’ve come, Theseus.” She approached him, the bangles on her ankles jingling as she traced a path around him. My aunt sent word. She’s the one who told the guards to be on the lookout for you, to try to stop you.”
“She’s the one who wanted me to come and she tries to stop me?” He marveled that the witch’s powers were such that she was able to speed the news of his arrival faster than a swift trireme.
“The guards were to try to stop you. She wanted you tested.”
“It seems I passed.”
“You’ll know in a moment…”
Theseus heard a great commotion outside. The guards had tracked him down. He grabbed a lampstand and hefted it above his head before the door.
“You can attempt to brain the whole of the palace guard before they kill you, but even if you succeed it only delays your purpose. Or you can get into the pithos beside my night-table,” she said, pointing at the great clay jar.
Theseus thought for a minute. His blood was up but somehow reason took hold. She could have cried out for help but hadn’t. In a flash, he leapt on the table and sprang down into the jar. He heard the guards enter, heard them trade words with Ariadne in their barbarous tongue, words he couldn’t know. For a moment he imagined her betraying him, that a gout of boiling oil would come flowing down on top of him in this clay hole, that his quest would end ignominiously with him in Hades lamenting the treachery of women. But then there was silence, followed by a rapping on the side of the pithos.
“You can come out, hero. I’ve sent them looking for you elsewhere.”
Theseus emerged to see that the room was indeed empty. Climbing back down, he stood before her, now more conscious of the fact that he was still mostly naked. “Why are you helping me?”
“I mean for you to slay my brother.”
“The Minotaur is your brother!?”
“It’s what the peasants say, that my mother mated with a bull to produce him, that we hide him deep within our sanctuary and feed him foreigners.”
“Is that not so?”
“Not in the manner the common folk imagine. Or perhaps even sons of Zeus…”
“What do you mean- you women and your damn riddles!”
“You passed my test Theseus. You’re fair and bold and long for kleos. But I see something else in you. You have the gift of reason; you can think. You can bend your spirit to your mind. Any other hero would be lost against my brother, but you, you stand a chance.”
Theseus found himself liking her. True, her body quite wrapped itself around his imagination, but there was a depth to her. She was a dark sea he wished to swim in. But still there was his mission. “What is the Minotaur? I bid you speak plainly.”
“My brother is what came of a broken ritual, or rather, the breaking of ritual itself. My father was supposed to sacrifice a divine bull to the gods, but he kept it for himself and used it as the foundation of our house’s great wealth. First cattle, then crops, then trade; Krete sits at the crossroads of the world and we have all that men could desire. But though we forgot the gods they have not forgotten us. Our neglect has spawned my brother, whom my father must house in the holiest part of our most sacred places, far from what damage he might cause to the world he created. His vizier Daidalos used craft and magic to imprison him there; men would call it a maze, but it must be experienced to be really known. But imprisoned there, he prevents we priestesses from attending to our rites, and severs our connection to the eternal.”
“Why feed it? A monster so imprisoned threatens no one.”
“My brother is the source of all the wealth of our island, and many places besides. His presence is my father’s assurance of abundance, of coins and slaves and domination, all the things the great of the world would trade their young to attain. For those with much desire nothing more than more. He has taken the place of the gods in our sacred spaces and removed us from sacred time. Everything flows one way now, a great artifice that must be fueled. The youth are the logs on that fire.”
“Your brother… I see it now. You both bind men to a course, one sacred and one profane, one that honors the gods and one that traduces them. He is like some false priest, some hierophant of cargo…”
Ariadne smiled. The Athenian prince caught on faster than she’d hoped. And her imagination was, if anything, more subtle than his. “My people prosper and wither all at once. Ours is a crisis of meaning- our ships are laden but they lack a destination. We row about in circles and we sink. You’ve seen this yourself in your own city. You know what comes of it.”
Theseus nodded. “So be it then. I had resolved to fight this monster when I came here, but you have only given me greater urgency. Take me to him.”
“Give me a moment.” She turned and walked over to a chest. “There are some things you will need…”
“I thought she helped him because she was in love with him? I don’t understand all this other stuff.”
The librarian drew another book from the shelf. “Who said she didn’t? And the other stuff, well, it’s a bit much for one so young. Imagine a place and a time where normal things don’t happen, where you have a connection to things beyond the ‘stuff’ you see everyday. When you think about something ‘meaning’ something . . . I suppose you could say it’s where the meaning comes from. It’s where we go to get away from the things that don’t mean anything. Plato lays it out here- book four of his Aigupton Dialogoi. This is a manuscript from Petrarch, by way of Photios of Byzantium. It’s never been in print, though some have had occasion to encounter it. Petrarch’s Greek hand was never the best, so some errors crept in, but . . .”
“Where did you get all these books? I mean, I know you’re a librarian but this is stuff that looks like it should be in a museum or a college or something. Why is it this library in this ghetto school?”
“Like I told you, I’ve been doing this job for a while. And like I also told you, things can get forgotten and someone has to keep track of them.”
“But why not give them to some professor or something?”
“Who do you think keeps doing the forgetting? And these days, it’s on an industrial scale.”
“But isn’t it their job to teach people things?”
“Yes, much is taught, but little is cultivated. A smart man in our world is a useful man, but neither of the two are the same as a wise man. A time is coming soon when men will have a universe of information at their fingertips and stumble about in the blindest ignorance. Machines will do their work and then their thinking. You’ve seen it foreshadowed, out there, that IBM 486 PC. That’s not a hundredth of what’s to come. They will lose all remembrance of that place and time of meaning.”
“What do we do?”
“Return.”
“Return?”
“It’s a bit tricky getting there, unfortunately.”
Ariadne led Theseus down the twisting, torchlit corridors of the palace, her bare feet treading practiced steps on the worn stone floors. She hefted a bag over her shoulder. Unlike with his mad dash, she seemed to know exactly where they were going, though the prince could swear that they passed the same places more than once. Looking back it seemed that what had been long halls now appeared as dead ends, such that if they had tried to backtrack they would have run into walls. She seemed to sense his unease. “You should know that the pathways do not follow here as they do in other places. The shapes of things bend themselves to different laws. You must trust me.”
Theseus had little choice but to comply, but the effect was a bit unnerving. Bandits he could slay by the hundreds, but corridors that defied sense were a different matter. After a great while they came upon the double doors he’d seen when they’d first brought him to this place. A torch burned on either side of each wooden portal, illuminating the double-axes painted thereon. She turned to him and doffed her bag. “I have two gifts for you.” She held up a sword in her right hand and a ball of string in the other and offered them to him.
He took them and stared at her, the torchlight dancing in her eyes.
“You will need this sword to slay my brother; mark me, he cannot be killed without it.”
“And the string?”
“You must tie it to the latch of the door from which you entered. It is the only way you will find your way back. For though you might kill the Minotaur you will wander lost forever unless you can find a path anew, and that will require no small sacrifice. This is your surest help, to return from whence you came.”
“It doesn’t seem very long. How far will it measure?”
“As far as it needs to. And remember this also. You must never drop it. For once out of hand it will cease to bind you to your source. It is your way back only so long as it connects you.”
Theseus hefted his gifts. The sword was bronze and heavy, a leaf-shaped blade covered with wavy patterns on its edges. Its hilt resembled a spray of water, blue stones adorning it. The thread was linen, in a ball a bit larger than his fist, with both ends sticking out from its midst.
Aridane studied him intently, making sure she had his full attention before she continued. “You will see things beyond those doors that will be strange to you beyond your imagination- things that make no sense, impossible things that yet are. The Laburinthos will test your mind far more than your body. Do not fall into confusion and do not wander from your purpose. You will have to descend deep within, in every sense. The Minotaur dwells near the Fountain of Memory, which flows with the water of Mnemosune. It is the holiest of our shrines. Even if he wanders from it he is scarcely gone for long; he hates it and does everything he can to pollute and desecrate it. You can always find him there, if he does not find you first. And one more thing, there is a boon I desire for helping you.”
“What would you ask of me?”
“I wish you to take me from this place. I wish to marry.”
Theseus’ heart leapt at the prospect. Even in the face of danger his thoughts somehow collapsed into the thought of this princess in his arms. He reached for her. She placed a firm hand on his bare chest.
“Marry . . . after . . . You have a task before you first, hero. Return to me here and we will sail away.” She turned and took a latch in each hand, flinging the doors apart. A great cold blast of stale air hit them, though in the far distance of the hall he could see a dim light. “You should know he has a name, my brother. Minotaur is what men call him. His true name in your tongue is Asterion, the Starry One. You will see.”
Theseus looked at her once more, then heaved himself past her into the tunnel. The doors shut behind him, and anchoring one end of the string to a handle, he rushed off to his destiny.
I never thought previously of the Theseus myth as a parable, but in your telling I see what should have been plain. It warns against the breaking of bonds with god(s) and the consequent infestation and defilement of the holiest places--the spiritual and ideational centres of the polity--by half-human monstrosities who consume children.
Not that this benighted old rubbish has anything to say about the condition of things today...
So good, thank you very much. Your story telling skill is superb.