The Minotaur

                                                                            drawing by Sarah Lyda
 
from The Deep Well Tapes: Secret of the Pomegranate
by Marc Bregman

The Minotaur, the half bull/half man, is the power of connection to the soul self and the potency that comes from the connection. He, like Hades, lives in an underworld – a labyrinth. The underworld is actually a place of light, beauty and heavenly warmth, not darkness. But since this is Zeus’ pantheistic reality, anything from the Archetypal Realm is portrayed as dark and bleak.

The idea of the hero’s journey as going into the labyrinth, killing the Minotaur and then finding his way back out is the fool’s journey for the true journey of the hero is to not come back out. The labyrinth is there to become lost in. The Minotaur knows where he is – one needs not find the Animus for he will find you.

The job of the hero is not to track down the Minotaur as the hunter. As the hunter, the hero by necessity must fathom the labyrinth and understand the mystery. The reality is that the hero only needs to enter the labyrinth. He does not need to find anyone. In a dream, a psychopomp, often a dog, may lead him into the labyrinth to find the Animus. The Animus may appear as a bear or a lion, but however the Minotaur appears, He finds the true hero in the most vulnerable moment in the dream.

It is the mind that wants to turn everything into a labyrinth, into something to be understood, figured out, strategized, dealt with and completed. The true journeyer is no hunter, is not looking for a carcass to prove his worth to his father. He is looking only to understand the meaning of his soul. Often, the hero must die to find the Father because the hero is created through the inflation or judgment of the mother or the concept of the mother’s perception of what the hero should be for her. This concept includes all of her disappointments and hurts, for she is wounded like Psyche and hopes her son will be the man that she lost. This is the man that the son has become. This is the man who is the fruit of the other’s conception, which was planted in the boy. This is the man, the fruit, that must die.

The man with the ego-driven mind and who inherited the maniacal male anger of the father that becomes the passionate anger of the son, must prove himself by killing the thing he can no longer receive. If the son is not receiving the love from the father, then what else could a father be good for other than for proving the son’s value by being slain by him.