A couple of posts ago, I said that I don't know where we are going with this exploration of darkness, depth, and soul, but I am following a thread. This metaphor has a mythological reference in the Greek myth of Ariadne, Theseus, and the Minotaur. The Minotaur, half bull, half man, was kept in a labyrinth on the island of Crete. Every year, seven young women and seven young men from Athens were sent into the labyrinth and sacrificed to the Minotaur. One year, the hero Theseus volunteered be one of the young men, with the idea that he would kill the beast. When he got to Crete he met Ariadne, daughter of Minos, the king of Crete, and she agreed to help him. Ariadne gave Theseus a spool of thread as he entered the labyrinth and held onto the other end. The hero met the Minotaur in the darkness, killed him, and followed the thread back out to the waiting Ariadne.
Like any myth, this story can be read in multiple ways, and it is part of a larger mythology. There are, for example, many stories about the hero Theseus (including a battle against the Amazons) and a longer narrative about Theseus and Ariadne (who ends up married to the God Dionysus), and the birth of the Minotaur (that's a strange one), and why the young people sacrificed were from Athens and not Crete (war, which we know something about today). The myths and stories that branch out from this single event of following the thread are themselves a labyrinth, a labyrinth of people and creatures and decisions and gods and fates that wind around, circle, and intersect. Some of them are dead ends in the narrative sense---try to follow them much beyond this story and there is nothing, no more to tell, a stonewall. But if you take for example, the Theseus branch, and keep your hand on that wall as you walk, it's a long journey in to the center. Perhaps we imagine that as the end of his life, a hero's death, which was his fate.
But we are concerned with the thread. The Greek word for Ariadne's thread, the ball of yarn, is clew, the root of our word "clue," a useful snippet, tenuous and indispensable. Theseus had a clue and a goal, but these don't guarantee the outcome. No one had survived the Minotaur and his labyrinth. However deliberate, his was an act of faith as well as courage. The trick is in following the thread, or believing, when you feel totally lost in the dark, that something so slender and fine exists, and can guide you to some unknown center, and back out to the light again.
