|
|
|
|
 |
--one
door closes, --another one opens |
|
|
Ariadne:
keeper of the labyrinths |
|
|
| Ariadnes story teaches us that
things may not always happen the way we expect or
hope they will, but sometimes these unexpected turns
on our paths can lead us to wonderful new options
that we hadnt even considered. |
 |
|
Offspring
 |
|
Theoi scours the ancient text looking for any and
all references. Here are others they found:
|
texts [1.1] THOAS (by
Dionysos) (Quintus
Smyrnaeus 4.385, Apollonius Rhodius 4.425)
[1.2] THOAS, STAPHYLOS, OINOPION, PEPARETHOS
(by
Dionysos) (Apollodorus
E1.9)
[1.3] OINOPION (by
Dionysos) (Anacreon Frag
505e, Diodorus Siculus 5.79.1)
[1.4] OINOPION, STAPHYLOS (by
Dionysos or Theseus) (Plutarch
Theseus 20.1)
[2.1] PHLIASOS, EURYMEDON (by
Dionysos)
(Hyginus Fabulae 14) |
theoi.com/Georgikos
/Ariadne.html
|
|
Sea Woman of the Islands From
Crete |
| The mythical stories about
Ariadne refer to places of her influence and her
worshipping. Her cult spread from Crete over the
islands Naxos, Delos, Cyprus, Chios, Lemnos
to Athens and Peloponnes, specially Argos. Due to
her influence over the islands she was sometimes
named "the sea woman." The Ariadne's cult on Naxos
was performed also with the orgiastic rites
together with lamentations and expressions of sorrow
|
| In Amathus on
Cyprus she was worshipped as Ariadne
Aphrodite.
|
 |
Aphrodite, the
goddess of love and beauty, is honored not only by
making love, but by seeing and creating beauty and
loving life.
In Pagan Meditations,
Ginette Paris writes that "sex games have
their place among interesting leisure-time
activities. But what has happened to sexuality as an
initiation into the realm of the sacred?"
The Sun, hearth of
tenderness and life,
Pours burning love over the delighted earth,
And, when one lies down in the valley, one smells
How the earth is nubile and rich in blood;
How its huge breast, raised by a soul,
Is made of love, like God, and of flesh, like woman,
And how it contains, big with sap and rays of light,
The vast swarming of all embryos!
And everything grows, and everything rises!
--O Venus, O Goddess!
Rimbaud, Soleil et Chair |
|
Dionysus, the god was linked in mythology with only
one major female, Ariadne.
Ariadne's divine origins were submerged and she
became known as the daughter of King Minos of
Crete, who conquered Athens after his son was
murdered there. The Athenians were required to
 sacrifice seven young men and seven maidens each
year to the Minotaur. One year, the sacrificial
party included Theseus, a young man who
volunteered to come and kill the Minotaur.
Ariadne
fell in love at the first sight of him, and
helped him by
giving him a magic sword and a ball of thread so that he
could find his way out the Minotaur's labyrinth. She ran
away with Theseus after he achieved his goal, and according
to Homer was punished by Artemis with death, but in Hesiod
and most others accounts, he left her sleeping on Naxos, and
Dionysus wedded her.
 |
|
The
Sleeping Ariadne in Vatican Museum |
Ariadne, the
daughter of King Minos, after helping Theseus to
escape from the labyrinth, was carried by him to the
island of Naxos and was left there asleep, while the
ungrateful Theseus pursued his way home without her.
Ariadne, on waking and finding herself deserted,
abandoned herself to grief.
 |
|
Aphrodite acts as matchmaker to the marriage of
Ariadne & Dionysos |
But Venus (Aphrodite) took pity on her,
and consoled her with the promise
that she should have an immortal lover, instead of
the mortal one she had lost.
The island where Ariadne was left was the favourite
island of Bacchus, the same that he wished the
Tyrrhenian mariners to carry him to, when they so
treacherously attempted to make prize of him. As
Ariadne sat lamenting her fate, Bacchus found her,
consoled her, and made her his wife. As a marriage
present he gave her a golden crown, enriched with
gems, and when she died, he took her crown and threw
it up into the sky. This golden crown was from
Thetis, a work of Hephaestus. As it mounted the gems grew
brighter and were turned into stars, and preserving
its form Ariadne's crown remains fixed in the
heavens as a constellation, between the kneeling
Hercules and the man who holds the serpent.
Others have said that the crown was given
to Ariadne by Theseus after having taken it from the depth
of the sea. For when Theseus came to Crete with the youths
there was a dispute between him and King Minos who, refusing
to believe that Theseus was Poseidon's son, drew a gold ring
from his finger and cast it into the sea, where it could be
easily found by a son of Poseidon.
 |
|
Theseus is awarded
the crown of Thetis, Queen of the mermaids or
Nereids These 50
beautiful daughters of Nereus and Doris dwell in the
Mediterranean Sea and are friendly and helpful
towards sailors fighting perilous storms. They are
believed to be able to prophesize. They belong to
the retinue of Poseidon |
So Theseus cast himself
into the sea and brought back, not only the ring of Minos
but also the crown that the Nereid Thetis had
received from Aphrodite as a wedding gift. (Some say this was presented to
him by Thetis or her sister Amphitrite.)
Theseus having proved both his lineage and courage he
received the attentions of Ariadne who conspired to escape
her small island for the excitement and allure of the big
city of Athens.
Araidne is the
one who chooses Theseus, finding him attractive and
falling in love with him. She also sees a way to
escape from the house of her father King Minos. In
exchange for her help in winning the fight against
the Minotaur and the labyrinth she makes Theseus
promise to take her to Athens. She wishes to control
her destiny and realizes this will take initiative
and planning and consults the builder of the
labyrinth which holds the Minotaur, Daedalus.
Together they craft a way out of the maze using a
ball of thread. Theseus's type of courage is needed
to kill the Minotaur but without the aid of the
creative idea his brute strength alone would not
have succeeded. Ariadne sets
sail from Crete with her hero Theseus, but
only goes so far. She falls asleep to avoid a path
she no longer needs to follow to escape her hero
husband whose next chapters will bring great grief
to his political family who value power over love.
Through sleep she is able to change her destiny.
Her next suitor, Dionysus, is
divine but not so heroic. He promises a trip
to Olympus but he is a needy god who lives in his
own labyrinth of
emotions and sensations. Ariadne is the mistress of
this labyrinth that will allow for a happy love
affair.
|
Ariadne
began as a
Cretan fertility goddess and was transformed in
patriarchal Greek myth to a mortal human but what is
her role in understanding today's gender
relationships |
"And when, by the virgin Ariadne's help, the difficult
entrance, which no former adventurer had ever reached again,
was found by winding up the thread, straightway the son of Aegeus, taking Minos' daughter, spread his sails for Dia;
and on that shore he cruelly abandoned his companion."
(Ovid, trans. Miller; book VIII, line 172-176)
'I will never love again, and
therefore in some sense I will never live again', cries
the deserted Ariadne in Richard Strauss' opera. At the
moment of her deepest despair, Dionysos is heard singing
off-stage. She hails him as the longed-for messenger of
death. But when he appears before her, she recognized in
him her true lover for whom, transformed through her
pain, she is now ready
Feminist
mythologist Ginette Paris spent many years
questioning whether Ariadne play the archetypal dupe
so oftened bestowed on the heroine my patriarchal
leanings of the very long line of story tellers
before her.
"Ariadne helps Theseus get his M.D. or
Ph.D by doing secretarial work, and when his career
is in full swing, he asks for a divorce and leaves
her...she looks like a trophy for Dionysos at the
end of his voyage of conquest."
"If a myth
could be outmoded it wouldn't be a myth any longer.
It would no longer trigger the imaginative process,
nor event even the irritation that is often a sign
that the myth needs to be reinterpreted.... In this
case the fact is that, when Ariadne wake up, the
ship is setting sail. But what sort of fiction will
one weave around that fact? One can say Ariadne
misses the boat, or that she gets off that
particular boat, or that she is abandoned. Same
fact, but a different consciousness of it."
Ginette Paris Pagan
Grace pg42 |
The
Sacred Marriage
Soon after
marrying Ariadne gave birth to many famous
children -- first of all to Staphylos, Thoas and
Oinopion. The last two became the kings of the
islands Lemnos and Chios.
Staphylus,
is the son of Dionysus who accompanies Jason and
the Argonauts in search of the Golden Fleece.
Also on this journey is
Orpheus a priest of the cult of Dionysus who
embodies a greater knowledge of Greek science of the
soul. Both Dionysian and Orphic mysteries used the
archetypal patterns of their stories to
initiatate the soul
into a spiritual reality.
People who just engage in
sex as a fun game, as something exciting like that, don't
realize what they're doing. Then you don't have the
sacramentalization. And the whole reason marriage is a
sacrament is that it lets you know what the hell is correct
and what isn't, and what's going on here. A male and female
coming together with the possibility of another life coming
out of it - that's a big act. --Joseph Campbell--
|
|
|
 |
Ariadne,
Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones 1863/1864
The Armand Hammer Collection |
She remained faithful to Dionysus, but was later
killed by Perseus at Argos. Dionysos
however descends into Hades and brings her and his
mother Semele back. They then join the gods in
Olympus.
A more adopted version has her
crown become a star constellation in the heavens
after her death and trip to Olympus |
 |
|
Minoan-Greek
Fertility Goddess |
| Ariadne ("utterly pure," from a
Cretan-Greek form for arihagne) was a fertility goddess of
Crete. Her name is merely an epithet, for she was originally
the "Mistress of the Labyrinth", both a prison with the
dreaded Minotaur at its center and a winding dance-ground.
She was especially worshipped on Naxos, Delos, Cyprus, and
in Athens. (The Romans called their comparable goddess
Libera and their poets associated her with Minoan-Greek
Ariadne.) |
| |
|
Crete
competes with Turkey's are ceramic
Neolithic remains that date to approximately
7000 BC. Little is known of Europe's first great
civilization which was likely destroyed in a great
cataclysmic event, however Minoan sacred symbols
include the bull and its horns of consecration, the
labrys (double-headed axe), the pillar, the serpent,
the sun-disk, and the tree |
The women
with whom
Dionysus is most intimately associated reach a state
of glory only by passing through deep sorrow
|
| |
|
