Minotaur

The myth of the half-bull and half- man son of the Cretan king Minos and his wife Pasiphae (remind Racine’s tragedy) held captive in the Labyrinth, a palace built especially for him, and nourished with the lives of seven young men and seven virgins from Athens. Yet this is a literature pamphlet, from Dante’s Inferno to Jorge Luis Borges, where Asterion, the Minotaur, lets Theseus kill him, literally abandons himself to his slayer. And in this painting, the Minotaur holds a double ax (an archaic weapon strictly characteristic of Indo-European warriors, as the Grecians were) and can be imagined in the gesture of evirating himself. As the priests of the Phrygian Goddess Cybele practiced in their holy and bloody ceremonies. It is a dance, a terrible one. The dance and the self-inflicted death of the most obtuse, aggressive side of humanity. Something yet not extinguished, as we all sadly see in everyday chronicles.