In Minôtauros Greek.

The former Greeks gave the name of Minotaure to a monster with body of man and head of bull. Son of Pasiphaé, woman of king Minos, and a bull sent by Poséidon, this monster was called actually Astérion. The myth of Minotaure is not a structured and independent myth; it is registered inside the mythical field oldest of Greek Antiquity, that of the Minoan thalassocratie and its relationship with the remainder of Greece.

Minotaure is found thus in the myth of Maze and its Icare son; it is because of this monster and of the shame which it imposed on Minos that the latter made build the Labyrinth, immense palate comprising such a tangle of rooms and corridors which it was impossible with very other that with Dédale, its architect, to find again his way there. It is there that the monster was locked up. Each year, Minos gave him in grazing ground seven young men and seven young girls of princely blood, tribute that this powerful king had imposed on the town of Athens.

Did this confrontation with the bull, which is reproduced in addition on certain frescos of the palate of Cnossos, represent an initiatory test which the noble foreigners were to overcome to be able to integrate the Minoan company?

It in any case translates the existence of close connections between Crete and the Mycenaean world, and the supremacy of the Minoan thalassocratie. This domination disappears with the execution from Minotaure by the young Athenian hero Thésée. This one, after having achieved a series of work worthy of those of Héraclès, joint with the quota of the young Athenians intended to be sacrificed, and, thanks to the contest of ARIANE, girl of Minos, not only manages to kill the monster, but also to escape, thanks to the “wire of ARIANE”, which enables him to find again its way through the corridors of the Labyrinth.

This victory of Thésée concretizes the fall of the Minoan thalassocratie and the consecutive rise of Athens. The myth of Minotaure is impregnated memory of the Minoan civilization, which appears to have had a worship of the bull and immense palates. The Labyrinth is indeed the palate of “double chops”, symbol which one found engraved on most Minoan monuments and which perhaps has a solar significance.

Minotaure belongs, in its capacity as monster, in the still wild world and not civilized; the victory of Thésée falls under the line of work of all the Greek heroes (Héraklès, Jason, Ulysses), who aim at eliminating any form from the past, all that, on ground, could worry or threaten civilization of the “city”. In this direction, it is significant that civilization Minoan, however Greek in several connections, is thus regarded as representative the dangers of a “different” civilization, belonging to a forever completed past.