The Monster Within

The Minotaur is a monster. 

We all house a Minotaur within our consciousness. 

This is a brief account of the Minotaur in mythology:

The Minotaur was part bull, part man.  He was the offspring of Queen Pasiphae and a bull. 

The Queen's husband, King Minos had prayed for a bull to sacrifice to Poseidon.  When the bull appeared, it was so marvellous that the King didn't want to kill it.  This angered Poseidon, so he made Pasiphae fall passionately in love with the bull. 

To satisfy her passion, Pasiphae enlisted the help of Daedalus, who constructed a hollow model of a beautiful heifer to attract the bull.  Pasiphae positioned herself in the model and in this way had intercourse with the bull, later giving birth to the Minotaur.  The angry king ordered Daedalus to construct the labyrinth.  There, in the center of the Labyrinth, the king imprisoned the Minotaur.

The king sacrificed seven boys and seven girls to the Minotaur every year.  One year, Theseus implored Ariadne, Minos's daughter, to tell him how to escape the Labyrinth.  Ariadne loved Theseus, so she gave him a ball of twine, which he could use to later find his way out.  Theseus reached the center of the Labyrinth, wrestled with the Minotaur and killed it.  Then Theseus led the children out of the Labyrinth to safety.

As author and teacher Douglas Thorpe points out, the Minotaur is a beast, like William Blake's Tyger, to be both feared and admired:

Tyger Tyger burning bright,
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye,
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

In what distant deeps or skies,
Burnt the fire of thine eyes?
On what wings dare he aspire?
What the hand dare sieze the fire?

And what shoulder, & what art,
Could twist sinews of thy heart?
And when thy heart began to beat,
What dread hand? & what dread feet?

What the hammer? and what the chain,
In what furnace was thy brain?
What the anvil ? what dread grasp,
Dare its deadly terrors clasp!

When the stars threw down their spears
And water'd heaven with their tears:
Did he smile his work to see?
Did he who made the Lamb make thee?

Tyger Tyger burning bright,
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye,
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?

But what does all this mean for the writer? 

It is the writer's task to recognize the Minotaur within.  The angry Minotaur is filled with wrath and violence, because he has been exiled.  Exiled from the unity we seek, fragmented by pain, sadness, and loss, we who write must meet the monster in the depths of our imagination, and we must come to understand what it is we see.  "All of the rage that burns within awaits creative transformation," Thorpe tells us.  He says:

Minotaur becomes a symbol for the wrath that can consume us if we fail to find a way to acknowledge and use it.  "Minotaur" takes its place inside [our work]. 

We need to recognize the Minotaur (or the Tyger) within.  And it is the sound of the Minotaur that writers must whisper inside readers' ears.

Photo credit from Edith Hamilton's Mythology.