Cook, Arthur B.: Zeus: a study in ancient religion (Band 1): Zeus god of the bright sky (Cambridge, 1914)

The Minotaur

491

dancer imitating the sun masqueraded in the Labyrinth as a bull.
That, if I mistake not, is the true explanation of Pasiphae's child,
the Minotaur. He was the crown-prince of Knossos in ritual attire,
and his bull-mask proclaimed his solar character1. Why the crown-
prince rather than the king should have discharged this duty2, and
why every ninth year he required a tale of human victims3, are
points for later consideration. Here I am concerned to note merely
his probable relation to the sun and to the dance.

Dr J. G. Frazer4, after discussing the dance of the youths and
maidens at Knossos in connexion with Labyrinths old and new,
pens the following paragraph, with which I find myself largely in
agreement5:

'A dance or game which has thus spread over Europe and survived in
a fashion to modern times must have been very popular, and bearing in mind
how often with the decay of old faiths the serious rites and pageants of grown
people have degenerated into the sports of children, we may reasonably ask
whether Ariadne's Dance or the Game of Troy may not have had its origin in
religious ritual. The ancients connected it with Cnossus and the Minotaur.
Now we have seen reason to hold, with many other scholars, that Cnossus was
the seat of a great worship of the sun, and that the Minotaur was a representation
or embodiment of the sun-g'od. May not, then, Ariadne's dance have been an
imitation of the sun's course in the sky ? and may not its intention have been,
by means of sympathetic magic, to aid the great luminary to run his race on
high? We have seen that during an eclipse of the sun the Chilcotin Indians
walk in a circle, leaning on staves, apparently to assist the labouring orb. In
Egypt also the king, who embodied the sun-god, seems to have solemnly walked
round the walls of a temple for the sake of helping the sun on his way. If there
is any truth in this conjecture, it would seem to follow that the sinuous lines of
the Labyrinth which the dancers followed in their evolutions may have
represented the ecliptic, the sun's apparent annual path in the sky. It is some
confirmation of this view that on coins of Cnossus the sun or a star appears in

1 In 1890 Miss J. E. Harrison wrote : ' It seems possible that the man-bull form of
the Minotaur may have been suggested by the necessities of a mimetic dance, the part
of Minotaur being taken by a man with a bull-head mask' {Myth. Mon. Anc. Ath.
p. cxxvii). This view I supported and sought to strengthen in the Jonm. Hell. Stud.
1894 xiv. 124 n. 247. In the Class. Rev. 1903 xvii. 410 f. I went further and conjectured
that, since the Cretans conceived of the sun as a bull, Minos as sun-king wore a bull-
mask, and that this ritual costume gave rise to the legend of the Minotaur. In Folk-Lore
1904 xv. 272 I shifted my ground and, for reasons which will subsequently appear, con-
tended that the Minotaur was, not Minos himself, but Minos' son in the ritual disguise
of the solar bull. See also G. Murray The Rise of the Greek Epic2 Oxford 1911
pp. 156—158.

2 Folk-Lore 1904 xv. 392 f.

3 Class. Rev. 1903 xvii. 411, Folk-Lore 1904 xv. 394 ff.

4 Frazer Golden Botigh?: The Dying God p. 77, cp. id.3 The Magic Art i. 312.

5 I had almost completed my own account of the Labyrinth before reading Dr Frazer's
important and helpful chapter. We have approached the matter from different angles,
he dealing with the octennial tenure of the kingship, I with the solar bull; but at this
point our results approximate.