The Greek Islands by Lawrence Durrell Page A

his existence and habits have given rise to numberless differing explanations, but there is no single one which answers all the questions. Equally full of enigma is the maze – did it have a ritual function, a religious function? Did it symbolize the evolution of the individual personality into maturity – after conquering all the stresses and fears of life? Otto Rank, the psychoanalyst, seemed to think the maze was a symbol of the loops of the big intestine of a sheep or a cow – the standard form of divination. Myself, I think that a man sentenced to death was given an outside chance of redeeming his life by crossing the labyrinth and avoiding the Minotaur if he could. Somewhere I have read that, in the old Roman arenas, where so many Christians were fed to the lions, not all the cages surrounding the arena were full of wild animals; and that a slave thrown into the pit was pardoned if he twice opened an empty cage. Maybe the labyrinth worked like this; maybe the trick was to sneak through without waking the monster?
    One can scent in all this some of the origins of our own children’s infant games, whose history goes very far back. Not to wake the monster … One remembers the suspense when Odysseus hears the question: ‘Who goes there?’ It is a breathless and fearful moment, but like a typical Greek hero he is never at a loss; he replies, ‘Nobody,’ and with this strange, double-take answer strikes the first chord in modern literature – so says a critic. The later history of Minos, the subduing of Athens and the tribute of maidens and boys for the Minotaur, has a more dramatic and historic background offering little satisfaction as to the origins of these fantasies, which at one time must havebeen capable of a rational explanation. A Mithraic type of bull-culture is strongly present in all the echoes, not only of Minos’s own origin but also of that of Zeus – who was originally a Cretan, though of course worshipped later on all over Greece.
    It was in Crete that Zeus was born, in a cave you can visit today if you will face a tremendous slog; and here, in secret, he was honeyed into babyhood by two nymphs, daughters of the then king.
    He, of course, was a refugee like his brother Poseidon, but he won the distinction of finally mastering his neurotic father Chronos (Time), who had the regrettable habit of putting everything in his mouth and often swallowing it. Phagomania! Chronos swallowed a whole shopping-list of young and unfledged gods, before, at last, he had to give way and allow the Olympian gods to form themselves into a general committee appointed to oversee earthly affairs. But if Minos (a mere man) knew he was supported by both Zeus and Poseidon he must have felt great confidence in himself and his luck; it was like having a couple of friends in Parliament.
    I am limiting myself to the affairs of Crete only in these superficial considerations of mythology; I am not suggesting that there is any link between the behaviour of such a polymorph-perverse profligate as the old head-prefect of Olympus and that of the modern Cretan who, like us all, has been bowed down by nearly two thousand years of monotheism and monosexuality. Zeus was not alone in his profligacy. Most of the Olympian heroes were very lightly screwed to their thrones; the mere sight of a nymph or a goddess, and they were in hot pursuit, eager to rid her of every complex, in the most good-natured way. (Inescapable vision of Harpo Marx with butterfly net and bicycle racing about the Paramount lot.) The list of Zeus’s own conquests in the Larousse Encyclopedia of Mythology is a long one. He left no nymph unturned. Minoshad an early tendency to imitate him, and once chased a young huntress called Bryomartys into the sea; but he came to his senses soon enough and sobered up. At any rate, he never managed the vast repertoire of impersonations and disguises of the old god – which must have made Zeus a much sought-after guest at