Man, Slayer of Self: Part I

The Beast

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The price and prize of a good quest is a good death.

Not at the end of life. The point is to die before we die.

But what dies? What part of us?

In many myths we find a sacrificial animal like a treasure that the hero may receive to achieve his own ritual death. This animal isn't the malevolent beast—often a dragon—of lore. Rather, it’s a holy creature.

The sacrifice in question concerns the hero intimately: It is the male hero's self-sacrifice, his deathly ordeal, slaughtering of his own animal-self, which in Hellenic tradition is usually a bull, the Ox of the Sun, equivalent to the Bible’s Passover Lamb.

Minos

The myth of the Minotaur provides a catalogue of relevant symbols in this regard.

Minos, the king of Crete, receives a white bull from the gods. He had asked for a sign with which to dispel the pretensions of those who would be king over him, and he receives it. White like the sun, luminous, it nonetheless emerges from the depths, the sea, being a gift from Poseidon.

The waters of the deep are the unconscious—if we want to frame this in psychological terms—which contains our vital instincts. But Minos thinks it too beautiful to slay as he was supposed to do. He is subject to attachment—too much so to slaughter his animal-self. As a result, his wife, the queen, will be defiled.

When man is weak, woman is wanton.

The queen soon finds the bull and is so struck by its beauty that she joins with it, bearing a monster with the body of a man and the head of a bull: the Minotaur.

The figure of the man who has not slain his animal-self, so that his higher faculties (the head, the mind) become beastly, become occupied by the animal, by the passions: that's the Minotaur.

Minos (the weak king, the weak will) leads the queen (the “soul,” the sensual part of the self) to become ensnared and join with the instincts. The personality or ego becomes a Minotaur, and must live in a labyrinth. Our mind and soul become tortuously complicated, a prison full of winding paths and dead ends. And such a personality will demand young sacrifices, like the Minotaur who was fed young Cretan men and women. This element of the story is also allegorical: our joys and passions in life will never get to mature, falling prey to the Minotaur within.

Enter the heroic masculine and feminine to set right the abomination of Minos and his queen: Theseus has to kill the monstrous ego, and he does this by stabbing its throat, for we must cease listening to our own beastly mind.

Theseus then finds his way out of the maze not by thinking, not by trying to reckon all of its winding paths, but by feeling. He does not escape through the mind but by the sense of touch, following the thread given to him by his love, Ariadne. This is key: the male will can slay the beast but may not be able to navigate the labyrinth of the mind, for its tendency is to think its way out (which, again, is what the labyrinth represents—a complicated mind). He must feel his way out instead; he must allow himself to be called-out by the attraction of the feminine: life, nature, the world, “becoming,” participation in the world.

Alas, just as King Minos went astray, Theseus does likewise: He rejects Ariadne.

But, in a sense, this is as it should be, because the will has to now be transformed. By killing the Minotaur, we are going to undergo a transformation. By defeating itself in the form of a monstrous ego, the personality recreates itself; it allows itself to be remade in a heavenly form. Thus, after Theseus leaves her, to Ariadne comes a husband worthy of her, a deity, Dionysus. We find the same motif in the rescue of Theseus from the underworld by the hero Heracles. We can imagine Theseus being rescued by Heracles, learning from him, and returning to claim his Ariadne, now as a “deified” hero.

Zeus

The myth of Zeus taking the form of a white bull and spiriting Europa away to Crete from her Phoenician home in Tyre, whereupon he takes his human form to join with her (that's the implication) is the precise inverse of the Minotaur myth. In both cases, the bull is white, luminous, related to the sun, but also to the waters (Zeus, in the form of a white bull, traverses the waters, after all).

Two Horns

The bull’s dual character can be related to its horns, which can appear as a crescent moon, or the luminous arc of solar light seen during an eclipse. In fact, the Zeus-Europa union has been theorized to relate to solar eclipse observances in Minoan culture. (This duality is also similar to the submissive Lamb in the Bible and the conquering Lion: The Lion represents the same figure as the Lamb, Christ, but is clearly solar, compared to the telluric Lamb.)

Like horns which grow from the head, the mind is ever engaged in two movements: aversion and attraction; desire and derision. But these two forces can also be harnessed for good.

You find a dual meaning in the sacrificial animal of the Rig Veda in India, where a cosmic horse is said to proceed both from Yama, god of death, and from the Sun, or from the “sea” and the “upper waters.” The Vedas also recommend cattle sacrifices following cattle raids, and oxen are offered to Indra in the Rig Veda. Horse sacrifice, however, is central. (But we're not going to get into the wider symbolism of the horse—the horse on which the Pale Rider rides in the Apocalypse, Pegasus in the case of Heracles—as that would be another topic.)

Back to Crete: whereas Minos’ wife unites not with him but with his animal-self, conceiving the Minotaur, a hybrid monster, Zeus unites with Europa successfully and, according to Pseudo-Apollodorus, produces several children, Minos among them. Decline has set in, then. A break in generations has occurred, with Minos failing where his father succeeded.

Crete, where Zeus united with Europa, held a yearly celebration in honour of the enthronement of the king of Olympus. According to Proclus, this was the very centre of Hellenic spirituality, and Porphyry tells us that Pythagoras himself sacrificed an animal and was initiated there, at Mount Ida.

The initiate brings his animal-self to be sacrificed at the Holy Mountain, which is a place of spiritual rebirth.

This is equivalent to Solomon sacrificing at the Jerusalem temple in 2 Chronicles, as the temple represents Mount Sinai (the Holy of Holies its the mountain peak, the highest point of the mountain is the innermost of the temple).

Zeus succeeds, Minos fails, and Theseus is an ambiguous success.

Another clear success, more expansive than the story of Zeus and Europa, would be that of Odysseus.

Odysseus

In Book 19 of Homer's Odyssey, Penelope explains that dreams reach mortals via one of two gates. One gate is made of horn and gives forth true dreams, and one of ivory, sending us false ones. She has just dreamt a dream that suggests Odysseus will return to her, but does not know if it's true, and in fact doubts that it is.

Horn may be taken to represent the slain beast. Once the solar bull or animal-self is subdued, our dreams are purified, and we may return from the hero's journey.

In fact, Odysseus does perform bull sacrifices, although things go wrong in this regard. In Book 12, he encounters the Oxen of the Sun, the holy bulls of the Helios, which cattle are guarded by two daughters of the Sun: Phaethusa and Lampetia. These are the maidens of initiation. We have here the recurring female role of guarding the prize of worthy men.

Odysseus' crew, who are entreated to let the holy animals be, transgress, killing the bulls. They defy Odysseus' orders on account of hunger and are punished: all will perish in a storm sent by Zeus, except Odysseus himself, whose journey home is now to be delayed.

The clamouring, the many voices of the mind and body, the instincts and passions—in this case, literally hunger—lead to premature initiation, like facing the cross without having fasted in the desert. Slaying the animal-self when it isn't subdued, when we aren't ready, when we are still subject to the unruly mind (Odysseus' crew; hunger) ends in failure.

But Odysseus learns a valuable lesson. He may now detach from his crew—they are dead, after all—and go it alone. When he finally arrives home, he gets the chance to apply that lesson, and does not let the same mistake play out twice. His slaughter of the suitors that want his wife is equivalent to Zeus killing off of his crew, for the suitors would do to his home what the crew did to the cattle of the Sun: they would violate Penelope like his crew disregarded the daughters of Helios.

Penelope's dream turns out to be correct: Odysseus was, in fact, returning. And since true dreams come from horn, we may say Odysseus has integrated the animal-self after all, the sacred bull. His crew, as an extension of him, did so unworthily, but he purified their mistake through his many adventuring feats.

Hermes

Another transgressor who stole the cattle of the Sun is Hermes.

According to the Homeric Hymn, he was born in a mountain from a nymph, Maia, equivalent to other holy mountains, and stole the sacred bulls of Apollo.

But, crucially, he does not eat their flesh, despite being tempted to do so. Unlike the crew of Odysseus, his theft was not motivated by hunger, the passions, instincts. Instead, Hermes sacrifices two of the cattle. This number is important: again, it represents duality (desire and disgust; affection and aversion; hope and fear). Then he distributes their remains. Specifically, he divides these into 12 parts, placing himself between them—12 is the number of ordered diversity: Christ and his disciples; the 12 gates of the Heavenly City in the Apocalypse; 12 as maximum number of spheres that can touch a central sphere of the same size; and so on. This 12-part distribution is a dismemberment of his own animal-self. Following the suspension of ordinary phenomenal perception, we enter deep contemplation.

Hermes now returns to the mountain of his birth, the tomb/womb, like Christ’s burial after the cross.

But the element of transgression in his tale must be accounted for. Hermes still has to reconcile with Apollo. The “psyche” or soul has suspended its animal-self and now reconciles with its own spirit, the “nous” in Greek terms. These two go to Zeus, and eventually, Hermes confesses his theft to Apollo. He then gives the sun-god his lyre: the creative voice is given over to a higher spiritual principle. Apollo, in turn, gives Hermes dominion, the sort of mastery that is received when we submit to the higher, in the form of a whip to keep grazing animals (the instincts) in order, and a staff, which symbolizes authority.

We are each of us Hermes and Apollo.

Jason the Argonaut

If we turn to the story of Medea and Jason the Argonaut, we find that Medea is a similar figure to Penelope but also to the daughters of the Sun, because she herself is a descendant of Helios.

Jason, for his part, is of the lineage of Hermes and is also engaged in the quest for a sacrificial solar animal, namely the Golden Fleece, a symbol of the animal-self purified, slain and integrated (equivalent to the blood of the Passover Lamb).

To this end, Jason gathers a crew, the Argonauts, which includes Heracles.

They set sail and come to the island of Lemnos, whose women, it turns out, have neglected the veneration of Aphrodite, meaning that they have rejected the feminine ideal. Aphrodite, therefore, turns them foul of smell. Femininity, in this case beauty, turns those who reject it foul (by comparison, perhaps). Their husbands seek other women, therefore, inciting the scorned wives to kill them.

The proper relation of the sexes has collapsed.

Later, Jason will kill the Harpies that have been appointed to eat the meals of a king called Phineus. In return for his help, Phineus instructs the Argonaut on how to finally make it to Colchis, where the Golden Fleece awaits.

There, a woman called Medea anoints him with a balm so that the heat from fire-breathing oxen does not burn him. Anointing relates to kingship, and becoming impervious to fire (to the dragon) is a sign of spiritual overcoming. Jason, it seems, is on the right track. As for the bulls in question, in this case, they are not so much solar as fiery, infernal mode, dragon-like. The mammalian instinct is fused with the reptilian instincts. (This dragon-bovine also occurs in Chinese culture as the Qilin.) With the tale of the Argonauts, we get something important: the figure of a sacrificial solar bull is in continuity with the hellish dragon figure: such are the bulls at Colchis, the cattle made by Hephaestus, gifted to the king of that land.

Medea teaches Jason how to defeat them, also helping him escape her father, but she kills her own brother in the process. She's disloyal to her original family, and so Zeus sends a storm to scourge their ship, and purification for Medea's transgression must be sought.

The women of Lemnos, the Harpies, and now also Medea herself, are all examples for corrupted femininity. Medea is supposed to be the guide for Jason, and she is, but an imperfect one. Jason finally overcomes other difficulties with her help, but ends up deciding to marry Creusa, heiress of Corinth, for political reasons, breaking his vow to marry Medea.

Scorned, Medea poisons Jason’s wife-to-be as well as her own children, that he might have no progeny. Jason then loses the favour of Hera, and his whole enterprise literally rots and crushes him when a piece of the Argo, his ship, collapses upon him in his sleep.

According to Euripides, Medea leaves Corinth on a chariot driven by dragons. We may imagine these dragons symbolically as the very same fire-breathing bulls that she helped Jason overcome, now in full draconian bloom to match her own evil.

Aeneas

The same association occurs in Virgil's Aeneid.

In Book 2, before the devastating fall of Troy, the priest of the city—this was a rotating position and was occupied by one Laocoön at the time—is about to perform a bull sacrifice when he is attacked by sea serpents, flaming-crested and sputtering fire.

The sacrifice is thus brutally interrupted. When the soul, the psyche, is chaotic, we cannot engage properly in the sacrifice of the animal-self. That the waters produce dragons to devour the city’s priest shows the Trojans were not worthy of the solar animal; instead of receiving light, they receive a burning fire. Thereafter, Troy is precisely destroyed by fire from a people from across the sea. Greeks coming from the waters to burn the city is a recurrence of the fire-crested sea-serpents.

Later on, Aeneas himself will face those chaotic waters; he sails to Thrace, Crete, is shipwrecked in Carthage for a time, finally arrives at Sicily and, from there, mainland Italy, where he sacrifices bulls at the instruction of a priestess of Apollo, Sibyl of the Sun.

Essentially, in Book 6 of the Aeneid, Aeneas does what the priest Laocoön could not do in Book 2. Aeneas’ solar bull sacrifice allows him to enter the underworld, ascend to paradise, and return to the earth with new insight. He succeeds because he has been purged through an exilic journey, analogous to Odysseus’ journey home (the Israelites’ Biblical wandering before entering the promised land, the Qur’anic exile in Medina prior to the conquest of Mecca, etc.) You can sacrifice the animal-self, but only after you've tamed it. You have to undergo the 40 days of fasting in the desert before you can face the cross without going insane, without being dragged off by the serpent like Laocoön.

Heracles

Heracles will actually capture the bull Poseidon gave to Minos during one of his labours. The bull breaks free, however, and is eventually sacrificed by Theseus before he faces the Minotaur. But Heracles' principle encounter with the Oxen of the Sun occurs later, during his 10th labour.

He faces the giant Geryon, who has stolen the sacred animals and taken them to the far west (associated with death, the setting sun). Geryon is the false self, the priority of the body over the mind, the ego that steals the energies of the animal-self. Consequently, during the 11th labour, Heracles can successfully face the dragon Ladon to win the apples of immortality.

We can map these onto the paradigm of the Gospel as well:

• By the 10th labour, Heracles has undergone many trials, equivalent to the 40-day fast.

• He can defeat Geryon, which is the equivalent of resisting the devil's temptations (power, but also the authority of the Sanhedrin and the Romans).

• He retrieves the holy cattle, which the slaying and glorification of the Lamb, the animal-self, on the cross.

• His defeat of the dragon Ladon is the overcoming of death, the Harrowing of Hades, and

• receiving the fruit of immortality is the Resurrection.

On one level, the dragon is that serpentine labyrinth in which the Minotaur dwells; it's what happens when we do not slay the animal-self. Reptilian instincts take over because we didn't tame the mammalian faculties, so to speak. But the dragon is also just that deeper foe we may defeat when we have faced the animal-self and integrated it. There's always a greater challenge after the bull sacrifice, frequently associated with keeping the hero from his wife or future wife:

• Heracles, for example, faces the dragon Ladon to get the Hesperides, eventually to marry Hebe, the cupbearer of the gods, after he has recovered the Oxen of the Sun.

• Odysseus slays the pretenders who clamour for Penelope after doing penance for his crew's eating of the Oxen of the Sun and having his return prophesied by a gate of horns.

• Aeneas defeats Turnus, who wanted the Latin princess Lavinia for himself, whom Aeneas eventually marries after the bull sacrifice at the Apollonian temple at Naples.

The dragon isn't always a dragon, but it always keeps the hero from fully engaging with the world, with “becoming,” nature, the realm, the feminine. And it can only be defeated after the hero has integrated his animal-self, which he can only do after rendering that self holy, which is to say, submissive (through a quest, fast, discipline, mortification).

That's the order of things.

Bilbo

In Toklien’s “The Hobbit,” the dragon Smaug comes from the north to occupy the mountain of the dwarves.

Since the sun's arc is southern from the northern hemisphere, the South represents light, waking-awareness, and the North darkness, contemplation. When we lose our ability to enter spiritual contemplation, our thoughts always churning, we get the dragon.

There is some indication in “The Silmarillion” that the devil of Tolkien's world, Morgoth, created dragons, making Smaug a satanic agency. He occupies the sacred mountain—like Sinai, Mount Ida, Erymanthos. The dwarves of the mountain are the productive powers of the body. The dwarves are driven out, and their treasure—all the energy that is in the body—is hoarded by this dragon.

Bilbo Baggins overcomes through a descent, abasement. He goes into the darkness of the mountain, like Heracles, like Aeneas:

"It was at this point that Bilbo stopped. Going on from there was the bravest thing he ever did. He fought the real battle in the tunnel alone, before he ever saw the vast danger that lay in wait. An unaccountable desire seized hold of him to rush out and reveal himself and tell all the truth to Smaug."

Defeating the dragon requires having enough of an inner witness that we don't give in to the desire to run from our practice.

Phases of the Quest

• Forty-day fast: Tame the beast, render it a holy solar animal—embracing challenges, a disciplined life, virtue, to make the body and mind submissive to the spirit and to the moral will.

• The Passion: Slay the beast, enter actual contemplation in which the ordinary movements of the mind subside and we don't react to the body: contemplative prayer, meditation.

• Crucifixion and Entombment: Face a violent reaction. This is the dragon, which is either a challenge that the hero sets himself up for, as with Heracles, Aeneas, Odysseus, or the dragon is something that is forced upon him, as in the case of the dwarves in Tolkien.

We’ve identified a hierarchy of heroes:

• the clear failure of Minos,

• the initial success followed by eventual failure of Jason,

• success albeit ambiguous of Theseus,

• clear success in the case of Heracles, Odysseus, Aeneas

In each successful case, adventuring through exile without despairing of ultimate victory was key: Heracles’ labours, Odysseus quest to come back home, Aeneas’ search for his people’s promised land.

Victory is for the steadfast.