Starting a freelancing endeavor very often equals embarking on a deeper quest of meaning and letting shapes emerge that one couldn't even dream of before. What is it that I want to do? What is it I actually will end up doing? What's the value of my work? What's the identity that communicates through the colors I pick, the images I choose, the name I assign to my little big endeavour?
The name 'asterion' chose me, much like many other of the good things that have shaped my life. After transitioning out of my role as a president at oikos, it was very clear that I was longing for the freedom self-employment had to offer. Too much possibility out there, too many colors on my palette to be restricted to the canvas of only one organization. So I went in, listening. Letting emerge. Writing down dreams and visions in random places & times like train journeys at 4 am in the morning. It's surely been a journey of growing aware of how important identity is as a concept in western society. And about how little this sometimes has to do with conscious choice, but with being found & leaning into felt resonance.
So, there I was, running through the rain in beautiful Negril, listening to the new book of one of my favorite thinkers, Sophie Strand. Zooming into stories about monsters & mothers, mythic mycelium and deeply kinetic cultures that have been sucked up and twisted on their head by sun-god driven narratives of what we nowadays would interpret as the foundations of patriarchy. There I was, looking over the glowing ocean, being introduced to a new version of a story I thought wasn’t related to me at all, feeling it ripple through my skin. Have you ever wondered about the nature of the minotaur and the labyrinth?
The creature, half man, half bull, has often been referred to as a dangerous monster that had to be locked away in a labyrinth - even though little is known about his wrongdoings.
Sophie summarizes the popular story: ‘Young Theseus of Athens comes to the rescue, wooing the Minotaur's sister, Ariadne, so that she reveals the secrets of the labyrinth. The patriarchal hero slays the Minotaur, wins the heart of the Cretan princess, and sets sail for more adventures, discarding Ariadne on another island almost as quickly as he had claimed her.’ *
There we go with the hero's journey as we know it: the warrior who slays the dragon, sealing his purpose by pushing against and defeating the other. ‘But who is the adversary? Is it really a monster? What if I told you there was a secret inside every dragon-slaying, beast-destroying myth you've ever heard? And what if that secret was both tender and tragic? What if behind every famous monster there was a mother?’ Mother as in a matriarchal, nature- & land-based way of being that is murdered and subsumed into a "solarized" sun god pantheon.
Sophie describes how nature reverence started turning into nature domination as the Indo-Germanic tribes started pushing violently into the Mediterranean, and how the mythology of the sacred bull and the labyrinth, as one example, far predate Greek myths.
‘When we look at Greek myths full of monsters, rape, and heroic valor-we have to remember that many of these myths are translations of older stories, or at least fusions of two competing mythologies: one focused on nature reverence and mother goddesses, and the other characterized by violent heroes and a "solarization" of gods and sacred symbols. [...] Deracinated and replanted into a new, violent mythological ecosystem, earlier gods became murderous monsters, and goddesses withered into helpless princesses.’ Sophie invites us to connect back to the lunar realm, stitching together what archaeologists and historians have managed to reconstruct about life on Crete and the Minoan culture- the origin of the Minotaur- which is characterized by movement, by dance as the plentiful nature-reverrent, peaceful depictions in the temporary art suggest. ‘Cretan culture is essentially kinetic. Divinity is reached not through heroic individualism but through connective, dynamic play. God does not dwell in the leaping youth or the charging bull but is constituted interstitially between the moving figures. The dance itself is the divine.’
‘The Minotaur, then, is a dancer.’, Sophie derives, ‘the god of mutability and movement. He represented the fluid, pleasureful interface between human beings and the animate world of everything else. When Theseus slays the Minotaur, he is not slaying a monster. He is slaying an entire culture- a Cretan culture dominated by the image of a feminine divinity’
The cretan figure of the Minotaur had a name: Asterion, or starry one. Sophie suggests that, before his Greek bastardization into an anonymous monster, his name may have referred to the constellation Taurus or to the rising of Sirius, an event that is linked to Cretan festivals and mead making. ‘So when we are thinking of the minotaur in the labyrinth, perhaps we are really seeing a solar system. The minotaur is the guiding star. The labyrinth's winding courses are the paths of planets, objects, beings, galactic dust caught in the divine pull of a horned nucleus.’
Sophie offers a beautiful interpretation: ‘The labyrinth never was a static object or a place. It was never a stone corridor. Instead, it was an event. It was ritual dance to honor the bull and the annual rising of certain constellations. Each "passageway" was a chain of human hands, a serpentins gyration of gestures. The labyrinth was only ever the sacred relationship between people dancing-ecstatically, kinetically-inscribing the patterns of the sky into the soft dirt of the ground.’
The minotaur, asterion, re-introduces us to the kind of playful, expressive movement that understands it is always in dialogue with other animals, the weather, the texture and slope of the landscape between our toes. What if we could all learn how to dance again? ‘And like the starry asterion, the more we dance the more people will be attracted into our orbit of participatory, exultant celebration.’ How profound. How poetic.
“What, if not this, is at the core of my work in the world?”, I thought to myself, still slightly drowning in a flood of insight and warm tears, melting together with the sweet rain and the salty dust of the ocean in front of me. What if not the idea that as we join our hands in common movement, as we seek connection to the land below our feet and look up to the stars in celebration, we connect to the magical force of life itself and make impossible futures possible.
Asterion, for me, represents an invitation into learning how to live together, in connection, celebration, and dance with all the life that renders the possibility of our own thriving. An invitation into play and exploration, steeping ourselves back deeply into the multiple contexts that make the meadow of our life as we find new, ancient ways to meet the challenges of our times. Kinetically, in reverence for nature and magic, together.
Will you dance with me?
*The quoted text in this post originates from Sophie Strand’s first book ‘The Flowering Wand: Rewilding the Sacred Masculine’. Make sure to get your copy or listen to the audio book :)
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