#icarus/asterion

[jamgraphicdesign]

Tragedies of the Labyrinth

Icarus & the Minotaur

[ligbi]

So there was a french animated film about the friendship between Icarus and the Minotaur last year and I was supposed to hear about it on the bird app?

I mean it’s literally not streaming anywhere yet nor does it have a home media release at this time but I would like to get hyped in hopes of one of those things happening eventually.

It has a good style! I would like to see the tragedy! 

[lalalalupia]

no children of the labyrinth escaped out alive.

LISTEN, LISTEN TO ME, I WILL MAKE ICARUS AND MINOTAUR TO BE FRIEND….AND ALSO Apollo 🔥🔥

[peachburger]

I’m obsessed with the film even though I haven’t watched it yet BUT WHEN I DO

It is on SIGHT.

[suzie-guru]

Despite the heavy rain in Grand Rapids, I took myself out and about and finally made it to where @hellenhighwater’s breathtaking and deeply moving work for ArtPrize, “Old Stories”, was being displayed.

It was thrilling to see all of this in person after watching their progression on @hellenhighwater’s tumblr. I kept wanting to grab others and go “Make sure to follow their tumblr! It’s a treasure trove!”

The pieces that moved me the most are incontestably the ones featuring the Minotaur - after Medusa, his story is the most tragic of the Greek Myths to me and these pieces made me ache for him even more. I fell in love with these statues through watching the progression of their creation, but seeing them in person? All I could think of is how badly he deserved to be rescued, saved from his imprisonment, his loneliness. It hit me like a gut punch.

Which is why I loved the third and final piece for his story so much. The original ending will always be told, but on the other end of the labyrinth, there’s a more hopeful, gentler ending where the walls crack and crumble, and Asterion steps out and away from his prison, gets to see the stars and feel the sun…

The piece I didn’t expect to move me so deeply was Narcissus.

As it says on the artist’s statement for the piece, in a mythos full of capricious gods, ravaging heroes, and half-human monsters, Narcissus’ only crime was being beautiful and solitary. How many girls have had to deal with the same persistence and accusations of coldness? Can’t he have the same protectiveness we give them? I never would have thought such things, but this work opened my mind. Thank you for that, @hellenhighwater.

Please, if you’re able to do so, come to Grand Rapids and see all of the works in person, especially @hellenhighwater’s! And vote for them!!!

Now, I’m off to write that story about Ariadne and Asterion being siblings that I always wanted to get around to…

[harley-the-pancake]

Guys. Guys. Guys.

Asterion means starry in Greek, Asterius means star.

The sun is a star.

Icarus flew too close to the sun.

Oh my god I’m connecting the dots.

[mirkobloom77]

@im-fairly-whitty your AU,,,,,

[amorphousbl0b]

“You tell me there is someone in the labyrinth.”

“There is.”

“Could I meet him?”

“You would not get along.”

“Oh, why not? I just want someone to play with.”

“He is a hungry creature. He eats people.”

“Why?”

“Because he is a monster. He has the body of an enormous man and the face of a bull.”

“Bulls eat grass, not meat.”

“This one eats men. That is all he has ever eaten. Rather, that is all he has ever been fed.”

“That is a sad way to live.”

“It is. But that is what our benefactor decrees, and I am at his mercy.”

“You? What did you do?”

“You know I built the labyrinth. It is the creature’s prison. Every boy and girl from our homeland who has died in that place has me to thank. Even then, I have done far worse than that.”

“I think the king is to blame.”

“Speak carefully when you besmirch him. Call him our benefactor, or when a cleverer guard listens, the bull father.”

“Bull father? You could not mean…”

“The thing in the maze, yes, is his son. And for this too I am to blame, I who crafted the means for his wife’s accursed tryst.”

“How could such a thing happen? People do not give birth to monsters.”

“The father was insolent and refused to give the gods their due. Asterion is a punishment.”

“A child cannot be a punishment.”

“No, my boy, I think he can.”

[beautifulbookishdisaster]

"Your big brawny monster of a man threw himself in front of me. I don't think I'm allowed to hate someone who took a bullet for me. It's really fucking inconvenient."

Katee Robert, Dark Restraint (Icarus)

[disruptivevoib]

Hi there! Im not sure if you already answered this question, but if you didn’t, may I ask what inspired you to choose The Muses as the names for your Eleutheromania au? I think it’s really cool :o)

I'll be so very real. I chose it pretty arbitrarily? I like greek mythos and thought the muses would be a fun gimmick! I think I'd def change them to something else if I could but the names are so heavily tied to me I don't really think it possible

[portokali]

something about the labyrinth. it’s like it curses sons and fathers

[piracypiranha]

Posting my wip to hold myself acoutable etc etc

[hellenhighwater]

What led to you choosing the myths you did? Like why Icarus, The Labyrinth, Narcissus, etc (I think that's all of them? I can't remember if Orpheus was in there at one point or not lol).

At first I was just doing the ones that I was fondest of--I spent some time reading my mom's old college textbooks when I was a little kid, and the mythology section always stuck with me. So initially I was just choosing ones that resonated. When I hit a point where I was deciding, okay, yeah, this is going to be a single body of work, I decided on central themes of isolation, escape, failure in the narrative, and threshold moments. The myths included are Icarus, the Minotaur, Orpheus and Eurydice, Prometheus, and Narcissus. For all of these except Prometheus, these stories include the moment of their deaths; for most of them, they are not the heroes of their own stories. I was also going for myths that I thought were pretty well-known.

There was another ask about this--there's a few that I considered but didn't include. Sisyphus was one, because his punishment is so visually evocative, but Sisyphus genuinely sucked. For figures like Asterion and Narcissus, you can see them as sympathetic if you look at their stories from their perspectives, but Sisyphus was a greedy murderous bastard who violated hospitality rules to kill people. I also really thought about Atlas, but I haven't settled on a depiction that would be feasible in ceramic while also conveying the weight that has to be present. It's one I may still work towards, we'll see.

[luvtak]

corona borealis, lfx

✧ genre/tw rambly soul-crushing fluff, one sweet kiss!!, lovely as a pet-name, felix being an undeniably sweet bf like always and hearing a bedtime story <3 , largely unedited.

✧ w/c 952 <3

✧ a/n definitely not brought on by asea felix are you kidding... he's so lovely i just had to dawdle on about it somewhere so here you go! also, the thought of telling lix a bedtime story makes me wanna cry i hope i'm not alone. mwah!!

His arm is hot around you, keeping you safe from the scary silhouettes the shadows bring, and the night is breathing. A group of you had come to this little campground for a night away from the city lights, and while the two of you are alone you can still hear the rest of the boy’s nighttime sounds mixing in with crickets and critters. 

Your boyfriend stands beside you, listening intently as you tell him stories of the stars. Usually, these tales come from the comfort of your bed–rustling under covers and speaking into his mouth, sharing breath and love until you fall asleep, tracing false shapes in the plastic stars adorning your ceiling. But tonight, under the cover of a too cold darkness you tell him his bedtime stories beneath the sky. 

His face is tilted up, looking to see where your fingers are pointing, and the soft glint in his midnight eyes makes you pause. You’ve never known someone who looked so alive, someone with a sun for a soul. Felix has the brightest smile you’ve ever seen, alight with joy and senseless mischief–eyes wide with wonder at the constellations rising above him. 

Looking at him is dizzying; that feeling when you put your arms out and spin so fast you fall, a carousel going so round and round. You feel like flying, rising up like the moment Icarus’ wings took him up and away. 

Sometimes you wonder if it’s normal to feel like this… if everyone in love feels as though they are the creator, the inventor of such depraved desire and compassion for another. Surely, you must be the first–no one else had felt Felix’s fingertips on their skin or his lips sweetly drinking them in. How could someone say they’ve encountered a deeper love than this when your sweetheart is the embodiment of love, Venus as a boy. 

He turns to you in your moment of hesitation, smiling at you with all the care in the world. He loves you endlessly, burns for you and the soft caress of your affection. You can tell he doesn’t know why you stopped speaking, but he’s happy just the same–sharing your space and time, living in this moment with you. He remembers the first time you told him a story, speaking the words softly, he thinks he fell in love right there. 

“What’s that one?” he asks, catching your still raised hand in his own. 

“Oh, it's a crown, see?” you can see his eyes tracing the points, finding the shape that connects the points together. “It’s Ariadne’s wedding tiara, she was a princess of Crete who helped Theseus slay her brother the Minotaur Asterion. After they escaped the labyrinth, the prince left her on the Island of Naxos where she was found by Dionysus,” 

“He left her there?!” he gasps, your sweet boy forever confused by ill intentions, even in a story. 

“Yeah, he’s so lame, right? Anyway, after the God finds her on his island they fall in love and eventually marry… the crown was her wedding present, and after she died Dionysus flung it into the sky to honor her.”

Felix is quiet for a long time after this, inhaling the story with all the deference you deserve. After every narrative he takes his time to think about how he feels about it: the first time you finished a movie with him and he was quiet for fifteen minutes before he told you he liked it, he is like that now. Quietly staring at the sky, not ignoring you for his hand still made its path up and down your arm and you know if you called his name he’d answer, but you don’t want to interrupt his silent seeking. 

His life is noisy, spirited, and wonderful in all the ways a beautiful boy like him creates, your infatuation came in chaos–in mindless chatter and kitchen counter dance parties, but you fell in love in silence. In the moments when the world was quiet and all you could hear was his heartbeat, the drawling intake of his lungs filling and releasing. You adore his voice, but just existing with him, sharing the same air would be lovely enough for a lifetime. 

Finally, after minutes of staring ahead, he speaks–softly but with no less intensity, 

“If something were to happen to you I would make you into a constellation.” 

His eyes, bright with longing stare into yours, and you know he’s not being funny. He means it with all of him, means it with every atom of his being. 

Shocked and in love with him you laugh, bursting with fondness never hidden. “I love you too,” you say, for you know that's what he means. A love that spills from his veins whenever he thinks of you, so massive and consuming that the words aren’t enough. “I’d make a constellation for you too, it’d be the prettiest one in the whole sky.” 

When he moves closer to you, you can feel the smile radiating on his shadowed face–sweeping his grin over the plane of your cheekbones. Scorching your skin where his lips touch, a traveling forest fire of kisses. When his journey ends, sliding his mouth over yours the flames grow, getting taller and taller as his caress goes deeper. 

The night is chilly, but there is no need for a coat when his arms are around you–sweeping you into his embrace with only the stars to watch. 

“Lets go to bed, lovely” he muttered, breathing through open-mouthed kisses and shared smiles. Leading you to where your tent lies, to where stories and sleep await you–love and life and dreams filled with him, your constellation of a boy. 

© LUVTAK 2024

[classicstober]

Welcome to ClassicsTober 2023!

✏️🏺🖊️

In 2021 my friend Dr Cora Beth Fraser and I (@greekmythcomix ) accidentally started ‘Classics-tober’ – a list of Ancient Mediterranean Myth and History prompts for each day in October, so that we had an excuse to draw Classics stuff for a month. We did it again last year and even more people joined in, so we’ll be running it again this year – we’re just putting the final touches to the prompt list for this year. And now that there are a LOT of new Social Media platforms, we’re going to be attempting to run it on as many of them as possible!

The idea is to create something - anything - for the prompt. Like other October prompt lists, it can be an illustration, but it can also be text, reference, historical artefact, video, story, translation... pretty much anything you're interested in from the Ancient Med World that fits with the prompt. There's no pressure to do every single one, just the ones you like.

This year we’ve chosen Ancient Greek Myth Characters, some well-known and others less so.

If you'd like to join in, tag this account and use #ClassicsTober and #ClassicsTober23 on your social media posts when you share them (and if on Tumblr tag this account)

NOTE: please make sure if you share the graphic you add the ALT text (below for you to copy and paste)

ALT:

Classics*-Tober3

Ancient Greek Myth Characters

* meaning Ancient Greece and Rome because no one's come up with a better term yet, but if you want to add additional Ancient Med cultures then yes please - especially if you can link them to versions of these myths/ characters!

1 Cassandra

2 Medusa

3 Asterion

4 Lycaon

5 Chiron

6 Medea

7 Persephone

8 Icarus

9 Achilles

10 Asklepius

11 Pandora

12 Theseus

13 Arachne

14 Helen

15 Prometheus

16 Circe

17 Atalanta

18 Phaedra

19 Sisyphus

20 Odysseus

21 Psyche

22 Midas

23 Orpheus

24 Hephaestus

25 Talos

26 Thetis

27 Pygmalion

28 Nyx

29 Nemesis

30 Tiresias

31 Hecate

#ClassicsTober #ClassicsTober23

Share or create any style of media inspired by the prompt for the day - illustration story, poetry, artefacts, video, translation, anything! Do as many as you like. Share with the hashtags above.

[whencyclopedia]

Minotaur

In Greek mythology, the Minotaur was a monster with the body of a man and the head and tail of a bull. The Minotaur was the offspring of the Cretan Queen Pasiphae and a majestic bull. Due to the Minotaur's monstrous form, King Minos ordered the craftsman, Daedalus, and his son, Icarus, to build a huge maze known as the Labyrinth to house the beast. The Minotaur remained in the Labyrinth receiving annual offerings of youths and maidens to eat. He was eventually killed by the Athenian hero Theseus.

The word Minotaur is a compound word consisting of the ancient Greek name "Μίνως" or "Minos" and the noun "ταύρος" or "bull." Thus, the word Minotaur comes to mean "bull of Minos." While, the Minotaur's birth name, Asterion, in ancient Greek "ἀστέριον" means "starry one" which suggests an association with the bull constellation: Taurus.

Minos & The Bull from the Sea

In Greek myth, Minos was one of the three sons from the union of Europa and Zeus; when Zeus was took the form of a bull. Europa's husband was the King of Crete, Asterion, who looked over the boys as if they were his own. When Aseterion died, it was unclear which of the three sons should ascend to power. The three sons were Minos, Sarpedon, and Rhadamanthus. It was Minos, whose name in Cretan actually means king, who was fated to be king of Crete even though Minos' ascension to power was a difficult journey because he first had to see off his sibling rivals. Minos, however, had one advantage that his brothers did not. He claimed that he had the support and authority from the gods to rule, and he boasted that he could prove it by praying for whatever he wanted and the gods would make it so. Thus, one day while sacrificing to Poseidon, he prayed that a bull would appear from the depths of the sea. Minos vowed to heaven that he would sacrifice the bull to Poseidon once it appeared. Poseidon, then, produced a magnificent bull from the sea; thus, Minos' claim for power was validated for no one dared to defy the favor of the gods, let alone the mighty Poseidon who ruled over all of the seas. As a result of winning the throne, Minos banished his brothers from Crete. The three brothers would be re-united in afterlife, for after they died they were made judges in the Underworld. It was their task to judge the dead in order to assign where their placement was in the Underworld based upon the merits of their life.

However, King Minos did not fulfill his vow to Poseidon; he kept the majestic Cretan bull for himself and sacrificed a different one to the god. Angered by King Minos' disrespect, Poseidon plotted to punish him for his arrogance and hubris. In accordance to some versions of the myth, it is Poseidon who punishes Minos by instilling a passion within the king's wife, Pasiphae, for the bull that came from the sea. However, according to the Roman author Hyginus, it is Venus (Aphrodite) who curses Pasiphae, because the Queen had not shown proper piety to the goddess for some time. The goddess punished her by sending a salacious passion for the majestic bull from the sea. Another version tells how Poseidon, angered by Minos, went to Aphrodite for her help in the matter and she cursed Pasiphae as a favor to Poseidon.

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