Labyrinth
Daedalus
Icarus
Crystal Earnest
Eccles. 7:7
"Surely oppression maketh a wise man mad; and a gift destroyeth the heart."
Solar Prominence Eruption
Icarus and Daedalus byLord Frederick Leighton
Chess: "Labyrinth" "Daedalus" "Icarus" "Crystal" "Earnest"Daedalus
In Greek mythology, Daedalus (Latin, also Hellenized Latin Daedalos, Greek Daidalos (Δαίδαλος) meaning "cunning worker", and Etruscan Taitale) was a skillful craftsman and artisan.[1] Daedalus had two sons: Icarus and Iapyx, along with a nephew, whose name is Perdix. He is first mentioned by Homer as the creator of a wide dancing-ground for Ariadne.[2] The Labyrinth on Crete, in which the Minotaur (part man, part bull) was kept, was also created by the artificer Daedalus. In the story of the labyrinth Hellenes told, the Athenian hero Theseus is challenged to kill the Minotaur, finding his way with the help of Ariadne's thread. Daedalus' appearance in Homer is in an extended simile, "plainly not Homer's invention," Robin Lane Fox observes: "he is a point of comparison and so he belongs in stories which Homer's audience already recognized." [3] In Bronze Age Crete, an inscription da-da-re-jo-de has been read as referring to a place at Knossos,[4] and a place of worship.[5]
In Homer's language, objects which are daidala are finely crafted. They are mostly objects of armour, but fine bowls and furnishings are daidala, and on one occasion so are the "bronze-working" of "clasps, twisted brooches, earrings and necklaces" made by Hephaestus while cared for in secret by the goddesses of the sea.[6]
Ignoring Homer, later writers envisaged the labyrinth as an edifice rather than a single dancing path to the center and out again, and gave it numberless winding passages and turns that opened into one another, seeming to have neither beginning nor end.[7] Ovid, in his Metamorphoses, suggests that Daedalus constructed the Labyrinth so cunningly that he himself could barely escape it after he built it.[8] Daedalus built the labyrinth for King Minos, who needed it to imprison his wife's son the Minotaur. The story is told that Poseidon had given a white bull to Minos so that he might use it as a sacrifice. Instead, Minos kept it for himself; and in revenge, Poseidon made his wife Pasiphaë lust for the bull.[9] For Pasiphaë, as Greek mythologers interpreted it, Daedalus also built a wooden cow so she could mate with the bull, for the Greeks imagined the Minoan bull of the sun to be an actual, earthly bull.
Athenians transferred Cretan Daedalus to make him Athenian-born, the grandson[10] of the ancient king Erechtheus, who fled to Crete, having killed his nephew. Over time, other stories were told of Daedalus. In the nineteenth century, Thomas Bulfinch combined these into a single synoptic view of material which Andrew Stewart calls a "historically-intractable farrago of 'evidence', heavily tinged with Athenian cultural chauvinism".
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