Icarus and his father, Daedalus, were to be sacrificed to the minotaur in the labyrinth of Crete.
But Daedalus built wings for them out of materials found in the maze.
On their escape, Icarus, dazzled by his newfound flying abilities, gets too high and close to the sun.
The wax holding his wings together melts, and he plunges to his death in the sea below.
What the heck does this mean? The Greeks were over-achievers, and whoever heard of wax wings that worked?
Sigmund "Oedipus Complex" Freud dominates our analyses of mythology today. For him, Greek myths were the psychological outpourings of primitive minds.
But Robert Graves disagrees: Myths are political records from a time before writing.
Maybe the truth is a bit of both.
First, you need to know what the Minotaur was.
Minos + Taurus = King Minos's Bull
Archaeology suggests that the Minoans were more advanced than their younger Greek neighbors.
They had 4-story buildings, trademark registration for commerce, running water, & complex bureaucratic offices.
But just because they share our penchant for wasting water and tax-payer money doesn't mean they were any less savage than the rest of the ancient world.
For example, they had a festival in which they locked tributes in their maze-like government offices and sacrificed them to a man-eating bull or possibly a man in a bull costume.
From this, we get the mythical bull monster in the dungeon of the king’s palace. Because, of course, it’s always just the leader who’s depraved, and everyone else just goes along with it, right?
So you could say that Icarus rising out of some bureaucratic nightmare on the wings of his father is an allegory about escaping "the all-consuming system" through generational hard work and ingenuity.
As for what it means to "fly too close to the sun," know that many cultures, Minoans included, saw the bull as a symbol of the sun.
So you have an old man escaping a corrupt system built around a "false sun." His child then uses his inventions to try to reach the real sun. The real deal melts his father’s hard work. Son suffers a great fall and is swallowed up by the faceless sea beneath him.
The story is definitely mirroring the historical tendency for kings and princes to want to be the sun.
Akhenaten, Alexander, Napoleon, and others all took the sun as their symbol, if not their identity. Louis XIV even had himself declared The Sun King.
It didn't end well for them or their successors.
So the deeper meaning of the myth of Daedalus and Icarus is something like this:
Just because you've invented a way out of the corrupt older system where you were once trapped doesn't mean that you or your descendants can escape the corruptions that once plagued it forever.
The Romans tried to prevent this by posting a slave behind their victorious generals during triumphal parades, repeating the phrase, "Remember you are mortal."
This practice was eventually done away with after Caesar was declared a god.
200 years later, you have Emperor Elagabalus performing human sacrifices while demanding to be worshipped as Sol Invictus, the "Victorious Sun."
The fall of the Romans took longer than most empires, which only made it all the more excruciating for those living in it.
This is why we must, as ever, remain vigilant and virtuous.
Above all else, resist the desire to replace the divine with our own image and be worshipped as a god in place of god. And for the love of all that’s holy, we must ingrain this in our successors.
Lest the old dark temptations beguile us in new forms and swallow up our children.
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