Hello friends,

This post is (a lot) longer than my usual transcripts—way too long for an email, so if you’d like a smoother read, make sure you’re reading it on the website. It touches something deeply personal, but also painfully widespread right now: the ache for belonging, and the subtle ways coercion can ride in on the back of it. What follows explores the mechanisms of high-control environments—how they recruit our hopes, reshape our inner world, and slowly rewrite our sense of self, often without us noticing until much later.

I could have trimmed this into something more “shareable.” Instead, I’ve kept it long to honour my own path, and to give these ideas the space they need to breathe.

Please note that this post is currently still under construction. There are more graphics to be added (particularly to the segment describing Lifton’s work). But since I am back at full-time teaching, it may take me a while to get those up and working. For now, please enjoy the text.

As always, I hope you find nourishment here—and perhaps the simple, steady recognition that if you have been through something like this, or are in it now, you are not broken. And you are not alone.

Click the episode cover art above to listen on Spotify, or hit play on the following YouTube video to have me narrate as you follow along in this expanded transcript.

Introduction

Have you ever been in a place where it felt safer for others to approve of you than to actually know you?

A place where the welcome felt warm—until you stopped performing or let an honest question or vulnerable part of yourself be seen.

Today’s story—Theseus’ sixth and final encounter on the road from Troezen ( to Athens—offers a picture of that kind of belonging—a belonging that is contingent on you being what somebody else wants you to be in order to fit in. There is a word for this kind of pressure that we feel: coercion.

Coercive spaces never announce their true intentions up front. They use all sorts of pressure tactics to shape those who cross their thresholds into their own image. From the outside, they borrow the language of care and seem to offer a place of belonging and safety.

Once you’re in a space like that, it often takes a while to realise the price you’ve agreed to pay.

In today’s part of the Theseus’ myth, our hero finally reaches the borders of Attica exhausted—five labours behind him—and finds a house at the crossroads. A fire. A meal. A bed.

But there is a catch: a stay at an inn like this could cost our hero his feet. And in our own lives, coercive belonging can cost us our ability to move forward on our own roads, too.

In this instalment, we’ll follow Theseus into that last house on the road, and then we’ll place a counter-image beside it—another crossing, another kind of host, and a man who learns that the self he was made to believe was “not enough” was carrying something far greater than he knew.

A Return to Acorn Theory

Before we walk through the door of this final encounter on the road, we need to return for a moment to a topic we discussed in the last instalment: James Hillman’s Acorn Theory.

For a fuller exploration of Hillman’s Acorn Theory, see:

1. https://theinwardsea.substack.com/i/184934110/acorn-theory-an-introduction

2. https://theinwardsea.substack.com/i/184934110/the-passing-of-the-crown-and-acorn-theory

But the essence is this: each of us is born with a specific soul-image—a unique calling that is already complete within us. It’s close to what Plato called the daimon: an intermediary spirit or guiding voice bridging the gap between the human and the divine. Even when we feel confused or take a wrong turn on the paths of our lives, the Acorn—this soul-image, this daimon—holds true. It contains the blueprint of our true stature.

Hillman challenges the medical model that views symptoms only as things to be cured or eradicated. He argues that what we call “symptoms”—our quirks, obsessions, and deviations—can be signposts pointing toward our specific fate or calling: the quiet voice of our daimon trying to make itself heard amid the noise of life.

Oak trees grow from acorns without any special effort. That growth may not always be easy, but unless it is interrupted in some way, an acorn will become an oak. The same is true for the Acorns in each of us. We will grow into the people we are meant to be. The Acorn is not something we need to perform. It is simply who we are and who we each will become.

But when our process is interrupted or we try too hard to reshape ourselves under external pressure, we risk a rupture. We become a psyche divided against itself.

By the time Theseus reaches the borders of Attica, he has faced five brutal labours. He is strong, yes, but he is exhausted. And it’s in that moment of weariness that the road finally opens up to reveal a house: a warm light in the window, and an invitation to finally stop and rest.

Let’s step into the story, and meet our host—the one the locals call Προκρούστης (Procrustes1)—the Stretcher.

The Myth: Theseus & Procrustes

The morning sun hung low over the hills as Theseus began the last leg of his journey to Athens. He followed the Sacred Way—Ιερά Οδός—the road walked by the initiates of Demeter’s2 mysteries at Eleusis. But Theseus was walking his own initiation. He felt the pull of his destiny like a physical tug in his chest. He was so close now.

As he walked, the club of Periphetes, strapped across his back, glinted in the bright sunlight. Under his cloak, the weight of his father’s sword brushed against his thigh: a cold secret that kept him tethered to the path even as his mind raced ahead, towards the marbled heights of Athens.

Occasionally he passed others on the road. A farmer led a donkey pulling a cart laden with grain and vegetables. Two young boys ran behind the cart, laughing and shouting as they whipped at one another with long blades of grass. The man nodded at Theseus as he passed. Theseus nodded back. In their eyes he was simply a tall, broad-shouldered youth in a dusty cloak. In his own heart, he was a prince bound for his throne.

Theseus settled into a steady, rhythmic pace: the gait of a man who knew exactly where his feet were taking him.

Perhaps it was youthful impatience, or perhaps Helios was driving the horses of the sun’s chariot harder today, but the road that rounded the bay seemed to stretch longer and longer as it approached the mountains growing on the horizon that still hid Athens from his view.

Almost before he knew it, the shadows were lying in long cracks across the ground—the fissures of night through which Great Nyx crept into the world. He had hoped to reach Athens before she once again mounted the heavens, but—

“Hello, traveller! Where are you headed this evening?”

The voice broke Theseus from his thoughts.

The man was sitting on a low stone wall at the edge of the path. Despite his greying hair and beard, there was a youthfulness in his eyes that made it impossible to guess his age. As Theseus approached, the man stood and stepped towards him with a wide, easy smile.

“I’m on my way to Athens, sir.” Theseus slowed his pace slightly. “I was hoping to reach the city gates by nightfall.”

The man followed his gaze towards the mountains, then, finding the sun in the western sky, he nodded. “It’s a long way to go at this hour.” He fell into step beside Theseus as if they’d been walking together all day. “You know the inns on the far side—they’ll take advantage if you arrive late and tired.”

“They will? I mean…I didn’t know. I was planning to…”

“Oh?” The man cut Theseus off. He sounded amused. “Such a strapping lad—is this your first time to Athens, then?”

Something in his tone made Theseus feel younger than he wanted to. He felt a flush climb his cheeks.

“Yes, sir. I’m going to…”

The weight of the sword reminded him of his mother’s voice: Tell no one of your purpose, Theseus. Your father’s brothers want the throne for themselves. If they discover that a true prince lives, your life will be in terrible danger. Tell no one!

“I’m going to look for…work” He said, as his hand instinctively shifted beneath his cloak to ensure the hilt of the sword was hidden.

“Ah! Athens… for work!” the man chuckled, a deep, paternal sound. “It’s a grand city, lad. But a city that eats the exhausted. You don’t want to arrive there with dust in your lungs and a hitch in your stride. You should enter it as a man of stature.”

He leaned in slightly, his tone turning conspiratorial.

“My home is just there,” he pointed towards the foothills of the mountain—“up against the slope. Do you see? There…where the roads meet. My wife has a pot of stew on the hearth and we have an extra bed. I build it with my own two hands.” He extended both his hands proudly as if for inspection.

“Come! Stay the night. Have a meal, and a bath. Set off fresh in the morning, and you’ll step into the agora looking like a prince. Tomorrow you’ll find your work. But today—rest.”

A flicker of the boyish enthusiasm he tried so hard to mask made its way from his chest to Theseus’ cheeks. The road had been long.

“You’re very generous, sir,” Theseus said. “It has been a long journey from Argolis3.”

“Argolis! Young man, you have walked far. And through such… dangerous land. Tell me,” the man glanced back towards the isthmus,“you didn’t have any…trouble, did you?”

“Well,” Theseus thought quickly, “I hear it’s safer these days. I’ve heard a champion—one that may one day be as great as Herakles himself—has been ridding the isthmus of its dangers. I heard even the dreadful sow of Crommyon is no more!”

“Amazing…The Crommyonian Sow, eh? What times we are living in. My son is a…” the man seemed to be searching for a word, “…trapper. He works in the forests near Corinth. He has told me stories of wild beasts and what he hunts out there on the isthmus.”

The hairs on back of Theseus’ neck stood on end as he remembered Sínis and the dreadful bent pines. But… he couldn’t have been this man’s son… could he?

“Anyway, now I must insist: tonight you will be a guest in my house. People around here call me Procrustes.”

What a strange name.

“The…stretcher?” Theseus said it and immediately realised it sounded like a question.

Procrustes chuckled. He was not the first to be surprised by this man’s strange nickname.

“Yes. It is a silly name. My wife and I stretch what little we have to welcome any traveller in need. Come along. It’s not far.”

And putting a strong arm around Theseus’ back, he ushered him up the road towards the little house in the distance.

As they walked, the two men spoke and laughed together, and the blue shadows of evening lengthened.

By the time they arrived, the sun was just beginning to dip behind the horizon. The house sat nestled against the slope of a hill overlooking a junction in the road. A humble structure of stone and timber, it seemed to lean into the mountain as if trying to hide itself among the deepening shadows.

Procrustes pushed the door open, and as they crossed the threshold, the warmth of the hearth carried smells of rosemary, garlic, stewing beans and meats. Theseus’ stomach growled.

“Sylea! We have a guest!” Procrustes called into the into the room as he held the door open.

From the shadows of the kitchen, a woman emerged. She moved with the graceful efficiency of the royal servants Theseus had known in his grandfather’s palace, her footsteps making no sound on the packed-earth floor. She was dressed in fine linen that seemed greyed by ash, her hair bound tight, and her face bore the practiced smile of one used to welcoming guests. She seemed completely unsurprised at his presence.

“This young man has come all the way from Argolis. He needs the strength of a good meal and a decent bed.” He turned to Theseus, gesturing for him to enter and make himself at home. “This is my wife. The daughter of a king, once—though she finds my own craft far more reliable than the whims of a court. Isn’t that right, my dear?”

Sylea didn’t answer. She didn’t even look up. She simply nodded her head and moved to the fire. From a large pot beside the fireplace, she drew a bowl of warm water.

“Have a seat at the table, lad. You must be hungry.”

Theseus unslung the bronze club and leaned it beside the door. Then he unfastened his cloak and drew it off. In the same motion—using the cloth as cover—he eased the sword free from it’s place in his belt and wrapped the blade into the folds. He laid the bundle by the threshold, then lifted the club and settled it across the cloth. He glanced at Procrustes and his wife. If his hosts noticed anything, neither of them said a word.

He made his way over to the round table in front of the fireplace. The warmth of the flames gently kneaded his legs. He hadn’t realised he was this tired. He sat.

Sylea brought the clay bowl of warm water over him and stood silently watching the gently sloshing surface of the water.

“Wash your hands, lad,” Procrustes said. “Let’s eat.”

After both he and his host had washed their hands, Sylea disappeared around the corner with the bowl of water and in a moment returned with two more bowls. From another pot at the hearth, she ladled stew into them and set them before the men. Never once did she meet his gaze. Even when he thanked her, she smiled and nodded but kept her eyes fixed on a point somewhere near his collarbone.

As the two men ate, Sylea unhooked the pot from its iron arm, and carried it away without a word. Theseus watched her vanish around the corner with it, the way a hand disappears into a sleeve. A moment later she returned with the pot refilled, set it back beside the hearth, and stood waiting—still, attentive—until the water warmed again.

Then she did it again—without looking at either of the men.

The silence of the house began to ring in his ears. The house seemed to be holding its breath.

Theseus was vaguely aware that Procrustes was talking—something about a small smithy he operated out at the back of the house. Theseus tried to focus on what his host was saying, but his attention was drawn more and more into the strange quiet beyond their small round table in the glowing light of the hearth.

“Lad… it is solid bronze, isn’t it?”

“Bronze?” Theseus’ mind snapped back into the conversation. “I’m sorry. What were you saying? I must be more tired than I realised. My mind wandered.”

Procrustes chuckled. “Of course you are,” he said, patting Theseus on the shoulder. “I was just asking if that club you were carrying is solid bronze. It is a remarkable piece of handiwork.”

“Yes… yes, I believe it is,” Theseus replied. “It was given uh—loaned—to me by…” he searched for a reasonable answer, “…a craftsman in Epidaurus. He said I needed a proper weapon for the road.”

He would need to be more careful. The food and warmth were causing him to drop his guard. But this place seemed safe enough. And he was tired.

“Well…” Procrustes rose from his seat, “You’re tired, lad. And you’ve got a whole adventure ahead of you. Let’s get you bathed and to bed.”

As if on cue, Sylea appeared. She was carrying a large folded bundle of cloth.

Here, in the light of the hearth, the man looked bigger than he had on the road.

Procrustes pushed in his chair, and held out a hand.

“Let us show you to your rest.”

Sylea, the folded bundle under one arm and a small oil lamp in her free hand, led the way down a short corridor that descended three stone steps into a guest room. Two clay lamps hung from delicate chains, pooling warm light over a space that was meticulously swept. Against the far wall stood a single, sturdy bed of polished wood. To the right, half-hidden behind the open door, a wide basin steamed faintly.

“And there it is.” Procrustes gestured towards the bed. “I’m not much of a carpenter. But I don’t think I did too badly. What do you think?”

Theseus looked. The bed, though sturdy enough, looked small. A large child might have been comfortable in it, but for him, it would be a compromise.

Sylea crossed the room and laid the folded bedding at the foot of the bed. She smoothed it once, then turned—eyes down, silent as ever—and left.

“It looks great. Thank you again for your hospitality, sir.” Compromise or not, Theseus could feel the bed calling to his weary legs.

“Ah. Think nothing of it, lad. Bathe while the water is still warm.” He indicated the basin. “And if you need anything, just let me know.”

Procrustes stepped back and let his gaze travel the room as though he were checking for something. Then he turned and closed the door quietly behind him. Theseus heard his footsteps climb the stairs and fade into the house.

Theseus washed as best he could, then unfolded and spread the bedding out on the thin mattress. It smelled of lavender and rosemary.

Then he climbed onto the bed, and lay down.

His feet hung over the edge.

He turned, curled, tried to fold himself smaller. Nothing worked. The mattress held his upper body, but not his legs.

After trying to get comfortable for a few minutes, he tried moving the blankets to the floor. It was too thin and the floor—however clean—was too cold and hard.

Then he remembered his cloak. If he had it, he could spread it on the floor and sleep there. His hosts wouldn’t be offended… would they? He wasn’t complaining. He was simply making do…

After a few more attempts at getting comfortable and settling in for the night, he stood up, pulled on his tunic, quietly opened the door of his room. He climbed the three stone steps and made his way down the corridor. He paused before entering the main room, listening.

Inside, he could hear the gentle crackle of the fire and the sound of bristles passing over leather.

Theseus took a breath and stepped into the room.

Procrustes seated by the hearth, drawing a cloth along the teeth of a saw that shone in the flicker light of the fire. Sylea knelt at his feet, her head bowed, scrubbing his heavy boots. Neither of them spoke.

The moment Theseus’s entered the room, the scene changed. Sylea rose in one quick movement, slipped the brush into the folds of her dress, and vanished into the kitchen. Procrustes stood, the paternal smile snapping back onto his face like a trap.

“Ah! Lad, is there something I can help you with? Not comfortable, son? Is the bed not right?”

Theseus stole a glance towards the main entrance. His bundled cloak lay there still—unmoved beneath the weight of the bronze club.

“It’s a fine bed, sir. But I’m too large for it. I was just… I was coming out to get my cloak. I might just sleep on the floor. After my travel, I’m used to it so it’s no trouble at all. I’m very grateful for…” He was over explaining himself. That same feeling of being younger than he was—as if he were still a child—was back. The last thing he wanted to do was break the laws of hospitality by insulting his generous host.

“Nonsense.” Procrustes cut the young man off.

He lifted the saw and tapped the tip of its blade. In the warm light, it flashed blue and cold.

“If the traveller does not fit the bed, it is simply a matter of adjustment. I have my tools right here. Come—let’s see to it that you fit.”

The wooden legs of the chair grated across the hard floor as Procrustes stood. He held the saw in one hand and, with the other, lifted the small oil lamp from the table where they had eaten.

Together, they returned along the corridor—down the three stone steps and into the room.

Theseus entered first. With the two men in it, the room felt smaller than before.

Procrustes closed the door.

“Let’s see…” he said, turning slowly. “Lie down, lad. Exactly as you did before. Let’s see what we’re dealing with here.”

He watched as Theseus lay back.

“Get comfortable, son. I’m a master of proportion. It just won’t do to have a guest who doesn’t fit the furniture.”

Theseus felt the cold wood of the frame against his neck. Procrustes stood near the foot of the bed, brow creased in appraisal—like a tailor taking measurements.

He set the lamp on the floor and tapped the teeth of the saw against his palm: tink-tink-tink.

“Ah yes,” he said after a moment. “I see the problem. You’re just too big. You can’t possibly be comfortable.”

Before Theseus could sit up, Procrustes leaned across him, pinning him just above his left knee with his elbow, holding his right leg down in a vice-like grip.

“What are you doing? Let me up!”

Theseus struggled against the weight of the larger man but Procrustes took no notice. He thrashed and hammered at the man’s back and neck. He may as well have been striking stone. Procrustes bore down with the calm weight of habit. He knew this work. He’d done it before—many times.

“Hush, lad,” he said. “No more struggle. No more fuss. This is where you belong. And you’ll fit soon enough.”

In his right hand, the fine teeth of the saw flashed in lamplight.

Theseus’ breath caught in his neck. Panic rose hot in his throat—and then he cut it off.

He went limp.

“There you go. It’ll all be over soon.”

Procrustes shifted his balance, tightening the pin, lining the saw up with the soft flesh just below the kneecap.

And that was all Theseus needed.

He snapped his upper body forward in a tight crunch—fast, silent—and caught the wrist of the hand gripping his leg with both hands. He clamped it to his chest and threw himself back onto the mattress like a falling stone.

Strong and practiced though Procrustes was, the elbow pinning the youth could not withstand the weight leaning on it and the wrench of Theseus’ pull.

The arm twisted. The elbow took the strain. Something popped.

Procrustes cried out, sharp, involuntary. His balance broke. He spun backward, away from the bed. Metal flashed in the lamplight and the saw clattered to the ground. Procrustes staggered, struck the wall, and sank to the floor.

Theseus was already on his feet on the far side.

Cursing and cradling his ruined arm to his chest, Procrustes hauled himself upright.

The bed lay between them.

Outrage and pain cut hard lines into his face as he circled the foot of the bed. Furious, he lunged at Theseus—trying to cut the corner, trying to close the gap between them.

But as he did so, Theseus darted forward, driving his shoulder into Procrustes’ chest.

The bedframe caught the larger man behind the knees. He tried to step back. There was nowhere to put his feet. And then he fell.

He toppled—hard—onto the bed, twisting as he fell. His injured arm folded under him and he made a sound that was neither a word nor a scream. His face blanched. His eyelids fluttered. Then he went slack.

Theseus worked fast. Before Procrustes had even begun regaining consciousness, he had torn the bedding into long strips, fed them under the bedframe, and hauled them back up over the body of his host—high across the shoulders, then the ribs. Another went under and over the hips. Theseus fed the ends beneath the frame, hauled them back up, cinched them until the fabric sang, and tied them off to the side rail. As Theseus finished securing the last knot, Procrustes bucked as he came to. The bed answered—wood groaning, fabric biting—but the knots held.

As the room swam back into focus, Procrustes blinked at the blurry form of Theseus standing over him, something shone bright and cold in his hand.

Procrustes’ eyes widened. “Insolent child! You don’t understand,” he rasped through gritted teeth. His voice and breath coming as jagged as the blade’s edge. “This is my home.”

Theseus’ lips tightened. He lifted the saw. In the lamp-light, the blade flashed bronze. “Oh,” he said quietly. “I do.”

Procrustes thrashed once, testing his bonds. The bed—the thing he’d built with his own hands—creaked beneath his weight. The trap held its maker fast.

“You can’t!”

Theseus lowered the saw. “You wanted your guests to fit,” he said. “Tonight, you fit.”

We don’t need to follow the blade as it does its grisly work.

From the road, the house would still have looked like refuge: a warm window at a crossroads, light against the dark.

And then—a scream, thin at first, then tearing.

In the distance, the wolves on Mount Corydallus answered.

When quiet returned, it returned all at once. The lamps steadied. The water in the basin behind the door lay perfectly still. Not even a ripple disturbed its surface.

Theseus stood for a long moment, listening to his own breath.

Then he turned, opened the door, and went back up the corridor.

“Sylea?” Theseus called into the main room.

There was no answer.

The hearth still glowed. The kitchen was empty. The doorway stood open to the night, and cold air moved through the house as if it belonged there.

Theseus washed the stains of his grisly labor from himself in the pot of water warming by the fire—slowly, almost like a rite. Then he gathered his cloak from where it lay by the entrance, the sword still wrapped in its folds beneath the club, and carried the bundle to the hearth.

He tossed another log onto the coals. He sat with his back to the wall, warmth at his knees.

And Theseus slept.

In the morning, he would walk on to Athens.

Amplification

And that was the story of Theseus’ final confrontation on the road to Athens. It’s from this story that the image of the Procrustean Bed is drawn. A Procrustean Bed is an arbitrary standard that we are forced to meet in order to be accepted in some field. And we are going to talk more about that in just a moment.

But before we get there, I want to revisit a conversation we had earlier in this series. Since we’re going to be exploring what it could mean for Theseus to laid out on the Procrustean bed and potentially lose his legs as a result, I think we should begin by taking one more look at the hero archetype.

Revisiting the Hero Archetype

When we encounter hero stories, our first instinct is often to look for inspiration—to treat the character as a role model and compare ourselves to them. But if we look closer at Theseus—especially at what takes place later in his life—we see someone who is just as likely to be rash, arrogant, or blind as he is to be courageous.

So for our purposes, I’d like to invite you to look at Theseus not as a figure of moral instruction, but as a function. In the geography of the psyche, the hero is a bridge-builder. You can already see that in Theseus’ dual parentage.

Theseus is born of a mortal lineage. This presents the sunlit world of conscious awareness and the ego: the part of us that can witness what’s happening, make choices, and take responsibility. When the hero-function is active, we become aware of the confrontations it facilitates—because those confrontations are the steps that lead us to growth.

On the other hand, Theseus is also the son of Poseidon—the Earth-shaker, the god of the sea—so he belongs equally to the deep, creative, and sometimes dangerous waters of the unconscious.

In the same way, the hero-archetype in each of us is born of both consciousness and the unconscious. It belongs to—and connects—both inner worlds. Through the heroic acts we’ve been tracing over these past few instalments, the energy of the wilderness can be brought into the ordered world of consciousness, not as chaos, but as something that can be worked with, refined, and integrated.

Although we talk about the hero-archetype as a noun, it is often more useful to think of it as a verb—as a function of the psyche rather than as a limb like an arm or a hand. Its job is to facilitate the integration of unconscious contents with the conscious ego in the automatic and natural process Carl Jung referred to as individuation4. Viewed this way, Theseus’ long road to Athens becomes an integrative journey illustrating how the hero archetype brings us into contact with hidden, unacknowledged parts of ourselves that often appear as obstacles on our path. Confronting such obstacles is scary for Theseus and for us, but stories like this one remind us that these encounters happen so that these neglected and outcast parts of ourselves can be brought to awareness, and turned into useful tools that are subject to our control.

Back at the beginning of the story, Theseus uncovered a sword and a pair of sandals that his mortal father, King Aegeus of Athens, left hidden beneath a heavy rock. They are the symbols of his destiny. From almost the moment he was conceived, they were already waiting for the day he would finally be able to claim them. They represent the Acorn—what James Hillman describes as a pre-existent soul-image that acts as a template, guiding each of us toward who we meant to be and what we value.

In the myth, Theseus carries these items with him on the road. They’re always with him, even though the story doesn’t really mention them again until he reaches Athens. That quiet detail is the myth’s way of showing us what it looks like to follow the natural path of growing up. It doesn’t require special enlightenment or discipline—only that we move through our lives following the needles of our inner compass as they swing between our desires and values.

The hero archetype is most visible in initiatory and liminal spaces—the passage between one stage in life, however great or small, and the next.

This process unfolds in what we can broadly think of as two arcs.

First, there’s a descent arc: an inward exploratory movement and confrontation with what’s been hidden, actively avoided, or unacknowledged. Recovery spaces have a saying—“You can’t change what you don’t acknowledge”—and it maps cleanly onto this part of the road. Before anything can be integrated, it has to be seen. It has to be faced. It has to be brought into the light of consciousness, even when it’s uncomfortable, even when it complicates the story we’ve been telling ourselves about who we are or what is true.

But recognition isn’t the end of the work. It’s the beginning of a different phase.

In heroic stories, the descent only becomes meaningful when the hero returns. The hero goes out into the wilderness—into the dragon’s territory—not simply to prove courage, but to recover something necessary for life: a resource, a truth, an energy that the community needs, and that the hero also needs in order to become whole.

That return to civilisation with the prize is the ascent arc. It’s the movement through which insight becomes embodied—where whatever shifted inside has to take form in choices, speech, boundaries, relationships, and the way we show up in the world. It’s where growth stops being a private realisation and becomes a lived pattern. The ascent arc is where our communities get involved, because whether we like it or not, personal change becomes a public affair once we begin to act on it.

So the bandits that appear on the descent arc can be read as inward-facing encounters—conflicts, shadows, distortions inside the psyche—while the figures we meet during the ascent arc are different. They still have a psychological dimension, of course, but they are manifest in our relationship to the social world around us.

This process is, in a deep sense, automatic. It is as natural as an acorn growing into an oak tree. An acorn doesn’t need a special class or motivational speech or to realise its potential as an oak tree. It just grows towards what it is. But with that type of acorn as with the metaphorical Acorn we each carry, that growth can be influenced. For the physical acorn, the most reliable way to deform that growth is to keep it confined—keep it in a small pot, keep pruning its roots and branches, keep rewarding the parts that look acceptable, and keep cutting back the parts that don’t. This is the art of bonsai. The tree is still alive. It grows, but it is denied its natural stature, shaped instead by shears and wire..

But one day, if that little tree is planted in deep and hospitable earth, it reaches again for its true stature. And as we shall see, the same is true for us.

As we’re working with myth and archetypal imagery, it’s worth remembering: archetypal images like the hero don’t appear first in stories and then get installed in us through our understanding of them. These images appear in stories because they reflect something that has always been there in the psyche, doing its work.

So by noticing the hero-pattern, we’re not trying to gain some new power or ability. The aim is to become more aware of what is already happening—and in doing so, bring more clarity to the process. That clarity can steady us, sometimes even move us along. At the very least, it gives us language to understand and narrate what we experience as we grow.

And when we’re in the middle of a life transition—when we’re moving between careers, questioning a faith tradition, or navigating the end of a relationship—that hero function is hard at work within us. Energy doesn’t appear from nowhere, and it is a finite resource. Progress along an initiatory road can feel like a relentless, featureless expanse. And in those moments, we may—like Theseus in today’s story—find the promise of rest at another archetypal image: an inn.

The Inn & The Innkeeper

The Inn

In stories, an inn or tavern holds two intertwined functions: shelter and social connection.

Inns appear, as Martha Grimes beautifully puts it, “at a confluence of roads.” That’s true both physically and symbolically: they’re where paths meet, where lives overlap—where travellers on different journeys come together and find an environment that echos the comfort of home without returning them there.

In our lives, “inns” show up as social spaces: friendships, workplaces, spiritual communities—any place that offers the feeling, even briefly, that we don’t have to translate or edit ourselves in order to be welcomed. They’re places where the existence of our Acorns—the sword and sandals we carry—is acknowledged without us having to keep it on display—and where it is taken as a given that everyone is headed somewhere. The inn itself is not the destination.

And when the road gets long, and the world starts to feel darker, and you see the lights of such an inn ahead… the promise of that welcome can become almost irresistible.

The Innkeeper

Every inn needs an innkeeper. They are the steward of the refuge—the one who embodies hospitality, who tends the fire, who recognises what it costs to be on the road.

In a healthy inn, the innkeeper’s role is not only to facilitate rest, but grant a kind of permission: permission for the traveller to be unfinished, to recover, to belong for a night without surrendering their journey.

The innkeeper, like the hero, is a kind of bridge-builder, too. They serve as the intermediary between the traveller and the resources available in the social space of the inn. They facilitate the arrival, the restoration, and finally, the return of the traveller to their path when they leave.

The inn in our story appears on the ascent arc of Theseus’ journey. Its the part that illustrates how our inner work begins to show up in public. As we change, we naturally start searching for inn-like spaces where what’s emerging in us can be met, mirrored, and strengthened.

The inn itself is just a building. It it the presence and attitude of the innkeeper—the host—that determines what kind of space it ultimately is.

Now, Procrustes isn’t called an innkeeper by the sources, but he presents himself as one. He invites travellers in. He offers rest. And once they accept the bed, he extracts a brutal price.

So before we embark on an exploration of what the shadow images of the inn and innkeeper might be, I want to name the danger of these types of spaces plainly: coercive belonging rarely announces itself. It borrows the language of care. It arrives looking like refuge. It is only later—when you look back and realise that the welcome has cost you parts of yourself—that you you can recognise the coercive nature of the inn you entered.

The internet has put a thousand doors to a thousand inns in our pockets. In our increasingly polarised world where many of us feel stretched thin and constantly on trial, a warm welcome can feel like a rescue. And that is exactly where Shadow Inns thrive.

The Shadow Inn & Shadow Innkeeper

If the shadows of the inn or the innkeeper were a simple inversion of the healthy image’s qualities, we’d have no difficulty distinguishing them. Nobody goes looking for sanctuary in a place that advertises its intention to detain and stunt the growth of any who cross its threshold.

The problem for Theseus—as for each of us—is that the shadow inn presents itself as a shelter. In the evening twilight, the light in the windows burns as brightly, the doorway beckons as reassuringly, and the room and board on offer still feels just as safe… at first. You’re received. You’re fed. There is companionship, a sense of camaraderie—the kind of relief you may have been waiting a lifetime to experience.

It is only once you’ve really settled in that it begins to shed its disguise.

This doesn’t happen in one dramatic moment. It happens in a hundred small, seductive shifts. At first, the inn offers you relief and welcome. But then it begins teaching you to fear what lies beyond its windows. What isn’t lit by its hearth gets spoken of as darkness. And the road outside—the same road that delivered you here—gets recast as dangerous and confusing: a lesser path. Eventually, when the thought of stepping back onto it returns, leaving is framed as betrayal. Inns like these are places where your physical presence is welcome. Your Acorn is not.

The message is subtle, but consistent: you’ve arrived. Stop searching now. Stop wandering now.

Sit.

Stay.

These types of shadow inns appear in a number of ways. They can show up as social groups, spiritual or self-help communities, even work environments—but they are, all of them, psychic parasites, and it is your soul that plays host to them, keeping them warm as they feed on your life energy. In a Shadow Inn, restoration becomes restriction, and comfort becomes capture5.

Sadly, this is also true about many of the communities we seek when we are most in need of reassurance and a sense of belonging.

In the myth, Procrustes has one goal: to lure travellers to his house so that he can measure them against a bed that is designed to not fit them. If they are too short, he stretches them, dislocating their joints and rendering them unable to continue their journey. If they are too tall—like Theseus—he cuts off their legs, again, bringing their journeys (and lives) to a premature end. His goal is to lure them into a place where they believe they will be able to find rest, only to reshape them according to his own measure. This is the Procrustean pattern—his modus operandi.

The Procrustean pattern doesn’t only appear in overtly organised groups. It also shows up in other ways in which we interact with the world—things that don’t look like “communities” at all, but that answer similar needs. We encounter it in digital platforms engineered to keep you scrolling, games designed around compulsive reward cycles, and the algorithmic responses to our likes and searches that slowly tighten social media feeds into ideological echo chambers. It even appears in certain forms of human–AI entanglement, as suggested by emerging case literature on what is being called AI-associated psychosis6.

Each of these contexts offers refuge of a kind—relief, distraction, a feeling of accomplishment, even belonging—but these comforts are often manufactured to promote and prolong engagement, more often than not at the cost of your attention, your emotional autonomy, and, in severe cases, your ability to keep walking your own road. None of these tools are inherently Procrustean; the shadow inn pattern emerges when the refuge they offer gives rise to dependency, and dependency then reshapes the traveller.

Places like this always have their own facilitators: a shadow innkeeper for the shadow inn.

The shadow version of the innkeeper still speaks the language of care. They may even feel sincere7. They offer exactly what a weary nervous system wants most: safety, certainty, a sense of belonging—an end, even temporarily, to the tiring work of the road. If the healthy version of the innkeeper’s job is to facilitate rest and restoration, the Shadow Innkeeper facilitates extraction. Before the weary traveller even realises there is a price to pay, they begin taking payment in the form of compliance.

In the healthy image, the innkeeper serves the traveller.

In the shadow image, the traveller serves the inn.

Procrustes is the incarnation of this inversion, and the myth gives us a brutally clear image of the cost he extracts. As Theseus discovered, admission to the Procrustean Inn is free, but accepting the offer of a bed will cost you your ability to continue your journey.

The Architecture of the Trap

I want to step away from the myth for a moment and look at this through a more clinical lens. Robert Jay Lifton, a psychiatrist who studied high-control environments—systems that demand total loyalty and punish deviation—describes how these places work. They don’t rely on force alone. They run a far more sophisticated operation.

In a long-term study of political prisoners who were—at least for a while—converted to a cause diametrically opposed to their worldview, Lifton observed that the conversion was driven by a scripted drama of death and rebirth—manufactured, rehearsed, and imposed from without8. The process he documents is an engineered path of growth that closely resembles the hero’s journey we’ve been tracing with Theseus—but with one lethal difference: the obstacles the travellers encounter on this route don’t arise from within their own soul. They are imposed by the Innkeeper.

What follows is a practical summary of the process Robert Jay Lifton describes—the way a trap gets built, piece by piece, until it starts to feel like the only reality in town. To make it easier to recognize (in groups, institutions, relationships, or even in your own inner life), I’m going to map it the same way we’ve been walking Theseus’s road: in two arcs—a descent, a turning point, and then an ascent.

The Descent: Confronting a Manufactured Shadow

In these environments, the first target is your sense of self—the sense of being enough. You’re ushered, gently but relentlessly, into the conviction that your Acorn, the core of what makes you you, is fundamentally flawed. Whether it’s your performance, your spiritual standing, or your values, you’re gradually trained into a posture of existential guilt.

The Shadow Innkeeper makes this look like care and concern, insisting that you’re only being helped—that this is all for your own good. It can be difficult to spot this process—especially if we trust the authority of that place. Having been on our own journeys for so long, we are used to seeing shadows rather than light within ourselves. Remember Periphetes! Remember Sínis! Remember that ravenous and wild Crommyonian Sow! If we’ve already met monsters on the inward road, we can hardly be surprised to be told there are more—ones we missed—until here they can be seen at last: illuminated and laid bare in the lamplit lodgings of the inn.

In coercive environments, we are led to confront what the Innkeeper—the trusted authority of the inn—identifies as our ‘shadows’. We’re encouraged to denounce the self we arrived with—to cut away the sword and sandals we came carrying. And if we trust that the voice—or voices—guiding this process are speaking from a morally, intellectually, or spiritually superior position, this self-betrayal starts to feel like moral progress.

If the encounter with the Crommyonian Sow—the devouring mother archetype— marked the turning point on Theseus’ path, after which the road began to rise, then manufactured shame and guilt function as its psychological counterpart in coercive environments. Here, these are devouring forces that eat away at the traveller’s sense of worth, until it begins to feel as though survival—or salvation—depends on being liberated from them.

The Turning Point

Shame and guilt are not the same thing9. Although they both arise as a result of a perceived personal deficiency, shame causes us to isolate ourselves while guilt carries with it a feeling of responsibility. When harnessed, guilt can serve as a motivation for change.

Coercive environments use both as tools to accomplish their goals: saturated in shame, we’re ready to cling to any offer of belonging that comes our way, and that is when the carefully installed sense of guilt is transmuted into motivation. This happens when we’re offered grace—a bridge back to belonging—provided we take the shape the Shadow Inn and Innkeeper(s) have prepared for us.

As Lifton puts it, “Since ideological totalists become the ultimate judges of good and evil within their world, they are able to use these universal tendencies toward guilt and shame as emotional levers for their controlling and manipulative influences. They become the arbiters of existential guilt, authorities without limit in dealing with others’ limitations. And their power is nowhere more evident than in their capacity to forgive.”10

When the prospect of forgiveness—the redemption of the monsters we’ve been shown within ourselves—is presented by a trusted authority, it feels like encouragement. Finally, somebody believes in us and our ability to do and be better. We begin to want to become exactly who they want us to be, because the alternative—rejection—starts to feel like a kind of death. Their ideology begins to masquerade as the voice of our own inner guides. The demon of the inn drowns out the daimon within.

The Ascent: The Rebirth of the Measured Self

Lifton calls this stage the rebirth—but it’s not a resurrection of the true self, or of the self you actually are. It’s a rebirth in the image of the inn, and it marks the point at which we conform to the shape prescribed by the inn. You emerge as a ‘new person’ who fits the bed—measured, adjusted, made suitable.

This is the bonsai logic again. The shadow inn does to our Acorns what a bonsai master does to an oak sapling: the roots trimmed back, the branches shaped into an approved silhouette, the whole living thing kept small enough to be managed in a shallow pot. It still grows—of course it does—but only in ways that can be shaped and managed.

That’s the tragedy of the Shadow Inn: it offers a simulation of growth. It builds bridges not into your own depths, but from an external dogma directly into your heart. There can be real relief in finally “fitting in”—but it comes at a cost: you trade the connection to your authentic center, for a comfort that was never meant to help you continue your journey.

Procrustes’ method is the myth’s brutal shorthand for this same “rebirth.”

He offers travellers a bed that is designed such that they will not fit. If the traveller is too short, he stretches them—this stretching happens in our own lives when we are stretched or pulled into behaviours and beliefs that aren’t congruent with the shape of the Self. Its almost like a kind of high-stakes peer-pressure. If they’re too long, he amputates what extends beyond the approved silhouette—cutting away what won’t fit.

And notice what gets targeted. I’m 6 ft 5 (that’s about 195cm tall). I know what hangs off the end of a bed first: your feet. The very things you need to keep travelling.

That’s the point. Coercive environments like the Shadow Inn doesn’t only harm you—they make you unable to walk the road you were on. Hospitality becomes incarceration, not by chains, but by reshaping you until leaving is no longer possible, or—at least—incredibly difficult.

And this pattern of coercion isn’t limited to the obvious context of so-called high-control groups. Wherever an in-group/out-group dynamic emerges, in any community in which an us-vs-them narrative is dominant, or where positive moral value is ascribed to membership of a specific group, the same logic appears. The trouble is, as I’ve mentioned before, it can be very hard to identify, especially if that narrative—the voice of the Shadow Innkeeper themselves—has begun speaking from inside your own head. When that happens, you begin trimming yourself without anyone else even being given the chance.

How to Spot a Shadow Inn

Most people don’t think about coercion. We don’t sit around building theories about control systems. But we do think about belonging. We think about meaning. We think about finding a place where we can be ourselves, be met, and grow. It’s usually only after something begins to feel… off—after what we thought was a welcome starts tightening around us—that we go looking for the language to describe what’s happening to us.

Now, before we move on, I want to be clear: not every corrective environment is coercive. Not every teacher is an innkeeper with a measuring tape behind their back. In a healthy setting, there is what Lifton describes as a “three-way tension” between the student, the teacher, and the ideas. The ideas have weight of their own. They can challenge both student and teacher. A healthy mentor doesn’t demand omnipotence, and doesn’t require you to demolish your old identity in order to be allowed to learn. The goal is realisation—helping you express what is already trying to grow in you—rather than moulding you into a rigid, pre-fabricated shape.

So, while not every corrective environment is coercive, not every environment that has used or uses coercive methods is trying to hurt people. Even the most well-intentioned social spaces or relationships may at times use coercive means to achieve their goals. There is a tension here that is so hard to hold: those good intentions and lofty ideals do not excuse the use of such psychological violence, but nor does the use of coercion automatically negate or destroy whatever truth there may be communicated in those contexts. This is what makes a Shadow Inn so difficult to recognise.

We all need to learn more about how to respect the incredible diversity of human experience and expression without feeling the need to trim it to fit our expectations, while at the same time educating ourselves and others about the horrific psychological and emotional violence that can and is done—all too often in the name of the best and highest ideals—through the application of these Procrustean methods.

So how can you spot a Shadow Inn or Procrustean pattern?

One simple question is this: in any social context—your work, your family, your spiritual group—do you feel safer being approved of than being known?

In a Shadow Inn, belonging often comes with conditions that are hard to identify at first. You begin to sense that there’s a narrow emotional range you’re allowed to inhabit. You learn, without anyone even having to name them, which feelings make the room go cold, which questions make the lamps flicker. And you start editing yourself—not because you’re learning discernment, but because you’re just trying to stay inside the circle of warmth.

Sometimes it even gets dressed up as growth. People praise your progress, but the “progress” always seems to make you easier to manage. You find yourself rehearsing your thoughts before you’re even sure what you think, scanning your own mind for the version of yourself that will be easiest to receive. And leaving—when you do finally imagine it—feels strangely expensive. Not only socially, but existentially. As if the road outside has been made unreal, or unsafe, or morally suspect.

And perhaps the clearest sign is this: when you look closely, you’ll notice that the innkeeper does not fit the same bed they expect you to lie in.

If any of that hits a nerve, go gently with yourself. These patterns are powerful partly because they arrive wearing warmth. And because the needs they answer—connection, meaning, and a sense of certainty—are not weaknesses. They’re human.

Procrustes & Sínis

It’s tempting to think of Procrustes only as an oppressive force out there in the world—someone or something we encounter when we accept the wrong invitation, get misled, and pay for it. And yes: predatory, coercive environments exist, and we’d be wise to learn how they work.

But to treat Procrustes as only external is to miss the more intimate danger: the way the measuring bed gets installed inside us.

This, too, is a kind of shadow inn. And as uncomfortable as it is to admit, the belief that we are only ever forced into unnatural shapes by other people is a strangely comforting denial—because it spares us from noticing how often we participate in our own constriction.

So before we take a look at another story—one that offers a bit of hope for those of us (perhaps that’s most of us) who have found themselves on the receiving end of the shadow inn’s “hospitality”—I want to turn back for a moment to the outlaw we met earlier on this road: Sínis, the pine-bender.

Back in Episode 5, we found him in a forest near Corinth. He takes unwary travellers, binds them to two bent pines, and releases the tension, tearing his victims in half.

It’s a brutal image, but it’s also a psychologically accurate one.

Theseus meets Sínis on the descent arc of his journey—the inward road—where the conflicts are not yet public-facing, not yet social in the obvious way. They’re private. They’re internal. They’re the kinds of forces that pull a person apart from the inside.

Sínis is what it feels like when the ego gets caught in the tension between two pressures that can’t easily be reconciled: what you are, and what you think you must be in order to be acceptable. Lifton names this with clinical clarity as “the contrast between what [one] is and what [one] would be”11. And that contrast becomes a kind of inner machinery: the need to belong meets the standards of belonging, and out of that collision a voice is born—a measuring voice—that can rule us with far less resistance than any outer authority ever could, because it speaks from inside our own skull.

So what does it mean, psychologically, to “defeat” Sínis?

Overcoming Sínis is not to destroy tension—because tension is part of growth. The task is to stop being torn by it. To hold the opposites in awareness without rushing to resolve them through self-betrayal. To learn, slowly, to walk the grey road.

That’s why Sínis comes before Procrustes.

When we lose sight of the bent pines—when we forget we’re in a tension that needs to be held—we start craving relief. We start looking for a way to discharge the strain. And that is when Procrustes’ offer becomes dangerous: the promise of rest, the promise of certainty that will end the pulling.

In other words: if you haven’t met Sínis within, Procrustes outside will feel like rescue.

Now—here’s where the myth does something I love. It doesn’t only give us a psychological sequence; it gives us a genealogical hint.

The sources don’t always agree on names. Plutarch calls the innkeeper Damastes (Δαμαστής) and notes that he is surnamed Procrustes12. Apollodorus uses Damastes as well, and adds that some call him Polypemon (Πολυπήμων)13. Pausanias gives Polypemon and, like Plutarch, notes the surname Procrustes14. Greek myth is a tangle of overlapping local traditions, and it’s easy to get lost in the weeds trying to sort out who is related to whom and how…

Where it gets interesting is when we turn back to the story of Sínis.

When Apollodorus tells the story of Sínis—he drops an interesting detail: he identifies Sínis as the son of Polypemon, by Sylea, daughter of Corinthus15.

Suddenly the myth offers a chilling picture of how some of those Sínis-like impulses get into our own hearts: the bed begets the bender.

Procrustes—or Polypemon as some knew him—doesn’t only live “out there” as a mechanism of social control. Over time, the systemic Procrustean standards and expectations that exist in our communities—even if they are never stated explicitly or taught as a principle—father Sínis-like voices within us. A measuring culture produces a measuring conscience. A society that sorts people into acceptable and unacceptable shapes eventually installs a sorter inside its members.

And this is where we have to be honest.

Nobody wants to admit they carry an inner Procrustean template—a private standard that dictates the acceptable form other people should take. Nobody wants to admit they’ve absorbed prejudicial notions about sex, gender, ethnicity, or culture against which they measure the world around them. But to some degree, most of us have. None of us decide to adopt prejudicial beliefs. We inherit them without even noticing it. They arrive through a thousand unspoken lessons: what gets rewarded, what gets mocked, what gets coded as “normal,” and what gets treated as a problem. As we grow up, we absorb them as part of the unspoken lessons we learn about belonging and our own place in the pecking order of society. They are sown in our hearts not by a single malevolent hand but rather by the collective. And when they finally bear fruit, other people usually notice before we do.

While we might not be able to control or choose what we believe, what we can do is question them. When we become aware of them—which usually happens when we notice that other people don’t believe the same things we do—instead of passing moral judgments, we can hold our own beliefs up for scrutiny and interrogate them. How certain are we that they are true? How did we decide that they are true? What could make us change our minds about them?

This line of self-interrogation is uncomfortable, and, if it sounds familiar, its because this is similar to the process we spoke about back in episode 3, when Theseus encountered Periphetes and claimed his bronze club. Prejudice is another cyclopean bandit with a bronze club blocking the road leading to our full potential. It doesn’t only harm its external targets. It also damages the one who carries it.

That inner template—Procrustean bed within—isn’t only used to judge and reshape the people around you. It turns back of the one using its standard. It begins measuring you, too—your body, your desires, your emotions, your place in the hierarchy, your worthiness to belong. It narrows your world and anything that doesn’t fit gets treated as a threat, or an embarrassment, or a defect that must be corrected. The same mechanism that trims other people down to size also cuts at your own soul.

So when we spoke about confronting Sínis—those snap judgments and inherited reflexes—we were really talking about becoming freer: freer to hold complexity without panic, freer to stay in relationship without reducing ourselves or others to a label, and freer to keep faith with the shape your Acorn is trying to grow into.

If we want to be able to face Procrustes on the outer road, we have to recognise Sínis on the inner one. First we must be able to acknowledge and be willing to carry the tension that comes with being human—the tension of being neither purely angelic, nor purely animalistic.

We have to confront our internalised prejudices, not only because, whether conscious or unconscious, they are morally abhorrent, but because they ultimately turn inward and stunt our own growth. They are the way in which we act like Procrustes by measuring and mutilating others on beds built by our beliefs. They cut us off from experiencing a sense of common humanity and sever connection between our desires and deeper values calling the resulting lack of compassion “maturity.” They drown out the quiet voice of your daimon and call it “common sense.”

St. Christopher & the Redemption of the Carrier Self

A Contrasting Image – The Weight of the Acorn

For a moment, stop what you’re doing and have a look at yourself. You don’t need a mirror for this. I’m asking you to look honestly at the shape of your soul.

If we look at our lives and see the approved silhouette of a bonsai—the parts of ourselves that have been cut back or that we have trimmed ourselves, the parts that have been wired into a specific shape to fit the small, shallow pots of the Shadow Inns we’ve lodged at—it’s easy to believe that the Acorn has been lost. When we recognise the losses we’ve suffered, it’s easy to assume that self-betrayal is permanent.

But the biology of the soul is far more stubborn than the lifeless carpentry of the bed. The bed is fixed; the Acorn is tenacious.

Your Acorn is tenacious.

The pattern we carry isn’t a physical thing that can be measured with wood and rope. It’s a gravitational pull—a living force that keeps insisting on its own shape, even when it’s been constrained for years.

And this is where I want to return to the image of the bonsai. That small tree kept in a pot can survive a long time without ever reaching its true stature. But one day—if it’s planted in deep, hospitable earth—it reaches again for its full height.

And as we shall see, the same is true for us.

The hope offered by the next story I want to share with you isn’t presented in the image of a hero who fights his way out of one such Shadow Inn. It’s in a man who tried to earn belonging in the service of power—trimming and wiring himself to fit prescribed roles, trying to be useful, acceptable, chosen—until he meets someone who gives him deep earth, someone who holds space for him to offer his service in a way that is congruent with his natural shape.

It’s the story of a man who discovers that the burden he shoulders is not proof of his unworthiness, but the king he has been seeking all along.

The Legend

Once upon a time, long ago, on a page in history where the wet ink of a new religion was still drying over the names of older gods and monsters, there lived a man named Offerus: a giant of Canaanite lineage, a man whose head brushed the low-hanging branches of the forest, and whose shadow stretched across an entire village like an early dusk.

For all his size and strength, Offerus’ heart was set on one thing: he wanted to find a master whose power would overshadow his strength.

The King and the Minstrel

After wandering for many days, he came to the court of a mighty king—a man draped in purple and seated upon a grand throne, whose name made the world tremble. And for a time, Offerus was content to serve him.

One afternoon, a minstrel arrived at the court and was brought into the great hall to sing before the king. As he sang, everyone in the room listened, spellbound by the dark and winding melody.

But the spell was broken when Offerus saw his king turn pale. He watched as the great man raised a trembling hand and hastily traced a complicated pattern across his chest. Disturbed, Offerus leaned down, his voice vibrating like distant thunder.

“My king, what troubles you? What is that sign you made?”

The king looked up, his eyes wide. “This man sings of the Devil,” he whispered. His regal bearing seemed brittle and small in the big room. “’Tis a fearful name, that. When I hear it, I make this sign so that he shall have no power over me. This is our only safeguard against one such as he.”

The Devil! Offerus had never heard of him before, but if he was able to inspire such fear in his own king, he must be powerful indeed. Offerus didn’t hesitate. He rose, standing to his full height.

“Mighty king,” he said, “if you are afraid of the Devil, then the Devil must be stronger than you. I commend you to God, good king, for now I must go find this Devil. Perhaps he is the master I am destined to serve.”

And with that, he turned his back on the court and walked out onto the road.

The Devil

He walked eastward, past villages, through valleys, and over mountains until he came to a great desert. There, in the shimmering heat-haze, he came upon a company of knights riding horses that seemed to breathe fire. At their head rode a figure so cold and imposing that the sun itself seemed to dim in his presence. The figure pulled his reins and looked up at the giant.

“Ho, stranger—where are you bound?”

Offerus, unafraid of the man, for his heart was set only on finding the lord he sought, replied, “Sir knight, I have walked far from my home. I am searching for the Devil. I have heard he is the strongest king, and I want to serve him.”

The figure smiled—a cold, sharp expression that opened like a crack in the dry ground.

“I am he.”

And so Offerus entered into the service of the Prince of Darkness. He followed him across the wastes until they came upon a highway.

After they had gone a long while on the road, they came upon a strange sight. There, simple and stark against the sky, stood a Cross. The Devil—the master of all terrors—jerked his horse’s reins so hard the animal screamed. Before Offerus could ask what was wrong, he fled off the road through thorny thickets and briar patches, circling far out of the way merely to avoid that piece of wood.

When at last Offerus caught up with his master, he asked in confusion, “My lord, why do you flee from that timbered sign?”

The Devil would not look at him, and his voice was like a dry whisper in the giant’s ear.

“There was a man named Christ who once hung upon a cross like that one. ’Tis a fearful sign, that. When I see it, I must go by another way, for he has power over me. There is no safeguard against one such as he.”

“Then,” Offerus shook his head, “I see that I have wasted my time here. You are weaker than he is. Now I must leave you. I am going to find this Christ.”

And without more words, he left him and went on alone.

The Wilderness

He walked and walked. Each time he found a castle, he would go in and inquire whether this was the castle of that king called Christ, and each time he would be told no.

He walked and walked. And at last he came into a wilderness so deep that even the birds seemed to have forgotten the way out of it.

He walked and walked, and for two days and nights he saw no smoke, no track, no sign of man. But then, on the third day, in the golden light of late afternoon, he came upon a river: wide as a field, slow at the edges and swift in the middle, with a colour like old iron.

A short distance upstream, upon its bank, stood a little hut—low-roofed and weather-worn. A thin curl of smoke rose from its chimney and was lost at once among the branches of the trees that gathered round it, as though trying to shield it out of pity.

Offerus looked upon it and thought, Not here. No king dwells in such a place. Yet it was the first token of human life he had seen in many days, and his heart was hungry for a voice.

As he stood there, the undergrowth stirred; and from among the trees emerged an old man. He was small, as bent as the knotted roots of the forest, and wrapped in a rough cloak the colour of earth.

Offerus stepped forward.

“Old man. I’m looking for the greatest king. I have travelled far so that I may serve him. Tell me, if you know: where might I find his castle?”

The hermit—for that is what the old man was— studied the giant for a long moment.

“Stranger,” the hermit’s voice sounded like the rustle of the leaves overhead, “I know this king whom you seek. But you will not find him in any castle.”

The old man’s gaze remained fixed on Offerus, passing through the breadth of his shoulders, through the great frame the world had always seen first, and resting upon the weariness beneath it.

“Then what am I to do? Where am I to go? I have borne myself thus far to offer myself into his service. But if he is nowhere to be found, where should I find my own purpose?”

The old man blinked once, and turned towards the door of his hut. “Fast. Pray,” he said, and he reached for his door.

Offerus’ shoulders sank. The power that had held him upright through all courts and kings, through the desert and before the devil was gone.

“But… I can’t fast,” he said softly. “My body is too big for it. And I don’t know how to pray. I don’t have the right words.”

The hermit’s hand remained on the latch. He didn’t move.

Then the old man turned to look at Offerus again. For the first time in all his wanderings Offerus felt that is was not his size that was being seen, but his soul.

The hermit’s gaze dropped to the giant’s hands—huge, calloused, built for labour, not liturgy—and for the briefest moment Offerus felt ashamed.

“What is your name, stranger?” There was no judgement in his voice.

“Offerus, sir.”

“That is a good name.” The hermit nodded thoughtfully.

“Then, Offerus, bring what you do have. Serve in a way you can.” He pointed toward the river. “The waters of that river flow fast and cold. Many drown trying to cross. Go there. Take a staff, and make your strength a shelter for those who must pass over. In serving the weak and the weary, you will be serving the greatest king of all. Do this—and he will know you.”

Offerus turned and looked at the water. It moved without pity. It moved without pause.

He looked at his hands again.

For a moment he thought of thrones, and banners, and mighty service in great halls—if there was no castle to find… then perhaps there was only this: a crossing, and a work, and the long patience of it. “That… I understand.”

And so, Offerus went down to the bank.

A Voice in the Dark

He built a cabin of wood from the trees and set wide, smooth river stones for a hearth. He took a long tree-trunk for a staff, and learned the river’s moods—where it lied, where it lunged, where it pulled travellers under as if it wanted to keep them.

From that time, Offerus became the bridge. Day and night, he carried the weak and the weary, his feet finding stones in the dark water while the current clawed at his legs.

Then came a night of storm.

The sky was bruised purple, and the river ran higher than he’d ever seen it. The trees groaned and bowed as the wind drove the rain in sheets across the water.

None would seek to cross the river this night. So Offerus settled into his hut and listened to the crackle of his fire and the wailing of the storm beyond its walls. Soon he drifted off into a deep sleep.

Through the roar of the flood, a voiceso small it seemed it ought to have been swallowed at once called out.

Offerus… carry me across.

At the sound of his own name, Offerus started awake. Who would be outside on a night like this? And who had said his name? No traveller had ever spoken it at the river. Yet the voice had said it as though it had known him all his life.

Grabbing his staff, he went out into the rain. Lightning tore the sky, and for an instant the bank showed itself—black trees, white water, but nothing more.

“Who calls?” Offerus lifted his voice like a lantern in the darkness.

But Nobody was there—only the flood worrying at the roots of the trees.

Wet and wondering, he returned to his hut. Perhaps it had been a dream. He put a log on the fire and huddled close to its warmth. Outside the storm didn’t lessen. The river roared as though it meant to carry his whole world away with it.

Soon, he began to feel the drowsy warmth of the fire replace the wetness of the wind and rain. And then… there it was again. The same voice, a second time—clearer than before, closer.

Offerus… carry me across.

For a second time he stepped out into the shrieking maelstrom. He searched the bank, one way and the other, calling into the rain. But there was still no one there. Only the water, and the branches lashing at the wind.

He returned again, troubled; for though he had served many travellers, he had never been called like this—by a voice that used his name and yet had no face.

Then it came a third time—very close now—right outside his door.

Offerus. Come! Carry me across.

Offerus seized his staff and went out, and this time he didn’t have to search.

There, near the raging edge of the angry river, where the reeds were bowing in obedience to the wind, stood a little child. He was small—no taller than Offerus’ knees—soaked through, trembling, and clinging with both hands to the root of a tree as though the river were trying to draw him away. His face was pale in the lightning, his hair plastered to his brow.

He didn’t cry out again. He only looked up at the giant, and held out one small hand.

“Offerus,” he said, “carry me across the river.”

The River Crossing

Offerus grasped the child’s hand firmly and swung him up onto his shoulders. He had carried grown men in armour across this river. The waters that would normally have risen to the height of a tall man’s shoulders were only at his waist. This storm would be an inconvenience, but didn’t pose any serious danger to him. Besides, for the giant, the child was as light as a feather. There was more chance of the child blowing away in the wind than of proving to be much of a burden.

Offerus stepped into the tempest. The water was moving quickly, tugging at his legs with surprising strength. He angled himself in the current so that the water flowed past him. He shortened his stride and slowed his pace. Step by slow, shuffling step, the giant carried his small passenger across the raging torrent.

But when he was halfway across the river, something changed.

The water didn’t only rise; it thickened around his legs. And the child—that little child who had seemed as light as a feather—was suddenly a weight that no man could bear. Offerus’ knees—knees that had never buckled before king or devil—began to feel as though they would give way.

“Child… what is this?” Offerus gasped, spitting water from his mouth. “How have you, who are so small, grown as heavy as the whole world?”

Hearing no answer, he drove his staff down into the mud, leaned forward, pulling himself as much as walking across the riverbed. And step by step—teeth clenched, puffing between tight lips—he forced the crossing.

At last his feet found the bank.

The Carried and the Carrier

Panting, Offerus let his staff fall from his hand. He set the child down upon the black, wet earth, and sank to his knees. Water streamed from him in sheets, like falls pouring off the side of a mountain.

“Who are you, child? What are you?”

The child looked up at him from beneath the wet locks plastered to his brow—small, and yet somehow older than the river.

“Offerus… you have lived your whole life looking for a place to belong in the service of the greatest king.”

Offerus went still. No man had spoken to him like that. No man had spoken into him like that.

“You sought him in courts, and deserts, and on the high roads. You sought him in the wilderness when all other doors had closed.”

The child’s gaze didn’t flinch.

“And now you have carried him.”

Offerus’ throat tightened.

“Who are you?”

The child’s voice was quiet. Certain. “I am he. And if I weighed the same as your whole world it is because that is what I am.”

For a moment, there was only the storm and the rush of blood in the giant’s ears.

Then the child spoke again.

“And you… You shall be Offerus no longer.”

The river roared behind them—but the child’s words ran deeper than its powerful current.

“The kings of the earth have told you to become smaller—to shrink the purpose in your heart to fit their service, to whittle yourself down into something safe. Useful. Acceptable. They gave you rooms where you could stay—so long as you did not take up too much space. But tonight you carried that which is without measure. You crossed without sinking beneath that weight. And when the burden grew unbearable… you did not throw it off.”

Offerus bowed forward, palms in the mud, trembling—not so much from cold as from the deep, merciful shock of being seen.

“From this day, your name will be Christopher: the carrier of the Christ-child.”

The Sign

Offerus—no. Christopher—looked up, throat tight, eyes stinging.

“And for a sign—” the child’s voice seemed further away, and somehow closer to his ear—“plant your staff in the earth.”

As Offerus blinked the water from his eyes and looked around. The child was gone.

So was the storm.

Around him the world had fallen into a silence so complete that, were it not for the wetness of the earth, he would never have believed there had ever been a storm. From a snarl of reeds at the river’s edge, a chorus of frogs began to sing into the first pale light of dawn breaking through the dissolving clouds.

Christopher’s hand found his staff and, as he pulled himself to his full height, he pressed it deep into the bank and left it there as witness.

Then he turned and made his way home.

The river was still fast, still cold. But a weight had lifted—not the weight of the child he had carried, a deeper weight—one he had carried, unrecognised, through all his years.

And, as the light grew—and as the world began to wake—the staff took root.

Green split the bark. Leaves unfurled. And by the time the sun cleared the trees the staff he had planted on the opposite bank stood alive—no longer a dead pole cut to purpose, but a thing restored to its own nature, rising past the measure that had been set for it, reaching again for its true stature.

Some people say that if you find that river, you can still see it there to this day.

Amplification

The Legend, the Bed, and the Acorn

So, Procrustes offers rest in a bed designed to make you fit his expectations. The hermit offers labor that allows you to stand to your full height.

I should be clear: what you’ve just read is not a myth in the old, cosmological sense. It is a legend, filtered through centuries of moral imagination. But its mythic charge is undeniable because it speaks to a process we all recognise: the long, exhausting search for purpose and meanings, and for a place where our true stature is allowed to exist.

The Summons and the False Kings

Offerus begins his journey much like Theseus and each of us: he sets out, at the prompting of his Acorn, following a silent summons toward a destiny he cannot yet name. He is looking for a place to belong.

He does what so many of us do on our own journeys: he mistakes being useful for being seen and welcomed. He assumes that if something is powerful enough to overpower him—a King, a Devil, a rigid belief system, or a demanding family—it must be big enough to protect him.

He winds up in the service of the “wrong” kings not because he is on the wrong path, but as part of that necessary downward growth that must occur before we begin growing up. He has to exhaust every false master and every Shadow Inn before he can recognise the true one. He has to learn—by the disappointing evidence of experience—that being shaped and used is not the same thing as being redeemed16.

That shaped self—the trimmed back, trained, wired, and stretched versions of ourselves that we become as a result of coercive environments—is not worthless. It is not the shape of a wasted life or ruined potential. It is a carrier.

It is the form you took to survive, and in its form—in your form—as controlled manipulated as it may have been, the power of the Acorn lives still, as strong as as ever.

The Hermit: The Anti-Procrustes

The Hermit is a man who lives in the wilderness outside the border of civilised society—beyond the courts and their measures. He keeps a higher law: the law of the divine which, read through our archetypal lens means he serves the deep, archetypal Self—the Self with a capital S.

He doesn’t look at Offerus and reach for the tools to prune and wire him into an acceptable shape. He doesn’t try to fix him. Instead, he offers deep earth.

He looks at the plain fact of Offerus’s size—the very thing which has marked him as being different in the eyes of other people—and he blesses it. The hermit guides Offerus towards action that aligns his differentness and the pull of his acorn—a form of service that is congruent with both who Offerus is now and who or what he wants to become.

“Go to the river,” he says. “Make your strength a shelter. Become the bridge.”

The Weight of Wholeness

Finally, we come to the image of the Child. Theology aside, in a mythological context, the Christ is a figure of transformation so complete that the usual heroic pattern can’t quite hold him. He doesn’t merely win a battle, outwit an enemy, or seize a treasure. He transfigures the terms of the struggle itself. He is, in Jungian language, the redemptive power of the transcendent function: the emergence of a third thing when the psyche has been split into opposites and can no longer survive by choosing one side.

In this story, that “third thing” arrives as the child.

In the legend of St. Christopher, that Child is the image of the union Jung is talking about.

Offerus doesn’t find him in a castle. He doesn’t earn him by bowing to an external authority. He appears when Offerus finally stop auditioning for approval, when he stops letting Procrustean standards dictate his shape—when he finally says, “Fast? Pray? I can’t do those things”—and refuses to cut himself down to fit even the hermit’s standards. He meets him when he stops looking for validation or acknowledgement from an external authority. He remains in the wilderness, and begins truly inhabiting his own shape by doing something that only he can really do—by stepping into exactly what makes him unique.

When he finally does this, the Acorn’s pull and his conscious pursuit of purpose meet at last in the same place.

And so the Child appears: small enough to be dismissed or overlooked, heavy enough to reveal what Offerus has truly been serving. Whatever Christ means theologically, mythically he carries a gravity of grace—the strange mercy by which the road is redeemed.

The weight of that Child is the weight of Wholeness.

The Bonsai as Carrier

This instalment has turned out longer than I intended. In writing it, I spent time in deep reflection on my own experiences of belonging—where it fed and nurtured me, and where it cost me parts of myself. I kept it long because the ideas we’re circling here need space to breathe.

Shadow Inns and Procrustean Beds are traumatic experiences but often the trauma only shows up later. When we are there—when we are in the moment of being measured and mutilated—they don’t always feel as bleak and violent as Theseus’ story shows them to be. Sometimes, like in the story of Offerus who became St. Christopher, they feel like having found the most powerful king to serve—a place where our strength is recognised.

It is only later that we realise, perhaps after years, that the real service we have been performing has been a process of self-refinement geared towards reduction and limitation—a dis-integration or dismantling and compartmentalising of ourselves—rather than growth and integration.

Trying to grow in this way—by cutting back parts of your soul and repressing instead of integrating them—is lonely and isolating work. It is almost always accompanied by a burden of loneliness and a sense of isolation despite the fact that, at least in the community or relationship in which this is taking place, we should feel more connected. Recognising this usually only happens in hindsight.

Personally, I have found strong medicine in these stories for myself and I wanted to share it with you. The difficulty has been in trying to share the images without imposing the limits of my own personal experiences on them. The patterns we’ve been speaking about in this episode/instalment are broad and widespread, but we each experience them in very specific and personal ways.

Once we become aware the ways in which we’ve experienced them, the shame and guilt—or the fear of being judged and rejected that held us in place while we were subject to the coercive process—comes up again. We blame ourselves for having been so manipulated, contained, reshaped.

When, like Christopher, clarity dawns—the moment in which the realisation that, “I’ve wasted my time here,” arrives—we’re confronted with the question of what we really are without the form and structure prescribed by the Shadow Inn. It is both painful and deeply humiliating to feel that the performative bonsai-self that brings you praise and acceptance in a coercive environment is not the real shape of who you are. And so, rather than open up and let the light in, we shut the weight of that painful humiliation away. Keep it somewhere dark and secret because if others saw it, we might be rejected by them, too.

That’s a lot.

As Brené Brown has pointed out, shame derives its power from being unspeakable17. What makes having fallen victim to coercion so unspeakable is how humiliating it feels to admit that we feel manipulated, taken advantage of…fooled.

Coercive environments, in whatever context they appear, rely on coopting our permission—our agreement to accept their invitation, to lie in the beds they provide, and to submit to their measuring and reshaping. To anyone on the outside, it is very difficult to understand what would make a person grant such permission. This is because, as I mentioned earlier, we don’t usually think about the mechanics of coercion until we find ourselves a victim of its cruel Procrustean pattern. And when we do, we feel stupid. We feel that, if we were fooled, it must be because we are foolish. And if we are foolish, then we must be fools.

It is very similar to what people who have been scammed feel after losing money. There is grief for the loss. And shame for our perceived foolishness. And that shame is empowered because nobody wants to advertise their folly. It feels unspeakable and it thrives in the darkness of that secrecy.

This can make it very hard to heal. But, if you look at some part of your life and recognise the approved silhouette—
the clipped branch,
the wired posture,
the version of you that learned to fit the bed of a Shadow Inn—
remember: the weight of that realisation is the weight of the redemptive and regenerative power of the Acorn.

The grief beneath the layers of anger and humiliation is the weight of the child on your shoulder as you find yourself midstream—halfway across a raging torrent.

If you feel those things, I want you to know that the bank is near, and the only reason you are making this crossing is because this is where your Acorn has led you: past courts and kings, deserts and devils—you are here. And this is a moment in which the shape of your soul is making itself known to you. It is an encounter—albeit an uncomfortable one—with the numinous and mysterious essence of who you are. Stay with it. Like Offerus, ask it, “How have you, who seemed as light as a feather when I began, now become as heavy as the whole world?” And step by slow, shuffling step, make your crossing.

Don’t call yourself weak and throw at the weight of your grief off by dismissing it.
That grief is the weight of what was trimmed so you could feel that you belonged.
But if it has weight, it means it is not gone. The Acorn—your Acorn, your potential—remains.

And here is the part that the shame we feel for allowing ourselves to be manipulated doesn’t want us to learn:
The trimmed and wired bonsai-self is not the enemy.
It is not a betrayal to despise.

It is the carrier-self—the form you took to survive the season you were in.

No matter how much it was cut back, it kept the Acorn alive inside you until deeper earth appeared.

Christopher can only appear if Offerus first carries the child across the river. Offerus is the bonsai-self.

The Bonsai-Self is the Carrier.

So if you find yourself lodged in the wrong place—whether it’s a group, a job, a relationship, a belief system—this is the question that matters: is the work now to break the spell and leave like Theseus did?
Or to stop auditioning and begin living in your own shape like Offerus—
Either way, the road is not wasted.
Either way, the Acorn is not lost.

You are not lost.

Reflection

Where do these stories land for you in your own life? How do they speak to you in your experience of the world and its expectations of what or who you should be be?

Here are three short prompts you can use to reflect on the topics we’ve discussed today.

As always, there are no right or wrong answers.

I. Check your Belonging

This is a quick one. Just go with the first reasonable idea that fits the prompt, and explore it.

The size of the community is not important here. Whether we’re talking about a workplace, a social circles, a spiritual community, or even smaller communities like families, or one-on-one relationships, these dynamics can appear anywhere.

Think of a place where you feel that you belong but only because you edit yourself or allow yourself to be edited in order to fit in.

Name just one way in which you quietly edit yourself in order to secure your belonging there?

This week, choose one small moment to stop editing yourself.
Say one honest sentence.
Set one gentle boundary.
Or admit one uncertainty.

Even if you only do it quietly with yourself—without a public performance or announcement—that still counts because allowing yourself to recognise and name the process is the a powerful way of honouring the weight of your acorn.

The goal of this prompt is not to say that the space you’re thinking of is guilty of coercion and manipulation—it’s to allow yourself, as well as others in that space to show up more authentically and ultimately to create a community in which you can see and be seen by one another and be validated for it.

II. One Rule to Ring Them All

In writing, name one seemingly arbitrary rule—spoken or unspoken—that you follow mainly out of fear. Now try name the fear that motivates you—perhaps its a fear of losing approval, a fear of losing access, safety, status, or belonging.

What does following this rule cost you?
Sleep?
Your voice?
Other relationships?
Self-trust?

Next time you’re confronted with a situation in which that rule is being enacted, just once try a care-based alternative. Something small.

If you’re in a group, try asking a gentle and polite clarifying question. (You might want to brainstorm ideas for what this might be so that you’ll be prepared a head of time when the opportunity presents itself.)

Try requesting time to think or give it to yourself by excusing yourself for a rest-room break.

We’re not talking about rules like being on time for meetings, or looking right and left before crossing a road, here—we’re talking about arbitrary rules that perhaps need not be as powerful as they feel in these settings.

If you are in a safe physical environment and you know you have a strong support system in a context other than the one in which this rule holds so much authority, try just once to break it in a small way without explanation.

Although this might feel like rebellion in certain situations, it is more than that: it is asserting your personal agency. If it turns out that the rule is actually important and helpful, you’ll discover its purpose, safely and be able to follow it in the future with a clear sense of why it is so important. It will no longer feel arbitrary. If it is arbitrary, however, you will also gain insight into its actual purpose beyond what it is supposedly doing.

III. Reclaim your inner compass

The next time you feel that tug to comply or conform to an arbitrary standard because it feels like your acceptance or belonging is on the line—pause.

In that moment, ask yourself: Is this drawing me toward personal integrity… or toward performance seeking approval from an external source?

Choose one anchoring practice for the next month. Keep it simple.

One option might be a daily two-minute note in whatever note application you have available on your phone, tablet, or computer. There, you can ask yourself just one simple question:

“What did I do today to stay true to myself today?”

Another option might be to choose one trusted, safe person outside the system where you feel pressured.

You might want to share this episode with them and say, “This spoke to me. Can we do little check-ins sometimes… just to stay honest?” Make sure that you both explicitly agree to keep your conversation judgment free. It is not a space to try fix one another, just a place to share and affirm each other’s experience.

These check-ing’s are not a space to complain or badmouth anyone or any group.

Just to notice pressure when it shows up—and to help one another stay grounded on your respective paths.

Closing Thoughts

And that brings us to the end of our journey together today. Thank you so much for walking with me.

With stories like these, the commentary is only a lamp I carry for a little while. It’s how I’ve tried to understand what the images have done in my own life—and I offer it in the hope that it sheds some light for you, too. But the real medicine isn’t in my words. It’s in the images of the stories themselves.

So if you take nothing else from this instalment—if you’re not ready to dig too deeply into your own social contexts for now, or you’d rather just breathe and move on—please take the images from the stories. The inn. The bed. The river. The child’s weight. The staff taking root.

Let them work in you at their own pace.

These images are the real medicine.

Subscribe now

I’d love to hear how these ideas land with you. Stories—particularly these old stories—are all about community, so if you are so inclined, drop me a line and let me know how you’re doing or leave a comment.

Leave a comment

Sources

‌Apollodorus, & Hyginus. (2007). Apollodorus’ library and Hyginus’ Fabulae: Two handbooks of Greek mythology (R. S. Smith & S. M. Trzaskoma, Trans.). Hackett Publishing Company.

Brown, B. (2012). Daring greatly: How the courage to be vulnerable transforms the way we live, love, parent, and lead. Penguin Publishing Group.

Campbell, J. (2004). The Hero with a Thousand Faces (commemorative edition). Princeton University Press. (Original work published 1949)

Vogler, C. (2007). The writer’s journey: Mythic structure for writers. Michael Wiese Productions.

Hillman, J. (2017). The soul’s code: In search of character and calling. Ballantine Books.

Jiang, J., Ren, X., & Ferrara, E. (2021). Social media polarization and echo chambers in the context of COVID-19: Case study. JMIRx Med, 2(3), e29570. https://doi.org/10.2196/29570

Jung, C. G. (2023). The Collected Works of C. G. Jung. Princeton University Press.

Lifton, R. J. (1989). Thought reform and the psychology of totalism : a study of “brainwashing” in China. University of North Carolina Press. (Original work published 1961)

Pageau, J. (2013, July 8). The icon of St. Christopher. Orthodox Arts Journal. https://orthodoxartsjournal.org/the-icon-of-st-christopher/

Polanyi, M. (2012). Personal knowledge: Towards a post-critical philosophy. Taylor & Francis. (Original work published 1958)

Shenstone, W. (2017). Written At An Inn At Henley. Key to Poetry. https://keytopoetry.com/william-shenstone/poems/written-at-an-inn-at-henley/

Son, D., Kim, G., Oh, H., & Sundar, S. S. (2026). A framework for Gaming Disorder Detection based on social media data using Large Language Model labeling. Engineering Applications of Artificial Intelligence, 165(Part A), 113447. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.engappai.2025.113447

Grimes, M. (2003). The Man with a Load of Mischief. Berkley Books. https://martha-grimes.freenovelread.com/page,4,388648-the_man_with_a_load_of_mischief

Pierre, J. M., Gaeta, B., Raghavan, G., & Sarma, K. V. (2025). “You’re not crazy”: A case of new-onset AI-associated psychosis. Innovations in Clinical Neuroscience, 22(10–12), 11–13. https://innovationscns.com/youre-not-crazy-a-case-of-new-onset-ai-associated-psychosis/

Tréguer, P. (2019, April 23). Meaning and origin of “Procrustean bed/Procrustean remedy.” Word Histories. https://wordhistories.net/2019/04/23/procrustean-origin/

Thank you so much for taking a moment to look at what I’ve been working on. This offering is a slightly revised and expanded transcript of Episode 7 of The Inward Sea podcast. It’s longer than my usual fare (it has more pictures, too).

If you’re reading this because it’s landed in your email inbox, please be aware that you’re probably not going to be able to see it all. For the best possible experience, open this message in your browser, and if you’ve got a Substack account, you can even click a little play button at the top of the article and have it read to you!

Although I’ve presented this topic a number of times over the years, collecting my scattered notes into a single piece has been both challenging and deeply rewarding. What with this being January and all—how are you doing with your New Year’s resolutions?—I hope you will get as much out of this piece as I got in making it.

As always, I’d love to hear from you—whether it’s about this post, a story that springs to mind as you read through it, or anything else! Please feel free to drop me a line any time.

If you have arrived here looking for the text version of the reflection prompts for this instalment, you’ll find them here (if you’re on mobile, you may have to scroll. These links don’t seem to work for phones or tablets).

Okay. Enough chit-chat. Let’s get on with the show!

Click this image to listen to the episode on Spotify

You can also listen to the audio version of this post on YouTube by pressing play on the video and continuing to read on Substack (though, there are a few differences)

Opening

Most of us can name the things we want to change—the parts of life that just… don’t feel right.

Maybe we want to the change the way we relate to food or money. Maybe it’s the way we keep showing up in relationships. Maybe it’s the promises we keep breaking to our own souls: the skill, the hobby, the creative life we keep pushing to the edge of the map as other “more important” things crowd our days.

Naming what we want to change is easy. Starting feels heroic.

But a few days—or a few weeks—later, life collects its usual debts. Time shrinks. Energy thins out and willpower goes with it. And the rulers of the old order—the habits and behaviours we tried to depose—show up again.

Maybe you’ve met them. They arrive with the pressure of a world that doesn’t know—or care—who you’re trying to become.

“You can try to change,” they say. “But you’ll still do what you’ve always done. You’ll still be what you’ve always been.” Maybe you’ve heard their voices before. Maybe you can hear them now.

Acorn Theory: an Introduction

Before we move on, I want to share one idea I’ll return to later—after Theseus’ encounter in Eleusis—when a victory could easily become a premature ending.

In his book, The Soul’s Code, James Hillman introduces what he calls the Acorn Theory. The image is simple: an acorn doesn’t contain a vague “potential.” It carries a pattern. It carries a blueprint—an image—of an oak. Plant it, and it won’t grow into just anything. It grows in a particular direction, with a particular shape.

Hillman suggests something like this lives in us too. Each of us carries an image—whether we can name it or not—of what we’re here to become. Sometimes we sense that shape early. Sometimes we recognise it only in hindsight. Sometimes other people see it in us before we do.

Hillman also insists this isn’t some modern invention. He places it in a much older stream of human imagination—and he’s blunt about what we’ve lost:

The concept of this individualised soul-image has a long, complicated history; its appearance in cultures is diverse and widespread and the names for it are legion. Only our contemporary psychology and psychiatry omit it from their textbooks. The study and therapy of the psyche in our society ignore this factor, which other cultures regard as the kernel of character and the repository of individual fate.(Hillman, The Soul’s Code, 2017 ed., Ch. 1)

Plato had an older word for this: the daimon (δαίμων)—an intermediary presence between the human and the divine. Not a “demon” in the modern sense. More like a guiding force you feel as a pull, a calling, a pressure toward the life that’s actually yours. This calling can be delayed, but it doesn’t disappear. When we ignore it for too long, it returns as symptoms—or as a dull sense that life has lost its meaning. “This image,” Hillman notes, “does not tolerate too much straying.”

While Hillman calls it the acorn, other Jungians could call it the Self—with a capital S. Religious language might call it God, or the Holy Spirit. We’re not debating philosophical vocabulary or theology here. I’m pointing out that different cultures keep returning us to the same shared experience. All these words are our efforts to name it. Hillman puts it like this:

These many words and names do not tell us what ‘it’ is, but they do confirm that it is. They also point to its mysteriousness. We cannot know what exactly we are referring to because its nature remains shadowy, revealing itself mainly in hints, intuitions, whispers, and the sudden urges and oddities that disturb your life and that we continue to call symptoms. (Hillman, 2017 ed., Ch. 1)

Whatever name you give it, the key idea for today’s discussion is this: not every win is aligned with the growth and shape of our own acorn. Some “successes” arrive like offers—clean, official, even deserved—and they still pull you off-course.

In Eleusis, Theseus is about to win something that looks like a perfect ending: a crown. But is that crown—deserved though it may be—aligned with the shape of his acorn, the inner impulse that sent him out from Troezen in the first place? And what does that mean for you and I?

Theseus’ Acorn and the Path of Growth

I love time-lapse videos of plants growing. They always show the same strange fact: before a seed reaches for the light, it commits to the dark. It has to grow down before it can grow up.

And that’s also the shape of Theseus’ road.

Zoom out and his journey runs from the “little city of Troezen”1 toward Athens—the centre of power, recognition, and public life in ancient Greece. This follows the same pattern we see in those time-lapse videos.

First comes the descent: the under-road of growth, where what’s hidden has to be met. Periphetes, Sínis, and the Crommyonian Sow are illustrations of what it means to honestly face the limiting beliefs, fears, and raw appetite within ourselves, and then to hold that tension—the tension of seeing ourselves honestly rather than in an overly flattering or overly condemning light.

NOTE: If you missed these pieces, you can check them out below, for free!
Periphetes:

Sínis & The Crommyonian Sow

Before we are able to make positive changes in our lives, we need to confront the things that need changing. Sometimes they are small things, and sometimes they are much bigger. Sometimes they are cyclopean thugs armed with divinely wrought bronze clubs. But having the courage to face them, acknowledge their presence within and as part of ourselves is how we begin temper their energy and redirect them, thus allowing them to become tools that benefit rather than harm us or our communities. This is a largely inwardly oriented process.2

In other stories, this initial part of the journey—the descending arc—is depicted as the hero’s descent into a cave where they face a dragon or some mortal danger, and win a treasure.

But, for a treasure won in the darkness of a cave to be of any worth, it must be brought out into the light. And a seed cannot stay underground forever.

After meeting the Crommyonian Sow, Theseus’ road turns upward. And this is the beginning of the ascent arc—of growing upwards. It is on this next leg of the journey that the depth and grounding achieved in the previous one become visible.

The forces that seem to oppose Theseus (and us) appearing on this arc change, too. Here, these threshold guardians wear the faces of authority figures and the struggle becomes social, public even, and involves action.

In Theseus’ story, Skíron marks that turn. His test is a social ritual, a demand for deference—the old authority asking you to kneel. But we encounter him outside the city. He may have the reputation of being a ruler, but he is still a force we encounter in the privacy of our own intimate meeting with the unconscious.

He is the test of whether we are really able to hold the tension between the unconscious energy of the insights we gain, or whether we will over-identify with them, become inflated. In the previous instalment, we spoke about that process in detail:

After publishing it I found a meme somebody3 shared on Substack that I find hillarious. It gives, in my opinion, a fantastic depiction of ego inflation and how it leads to dissolution—that is, more unconsciousness—rather than an expansion of conscious awareness and thus, growth. Put it in a textbook!

But, onward!

The next challenge Theseus faces doesn’t appear in the wilderness. It isn’t a beast or villain waiting to leap out from a ditch and ambush our hero. He is a king, sitting enthroned at the center of Eleusis.

This part of the myth tests Theseus—and us—twice. The first is obvious. The second is harder to spot—but it can end our journey just as surely. And that is where understanding the image of the acorn really matters.

So, with all that out of the way, we’re off to catch up with Theseus in the ancient city of Eleusis, where Demeter (Δήμητρα) is revered. In English, we know her as Demeter—Goddess of the ripened grain.

It’s a place of thresholds. A place of rites. A place where you bring an offering to Δήμητρα Μεγάλα Θεά—Demeter the Great Goddess—and receive her blessing. And that offering is not a bull, or a crown.

It’s a piglet.

A small, squealing, bristling scrap of appetite—the Crommyonian Sow, in miniature—an image that holds incredible symbolic weight. It is as if, in this place, the innocent offspring of that wild misaligned energy of the Sow is reunited with the image of the Great Mother archetype4. Here, in Eleusis, the bestial nature of instinct is redeemed.

Theseus’ confrontation with Cercyon is about to show us how that might happen in our own lives.

So—without further ado—let’s step into the story.

The Myth: The Wrestling King

Theseus followed the road from Mégara, away from the salt-spray and the vertical drop of cliffs, until he reached the fertile, heavy silence of the Thriasian Plain. In the late afternoon light, the world felt different. The Grey Road of the Isthmus had been a place of blurred edges and shifting meaning—but as he descended the jagged line of the mountain path, he saw grey walls ahead: ancient, immovable, certain. This, he knew, was the earthly home of the Great Goddess Demeter (Δήμητρα). This was Eleusis (Ελευσίνα).

Inside these walls, the air didn’t move with the freedom of the coast. It was thick with the smells of cooking fires and human life—the stagnant weight of a city that had forgotten how to exhale.

He threaded through narrow streets—stalls, awnings, smoke-blackened doorways. A vendor’s shout died mid-syllable. Another voice lowered. Eyes met his, held for a heartbeat, then turned away. He’d never walked these lanes, but he knew the story of this place: where the Great Goddess came grieving, searching for her daughter taken by the Underworld. And now the city rehearsed that old motion. A woman yanked her child close. A young man turned away, suddenly more interested in the nearby stone wall that in whatever he’d been doing. With each step, a fissure of silence opened in front of him. As he passed, it sealed behind him—bodies and sounds closing over the gap, settling back into their old rhythm, as though nothing had happened. He’d never walked these lanes—but Theseus didn’t need directions. The city itself provided them. He followed.

The lanes widened and delivered him into a town square washed in late light. At its centre was a ring of hard earth—packed smooth by a thousand impacts. The place didn’t look like a market anymore. It looked like a court.

A man waited on the far side of the circle. He sat so still, so heavy in himself, that for a moment Theseus mistook him for one of the temple statues—until the figure shifted. Of course, it had to be a man. Statues didn’t move.

He seemed too large for the city scene: shoulders like quarried stone, a neck like a tree stump. Forearms thick as old roots, hands as wide and rough as river-rock. This, Theseus knew, was Cercyon—the infamous king of Eleusis. Even seated, he looked less like a ruler than a landmark.

Rumours hung around him like his deep purple robes. Some swore Poseidon’s blood ran through his veins. Others named Hephaistos. Others still—in lowered tones—murmured Arcadia.

Looking at him now, Theseus wasn’t sure there was any blood there at all. Maybe those muscles were fed by the pulsing flow of gravel and fire.

For a moment, Cercyon only looked at him—slowly, like a man reading an inscription he already knows by heart.

“Traveller,” he said at last. His voice was not loud. It didn’t need to be.
Theseus bowed his head. “Your Majesty.”

Something like recognition—cool, almost indifferent—passed across Cercyon’s face.
“You know where you are.”
“Yes, Sire. I know what they call this city.”
“And what do they call me?”
Theseus raised his eyes and held the king’s gaze. “Cercyon.”

Around the circle of packed earth, a small group of onlookers had gathered. The corners of Cercyon’s mouth lifted. “Good” he said. “Then we can spare ourselves the long version.”

He lifted one hand—two fingers, barely a gesture. A boy at the edge of the square moved quickly, as if grateful to have something to do. He brought a clay cup and a small jug.

Cercyon nodded toward it. “Water.”
Theseus looked at the cup in the boy’s trembling hand, then back at the king.
“You offer it?” he asked.
“I do.” Cercyon’s eyes stayed on him. “In Eleusis, we honour custom.”

A pause—so deep it seemed the crowd had forgotten how to breathe. Theseus stepped forward, took the cup, and drank. Cercyon watched him swallow.

“Now,” he said, “your name.”
“Theseus, sire.”

A murmur rippled around the circle—fast, suppressed. Cercyon’s smile widened a fraction. “Theseus of Troezen. Grandson of Pittheus.”

Theseus said nothing.

“You’ve been busy on the road,” Cercyon went on, almost conversationally. “It seems the stories have travelled faster than you.” “I didn’t expect a man like you to come all the way to my…humble city.”

The crowd shifted. Someone whispered a prayer not meant for ears. Theseus kept his voice level. “If there are stories, they aren’t for me to tell, sire.” Cercyon made a soft sound that might have been laughter. “A modest hero! That’s new.” He nodded to the cleared circle. “In Eleusis,” he said, “a traveller receives a gift.” Theseus glanced at the hard-packed earth. Cercyon’s tone stayed almost courteous. “A contest. No weapons. Only wrestling.”

Somewhere in the city, a dog barked once. “And if I refuse?” Theseus asked. Cercyon’s eyes didn’t change, but the air did. “To refuse,” he said, “is to insult…the gods who guard custom.” “And…you? Your Majesty?” Theseus wondered if that title was as bitter in the ears of the crowd as it was on his lips. Cercyon’s gaze swept the crowd, then returned. “To the city. To custom.” His fist dropped onto his knee. Theseus nodded once.

“And if I accept?”
Cercyon leaned forward. The purple folds shifted over his knees like something living. “If you win,” he said, “everything that is mine becomes yours. House. Kingdom. Crown.”

A whisper moved through the ring: the kingdom!

“And if I lose?”
There was no warmth in Cercyon’s smile—only teeth. “Then you’ll pay the toll, like the rest. Your spirit can go where it likes. Your body stays here—feeding the soil and birds of my kingdom.”

Theseus looked at the circle. Looked at the king’s hands—wide as stones—resting easy on his thighs. Looked at the faces that would not meet his eyes. He handed the cup back to the boy and wiped his mouth.

“So this is your hospitality,” he said. Cercyon’s head tilted, almost amused. “You drank, didn’t you?”

Theseus breathed out once, as if making space inside himself. He laid his belongs—the club, his sword, the sandals, and his tunic at the edge of the arena. And then he stepped into the ring. “Then I accept your gift, O king,” he said.

Cercyon rose. No sword. No guards. He let his heavy cloak fall into the dust and stepped into the circle. The square went quiet the way animals go quiet when something larger enters the clearing. “Good,” Cercyon said, rolling his shoulders as if waking a familiar habit. “Show me what kind of man you are.”

Theseus widened his stance and lifted his hands—open, steady. “Show me,” he said, “what kind of king you are,” he said.

The two men circled one another—sizing up every movement..

Cercyon was a wall of muscle, and worse: experienced. He moved with the confidence of a man who had never been defeated. He expected Theseus to strain against him, to push back, to play the game by the old, brutal rules that pitted strength against strength.

But Theseus didn’t.

He was no longer the boy who’d swung at Herakles’ lion-skin with an axe. The road had trained him—taught him the purpose of strength, and when it’s a mistake to trust in it alone.

He settled his weight and listened. He could feel the bronze club in his stance now—no longer a weapon, but a way of standing. He didn’t rush forward. He didn’t push back.

Theseus feigned a lunge, then retreated a few paces, giving way, creating the space that would soon be filled with Cercyon’s bulk. He could feel his blood rushing like wind through the tall pines of the Isthmus, and his breath came in with the steady patience of the creature waiting below insatiable swell of the Bad Bay. He waited for Cercyon to decide—like tyrants always do—that the smaller man would break. He would use the bigger man’s certainty as Sínis had used the pines—to bind his opponent to the choice he’d made, then shred his chance of victory with its opposite.

When the king lunged, Theseus allowed him to believe it. He yielded the space—just a breath, just a half-step—like a man stepping back from the edge of a cliff. Cercyon’s power surged forward, unstoppable, and for an instant, uncontrollable—even for himself.

That was the opening. Theseus twisted, turned, and pivoted into it—hard and decisive—the savage appetite of that bristled Crommyonian beast stampeding through his veins.

Cercyon tried to recover by doing what he always did—by closing in, by crushing. And as that weight came down on him, Theseus didn’t resist it head-on. He moved with it, like a pine in the wind. Then, at precisely the right moment, in a motion that looked more like a dance than a fight, he reached deep, hooked beneath the king’s centre of gravity, and lifted.

For the first time in his long, brutal reign, Cercyon’s feet left the earth.

The king flailed, as he came ungrounded. He was no longer the Arcadian oak; he was just a man suspended in the empty air. Theseus held him there for a heartbeat—an embrace that was both a death sentence and a revelation—and then drove him down, hard, into the very dust he used to rule.

An ugly snapping sound echoed around the arena.

Cercyon, the son of Poseidon, Hephaistos, of some Arcadian line—or whoever—lay in a crumpled heap on the packed dirt.

The circle went silent.

Finally, the elders of Eleusis began to stir, their faces like wet candles sputtered between expressions of terror and a sudden, desperate relief.

But before they could speak, a young man broke through the crowd.

He was ragged, his eyes wide and bright with a hope that looked like a wound. This was Hippothoon (Ἱπποθόων)—the son of the murdered Alope5.

Theseus looked at the boy and felt a sudden, cold jolt of recognition. He saw it in the set of the shoulders, the particular light in the eyes—the same salt-etched heritage his mother, Aethra, had spoken about when he was a child in Troezen.

“Maybe you’re the son of a god, Theseus—maybe you are the son of Poseidon!”

He saw a mirror of his own hidden history. Here was another son of Poseidon, the Earth-Shaker; a half-brother in spirit, standing in the wreckage of a family line that had turned inward and rotted.

One of the elders who had gathered up Cercyon’s royal robes stepped forward. In his hand, he held the crown of Eleusis. “The law is met,” he said “By king Cercyon’s own oath, the throne belongs now to you, Theseus of Troezen.”

Theseus looked at the crown. He looked at the faces of the gathered crowd. Maybe it was the light of the early evening, or maybe it was an inward light—the light of hope—that made their faces glow. Life could be comfortable here. It would be so easy to stop. To rule. To seat himself in the high place at the centre of this old city.

At the edge of the ring, the bronze club, and the bronze sword left for him by his father were cast in golden light. He remembered the rock in Troezen. Those tokens weren’t meant for an Eleusinian throne; they were meant for Athens. To stay here would be to build a kingdom around a detour.

Theseus reached out, not for the crown, but for Hippothoon’s hand. He pulled the young man forward, in front of the elder.

“Honorable elder, my path leads elsewhere. This is your king,” he said. “King Hippothoon, son of Cercyon’s murdered daughter, Alope, and of my father: Poseidon, the Earth-Shaker.”

All around the circle, the crowd broke cheering. Celebrations continued long into the night.

The next morning, Theseus gathered his belongings, shouldered his burden, and set out again. He followed the path walked by the initiates of the Mysteries out of Eleusis towards Athens.

Athens was closer now. He could almost smell the smoke of his father’s hearth.

Amplification

Cercyon (Κερκύων) – The Wrestling King

Until now, the forces on Theseus’ road—Periphetes, Sínis, the Crommyonian Sow—rise out of the spaces between towns and cities. Skíron marks a turning point. He is still situated outside a city, but he is elevated by the rising road, and as we saw last time, his implied nobility is part of the danger he represents.

Cities stand for conscious order6; beyond them is psychic life too vast to be fully brought inside. The task isn’t to conquer what can’t be tamed, but to learn its terms—so we can live with it without doing—or sustaining—harm. So when this story begins presenting forces of opposition that come packaged with social or hierarchical overtones—cultural cues that the Ancient Greek audience would certainly have picked up on but which get flattened by our modern views of heroes and villains—we can read it as a change in the nature of the work being done. As noted earlier, in this myth, that shift occurs with Skíron. In the previous instalment we met him standing on the cliffs of the Bad Bay. Like Theseus’ earlier encounters, he appears outside a city along the path through the wilderness, but he was not just a bandit. We learned how, despite the fact that we met him in the liminal space of —to the storytellers of Mégara, at least—Skíron bore a reputation of nobility, of authority, and of civic status.

The image of Cercyon continues in this direction. He sits enthroned at the centre of Eleusis (Ἐλευσίς / Ελευσίνα), charged—at least in the eyes of the city—with preserving order and custom.

Plutarch slips in a detail that’s easy to miss. He doesn’t just describe him as “Cercyon the king.” He says: Cercyon the Arcadian.7

Arcadia (Ἀρκαδία) is Pan-country—the landscape where shepherds, nymphs, and even the mountains move to the Saturnian rhythms of the Golden Age. Pan is that landscape given a body: hooves and horns, shaggy legs, appetite and music—more at home in groves than temples. In one famous tale, the nymph Syrinx flees him and escapes by becoming reeds; Pan cuts the reeds, binds them, and the panpipes enter the world.8 Every encounter with this god is marked by a feral throb beneath the skin of civility.

That’s the spirit Plutarch conjures in the throne room when he calls Cercyon “the Arcadian.” Robert Louis Stevenson catches the feeling perfectly: you can “…hear the goat-footed piper making the music which is itself the charm and terror of things.”9

So while Skíron shows us twisted nobility exercising authority beyond the city walls, Cercyon inverts it. He is repression embodied: cloven-hoofed Arcadia pressed down and disguised beneath royal robes. And if there’s one thing we know about repression, it’s this—what we pave over doesn’t just disappear. It gathers pressure beneath the surface until it breaks containment. And when that happens, what emerges is rarely pretty.

We see that clearly with Cercyon. The stories clustered around him are brutal. Hyginus and Pausanias both tell us that he puts his daughter Alope (Ἀλόπη) to death after she bears a child by Poseidon. After Theseus kills Cercyon, it is this child—Hippothoon— who steps forward to claim the kingdom.

If Cercyon were a character in a modern story, we’d expect some account of how the people respond to this brutality. But myth works differently: the king, the city, and its citizens form one psychic system. There is no public outcry because Cercyon’s cruelty is authorised by his station—woven into the fabric of the place.

And the same thing happens in us: when an unhealthy habit or maladaptive pattern has “a throne,” we rarely meet it with protest. We rationalise it, make excuses, and accept it as part of who we are—no matter what it costs us over time.

By all accounts, Cercyon is very strong—but the sources can’t quite agree on where that strength comes from. Some make him the son of Poseidon; others connect him to Hephaestus; still others offer different genealogies, each trying, in its own way, to account for his terrible force.

Regardless, Cercyon is not presented as a bandit on the road. He is a legitimate ruler—whose strength represents the weight of tradition, custom, and “this is how things are done.”

In our modern lives, kings don’t only live in palaces. They rule in our lives as patterns. The most powerful (and often tyranical) ones are those of whom we remain unaware. They can show up as reputation, or habit: a centre of psychic authority that once held things together, but which can grow stale—and eventually require renewal.

The Image of the King-in-Need-of-Renewal

Cercyon is not the first king we’ve discussed, and he won’t be the last. Back in Episode 2—The Bull and the Burnout—we spent time with King Minos of Crete: the ruler who tries to stabilise his world by clinging to a gift from Poseidon… and ends up building a labyrinth to hide the results of his insecurity. Cercyon belongs to that same family of images.

In amplifying these images, its important to remember that one image can carry several truths at once. The king isn’t only a political leader. He is the organising centre—the authority a whole system arranges itself around. In a tribe, that might be a chief. In a city, it’s the ruler, the laws, the customs. In a psyche, it’s the way we hold ourselves together—our identity, our sense of “this is who I am,” our “this is how life works,” or perhaps, “this is what I do in these situations.”

In her 1971 book, An Introduction to the Interpretation of Fairytales, Marie-Louise von Franz explains how in many traditional societies, the king matters less because he’s morally superior than because he contains the vitality of the group. If the king withers, the kingdom withers. If he becomes impotent, the land becomes barren. And when that potency fades, renewal is demanded—sometimes symbolically, sometimes literally, and often violently.

She goes on to describe what happens when such an ordering centre wears out. She points out, and I think it bears repeating here, that the king is a symbol of the Self. It is not the actual archetypal Self, but a symbolic image set up to act as an organising principle in the conscious psyche. Regarding the aging and wearing out of this symbol she writes:

If you study the comparative history of religions, you will note the tendency for any religious ritual or dogma that has become conscious to wear out after a time, to lose its original emotional impact and become a dead formula. Although it also acquires the positive qualities of consciousness such as continuity, it loses the irrational contact with the flow of life and tends to become mechanical. This is true not only of religious doctrines and political systems but for everything else as well, because when something has long been conscious, the wine goes out of the bottle. It becomes a dead world. Therefore, if our conscious life is to avoid petrifaction there is a necessity for constant renewal by contact with the flow of psychic events in the unconscious and the king, being the dominant and most central symbol in the contents of the collective unconscious, is naturally subject to this need to an even greater extent. (von Franz, 1971, Ch. 4 p. 6)

Although it is a bit of a mouthful, that’s a beautiful to describe what people mean when they say: I don’t feel like myself anymore. I feel stuck. I don’t know why I keep doing this.

When that happens, it’s not the deepest centre—the actual Self, or daimon, or acorn, to use Hillman’s language—that is suffering depletion. It’s the rule-set—the image or symbol of who we think we are—that has run out of power. That old king can no longer hold the life-force in a healthy way. And then renewal isn’t optional. Something must shift—or the inner kingdom petrifies.

And notice where that renewal comes from in von Franz’s line: “…by contact with the flow of psychic events in the unconscious.” In myth, that contact often arrives from outside the walls of the city. Theseus approaches Eleusis as an outsider, carrying precisely that disruptive power of renewal within him.

Up to now, the work we’ve been doing in this series has mostly been inward: a matter of recognition, naming, reframing, defusing shame, seeing what’s going on underneath. Insight is important in this kind of work—but insight alone doesn’t dethrone a king. A king is replaced when a new centre proves it can actually hold the kingdom together.

Cercyon invites travellers to wrestle. The offer is enticing: his kingdom if they win—and he kills them when they lose. No appeals. No second chances.

I know that offer. I’m sure you know it, too. Some of our habits rule us like that. As soon as we we make any attempt to change, they clamp down. We may set out feeling heroically charged to to grow, and then, suddenly we’re tired, distracted, ashamed, craving relief—anything that gets us to drop our guard—and then you blink and you’re back where you started.

This may be a story about wrestling, but it isn’t really a story about muscles or strength. It’s a story about what you do when the old pattern gets its hands on you. And I have some good news for you: there are more ways to win in this wrestling match than simply being strong.

Wrestling

Growing up, I avoided sports. Partly because music is a very important part of my life, and a finger injury could shut down flute or piano for weeks. Mostly because of social anxiety. But also because, after several rounds of corrective eye surgery when I was very young, I never developed good depth perception.

When I played that child-friendly version of tennis with the big spongy orange ball, my teacher always said: keep your eyes on the ball. I tried. I missed. The only chance I had was watching the shadow of the ball on the ground—but even then, my attempts at connecting racket to ball did little more than circulate air.

I’ve read that chaos theory suggests a butterfly flapping its wings in the Amazon may set off storms in Europe. On behalf of Little Dim, I offer my sincere apologies to anyone affected by my early attempts at racket or bat-based ball sports. Of course, it’s equally possible my wild swings prevented a few tornadoes. For that, you’re welcome. I’ll wear that cap with pride.

All of this is to say: I don’t know much about wrestling as a sport. I am, however, intimately acquainted with its metaphor.

If you’ve ever tried to shake a habit, change the way you respond under pressure, or commit to something that matters—practice, study, creation—while a thousand other things compete for your attention, then perhaps you are, too.

Wrestling is ancient. It shows up in early literature and early visual records of organised combat. Some sport sociologists point at the cave paintings at Lascaux in France—dated to roughly 15,000–17,000 years ago—and suggest wrestling may be the oldest “sport” (Delaney & Madigan, 2021, Ch. 3). This claim is disputed, however and I have, since recording this episode, discovered more claims stating that the earliest depictions of wrestling occur in the rock art Tassili n’Ajjer, in Algeria. Or perhaps in Mongolia. Graphic sources for these images seem few and far between, and so, for our purposes, it is enough to recognize that what think of as wrestling today is ancient.

Whether or not the a specific site (looking at you, Lascaux) contains depictions of wrestling, sociologists wisely point out that these ancient depictions of wrestling or any “sport-like” activity isn’t the same thing as the modern sport with which we are acquainted. In many cultures—human and animal—wrestling-like behaviour is a way of establishing order, settling questions of dominance and submission.

And it’s that older, more primal sense of wrestling that matters here, when we’re talking about Theseus’ road.

Wrestling the Wild: The Epic of Gilgamesh

Wrestling is a central image of pivotal importance in The Epic of Gilgamesh, one of the oldest surviving works of literature we have. The story comes down through a long chain of Mesopotamian tablets and versions, reaching back into the early second millennium BCE and beyond. It follows Gilgamesh, king of Uruk—two-thirds divine, one-third mortal—and, at the start of the tale at least, an absolute menace. He is quite possibly the first literary portrait of a tyrant whose legitimacy is founded on building a wall (Foster, 2019, I: 11–14).

Gilgamesh mistreats the people of his city—men and women alike—until the outcry reaches the gods (Foster, 2019, I: 53–102). And so Aruru—Goddess who creates life—fashions a counter-force: Enkidu, a wild man, formed from clay, living on the steppes—undoing traps, disrupting the machinery of civilisation at its edge (Foster, 2019, I: 53–102).

A hunter sees Enkidu, panics, and the story kicks into a mythic civilising sequence involving a lot of sex, food, clothing, a haircut—until Enkidu arrives in Uruk to challenge the king. He meets Gilgamesh at the gates of a wedding feast and they grapple (Foster, 2019, II: 90–114).

There are no weapons. We can read it as wrestling. And the match doesn’t end in a clean victory. Despite this, Gilgamesh kneels and claims it anyway, even though they seem evenly matched—but then something startling happens: the two opponents become inseparable.

From there they go on to have many adventures together, hunting and defeating demons. But that is another story for another time.

For now, notice the structure. Two incomplete forces meet: Gilgamesh, the corrupted king-in-need-of-renewal; and Enkidu, the counter-force raised from beyond the city’s order. Through that grappling both Gilgamesh and Enkidu are changed. They find wholeness and completion.

And that’s why this matters for Theseus. Whether it’s Cercyon meeting Theseus, or Gilgamesh meeting Enkidu, the pattern is the same: something from beyond the walls arrives to challenge the ruling centre. And that change occurs when they come into close contact with one another.

Myth chooses the image of wrestling for this. Not a duel at distance, but a contest close enough to feel breath and body heat. A contest of leverage, balance, will. In Theseus’ story, it ends in death and succession: Cercyon falls and the crown passes—through Theseus—to Hippothoon. In Gilgamesh, it ends in a different kind of renewal: the desire for dominance turns into a deep and loving bond. The king isn’t changed by advice or even the protests of his people. He’s changed by contact with his opposite.

That’s the point I want to carry from Uruk to Eleusis.

Because the king is to the city what our habitual patterns are to us: the organising centre that sets the rules, decides what gets expressed, and keeps the system running—healthy or not. Myth shows renewal as one ruler falling and another taking his place; lived experience is messier. The old pattern doesn’t vanish on cue. Change arrives when we meet its force, stay present, and redirect the energy into a new channel.

And wrestling is an apt image for that. It asks for the same skill: recognition, contact, balance, responsiveness—the ability to yield without collapse, and resist without rigidity.

How to win when wrestling

From the story of Gilgamesh and Enkidu, we can see that victory in this grappling struggle for renewal can take many forms. Gilgamesh kneels and claims victory, even without a clean win. And yet, the king who rises after that isn’t the king who entered the fight.

Before we return to Eleusis, there are two more wrestling stories worth bringing into this circle. Each turns the lens and shows a different facet of what “winning” can mean in story—and in our own lives.

Jacob and the Angel

The first is borrowed from the tradition of the Hebrew Bible: the story of Jacob wrestling an angel. I’ll retell it, but you’ll find it in Genesis 32:22–31.

Jacob is on the move with his family. After many years, he is finally headed back to make things right with his brother, Esau. He reaches the edge of a river and sets up camp. Rivers are borders, thresholds that can be difficult to cross, but they’re also channels. They both divide and irrigate the land. They flow and carry the current forward. We use the language of water, rain, and rivers to talk about our experience of life. We talk about going through “dry spells,” or inspiration that has “run dry.” We describe certain seasons in life as times when things finally “start flowing” again. This is river-talk. It is also language that helps us identify a threshold and what we need to cross, or perhaps have already crossed.

In the story, Jacob sends everyone across the river first—wives, servants, children, I imagine them picking their way across the shallow river as the sun sets and the first stars in the purple sky reflect on the fast-flowing water. Jacob, however, stays behind at the camp.

He’s left alone on the near side.

And then the text says a Man—printed with a capital M—comes to him in the dark and wrestles with him.

This goes on all night, and as dawn approaches, the Man finds that he cannot force Jacob into submission. So he touches Jacob’s hip and dislocates it. Even when he is injured, Jacob refuses to release the Man. And there, in the spreading of the pre-dawn light, Jacob says something almost shocking in its stubborn insistence: I won’t let you go unless you bless me.

The Man asks Jacob his name, and then renames him—“Israel; for you have struggled with God and with men, and have prevailed.”

When Jacob asks the Man His name, the Man replies, “Why do you ask me my name?” And blesses him.

That is the last we see of that Man. Having received a new name himself, Jacob renames that place on the bank of the river Peniel, saying, ““For I have seen God face to face, and my life is preserved.”

And then the story ends with a beautiful line:

Just as he crossed over Penuel the sun rose on him, and he limped on his hip. (Genesis 32:31)

In this story, Jacob is the one in need of renewal. He needs to mend the rift between him and his brother caused by his deception years earlier. And here, through this wrestling match that takes places on the verge of a threshold, he is changed.

But here again, we see a different definition of victory in this story. He eventually crosses that threshold with a limp. It is a victory won, not by besting his opponent, but by refusing to be subdued by Him. And as a result, he also receives a new name.

Renaming is one of those recurring renewal-images in myth: the old name can’t contain the new live, so the story gives a new one. I wrote more about that in another Substack essay:

Now, If we stay with the image, without getting lost in doctrinal debates, two things stand out.

First: the opponent isn’t framed as a villain. The force Jacob wrestles is aligned with the ordering power of the sacred—call it God, call it the Self, call it the daimon, call it the acorn. Jacob doesn’t “defeat” that power in the usual sense. He endures contact with it. He holds on through the night and refuses to be overpowered.

Second: prevailing doesn’t mean walking away unscarred. Prevailing means the struggle doesn’t end before the blessing is won—before the light of dawn returns order to the darkness of night and the new name arrives.

So if we ask what “winning” can mean, Jacob answers: sometimes victory is persistence. Sometimes victory is crossing the threshold, even if you cross it limping. Sometimes the new identity is simply this: I am the one who wrestled and I did not give up.

I did not give way.

I did not give in.

And now—hold that image, because the next wrestling story turns the lens another way.

Herakles and Antaeus

For this story, we’re going to take a look at Theseus’ role model: Herakles. Everyone knows that Herakles is strong. But in this story—as with Theseus’ own—strength is secondary.

On his way through Libya for the eleventh labour, Herakles meets Antaeus (. The sources describe him as the ruler of Libya: a king like Cercyon. He doesn’t ambush. He waits—planted in his own territory—demanding a contest from anyone who passes. And like Cercyon, he wrestles to kill. Pindar says he used the skulls of his victims to roof a temple of his father, Poseidon.10

Antaeus’ mother is Gaia (Γαῖα), the Earth. Because of that, each time he touches the ground, he grows stronger. He draws power from the earth itself.

Oblivious to this, Herakles grapples. He throws. He drives Antaeus into dust. And each time Antaeus springs back stronger—recharged—while Herakles begins to tire.

So Herakles changes the move. He lifts him—disconnecting him from the ground, cutting him off from the source. Suspended, Antaeus weakens. Only then can Herakles finish the struggle. He crushes him in a bear hug.

That’s the whole image in one motion: Herakles wins by ungrounding the opponent and drawing him in close… hugging him.

I think there is medicine in that.

Returning to Eleusis

Armed with these images, we return to Eleusis to look again at the match taking place there.

In his Descriptions of Greece Pausanias pauses while describing the area surrounding Eleusis to mention the fight between Theseus and Cercyon because the fight mattered. He says Theseus defeats Cercyon not by physical size or sheer force, but by skill—a revolutionary act in wrestling.11 Theseus refuses to wrestle by Cercyon’s rules. He refuses to let tradition set the limits of what’s possible, and he changes the terms of the contest.

What are the traditions you have held in your own wrestling matches in the past? What has dictated how your wrestled with old behavior patterns that no longer serve you?

Apollodorus preserves a variation. He tells us that Theseus wins in Heraklean fashion—by lifting Cercyon high and driving him down.12

Put the two versions together and something clearer emerges: the victory isn’t in brute strength. It’s in the refusal to act according to the old terms and then, skill or tenacity to embody that refusal.

And that brings us back to our own wrestling matches.

It’s rarely people we wrestle, at least not in the straightforward sense. Yes—sometimes there’s external conflict. But what hooks us, drains us, and repeats is often an inner pattern old and established enough to feel like a natural reflex. Trying to change something like that can feel like wrestling Antaeus: you push it down, swear it off, pin it to the ground—only to find it rising again, stronger than ever.

In a physical fight, you don’t keep driving into your opponent’s strongest point. You look for the angle that yields. The gap in the defence. The place where the pattern can’t keep doing what it always does.

That is also where our opponents target us. So what is that gap for you?

Is it the wish to escape stress? The hunger for comfort? The craving for a quick reward? Or is it that persuasive voice that says: just one more time. Change can wait.

That voice is dangerous because it doesn’t argue against your goal. It doesn’t try to prove you incapable. It simply makes the goal feel optional right now. It promises you’ll return to the road after one last detour.

It lies.

Those are the moments in which we find ourselves wrestling on the dark bank of the river like Jacob.

Those are the moments in which winning means holding to the opponent, not giving in to its attempts to overthrow us, drawing it in, close, until the light of dawn brings with it clarity.

Some patterns grow stronger each time they “touch down.” Each time we give in or let go, they drop back into automaticity—into that place where “it just happens,” and we can’t quite say why. This is why, after doing the inward work of recognising and confronting the inward bandits that hijack us as we’re trying to grow, we have to bring that work into our physical lives. This is where the wrestling happens for us.

The task isn’t to crush the pattern—or to put as much distance between it and us as possible. Sometimes it’s to draw it close, lift it into consciousness, and hold it there—steady, without flinching, and without collapsing into shame—until the light of dawn brings clarity.

And when it does, we may walk away limping—but we walk away changed: renamed, redefined, and no longer ruled by what once held power over us.

This is one reason good therapy can be so effective, and I’ll say this carefully: not because the therapist “fixes” you, but because a skilled therapist can help you keep contact long enough for clarity to arrive. I’ve come to recognise this through my own experience in the client’s chair—my wonderful counsellor called it the Therapy Fairy. The “fairy” isn’t magic. It’s what happens when something that used to rule from below is held up to the light long enough for its shape to be seen.

Once the shape is seen, a new move becomes possible.

This is the move we’ve been circling since Periphetes and the bronze club, since Sínis and the balancing of opposites: not repression—pushing the unwanted down and away—but the closer work of staying in contact and redirecting energy rather than denying it.

Gilgamesh gives the same structure in another key. The tyrant-king meets an equal raised from the wild. They grapple. And the shift arrives when the quest for dominance resolves into wholeness and renewal.

That’s what Theseus accomplishes in Eleusis.

But after victory comes the second test: removing the tyrant clears the seat, but it doesn’t tell you what to do with it.

So ask yourself: if the throne were offered to you, would you take it?

The Passing of the Crown & Acorn Theory

Some victories expand the road. Others try to end it early.

There’s a particular temptation that can follow progress: the temptation to stop where you are and build a kingdom around the ground you’ve just claimed. We’ve already brushed against that on Skíron’s cliff—where the hero is tested, not by brute force, but by the lure of a false authority that demands submission.

Eleusis offers Theseus a version of the same test, but this time wearing the robes of legitimacy. When he defeats Cercyon, he wins—by Cercyon’s own terms—the right to rule. He stands in the centre of a city that could recognise him as king, and it would all look clean. Official. Even deserved.

But notice what would happen if he stayed.

Theseus overthrows Cercyon by rejecting the rules of the corrupt ruler—by refusing to let Cercyon’s authority over “how things are done” dictate how he responds in the wrestling match. If, after that, he accepts the throne, he would—after his victory—be accepting and playing by Cercyon’s rules again. His victory would dissolve, and with it, his purpose—and the sword and sandals that mark it—would be erased. His journey would end here, in what might look like a victory but ultimately be a betrayal of the calling—the acorn—of his own soul.

In Theseus’ story, the hero-image isn’t only modelling courage. It’s modelling discernment—how to tell the difference between a true step forward and a beautiful-looking detour. Because life offers us “crowns” all the time: early praise, a promotion, an opportunity, a role that fits well enough to feel like fate. Sometimes those offers are good. Sometimes they’re earned. Sometimes they even arrive with a sense of relief—finally, a place to stop.

But relief isn’t the same as alignment. If, on our road, we are chasing goal defined by others—by what we feel society, or our friends and family expect of us—there is a very good chance that we eventually end up taking up this crown and waking up years later wondering why everything feels so meaningless to us.

So many of us settle without ever meaning to. We drift into careers—or relationships, identities, reputations—that reward us quickly, or satisfy someone else’s idea of who we should become. We accept the crown because it’s there, because it’s legible, because it looks like success from the outside. And then, one day, we wake up with that quiet, unnerving feeling von Franz gestures at when she says: the wine has gone out of the bottle. Nothing is wrong, exactly. And yet something essential has thinned. The life-force is gone flat. The acorn hasn’t died—but it has been asked to grow into a shape that isn’t its own.

That’s the payoff this story offers here: Theseus doesn’t confuse “I can” with “I must.” He doesn’t turn a local victory into a final identity.

After Cercyon falls, another figure steps forward: Hippothoon—Alope’s son, the one who, in the Eleusinian strand of the tradition, holds rightful claim to the place Theseus has just freed. Theseus does something that matters precisely because it is so unglamorous: he yields the crown.

This isn’t a performance of virtue.

Theseus is aligning himself with the deeper trajectory of his soul—showing that he knows where he stands in relation to his calling.He doesn’t confuse “I can” with “I must.” He doesn’t turn victory into identity. He lets the kingship go where it belongs—and then he returns to the road, still a traveller, still unfinished, still answerable to the larger pattern that called him out of Troezen in the first place.

Reflection Prompts

Before I leave you with some reflection prompts, let’s take a look at the pattern we’ve uncovered in today’s stories.

We’ve seen it again and again—at the gates of Uruk, on the riverbank with Jacob, in the dust of Libya, and in the wrestling ground at Eleusis.

Each story is supported by the same bones:
First, a threshold is reached.
Second, an old ruling pattern is confronted.
Third, the victory comes not through brute force, but through drawing closer, through lifting, through balance.
And finally, the renewal of a burned out, corrupted, or depleted pattern occurs through contact with a psychic energy arriving from outside of normal consciousness.

The archetypal images in these myths are precisely that type of energy. That is why story has been used as a kind of medicine for as long as our species has been able to tell them.

But here’s where we need to slow down.

Because in real life, not every opponent yields. Not every pattern breaks open when we ask it to. There are things about ourselves—and about the world—we may not be able to change.

And there are things we can. Knowing the difference… that’s another, very real kind of wrestling match.

I’m not here to answer the question of what you can change about yourself and what you cannot. During classes and workshops, I’ve been asked this type of question over and over, and each time, the only answer I can give is: I can’t tell you what you can change about yourself. No one can.

That’s soul-work. That’s the acorn work.

And answering those questions takes courage—because it asks us to be honest with ourselves about what’s ours to carry, and what isn’t.

But there’s something else we can do, even when change feels out of reach.

We can learn to redirect the energy into more beneficial channels.

The story of Jacob shows us this: not every struggle ends with victory or conquest. Sometimes we limp away from the threshold, wounded—but changed nonetheless.

And Gilgamesh reminds us that even when the wild one cannot be conquered, he can be embraced—and that embrace begins the real transformation, even if it isn’t the transformation we initially expected.

So maybe the questions aren’t always: Can I win this fight? Can I change this or that about myself?

Maybe the deeper question is: Can I stay close to what I would rather avoid, long enough to understand what it needs and why it is appearing in my life?

Victory isn’t always dominance.

Sometimes, victory is contact.

Sometimes, it’s the embrace.

Reflection Prompt 1: The Nature of the Struggle

This is one of those questions that doesn’t ask for a quick answer—it asks for a pause. Take a moment to name what you’re struggling with right now. Not what you think you should be wrestling with, but what’s actually pulling on you, draining you, showing up again and again. And then ask yourself: How am I meeting this thing? Am I trying to crush it? Ignore it? Or am I staying in conscious contact with it, even when it’s hard?

This is Jacob’s wisdom. He doesn’t win by striking down his opponent—he wins by not letting go. He stays through the night. Sometimes that’s what real strength looks like: not pushing harder, but staying present without yielding to the parts of ourselves we’d rather avoid.

Reflection Prompt 2: The Script of Identity

We all carry stories about ourselves—some given to us, some we wrote to survive. Over time, those stories can solidify into identities. “I’m just like this.” “That’s just how I am.” But what if that pain, or that reflex, isn’t the truth of who you are—just something you’ve carried for a long time?

Before Enkidu, Gilgamesh mistook his domination for strength. It took a wild mirror to show him something different. Sometimes the traits we think are fixed are really just strategies we’ve outgrown. This isn’t about blame—it’s about compassion. Is there something in you that’s been waiting to be seen differently?

Reflection Prompt 3: The Paradox of the Embrace

In the heat of the struggle, our instinct is to shove the rejected behavior away, to pin it down, or to flee from it. But Herakles won by drawing Antaeus in close and lifting him off the ground.

Think of a pattern you’ve been fighting—perhaps a compulsion, a specific type of reactivity, or a cycle of avoidance. What if, instead of trying to push it down, you “lifted” it up into the light of your awareness?

This isn’t about giving in to the behaviour or satisfying a damaging urge. It is about ungrounding the pattern from the place where it happens automatically. When you draw it close, you can begin to ask: What is the unmet need at the heart of this? What is the unrecognised hunger that this behaviour is trying—however clumsily or destructively—to feed? Compassion isn’t permission; it’s the skill of seeing clearly. It is the realisation that the wild thing you are wrestling might actually be a part of you that has been starved of a better way to survive. Can you hold it long enough to find out what it’s actually looking for?

Reflection Prompt 4: Growing Downward

Inspired by Hillman’s Acorn Theory, this question invites a shift in perspective: instead of striving harder or reaching higher, what if what’s needed is a descent? A rooting? When growth feels blocked, we often assume something is wrong with us—or that we need to just try harder. But sometimes, the call is not to grow up but to grow down—to return to the soil of our lives, to reconnect with what nourishes and grounds us.

This kind of downward growth isn’t glamorous, and it rarely comes with applause. But it’s what allows real transformation to take place—not just the appearance of progress, but the slow, steady unfolding of purpose from the inside out.

But…

If something in this episode stirred a “king” in you—if a part of your own pattern stepped forward to challenge you today—I hope you’ll give yourself the grace to hold it just a little longer. Don’t try to force it to change yet. Just let it speak. Let it tell you what need its been trying to fill or what it has been protecting all this time.

As always, if you enjoyed this instalment or want to reach out and chat, please leave a comment on this post or send me a message. I love hearing how my work connects with my readers and listeners.

Leave a comment

Perhaps you know a story that fits in with the idea of wrestling our old ruling patterns in order to bring the change we understand into reality by embodying it through action. If you do, please drop it in a comment here—even if its just a name that I can go dig up online!

Thank you so much for spending time with me.

See you next time.

~ Dimitri

Sources

‌Apollodorus, & Hyginus. (2007). Apollodorus’ library and Hyginus’ Fabulae: Two handbooks of Greek mythology (R. S. Smith & S. M. Trzaskoma, Trans.). Hackett Publishing Company.

Delaney, T., & Madigan, T. (2021). The sociology of sports: An introduction (3rd ed., Vol. 3). McFarland.

Foster, B. R. (Trans. & Ed.). (2019). The epic of Gilgamesh: A new translation, analogues, criticism and response (2nd ed.). W. W. Norton & Company.

Gilgamesh. (2025, December 20). In Encyclopedia Britannica. https://www.britannica.com/topic/Gilgamesh

Hillman, J. (2017). The soul’s code: In search of character and calling. Ballantine Books.

Nagy, G. (2018, December 12). Homeric hymn to Demeter. The Center for Hellenic Studies. https://chs.harvard.edu/primary-source/homeric-hymn-to-demeter-sb/

Ovid. (2025). Metamorphoses (A. S. Kline, Trans.). University of Virginia E-Text Center. https://ovid.lib.virginia.edu/trans/Metamorph.htm (Original work published ca. 8 CE)

Pausanias. (1918). Description of Greece (W. H. S. Jones & H. A. Ormerod, Trans.). Perseus Digital Library. http://data.perseus.org/citations/urn:cts:greekLit:tlg0525.tlg001.perseus-eng1:1.39.3

Plutarch. (1914). Theseus (B. Perrin, Trans.). In Plutarch’s lives (Vol. 1). Harvard University Press; Perseus Digital Library. http://data.perseus.org/citations/urn:cts:greekLit:tlg0007.tlg001.perseus-eng2:11.1

Pryke, L. M. (2019). Gilgamesh. Routledge.

Stevenson, R. L. (1881). Pan’s pipes. In Virginibus puerisque, and other papers (Project Gutenberg eBook No. 386). Project Gutenberg. https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/386

von Franz, M.-L. (1971). An introduction to the interpretation of fairytales (J. Hillman, Ed.). Spring Publications. (Original work published 1970)

This is a reflection on the labyrinth walk hosted at Gwacheon Foreign Language High School on 20 May 2025. Thank you to Mr. Thomas Hackney for auditing the class and offering feedback on my presentation, facilitation, and planning. Thank you as well to Mr. Park Jinseong for photographing the event with care for student privacy, and for the beautiful images included here. (You can find more of his work on his flickr page.) Finally, thank you to my students for permission to share their anonymous reflections with Substack readers and the Veriditas Certification Committee.

The Bell

The bell at my school in South Korea is not the overenthusiastic clanging of hammers striking tiny gongs. No. It’s a soulless digital tune in D major, piped through crackling ceiling speakers.

This synthetic horror plays at the beginning and end of every period. It causes what little free time the students (and staff) manage to salvage between classes to evaporate on contact—and, just as reliably, detonates a teacher’s last, hopeful sentence halfway through its own existence. One moment you’re trying to land one final thought with dignity. The next, the melody arrives like an oddly cheerful demolition crew, and the students surge towards the door.

At 15:50, though, it hits with all the exuberant enthusiasm of the final bars of Tchaikovsky’s 1812 overture1. Same tune, same distorted buzz—but, this time, it marks the end of the formal school day (if not the end of the students’ time at school).

Tuesday, 20 May 2025, 15:50—that bell rang. The final English class of the day concluded, I made my way back to the foreign languages office, walking past classroom doors held open while desks were shunted aside to make room for sweeping and mopping. Inside, students sorted and carried out the day’s recycling and trash. Another group—armed with wet cloths and the brisk seriousness that comes from knowing you’ve only got a twenty-minute break—wiped down surfaces.

Blink and you’ll miss it. The entire affair takes less than five minutes.

If you’ve never spent time in a Korean school, this is one of the small cultural revelations that sneaks up on you. There’s no invisible army of caretakers arriving after hours to reset the building. The students do it with dignity and the understanding that it is in these rooms that their future is being formed.

I watched from my office as the last motions of cleaning resolved into stillness. And then—all at once—the exodus began.

A sudden Brownian motion: teenage bodies diffusing from classrooms into the openness of corridors and stairwells, and finally out into the playground. Ahead of them lay twenty minutes of open space and evening air before the extra-curricular program began.

Most would soon be heading back into classrooms filled with maths problems, video lectures on how to solve the notorious CSAT (수능/SuNeung) English questions, and the golden late-spring sun filtering through the blinds.

But for a small group of students, the evening held something else in store.

Our classes run from 16:10 to 17:00. That evening, as part of my course Folklore, Mythology and Me, I had arranged something that would bend the schedule. We’d meet in our usual time slot and dinner would follow, as usual, from 17:00–18:00.

From 18:00–19:00—after protracted negotiations with department heads, homeroom teachers, the sports department (who maintain a kind of permanent claim on the auditorium, except during the annual cultural festival), and the administration office—I’d managed to secure permission for any student who wanted to attend a labyrinth walk to be excused from supervised study for an additional hour. Instead of returning to their desks after dinner, they would come with me to the auditorium, where the labyrinth would be waiting.

Tonight’s Lesson would mark the moment we moved from story and symbol into something riskier and more adult: the turning of insight into embodied practice. The heart of the evening would be a simple exchange. Each student would receive a carefully crafted message of affirmation on a small card—words that, in the pressure-cooker atmosphere of South Korean high school life, people don’t always get to hear out loud. They would sit with the message, meet their reaction to it, and then choose the moment to let it go—trading something that (I hoped) felt precious for a blank sheet of coloured paper on which they would write a message of their own.

For the students heading to my strangely unacademic course, the evening held what I hoped was the quiet thrill of something entirely different—something mythological that wouldn’t just be discussed, but walked.

The Road to the Labyrinth

By that point in the semester, we’d already been walking a winding path of thematically interrelated stories.

We’d begun with a Korean folktale about a bag of forgotten stories hung behind a kitchen door—and the trouble they caused when they slipped back into the world. We’d traced the long tension between mythos and logos, and asked what happens when imagination gets exiled from a culture. We’d sat with The Shipwrecked Sailor from Middle Kingdom Egypt, and followed the Perceval’s quest for the Grail into the bleak question the Fisher King was never asked. We’d returned to Crete and the palace at Knossos—and finally to the central story: King Minos and the Bull from the Sea.

This class mattered to me. It was the first full labyrinth walk I hosted after completing facilitator training with Veriditas—my first time using a labyrinth large enough to walk with the body, not just trace with a fingertip.

But before that, there was still one more classroom lesson to teach.

Session One: The Classroom

I began the class by putting Herman Melville on the screen in Korean—an old voice, strangely fresh in Korean script on the screen.

In Chapter 58 of Moby-Dick, he asks us to consider the sea: how the most dreaded creatures glide beneath the surface, mostly hidden, sometimes dazzling, and how the ocean’s beauty can be inseparable from its violence. Then he guides our attention towards the land and sea—and asks whether we recognise that strange analogy to something in ourselves. Each of us, he suggests, contains an “insular Tahiti”: a pocket of peace surrounded by half-known life. And he closes with an ominous benediction: “God keep thee—push not off from that isle, thou canst never return.”

I didn’t ask the students to analyse the passage in the usual academic way. I asked them to notice what it did to their imaginations.

The sea: beautiful, vast, and bright—and not particularly interested in your survival.
The land: familiar, orderly, and—at least on the surface—manageable.

Melville’s question hung in the air on that day as it does now. Do you recognise the analogy?

After a moment of calm reflection, we hoisted sail and caught the wind of an all too familiar story: the myth of King Minos and Bull from the Sea.

By Lesson 8 we’d already spent quite a bit of time at Knossos, talking about the danger of inflation—what happens when a person (or a ruler) starts believing too completely in their own story. Minos is the patron saint of Believing Your Own Press. He receives a magnificent white bull as a sign of status and favour, and becomes so attached to what it seems to prove about him that he can’t let it go. In the end, he builds a labyrinth—not as a marvel of architecture, but as a hiding place for the consequences of his grip.

The parallel with Melville’s Captain Ahab is striking. Both are obsessed. And obsession, once it takes hold, has a way of narrowing the world until a single object—a bull, a whale, a grudge, a goal—starts to feel like destiny itself. Ahab cannot leave off his chase of the white whale any more than Minos can relinquish his claim on that magnificent bull.

And here, too, was Melville’s analogy—closer than it first appears. These stories show what happens when we start building a self around a fixation; when one story becomes the hub around which everything else is organised. Something that should have been met, recognised—and released instead becomes a life’s centre of gravity.

But seeing that pattern echoed across thousands of years isn’t the end of the work. Knowing things—recognising motifs, naming symbols, making clever connections—can genuinely help. It can also become a kind of safe entertainment: insight that never has to risk anything.

The more important step—the one that actually changes a life—is that of embodiment: when understanding begins showing up in action. Insight and knowledge are not enough. For them to truly be valuable, they have to show up in what we do, in what we avoid, in what we practise—in what we repeatedly choose.

So I gave them an example from my own life, one without the mythic grandeur attached to it: my long-standing claim that I was “bad at maths.”

For years that sentence felt like a biological certainty, as if somewhere deep in my DNA there was a gene that simply barred me from numbers. But it wasn’t a fact. It was a story—one that shut down possibility and protected me from the humiliation of trying. Later, when I finally had a patient teacher (my grandfather), and when I applied myself with even a little consistency, the “truth” shifted. I went from an F to a high B. Nothing about me as a person had changed. But the story I told myself had—and because the story changed, my actions changed.

“I’m bad at maths” sounds like a statement about reality. A more honest version might be: “I dislike maths because I don’t understand it yet—and I haven’t properly tried to fix what I don’t understand.” The same life, told one way, is a prison. Told the other way, it’s a doorway.

I asked the students to take a few minutes to journal about a story they might be mistaking for truth—something they say about themselves with the same concrete certainty: I can’t do this. I’m not that kind of person. I always fail at that. I hate speaking in public. I’m just not confident.

Because this is where the myths stop being “about” Minos or Ahab and start becoming relevant to the ordinary, modern lives sitting in front of me. The thing that rises up from somewhere half-known inside us—the thought we accept without question, the fixation we keep feeding, the fear we keep rehearsing—can end up steering far more than we realise.

We ended by going over the labyrinth walk procedure: what would happen after dinner, how the space would work, what was expected (very little), and what wasn’t (performance, or the need to do it the “right” way, or have the “proper” experience). Then class was over—the awful song played again—and the students went to eat.

And while they ate, I headed for the auditorium.

Interlude: Dinner and Setup

While the students headed toward dinner, I went the other way—down quiet corridors and up deserted flights of stairs to the auditorium—carrying the unmistakable mix of anticipation and logistical dread that should rightfully accompany any “transformative experience” that depends on tape, a tarp, and the cooperation of institutional furniture. Was the tape still sticking to the tarp? Would I walk in and find five hundred chairs set up in neat rows?

The school’s auditorium not a sacred space. It’s a practical one. Teenagers know what it’s for: sports, announcements, an annual cultural showcase, and the collective endurance of required for when some adult speaks for far too long. It is certainly not a place in which one usually takes meandering, reflective walks.

Which is why the task—before any labyrinth could appear—was to negotiate with the room’s default identity.

The badminton nets were up, pulled taut across the floor like territorial declarations from the sports department. And like many high school sports departments, the equipment didn’t politely move aside when asked. It had to be dragged. Wheels that promised ease delivered the kind of irony only English departments would appreciate2. Nothing about it was poetic. And yet there I was, hauling those bulky frames toward the edges, trying not to scratch the floor or tangle the nets lest I be barred from using the venue ever again.

Then came the tarp.

A ten-by-ten metres does not unfold like a picnic blanket. At first, it is just a stubborn mass. I wrestled it open, smoothed it where I could, and nudged the edges into place.

In the empty hall, the ancient pattern incongruously rendered in tape on beige waterproof fabric looked strange. The two lights I had turned on reflected off the creases in the tarp—a still life of the surface of the sea.

I completed my preparations in a few steps: the speaker and iPad for the ocean soundscape; the box that would wait at the center; the cards, the papers, the markers. I left a few final pieces for the students to do when they arrived. Partly because it saves time. Partly because it changes the atmosphere. If they help build the space, even in small ways, they enter it differently.

I tested the sound. The gentle rhythm of surf and gulls filled the hall.

Then I waited.

By 17:50, the doors opened and the first few arrived. They came in clusters—some still sipping drinks from the snack shop, some checking phones. But as they walked in, the energy shifted and they grew suddenly quiet as they took in the labyrinth. Their presence was the final piece in the setting of the venue. The transformation was complete and the auditorium took on the atmosphere of a sanctuary.

And whatever we were doing—whether quietly taking in the scene, sitting on the floor, or, like me, feeling a little worried and waiting to see who would show up—our walks had already begun.

Session Two: Into the Labyrinth

At 18:00 that bell rang again. By now, all 20 of the students registered in my course had arrived and we began the second session by warming the space. I reminded them of the procedure we had discussed: first, we would walk the outside of the labyrinth—letting our bodies learn its shape before we tried to enter it.

On that first circuit, each student would take a single affirmation card at random—no hunting for the “best” one, no swapping with friends, no treating it like fortune-telling. Just one card. One message. Something to be read and, for the duration of the walk, received as meant for them. Something to hold lightly.

They could circle the perimeter as many times as they needed. Then—if and when they felt ready—they could come to me at the entrance. I would space the walkers out so no one felt chased, and so the path stayed open enough for each person to have their own experience without feeling that anyone was pressing too close behind.

We began.

They moved around the outer ring in a loose orbit: ocean sound in the air, the soft drag and whisper of tarp underfoot, the taped lines glinting as they caught the light. On that first loop, hands reached for cards. Some students glanced down immediately. Some held the card at their side, as if they didn’t want to be seen reading it. Some read, then folded it inward quickly, as if it had suddenly become something intensely private.

A few accepted the words on their card easily. Quite a few didn’t or couldn’t. Their resistance showed on their faces and in their walk. But as they continued around the perimeter, something started to change.

And then, one by one, they approached the entrance.

Not in a line—thankfully not—though a few clearly wanted to go in pairs. For the sake of the space, I quietly separated them, letting friends walk in the same general window but reminding them of the one expectation that mattered: the labyrinth is a path each person walks by—and for—themselves. Some began winding their way towards the center while others seemed to be content walking around the outside. Each was fully engaged in a dialogue with something inside themselves.

At the entrance, each student waited, watched the person ahead make that first turn, then stepped forward when I indicated that there was space enough for them to begin. After a few had entered, it became quite apparent that the labyrinth taught its own etiquette without me needing to put it into words. You share one path. You don’t rush. You don’t perform. You just walk.

By the time most of the students had crossed the threshold and had begun moving inward, the auditorium felt like a completely different place. The gym had stopped being a gym. The room had become quiet in a way schools rarely are: not “teacher is watching” quiet, not disciplined quiet—just quiet, because something honest was happening.

The labyrinth—taped lines on a beige tarp—was doing its work.

The Center: Learning to Let Go

The center of a labyrinth looks like a destination. Even if you’ve listened to a teacher or facilitator go on about it for a while—it’s difficult not to feel that reaching the center is a moment of achievement: the point at which you’ve reached the goal of your walk.

It’s only once you’re standing there that you realise it’s really just a pause. What you mistook for the goal is actually a container—a vessel in which abstract insights are transmuted into physical experience.

When a student reached the middle, they were invited to sit—if they wanted—and stay as long as they needed. Some folded down immediately. Some hovered, uncertain, as if waiting for the next instruction. A few simply stood there, holding their card with both hands, letting the message settle.

Each knew this would be the last time they ever held that particular card. The last time those words would exist in their hands in that form. No matter how precious receiving the message might have felt, it was never meant to become a talisman. It was meant to be received—and then released.

The cards were written as messages from me to them: teacher to student, human to human. I’d tried to craft each one so it could be true for anyone in the room—simple statements about experiences common to all people, but specific enough to feel personal. And the moment a message like that lands in your hand, the mind does what it always does:

Yes, but…

That may be true for others, but it can’t be about me.

I don’t deserve that.

I’m not like that.

These words aren’t for me.

That friction was part of the point. The cards were there to bring a familiar resistance into view: the reflex to reject a kinder story about yourself than the one you’ve rehearsed for years. To lure those quiet, unquestioned beliefs—I’m bad at maths. I’m not confident. I can’t do that—into the light long enough to look at them, and then, like the card, loosen your grip.

When they felt ready, each student placed their affirmation card in a box in the center of the labyrinth.

And then—only then—they took something else in its place: a single sheet of coloured paper.

It was a small exchange, almost laughably simple. A piece of cardstock for a piece of cardstock. But hidden inside that tiny action was the core moment of embodied insight.

The affirmation card was designed to feel precious. I told them—explicitly—that this would be the last time they ever held that particular message in their hands. Scarcity does what scarcity always does: it makes paper feel like treasure.

The coloured page, on the other hand, was blank. It held no message. No reassurance. No proof that it had been “meant” for them. Just an empty surface whose value would be determined by the choices they made.

In the comfortable lighting of the auditorium, accompanied by the strangely complimentary blend of recorded ocean-scape and the sounds of socks shushing and scrunching over the creases in the PVC tarp, students encountered that moment on their own terms. No one took their card away. No bell rang to announce time’s up. Each student had to choose the moment to let go. They had to decide when they’d allowed my words to define their experience long enough—and when it was time to release them into the box and take up something riskier: the responsibility of their potential embodied in that blank page.

In a way, it echoed the stories we’d been circling for weeks. Minos could not let go of the bull he mistook for proof of who he was. Ahab could not release the definition his wound stamped into his being. Both men clung to an external message until it swallowed everything.

The labyrinth offered my students a gentler, smaller version of that same crossroads: here is a message. Here is the temptation to clutch it. And here is the invitation to put it down—and step into authorship.

One by one, cards disappeared into the box. Some students did it quickly, like ripping off a bandage. Some did it slowly, with tears and careful tenderness. And then they rose, holding their coloured page, and began the walk outward—back through the turns, back toward the entrance, back toward the world.

The Way Back and the Marks We Leave

A labyrinth is unicursal: there is only one way in, and it’s the same one as the way out. There are no dead ends, no puzzles to solve—and yet the way out never feels the same as the way in. The turns that carried the students inward now carried them back toward the edge, coloured page in hand, the ocean sound still washing through the room.

Once they stepped off the tarp, each student was asked to find a comfortable place in the auditorium—on the floor, against the wall, on the stage steps—and write an anonymous message on that blank coloured page. Not a summary of their experience, and not something polished. Just a sentence or two they felt moved to offer; a message they wanted to give to the world without needing to sign their name to it.

Each collected a coloured marker from the writing station where we’d laid out coloured markers in simple piles and found their writing spot. The room settled into the stillness of people choosing words carefully.

Some students wrote quickly, as if the message had been waiting inside them the whole time. Others stared at the page for a long while, chewing the inside of a cheek, testing phrases silently, crossing out and starting again. A few held their paper close to their chest while they wrote—not to hide it from others so much as to keep it private until it was ready to exist on its own terms apart from them.

The path extended outward to here—into the ordinary, vulnerable act of putting words on paper and offering them away.

They had entered the room to receive a message. They left the path having written one.

A few of those precious pages are included below.

Closing Circle

On a labyrinth—whether you are young or old—you begin to feel part of a tide governed by the path itself.

A few of my guests finished writing on their coloured pages early, and I was intrigued to watch them drift back toward the tarp. Without asking permission, without checking what was “supposed” to happen next, they stepped onto the path again. It felt sacred: a second walk chosen purely of their own accord, as if they wanted to find out whether the turns would feel different now that their hands were empty and their message had been given away.

For one student, the second walk became something else entirely. I watched her shuffle forward, then try twirling—circling—and then, unmistakably, dancing. Not for attention. Not for approval. Just a body finding its own language for whatever had been stirred.

South Korean high schools are not, in my experience, places where spontaneous self-expression happens without consequence. Conformity exerts a powerful social gravity here—especially among teenagers. And yet this student’s dance didn’t read as a brave act of non-conformity. No one stared. No one laughed. Another student joined in, walking backwards. Nobody seemed to take any notice. In the temporarily liminal space of a dim auditorium—surf and gulls in the air, feet scuffing on tarp, markers scraping thoughtfully on paper—each person was oddly free: free to be themselves for a moment, without needing to judge anyone else, and without feeling judged. A rare freedom indeed in any high school life.

When it felt right—when the energy had begun to settle—I invited everyone to sit in a loose circle on the labyrinth. They came holding their reflections, and I asked them to share anything they wanted.

There was no pressure to speak. Silence counted as participation. A few students shared anyway—not long speeches, just small, clear sentences about what surprised them, what felt difficult, what they hadn’t expected to feel. Their sincerity had that awkward brightness teenagers get when they don’t have a carefully prepared script to hide behind. There was soft laughter too—not the laughter of alienation, but of recognition.

There was no fire in our circle that night, but there may as well have been. For a few minutes, we gathered the way humans have always gathered: around the warmth of a shared experience. Teacher and students. South African and Korean. People who’d lived in Indonesia and Germany, China and the USA. For that brief stretch of time, we were simply one community that held a world of experiences—a brief glimpse of what could be possible for humanity.

Tuesday, 20 May 2025, 19:00—that bell rang. Nothing lasts forever, and knowing what to release—and when—can be one of the hardest lessons to learn. Thankfully, in schools, that awful bell makes it a bit simpler.

Our time was up. One by one, they entrusted their reflection pages to me, put their shoes back on, exchanged a few words, and made their way toward their classrooms. Some walked hand in hand. Others with an arm around a friend’s shoulders.

A small group stayed behind without being asked. They capped markers, gathered stray booklets and scraps of paper, and began resetting the room.

As the auditorium emptied, the labyrinth was still what it had always been: black tape on a massive tarp. And yet it didn’t feel like just a sum of its parts. Two students helped me fold and roll it. Another two dragged the nets back into place and unplugged my little speaker and iPad—undoing the evenings earlier transformation with the same quiet competence they’d shown while cleaning their classrooms. The auditorium returned to its default identity: gym, stage, multipurpose room.

But the atmosphere didn’t reset as neatly as the furniture.

I turned off the lights and stepped into the corridor. The school had snapped back into its normal schedule. The same D major tune that had poured students into the corridors at 15:50 had now gathered them back into the stillness of their brightly lit rooms full of bowed heads and open books.

And yet, as I started down the stairwells—those flights that double back on themselves—and along the corridors that wind toward the main entrance and the open, warm evening air beyond, it struck me how the architecture of a day is its own kind of labyrinth, whether we notice it or not. We move along a path: the same route in, the same route out, never quite the same experience twice. Every moment of every day asks the same quiet questions of us:

what do you carry,

what do you release,

and what message do you leave on the hearts of others?

I had gone in thinking that I was offering my students an experience. I went in hoping they would get something out of it.

I walked out thinking: maybe we did.

Epilogue

For two months, the labyrinth lay rolled, folded, and tucked away in its expandable luggage bag behind a stack of chairs and a curtain in the auditorium. But that first walk—like all labyrinth walks—extended forward.

On 17 July 2025, during our school’s Major Language Day (전공어의 날), a handful of the students who had walked in May volunteered to return—not as participants this time, but as a small team of facilitators. They could have been out with their friends in the bright chaos of the day—activity booths, games, international snacks, the whole carnival of it—but instead they chose the auditorium again.

The labyrinth went down on the floor once more. This time there were five hundred chairs. We moved them. Then, when the walk was done, we set them back. The nets were dragged. The room was negotiated—again—into unfamiliarity.

Along the perimeter of the tarp, I’d turned the badminton nets into an improvised display: reflection pages hanging like prayer flags, bright sheets of paper carrying words that no longer belonged to any one person.

Many of the students who had walked before returned. None of them searched through the affirmation cards to find the one that had been “theirs.” Almost all of them began on the outside, circling slowly, reading what had been left behind. And every now and then, one of them would stop.

You could see it when it happened. A pause. A tiny shift in the face. A moment of recognition. Those were their words—though nobody else would know it. They knew it. And when another student lingered to read that same message—when those words were allowed to hang in someone else’s mind for a moment—the original exchange completed itself again.

We are shaped, of course, by what happens to us, and by what we’re told. But what defines us—slowly, quietly, over time—is what we choose to do with it. The marks we leave behind. The tone our presence leaves in a room after we’ve walked out of it.

If you made it all the way to the end of this long piece, I’d love to hear from you.

Leave a comment

Additionally, if you’d like to catch a glimpse of the kind of stuff we cover in my after-school program, consider checking out my podcast, The Inward Sea, via my Podcast Hub here on Substack.

Foreword

The Inward Sea is a long-form podcast about myth and folklore, the lived experience of psychology, creativity, and the inner landscapes we learn to navigate as we grow. I’m the host, creator, producer, and editor of the show, and I try produce one episode a month (usually published around the middle of the month) which is followed by an expanded transcript with pictures, additional notes, and a list of my sources here on Substack.

Each episode includes a myth or mythological scene, an amplification of the images and symbols that bob to the surface in the tale, and a reflection segment in which I present you, dear listener/reader, with an opportunity to develop your own relationship with the archetypal contents of the story.

If you’ve found your way here through my writing, this page is simply a doorway—from the written voice to the spoken one. No special knowledge required, no commitment expected. Just a place to listen, if and when you feel curious.

Many people don’t actively “look for” podcasts, or aren’t quite sure where they live. That’s completely normal. This page exists to make that part easy—so you can listen wherever you already are, in whatever way feels most natural to you.

Table of Contents

Here is a short list of contents to help you find a platform that suits you. Please visit the last bit of this post before you leave.

WARNING: these links don’t seem to work on mobile.

1. Apple podcasts

2. Spotify

3. Youtube

4. Amazon Music

5. Other Platforms

6. Help the Work Travel

The Most Popular Platforms

Apple Podcasts

You can link to Apple Podcasts by clicking this link or using the player embedded below. To see a full list of the episodes, just click the purple “See More Episodes” link in the bottom right corner of the player.

This is a great choice if you are iphone or a Mac. The only down side is that it seems my episode art isn’t showing up here (but you can still see it in the transcripts, if that tickles your fancy.)

To subscribe, you will need to sign in with your Apple ID (like you do with the Appstore).

Spotify

This platform works on almost any device and is familiar to many listeners. It’s easy to follow and return to later.

This player will play the first episode if you click the play button. To play the other episodes, you can go to the Spotify podcast homepage by either this link clicking the circular Spotify logo in the top right corner of this player.

Youtube

This is a simple Youtube version of the same audio available through the podcasting platforms. This is a great option if you like to listen to Youtube videos.

BONUS: there is no real video content so you can do whatever else you’d like while letting the audio play in the background!

Go to The Inward Sea Youtube Channel

Amazon Music

Listen to The Inward Sea on Amazon Music. Great if you have Alexa. Or you can click on the link below and get it

The Other Platforms

If none of the above appeal to you, fear not! There are many other options to choose from. Below at a list of links you can follow to find The Inward Sea Podcast on a platform that suits your needs.

To get to the content, just click the logo of the site that appeals to you!

Help the Work Travel

If you enjoy listening and feel inclined to help my work travel a little further, there are a few simple ways people usually do that:

• following or subscribing on your preferred platform. All it will cost you is a few clicks.

• leaving a short rating or review on the platform of your choice. Again, entirely free apart from the few words you drop along the way.

• sharing an episode with someone who might appreciate it

You can also share this post with anyone you think might be interested in the work I do. An exploration of the inward sea is always more fun with more hands on deck!

Share The Inward Sea’s Substack

These small gestures don’t fund the project or determine whether it continues—but they do help it move beyond my own circle, and they make it easier for the right listeners to stumble across it.

If that feels like something you’d like to be part of, thank you.

If not, you’re still very welcome here.

Either way, I’m glad you found your way to this cove on the shore of The Inward Sea.

Before you go, if there is a platform that I’ve missed that you feel would help me get my work out to a wider audience more effectively, please let me know by commenting or messaging me.

Leave a comment

The most dangerous moments in any period of growth are not the ones where everything collapses, nor are they the ones in which we find ourselves sliding into a dark patch along the road.

Those moments are clear. We know exactly what they are, and even though they are unpleasant, we recognise them with ease.

The most dangerous moments of growth often come after the crisis has passed.

They arrive quite unexpectedly, when the horizon opens, the path begins to rise, and we feel the unmistakable lift that tells us we are finally moving forward.

In those moments, its so important that we remember that every ascent in consciousness brings a new kind of fall risk.

The ascent: that’s the moment of danger—the bright one—in which we are most likely to sabotage everything we’ve been working and walking towards.

Why?

Why do we stumble at the very edge of meaningful transformation?

Theseus discovered the answer above the waters of Κακιά Σκάλα—the “Bad Bay”.

And whether we want to face it or not, so will we.

My name is Dimitri, and thank you so much for visiting The Inward Sea. I hope you get as much out of this piece as I did while working on it.

To help you make the mythological images from this part of Theseus’ story your own and see how they show up in your own life, there are three journaling prompts at the end of this transcript.

Before we begin…

Before we begin, I want to let you know that you’re dropping in on what is an expanded transcript for the fourth episode in my podcast series dealing with the myth of Theseus.

This is an episode about ascent and grounding, false authority and inner balance—and why every rise in consciousness brings with it a new kind of fall risk.

You can listen to this episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, or, if you prefer, from Podbean.

Introduction

If this is your first time here, welcome. The Inward Sea is a publication about the times and places where myth, psychology, and lived experience meet—and how the old stories can help us navigate the inner waters of our own lives.

Here, we follow a mythic thread and let it shine a light on something real happening inside us.

Today, we’re continuing our journey with Theseus—the young hero walking the long, dangerous road from his home town in Troezen towards his destiny in Athens.

The path, so far…

So far, we’ve seen Theseus begin life in Troezen, learning that his father had left the signs of his destiny beneath a great stone. Again and again, the boy tested his strength—until one day, the rock finally moved, and the road of readiness opened before him.

We’ve travelled with him through the hills around Epidaurus, where he reclaimed the energy bound up in old complexes by confronting Periphetes.

We’ve watched him survive the rending logic of Sínis, the Binder, and followed him into the moral fog of Crommyon, where he met the Sow raised by Phaea. That is where he learned to walk the grey road between judgment and instinct.

All of that was descent: a necessary movement downward into the unconscious, where shadow energy could be met and integrated.

But now the terrain changes.

The land begins to rise.

Theseus feels the first real lift of ascent—and that is precisely when today’s encounter appears.

Ahead of him, a lone figure waits on high ground, feet outstretched, calmly waiting for the young hero to enter his territory.

Today, Theseus will have to face a ritual of respect and hospitality turned upside down—and the very real possibility of being swallowed by an ancient, archetypal agent of dissolution waiting in the waters of the Bad Bay below.

This is the part of the story in which what each of us does with our growth is put to the test.

This is where the danger hiding inside every ascent finally shows its face.

So, without further ado, let’s step onto the Skironian Rocks.

The Myth: Skíron & The Risk of Rising

The gravel path had narrowed as it climbed the limestone cliffs towards the higher ground of the isthmus.

It had carried Theseus up from the seaside village of Crommyon—away from the coast where he’d faced the Sow—into a harsh, ascending landscape of stone and wind. Looking back, he could trace the path he had taken: a thin, pale line coiling down the hillside toward the sea. Crommyon lay far below now, cradled between the deep blue water and the hard rock on which he now stood. From up here, the shoreline looked almost peaceful—nothing like the place where he had just confronted the raw, hungry wildness of the monstrous Sow.

The land that stretched before him was a true in-between place.

Not Corinth.

Not Megara.

A land of borders and thresholds, claimed by no one, known only because it let travellers pass from one kingdom to the next.

Ahead, the path wound upward still, around the headland toward the spine of the isthmus, a place where land and sky pressed tightly together. It was a landscape that offered an invitation to ascent while whispering quiet warnings against it. This was a road meant to be crossed, not lingered on.

As he continued walking, the shoreline curved away like an old sickle, its blade notched by years of the sea’s work. Around the bay, the relentless water had carved hidden coves and inlets that glimmered with an unsettling calm.

Far below, waves exhaled against the cliffs in long, rhythmic breaths. The water nearest the rocks was almost black, gnawing at the limestone in slow, patient mouthfuls. Here and there, where the land had lost its grip, whole sections had already collapsed and were dissolving into the surf.

He forced himself not to look down.

Walking a narrow road suspended between rising heights and churning depths is no time for doubt. He lifted his face into the breeze from the sea. Farther out, the water softened into a deep, impossible blue. Perspective helped.

To his left, the cliffs rose sharply—pale limestone, sun-bleached and fractured, held together only by the dark pines that clung to them like pins fastening a fraying garment. Those pines didn’t cling out of desperation—they simply held fast because that is what pines do in high places. A living insistence. A way of being.

Heat shimmered off the stone. Resin, dust, and salt hung thick in the air.

And always, to his right, the world simply… fell away.

Theseus pressed on, letting the crunch of his sandals and the slow pulse of the waves carry him forward.

Then—across the bay—something drew his attention.

A flicker of movement halfway up the cliff as a gust of wind caught the hem of a cloak. The lone figure was too far away to see clearly, but Theseus could just make out the shape of a man standing where the cliff jutted out over the dark water, looking out over the bay.

Theseus followed the sweep of the bay, tracing the line of the path around the notched arc of the limestone cliffs..

His path would take him there.

For a moment, relief lifted lightly in his chest at the sight of another traveller on this lonely stretch of coast.

But then the sea below him changed.

The surface, moments ago steady in its rhythm, began to swell in slow, deliberate waves—small at first, then larger, as though something vast was shifting beneath the water.

A shadow rolled across the bay, sliding just under the surface.

Instinctively, he glanced upward.

But the sky was empty—clear, bright, utterly still.

There were no clouds.

When he looked down again, the shadow had dissolved into the blue as if it had never been there.

All that remained were wide, heavy ripples spreading outward, lifting themselves toward the shore where the darkness had passed.

There was something alive down there.

Something big.

He kept walking.

The path skirted the cliffs, curving around the bay. With every step toward the distant figure, the relief he’d felt began to evaporate—thinning into a long, sharp line of caution stretched tight inside his chest.

The path levelled out as he rounded the curve of the bay. The figure he’d glimpsed earlier was now plainly in view—an older man seated on a low, three-legged stool that looked as weathered as the cliffs themselves.

He wasn’t hunched the way most elders were on the road. There he sat, looking out over the sea—tall, long-limbed, with the patient austerity of rock. His cloak, though bleached by the sun and carrying its share of dust, was finely woven, the border marked with delicate geometric patterns. He didn’t look like a wanderer; he looked like one of the dark pines clinging to the rock above him—gaunt, rooted, and older than he first appeared.

As Theseus approached, the man didn’t startle. He didn’t even turn at first—only lifted his chin a fraction, as if acknowledging someone he had expected.

Then, as if greeting an old companion, he glanced over his shoulder.

“Ah,” he said with a faint smile. “There you are.”

Theseus hesitated. “Have we met?”

The old man gave a soft laugh. “We have now, my friend.”

He gestured toward the sea with one long arm.

“Come. Look at her. Isn’t she breath-taking?”

He was seated no more than three paces from the cliff’s edge, his stool perched so close to the drop that to stand beside him, Theseus would have to step nearer to the precipice than he liked. Below him, the waves continued chewing at the cliffs—steady and patient.

“It…she is,” he admitted. “The view is… extraordinary.”

“Extraordinary,” echoed the old man, his voice dipping into a dark reverence.

“Vast. Savage. So terribly alive.”

As he spoke, it felt to Theseus as though the horizon itself became a living creature. He could almost see it breathing.

“These waters,” the old man murmured, “are older than any of us. They take whatever they want. Stones… ships… men…”

He paused.

“They are always hungry.”

Theseus glanced out over the bay. The waves looked calm enough now, glittering in the sun—but the memory of the shadow stirred beneath his ribs.

Was this old man a sailor? No sailor wore a cloak of that quality. A local lord? A priest? Theseus realised he didn’t even know the man’s name.

The old man still didn’t look at him. His eyes remained fixed on the water, unblinking, as though he could see something moving out there beneath the blue.

After a moment, he sighed gently. “It is good to have company on this road. Not many make the crossing alone.”

Theseus wasn’t sure if that was a compliment or a warning.

The old man shifted on his stool, slowly and theatrically, with the stiffness of age but none of its fragility.

“I would offer you my seat,” he said, “but these old legs…” He patted his thigh with a fond, weary gesture. “They’ve walked far today.”

He let the sentence trail off, inviting sympathy without asking for it.

Stepping forward, Theseus nodded politely. “No, no,… please…The road is long.”

“Long,” the old man repeated, almost to himself.

The hush between them filled with the slow grind of the sea below.

Then he turned toward Theseus fully, something sly and searching in his gaze.

“Since you are so young,” he said, “and respectful… perhaps you would grant an old man a small courtesy?”

Theseus felt a many-legged warning skitter up his spine.

“What courtesy?”

The old man extended a dusty foot toward him, angled so that Theseus would have to step even closer to the edge to reach it. He kept his gaze on the sea, as though the boy’s place in the arrangement was obvious—kneel here, between me and the drop.

“Only this,” he said softly.

“As a sign of respect for age, and for the gods who watch these roads… would you wash the dust of the journey from my feet?”

The words hung between them—gentle, reasonable, perfectly polite.

And wrong.

Wrong in the way a calm sea can hide a monster beneath its glistening skin.

Theseus didn’t move.

For a heartbeat, he simply stood there, looking at the old man’s outstretched foot. The wind caught the heavy cloak, billowing it toward the drop and sending a scatter of pebbles skittering off the edge into the empty air yawning beneath them both. The old man hadn’t looked at him once since making the request. He expected obedience the way the ocean below expect falling stones.

Theseus felt the pull—not just of the old man’s voice, but of the cliff itself, the hungry blue far below, the slow, silent invitation to surrender; to kneel. A younger boy, the child from Troezen, might have bent without thinking.

But he was not that boy now.

He drew a sharp breath and stepped back—just far enough to be sure of the ground beneath his heels, to sense the firm weight of the cliff behind him standing in steadfast defiance of the ever-hungry sea.

The pines did not tremble when the wind pushed at them; they simply held. Theseus felt something of that steadiness rising through his legs.

“No,” he said quietly.

His voice was steady.

No anger.

Just certainty.

The old man’s head turned toward him at last, just a fraction, as though he had heard something impossible.

The sea below went very still.

The old man blinked at Theseus’ refusal.

A flicker of annoyance crossed his face, then smoothed into something gracious, almost indulgent.

“Oh… my apologies,” he said with hollow warmth. “I forget myself. A man can grow accustomed to heights like these after so many days in this blessed place. But I expect it may be unnerving for”—his eyes swept Theseus—“a traveller used to… lower ground.”

The condescension in his voice was thinly masked.

Still seated, he grabbed the stool with both his hands and made a show of shuffling it around, rotating it so Theseus would no longer need to kneel with his back to the drop. Theseus noticed that he had also moved it a few finger-lengths closer to the edge.

“There,” he said lightly. “Better, yes? No danger at all.”

He tilted his head, fixing Theseus with a look that was practiced, paternal, calculating.

“But I must ask again—surely you wouldn’t disrespect an elder in your own city? Among my people, and in this land of Mégara, respect is expected. And deserved.”

He paused, his eyes narrowing.

“I am Skíron,” he said, as though revealing a truth Theseus should honour. “Husband of Chariclo1 the daughter of Cychreus2 the dragon-slayer, ruler of Salamis3. My name carries weight here. You would do well to honour it.”

Theseus stepped forward.

Skíron’s mouth softened into a pleased smile.

He rolled his ankle against the dry ground, beckoning.

But Theseus did not kneel.

He kept moving—calm, deliberate—and lowered his body as though preparing to honour the request. His hands extended—not toward Skíron’s foot, but toward the legs of the three-legged stool beneath him.

Before Skíron understood, Theseus had gripped the stool.

One sharp wrench.

The stool came free.

Skíron, his face flicking between expressions of surprise, confusion, and outrage sprang upright quickly, arms pinwheeling as he tried to regain balance.

And Theseus moved again.

He pivoted, braced, and drove the stool forward like a battering ram—wood against skin, grounded force striking false authority. The blow caught Skíron square in the chest. The old man staggered back, heels sliding on gravel, cloak flaring like the wings of a wounded bird—

—and then he went over.

There was no scream.

Only the sound of wind tearing past heavy cloth.

Theseus didn’t watch him fall.

He stood motionless, chest heaving, fingers tight around the stool—uncertain whether he had escaped murder or committed it. Even the wind seemed to hold its breath.

And then the sea changed.

The calm surface broke into a violent boil. A deep, resonant thrum rose from below, as though the seabed itself were lifting. Theseus stepped back at the rising roar.

A shape breached the surface.

For an instant, it looked like an island heaving upward—dark, barnacled, vast.

Sunlight glinted across the geometric patterning of its curved back: hexagonal plates, ancient and monstrous, glistening like wet stone.

Then, as suddenly as it had appeared, it sank again.

The water swallowed it in one smooth motion. The sea heaved, shuddered, then stilled as the shadow slid back into the black depths of the bay.

Theseus stood frozen, the stool trembling faintly in his hands.

Something down there had been waiting.

And whatever it was, it had taken Skíron whole.

The bay stilled, the last heave of water smoothing itself against the rock.

Theseus loosened his grip on the stool. A moment ago he had been on the brink of losing his footing—now he could feel the stone beneath him, solid and unmoving, as though he too had begun to grow roots like the black pines—holding fast, not out of panic, but because this was simply how one lived on high ground.

The path ahead rose in a long, pale line.

And for the first time since leaving Crommyon, he understood something—not in words, but in that strange silence that follows danger: that moving upward would demand more of him than strength alone.

He set the stool back where it had been.

Then, fixing his eyes on the point where the path climbed out of sight around the headland, Theseus stepped forward again.

Amplification

And that is where we’ll leave Theseus for now.

Take a moment and cast your mind’s eye back over what we’ve just witnessed. What image or moments in the story stand out most strongly for you? Which ones can you still see clearly, and why do you think they linger when others fade?

The story of Theseus’ journey to Athens has survived for centuries. It has meant different things to different people, in different ages, and it keeps pulling us back to retell it again and again.

Why is that?

Back in our episode with Sínis among the pines, we touched on a crucial point: we don’t need to pin this story down to one meaning at the cost of all the others. In fact, we can’t. There are as many ways of understanding a myth as there are people who tell it and hear it.

What stays remarkably consistent, though, is the way myths, folktales, and even our own dreams can become meaningful. To bring wisdom from these stories into our everyday lives, we have to let their images and symbols speak on their own terms. We have to build a personal relationship with them.

Depth psychology calls this process amplification.

When we amplify a symbol—from a story, a dream, or a sudden inner image—we explore how it has appeared for other people, in other times and places. It’s a kind of shared exploration that helps us see how a single image can connect us to countless other human beings across time.

At some point in that process, something clicks. There’s a moment of recognition where we suddenly “see” what the story is saying to us, and we feel, in some strange way, “seen” by the story in return.

When that happens, the same narrative arc we thought we already knew can suddenly open a window onto a part of ourselves we’ve never explored. It can reveal a doorway into an undiscovered room in the soul.

So, with that in mind, let’s begin our own amplification of this part of Theseus’ story. I’llm going to share things that have clicked for me. Some of these ideas and images I have gathered myself; others have emerged through shared reflection in classes and workshops. I want you to stay open to the wild associations that may leap out at you from your own inner-world. If you suddenly find yourself putting pieces of your own experience and this story together in ways that feel insightful and exciting, I’d love to know about it!

These old stories, while they may facilitate wonderful personal exploration, are all about community and our connection to one another. So please reach out through the comment section and let me know how and where these images speak to you.

Leave a comment

We’ll begin, not by looking at the characters or creatures appearing in this encounter, but by looking at the living earth over which our hero is moving. Because, when you really take a moment to think about it, though often overlooked, the path is defined by the terrain as much as it is by the walker. The environment forms the Self, and the Self forms the environment, because each is the other in disguise.

In this part of the myth, the ground begins to rise. We’re lifted out of the descent we followed from the mountainous regions of Argolis and Corinth, through the pine forests to the Crommyonian coast, as Theseus draws closer to Mégara.

Image 1: Ascent & Descent

Every great story reminds us that before we rise, we descend. Before the acorn grows up into the mighty oak, it must first grow down, and indeed, the height it will eventually achieve is dependent on the depths to which it has been rooted. And yet—even after seeing this patterns play out around us all our lives—most of us still resist descent when it arrives. We don’t want the forest, the darkness, the greyness of uncertainty. But myth keeps insisting: descent is not a detour. It’s the first necessary leg of the journey; the riveting first act in the drama of renewal and growth.

This pattern isn’t unique to Greek myth. Scholars have been mapping it for more than a century. Early mythologists like von Hahn, Lord Raglan, and Otto Rank noticed that the hero’s life usually begins with loss, exile, or danger—some kind of downward movement—before any ascent or recognition can take place (O’Connor, 2001, pp. 118–121).

Later, Joseph Campbell and writers like Christopher Vogler carried that pattern forward into modern storytelling. Whether we prefer psychological, literary, or anthropological lenses, the same truth keeps surfacing: any genuine ascent requires a descent first.

And that brings us to a story that sits in fascinating contrast to Theseus: the story of Icarus.

Two Images of Ascent: Theseus & Icarus

In a nutshell4, Theseus and Icarus are both young men, both standing in the long shadows of their fathers, and both reaching toward a future that hasn’t fully formed yet. If we look at them through the lens of YinYang symbolism, whatever their physical sex, both occupy a receptive, or yin-dominant, position—they’re learning from elders, taking in guidance, not yet fully individuated.

And this is where their paths diverge.

Theseus begins by choosing a path of descent first. Instead of taking the quick, easy route across the Saronic Gulf to Athens, he deliberately enters the dangerous land-route—knowing he’ll face trials and uncertainty. He descends so he can rise properly.

Icarus does not.

Daedalus—the great inventor and father of Icarus is a man who has already walked his own path of descent and ascent. In this tragic story, Daedalus is the uncorrupted Senex counterpart to the Puer Aeternus archetype we see in Icarus. To facilitate their escape from imprisonment on Crete, Daedalus gives his young son wings and a set of careful instructions:

“Do not fly too low, where the sea’s spray will weigh the wings down; Do not fly too high, where the sun’s heat will melt the wax.”

He offers Icarus the two poles of human experience: the descent that drags us under, and the ascent that burns us up.

But Icarus never undergoes a true descent. The moment he feels the power of the wings, he leaps into ascent prematurely, without the inner structure required to hold the tension between the opposites. He rises before he’s ready—and his ascent turns into a fast and fatal descent.

It’s almost as if the old saying, what goes up must come down, applies just as much to psychological development as it does to physics.

In Theseus’ story, the descent came first: the discipline and patience of moving the rock in Troezen; the reclaiming of projected energy through Periphetes; the balance learned through Sínis; and the encounter with the ambivalent instinctual depths at the nadir of his journey through the Crommyonian Sow. That slow movement downward prepared him for the beginnings of ascent we’re now witnessing.

In Icarus’ story, ascent happens before wisdom, before grounding, before any meaningful contact with the depths—and so ascent becomes collapse.

Myth reminds us: f we skip the descent, the ascent won’t last.

Yin-Yang (陰陽) and Enantiodromia

This pattern of descent and ascent becomes even clearer when we look at it through the lens of Yin (陰) and Yang (陽), and through a principle the Greeks called enantiodromia5.

In Taoist cosmology, Yin and Yang aren’t moral forces. They’re not “good” and “bad,” and they’re not locked in battle in the way we imagine the forces of light and dark or good and evil to be in popular modern thought. They describe the natural alternation of energies we see everywhere: night turning into day, heat rising then giving way to cold, activity cresting then slipping into rest. When one force reaches its fullness, the other begins to grow within it.

Yang is the energy that rises, defines, acts, and pushes outward. It seeks altitude, clarity, achievement.

Yin is the energy that sinks, receives, dissolves, and pulls inward. It seeks depth, stillness, and incubation.

When Yang reaches its peak, Yin slips in. When Yin reaches its depth, Yang begins again. Neither wins. They turn into one another.

The Greeks noticed this too. Heraclitus6, writing more than two thousand years ago, observed that anything pushed far enough will eventually transform into its opposite. Later, Carl Jung borrowed the term enantiodromia from Heraclitus to describe what happens in the psyche when we push one attitude, one pattern, or one psychological stance too far.

He wrote:

The only person who escapes the grim law of enantiodromia is the one who knows how to separate himself from the unconscious—not by repressing it, for then it simply attacks him from the rear, but by putting it clearly before him as that which he is not. (CW7 §§ 111–113)

By placing the unconscious clearly before us, we, like Theseus, are saying “no” to the impulse to kneel to a false authority that may seem like it is able to grant us some kind of status on the new high ground we’re in the process of attaining.

That’s exactly what Theseus has been doing.

He chose the path of descent first, knowing he would face difficulty. That downward movement—into uncertainty, into confusion, into danger—meant that when ascent finally began, it could rest on something real.

We’ve watched this pattern unfold from the very beginning:

Periphetes meets him first: the limping man with the bronze club. The club symbolises the blunt emotional force of a complex—something that once protected us but now stops us from growing. By confronting Periphetes and taking his club, Theseus learns to reclaim the emotional energy that had been hijacked by old narratives.

Sínis appears next: the figure who pulls things apart, binding travellers to two bending trees. This is the moment when the old judge within us tries to divide whatever new is emerging into opposites—right and wrong, all-or-nothing thinking, rigid categories. Theseus survives by turning judgment back on the judge: liberating himself from the voice that insists everything must be either/or.

And then comes the Crommyonian Sow, the ambivalent instinctual force at the lowest point of his descent, on the shore of the sea. Here, the hero meets raw animal energy that doesn’t care about morality at all—only hunger, impulse, survival, and dissolution. This is the devouring mother archetype in her instinctual form: terrifying, but also the source of nourishment and life. Theseus’s task is not to destroy instinct but to subdue it—to bring its energy into consciousness so it can be lived in a useful way.

This is the point where the descent completes its work.

The unconscious has been met. Shadow energy has been integrated. Something new has taken shape. And now the psyche begins to move upward again.

Each time we integrate something from the unconscious, we enter a new phase of ascent. Sometimes it feels like a dramatic “ah-ha!” moment—almost like a conversion experience. Other times it’s subtle, almost imperceptible. Either way, the energy shifts. We begin to feel momentum. We re-centre ourselves. We re-order our lives around what we’ve learned.

And of course, this feels great. Like Theseus at the beginning of today’s story, it’s a moment at which we often turn around and marvel at just how far we’ve come. And that, too, is good. We should feel proud. We are doing the work, after all.

But here’s the danger: When we are feeling good about ourselves, we tend to lose sight of the shadows we’ve just finished confronting. It’s really easy to forget them in the excitement of the moment. And that’s when, as Carl Jung warned us, they can attack us from the rear.

Every ascent carries within it the seed of the next fall. Yin grows from within Yang when Yang reaches its fullness. Ascent, when taken past its natural limit, becomes collapse.

That’s the law of enantiodromia.

This is why the trickiest part of any upward movement—whether psychological, spiritual, creative, or emotional—is staying grounded enough not to be carried past the point of balance by our own momentum. This is the tension we have to hold: moving upward without being inflated; progressing without behaving as if we’ve “arrived.”

And this is precisely the moment where Theseus encounters his next trial.

Image 2: Skíron

In this encounter, Theseus meets enantiodromia personified. Remember, this initiatory path that Theseus is walking is presented as a once-off journey in the story, but in real life it happens to us over and over again. If we look at our lives carefully, we may even begin to notice that we are at different stages on this path in a variety of areas in life. Somewhere, we are just confronting a complex that blocks our path, while in another area, we may be, like Theseus in our story today, beginning to rise out of the shadow. Perhaps, in some areas, we’ve already arrived.

I mention this now because it’s important to remember that the descent arc we’ve been discussing up to now is something that will and must happen again and again. In meeting Skíron at the this point in the journey our goal is not to try avoid any all future descents, but rather to make sure that we do not allow ourselves to lose the progress we have made in this (or any) specific area of growth by allowing the upward momentum of progress to lead to inflation.

After his encounters with bandits that represent shadowy, repressed, or unconscious parts of his psyche, he has begun to rise.

He’s carried forward by the momentum that always follows integration. Just like we do when we’ve discovered or learned something—perhaps even overcome some obstacle we always thought was always going to stop us—we can imagine him feeling lighter, clearer, feeling the first warmth of recognition. And that’s exactly when the most subtle danger appears: the danger of being carried too far by our own ascent.

That danger takes the shape of Skíron.

According to Plutarch, many storytellers describe Skíron as a bandit who forces travellers to wash his feet on a narrow cliff-face. As they kneel, he kicks them over the edge into the sea below—into the jaws of the great turtle that waits there. But the writers of Mégara tell a very different story. They insist Skíron was a righteous man, a chastiser of robbers, and a companion of the just. They point to his family ties: son-in-law of Cychreus (Κυχρεύς), father-in-law to Aeacus (Αἰακός)7, grandfather of Peleus and Telamon. “It is not likely,” they argue, “that the best of men made family alliances with the basest.”

So which version is true?

Myth doesn’t force us to choose.

Instead, it asks a more interesting question: Why do some people see a tyrant where others insist on a sage? What does that ambiguity reveal about the way authority works—not only in the world, but inside us?

Skíron sits on high ground, above the road, above the traveller, above the sea. That elevation is more than simply topographical—it’s psychological. He occupies the place we reserve for temples or shrines; structures designed to facilitate conscious relationship with the archetypal forces of the unconscious. There we expect to find the elder or the guide—a voice that proclaims wisdom. But something in Skíron has hardened. The external shape of wisdom remains—he appears to be a wise old man—but the spirit is gone. Hospitality has become entitlement. Humility has become humiliation. The sacred gesture of foot-washing has been inverted to serve the corruption of the one who demands it.

You and I meet Skíron whenever something new rising within us kneels before a false authority, either internal or external. Sometimes that authority is a person. Sometimes it is a belief, a role, a spiritual identity, or even a shiny new insight that we’ve mistaken for the whole truth.

This moment always comes after a period of descent. And if we’re not careful, it may precede a more violent one .

It arrives precisely when we feel like we’ve finally “figured it all out,” when the hard work of shadow-integration has given us a sense of clarity or strength. And look, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that feeling. It’s natural. It’s good. But when the ego identifies with that energy—when it says to itself, “Ah, now I’m the hero of my own story; now I’m above the old patterns”—that’s when Skíron extends his feet.

Ego inflation begins the moment we start acting as if our recent growth grants us special status, or moral advantage, or a shortcut past the next layer of uncertainty. It’s the moment humility gives way to superiority. And we rarely notice it happening. We mistake the feeling of “upward movement” for elevation of the self.

Depth psychologist Robert Johnson describes the mechanism clearly:

The ego gets inflated when we are caught up in a power system; when we are lost in an ideal or abstraction at the expense of ordinary humanness; when the ego has been puffed up by identifying with an archetype and has lost all sense of its limits. (Johnson, 2009, p. 56)

And that’s exactly what Skíron symbolises: the moment the hero inside us stops being a servant to growth and the ego beings posing as a ruler. That is the moment ascent flips into its opposite; the moment enantiodromia begins.

To map this story onto what happens inside us: the Skíron-pattern is the one that forces the hero-aspect within us to kneel—not in reverence, but in misplaced surrender. The emerging, conscious part of the psyche lowers itself before an archetypal image of authority—and in doing so, loses its footing.

And once that happens, the fall is inevitable.

Skíron’s real threat is not the kick. It’s the posture he demands.

When we kneel before the wrong inner ruler—before the inflated ideal, the rigid belief, the superior persona—we move ourselves to the cliff’s edge. And the moment we identify with that false authority, we are no longer ascending. We are already falling.

And that is exactly where Theseus now stands: at the threshold between ascent and collapse.

The turtle waits below.

Image 3: The Turtle

And now we come to the creature waiting at the bottom of Skíron’s cliff.

The turtle—chelōna (χελώνα)—is one of the oldest images in world mythology. Slow, silent, patient, ancient. It doesn’t charge. It doesn’t chase. It waits. It belongs to the deep places: the underworld, the waters, the long memory of the earth.

For me, this part of the myth has always hit very close to home.

When I was little, growing up in South Africa, one of my favourite places to play was on the veranda of the block of flats we lived in. I would sit out there and push my toy cars around on the tiled floor making all the sounds. At some point—much like Skíron himself—I discovered the joyful thrill of sending objects over the edge under the safety railing.

I’d look at my parents with both hands raised, innocent as only a toddler can pretend to be, and announce “πάει!”

“Gone!”

One day, someone—probably my father—brought a tortoise home. It wasn’t a pet. I may be giving away my age, but when I was a kid, I remember finding a few wild tortoises on the slopes of Table Mountain…

Anyway, if you’ve read this far. You deserve a treat and you’re probably my best friend. So here’s some photographic evidence for you. It is the only picture of Little Me and the tortoise.

I don’t remember this, it would have been before I was two years old (yes, I was a big baby), but I’ve heard my parents tell the story. It comes up every time my love for animals is a topic of conversation…

Apparently, I was pushing the poor little guy around, again, making all the sounds, pretending he was one of my cars. And out of respect for the dignity of that little tortoise, I’ll let you imagine what happened shortly afterwards.

And here I’ll make a promise: when I get back to South Africa, I have some volunteering or donating to do at a tortoise sanctuary.

This story has nothing to do with today’s episode. It’s just something that I think of every time a tortoise or a turtle appears in a story. And they actually crop up quite a lot. Turtles and tortoises have been stepping across mythic thresholds for a very long time.

In the Hymn to Hermes, the newborn god—literally a day old—finds a tortoise on the threshold between his hidden birthplace in a cave (the dark, unconscious realm) and his ascent into the world of the Olympians. From its shell he fashions the first lyre: an instrument of power, beauty, and persuasion. The tortoise becomes the catalyst for his ascent.

But in Theseus’ story, the turtle plays the opposite role. It waits below the cliff as an agent of dissolution. A devourer. A return-to-origin.

This is another face of the archetype depth psychologists call the Devouring Mother or the Terrible Mother8—an image of Yin at its most overwhelming. It is not evil, just an expression of the same indiscriminate appetite we encountered earlier in this journey through the image of the Crommyonian Sow and Phaea. It is the force that dissolves form back into formlessness. The power of the unconscious to swallow the ego when it loses its footing.

And this isn’t just Greek. In East Asian mythology, the creature associated with the North—the direction of winter, water, the end of life—is Hyeonmu (현무), the Black Tortoise or Dragon Turtle. It guards thresholds. It protects the dead on their journey through darkness. Even the name turtle—and its land-dwelling cousin tortoise9—echoes the Latin word Tartarus, the underworld.

The symbolism is surprisingly universal: the turtle or tortoise belongs to the depths, whether they be of the ocean or of the chthonic earth itself.

So, if Theseus had been kicked off that cliff, he wouldn’t simply have died. He would have been dissolved, like Jonah in the belly of the fish, or like Osiris sealed into a coffin and carried away by the Nile. This is an underworld image—not of annihilation, but of dismemberment, reconstitution, and eventual rebirth.

That’s what happens psychologically when the ego becomes inflated.

It isn’t “broken” out of malice or vengeance for some transgression.

It simply loses its ability to stand at the threshold between inner and outer worlds. It collapses back into the unconscious because it can no longer bear the weight of the archetypal energy it has identified with.

From the outside, we recognise this easily.

Inflated egos look immature, chaotic, or terminally self-involved. The person seems strangely unaware of how they’re showing up in front of others. They may have achieved something significant, but the achievement has fused with their identity. They’re no longer relating to others; they’re orbiting around their own expansion.

From the inside, it can be much harder to notice.

It can feel like turbulence, confusion, emotional overwhelm. It often comes with a massive persecution complex in which it feels like the whole world is unjustly positioned against us and our brilliance. In severe cases, it can show up as a complete break with reality. The ego has lost its place as mediator. It has been swept up by energy too large for it to hold.

And that’s what the turtle represents: not punishment, but dissolution. A return to the depths until the psyche can reorganise itself. A symbolic “reset,” painful but necessary, when ascent has gone too far.

Growth really isn’t for the faint of heart and myths repeatedly remind us of this.

When we’re in over our heads, we often need help—not more self-analysis, not more heroic striving, but actual support: a therapist, a spiritual director, a wise friend who can anchor us while we find our footing again. If you’re in a situation in which you feel this kind of dissolution, knowing you need help and reaching out for it is a sign that you’re already beginning to put the pieces back together again.

In the midst of an ascent, if we can hold our ground at the cliff’s edge—if we can resist kneeling before Skíron—then we don’t fall.

We keep growing.

And the turtle remains where it belongs: below, in the depths, waiting for whatever needs dissolving next.

Reflection
How do these symbols speak to you?

In the story, Theseus stands at that cliff-edge moment we all reach sooner or later—the moment after real growth has happened, when things finally feel clearer, lighter, more possible.

That’s when Skíron appears. That’s when inflation whispers to us, tempting to bow to an archetypal image and identify with it rather than maintaining our position on the Grey Road.

And that’s when the turtle waits below.

Warnings in myth aren’t there to frighten us. They’re signposts—reminders that certain dangers appear at particular moments in our development. This story isn’t asking you to fear its images. It’s asking you to recognise them so you can navigate your own ascent with steadiness and awareness.

Every one of us walks this road. And very often, we walk different parts of it at the same time.

You might be entering a descent in a creative project or a new responsibility at work, while rising out of a difficult but necessary conversation with someone you love.

Life doesn’t move in a single direction. It leads us on a spiralling path around the center point of the Self.

Wherever you are right now, I’d like to invite you to imagine yourself standing where Theseus stands—on higher ground, just at the edge of a new territory.

What feels most vulnerable or unsteady for you at this moment?

Where do you sense your own footing might slip? And where, like those pines on the limestone cliffs, might you need less heroics and more simple, steady holding fast?

As we grow and climb toward higher ground within ourselves, the task is not to avoid ascent — but to stay grounded enough to recognise the temptation to kneel before a false authority, and the risk of mistaking momentum for mastery.

All of us need reminders to stay steady when the path begins to rise.

So before we close, let’s turn these symbols inward for a moment.

Not to judge or criticise ourselves—simply to notice where this part of the story echoes something in our own lives.

Noticing is all that’s required.

The rest unfolds from there.

Here are a few journaling prompts to help you explore these images more personally:

Journaling Prompt 1: Where are you rising right now?

Where in your life have you begun to feel a bit of momentum—a lift, a sense of clarity, or the first, gentle incline of an ascending path?

If you can identify something in your life that is starting on an upward path, know that sooner or later, you will encounter the false authority of Skíron. When you imagine your own Skíron—the force that wants you to kneel at the wrong moment—what shape does it take?

Is it a person?

A belief?

A fear?

A perfectionist impulse?

What would it look like, in this season of your life, not to kneel?

Journaling Prompt 2: Where are you vulnerable to kneeling?

Perhaps you can think back and recognise a time when you were walking an ascending road—when things were beginning to move, or when entering a new area or phase of life brought you a sense of exhilaration.

Where, in those moments, have you found yourself kneeling to an inappropriate authority without meaning to? Where have you been swept up, inflated, or carried farther than you intended?

How has that experience shaped your approach to growth now?

Has it made you more cautious? Less trusting of your own excitement?

Or has it helped you recognise when you’re nearing the cliff’s edge?

If you were to walk that path again today, with more awareness, what would staying grounded look like?

And how might that shift the way you move through the world and relate to others?

Journaling Prompt 3: What does it look like to walk the grey road when things start going well?

Through his encounters with Sínis and then Phaea and the Crommyonian Sow, Theseus learned to walk the grey road—the path between black and white, between instinct and judgment.

It’s easier to walk that grey road when life feels confusing or heavy, when we’re already on a descent. In those times, humility and careful attention feel natural and we’re inclined to temper the darkness we sense around us with the light of whatever silver lining presents itself.

But what about when things begin to rise?

When the path brightens, when opportunities open, when momentum builds—what helps you stay aware of the shadow you met in the descent, instead of rushing past it?

What would it look like to remain steady on the grey road—not dimming your ascent, but staying rooted enough that the ascent doesn’t carry you into inflation?

The Ending

As we close this part of the journey, it’s worth holding onto the question that has been shaping this episode: how do we stay grounded when life begins to rise?

This is a thread we’ll follow more closely in the next episode, as Theseus encounters another test—one that challenges not just his strength, but his balance, and his ability to remain balanced and redirect oppositional energy that comes against him.

Its something we could all use a bit of practice with, I think.

If this episode resonated with you, and if you’d like to support the work in a small but meaningful way, please head over to a podcast platform of your choice and leave a rating or review for my podcast or share this post. It genuinely helps. Independent projects like this live or die by whether they’re discoverable, and thoughtful feedback makes it more likely that these stories find the people who need them.

Share

It also helps me know that the work is landing somewhere safely—which, in its own way, is a small ascent. I’ll do my best to stay grounded with it.

Thank you so much for walking this road with me. If you’ve read this far, please leave me a comment and let me know what you thought of this deep-dive into the images and symbols of Theseus’ encounter with Skíron.

Leave a comment

Until next time, take good care, walk steadily, and—as the Irish say—may the road rise up to meet you…

and may your toddler-self be kept at a safe distance from any unsuspecting tortoises.

Subscribe now

Sources:

‌Johnson, R. A. (2009). Inner work: Using dreams and active imagination for personal growth. Harperone.

Jung, C. G. (2023). The Collected Works of C. G. Jung. Princeton University Press.

Jung, C. G., & Douglas, C. (1997). Visions : notes of the seminar given in 1930-1934. Vol. 1. Princeton University Press.

Louis, F. (2003). The genesis of an icon: The “Taiji” diagram’s early history. Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, 63(1), 145–196. https://www.jstor.org/stable/25066694

Neumann, E. (2015). The Origins And History Of Consciousness. Routledge.

O’Connor, P. (2001). Beyond the Mist. Orion Publishing Company.

Plutarch. (1914). Theseus (B. Perrin, Trans.). In Plutarch’s Lives (Vol. 1). Harvard University Press. Perseus Digital Library. http://data.perseus.org/citations/urn:cts:greekLit:tlg0007.tlg001.perseus-eng2:10.1

Rank, O., Raglan, B., & Dundes, A. (1990). In quest of the hero. Princeton University Press.

Rees, A. D., & Rees, B. R. (1973). Celtic heritage: ancient tradition in Ireland and Wales. London, Thames And Hudson.

Ronnberg, A. (2021). The Book of Symbols. Taschen

Vogler, C. (2007). The writer’s journey: Mythic structure for writers. Michael Wiese Productions.

16:00–24 November 2025

The final bell rang. Students rushed out of their classrooms to grab a few minutes of break before the evening “self-study” (야자1) period commenced.

For most high school students in South Korea, the formal academic day begins somewhere around 8am, and ends close to 9 or 10pm. After that they often end up going to late-night (and illegal) cram-schools called Hagwons (학원) whose windows are facades made to look as though the institute has closed at 10pm, as per the law, behind which classes continue late into the night.

During the first hour of “self-study”, the school at which I work allows students to enrol in extracurricular courses offered by the teachers. Extra language courses, mathematics and science courses are all on offer—most of which are aimed at topics like how to read exam passages more effectively, or tricks and tips for solving examination problems quickly.

Among these noble and highly practical courses is the occasional oddball: a class aimed at creative story-telling using tarot cards, a course about fairytales from around the world, or, as was the case this semester, one going by the academically dubious title of Mythology and Psychology: The Myth of Theseus. It’s usually my name attached to these. I suppose I take the idea of self-study quite literally.

The date was the 24th of November, in the middle of my final practical assessments for the year and with the final exams looming on the (very near) horizon, I hurried off to the library where I would be hosting the first part of the evening’s special event.

The event took place in two sessions, a classroom session, held in the library during our regular class time, and a second session in the school auditorium which took place in the hour after the students had eaten dinner (our school provides hot lunches and dinners for the students.)

During the first session we reflected on Theseus’ journey to Athens and explored the question When did Theseus become a hero?

Was it when he confronted Periphetes and claimed the bandit’s bronze club?

Was it when he faced Sínis, the Binder, and refused to be bound to the opposing forces of this outlaw’s twin pines?

Was it, perhaps, when he faced and subdued the wild instinctual force of the Crommyonian Sow and her grey mistress, Phaea?

Or perhaps when he faced the false authority of Skíron on the cliffs of Mégara?

Was it when he defeated Cercyon of Eleusis in a wrestling match by using tactics of speed and cunning rather than trying to match the man in strength?

Or did he become a hero when he refused to be fitted to the bed of Procoustes who would either chop off the parts of his victims that would not fit on the bed he offered or stretch them until their joints popped out and they were finally tall enough for his liking.

So, when did Theseus become a hero? And when do we find ourselves equal to the calling we feel for our lives?

The Shameless Plug

If you’d like to walk this path with me and my students, you can check out the links connected to the bandit’s names above for the transcripts of my podcast episodes based on these classes. Or you can search your favorite podcast platform for “The Inward Sea”.

Here are some links, if you’d like:

Apple | Amazon | Spotify | Podchaser | Youtube

Acorn Theory

This is where the Acorn Theory so beautifully taught by James Hillman came in. The Korean word for acorn is 도토리 (DoToRi). And with the help of some beautiful time-lapse videos from YouTube, we explored how the acorn, small though it may seem, holds the genetic material of the giant oak—of many generations of such oaks.

According to Hillman:

…we need to make clear that today’s main paradigm for understanding a human life, the interplay of genetics and environment, omits something essential—the particularity you feel to be you. By accepting the idea that I am the effect of a subtle buffeting between hereditary and societal forces, I reduce myself to a result. The more my life is accounted for by what already occurred in my chromosomes, by what my parents did or didn’t do, and by my early years now long past, the more my biography is the story of a victim. I am living a plot written by my genetic code, ancestral heredity, traumatic occasions, parental unconsciousness, societal accidents. (Hillman, 2017, Ch.1)

In sharp contrast to most modern theories, the Acorn Theory proposes a different point of view, one that holds the redemptive power of a myth told by Plato in his Myth of Er at its heart. In introducing the Acorn Theory Hillman writes:

The acorn theory proposes and I will bring evidence for the claim that you and I and every single person is born with a defining image. Individuality resides in a formal cause—to use old philosophical language going back to Aristotle. We each embody our own idea, in the language of Plato and Plotinus. And this form, this idea, this image does not tolerate too much straying. The theory also attributes to this innate image an angelic or daimonic intention, as if it were a spark of consciousness; and, moreover, holds that it has our interest at heart because it chose us for its reasons. (Hillman, 2017, Ch.1)

Acorn Theory asks us to accept one another and ourselves as beings who come into this world with an image of selfhood—the innate image or diamon—that guides our growth. Like the acorn contains the genetic material that shapes the growth of the tree and all trees after it, our souls contain the code that shapes our lives. When denied, our growth is stunted and maladaptive behaviours and pain ensue.

The acorn theory provides a psychology of childhood. It affirms the child’s inherent uniqueness and destiny, which means first of all that the clinical data of dysfunction belong in some way to that uniqueness and destiny. Psychopathologies are as authentic as the child itself, not secondary, contingent. Given with the child, even given to the child, the clinical data are part of its gift. This means that each child is a gifted child, filled with data of all sorts, gifts peculiar to that child which show themselves in peculiar ways, often maladaptive and causing pain. So this book is about children, offering a way to regard them differently, to enter their imaginations, and to discover in their pathologies what their daimon might be indicating and what their destiny might want. (Hillman, 2017, Ch.1)

So, when did Theseus become a hero? The answer is simply “When he became Theseus.”

And, when do we find ourselves equal to the calling we feel for our lives?

Well…

We already are.

With all of this covered, we returned to the myth of Theseus and asked ourselves a few questions in preparation for the walk.

The students were encouraged to think about these questions and pick one that they felt resonated most with them. No need to share the question, no need to answer it, just take it with them to dinner, and then, after dinner, into the labyrinth.

And with that, the class adjourned. My bright-eyed students hurried off to eat their dinner, and I went to the school hall to move badminton nets and set up the labyrinth.

The Labyrinth

The labyrinth is an ancient archetypal pattern. It pops up all over the world with some of the oldest being ones in northern Russia dating from about four or five thousand years ago.

It appears all around the Mediterranean, in Asia, in the Americas. It is part of pre-Christian cultural practices and can be found on the floors of cathedrals. It seems to be a physical archetype, something that springs from the psyche of humanity.

A labyrinth is not a maze. It is not a puzzle. There are no dead-ends no way to get lost on it (provided you manage not to accidentally step over boundaries of the path). All a labyrinth requires of a walker is that the walker trust the path

This was the third formal labyrinth walk I hosted after completing my facilitation training with the Reverend Dr. Lauren Artress and Veriditas in March of 2025. There are a few labyrinths around South Korea, but sadly none near enough for me to use as part of an experiential learning activity with my students. So, I made one.

For a few weeks, I was hunting on South Korea’s online shopping portals for a large enough piece of fabric. Since I know nothing about sewing, I thought it would be good to find something durable and easy to store. A tarp!

What you might not know about me is that I am horrible at maths. It’s not that I can’t do it. I am sure, if I had applied myself more as a student, I would have loved it… but unfortunately I have one of those math-phobia things. Anyway, imagine my joy when I found a tarp that would… *gasp*… only weigh 1.5kgs and have a surface area large enough on which to create a 5-circuit medieval labyrinth!

You better believe I hit “buy” immediately.

Of course, when it arrived, it was 15kgs of tarp, not 1.5kgs. Luckily, I had help and, armed with permanent markers, lots of string, an old mic-stand, and kilometres of black duct-tape, we crafted a labyrinth. It is 10mx10m and took two weekends of time on our hands and knees to create.

I am happy to report that this tape-n-tarp labyrinth has stood the test of time, now. It has survived hundreds of feet and some very enthusiastic rolling and insistent crushing, and seems no worse for wear.

This was the labyrinth I had to set up for the walk.

The Walk

Towards the end of their dinner time, students started coming in to the auditorium. They helped pull the huge labyrinth a bit smoother and explored it, walking around it, jumping over the “walls” between the circuits of the path, and warming the space with their curiosity and enthusiasm.

Once everyone had arrived, I gave a brief introduction of how to walk the labyrinth. I reminded them that for the duration of this walk, this time and this space was entirely theirs. The only two rules I asked them to observe while walking were:

1. to remember that they were not walking alone and to make sure that each would allow others to walk with the same freedom from judgment and expectation that they would like to experience during their walk.

2. to walk in mindful silence, listening to the sounds of their feet on the path.

Everything else was up to each of them. When walking a labyrinth, you can walk quickly or slowly, forwards, backwards, twirling, or skipping. You can crawl if you want. This is your labyrinth.

This is your path.

This is your life.

And, in the center, when they finally reached it, there would something only for them. Something with their name written on it.

We began by walking around the circumference, pausing briefing at 6 stations along the way to reflect on the question posted at it. These were the same questions we had contemplated earlier during class. This time, they were printed on paper small enough for each student to take one that they wanted to walk with—not answer, just walk with, to see what might emerge.

One by one, the students, when they each felt ready approached me at the entrance to the labyrinth and began their walks.

The Center

In the center of the labyrinth there was a small, grey box, and in the box were small black pouches with a tiny wooden acorn pendant in each of them. I wanted to students to have something to remember the walk by and to keep with them through the exhausting three weeks leading up to the final exams. There was also a blank page on which they could write a letter to themselves to record their thoughts and experiences in the walk.

A few of them shared their letters with me after the event. They are incredibly precious and honest windows into the hearts of these wonderful young people.

The Journey Back

The walking and journalling continued for about 45 minutes. Some students returned to the labyrinth for a second walk. After our walk was over, we all gathered on the labyrinth. The path we had just walked became the place where we planted ourselves and felt a sense of togetherness.

We spoke about the name of our walk: 도(스)토리 (Do-S-To-Ri)

While 도토리 means “acorn” in Korean, the Hanja2 character 道 (Dao) is also pronounced 도 in Korean. Our journey with Theseus, our labyrinth walk, and our pondering of the acorn have all been an exploration of the narratives we construct about ourselves: stories (스토리). So, as much as this walk has been about an experience on the labyrinth as part of an extra-curricular course, it has also been about the story of the path, the 道 (Dao) or 도 that each of us walk in life.

It was then that I asked them to look at their acorns.

You see, these acorns unscrew. The tops come off and inside, I had written a note for each of my students. As a teacher, so much of my job is correcting student’s sentences or highlighting where they have made a mistake because the South Korean education system demands a bell-curve for every assessment.

I don’t get to acknowledge effort and growth the way I want to. I have to hold every courageous act of individual effort up against a standard that will yield results that the education system will acknowledge. I have to play an unwilling role in a machine that ranks and (perhaps inadvertently) dictates so much of what these teens feel is their personal worth and potential through scores. So, when an opportunity presents itself, I want to make sure that they know that they are worth so much more.

For each kid I had written a short comment about something admirable I had noticed in them this semester.

There were tears. I had to try hold back a few of my own.

Whatever happens to those little acorns, I hope the memory of what they mean will stay with those who walked. I know it will with me.

The End

The bell rang. My students had 10 minutes of break time before they had to return to their classrooms and begin studying, but most of them were concerned about how I was going to roll up the labyrinth alone.

I’ve done it before. It takes about an hour to do it well enough to get it back into it’s bag.

Perhaps they are just nice kids. Maybe it was a shared sense of community and camaraderie focussed on what we had just experienced together. Or it may have been that they simply didn’t want head back into their classrooms where their books and the threat of scores were looming over them, but whatever it was, I was very grateful that everyone wanted to help roll the labyrinth.

There was running and laughing as they helped drag the corners from one side to meet those at the other—like folding a giant blanket. The labyrinth billowed like the sails of a great ship, reminding me of how this static pattern of concentric rings is a vessel of exploration capable of carrying us to incredible new worlds within ourselves.

This time, it took just 10 minutes, and the labyrinth was back in its black expandable luggage carrier, tucked away behind a curtain in the hall.

We turned the lights off, and went out into the night.

Leave a comment

Sources

Hillman, J. (2017). The soul’s code : in search of character and calling. Ballantine Books.

Hello, and thank you so much for stopping by.

Before we begin, I want to let you know that you’re dropping in on what is an expanded transcript for the third episode in my podcast series dealing with the myth of Theseus.

You can listen to this episode on apple podcasts, spotify, amazon music, or, if you prefer, from here.

Introduction and a Brief Recap

In our last journey, we learned how to face the parts of ourselves we once rejected. But the real work begins after the confrontation.

What happens when we pick up the bandit’s club only to realize that the power we once feared was ours all along?

When we begin to understand why unhelpful and sometimes potentially harmful beliefs and behavior patterns so often block us when we’re trying to grow into better versions of ourselves, the labels of “good” and “bad” no longer seem to hold.

At times like these, the simple stories that we have told to prop up our identity can begin to feel as though they are ready to collapse. And in their place, a new and more complicated path stretches out before us —no longer a road of black and white thinking, but a shimmering and shifting territory of grey.

In reclaiming the bronze club—the raw psychic energy of emotion from the bandit-like complex we encounter—we also need to learn how to carry and integrate it.

How can we learn to use this powerful part of ourselves for good without slipping back into the old, familiar story of self-condemnation and shame for everything it once was?

The key here is to understand the process that led us to exile these parts of ourselves in the first place, and to find a new way of understanding them. In this episode, we’ll journey further with Theseus (Θησέας) and meet a bandit whose tying of knots may help us understand how to loosen our own.

So, take a deep breath. Let the noise of the modern world fade for a moment. The road ahead narrows as we turn eastward, toward the Isthmus—that thin strip of land held between the restless Ionian and Aegean seas.

Listen… you can almost hear the wind whispering through the pines.

Let’s join Theseus there (to help you find where “there” is, here is a handy map!).

The Myth: Sínis—The Pine-Bender

A cool wind drifted from the north, carrying the scent of turned earth mixed with the salt of the Ionian Sea.

It had been two days since his encounter with Periphetes (Περιφήτης)—two days of climbing out of Epidaurus (Ἐπίδαυρος) through the stony folds of mountainous region, keeping to the high ground where the valleys still held rain and shadow.

The great bronze club, though heavy, now rested on his shoulder as naturally as if it had always been there.

Now, pausing on the lower slopes of Mount Oneion (Ονήιον), Theseus looked down at the road that coiled across the landscape toward a point where the land itself seemed to have been bent eastward and held taut between two seas. In the distance, the path slipped in and out of a pine forest before reemerging beyond it, tracing a narrow line along the pale cliffs that fell toward the distant shimmer of the Saronic Gulf. Beyond that Megara (Μέγαρα) and the oracle at Eleusis (Ελευσίνα), and even further still, Attica (Αττική) at whose heart lay Athens (Αθήνα)—his father’s kingdom and his destiny.

Shifting the weight of the bronze club, he set out again, picking his way down the rocky slopes. As Helios climbed higher, the sound of gravel beneath his sandals gradually gave way to the dry crunch of pine needles. The breeze that had carried the familiar scents of soil and surf now brought with it the resin-spiced whispers of the forest.

Theseus heard the man before he saw him. Panting grunts and the scrape of feet slipping over the forest floor were accompanied by the most alarming sounds of creaking wood. Somebody was working very hard.

As he rounded a bend in the road, Theseus came across a man facing away from him, he was older, broad-shouldered, with weathered skin and arms corded with muscle like twisted roots. He was grunting and panting as he strained against a long rope tied to the top of a young but already very tall pine. With great effort the man was pulling the top of the pine downwards toward another tree that stood opposite it on the other side of the path. From the top of bending tree dangled another, shorter length of rope, swinging to and fro, as the old man deftly pulled the crown lower towards the road.

“A moment of your strength, young traveller,” the man grunted through puffing breaths. “This tree needs tying down. Help me hold it while I secure the knot.”

Clearly the man needed help, so Theseus quickly set his club down and took hold the rope. Even with the man still helping to hold the rope in place, he felt the incredible, living force of tree surge against him. It strained against the two of them, but, summoning all of this strength, he held tight.

Hand over hand, the man moved around and behind him, pulling the slack length of the rope below his grip around the trunk of the tree on the opposite side of the road, As he was pulling, Theseus couldn’t help but notice that the tree to which the man was tying the rope already had ropes secured to its highest branches. A long one dangled all the way to the ground, while a shorter length ended about half way down its trunk. Theseus tightened his grip and leaned back, pulling harder to give the old man more slack with which to work.

“Sir,” said Theseus, “Who are you?”

“I am a son of a blacksmith, a descendant of Corinthus,” the man offered as he looped and pulled on the knot.

“And what is it you’re doing, here?” Theseus asked, his hands burning from the strain.

The man paused and looked at him. Theseus could feel the gaze rake over him as he strained against the pull of the bent pine.

“Resetting a trap,” the man replied, “my lazy apprentice tied it poorly. It’s for… boars…” He trailed off and then, as if finding his train of thought again, added, “there is a vicious beast that has been terrorising this road.”

The man resumed working, but Theseus couldn’t shake the feeling that while the old man’s hands busied themselves with the knot, his eyes were measuring him.

“You have a strong back,” the man said after a moment. “Here—let me show you a trick to take the strain off your hands. We can tie the rope around your waist and shoulders. Let’s do it that way when we pull down this second tree over here…”

The offer hung in the still air. And in that instant, Theseus knew. This was no boar trap. The snare was for him—and the man holding the rope was the infamous outlaw Sínis (Σίνις), the Pine-Bender himself.

The realisation dropped in him like a pebble in deep water. He didn’t move. He couldn’t. To release the rope now would give him away. Instead, he shifted his weight—subtly, carefully—as if testing the strain of the pine, all the while searching for a way to turn the moment in his favour.

The rope quivered in his hands, rough fibres biting into his palms. Behind him, Sínis exhaled—a sound thick with satisfaction… for his knot or his next kill, or perhaps both. Theseus couldn’t be certain.

“There. That should hold it,” the bandit said.

Theseus drew a sharp breath. Then, pitching his voice just enough to hide the steadiness in his body, he called out, “It’s slipping! I can’t hold it much longer!”

The older man clicked his tongue in annoyance. “It will hold, boy. Now let go—we have the other tree to set.”

“No,” Theseus insisted, his voice tight with effort. “Come, see for yourself. It’s not going to hold. I can feel it giving way!”

With a sigh, Sínis came over and gripped the rope just above Theseus’ hands, tugging hard to prove its strength. At that exact moment, Theseus, with a great roar, jerked the rope violently downward and released the rope. The pine groaned as if it would finally give way, and in the sudden, shocking recoil, Sínis was thrown off his feet, landing hard on the dusty ground. The knot held.

Before the bandit could recover, Theseus was on him, taking the shorter rope from the bent tree and expertly winding it around the man’s torso, securing it tightly beneath Sínis’ armpits

“What is this!” Sínis rasped, in stunned outrage.

I know who you are,” Theseus said, his voice low and cold. “Not a son of just any blacksmith, but of the outlaw Damastes (Δαμαστής)—the Subduer. You’re no hunter, but a ravager—a destroyer of those who trust you. You are Sínis.”

As he spoke, he hauled down the second pine, his words punctuated by short, sharp breaths. “This is no trap for boars,” he panted, drawing the great trunk lower and lower. “It’s for the ones… kind enough… to lend you a hand. A snare for all who mistake your deceit for guidance.”

He fastened the long rope to the base of the first tree, where Sínis already strained against his own bindings. The bandit froze, aware that even one reckless move could tear the cords apart and catapult him to his death. He began protesting, his voice cracking with panic, but Theseus ignored him.

Without a word, the young hero took up the short length of rope that hung from the now secured second tree and, grabbing Sínis’s feet, tied his ankles fast.

All was set. The two pines strained against their bonds, with Sínis strung, begging and pleading between them. Theseus looked at the older man, whose face was now a mask of terror and rage. “You did not set this trap for beasts,” he said calmly, “but one will surely die in it today.”

He drew the sword his father had left him under the great rock in Troezen (Τροιζήνα). With two swift, clean cuts, he severed the ropes that held the great trees down.

With a terrifying, splintering roar, the pines sprang back to their full height. Sínis’ shoulders followed the one, while his ankles went with the other. And in a moment, all the tension that had been held in their wooden trunks released in a spray of pine needles and gore.

For a long moment, there was silence. Then, slowly, the sounds of the forest returned, and the wind began to whisper through the pines once more.

The road continued down and to the right, towards the shores of the Saronic Gulf, and onwards to the town of Crommyon (Κρομμυών).

Amplification: The Pine-Bender

So now we’ve met Sínis—the pine bender. What images from his story resonated with you, and how is he different from Periphetes?

Perhaps you noticed how the pictures rigidity of the singular point of view and the crushing weight of the bronze club have, in the image of this second bandit, been replaced with the sinuous flexibility of growing wood. Periphetes confronts us with brute resistance; Sínis, with dynamic tension.

Sínis is the second bandit Theseus encounters on his journey to Athens. He is a picture of what happens when we begin facing the complexes and limiting beliefs in the shadow.

To understand where on our path we meet this force, we need to find the place where opposing forces are bent towards one another, held in tension for a moment, and then suddenly released. A great example of this, and perhaps this is because it is where I most often see it happening for myself, is in decisions based on value-judgments—the split second decisions we make on how to respond to things that happen to or inside us.

You may have seen a quote floating around, often attributed to the psychiatrist Viktor Frankl: “Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response.”

While that exact phrasing is not actually in Frankl’s work, the idea is central to existential psychology. The psychologist Rollo May put it beautifully when he wrote: “Human freedom involves our capacity to pause between stimulus and response and, in that pause, to choose the one response toward which we wish to throw our weight.”1

That pause... that space... is where our real power lies. It’s the gap where we can stop an old, unconscious reaction and choose something new. And it is right there, in that charged and often uncomfortable space, that Sínis waits for us. He is the embodiment of the pull of our old patterns straining against the push of new possibilities. He is what happens when the energies that should be held in creative tension instead rebound violently towards their opposites.

In archetypal terms, we can see Sínis as a corrupted Senex, or a negative elder figure. Where a healthy elder guides the hero, the corrupted Senex fears renewal. He demands conformity. He bends new life towards his old will and tears apart whatever resists him. Like J. M. Barrie’s Captain Hook to Peter Pan, he is the authoritative figure who blocks the path of transformation instead of guiding the hero across the threshold.

And this is where the genius of the myth really shines. The story of Sínis is so powerful because the story itself models the very tension it describes. It strains against itself, pulling in two directions at once. Let me show you what I mean.

The ancient sources can’t even agree on how Sínis killed his victims.

According to Apollodorus2 and Hyginus3, he would ask a traveller to help him hold down a single, bent pine tree. Then he’d let go. The victim, unable to hold the tension alone, would be flung into the air and crash back to earth. One extreme to the other.

But according to Diodorus4 and Pausanias5, he would bend two pine trees down, tie a person’s limbs to each, and then release the trees. They would spring up in opposite directions, ripping the victim in two.

Even the timeline is contradictory. The Parian Chronicle6, an ancient marble inscription, claims that Theseus defeated Sínis after he was already king of Athens, establishing the Isthmian Games7[7] in his honour.

So which version is right? Which is the real story?

You see, here again, the opposites appear. Surely one version must be correct and the other incorrect, right?

Mythology has always been comfortable with contradiction. Myths can hold multiplicity without collapsing; we, on the other hand, usually can’t.

Rather than holding the tension between opposites within us—like a drawn bowstring, alive with potential but requiring effort and a bit of discomfort to maintain—we rush to release it. We hurry to decide what’s right, what’s wrong, who we are, what we are not. This happens mostly beneath our awareness, where our complexes steer the wheel. This is the inner work of Sínis.

Each of us carries a form of that corrupted Senex archetype within ourselves. It’s the impulse to resolve inner conflict in a way that sabotages our own growth.

So what does this inner saboteur, this corrupted mentor, sound or feel like? How might we begin to identify it? It’s different for all of us. For some, it’s a voice of impatience: ‘Just pick one and get it over with.’ For others, it’s a voice of conformity: ‘Don’t rock the boat; just do what’s expected.’

But listen closely, and you might notice a common strategy. The goal is often the same: it urges us to choose what is socially acceptable over what feels personally authentic. What does that pressure feel like for you? Where do you feel it?

That is the Sínis pattern. As with the pine trees, it binds our experiences to opposing poles—good and bad, success and failure—and in that sudden, premature resolution, our attempts to grow are torn apart. We find ourselves flung between who we are becoming and who we once were.

So, now that we understand more about the image from the story, what can we do with it? In the myth, Theseus defeats Sínis by turning the bandit’s own method against him. The very energy that once trapped becomes the means of liberation. Transformation here doesn’t come from compromise; it comes from creativity. It’s the discovery of a third way that dissolves the old conflict.

Remember, the hero is not a role model to imitate, but a pattern of consciousness we can apply. The “Theseus move” is about learning to stand in that living tension without being torn apart.

Think of a moment when you feel torn between acting and waiting. The Sínis reflex is to pick one—to relieve the tension. The Theseus move is to pause and let both choices inform you. Can action contain non-action? Could non-action be a form of action? Considering questions like this is where we begin to discover the third way.

Theseus meets his bandits one by one as he travels from Troezen to Athens. But in our own inner work, we will often have to apply the strategies from a few of these mythical encounters at the same time.

It is more helpful to view the bandits in the story less like a step-by-step set of instructions and more like facets of the same process. Each presents a different strategy for navigating the inner obstacles that arise along our path of growth.

In real life, we apply the wisdom of all these encounters simultaneously, learning to hold the tensions between the various approaches taken by the hero archetype rather than relying on any one strategy to bring that which is unconscious into the light of consciousness.

You see, when we begin this work and first recognise a bandit-like pattern within ourselves, the Sínis-like impulse is to label it as “bad.” That act of judgment gives us a quick way to release the tension. It lets us feel momentarily “right” in the face of what might otherwise make us feel ashamed. Even if we can’t be perfect, at least we can judge perfectly—that’s the hidden bargain behind this reflex. It feels good, in a grim sort of way, to chastise what we deem “wrong.” But the moment we do, we bind part of ourselves to that label. The declaration “this is bad” immediately calls forth its opposite: “I should be good.” Instead of sitting with the discomfort and learning from it, we push the rejected part away and try to cover it with something more acceptable. What follows is a cycle of denial and defensiveness—a desperate effort to look whole without actually becoming whole.

And that’s when Sínis gets us. By doing this, we’ve already stepped into his trap. The moment we bind one part of ourselves to “bad” and another to “good,” the rope tightens, and we’re stretched between them, mistaking the judgment we’ve cast for actual virtue while the deeper work of integration remains undone.

We take the opposing pines of “good” and “bad,” bind the complex to them, and release the tension by condemning ourselves. This is how repression works. We banish the energy of whatever uncomfortable aspect of the psyche we encounter right back into the unconscious, often using judgments we’ve absorbed from parents, teachers, or society. And our growth is, once again, undone.

But this part of the story doesn’t end there. There’s another danger waiting on the far side of this work. Sínis tears us apart when we try to resolve the opposites too quickly—but if we go too far the other way, dissolving every boundary, every tension, we drift towards another kind of undoing. The road narrows now, carrying a kind of tension of its own as it bends towards the Isthmus, the narrow strip of land connecting the Peloponnese to the mainland.

Mythological Images from the Grey Road: Phaea and the Crommyonian Sow

Here, as if the tension of Sínis’ pines were the force holding this part of the myth together, the story seems to dissolve. So, for the next part of our journey together, I’d like to do something a little different.

Rather than retelling a story, I’d like to walk with you through the imagery that survives from this strange and fragmentary part of the myth.

The reason is simple: here, the record falters. No two ancient sources agree on what exactly happens next, or even who—or what—the next confrontation Theseus must face is.

What the sources do agree on is that, as Theseus was crossing the isthmus, he approached the town of Crommyon which lay between Corinth and Megara, where he faced and killed the Crommyonian Sow (I’ve updated the map to help you plan your next trip to Greece).

Some say that this monstrous sow was raised by an old woman named Phaea (Φαία). Others say that the sow was named Phaea. Still others claim there was no beast at all—only a woman name Phaea so savage (and unhygienic) that she was called a sow.

But you see, I think that uncertainty is the point. This part of the road—at least, viewed through the lens I’m adopting here—is supposed to be hard to see clearly.

After facing the violent clarity of Sínis—the bandit-urge within each of us that splits the world into opposites and tears us apart between them—Theseus enters a different kind of trial.

The pines no longer threaten to tear him apart; instead, after abandoning the need to polarise the world, the path itself begins to blur. At this point, our hero steps into the grey country between black and white, where boundaries soften and certainty dissolves. And the seeming lack of definition and contrast that arises when we let go of dualistic thinking and enter the grey space of a third way, is appropriate because one way of interpreting the name Phaea is as “the Grey One”8.

Psychologically, this is the territory we enter after we stop forcing our inner world into rigid boxes of ‘good’ and ‘bad’. It can feel like a seemingly directionless mist-washed region of moral ambiguity. This is a space in that asks us to exercise deeper discernment, in which we learn to navigate by a more nuanced compass moral compass, and take personal responsibility for our choices and their consequences rather than chalking them up to external or inherited definitions.

This uncertain, and liminal space holds a profound danger. In letting go of the certainties prescribed by external authorities, we risk letting go of discernment altogether. We risk dissolving into a mess of undifferentiated amoral chaos, in which every impulse feels valid and every boundary disappears. Symbolically speaking, this is the danger of being consumed by the Crommyonian Sow.

Almost as far back as we can remember, the pig has been a creature of paradox—sacred and profane, fertile and gluttonous, nurturing and devouring.In many ancient myths, the pig stands at the threshold between creation and decay. For example, the Egyptian sky goddess Nut was said to swallow her piglets—the stars—each night and then birth them again each morning, while in Greece, Demeter (Δημήτηρ) received piglets as sacrificial offerings for the renewal of the earth. The same animal that symbolized divine fruitfulness also came to embody sloth and lust, purity and filth.

Because it feeds on indiscriminately, seemingly devouring everything—including its own young— and yet is capable of giving birth to large numbers of young, the pig has long mirrored the amoral cycles of nature itself—where creation and destruction are not opposites, but phases of one eternal appetite.

From a western perspective, a cultural lens heavily influenced by Christianity, the pig also has strong associations with the image of possession9. From a symbolic perspective, we can understand the idea of such possession as being a state in which the conscious ego is swallowed by unconscious drives and behaviours, causing a person to behave more like an animal or a beast rather than a human being.

Even today, the pig remains a complex and seemingly contradictory symbolic image. Its near-human skin and unsettling blend of intelligence, appetite, and emotion draw both disgust and affection. We call someone a “pig” when they’ve surrendered to greed or corruption—when the appetite devours the soul—but we also hold gentler opinions of this amazing animal: in Winni-the-Pooh we see Piglet’s anxious innocence, the talking pig, Babe’s pure-hearted courage, or the character’s like Wilbur from Charlotte’s Web.

The image of the pig in both mythology and pop culture exposes what we’d rather not see, or acknowledge, in ourselves: the uneasy union of tenderness and gluttony, empathy and indulgence, innocence and appetite. It is this volatility—this oscillation between devotion and devouring—that makes the Crommyonian Sow such a haunting image.

And so, as the myth fades into fog, we find that the Crommyonian Sow isn’t only a monster on the road—it’s the image of a force within us. The unconscious is powerful, it is vast, and it holds the raw material for our growth. But the unconscious is not your friend. It is not a benevolent guide to be blindly followed. Shadow work is not about surrendering to the impulse of the amoral forces of instinct and urge within; it is a conscious, alchemical craft of engaging with them to transmute their contents into resources for a better life.

In the story, waiting for Theseus in that grey, misty place is the perfect image of this amoral, undifferentiated power: the Crommyonian Sow. An untamed creature of instinct, as capable of giving birth to multitudes as she is of devouring them.

According Apollodorus10, this frightening creature was raised by an old woman named Phaea—The Grey One.

This name, Phaea, is another symbolic image to consider. It invites us to pause and consider what grey or greyness means to us—or what it might have meant to the ancient Greeks who have leant us this story.

Luckily, greyness appears in another place in this mythology as well: One of the most famous epithets of the Goddess Athena is Glaucopis (γλαυκῶπις). We often translate this as ‘grey-eyed,’ but it also means so much more. It can mean bright-eyed, or even blue-eyed. It evokes the shimmering, silvery-blue quality of the sea—a colour that is alive, full of hidden depth, and unimaginable power.

The point, again is for us modern readers to learn accept ambiguity rather than rushing to resolve it because despite our very best efforts, there is simply no way that any of us can ever claim to know exactly how the person sitting next to us sees or perceives colour, let alone how it might have been perceived by people who are long gone.

A lot has been said about ancient people and colours. There is a misconception, for example that ancient cultures didn’t have a word for or perhaps didn’t see the colour “blue.” While the historical debate about ancient colour perception is a fascinating topic, it is best left to those more informed than myself. What we can say for certain is that our experience of colour is deeply personal and cultural.

In this myth, ‘grey’ isn’t a flat, neutral colour; it is a dynamic quality, full of light and mystery. It’s a powerful reminder that we can never truly know another’s experience of colour, just as we can never pin down a single, simple meaning for our own inner states. To remember this is to understand the importance of the grey space that opens when we hold the tension between opposites, allowing multiple truths to exist at once, shimmering with potential.

So when we hear that the monster of the Isthmus is connected to Phaea, ‘the grey one,’ we’re being told that we are in a place of deep symbolic ambiguity. The lines between the nurturer, the monster she creates, and the predator all dissolve into one. This confusion is the point. It’s a perfect portrait of that inner state where we can no longer distinguish a raw impulse from the part of our soul or psyche that gives it life. This is the Devouring Mother archetype11—the all-consuming force that erases identity and consciousness.

So what does our hero do? He doesn’t negotiate with this force, and he doesn’t surrender to it. He slays the Sow.

But this is not a simple act of destruction. In the language of the psyche, “slaying the Sow” is a profound act of alchemical transmutation. It is the conscious ego stepping in to set a firm, ethical boundary with a destructive, all-consuming inner force. It is the moment we stop being devoured by a pattern and instead find the sacred energy trapped within it, liberating that energy for a new purpose.

What does “Slaying the Sow” look like in our own lives?

To start with, we need to identify and name whatever force threatens to consume our energy. It will often be something wild and unbridled—an impulse we would usually judge as “bad” and try to repress. But now that we’ve moved beyond the Sínis-trap, we know better than to string ourselves up on those old value judgments. Now, we can choose to stay with the tension instead. That’s the grey path—the confrontation with what lies beneath.

Here I’m going to reach for the low-hanging fruit of envy as an example. In our current age of social media and the perpetual curation of our lives and exploits on the internet, envy and its eager bedfellow, self-loathing, are some of the easiest of these consuming aspects of the unconscious to drag out into the light. The devouring pattern is that endless scroll—either literally through social media posts, or figuratively through thoughts of everything others have or have achieved that we feel is missing in our own lives—and the resulting bitterness that eats away at our sense of worth. The alchemical act, the slaying of the Sow, is to address the root of the bitterness, not to suppress the desire. It is to consciously ask, “What is this envy telling me that I want for my own life?” and then to channel that intense energy into building it for ourselves.

Another example that might easily be applied to a large swathe of the population is the way many of us are paralyzed by apathy. Here, potential is devoured by a fog of inaction. Today, we are perpetually bombarded by so much information that it is far easier to give up trying to locate our own inner compass among the mess of what the entire world seems to be telling us we should be doing.

Inaction may look like laziness, but there’s often something deeper going on. When the world around us seems to be pushing us in directions that lie at odds with the deepest core of who we are, inaction can often be a subtle act of resistance. “Slaying the Sow” here is to honour the message in that resistance—that the soul is protesting a false path, refusing to walk it. Naming that resistance is the act that frees the energy to move again—to search for a truer, more authentic path, even if the first step is small and uncertain.

Whether it appears as envy or apathy—or anything else that drains our vitality and robs us of our potential in any given moment—the principle is the same: that which threatens to devour us most often carries the key to our transformation.

As with the confrontation with Sínis, Theseus’ interaction with the Crommyonian Sow and/or Phaea is an extension of the work he began by claiming the sword and sandals from the rock back in Troezen and then facing the cyclopean Periphetes and claiming the bronze club. In fact, all the bandits along Theseus’ path to Athens are images of the same process of growth that takes place as we go through our own initiatory phases in life.

When Theseus kills the Sow, he gets no treasure. There’s no golden fleece, no magical prize. And this is key. The reward is not external; it is the forging of a new capacity within the soul. The confrontation and bringing that which is unconscious into consciousness is the prize. It is the establishment of discernment, of self-regulation, and of an equal, respectful relationship between the conscious ego and the powerful forces of the unconscious.

As you reflect on this, perhaps you can begin to notice the truth in it for your own life. The inner-work of facing your rigidity, holding your inner conflicts, and drawing a line with your own devouring impulses… that isn’t self-indulgence. It’s the necessary, foundational work we do on ourselves before we can be of genuine, healthy service to our communities and the external world. We have to build the self before we can bring that self to society.

So before we move on, take a moment to consider: what might the Sow be devouring in you? What energy, if reclaimed, could become the strength that carries you forward?

Before I share some ideas you can use to connect more deeply with this part of the myth, let’s trace the path we’ve walked with Theseus so far: First, we must be grounded enough to know when we have outgrown our world and are ready to grow. Then, on that path, we face the narrow-minded, single-eyed beliefs that block the way. This is the start of shadow work—reclaiming the raw energy we once rejected. Doing this demands that we let go of the Sínis-like need to strap parts of ourselves to opposing poles by making harsh value judgments, and instead enter that grey, nuanced space. And there, we face the Sow, a symbol of both rich fertility and indiscriminate appetite. We are not here to embrace amorality, but to transmute that raw energy into personal responsibility, discernment, and compassion. Because if we can recognise this complexity in ourselves, we must know for certain that it is equally present in others.

Questions for Walking the Grey Road

As we bring the myth of Theseus into our own lives, the real work begins. As always, I want to leave you with a few ideas to help you explore this part of the myth for yourself.

The following reflection prompts are designed as a starting point for your own journaling or quiet reflection. They invite you to look not for mythic figures, but for the universal human patterns they help us recognise.

Consider these prompts are way-marks along the same narrow road Theseus walked—the isthmus between two restless seas, where one tide pulls towards what we’ve been, and the other towards what we’re becoming.

There are no right or wrong answers here, only avenues to explore and associations to uncover. Each question invites you a little further along that grey stretch between knowing and not-knowing.

Holding the Tension

When you notice you’ve had a strong emotional reaction to a situation or perhaps a person—irritation, envy, a snap judgment that feels almost automatic—can you pause and roll it back for a moment, just to look at it without the label you’ve attached to it?

Notice the story you’ve already attached to it—the label some part of you reached for without even asking. Now listen to the tone of that inner judge. Does it feel grounded and wise—or anxious, demanding, maybe trying to please what’s socially acceptable rather than what’s truly authentic to you?

What happens when you loosen the story’s grip by consciously trying to tell it in a different way? What kind of tension pushed you toward that quick resolution? What opposites were pulling on you? Was it the tension between feeling afraid and wanting security, or perhaps the anticipation of rejection and the desire for belonging? Try on a few pairs of opposites—as many as you can think of, even if they don’t immediately seem to fit. Don’t worry about finding the perfect words; just stay with the feeling until something clicks.

This is how we begin to turn the work of Sínis (Σίνις) back on the corrupted Senex—by bringing awareness to the uncomfortable tensions that drive our snap judgments and unnoticed acts of repression.

The Unseen Cost of a Repeating Pattern

As I mentioned earlier, the unconscious is a vast source of wisdom and strength. It holds all the psychic energy we need to live fully—but it is not our friend. It is wild, ancient, and not adapted to the world we live in. It needs the mediation of the conscious ego for its impulses to find healthy, fulfilling expression in life.

We all have habitual loops in which raw, untamed impulses drain our energy instead of nourishing us. Think of an area of your life—your work, your relationships, your creative practice—where you feel that emptiness, as if something deep within is feeding on your vitality.

Where in your life does something that once felt alive now feed on your energy instead—can you name a habit, a pattern of thinking, or perhaps a project that leaves you feeling emptier each time you return to it?

If you listen closely, what denied longing might be hiding inside that emptiness—what sacred aim of the soul has turned inward, devouring rather than nourishing?

When you feel like you’ve identified an area like this, no matter what it is, try listing whatever what small, honest actions could begin to give that energy back its rightful direction? Just write whatever comes to mind and engage in some free association with the imagery and how you feel about it without looking for precise, concrete answers and definitions.

You like to picture the Crommyonian Sow and see what explore what you imagine it eating. Practice some free association with the images you imagine. Explore what symbols emerge until you feel something click into place.

The Sacred Message in the Struggle

The deepest shift in inner work comes when we stop treating a difficult pattern as an enemy to destroy, and begin to approach it as a messenger to understand.

In the myth, Theseus kills the devouring archetype—but as we’ve seen, that “slaying” is symbolic. It shows him transforming the raw, consuming energy of that obstacle into something of value on his path of initiation.

This final question invites you to practice that same shift. Imagine, for a moment, that the draining pattern you just identified isn’t a flaw at all, but a desperate—if misguided—attempt to meet a deep, life-affirming need.

If you were to listen to that struggle with compassionate curiosity, what sacred message, what deep or unacknowledged desire, might you hear?

What part of you is it trying, in its own clumsy way, to protect… or to champion on behalf of your well-being?

A Final Note on The Pressures of Polarisation and Embracing the Grey Road

Before we close, I want to leave you with one final thought. The inner work we’ve explored today—learning to hold the tension of opposites and walk the grey road of discernment—is not just a private, psychological exercise. It is a vital practice for navigating the world we live in.

Our conscious mind, the part of us that depth psychology calls the ego, loves to organise, define, categorise, and create clear, logical structures. This is a necessary and beautiful human capacity. But our soul, our unconscious, speaks the language of mythos—a language of story, of image, of paradox.

Mythos can hold three different versions of the same story, crown a deity with a garland of a dozen contradictory names, and see truth in multiple, overlapping layers.

The world around us, however, relentlessly pressures us to abandon mythos for a weaponised and oversimplified logos. Why? Because when we buy into somebody else’s definitions of where the poles in black-and-white thinking lie, we become easier to steer.

Political campaigns, advertising, and even religious ideologies often work by creating false dichotomies that demands we pick a side—for us or against us, good or evil, pure or tainted. They flatten the complex, soulful grey areas of life into a battlefield of black and white.

They present us with their story and, as the great thinkers on myth remind us, the moment anyone insists that their story must be taken as the one and only literal fact, we are no longer in the realm of soul, but in the realm of control.

To consciously walk the grey road—to pick a third and more nuanced way through this world, then, is an act of courageous heroism. It is the conscious refusal to be polarised. It is to insist on the dignity of the multifaceted experience of life.

It allows for the practice of compassion and empathy even when disagreements are are present. And it honours the sacred, mythic truth that the most important things in life can never be reduced to a simple, easy answer.

Seeing the Hero in Action

So far, Theseus has faced three bandits on his road: Periphetes, the club-bearer, Sínis, the Pine-bender, and the Crommyonian Sow.

In working with this myth and teaching it in classes, I’ve found it very helpful to ask people to look at how the hero archetype has showed up in consciously or unconsciously in the lives of others. Sometimes, seeing how other real people have grown through the challenges they faced along their initiatory journeys.

It’s not a very deep or taxing exercise, but it really can be quite instructive to look at how the archetype of the hero shows up in other people’s stories so that we can become more sensitive to where and how it might show up in our own.

Being a South African, one of my go-to figures is, of course, the political activist, freedom fighter, turned president and father of the nation, Nelson Mandela.

Of course, Nelson Mandela is someone that most people today—especially in the South African context—consider to be a hero. But that is not what we are talking about here.

The hero in mythology is not a person. It is a part of the psyche; a spark of consciousness that, when the time is right—when it discovers within itself the readiness and a sense of potential, quests into the unknown depths within in search of renewal. It is the offspring of a king—the ego that has ruled for a period of life through actions that have become comfortable and habitual. But it is also the offspring of a deeper power, an archetypal force in the unconscious that is pushing towards integration. This is why heroes in myth must also have some kind of divine lineage.

And so, this nascent flicker of consciousness and potential begins to confront unconscious forces that have become accustomed to the habitual patterns of the ego. These are the bandit like beliefs and complexes that hinder and oppose the renewal, not because they are evil or bad, but simply because they have, for the longest time been successful in helping us survive in our old milieu. To grow, their energy must be reclaimed and put to better use.

There, in the shadow of the path through the wilderness, the hero-spark confronts these unconscious elements and by bringing awareness to them, begins to liberate the energy once devoted to those purposes, making it available for more useful undertakings—turning it it into something that can be held in our conscious toolbox, ready to be applied at the proper time and when needed, an extension of our will power rather than an unconscious reflexive complex to which we might otherwise fall victim.

If you’d like to try something like this, pick a person who you know or perhaps know of—historical and even fictional characters work well for this—and see how the pattern we’ve explored so far is reflected in that person or character’s inward development.

When faced with the brutality and oppression of the racist apartheid regime, did Nelson Mandela emerge from his incarceration bent on vengeance, seeking to subject his oppressors to the same wickedness he had been forced to endure? What had to happen within him to turn his entirely valid hatred for the system and people who supported into the power and compassion to lead the entire nation toward reconciliation?

This is just an example that has been useful and pertinent to my situation. If you look around you, I’m sure you will be able to find any number of examples of people whose path will provide you with incredibly insightful meditations when considered through the lens of the three bandit confrontations we have already discussed.

I do want to stress, however, that here we are not yet considering outward actions of these people or characters. We are focussing on their inward shifts. Nor are we considering only people who we would count as “heroic” in the modern sense of the word. The hero in myth is a facet of the psyche, not a whole person and it is very important that we keep that thought foremost in our minds as we do this kind of exercise.

We’re only considering the inward shifts made by these people and characters because, for now, the challenges Theseus has faced on his round have been inward challenges. The first three bandits, in this interpretation, are confrontations that allow Theseus to reframe his relationship with himself—the forces that have defined him to this point and kept him from moving forward along his road.

But the journey is not over. There are still three confrontations waiting for him on the road ahead—encounters that will allow us to consider how to bring this inner work, this work of integration, to our outer lives and society.

The Road Ahead

In the next instalment, we’ll move closer to the sea once more, where Theseus meets another old man—one with a strange pet—who will help us explore the danger of false humility.

Until then, if content resonates with you (and if you’ve stuck around all the way to down here, you’re definitely one of my favourite people now), I’d love to hear what the symbols in this part of the myth mean to you. You can leave a comment here or perhaps you wouldn’t mind writing a review and/or a rating on my podcast page,—it’s entirely free, and it helps me know the work is landing with people.

Leave a comment

Thank you so much for sharing this time with me.

Until next time—may you find peace in the tension, and beauty in the shimmering grey space of life.

References & Further Reading

Apollodorus, & Hyginus. (2007). Apollodorus’ Library and Hyginus’ Fabulae: Two handbooks of Greek mythology (R. S. Smith & S. M. Trzaskoma, Trans. & Eds.). Hackett Publishing Company.

Covey, S. R. (2020). 7 HABITS OF HIGHLY EFFECTIVE PEOPLE : powerful lessons in personal change. Simon & Schuster. (Original work published 1989)

Diodorus Siculus. (1939). Diodorus of Sicily: In twelve volumes, Vol. III (Books IV [continued] 59–VIII) (C. H. Oldfather, Trans.). William Heinemann Ltd; Harvard University Press.

Kapach, A. (2023, January 14). Crommyonian Sow. Mythopedia. https://mythopedia.com/topics/crommyonian-sow/

Marmor Parium (trans. by Gillian Newing), 2001, ToposText. Topostext.org. https://doi.org/epigraphy.packhum.org/text/77668

May, R. (1994). The Courage to Create (The Delphic Oracle as Therapist). W. W. Norton & Company. [“The Delphic Oracle as Therapist” was first published in The Reach of Mind: Essays inMemory of Kurt Goldstein, Marianne L. Simmel, ed. (New York, 1968).]

Pausanias. (1918). Description of Greece (W. H. S. Jones & H. A. Ormerod, Trans.). Loeb Classical Library. Harvard University Press.

Ronnberg, A. (2021). The Book of Symbols. Taschen

Stephen Jay Gould. (1990). Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History. W. W. Norton & Company.

This week, something happened at the high school where I teach in South Korea that made me pause. My elective course Mythology & Psychology: The Myth of Theseus filled up completely—on the very first day of registration. Twenty-five students signed up immediately, leaving no seats open.

On the surface, it’s just numbers on a school system screen. But to me, it speaks to something deeper. These students are voluntarily choosing a class that isn’t about test scores or college prep, but about conversation, reflection, and the strange power of old stories to help us understand ourselves. They come willing to wrestle with myth in English, across cultural and linguistic barriers, and still—the seats vanish faster each semester.

I think that says something important: young people are hungry for meaning. They want stories that help them think about who they are, who they’re becoming, and how to face the unknowns of life. And that’s exactly what mythology is for.

Part of why I share this here is because I know my time in Korea is finite. One day soon, I’ll bring this kind of work back to South Africa, aiming to plant it in schools, universities, and communities there. Seeing these courses resonate here gives me hope that the need is universal—and that there’s a place for this kind of learning wherever people are willing to listen and reflect.

For now, I’m grateful—and a little in awe—that Theseus and his long road of trials still has something to offer teenagers in 2025.

For a taste of what we cover in the course, check out The Inward Sea Podcast Hub page and choose where you want to listen!

This is the second part in a series dealing with the myth of Theseus and his longissima via—his long walk of initiation from Troezen to Athens. Like any of us, on his way to becoming who he is meant to be, Theseus must face challenges. Along his path, he must face six bandits stationed at what are referred to the six gates to the underworld.

Although Theseus is not venturing into Hades (yet), the underworld he must face as he grows is the same as the one we must each face—the shadowed realm of the unconscious. You can find the first part of this series here.

What can this myth teach us about the trials we face as we grow? Grab a cup of whatever beverage brings you the most comfort and joy, and let’s walk a way together, you and I.

This is the expanded transcript for this podcast episode. You can find the audio version on most podcast platforms. If you enjoy the article or the episode, please consider leaving a review and a rating on a platform of your choice. It really helps me know if what I am doing is landing for my listeners. Thank you, and lets get on with it because we’ve got an exciting journey ahead of us.

Introduction

Hello, and welcome to The Inward Sea. If this is your first time here, my name is Dimitri, and you’ve stepped into the second part of our series following Theseus (Θησέας) on his long road to Athens (Αθήνα).

Last time, we lingered at the beginning: his strange conception, his boyhood fascination with Heracles (Ηρακλής), and the moment—when he was about sixteen—that he rolled aside a great stone to discover what his father, King Aegeas (Αιγέας) of Athens, had hidden for him: a pair of sandals and a sword—tokens of his identity and readiness.

If you missed that part of the story, I’d encourage you to go back and listen to it first—it lays the groundwork for what happens now.

In just a moment, we’re going to dive back in where we left off last time: Theseus, a strong sixteen-year-old youth has just moved a rock and uncovered the tokens left for him and he is about to set out from Troezen (Τροιζήνα), northward toward Epidaurus (Ἐπίδαυρος). And there, before the famous amphitheater was ever built, the boy met his first trial: a limping bandit, who may even have been a cyclops, waiting with a bronze club to smash the heads of travellers.

Today’s piece is all about Bandit Spotting— and it’s kind of beginner’s guide to shadow work. Here’s how we’ll walk this essay together: first, I’ll tell the story itself. Then we’ll draw closer to the symbols—what does it mean that the hero takes the road, that the first enemy he meets is a bandit, that the weapon is a club of solid bronze? We’ll use those images to explore something Jung called a psychological complex: those knotted bundles of emotion and instinct that rise up from the unconscious and seize us. After that, I’ll give you four practical steps you can try when you face your own inner bandits. And finally, I’ll leave you with three reflection questions—prompts you can return to again and again in your journaling, to help you do the hero’s work Theseus models for us on his path.

So yes, this podcast is called The Inward Sea, but today, strap on your sandals—we’re travelling over land. And yet, even here on the rocky road through the wilderness, the tides of the unconscious are never far away.

Subscribe now

The Myth – The Bandit and the Bronze Club

The next morning, as Eos (Ηώς) flung wide the gates of dawn and Helios (Ήλιος) laid the first golden beams across the land, Theseus was already awake.

He strapped the sandals—unearthed yesterday from beneath the great stone—to his feet. They weren’t his, but they fit well enough. The sword hung at his side, plain scabbard, plain baldric. No frills. But the weight of it spoke of destiny.

His mother and grandfather gave him the usual mix of hugs, cautions, and pleas to take the boat—always the boat!—that would have whisked him across the Saronic Gulf in safety. But Theseus had made up his mind. Boats were for merchants. Heroes walked. Heroes faced the road. Heroes, he thought, were made in dust and danger, not in comfort. So north he went, out of Troezen, each step setting off tiny rounds of applause as the sole of his sandals ground over the loose gravel.

The road carried him through olive-dotted slopes and cypress-lined valleys until he came near Epidaurus. And there—leaning against a rock as though the whole world were his to lean upon—stood a man. A very large man. Some said he was the son of Hephaistos (Ήφαιστος) , god of fire and forge. Others swore he was a Cyclops, one glaring eye blazing from the centre of his forehead. Everyone agreed on two things: he limped, and he carried a club. A club of bronze so heavy it seemed the earth itself winced beneath its weight.

This, of course, was Periphetes (Περιφήτης). Bandit. Road-scourge. Skull-smasher. Known to locals as Corynetes (Κορυνήτης)—the Club-Bearer.

“You there, boy!” he bellowed. “This is my road. All who wish to pass my come to me to pay the toll!”

“And what is the toll, sir?” Theseus replied, with studied politeness, keeping his distance.

“Come closer. I’ll show you,” growled Periphetes.

So Theseus did. Slowly, steadily, sandals crunching the gravel, the boy walked toward the brute. It was like approaching a very large, very irritable bull that had also been given a weapon and a bad temper. The outlaw leaned on his club, one eye glinting, lips twitching, drool gathering in the corner of his mouth. He looked delighted, which is never a reassuring look on someone with murder in mind.

“That’s a… fine-looking club you’ve got,” said Theseus, keeping his voice light, as if complimenting a neighbour’s choice of garden rake.

“Oh, it is,” purred Periphetes, stroking the bronze like a cat. “Solid bronze. Forged by my father, Hephaistos himself.”

“Really?” Theseus cocked his head. “Funny… it looks awfully light. Almost like wood with a bronze veneer. My mother has jewellery like that—bronze outside, nothing inside.”

“What!?” roared Periphetes. His face flushed crimson, his single eye bulged like a boiled onion. “Overlay? OVERLAY!? You dare insult me? Here! Try it yourself… boy!”

And with a snarl, he thrust the club forward, shoving its weight into Theseus’ arms.

The youth staggered. Gods, it was heavy—preposterously so. His knees wobbled, his elbows screamed, his spine groaned like an old ship’s mast in a storm. For a moment, you’d have thought he’d collapse into the dirt then and there.

Periphetes’ lips trembled—though whether from eagerness or simple slobber, it was hard to tell. This wasn’t the way things usually went, but seeing this youth struggling against the weight of the club that would soon crush him was delightful.

“You’re right,” Theseus puffed, cheeks glowing red, “it really is… solid… bronze…”

“Yes,” gloated Periphetes, chest swelling, “forged by the skill of my father—”

“Well then,” said Theseus, brightening suddenly, “let’s see what happens if I do this.”

And with a shocking burst of strength, the boy swung the great lump of metal back over his head and brought it down. The sound it made was very final. Bronze met bone, bone lost, and what had previously been held securely inside Periphetes’ large head was now spectacularly and messily outside. The blow rang out across the hills, and with it a flock of birds erupted skyward, wheeling in a frenzy as though they themselves carried off the echo of the strike. They scattered, black specks against the bright sky, and their wings bore the first whispers of a story that would be told for thousands of years to come.

To anyone watching, the ease with which Theseus wielded the weapon would have seemed impossible. Divine blood, perhaps. Or maybe just a young man’s years of training finally tested. Either way, the club was his now. He lifted it, first in one hand, then the other, testing its balance. It was heavy, yes. But it belonged to him now.

By the time Helios had summited the heavens and begun his slow, reluctant descent toward the western hills, Theseus was on the road again, the great bronze club slung across his shoulder. Behind him, rumours scattered like seeds on the wind, taking root in rafters, curling into campfire talk, and drifting skyward on plumes of smoke until even the stars seemed to hum with the tale. They moved faster than he could walk: the outlaw of Epidaurus was dead. Ahead of him, they eddied and pooled in the villages, swelling into fast flowing streams that would reach Athens before him. The youth of Troezen was gone. In his place marched a new figure: the young hero who bore a club of pure bronze.

Amplification

So, that’s the story. Taken at face value, it’s rather simple. Boy meets giant, giant tries to smash boy’s head in, boy smashes giant’s head in instead.

But when we look a little closer at the symbols involved, there is a lot more going on under the hood of this seemingly simple scene from the myth.

This is where we will unpack the symbols. As we’re going through this part, you might want to keep a notebook handy to jot down any ideas that occur to you. When dealing with symbols in mythology, it is useful to know how other people can cultures interpret them, but the most important meanings are the ones that emerge from your own contact with the images. I’d love to hear what you make of these images!

The Hero and the Road

In mythology, the hero is the one who tames the wild. Heroes don’t simply slay monsters; they take chaotic, untamed, often primal forces and turn them into something that serves life. In myth and legend, heroes are celebrated because their actions stabilise and order the world in way that makes civilisation possible.

As a little side note…

The word Hero was originally a woman’s name—Hero (Ἡρώ), the priestess of Aphrodite. Her story reminds us that heroism, at its core, was never gendered. It’s about courage, sacrifice, and transformation—whether through battle or devotion.

The image here, painted by Edward Burne-Jones, shows Hero tending a flame. Not conquering, but preserving. Not slaying, but serving. Still heroic.

This matters because language shapes how we relate to these stories. A single word can invite us in—or shut us out. I explore this more in my piece Beyond Masculine and Feminine, where I suggest Yin and Yang as more inclusive tools for understanding archetypal energies.

The title of hero, like the flame, belongs to anyone willing to carry it.

And now, back to the hero and the road:

Psychologically, this ordering of the world and our experiences in it is the ego’s task. The ego, like the hero, isn’t meant to destroy the unconscious, but to engage whatever emerges from it, wrestle with it, and integrate its energies, making them useful in our lives. That’s why the archetype of the hero is so enduring: it isn’t a role model to imitate, but a pattern, a map of how consciousness can engage with what lies beyond it.

To better understand this, it helps to shift the way we think about the ego. For many, the word ego suggests pride or arrogance, but that’s not what we mean here. In this context, the ego is simply the part of the psyche that says “I.” As soon as we label one thing “I,” we labels everything else “not I.” The ego is the intermediary between the external world we experience through our senses—things we label as “not I”, and the inner world we think of as “I” and which we experience through psyche.

Sometimes the ego forgets this task and assumes it is the whole of who we are. But all we need to do is recall a dream—or notice an unconscious impulse surfacing—to realise that there is far more to the psyche than what the ego perceives. The ego is a small flare of light inside a much larger field. What Jung called the “Self” is infinitely more expansive, containing the whole range of what we are and could be.

To grapple with this concept the image of a biological cell can be helpful. A cell survives by exchanging nutrients and energy across its membrane. The psyche works the same way: the ego is that permeable boundary—the membrane—mediating between the inner and outer worlds. From the outside, it takes in stimulus and translates it into experience, memory, meaning. From the inside, it takes raw psychic energy—fear, desire, imagination—and gives it form in words, choices, and actions. Its task is not to silence what rises from beyond its perceptual boundaries on either side, but to meet it, wrestle with it, and transform it into something useful.

And this is where we need to be clear: the “unconscious” is just a word, another mythological image, for everything that lies outside the ego’s awareness but still belongs to the universe. It exists in two directions at once: inwardly, in forgotten memories, instincts, and hidden creativity; and outwardly, in the unpredictable events and encounters of the world around us. The unconscious is not a locked basement in the mind—it is the wilderness itself, both inner and outer.

This is why myth is so useful: the hero gives us a way to imagine what the ego is meant to do. Just as Theseus doesn’t stay in the safety of Troezen but takes the dangerous road through the wilderness, the ego cannot simply rest in what is already known. Its task is to walk into the unknown—the unconscious—where the path is unclear, where fears and impulses leap out, and where every step feels risky. That work of exchange and integration, of making more of what is unconscious into consciousness, is what Jung called individuation.

The hero’s work is not about conquest for its own sake—it’s about transformation. What is raw, chaotic, and threatening must be faced, not ignored, and turned into something that can serve life. The ego’s heroic labor is the same: to meet what rises from the shadow, wrestle with it, and carry its energy into consciousness.

When we begin to see our lives this way, our struggles take on a different meaning. The resistance we feel, the habits that pull us off course, the fears that hold us back—these are not signs of failure or that we are headed in the wrong direction. They are the bandits on our road. They are psychological complexes that emerge when we move toward growth. And the only way forward is through them.

Theseus’ journey from Troezen to Athens is a picture of this process. He could have sailed there easily, safe from danger. Plutarch tells us that “Theseus might have travelled to Athens by sea without any trouble, suffering no outrage at the hands of those robbers.” But he didn’t. He chose the road through the wilderness, knowing it was filled with bandits. Earlier, Plutarch adds that,”Theseus, of his own choice, when no one compelled him, but when it was possible for him to reign without fear at Troezen, reached out after great achievements.”1 In other words, he could have remained safe, even powerful, in Troezen—but he chose the path of trials instead.

That path through the wilderness between Troezen and Athens is a path that we, too, must walk. It is unpredictable, tangled, sometimes frightening. For us, it looks like a season of transition when everything feels unclear.

Walking that path means coming face to face with aspects of ourselves we’ve perhaps never had to face in the tame and secure setting we’re leaving behind. Often they look like monsters or cyclopean bandits with bronze clubs. Facing them and integrating the energy they hoard is the inner hero-work we are called to whenever we try to make outer changes. Growth demands a shedding of old identities—but those old identities don’t always go willingly or quietly.

The Complex Image – Periphetes & the Bronze Club

Part I: The Limping Bandit

Like Theseus, when we step into the untamed regions of growth within ourselves—beyond the known and the comfortable—the first thing we often encounter is resistance. Not from the outside world, but from something inside ourselves. And that’s exactly what Periphetes represents.

The path from Troezen to Athens runs through wild terrain—much like the inner wilderness we all must pass through when we begin any serious change. In myth, this in-between space is where the bandits and outlaws wait. In psychology, it’s where complexes reside.

Periphetes, the so-called Club-Bearer or Corynetes, is a powerful image of a psychological complex. He’s not a random thought or mood, but a whole splinter-psyche: a semi-autonomous bundle of thoughts, emotions, reactions, and memories—all orbiting around an unresolved emotional charge.

A complex often originates from a wound or unintegrated experience. Something we go through but don’t fully process at the time. And like Periphetes, a complex often lies in wait by the roadside of change, ready to strike the moment we try to grow past it’s threshold.

He is lame, like the god Hephaistos—who, according to to a story found in Apollodorus’ Library, attempted to violate Athena2. The goddess came to the him because she wanted weapons, but Hephaestus wanted a whole lot more, and when she rejected his overtures and fled, he gave limping pursuit.

Periphetes is sometimes said to be the son of Hephaistos. This mythic genealogy invites us to think of him not simply as a brute, but as the uncontrolled instinctual force born from a creative lineage3. Much like his father, Periphetes also suffers rejection—after all, it is out here in the wilderness that we encounter him. He is turned out, rejected from the society of the nearby town and so, despite his divine lineage, he makes his living by attacking those who pass his bend in the road. Wounded wild things can turn violent. To paraphrase Martin Shaw, the parts of ourselves that we exile often end up becoming hostile towards us. This is often the case with our inner bandits.

Periphetes doesn’t stalk his prey. He lies in wait. That’s what complexes do. They don’t hunt us down—we meet them when we, in an effort to grow beyond our limitations. When we step forward into growth, something old and wounded inside us flares up and demands our attention. Those intimidating inner voices that brandish clubs of fear, shame, or self-doubt stand at critical thresholds along our path to growth telling us that we’re not ready, or that we are too broken, or just simply not good enough to be who we want to become.

This is the bandit’s voice. Not the voice of truth, but of trauma. Not a guide, but a guard—stationed on the threshold of transformation.

Part II: The Bronze Club

Theseus doesn’t just defeat Periphetes, though. He takes ownership of the bandit’s club.

He doesn’t run from the encounter, and having dispatched the bandit, he takes the bronze club as his own weapon. He claims what was once used against him and carries it forward with him. And that action is the real initiation. It’s an act of alchemy, transmuting the corrupted energy of a complex that has been exiled to the wilderness of the unconscious, either intentionally or unintentionally, and integrates it into conscious awareness.

You see, the club is not just a weapon—it’s a symbol of unconscious power. It’s what knocks us sideways when we’re overwhelmed by fear, shame, or self-doubt. It’s the sudden rush of affect, the "thump" of emotion that seems to swing out of nowhere.

It is emotional energy. Raw, instinctual energy. And this is the key: the club is made of bronze—the same material as the sword hidden under the rock back in Troezen.

Both are weapons, both bronze. Same origin. But they have different forms.

The sword is crafted by awareness and skill. It is designed to suit the needs of the ego, which, as I mentioned earlier, is the ordering and organizing principle of the psyche. It cuts cleanly. It requires skill to use. The club, on the other hand, is blunt. It requires force, not finesse. And yet, both come from the same psychic forge.

Hephaistos, remember, was the smith of the gods. The club and the sword were both made in his fires. So too with us: our fear and our courage, our rage and our resolve—they’re made of the same stuff. It’s how we shape and use them that makes the difference.

The club is affect—the intense feeling that hasn’t yet been reflected upon. But when Theseus lifts it, something shifts. He doesn’t just survive the blow; he reclaims the source of the blow as a tool of transformation.

And this is the hidden teaching: The things that hurt us can also empower us. When we integrate the energy locked in a complex, we become stronger—not in spite of our wounds, but because of them.

So ask yourself: What clubs lie by the roadside of your own story? What weapons once used against you are waiting to be claimed, cleaned, and carried—not to hurt others, but to protect what is becoming?

This is Theseus' first act of true heroism. Not killing the bandit, but transforming the encounter.

And it’s a pattern we can use again and again.

The Four Steps to Becoming a Club Owner

So how do we do this in real life? How do we take the lesson of Theseus and Periphetes and turn it into something we can actually practice?

1. Bandit Spotting

Theseus knew the road was dangerous. He didn’t set out naïvely—he knew there would be bandits between Troezen and Athens. In the same way, when we step onto the path of growth, we can expect resistance. When we encounter it, it’s not a sign something has gone wrong or that we have chosen the wrong path—it’s an important part of the journey.

Knowing that we will encounter resistance allows us to start noticing its signs before we get within striking distance: the tightness in the chest, the urge to procrastinate, the voice that whispers “who do you think you are?” When we are able to identify signs that something which may have stopped us before may be lurking around a corner, we are able to prepare a strategy for the coming confrontation.

Spotting the bandit early means we don’t get ambushed.

2. Outing the Outlaw

Our complexes retain much of their power simply because we do not want to acknowledge them. To apply the lessons we can learn from the model of Theseus, we need to really highlight the fact that Theseus doesn’t look away from Periphetes, and he doesn’t ignore the weapon in the outlaw’s hand. He names what he’s facing and engages with it. For us, that looks like saying: “Yes, this is fear. Yes, this is shame. Yes, this is self-doubt.”

To “out” the outlaw means to consciously name two things. It doesn’t matter the order in which we do this, but it is important that we identify two key elements whenever we start to feel the stirring of something that might later try stop us: The bandit—that’s the one that speaks to us, and their weapon—the emotional or energetic center from which they speak.

This might look like acknowledging, “Yes, this sudden urge to clean the bathroom and reorganise all my books is procrastination—and I think its suddenly appearing now because sitting down to script the next episode of this podcast (or Substack essay) feels scary.”

In this step, a detailed analysis is not that important. It’s more important to look inward with brutal honesty and just say things as they come to your attention. You might even want to write down your ideas without worrying about whether they are true or false, but just explore why it suddenly seems like a better idea to do whatever else you can, than take the next step in your journey.

In case you couldn’t tell, bathroom cleaning thing is something that comes up a lot for me. There’s nothing like the smell of chemicals and some good scrubbing to placate self-doubt and the voice that howls, “imposter!” every time I sit down to write. And, on the plus side, a sparkling bathroom is a lovely thing. Whether or not it needs to be scrubbed down every two days is up for debate, I suppose.

The real trick is to try spot it as it is happening—sort of like catching this outlaw in the act and taking a moment to trap it in a name. This gives it a form that allows you to take whatever countermeasures you like.

Giving a name to the outlaw and the club—even if it is not complete or entirely accurate at first—is powerful because it drags the complex out of the shadow and into the light of consciousness. Once we can see the complex, we are already safer, and now bound by a name, the complex is already less powerful. This opens the way to the next step in the process.

3. Questioning the Club

This next step is where we gain further clarity. And this is one in which a little bit of journalling really goes a long way.

Theseus doesn’t see the bandit, recognise him as Periphetes with the bronze club, and then decide to take another route. After naming the bandit and the weapon, Theseus engages the outlaw in conversation, still from a safe distance.

Theseus is not aggressive. He is well aware of the fact that this Periphetes is dangerous, and so he keeps his distance, but he engages with him playfully. Our hero allows the brute to believe that the balance of power still rests with him and his club.

See how Theseus speaks to Periphetes? He doesn’t attack him. He doesn’t declare his intention to rid the world of his evil… rather, he begins to question the club.

He acknowledges that the club looks strong and heavy, but he also voices doubt about it. “Is it really solid bronze? It could be nothing more than plated wood.”

For you and I, this gives us a wonderful technique for dealing with unhelpful complexes as we identify them and it is something remarkably close to practices in Cognitive Behavioural Therapy or Dialectical Behavioural Therapy.

Many of us might be tempted to dig into why the Periphetes on our road is stationed right here at this bend in the road. When did he take up residence here? Why did he do it? What does he gain from smashing passers-by with his club? Unpacking all of these things might be interesting, but it doesn’t do much to help us in most cases.

It is enough, most of the time, to recognise that this bandit is bent on hijacking us. This particular complex and the behaviours that mollify it are not helpful to us. How and why they are here is less important than that the road is cleared and the threat they pose is dealt with.

It may very well be that in the past, these outlaws were defensive features that helped us cope with difficult situations. Perhaps they were guarding a particular part of our hearts or set up to clear the road of even greater threats. But right now, in this situation, the outlaws are hoarding two valuable resources that we need in order to grow: the bronze club and access to the road that will lead us to a more integrated state.

To question the club does not mean to attack it. It does not mean to try avoid it. Rather, it means treating it with curiosity. If we have named the outlaw perfectionism and the club it wields self-doubt, we now have the space to ask what is really at stake if we proceed down the road. As long as we are physically safe, we have the space and ability to explore what else it might be. Perhaps something else is hidden beneath that familiar veneer…You see, curiosity slows the swing of the club. Even a pause of a few seconds can shift the power and once you stop being the target, you start becoming the one who chooses what to do with the energy.

4. Who’s the Boss?

The amazing thing about this process is that sometimes it happens in a flash. Sometimes, it really is just the act of recognising, naming, and questioning that almost immediately causes a reclamation of the inner psychic energies that seemed to oppose us.

Other times, it takes longer and involves more work. Even if this is the case, the same three steps, repeated whenever they are needed will ultimately yield the same result.

At some point, the outlaw will stop being the boss. The complex — that bundle of fear, shame, or instinct — only gets to terrorise the world so long as it remains exiled, unacknowledged, lurking in the shadows. But when the ego does its hero-work, when we see it, name it, and dispatch the voice at its core, something changes. The outlaw is disarmed. The club is ours. And the energy once tied up in anxiety, shame, or avoidance becomes a resource. Something we can carry, consciously, with purpose.

This is what Jung meant by integration: the complex doesn’t vanish, it becomes part of us. No longer an outlaw, but an ally. That’s the moment the answer to “Who’s the Boss?” shifts — it’s not the bandit, not the club, not the shadow. It’s the archetypal Self—the totality of who you are and what you can be, standing at the center, carrying what once threatened to crush you.

When Theseus defeats Periphetes, he doesn’t just remove an obstacle on the road—he takes the club. He claims the very weapon that was meant to destroy him. And that’s the final piece for us. Because those raw instincts—fear, shame, even anxiety—they’re not garbage to be thrown out. Both the sword and the club are made of the same psychic material.

It is the task of the ego, illustrated through the archetypal hero appearing in stories we’ve collectively told for thousands of years, to bring that psychic material out of the shadow and make it available to serve the whole Self in the grand project of living well in this world.

Reflection Questions

No matter how old or how successful any of us are, we’ve all met our Periphetes. And he’s not a once-off encounter. Every time we step into a new season of growth, he’s there again—waiting just past the first bend in the road.

Of course, not everything that doesn’t work out in life is because of an inner Periphetes. Sometimes circumstances simply don’t align, and if that’s what you’ve gone through, I’m sorry. I know that feeling. I just hope you’re not beating yourself with that bronze club of shame, fear, or self-doubt. If you are, then maybe you’re right in the thick of it now—and if so, take heart: that bandit can’t chase you. You can step back, catch your breath, and begin naming the complex.

And if you’re not in that spot right now, I’m sure you can remember a time when something you cared about never took off—not because of logistics, but because you faltered, ambushed by that outlaw voice and its heavy club. If you’ve known that moment, then you, too, are in a great place to do hero-work. Having walked even a little way down that road gives you foresight. Next time, you’ll know what waits around the first bend.

So whether you’re in it right now or remembering a past encounter, here are three questions to carry with you as you prepare for the next time Περιφήτης (Periphetes) steps out of the shadows:

1. What are the first signs this bandit is near?

When Theseus chose the wilderness road, he had to read the terrain—broken branches, sudden silences, faint tracks—that warned a bandit might be waiting just ahead. In the same way, your body gives you signals when a complex is near. A tight chest, a heavy gut, sudden sleepiness, or even a restless urge to clean the bathroom—these are the footprints in the dust that Periphetes is close.

Our senses usually face outward, but the body is also a landscape where the psyche leaves its signs. Paying attention here matters: when the inner work feels too abstract, tending to these physical signals—slowing your breath, grounding your feet, shifting your posture—can turn the ambush into a moment of awareness. Spotting the bandit in your body is like catching sight of him on the road: it gives you the upper hand before he swings the club.

2. If I gave this outlaw a voice, what would it say?

Every complex speaks. Sometimes it whispers, “Who do you think you are?” Sometimes it shouts, “Turn back!” Instead of shutting it down, try meeting it with curiosity. Imagine pulling up a chair across from this limping bandit, his club on the ground for a moment. Let him talk. What words tumble out? What feelings fuel them—fear, shame, the ache of old frustration?

This is active imagination4: you allow the outlaw to speak, not as an enemy to silence, but as a part of you that was exiled long ago. Don’t force it—just listen to what is already being said. In Gestalt terms, it’s a dialogue: you on one side, the complex on the other. Ask him what he’s protecting or fighting for. Ask what he needs. Remember: hurt parts protect themselves the only way they know how. If you give this oaf a voice, he may surprise you. Behind the threat might be a strange kind of wisdom—or at least a clue about what’s really at stake.

Stay with this step until you’ve heard something that surprises you, even a little. That surprise is your signal that you’re ready for the next step.

3. How might I reclaim the club?

Once you’ve heard the outlaw’s voice, the work shifts. Because the club—the raw energy that gives his words weight—isn’t just his. It’s yours. Picture it for a moment: that heavy bronze club, once used to smash you down. What if you could take it into your own hands? The weight wouldn’t change—but the meaning would. Instead of a threat, it would become energy you could direct.

Now let the image shift. The club is no longer raised against you; it rests in your grip. You choose how to hold it, when to lift it, when to set it down. That’s the turning point: when what once overwhelmed you becomes something you can carry.

As a journal prompt, ask yourself:

• If I could claim this “club,” what would it look like in my life?

• How would carrying it as a chosen and valuable tool change the way I move, act, or speak?

• What would it feel like in my body to wield that same energy with purpose, instead of being crushed by it?

I really hope you’ll take some time to sit with these three questions. Working with them is a powerful way to practice the first three steps we talked about: spotting the bandit’s voice before it hijacks you, outing the outlaw by identifying the internal narrative and its emotional charge, and beginning to question the club—not with fear, but with imagination and curiosity.

That last one is subtle but essential. The second question especially can open the door for you to meet your instinctive reactions with a little more awareness, a little less reactivity. This is the shift from being gripped by a complex to engaging it. In my classes and workshops, I always emphasize that these four steps—and the three questions—aren’t a one-time fix. They’re tools you can return to again and again, with each new challenge or even by reflecting on past moments where you felt stuck or overwhelmed.

Over time, this process helps you relocate the center of power within the complex. It gently loosens the grip that the shadow—what Jung called the inferior function—has on your choices. And that makes more of your own strength available to you. I hope the practice brings as much clarity and freedom to you as it continues to bring to me.

Wrapping Up

In the next installment, we’ll follow Theseus further along the longissima via—the long road of initiation. Five more bandits still lie ahead, each one a kind of gatekeeper, each one a test. The very next is one that follows naturally as the second step in the process of claiming the bronze club we spoke about today. Theseus must soon face Sinis (Σίνις) the Pine-Bender, who will challenge us with the image of being pulled in two directions at once, and with the necessity of holding the tension between opposites—a lesson that feels especially timely in our own climate of division and polarisation.

But before we part ways, let me leave you with this: Periphetes is not a once-off opponent. He doesn’t vanish after one defeat. Each time we set out on a new path of growth, he’s there again, waiting around that first bend in the road. That’s why the three reflection prompts I gave you aren’t meant to be one-time exercises. Use them a few times over—with different situations in your life, or even by looking back at moments in the past where you may have stumbled or succumbed to him. The more often you revisit the questions and the steps we spoke about today, the more you’ll begin to notice the signs of a Periphetes showing up in real time. And that awareness gives you the chance to do the hero’s work: to spot the bandit in time, out the outlaw, question the club, and reclaim its strength as your own.

Thank you for spending your time with me on this journey. If today’s story or reflection gave you something useful, it would mean a great deal to me if you would head over to apple, amazon, spotify, or a podcast platform of your choice (just search for “The Inward Sea”) and leave a rating and short review. Those small gestures help carry this work further, just as the story of Theseus spread faster than his own footsteps. And if you know someone who might be stepping out on their own road of growth, or going through a bit of an initiation themselves, please share this episode with them. Stories are meant to be carried and passed along.

Until next time—travel well, and keep walking your road. Athens is waiting.

Share

Leave a comment

References

Apollodorus. (1921). The Library (J. G. Frazer, Trans.). Loeb Classical Library. Harvard University Press. https://www.theoi.com/Text/Apollodorus1.html

Diodorus of Sicily. (1933/1989). Library of history: Books I and II, 1–34 (C. H. Oldfather, Trans., Vol. 1). Harvard University Press.

Francis, R. (1987). The book of the sword. Dover Publications.

Pausanias. (1918). Description of Greece (W. H. S. Jones & H. A. Ormerod, Trans.). Loeb Classical Library. Harvard University Press.

Plutarch. (1914/1967). Plutarch’s lives: Theseus and Romulus, Lycurgus and Numa, Solon and Publicola (B. Perrin, Trans., Vol. 1). Harvard University Press; William Heinemann Ltd.

Ronnberg, A. (2021). The Book of Symbols. Taschen

For further reading on the shadow and shadow work:

von Franz, Marie-Louise. (1985). Projection and re-collection in Jungian psychology : reflections of the soul. Open Court.

‌Johnson, R. A. (2009). Inner work: Using dreams and active imagination for personal growth. Harperone.

Jung, C., & R F C Hull. (2014). Collected Works of C.G. Jung, Volume 9 (Part 2): Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self. Princeton Princeton University Press.

Names and Locations for the Curious

The characters are listed in order of appearance in the episode:

Θησέας (Theseus)—thi-SEH-as—Our young hero.

Ηρακλής (Iraklís)—Ee-ra-KLEES—Heracles (more commonly known by the the Roman version of his name made even more popular by Disney, Hercules); cousin and role model for Theseus

Αιγέας (Aegeas) eh-YEH-as King of Athens; leaves a sword and sandals under the stone.

Ηώς (Eos) — EE-os — Goddess of dawn, sister of Helios and Selene.

Ήλιος (Helios) — EE-lee-os — The sun god, who drives his golden chariot across the sky each day.

Ήφαιστος (Hephaistos) — EE-fe-stos — God of fire, metallurgy, and crafts.

Περιφήτης (Periphetes)—Pe-ree-FEE-tees—Crippled bandit with a bronze club; possibly a chthonic cyclopean figure and the son of Hephaistos.

Κορυνήτης (Corynetes) — Ko-ree-NEE-tees — “The Club-Bearer,” an epithet of Periphetes, the outlaw Theseus defeats near Epidauros.

Αθηνά (Athiná)—Ah-thee-NAH—Goddess associated with wisdom, , and olive trees.

Ἐριχθόνιος (Erichthónios)—eh-ree-HTHO-nee-os— Early king of Athens, born from the earth after Hephaestus’ failed assault on Athena.

Σίνις (Sinis) — SEE-nees — Also called the Pine-Bender, one of the bandits Theseus confronts on the road to Athens.

Locations

Τροιζήνα (Troezen) Tri-ZEE-na Theseus’ birthplace and childhood home; coastal city in the Peloponnese.

Αθήνα (Athens) Ah-THEE-na Seat of Aegeus’ throne and Theseus’ eventual home.

Ἐπίδαυρος (Epidauros) EPI-tha-vros Region famous for the theatre and sanctuary of Asclepius.

Welcome

Hello, and welcome to The Inward Sea.

This is an expanded transcript for the third episode of my podcast, and the first in a series in which I’m going to take you on a deep exploration of a hero in Greek mythology.

Today we’re going to be looking at The Wannabe Hero’s Road to Readiness—because whether or not you or I wannabe a hero, there are times in all of our lives when we need to step up and be a bit heroic, anyway.

Before we launch into our myth, let’s sit for a moment with a powerful question:

What does it really mean to come of age—not just in years, but in soul?

No matter your age, this story and the symbols it offers is for you. Because it’s not just we who come of age. You see, at some point every new beginning—whether it’s at a new job, in a new relationship, or undertaking a new creative project—will lead us down a path of initiation.

Across cultures, our ancestors marked the passage from one stage of life to another with initiation rites and rituals. Some traditions still do. But in many places today, those deep rites of passage have been replaced by things like academic exams or a inner turmoil that no one sees.

Initiation rituals that marked the coming of age of an individual in ancient cultures were—and in some cases where they are still practiced, are—often quite a lot more traumatic than the modern sanitised practices that have taken their places in society. This is not to say that traumatic experiences do not occur.

Carl Jung likened the psychological function of these ancient rituals to the breaking of a weak bone so that it would grow back stronger as a result of the callouses or scarred tissue that results from the healing1.

The way that modern initiation ceremonies, although still meaningful, largely consist of pageantry and celebration, leave the real trauma of breaking and healing aspects of ourselves as we grow as something each of us have to face personally. And, that’s where stories like this one comes in.

Over the course of the next few episodes (as well as these expanded transcripts), we’ll walk alongside a young man who’s still in the process of becoming.

He’s not a hero…yet. Nor is he a king. He doesn’t even know who his father is. In English, his name is Theseus but in Greek it’s said Θησέας. In my podcast, wherever possible, I try to use the pronunciation of names as close to the way that they would be said in their home languages.

It’s my way of offering a nod of appreciation to the original cultures that have given us (loaned us?) these wonderful stories. If you have trouble with the names, or if, in my attempt to honour their cultural roots I end up butchering them entirely, there’ll be a list of the names of the characters in Greek and English at the end of this transcript for those of you who are curious or more fluent in Greek than I am.

In today’s story, there’s a stone that won’t move. A mother who knows more than she says. And a choice between two roads—one safe, the other littered with danger.

He is walking the path of initiation from youthful innocence and obscurity, to maturity and recognition.

Whether you’re entering something new or leaving something behind Theseus’s early path, and the characters he meets on it, offer us guidance and insight. It is a remarkably detailed map of what forces we have to face as we move into new spaces.

At the very least, it can help us look back and notice where we have gone through similar processes in our lives and become more able to recognise them when they inevitably come around again.

Quick Note Before We Begin…

Last time, we explored the myth of King Minos, the sea god, Poseidon, and a broken promise that birthed a manifestation of Minos’s shame: the Minotaur.

Originally, I planned to continue from there and follow Theseus as he enters the labyrinth, armed with a spool of borrowed thread and a sword.

But his confrontation with Πασιφάη (Pasiphaë)’s son—the fruit of Minos’s betrayal—only makes sense (both for him and for us) if we understand the path that shaped him. Theseus didn’t just appear one day, fully formed and ready to confront the Minotaur. In the process of becoming the hero we think of when we hear his name, he walked a path of initiation that positioned him as a model of ego consciousness that we can view in contrast to the model described in King Minos.

So, to understand that better, and hopefully learn a thing or two about ourselves in the process, we are going to walk his path with him.

That path doesn’t begin in darkness. It begins in Τροιζήνα (Troezen), with the questions surrounding his birth, and the weight of a stone that must wait years before it can be moved.

Our story today, starts not with Theseus, but with King Αιγέας (Aegeus)—ruler of Αθήνα (Athens).

The Story of Theseus - (Part I)

The retelling of this myth is based on the accounts by Apollodorus, Diodorus of Sicily Pausanias, and Plutarch.

Uncertainty wrapped itself around the palace in Αθήνα (Athens). It clung in heavy pleats and folds between the cornices and columns. It billowed through colonnades and courtyards like wind-caught linen, coiling through corridors and cloaking marble surfaces in silence. At the center of it all sat King Aegeus.

The problem, you see, was this: Aegeus had no heir. And power without succession is a slow march toward collapse.

He had already taken two wives, but both had remained childless. So Aegeus set off to seek the aid of the gods. He journeyed north to the oracle of Απόλλωνας (Apollo) at Delphi, hoping for clarity. But the god, as gods often do, replied in riddle.

“Loose not the bulging mouth of the wineskin, O best of men, until you reach the height of Athens.”

Confused and troubled by the words of the oracle, Aegeus left Delphi and made his way south again—this time to the city of Troezen, where his friend Πιτθέας (Pittheus) ruled.

Now, Pittheus, was a clever man. Too clever, perhaps. Over a meal, Aegeus recounted the riddle. Pittheus understood immediately. Wineskin? That was no wineskin. The god’s poetry was thinly veiled, and Pittheus read it for what it was: Aegeus was to… keep it in his pants until reaching Athens.

But Pittheus, ever the opportunist, had other ideas. Why wait on fate when a daughter and now a dynasty were both within easy reach?

Instead of explaining the prophecy, he told his friend that he had done well to visit him. It was, after all, safer to drink here in his home than out on the road. Then he poured Aegeus another drink, and another, and another. And then he introduced him to his beautiful daughter, Αίθρα (Aethra).

That night, led by wine—and, in no small part, by the gentle manipulations of his host—Aegeus lay with Aethra. The mouth of the king’s bulging wineskin, quite contrary the oracle’s warning, was very much loosed. Prophecy be damned.

Whether Aegeus remembered the oracle in that moment is anyone’s guess. But Pittheus certainly did. And somewhere, perhaps, Apollo was shaking his head.

After the deed was done, Aethra fell into a deep sleep. She dreamed. And in her dream, the goddess Αθηνά (Athena) appeared to her and told her to wake up and wade out to an island which lay close to Troezen’s shores.

Quietly, Aethra left the sleeping king and slipped out into the night.

On the island, Aethra visited a shrine, when Poseidon, too, appeared to her—his own intentions rather more clear than Apollo’s riddles. And by dawn, it seems, another far more divine wineskin had also been loosed.

None of the sources have anything to say about how Aethra felt about any of this, which reminds us that this is a myth, not a memoir: these characters are archetypal energies—forces of the unconscious—rather than people with inner monologues and private agency.

But back to the story…

When morning light—and sobriety—returned, King Aegeus began to worry. What if Aethra was pregnant? What would become of the child in the uncertain, and—one might suspect—Game-of-Thrones-like landscape of Athens, where his brothers’ children were likely already plotting their place in line?

So, Aegeus took his sandals and a sword and buried them beneath a great stone. Before he departed, he pulled Aethra aside and gave her instructions: if she was pregnant, if she bore a son, and if that boy grew strong enough to lift the rock, she was to secretly send him to Athens carrying the tokens hidden beneath it. Then—and only then—would Aegeus recognise the boy as his heir.

And with that, he left.

Aethra never told him about the island, or what happened after the king had fallen asleep.

As the weeks went by, it became abundantly evident that Aethra was, in fact pregnant, and ten months later she gave birth to a baby boy. She named him Theseus2.

She raised him quietly, letting him grow into himself. He had no father—at least, not one he could name—only his mother, Aethra, and his grandfather, the clever and politically minded Pittheus. The other boys had stories about their fathers—heroes, merchants, warriors—Theseus had only silence.

But the silence around his lineage didn’t mean Theseus had no role models. More than anything else, he admired Ηρακλής (Herakles). The young prince dreamed of the hero’s labors at night, and in daylight tried to emulate them in every way he could3. Once, when Herakles was visiting Pittheus, he set down his lion skin while resting at the palace. The children, mistaking the thing for a live beast, screamed and scattered—except for Theseus. He didn’t run. He grabbed the nearest axe and struck at it, undaunted4. (Apparently, no one thought to ask why a child had such easy access to an axe, but this is a myth, after all.)

Clearly, young Theseus was not like the other boys in the city. He ran faster. He fought harder. Was it because he was trying to prove something? Was he trying to fill in the missing shape of his father with strength and skill? We don’t know. The inner life of heroes is rarely recorded. They’re measured by what they do—not by what they feel. But time and time again he would return to his mother with the question of who his father was, but Aethra never let anything slip.

It may have been Pittheus—ever the opportunist—who spread the tale that the boy was a son of Poseidon. After all, the god of the sea was deeply honored in Troezen, and a divine pedigree could open doors. Whether Theseus himself believed it—or saw it as his mother and grandfather’s way of dodging the truth—is another question entirely. The story may have satisfied the people of Troezen, even earned him some status, but it doesn’t seem like it was enough of an answer for Theseus.

And so he grew. One day, Aethra looked at him and realised he was no longer the child she remembered. The softness in his face was being replaced by the beginnings of a beard and his hands bore the callouses from training with the sword and javelin. And so, one day, when the young man asked her again about his father, she led him to the rock and told him that his father—a great man, had left him an inheritance beneath it.

Now, we’re not told how many times he tried to move that boulder. Maybe it was once. Maybe it was many times. Maybe he returned to it in secret, when no one was watching, testing himself against it. Trying. Failing. Waiting. Growing. Trying again.

What we do know is that one day, when Theseus was all of sixteen years old and ready for it, the rock moved.

Beneath it, he found the sandals and the sword—tokens left by a man he had never met. A lineage he had never known. By picking them up and dusting them off, he stepped into a story that had been waiting for him all along.

Amplification

Amplification, in Jungian dreamwork and the interpretation of mythological material, is the process of deepening the meaning of an image, symbol, or motif by exploring its broader cultural, historical, and archetypal associations. Rather than reducing a dream or myth to a personal or purely psychological explanation, amplification situates it within the wider symbolic patterns found in religion, art, literature, and folklore. By drawing these parallels, the image is “amplified,” allowing layers of meaning to emerge and revealing its resonance both in the individual psyche and across the collective human experience.

There’s so much to unpack in this part of the story.

But I want to limit our discussion to the person and actions of Theseus because he offers a striking contrast to Minos, whose story we explored previously.

There are so many things that we could talk about concerning the archetypal heroic figure—for example the dual paternity thing— but we’re going to have to return to many of these images later anyway. Luckily, they appear so often that we will definitely get a chance to reflect on them through other myths in the future.

Before we move on, let me ask you this:

What’s resonating for you so far?

Is there an image that caught your attention? A moment that felt heavy, or strange, or magnetic?

If so, I really encourage you to make a note of it. These mythic moments—especially the ones that tug at us for no clear reason—tend to lead somewhere. And when we revisit them later, we often discover they were already whispering something meant just for us.

In a way, they’re like the rock in this myth—

Silent.

Waiting.

They call to us—to test our strength, our curiosity, our readiness.

And like the stone in our story, they may be hiding exactly what we need to begin the journey that’s waiting for us.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s start by talking about Theseus himself—the hero.

The Archetype of the Hero

If I were to ask you to pull a lesson from this story, most people would instinctively focus on Theseus—what he does, what he learns—and then try to frame that in terms of their own lives.

And like I’ve said before, there isn’t really a right or wrong way to interpret a myth. But some ways yield more insight than others. Identifying directly with the hero character tends to give us less.

Marie-Louise von Franz, speaking about the hero archetype, once wrote:

It can therefore be said that the hero is an archetypal figure which presents a model of an ego functioning in accord with the Self. […] It is a model to be looked at, and it is demonstrating a rightly functioning ego—an ego that functions in accordance with the requirements of the Self.5

That’s a dense sentence, but here’s the key idea:

The hero in a myth isn’t a realistic human character. They’re not meant to reflect our personal psychology in all its complexity. They’re archetypal images—symbolic figures that act out essential psychic patterns.

Modern retellings often try to flesh these characters out. We get their inner thoughts, their traumas, their motivations. But the older stories rarely work that way. The mythic hero isn’t “relatable.” He—or she—is a moving pattern; a kind of inner choreography, part of a much larger psychic ecology of archetypes and complexes.

But we, the readers or listeners, are real people. We have messy, conflicting emotions. We are full of contradictions, dreams, wounds, and half-formed insights. When we approach these stories, we bring that whole inner world with us. But the figures in the myth are not whole personalities. They’re fragments—projections—parts of a much bigger psychic system.

So Theseus isn’t an avatar for you or me in the world of the story. He’s not a role model in the Instagram-influencer sense. He’s a model—as in a diagram, a map. Something we can observe and learn from, but not something we should try be.

You may remember from Episode 2 that we talked about King Minos of Crete. Minos is a character who makes obvious mistakes—big, ego-driven blunders that set off disastrous consequences. With him, we don’t usually feel tempted to see ourselves in his story.

But with a hero like Theseus, it’s different. There’s a strong pull to identify with him—to cast ourselves in the heroic role. That’s understandable. But it’s also a bit of a trap.

Back in the 90s, some Christian groups wore bracelets with the initials WWJD—“What Would Jesus Do?” It was a well-meaning gesture. But from a psychological perspective, it risks encouraging performance over transformation. It can lead people to imitate behaviours they feel would be perceived as “good” or “right” rather than paying attention to the interior causes of the conflicts they are trying to resolve through that “right” behaviour.

If we were to consider an alternative bracelet, WWTD? (What Would Theseus Do?), we might be tempted to simply mimic his behaviour. Try move the boulder, fail, go train and work out, come back, try again… There is, as I am sure you can tell, a fine line here.

This kind of imitation isn’t necessarily bad, but when it becomes something driven by external expectations of what is good, right, or moral, we often begin to try place those same expectations on others, too. What is intended for growth can end up becoming something like the white bull from episode 2 rather than an actual avenue of personal development.

This is all to say that Theseus—our hero—is not a character that we should try emulate in life. Rather, he is a representation of how we can modulate the attitude of our ego and reorient it in relation to other facets of psyche, inwardly. We’ll see an example of that we we follow him further along his road in just a moment.

We can learn from the hero’s pattern without needing to cosplay as one. Theseus shows us what the ego can be when it accepts the gifts and follows the paths set by something older, deeper, and wiser than itself.

So in this story, Theseus is not you or me.

He is an image of the ego in right relationship with the Self. This is one of the reasons that the image of a hero in stories is often one that has two fathers. One father represents the the known world of conscious awareness, while the other represents the deeper source—the archetypal Self of which we are mostly unconscious.

We are conscious beings. The point here is not to identify with the unconscious and try to give ourselves over to it. Instead, the task of the ego is to slowly, on a journey much like Theseus’, confront things that arise from the unconscious—in this myth, pictured by things that appear on the wilderness road outside the ordered confines of the city—and integrate them or transmute their energy to make them useful to us instead of being overwhelmed by the force of their raw power. We’ll talk about the image of the sword in a moment because the sword is a powerful depiction of what this process entails.

Anyway, back to Theseus: his ability to lift the stone, and claim the sandals and sword left by his father, marks the beginning of a journey that all of us must walk in one form or another: the path of initiation.

Now, remember: mythology doesn’t give us instructions.

It gives us images.

So let’s turn to the next set of images that concern Theseus—the sandals, the sword, and the rock that guarded them.

The Threshold of Initiation

Having finally succeeded in moving the rock that his father placed so intentionally, Theseus is now able to claim his inheritance from his dad: a pair of sandals, and a sword. These are obviously symbolic images—after all, neither a pair of sandals nor a sword left under a rock for sixteen years is likely to be very useful.

The Sandals

When Theseus moves the rock and uncovers the sandals, he isn’t just claiming a pair of old shoes that have been buried for some time—he is stepping into a new relationship with his world.

In folklore and myth, shoes often signal where we stand, both literally and symbolically. They’re more than just practical gear for the road ahead. They represent our standpoint—our footing in the world, and our connection to the ground beneath us. Psychologically, this means the sandals mark Theseus’s first act of grounding himself in the reality of who he is and who he is being called to become.

And it’s not a small gesture. Stepping into one’s father’s shoes is a metaphorical image with which most of us are familiar. We use it to talk about responsibility, power, inheritance, and legacy. While we usually mean this metaphorically, Theseus actually does it—quite literally.

By claiming his father’s sandals so far from Athens, the hero is signalling that he is ready to earn his place at the table, prepared to undertake the difficult journey toward becoming the kind of man who can wield that legacy with wisdom. The sandals give him traction. They mark the beginning of his authority—not yet as a king, but as someone willing to walk the road toward recognition.

What does that look like for you and me? Well, the image here is showing us the hero-model claiming something from the past from which it has been separated. The separation is through not fault of its own just like how we, in the process of growing up, fragment and compartmentalise ourselves. This is all perfectly natural, of course. None of us behave in the same way with our friends as we do with our parents. As we grow, we learn how to adopt different personas in different groups and and social settings. Some parts of ourselves that we don’t pay much attention to because they just don’t seem to fit into any particular setting, or perhaps because we are actively repressing them, remain under-developed.

These under-developed parts of ourselves, though we pretend they do not exist, are still a part of us. As we grow, they do not, but they gather to themselves more and more psychic energy and occasionally manifest just as Theseus returns time and time again to Aethra to ask who his father is. He knows he has an earthly father, but as long as both Aethra and the rock remain immovable, he has no chance of reestablishing a connection with him.

For you and me, the act of claiming the sandals might look like a willingness to walk into those underdeveloped parts of ourselves—to explore parts of ourselves that we have buried either as a natural result of growing, or perhaps as a result of fear and shame.

It’s important to remember that it’s not just scary stuff that is buried beneath our metaphorical rocks. How many people go through life claiming things like “I’m not creative,” or “I’m bad at mathematics,”… these statements are rocks. Rolling them away and being willing to engage with those things that we think we are not—the things that we just don’t see as part of our identity—that’s one way of claiming the sandals.

By doing that, by being willing to explore and engage with the variables we stick into statements of, “Well, I’m not X,” or, “I can’t do Y,”, we come to another common saying about shoes—one that calls for compassion.

To “walk in someone else’s shoes” means to see the world from their point of view. It often means confronting the parts of them that we experience as them having walked away from us—just like Aegeus did from Theseus. It calls us to view the world from a point of view that is different from the way we see it.

Theseus doesn’t step into his father’s sandals out of blind loyalty to or angsty teenage rebellion against the authority that a father figure represents, he does it with a readiness to face a relationship what has been left unfinished. He is about to walk a path not to repeat the past, nor to deny it—but to redefine it through his own actions, and begin something new. And, as we shall see, on his own terms.

How might our own lives—and the lives of those around us—change if we approach those underdeveloped parts of ourselves in the same way?

They may be his father’s sandals—but the road he is about to walk is his alone.

The shoe is a symbol of power, for which reason we speak of being ’under someone's heel' or 'stepping into one's father's shoes.' Clothing may represent either the persona, our outer attitude, or an inner attitude, and the changing of clothes in the mysteries stood for transformation into an enlightened understanding. Shoes are the lowest part of our clothing and represent our standpoint in relation to reality—how solidly our feet are planted on the ground; how solidly the earth supports us gives the measure of our power.6

The Sword

Now, if the sandals show that Theseus is ready to walk the path, then the sword reveals that he is ready to shape it.

But what does it mean to shape a path? After all, we don’t usually think of paths as things we shape—they’re things we follow. Yet if we pause for a moment and consider how our choices carve the routes we walk each day, a deeper truth begins to surface: we determine where a path begins, where it ends, and—crucially—what shape it takes between those two points.

We shape a path the moment we declare, “This is where I begin.” The moment we say, “That is where I’m going.” And despite the stories we often tell ourselves, those declarations are choices—even if we make them unconsciously.

To shape the path, then, is not to control the world, but to refine the lens through which we see it. The sword symbolises a newly forged faculty of the psyche: the power to cut through illusion, to separate what is real from what is merely projected. It marks the capacity to discern what is truly ours from what we’ve inherited, absorbed, or adapted for survival.

In Jungian terms, it is the focused application of libido—not as raw drive or compulsive desire, but as living energy directed toward clarity, truth, and meaningful action. When we carry that sword, we begin to move with a different kind of agency. We no longer just react—we choose. We edit. We discriminate. And with each choice, we chisel a path not only through the world, but through our own psychic wilderness.

And if myth has taught us anything, it’s this: swords don’t just appear in our hands by accident. They arrive when we are ready to meet them. They are heralds of destiny, yes—but also reminders of responsibility.

Think of Luke Skywalker receiving his father’s lightsaber—not at the beginning of his life, but when he’s ready to confront the legacy that shaped him. Or the young Arthur pulling the sword from the stone, and later receiving that most wonderful of all swords, Excalibur, from the Lady of the Lake—not as the proof of his birthright, but as a sign of his worthiness. In samurai tradition, the sword (うちがたな, uchigatana) was seen as the soul of the warrior—not merely a weapon, but an embodiment of discipline, clarity, and moral code. Always sharpened. Always sheathed unless necessary.

Psychologically, the sword represents the focused application of libido. The term libido can sound confusing if you’re not familiar with Jungian terminology. In the early days of psychoanalysis, libido was understood to something like the driving force of desire, and naturally, it was strongly associated with sexual urges. But later, especially in the works of Carl Jung, it took on a more universal meaning something more akin to a deep reservoir of living psychic energy within each of us7.

And the sword? Well, a sword is not a primitive weapon like a club or sharpened stone. It is metal, mined, smelted, and forged for a purpose. It is beyond the base forces that drive us to act on impulse or out of blind obedience to instinctual urges. The sword represents libido that has been tempered, forged and sharpened to achieve a specific result. It is will with an edge.

In alchemical traditions, the sword is also the tool that divides and clarifies. It cuts through confusion, separates the base from the refined. Just as the alchemist divides the prima materia to reveal hidden essence, so the hero must learn to wield discernment—within and without. The blade doesn’t just strike; it transforms8.

When Theseus finally succeeds in moving the stone, that effort is already the first use of the sword. The act of moving the rock is not purely physical—it’s the culmination of waiting, of growth, of restraint. The sword doesn’t make him powerful. He gains the sword in recognition of the fact that he already is.

In many myths, the sword appears at the threshold of transformation. It cuts away the old. It’s blade is a symbol of the dividing line between innocence and experience, unconscious potential and conscious responsibility. It is the tool of the one who has learned how—and when—to act.

But it’s also dangerous. The sword divides, wounds, and—if misused—corrupts. That’s why it’s hidden. That’s why it can’t be given too early. To carry the sword is to carry the burden of one’s own agency. To know that power is not just the ability to act, but the responsibility to act well.

So as Theseus takes up the blade, he is stepping into a new stage of his own growth armed with the tools he has gained to that point.

The Rock and the Threshold of Initiation

But before Theseus can claim either of these items—the sandals that ground our authority and enable free movement over difficult terrain, and the sword, representing the intentionally shaped use of mental energy that enables us to divide and dissolve what we once perceived as singular (experiences, projections, identities)—he must reach an age and level of strength that will allow him to move the rock that covers them.

Stones and rocks are everywhere. We step over them, build on them, clear them away. Rarely do they carry meaning until they are altered in some way, perhaps by being moved, painted, or carved. Then, they begin to hum with mythic charge.

Think of the rocks of Stonehenge. Or the standing stone in Stenness, Scotland. Physically, those rocks are no different from the gravel we kick aside or the rocks we blast through to build roads. Yet placed with intention, these stones begin to resonate with numinous energy. We know they are huge, heavy, and must have taken vast effort to place so deliberately, but who put them there? When? And why?

In this way, these rocks, ordinary though their geological material may be, take on the role of threshold symbols. In a wonderfully physical way, mark the meeting point between the known and the unknown.

Now, we may never know who placed those stones or why. But all of us feel the the mythical weight of the numinous in what we perceive as wonder. They seem to vibrate with threshold energy and immediately engage the imagination.

Luckily in our story today, we do know exactly who placed the rock—and why. And that gives us something precious: the ability to name the threshold it marks.

This rock is the first gate of Theseus’ initiation. It was placed by King Aegeus, Theseus’ earthly father. Remember: like so many heroes, Theseus has two fathers—King Aegeus from the known world, and the sea god, Poseidon, from the Otherworld.

Theseus cannot simply take the sword and sandals whenever he wants. He must move the rock. He must prove something—not just to his father, but to the world, and most importantly, to himself.

The rock is a test of strength, yes, but more than that, it is a test of readiness. The first threshold of maturity. The symbolic beginning of his journey. It is the first step in his initiation.

The Meaning of Initiation

Now, initiation might feel like an uncomfortable word to us today.

It might call up images of fraternity hazing or military rituals. But these are modern distortions of something far older. Initiation, in its original sense, is universal—a ritual common to all human cultures since time immemorial.

And yet, here’s something we rarely talk about: Initiation isn’t a one-time event. It’s not just a bat mitzvah, a quinceañera, or a graduation.

Psychologically, initiation is cyclical. Sandals are not made for just a single step or even a single journey and a sword is not made to strike just once. We undergo initiations every time we cross into new terrain, every time we begin a creative project, step into a new role, start a relationship, or leave something behind. Throughout our lives, we go through many initiations whether we are aware of them or not.

Each of these moments demands something of us and they all follow a similar pattern9:

• Preparation, in which we leave our old paradigm.

• Confrontation, in which we come face to face with the “forces” governing that new space we are entering.

• And finally—if we survive—emergence, in which we return to the world with the personal agency to wield the forces we have faced and overcome.

Initiation, in that sense, is both mythic and personal. It’s not just something we go through. It’s something we grow through10.

In societies, coming-of-age initiation rites exist so that the young person can confront the forces they once thought absolute—even divine—and come out transformed, ready to accept the responsibilities of adulthood.

Our modern discomfort with the brutality of these confrontations misses their deeper purpose. These rituals were designed to be believable, to the psyche. And that often meant they were terrifying.

But on the other side of terror is transformation. The initiate emerges marked, often physically changed, and spiritually realigned. Ready to hold the very powers that once held them.

And here’s the catch: the moment of initiation for each of us is not under our personal control. It arrives with time—age, loss, challenge, or crisis. None of us get to choose when the rock is ready to be moved.

Despite his longing to be a hero like Heracles, Theseus had to wait. First, until he was old enough to try. And then, until he was strong enough to actually move the rock. Only after that period of waiting and trying—what may have felt like false starts or disappointing failures—could he claim the sandals and sword, and make his way to Athens, his father’s city.

But, let’s go back to the story, shall we, back to the time of oracles and gods, to a young man who has just uncovered symbols of his destiny.

The Story of Theseus - (Part II)

The gentle light of the fading day painted the world in amber and gold. Long blue shadows, like the fingers of the young night, reached across the tiled courtyard where Theseus stood beside his mother. A soft breeze rustled the olive trees nearby, their gilt-edged leaves whispering like old women at a well. Across from them sat his grandfather, King Pittheus—aged, sharp-eyed, and wrapped in a light robe of pale wool, the colour of distant storms.

Pittheus had always known who the boy’s earthly father was. But he had not known about the rock. Or the sandals. Or the sword.

Now, as Theseus held the tokens in his hands, the weight of the moment settled over the three of them.

Aethra spoke.

She told her father everything—how King Aegeus had placed the items beneath the stone and left instructions should his son be born to her. She went on to explain, possibly more for Theseus’ benefit than his grandfather’s, the need for the secrecy, and Aegeus’ fear that his brothers’ children in Athens would kill the boy before he could be recognised.

And when she finished, she fell silent.

Pittheus nodded gravely. He looked out toward the bay, where the sunlight shimmered on the water like coins spilled from a hole in Helios’ purse as he had passed overhead.

Athens was not far. The sea journey would be swift and safe, cutting across the blue waters in a matter of hours. Pittheus, ever pragmatic, immediately offered a vessel—a fast galley, fully manned. It could deliver Theseus directly to the shores of the Attic peninsula, where the palace lay only a short walk inland.

But the boy—no, the man—did not answer immediately. He looked inland. Toward the dry hills and winding paths. The wilderness between Troezen and Athens was the road that Heracles would have chosen.

The safe route was not the one that called to him.

And so, despite his mother’s worries and grandfather’s insistence, Theseus refused the offer of the boat and safe passage, and chose to go by land. After all, his father, the king of Athens, hadn’t left him oars but sandals.

This choice to go willingly along the difficult path is one that Theseus will make again later in life. Although at that point, it will be a long and winding road into darkness—into the shadowed turns of the winding labyrinth.

But for now, as the late afternoon gave way to evening, and shades of amber deepened to the purples and blues of night, Theseus began making his plans to leave the following morning.

The Longissima Via

The Alchemical Road

The road between Troezen and Athens skirts the Saronic Gulf. It traces a path connecting six mythological gates to the underworld, each guarded by a monstrous chtonic figure. Of course, there are many ways to frame this journey. And if I let myself, I could fall down a dozen rabbit holes here.

We could talk about the rock Theseus moved as the philosopher’s stone—a catalyst for the alchemical transformation that occurs on the long road to Athens. In this framing, the sword and sandals become the tools for division and discernment, to separate the elements within while the path describes stages of dissolution, reintegration, and emergence—from the materia prima of Theseus’ childhood self into the into golden hero we think of when we hear his name.

But for today, I’ll keep it simple. Since Theseus walks this road, we’ll walk it with him. Step by step. Encounter by encounter.

I hope that by following this hero on his long road, you’ll also gain the courage to approach the road before you a little differently.

Jung described the path to wholeness as a longissima via—a snakelike journey, full of detours and terrors, but one that unites opposites and leads to integration, much like the alchemists’ magnum opus. That phrase gave me a meaningful name for Theseus’s road: not a shortcut, but a longissima via—where each confrontation on the road isn’t a detour, but a necessary turn.

In talking about this same path in his book, The Hero With A Thousand Faces, Joseph Campbell says “The passage of the mythological hero may be over-ground, incidentally; fundamentally it is inward—into depths where obscure resistances are overcome, and long lost, forgotten powers are revivified, to be made available for the transfiguration of the world.” (Campbell, 2004, p. 27)

Theseus doesn’t know it yet, but each of the six figures he’ll meet will mirror distorted aspects of human nature—forces that twist, tempt, or overpower us when left unchecked. They are challenges not just of body, but of psyche.

Reflection

So… what moments or images stood out to you from today’s story?

Was it the rock—that massive boulder Theseus had to wait years before he was strong enough to move?

Was it the sandals and the sword?

Or was it the moment he chose the long road, the dangerous one, when the safer path lay glittering right there across the sea?

Maybe you’ve faced a choice like that in your own life. The choice between the easy way—the route with fewer obstacles—and the longer path, the one that asks something deeper of you. The one where you know you’ll have to face real resistance. The one that will change you.

Let’s pause here for a moment.

Remember those six bandits I mentioned? They’re threshold figures—guardians of the in-between. Theseus isn’t descending into Άδης (Hades)—the world of the dead. He’s walking from one city to another—from Troezen to Athens. The journey from a smaller town, to the burgeoning and flourishing city he is to inherit; a picture of growth and the kind of move we all must make as we move into bigger psychological and emotional spaces over and over throughout our lives. But the journey itself is initiatory. For each of us, making that move is a rite of passage.

And in a symbolic sense, those bandits mark gates to the underworld—not because he’s literally going underground, but because he’s entering psychological terrain shaped by the unconscious.

These gates show up whenever we’re on the brink of change. When we’re leaving behind an old version of ourselves, but not yet sure who we’re becoming. And that kind of transformation doesn’t just arrive out of nowhere. It begins with an act of strength—of readiness.

It begins, in this story, when the stone is finally lifted.

Because under that stone lies something crucial—not just the sandals and the sword, but a truth about who Theseus really is. A truth that was hidden, unknown, even to him. Until he was ready.

And the same is often true for us. Our next chapter often waits under some metaphorical stone—something we haven’t been strong enough to face or see clearly… until now.

Whenever I reflect on this story, I’m reminded of a line from the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius. He wrote:

The impediment to action advances action.
What stands in the way becomes the way.11

That’s what the stone in this myth represents. The sandals and the sword hidden beneath it? They aren’t just gifts from a father who is unable to be around while his child is growing up. They’re proof of readiness. They’re the evidence that Theseus has crossed some invisible line. He’s no longer just someone with potential. He’s someone who has chosen and who is equipped by everything he has been through to step forward onto the longissima via of initiation.

In order to get to that point, Theseus had to have the courage and tenacity to try as well as the faith to trust that the rock was worth moving without knowing what was beneath it.

And in closing, I want to leave you with a few questions to ponder. As always, there are not right answers here, only territory for you to explore on your own terms.

• Are there stories—told by others or by your own mind—that have shaped who you think you are?
  Are any of those stories ready to be questioned, outgrown, or rewritten?

• What is the “stone” in your life right now?
  Is there something heavy, unmoving, that you feel you are growing toward being able to lift? What might be waiting for you underneath it?

• Finally: What does it mean, for you, to choose the path that will change you rather than just get you from A to B?
  What are you afraid of having to face along the way?

Epilogue

Next time, we will journey with Theseus from Troezen, to the nearby town of Επίδαυρος (Epidauros) where he will come face to face with his first real test on the road—a bandit named Περιφήτης (Periphetes) who some say is a misshapen son of a god.

Through this encounter, Theseus will demonstrate the real power of the sword he has received, and we’ll discover what a bronze club has in common with the pelt of a lion.

But for now, thank you so much for spending your time with me.

If you enjoyed this introduction to Theseus’ myth (there is a lot more to come!) or if something leapt out at you and want to chat about it, please leave a comment on the episode or reach out to me through my website at www.theinwardsea.com or drop me a comment here!

As always, I would really appreciate it if you’d subscribe to this page and my podcast, rate the episodes and leave a review or a comment. Of course, I’d be super grateful if you’d share it with anyone you think might find it interesting. I really enjoy researching and preparing these episodes and I’d love to know how they land with you.

So once again, thank you, and until next time, keep pushing on those rocks—they will move, one day, and then, who knows what you’ll find beneath them!

Leave a comment

Bibliography:

Apollodorus. (1921). The Library (J. G. Frazer, Trans.). Loeb Classical Library. Harvard University Press. https://www.theoi.com/Text/Apollodorus1.html

Aurelius, M. (2003). Meditations (G. Hays, Trans.). Modern Library.

Campbell, J. (2004). The Hero with a Thousand Faces (commemorative edition). Princeton University Press. (Original work published 1949)

Diodorus Siculus. (n.d.). Library of History (C. H. Oldfather, Trans.). Book 4, Sections 59–85. Theoi Greek Mythology. Retrieved July 18, 2025, from https://www.theoi.com/Text/DiodorusSiculus4D.html

Jung, C. G. (2023). The Collected Works of C. G. Jung. Princeton University Press.

Jung, C. G., & Douglas, C. (1997). Visions : notes of the seminar given in 1930-1934. Vol. 1. Princeton University Press.

Neumann, E. (1954). The origins and history of consciousness (R. F. C. Hull, Trans.). Princeton University Press.

Pausanias. (1918). Description of Greece (W. H. S. Jones & H. A. Ormerod, Trans.). Loeb Classical Library. Harvard University Press. https://www.theoi.com/Text/Pausanias1C.html

Plutarch. (1914). Theseus (B. Perrin, Trans.). In Plutarch’s Lives (Vol. 1). Harvard University Press. Perseus Digital Library. http://data.perseus.org/citations/urn:cts:greekLit:tlg0007.tlg001.perseus-eng2:1.1

Ronnberg, A. (2021). The Book of Symbols. Taschen

von Franz, M.-L. (1971). An Introduction to the Interpretation of Fairytales (J. Hillman, Ed.) Spring Publications. (Original work published 1970)

Names and Locations for the Curious

Characters

The characters are listed in order of appearance in the episode:

Θησέας (Theseus) thi-SEH-as – Our young hero.

Μίνως (Minos) MEE-nos – The King of Crete (part of his story is dealt with in the episode entitled The Bull and the Burnout).

Ποσειδών (Poseidón) Po-see-THON – God of the sea; father of Theseus by Aethra, according to myth.

Πασιφάη (Pasiphaë) pah-si-FAH-ee – The wife of King Minos and a powerful enchantress.

Αιγέας (Aegeas) eh-YEH-as – King of Athens; leaves a sword and sandals under the stone.

Απόλλωνας (Apollo) a-PO-lo-nas – God of music, prophecy, healing, and the arts; later associated with the sun and with order and harmony in Greek mythology.

Πιτθέας/Πιτθέως (Pittheas) Peet-THEH-as – King of Troezen; wise interpreter of oracles.

Αίθρα (Aethra) EH-thra – Daughter of Pittheus; sleeps with both Aegeas and Poseidon.

Αθηνά (Athiná) Ah-thee-NAH – According to some sources (e.g., Plutarch), it is Athena who visits Aethra in a dream and tells her to go to the shore to offer sacrifice — where she meets Poseidon.

Ηρακλής (Iraklís) Ee-ra-KLEES – Hercules; cousin and role model for Theseus

Περιφήτης (Periphetes) Pe-ree-FEE-tees – Crippled bandit with a bronze club; possibly a chthonic cyclopean figure and the son of Hephaestos.

Locations

Τροιζήνα (Troezen) Tri-ZEE-na – Theseus’ birthplace and childhood home; coastal city in the Peloponnese.

Αθήνα (Athens) Ah-THEE-na – Seat of Aegeus’ throne and Theseus’ eventual home.

Ἐπίδαυρος (Epidauros) EPI-tha-vros – Region famous for the theatre and sanctuary of Asclepius.

This is an annotated and (slightly) expanded transcript of episode 2 of my podcast where we explore the intersection of mythology, folklore, and modern life. I'm Dimitri, and I'll be your companion on this journey of discovery.

The Beginning Bit

Each episode, we'll follow routes charted in the old stories and let them lead us into forgotten currents and toward new show. Welcome to The Inward Sea. (Cue theme music by me, mixed and mastered by me, too—if you happen to know how to make it sound better, please leave a comment because on the mixing and mastering side of things, I don’t really know what I’m doing at all).

In this episode, I take you to the island of Crete where a new king, Minos, is about to take the throne. He turns to his uncle, Poseidon, the god in the deep, and asks for a sign of his right to rule, and Poseidon sends him one. What happens next is a powerful mythological image reminding us—perhaps especially those of us in creative fields—of what happens when we identify ourselves too closely with our talents instead of honouring their source.

Listen to the episode here.

Subscribe now

Have you ever caught yourself having confused the map for the terrain? It's a pretty common mistake, actually. If you're on social media and you've ever caught yourself looking at the number of likes a post got, rather than the real social connections that resulted from it, you know what I mean.

Or perhaps as a student you learnt that your test scores mattered more than your actual education and personal growth. Instead of pursuing a deep understanding of the subject you were studying you contented yourself with memorization, only to forget what you had studied after the exam.

Maybe you had an amazing talent. Or a deeply felt calling that somehow became conflated with your identity. Perhaps you were The Musician, or The Artist, or The Writer, and everyone around you knew it. It can be confusing, especially as a young person, when everyone around you praises you for something you do, instead of recognizing and validating the meaning it has for you.

Most of us automatically take that applause as a sign that we are somehow worthy, and then do whatever it takes to get more of it. And over time, that thing that once held so much meaning for our souls becomes little more than a tool that we use to gain approval and acknowledgement from others.

Today's story is about this shift and the burnout that so often follows. In my previous episode, I took you to an island. It was Melville's Tahiti, the green and docile land surrounded by the sea, which he described as being full of the horrors of the half-known life. Well, today we're setting sail for another island, from a story much older than Melville's. But perhaps, despite the age difference, these stories are not so different after all…

The Myth: Minos and the Cretan Bull

This island is Crete. It's the largest island in what today is called Greece. But right now, at the time of our story, it is the heart of the Minoan civilization, a powerful seafaring kingdom surrounded by myth, mystery, and the glittering Mediterranean Sea.

Minos (Μίνως), a son of the god Zeus and an ancient Cretan moon goddess Europa (Εὐρώπη), wants to claim the throne. The thing is, he doesn't want to just seize power. He wants his rule to be seen as divinely sanctioned. So he turns to his uncle, Poseidon (Ποσειδῶν), the god of the sea, and asks for a sign, something visible and undeniable, as proof that he is the ruler chosen by the god in the deep that is both the livelihood and military might of Crete.

And Poseidon answers. From the waves there rises a bull, pure white massive and more beautiful than any ordinary animal could ever be. And with it comes the understanding of reciprocity: Minos is to offer this bull as a sacrifice to Poseidon , in acknowledgment of the relationship between his terrestrial throne and the throne in the depths.

But Minos can't do it. He sees that bull, and something in him wants to keep it. Maybe it's pride, maybe greed, perhaps he doesn't trust that if he relinquishes that magnificent symbol of his authority, his right to rule will still stand secure. Whatever his reasons, Minos instead switches the animal with a lesser one from his herds and sacrifices it instead.

In doing this, Minos doesn't just deny Poseidon a sacrifice, he chooses the symbol over the authentic relationship between himself. the king on the land, and Poseidon, the king in the sea, upon whose authority his own right to rule is anchored.

Poseidon is infuriated by this betrayal, and responds with a curse He turns Minos's betrayal back on him by causing his queen Pasiphaë (Πασιφάη) to lust after the very same bull that Minos had coveted.

Now, Pasiphaë is no mere queen. She is a powerful sorceress, an immortal, a child of Helios (Ἥλιος), the charioteer of the sun, and the oceanid nymph Perse (Πέρση). Her grandparents were of the old order of the gods, the Titans.

But no matter her power or lineage, no sorcery can counter the wrath of Poseidon. So, through the cunning craftsmanship of Daedalus (Δαίδαλος) of Athens, and one of the most disturbing scenes in all of Greek mythology Pasiphaë finds a way to fulfil her desire, and from that unnatural union between Minos's queen and the white bull from the sea, Μινώταυρος, the Minotaur—the bull of Minos — is born.

Now, what do you do when your son has the head of a bull and eats only human flesh? Why, you call in your handyman, of course, and build a labyrinth in which to hide your horned shame. And so once again Daedalus is called, and construction begins. But we'll talk more about labyrinths in a later episode. That's where we'll leave this myth for now.

The Image of the Sea and Poseidon

Myths like dreams carry meaning beyond their plot-lines. They're not just moral lessons, they're symbolic maps. So, grab your shovel. Let's see where this myth is telling us to dig.

Let's begin with the sea.

Across many traditions, it's understood as the birthplace of life, fluid, mysterious, and dangerous. In Jungian terms, it mirrors the unconscious, the realm of feeling, intuition, cultural memory, and dreams. It holds the roots of life and the power to swallow it whole.

Rather than using the traditional masculine/feminine labels used by Freud and Jung, I prefer the terms Yáng- (陽) and Yīn-(陰)-dominant from Taoist cosmology1. You can explore this in more depth in the article, Beyond Masculine and Feminine right here on Substack.

In short, Yīn (陰) and Yáng (陽) describe polarities of Qì (氣), the vital energy of the universe. Everything we perceive, ourselves included, arises from their interplay. The Tàijí (太極), symbol often called Yin-Yang in the West, shows this beautifully. Each side contains a drop of its opposite. Nothing is pure Yīn or Yáng, everything holds a trace of its counterpart.

So when we say that the sea is a yīn-dominant image, we mean it carries more of those qualities: darkness, fluidity, mystery, and depth. But not only those it contains some Yáng too.

And this is exactly what we see in our myth when we look at the relationship between the sea and Poseidon, the Yáng force within the Yīn field. He's not the sea itself, but its motion, the power that churns the depths. One of his epithets, Enosichthon (Ἐνοσίχθων) — Earth Shaker, tells us exactly who he is, a god of disturbance, a force from the deep that breaches the surface.

In volume thirteen of his collected works, Carl Jung discusses the gods of Olympus and psychological processes. He says,

"We think we can congratulate ourselves on having already reached such a pinnacle of clarity, imagining that we have left all these phantasmal gods far behind. But what we have left behind are only verbal specters, not the psychic facts that were responsible for the birth of the gods. We are still as much possessed by autonomous psychic contents as if they were Olympians. Today they are called phobias, obsessions, and so forth, In a word, neurotic symptoms. The gods have become diseases. Zeus no longer rules Olympus, but rather the solar plexus, and produces curious specimens for the doctor's consulting room, or disorders the brains of politicians and journalists who unwittingly let loose psychic epidemics on the world." (Jung: CW 13, §54)

To Jung, Poseidon is a personification of an archetypal force in the psyche. Our sense of self, the "I" who dreams, feels and acts, arises from this deeper source. And in this myth, it is Poseidon, not Minos, who represents that archetypal self.

To understand this more fully, we need to take a look at a few other images that appear in this story.

So, if the sea is the yīn-dominant domain of the unconscious and Poseidon is the yáng within it, then what do we make of the island of Crete and its king, Minos?

Crete and the Kingdom

Crete, like Melville's Tahiti from the introduction, is a picture of conscious experience. It is the island of awareness that we build throughout life. It's dry, ordered, sunlit, stable, and mapped—that is, perceivable and governed by will power. It is the yáng to the sea's yīn, the space in which we become aware of our psychic lives.

Right now, you're aware of certain things in your surroundings, but not everything. That's because attention is selective. There's a filter in the psyche that protects us from being overwhelmed.

Our eyes are a good metaphor for this type of attention. We take in a whole scene through them, but we can only focus sharply on one thing at a time. Try it now. Pick one object. Notice how everything else fades slightly into the background when you focus on it. Like Crete under Minos, our conscious life is ordered by the ego. And by ego, I don't mean arrogance. I mean that narrow beam of conscious awareness capable of decision and will.

You've heard the phrase, "The eyes are the windows to the soul." Well, in a psychological sense, that's not far off, if we think of the ego as the part of us that says, "I". Most people think of this "I" as the whole self, but just like the physical eye, it cannot focus on the whole scene at once. The ego can only process a narrow beam of psychic life. It exists to order and organize our experience of the world. Its job is to help us survive by making decisions and choosing when and where to apply our force of will to the world.

In this myth, Minos is the image of the ego, and he reveals a mistake we often make.

The Faithless King and the Cursed Queen

So, Minos, the king of Crete, represents the ego. He belongs to the yáng domain of conscious life, the island. He's not the island itself, but his rule sustains it. Like the island, he is a yáng-dominant figure, directional, assertive, and controlling.

As we've seen, every young image has its yīn counterpart. Minos is paired with Pasiphaë, just as Poseidon is paired with the sea. But this pairing plays out in the civilized domain of conscious life, not the unconscious depths.

Minos begins in a surprisingly healthy place. He doesn't simply assume he has the right to rule, instead he turns to a deeper authority and asks for a sign. In Jungian terms, Minos starts out as the portrait of a well-adjusted ego2, one aware of its limits and seeking alignment with the archetypal self. In this state, the ego serves the deeper self and supports authentic growth.

But then something shifts.

When the sign of his right to rule appears, the Minos-ego clings to it he clutches at the symbol, the white bull, and lets go of his reverence for the deeper authority that sent it.

And we do this too.

We're praised for a talent or a skill, and then we want more of that validation. Over time, we start identifying with the gift itself. We stop seeing it as something that we do and begin thinking that it's who we are. And because it brings us praise and a sense of validation, we begin to believe that it is what makes us worthy.

This is a quiet but dangerous shift. The ego, knowing it isn't the source of the talent, gets anxious. and it starts building an identity around the gift, turning it into a persona to ensure that it continues receiving that external validation. Jung called this ego-inflation, when the ego claims energy from the unconscious and builds an identity around it.

In many myths, the ego is portrayed as a sun god, king, or a hero character3. But as Jung reminds us, the ego is not meant to rule the psyche. It is meant to serve it, like a minister, not like a king. When the ego forgets this, it cuts ties with the deeper self and begins to lead us away from who we truly are (Franz, 1980, Lecture 1).

In the myth, Minos breaks faith with the self, but it is Pasiphaë, his queen, who suffers the consequences. Though she may seem secondary, Pasiphaë is actually the hinge on which this myth turns. She's not just Minos's queen, she's the daughter of Helios, the son's charioteer, a figure of vision and clarity. On her mother's side, she descends from Oceanus (Ὠκεανός) and Tehys (Τηθύς), both figures tied to the sea, chaos and destruction. In Pasiphaë, solar light and oceanic depth are united, awareness and dissolution. She is the unconscious psyche, the soul, who is bound to the ego. She is the yīn to Minos' yáng, not just because she is female, but because she is receptive.

Symbolically, here's what unfolds. The ego, in its quest for dominance, abandons its relationship with the archetypal self and clings to the symbol that validates its rule rather than trusting its source; it grasps at the symbol that brings it recognition. And when that happens, Pasiphaë—the receptive aspect of our conscious lives—gives birth to a distorted version of what the ego tried to appropriate.

We all know what happens next. The Minotaur, a symbol of Minos's shame, is born and locked away in the darkness of the labyrinth. And we do this too. We hide the things that we've twisted or misused, the parts of ourselves that we've become ashamed of, in dark corners in our interior world.

It is interesting to note that once the Minotaur is born from Pasiphaë, the myth no longer tells the story of Minos as the king with the bull, but rather, the king with the queen who gave birth to a bull-headed son. It is as if the gift from the sea has been transmuted into the monster that must be hidden in the labyrinth.

If Minos begins as a healthy ego aligned with the self, what broke that bond? What caused the shift? Let's take a look at the bull.

The White Bull–Herald of the Sacred

Across cultures, white animals mark a threshold— a crossing into the other world. Whether it's the land of the dead, Faerie, or some other liminal realm, this place carries mystery, power, and a logic beyond reason— a mirror of the deep strength hidden in the unconscious. The white animal is a flash of yáng rising from the oceanic yīn, a sacred messenger from the depths to the shores of awareness.

The white animal doesn't linger. It's not meant to. Like a vision or a dream, it appears when the psyche is ready, offering a quiet invitation to enter into relationship with the power it embodies. Chase it and it vanishes mistreat it and disaster usually follows. This is the nature of these gifts from the unconscious they must be approached with reverence, not seized for display.

In Irish, Welsh, and Arthurian lore, it's the white stag, a boar, or a bird. In Asia, it's a fox, a crane, or a tiger. In Native American tradition, it's the white buffalo. These wild, instinctual creatures appear when transformation or growth is about to take place, and that growth begins when we recognize unconscious parts of ourselves and bring them into awareness. That's the work of integration. But it takes courage, and it's always easier to chase approval than look inward and ask who or what we really are.

In this myth, the white bull is exactly that, an invitation, a gift that rises from the sea, affirming Minos' right to rule, but not without cost. To receive it, Minos would have to admit that his authority doesn't come from himself, but from Poseidon. And that 's where the ego flinches. The "I" doesn't easily bow. And so Minos clings to the gift as proof of his worth rather than honoring his relationship to the deeper authority.

So here's what I hope you'll take away from this image: It's not that the gift defines the king, it's his response. Whether he honours the source or bet it determines not just his character, but also his well-being.

For you and me, the white animal might appear as a flash of insight, a creative spark, a quiet nudge towards something new from deep within us. And like many of the white creatures in our own world, the white lions in Southern Africa or the white snow leopards from Central and Southern Asia these creatures are not ours to tame.

The mythological white animal—whether it be the cretan bull or Melville’s Moby Dick—is not meant to be mounted as a trophy above the mantelpieces of our self worth. It's meant to be protected, and when we're ready, followed. Perhaps now, if you look closely, you can spot the moments in your life where something that had been deeply meaningful started becoming performative; where your soul went quiet and your ego took the mic.

A Personal Reflection

While writing this episode, I found myself doing exactly what this myth warns against. At first, the process felt clear, exciting even. But as the scope of the episode grew, so did the pressure. I was juggling final exams, grading mountains of students' work, and in the middle of it all I kept piling on books, trying to make sure every idea I shared had a proper citation, a pedigree—something to prove that it was worth saying. And that's when it hit me: I was clinging to the bull.

The White Bull for me was the illusion of mastery, the belief that I had to be flawless, airtight, academically unimpeachable before I had the right to speak. I stopped trusting what I already knew was helpful, and instead measured every insight by how closely it echoed the voices of more established thinkers. If I could point and say, "See! I'm saying what they said," then maybe I would be allowed to speak too.

And that's the trap. Like Minos, I wasn't honoring the source, the deep well from which these insights sprang. I was parading the gift as proof of my legitimacy. I forgot that these ideas first surfaced as flashes of clarity in conversations, in classrooms, in quiet moments of listening and reflecting, long before I ever thought to footnote them.

The moment I realized this, I felt the cost. I'd traded flow for fear, and I'd turned something soulful into something performative. And instead of feeling joy or clarity, I felt shame. As if I, without all the citations, wasn't enough.

Now, I'm sharing this not because it's easy—it isn’t—but because I know that I'm not the only one who does this.

Many of us do. We confuse the gift with the proof of our worth, and in doing so, we quietly cut ourselves off from the deep.

And if there is a faster road to burnout, I haven't found it yet.

The Heart of This Story

I want to leave you with a few questions, but before we do that, let's take a moment to return to the heart of the story, because there's something here that I think we easily miss.

Minos was chosen by Poseidon. He didn't just seize the throne. He asked for a sign, and one was given. He was worthy, not because he was flawless, but because he was in a right relationship with an authority deeper than just the ego. And the same is true for you and me.

We're not worthy because we're perfect, or accomplished, or admired. We're worthy because we're real, because each of us is connected to the deep wellspring of life, just like anyone else. The white animal only appears when we're ready for it. Its arrival is not a reward, it's an invitation. And when we lose our way, when we cling too tightly, when we crown the ego king and silence the soul, the pain that follows is not punishment.

Like physical pain, psychic pain is a signal. Shame, burnout, numbness they are the voice of the stricken Pasiphaë rising from within — the part of us that still remembers, still feels, still longs to be whole again. Grief, rage, shame, and the ache of meaninglessness are not the end of the story. They are signs that something sacred is asking for our attention.

Reflection Questions

So now, as this leg of our journey draws to a close, I want to offer you three questions—not as a test, but as a way back, a way to sit beside the part of yourself that still remembers the gift and the joy of using it, and longs to live in relationship with it again.

These aren't the kinds of questions that need quick answers. They're the kind that work slowly, the kind that reveal more answers over time—in dreams, in conversations, and in quiet moments when something shifts inside of you and you realize, "Ah, this is what it was pointing towards."

So, here they are.

What gift have I mistaken for proof?

• What white bull have I claimed as mine, a talent, a title, a role, and held on to as if it alone could secure my place in this world?

• When did I stop treating it as a living thing and start using it as a trophy?

• Like Minos, have I begun to confuse the gift with my right to belong? And if I were to let it go, to return it to the deep, what would that require of me?

What part of me pays for the image I portray to the world?

• What inner voice, what truth, what grief or longing have I hidden away, afraid that if I allowed it to be seen everything I've built would unravel?

• When I perform well, when I achieve or impress, who or what is paying the price inside of me? Pasiphaë carried the consequences of Minos's denial.

• What is the cost of mine? And if I dared to face what I've hidden in the labyrinth of my own heart, what might I finally understand?

What shape has the Minotaur taken in my life?

• Is there a burden I've been carrying or a pattern I can't seem to escape — something I'd rather not admit is mine — that may have grown out of a broken connection with my deeper, truer self?

• And what part of me do I try and hide that every now and then threatens my carefully curated image with its demands to be fed?

• If I look at its shape, honestly and without shame, what gift does it resemble that I might have mistreated at some stage?

Feel free to copy and print these questions for yourself. Don’t try answer them in one sitting, rather play with them in different situations in life. What do the answers look like when you are working on a project, and how are they different when you are in a social setting? How about when you’re in a situation with people you don’t know well?

Because we all have various personas that we employ in different settings, the answers to these questions will vary. I hope they will be as illuminating for you as they have been for me.

Final Thoughts

As we come to shore for today, let me leave you with this: Minos is not king because of the bull. And you are not worthy because of your talents or your titles or your abilities. You are worthy because you are real. Because you are here, alive, awake, part of the unbroken thread of life that stretches back to the very beginning of time. The gift, whatever form it takes, is not proof of your worth. It's the vessel through which your soul contributes to the world. It was never meant to be hoard or worshipped, or used to earn love.

Each of us have a decision to make: do we cling to the bull, to performance, the praise, or the symbol? or, do we return the gift to the deep, not to discard it but to honour its source? The ego doesn't need to be destroyed. It just needs to remember its place, not as a king, but as a steward, a wise mediator between inner truth and outer life. Because that's where our balance lies; not in conquest, but in service.

In our next episode, we'll walk deeper into this story and into the labyrinth. We'll follow Theseus (Θησέας), the youth who enters the dark with tools borrowed from a princess, and we'll meet Pasiphaë's child, the Minotaur, not as a monster to be destroyed, but as an alchemical reagent whose name might surprise you

These characters are not just ancient strangers. They're inner guides, and they show us what it means to respond to the call, to descend willingly into the shadow, and to re-emerge with something worth living for.

Thank you so much for joining me today. If this episode stirred something in you, I hope you'll stay connected. Subscribe to the podcast, leave a comment, share it with someone who might need it, or visit my website at www.theinwardsea.com (there isn’t too much happening there, yet, but stay tuned - I’ve got some online labyrinth workshops in the oven and they’ll be ready soon).

And if all you do is sit quietly with the questions or the images or something that this episode brought to the surface in your own heart, that's enough too. You're doing the work.

So, once again, thank you for journeying with me today. My name is Dimitri. And you've been listening to (or, more accurately, reading through) The Inward Sea.

References:

von Franz, M.-L. (1980). The Psychological Meaning of Redemption Motifs in Fairytales.

von Franz, M.-L. (2017). The Feminine in Fairy Tales. Shambhala Publications.

‌Johnson, R. A. (2009). Inner work: Using dreams and active imagination for personal growth. Harperone.

Jung, C. G. (2023). The Collected Works of C. G. Jung. Princeton University Press.

The Power of (Re)Naming

The NeverEnding Story by Michael Ende is one of my favorite books, though I only got to read it when I was ten or eleven (the school librarian was convinced it was too difficult for me at nine)1. At that stage, I was already familiar with the story because I’d rented the VHS from the local video shop (a number of times). Like anyone else who grew up with that movie, I remember the trauma of watching Artax, the white horse, sink into the Swamp of Sadness. The terror I felt at the sight of Gmork, servant to the masters of the Nothing, as he lay pinned beneath the rubble of the ruined city during his final confrontation with Atreyu is a defining memory of the movie. Like most of the English-speaking world online, I had no idea what name Bastion screamed into the storm when he renamed the Childlike Empress. I remember asking both my parents to listen to that part to tell me what he shouted. They also couldn’t hear it. It’s impossible to make out.

When the librarian eventually decided that I had the necessary number of years under my belt to read the book, I finally learned that name: Moon Child. Today, thanks to the magic of subtitles, that confusion is mostly a thing of the past. It took many more years for me to recognize that this pattern is far older than Ende’s wonderful novel. In mythology from all over the world, the act of giving old or corrupted things new names is an almost universal mechanism by which they can be restored2. By giving the Childlike Empress a new name, Bastion performs an act of creative renewal, restoring (and reforming) the inner world of the imagination.

This pattern runs deeper than fantasy. In folktales and mythology from around the world, we find the same principle at work: to renew something broken, lost, or enchanted, we must clothe it in a new name. In the story of the Six Swans, a sister breaks the spell over her brothers not by speaking, but by weaving nettle shirts in silence. It takes her 6 years, over the course of which, people become convinced she is a witch. In the end, as she is about to be burned at the stake, she throws the shirts over her swan-brothers (who conveniently happen to be flying by), clothing them once more in their true identities and forms3.

It’s a powerful image, isn’t it? Identity restored not through force or argument, but through silent dedication and symbolic action that mirrors the act of renaming. And this, too, is the task at hand. Especially when the symbolic language we’ve inherited no longer serves us.

In this essay, I explore what happens when the symbolic language we use to describe the inner life—particularly Jung’s archetypal terms “masculine” and “feminine”—no longer reflects the realities we’re experiencing. Drawing on myth, Taoist cosmology, and my own experiences as an educator, I suggest a shift: from gendered archetypes to the more fluid framework of yīn and yáng. This isn’t just about semantics—it’s about finding a vocabulary spacious enough to honor complexity, one that invites reflection instead of division. In a time when identity is both deeply personal and politically charged, the language we use matters. And perhaps, by reaching for symbols that move and breathe, we can begin to imagine new ways of understanding ourselves—and each other.

Subscribe now

When Symbols Get Stuck

The terms Carl Jung used to describe archetypal images4—words like masculine and feminine—were once fluid, symbolic tools for expressing psychic patterns. But in today’s climate, so charged with political and cultural tension, those words have become too heavily burdened with misinterpretation. To renew their meaning, I propose a shift: one that draws on the language of classical Chinese philosophy. This move away from familiar, gendered terminology invites a more elemental and less prescriptive view of psychic dynamics. By turning to culturally distinct concepts like yīnyáng (陰陽), we not only broaden our symbolic vocabulary, but also sidestep the limitations imposed by current ideological frameworks.

Jung Encounters the East

In 1928, a new world opened up for Jung. After encountering a Taoist alchemical text, The Secret of the Golden Flower, through his friend Richard Wilhelm, Jung began looking beyond the Greco-Christian symbolic tradition that shaped much of his early vocabulary (CW 13, Foreword to the Second German Edition). Having previously only had access to a deficient translation of the text, he found in the I Ching (now translated by Wilhelm) and in Taoist cosmology more broadly, a symbolic system that mirrored his own psychological insights presented with a fluidity and humility he felt Western thought lacked (CW 11, §791)5.

The Taoist concept of yīn (陰) and yáng (陽) speaks not of static categories, but of relationship, rhythm, and change. These are not gender roles or fixed traits. They are dynamic expressions or polarities of qì (氣)—the life-force of Nature which flows through all things according to the the Tao (道)—The Way. Yang is associated with motion, assertion, heat, and light—qualities often labeled masculine in both Chinese philosophy and Western psychology.. Yīn, by contrast, is receptive, cool, still, and dark—often read as feminine6. But crucially, in Taoist thought, neither is superior, and neither exists in isolation. Each arises in response to and directly from the other (Wong, 2011, p. 126).

Jung recognized this. In The Collected Works, he described yáng as “the spirit,” conditioned by ideals and vision, and yīn as “the earth,” grounded and instinctual But rather than casting them in opposition, he emphasized their interdependence. “Yáng and yīn,” he wrote, “are deadly enemies who need one another”(CW 10, § 913)7. This tension between irreconcilable yet united opposites is, according to Jung’s observations, the engine that drives the psyche’s movement toward wholeness (CW 9, § 294).

This movement is what Jung called individuation8, the process whereby the conscious and unconscious parts of the self come into relationship over the course of a person’s life, leading them to a condition of wholeness. Some Jungian writers, like Robert Johnson, have evoked the image of paired dragons to illustrate the dance of yīn and yáng—locked in motion, distinct yet inseparable (Johnson, 2009, p. 50). But even without metaphor, the symbolic language of yīn and yáng offers something masculine and feminine no longer can: a way to speak of opposites without collapsing them into gender norms. They preserve the polarity of the concepts without reinforcing outdated and potentially confusing binaries.

A Question After Class

The need for a shift in vocabulary was never more clear to me than one Friday afternoon. I’d just wrapped up one of my favorite classes—an extracurricular course on global mythology and folklore. The story we’d been discussing was Tatterhood, a Norwegian folktale that’s become something of a legend among my students. I’ve been teaching this course at the same high school since 2021, and every semester without fail, someone asks, “When are we going to do the one with the girl and the goat ?” They rarely remember her name, but they do remember her.

After class, I was doing the usual tidying up and making sure everything was left as we’d found it (sadly, there isn’t a dedicated venue for this class — if there were, imagine the fun I could have decorating it!) As I was straightening things up, one of the students lingered near the door. She hung around for a while, fidgeting with unimportant stuff in her bag, looking as if she had something to say but hadn’t quite figured out how or if to say it.

Then asked:

“What if… I don’t really think of myself as feminine?”

Her question wasn’t just about identity. She is a very confident young lady who is vocal about her opinions and (at least to me) doesn’t seem plagued with the same insecurities many others grapple with. She is well on her way to solidifying her sense of identity and is quite vocal about it. This was a question about language. Specifially, about the language I had been using in the class, as we discussed a the images from a folktale called Tatterhood9.

I had framed Tatterhood as a tale of the archetypal (that is, a deep, recurring psychic image or pattern) feminine in its shadowed form: wild, disheveled, and defiantly other. But that framing carries an implicit contrast: if that’s the shadow, then the “conscious” feminine should, by contrast, be tame, beautiful, and conforming. That’s not a view I hold—or find particularly useful. And it was certainly not the message I was hoping to convey to the class.

As I stood there, listening to her trying to explain what she meant, I began to understand why I’ve felt uneasy with certain terminology when teaching the transformative power of myth and folktales: the language we’ve inherited to talk about archetypal imagery is one that can too easily begin to feel prescriptive10. Luckily (or perhaps, Jung would say, synchronistically) an answer presented itself in a most unexpected place—slightly above my right shoulder, to be precise.

Every classroom in South Korea displays the national flag, the Taegeukgi (태극기). The flag itself is striking in its simplicity. A white field serves as the background as a symbol of peace and purity, though I suspect it also speaks to emptiness in the Taoist sense: not absence, but open potential.

In each corner sits a trigram drawn from the Bagua (八卦), the eight-fold arrangement of broken and unbroken lines used in Taoist cosmology and divination. Each trigram is made up of three lines, which represent combinations of yīn (- -) and yáng (—): broken lines for yīn, solid lines for yáng. These are not static symbols but dynamic expressions of how qì (氣), the vital energy that animates all things, moves and shifts through the universe.

At the center of it all is the taegeuk (태극) — a red and blue swirl that is Korea’s own traditional version of the Chinese Taijitu (太極圖). Though it mirrors the more familiar black-and-white symbol, this version carries its own cultural hues and connotations. The red above symbolizes active, bright, and assertive energy; the blue below holds receptive, dark, and yielding power. Together, they represent balance and mutual becoming.

I’ve looked at that flag hundreds of times over the years of working in South Korea, but at that moment, the swirls prompted a thought process that resulted in a new approach to teaching about mythology and archetypal imagery for me.

That Friday afternoon, our conversation led to and understanding that what Jung once called feminine archetypal images might be better understood as yīn-dominant, and what he called masculine might map more clearly onto the idea of being yáng-dominant (that is, expressing more of the qualities traditionally associated with yīn—cool, receptive, interior—rather than claiming a fixed identity.

In these terms, dominant simply refers to which energy or mode is currently most active in the moment or image but it does not limit the contents. A yīn-dominant image must also include a certain amount of yáng characteristics. As the language shifted, so too did understanding. The conversation became less about identity and more about the movement, quality, and pattern of things inside ourselves.

So, that’s what led me to the framework of Yīn and Yáng. But before we can use that framework, it’s important to be honest about where Jung’s system ends and where other ways of seeing might help us go further.

When trying to understand foundational concepts like yīn-yáng, it’s a good idea to be wary of relying solely on Jung's analysis and turn instead to culturally informed sources. Jung's approach, while insightful in its own right, was rooted in the Eurocentric perspective of his time11, one that could "impede his [and our] full understanding of non-Western approaches" (Katz, 2018, p. 189-190).

In multiple places in his Collected Works (CW 13 §16; CW 15 §89), he warned Western readers against adopting non-Western spiritual paths. On the surface, that might sound like an early caution against what we now think of as cultural appropriation12. To be fair, Jung was concerned with depth and authenticity in his work of understanding and healing the psyche and he didn’t want people skipping over the hard work of self-knowledge by outsourcing it to someone else’s tradition.

Still, there’s a paradox here. In warning us against the adoption of spiritual paths rooted in non-European cultures, Jung is showing signs of a Eurocentric, self-imposed barrier to genuinely understanding and valuing Indigenous or Eastern wisdom on its own terms13. This makes his interpretation less reliable for those seeking an authentic, culturally-rooted understanding of concepts like Yīn-Yáng. When reading Jungian authors, it is therefore wise to read references to these concepts as metaphors within a Jungian system rather than as faithful representations of Taoist thought.

That brings me to my own position. Yes, I’m borrowing the vocabulary of Chinese philosophy and applying it to a framework Jung helped develop. And yes, that’s already a kind of cross-cultural translation. I’m not, however, suggesting that we simply swap old words for new ones, or try to dress up the ideas of feminine and masculine in more fashionable language. What I am proposing is that we step into a broader worldview in which these energies aren’t gendered roles or fixed identities, but interdependent patterns of energy with us — informed by the way the Chinese classical philosophers saw them.

Mapping the Tao

Since I’ve been going on about it for a bit, let me pause to do you the mild disservice of trying to explain the basics of Yīn, Yáng, and the Taoist cosmology from which this concept emerges. I say “disservice” because these ideas resist simplification. Any attempt to do so feels a lot like what I’ve just been cautioning against—but I’ll do my best anyway. In what follows, I lean heavily on the work of people far more qualified than I am to speak on these matters—Eva Wong, whose writings on Taoism stem from authentic personal practice, and Benebell Wen, a younger but no less scholarly voice in the study of Chinese metaphysics and mystical traditions.

In classical Chinese thought, the creation of the universe is a process of division. As seen in Figure 2, it all begins with Wújí (無極) a term that literally means without limit. It is a depiction of the undifferentiated field encompassing all that is. Within this limitless field of undifferentiated creation, the Tao is self-created. It is expressed by the image of the Tàijítú (太極圖) with its three concentric rings of alternating black and white symbolising yīn and yáng polarities14. These opposing poles are like the peaks and valleys in a sine wave—they are not separate entities but rather oppose positions on a single spectrum, and this spectrum is divided into different “shades” of yīn and yáng.

This idea of division can most clearly be seen in the way the 64 hexagrams of the I Ching are derived from the single lines representing yīn (- -) and yáng (—).

Modern depictions of the Tàijítú look like two swirls, one black and one white, each containing a dot of the other (see Figures 3 and 4). It represents the Great Ultimate: the interplay of polarity within unity. At the risk of being repetitive, it is important to understand that Wújí describes the pre-existent state of un-differentiation. Taiji with its the polarities of yīn and yáng move in Wújí, ordering what the Tao Te Jing describes as the Myriad Things—that is, the physicality and activity of the universe:

The Tao gave Birth

To the One.

The One gave Birth

To the Two.

The Two gave Birth

To the Three.

The Three gave Birth

To the Myriad Things,…

—(Laozi & Minford, 2019, ch. 42).

This is poetic language, yes—but it’s also a reminder that what we call “things” arise not from solidity, but from dynamic balance and the breath-like movement of Nature's ultimate laws.

Wújí and Taiji form a pair of opposites (undifferentiated and differentiated polarities) that, in Taoist cosmology, are not hierarchical but equivalent. Wuji, as previously mentioned, is the totality of undifferentiated creation—the limitless potential before form. Taiji, by contrast, is the emergence of polarity15 within the whole. Yīn and yáng exist within the greater form of the Wújí circle, reminding us that the two sets of opposites (Wújí and Taiji, yīn and yáng) are one. This is the Tao. If your head is spinning, that’s okay.

“What does that mean exactly? Chinese philosophers have been debating that point and writing dense treatises on just that topic for the last three thousand years,” writes Benebell Wen with characteristic humility and wit (Wen, 2023, p. 160). Holding the image of Wújí and Taiji in mind as a kind of living paradox is part of what makes Taoist thought so enduring—and so valuable to those of us raised in a culture that prefers its answers neat and its categories stable. You don’t have to fully grasp the cosmology; just feel into the paradox. That’s where the richness lives.

The Taiji is an image, a graphic representation of the Tao (道) that is, The Way16. It depicts the unchanging nature of change itself as yīn grows, reaches its fullness, then gives rise to yáng, and yáng, in turn, grows, reaches its fullness, and gives rise to yīn. Although these two energetic expressions are opposites in every way, they are also equals, each finding its beginning and its end in the other. This is precisely the tension that Western thought often tries to dissolve. In his lectures, Jung commented on how deeply embedded such oppositional thinking was in Eastern philosophy:

“[…] Yin is by no means just the earth, it is also the earth, it contains the earth, the darkness of humanity, perhaps the cave, perhaps the black snake… it is absolutely characteristic in contrast to Yang. You see, the Eastern mind always thinks in these pairs of opposites, while we [Westerners] are always trying to establish the uniqueness of things… But the Eastern mind cannot think of a definite Yin without having the concept of Yang always in mind at the same time. […] In the fully developed Yin, the Yang germ is already underway, and in the fully developed Yang, Yin begins. That is the Chinese paradox. Sunset begins at midday, and sunrise begins at midnight.”

— (Jung & Douglas, 1997, p. 355)17

Revisiting Jung Through a Taoist Lens

Now that we’ve circled back to Jung, let’s take another look at his terminology. Jung is right to note that “yīn is by no means just the earth.” As an archetypal image, yīn carries earth as one of its meanings—alongside shadow, cold, receptivity, and wetness. Likewise, yáng isn’t the sky itself, but it evokes sky—alongside light, warmth, creative force, and activity. And this extends to the concepts of masculine and feminine.

In Zhou Dunyi’s Taijitu Diagram (Figure 2), the Chinese text on the left is translated as, “The Qian (乾) Path (道) transforms into the masculine (男).” While the text on the right says, “The Kun (坤) Path (道) transforms into the feminine (女).”At first glance, this might seem like just another nod to gendered language, so why bother shifting terminology at all? Well, you will notice that this illustration is organised vertically. It describes a process of becoming.

What we’re seeing is a cosmological unfolding that begins with Wújí, the limitless source, moves through Taiji, and continues into the polarity of yīn and yáng—all the way to the generation of the “ten thousand things.” Note how the image moves downward, showing a dynamic and dividing evolution of energy into matter and identity.

Now, this might feel like a lot to hold onto. That’s because it is.

But that’s also the point: Taoist images are meant to be lived with, not solved—rather like the idea of the collective unconscious or the archetypes.

All of this is to say that while it was clear to Jung that men and women both contain masculine and feminine aspects — the animus and anima images — that idea poses a real barrier to discussion and exploration in our time. Yīn and yáng may contain qualities we associate with masculinity or femininity, but in Taoist cosmology, each gives rise to the other. Nothing remains static. What is yīn becomes yáng. What is yáng becomes yīn. The roles reverse. The energy flows. This kind of fluid movement is harder to express using the language of gender and sex. Gendered terms are designed to offer clarity and stability—which makes them useful when describing people, but limiting when exploring symbols meant to flow, merge, and transform.

The motion of yīn and yáng—that cycle in which one matures and then births the other from within itself—is precisely what gets lost when we flatten archetypes through the use of language that refers to culturally reinforced stereotypes. It’s what the Jungian lexicon relying on gendered words, for all its brilliance, often misses18.

Moving Energy, Not Roles

In the framework of yīn- and yáng-dominant imagery, psychic energy doesn’t demand that we “become more masculine” or “embrace the feminine within.” Instead, it asks us to attend to patterns of energetic movement. Are we pushing outward when we need to turn inward? Are we holding back when life calls us to act? The language of yīn and yáng allows us to name these psychic currents without collapsing them into gendered identities. It restores symbolic clarity.

Instead of being distracted, and potentially misled by culturally conditioned associations with gender roles (many of which are also unconscious and accepted as some kind of biological fact of life), wisdom lies in knowing when to move with yang and when to yield with yīn. Often, the really difficult lessons we learn is how to live within the tension between these two polarities, rather than resolving it prematurely. This way of seeing honors the dual nature of what we perceive to be opposites, without creating an image of two separate characters (CW 11, §791). It welcomes paradox, elasticity, and emergence.

It also aligns with Jung’s core belief that archetypes are “not determined as regards their content, but only as regards their form, and then only to a very limited degree” (CW 9, §55). They are not rules to follow. They are patterns to witness—arising, dissolving, and always transforming.

Yīn and yáng offer us a symbolic vocabulary that stays true to that insight. They do not ask us to question our identity, but to examine how energy is moving through us. They don’t tell us which side to be on. They show us that life itself unfolds in cycles of differentiation and return, expansion and contraction, fire and water.

Naming for Renewal

While ideas about exactly what it means to be a man or a woman, male or female, will certainly continue to evolve across generations and cultures, shaping how people present themselves and inhabit social roles, these terms need not be carried into the abstract, interior world of the psyche. Male and female may describe a certain biological aspect of what we are, but calling psychic principles or archetypal images masculine or feminine can shrink or even twist their meaning.

Renaming these qualities as yīn-dominant and yang-dominant offers a more abstract, less culturally loaded vocabulary which is better suited to the exploration of the complex, paradoxical nature of archetypes in our time. It helps us avoid the trap of reducing inner figures to fixed gender roles.

These new names support a deeper, more flexible engagement with the archetypes, those dynamic images and instinctual patterns which must, again and again, be subject to reinterpretation. By framing them in terms of yīn and yáng, analysis can better guide individuals toward integrating their conscious and unconscious selves, without reinforcing outdated or culturally fraught binaries.

This shift in language honors the evolving nature of the psyche. And, in a way, this essay is me, leaning from a window, shouting a new name — Moon Child!— into the maelstrom of political and social discourse surrounding gender and identity, in the hope of being able to bring renewal to both these images and the students (or other people) with whom I share them.

If this resonated with you, I’d love to hear your thoughts. Feel free to reply, comment, or share with someone who might be wrestling with these images too.

Share The Inward Sea’s Substack

You can also join me on my monthly podcast, each episode of which explores a mythological story (or scene from a story) in terms of what it might mean for us in our modern lives.

References

Edescas2. (n.d.). Zhou Dunyi Taijitu with English labels [Image]. Wikimedia Commons. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Zhou_Dunyi_Taijitu_English.png

Hanziyuan. (n.d.). Character analysis: 極, 太, 無. Retrieved June 11, 2025, from https://hanziyuan.net/

Johnson, R. A. (2009). Inner work: Using dreams and active imagination for personal growth. Harperone.

Jung, C. G., & Douglas, C. (1997). Visions : notes of the seminar given in 1930-1934. Vol. 1. Princeton University Press.

Jung, C. G. (2023). The Collected Works of C. G. Jung. Princeton University Press.

Katz, R. (2018). Indigenous healing psychology : honoring the wisdom of the first peoples. Healing Arts.

Laozi, & Minford, J. (2019). Tao te ching (Daodejing) : the tao and the power. Penguin Books, [8.

Maxwell, G. (n.d.). Yin yang [Image]. Wikimedia Commons. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Yin_yang.svg

Lee, E.-j., Park, Y.-h., Great Brightstar, & others. (n.d.). Flag of South Korea (Taegeukgi) [Image]. Wikimedia Commons. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Flag_of_South_Korea.svg

Sonu Shamdasani. (2003). C.G. Jung and the making of modern psychology : the dream of a science. Cambridge University Press.

Tyler, R. (1987). Japanese Tales. Pantheon.

Wen, B. (2023). I Ching The Oracle: A Practical Guide to the Book of Changes. North Atlantic Books.

Wong, E. (2011). Taoism : an essential guide. Shambhala. https://archive.org/details/TaoismEvaWong

Matos, L., Machado, J., Monteiro, F., & Greten, H. (2021). Understanding Traditional Chinese Medicine therapeutics: An overview of the basics and clinical applications. Healthcare, 9(3), 257. https://doi.org/10.3390/healthcare9030257

🎧 This post is a companion to Episode 1 of The Inward Sea:

Listen here on Podbean

Introduction

This is a podcast where we explore the intersection of mythology, folklore and modern life. I'm Dimitri and I'll be your companion on this journey of discovery. Each episode we'll follow routes charted in the old stories and let them lead us into forgotten currents and toward new shores. Welcome to the Inward Sea.

All the music you hear in this podcast (though, sadly not on Substack) is my own work. I particularly enjoyed writing and orchestrating the “Inward Sea Theme Music” but I don’t really know what I’m doing with mixing and mastering so if any of you lovely folks have any suggestions or feedback, please feel free to drop me a message!

Anyway, Hello!

And thanks for joining me in this, the introductory instalment of the Inward Sea. This piece is a bit different from what you'll see here in the future.

It's a chance for me to tell you a bit about myself and share some background information with you about this podcast and why it’s called The Inward Sea. A bit later, I’ll get into what you can expect from future episodes, as well as why and how these old stories, the myths and folktales I’ll be sharing with you, still matter in a world like ours.

Subscribe now

A Bit About Me

Since we're just setting out, it's probably best to begin with some introductions. My name is Dimitri. I'm a composer, an artist, and an educator. But more importantly for the purposes of this podcast, I’m a collector of stories.

I am going to be the voice that you hear on this podcast, but I don’t want to set myself up as the captain of your voyage. The Inward Sea is an image I came across in Herman Melville’s Moby Dick. It’s also a poem written by Howard Thurman - although, I only discovered that after I began jotting down my thoughts for the episodes.

You see, although I will be offering you insights I have gained as well as a way for you to explore stories for yourself, I don’t ever want you to ever believe that an interpretation or idea I share here is The Truth. It’s very difficult to say capital letters so I hope the idea is coming across here. When I say that I don’t want you to get the idea that what I share here is The Truth (did you hear those capital letters?) I mean that I don’t want you to believe that my interpretation of these stories is the only one or that any insight I share here is somehow dogma in a mythological, philosophical, or psychological gospel.

What I share here is a truth - one of many possible interpretations that I have discovered - things that resonated deeply with me and others with whom I have shared them with in various courses and workshops. I hope that you will feel empowered and courageous enough to embark on your own voyage of exploration and, when you return, share what you find with me, too.

So, although I’m going to the one doing most of the talking in this show, think of me more like someone who's collected a sea chest full of old maps. Maps, I would like to share with you in the hope that they inspire you to venture out into the deep to discover great things for, and within, yourself.

Over the course of many years now, I've done a lot of wandering and quite a bit of mapmaking, and what I've learned over and over again is that each discovery, each nugget meaning or insight that I've gleaned from these stories, opens into deeper mystery.

This podcast will be, in many ways, a journal of those explorations.

A Bit About Stories

As an educator, I've often found myself asking how we ended up surrounded by so much information and yet so cut off from a sense of meaning. I used to think that we were story-starved, that we had somehow wandered too far from the campfire circle of our ancestral storytellers.

But that's not quite right, is it?

Today, we're not short on stories. We're drowning in them, caught in a great flood of biblical or Babylonian proportions. Narratives and stories swirl around us constantly, competing for our attention, our emotional investment, and demanding our allegiance. They pour from the screens we carry around in our pockets. They arrive dressed as news or as entertainment, even as self-help manuals.

Many of the stories we are fed today aren’t about truth or genuine connection or personal growth—they’re about power. They’re crafted to capture our attention, to sell us something, and dictate who we should be in order to fit in and feel validated by others. In the process, they distract us from what truly matters, encouraging us to trade authentic self-expression and meaningful personal pursuits for superficial behaviours aimed at winning external approval.

But that is not what mythology and folklore do: each teller and listener glimpses something different in the same story, a unique reflection shaped by their own inner landscape. And yet, these stories remain shared, communal. The images in them have crossed language and cultural barriers precisely because they speak to the deeper parts of our humanity—the parts we all share.

Today, we may find these old stories written on the pages of books or on websites. Perhaps we find them being retold over and over in exactly the same way each time in videos or podcasts like this one. But here’s the secret. These stories were never made to written down or trapped in a single form of telling. They come alive when we tell them.

In the opening passages of his book Comparative Mythology1 professor Jaan Puhvel does a wonderful job of outlining how we ended up with the words “myth” and “mythology” for these old stories. The word is derived from the Proto-Indo-European root ‘muh-’ from which we get such other modern words as matter and mother. Professor Puhvel points out that originally the Greek concept of Mythos was simply speaking (as is communicating between people).

You see, when we allow these myths and folktales to live in our mouths rather than on the pages of a book, they begin to breathe and shift. When we lend them our own breath and give them form with our movement and our energy, our life, they begin to change. Each retelling is coloured and shaped by the swell and ebb of unconscious tides in the teller, and as we listen, the images conjured up in our minds spring directly from deep and unrehearsed places within us, places we don't often get to explore.

In this podcast, we are going to examine those images through the lens of Jungian thought and cultural symbolism. Not to master them or to pin them to boards like butterflies - because, once you pin a butterfly, it may still look like a butterfly but it does not behave like one. We are going to examine them, hold them lightly, turn them this way and that and get a sense of them, and then let them go again.

And one day, when we happen upon them again, we can take the moment to reexamine them to see how they may have grown or changed - or, perhaps, how we have.

Over the years, I've shared many tales with my students in classes and workshops. And now and then, someone asks me where I find stories. The truth is, I rarely go looking for them. And even when I do, the ones that speak the loudest are usually the ones I happen upon when I’m looking for something else entirely. Most of the time, stories arrive on their own.

I think it was Michael Mead2, one of the great storytellers of our time, who said that the story is not something that you choose. The story chooses you. And that really resonates with me.

Like Gandalf in The Lord of the Rings movies, stories are never late. They arrive precisely when they mean to - and in my experience, they often arrive a little early. Just early enough to make you wonder what they're all about. To carry them around in your pocket like a stone. Until life happens. And then, quite suddenly, the story seems to spring into action. And it delivers an offering of strange, unexpected wisdom that you didn't know you needed.

In the rational paradigm we're so accustomed to, it's easy to dismiss these moments as mere coincidence. But others, like psychologist Carl Jung, called this synchronicity3. A meaningful coincidence. An a-causal connecting principle that appears when two distinct signifiers of meaning come into proximity in the crucible of conscious experience.

The Japanese philosopher, and I hope I'm saying his name correctly, Yasuo Yuasa (湯浅 泰雄)4, once suggested that when body and mind are aligned, the world itself begins to speak. I believe that sometimes, stories are the shape that voice takes.

Caught by a Story

Before we dive into the bigger myths and folktales, I want to begin with a moment. A personal one. This is not a moment in which I found a story - but one in which a story caught me, and something in me began to shift, which ultimately led to the creation of this podcast.

Long ago, I had just left my home country and flown halfway around the world to teach English. I had cast off from everything familiar and stepped into the unknown. This was long before smartphones, before Google Maps conveniently lived in your pocket. A new friend, another English teacher living in the small Korean town where I had just arrived, lent me a CD audiobook of Moby Dick, and it became a kind of lifeline: one of the only English voices I heard each day.

I still remember the night I first heard this passage. I had just gotten home after getting completely lost on a walk through my new neighborhood, a place with no familiar landmarks and no natural compass to guide me. Back home, Table Mountain towered over the city where I'd lived my whole life. It anchored everything. You always knew where you were in relation to its shape. But here, there was no such anchor.

The sun had set while I was out walking, and I found myself in a snarl of narrow streets. The street lamps perched like fat, luminous birds amid an aerial jungle of tangled electric and telephone wires.

The wires… the streets… It was as if the old maxim, As above, so below, had taken on a literal, physical form. I passed the same doorway at least three times - later, I'd learn it was a Buddhist temple. Shop signs blinked at me in a language I couldn't yet pronounce, and every oddly-shaped city block of strangely mismatched architecture felt like a question I didn't know how to answer yet.

When I finally made it back to my tiny fourth-floor apartment, I took off my shoes and slid the CD into the laptop my employer had loaned me. (They were still called laptops back then, right? Not notebooks.) After popping the CD in, I collapsed onto the bed and let the narrator's voice wash over me like salt water.

It didn't feel like a recording. Despite the awful speakers and the incredibly enthusiastic fan of that old machine, it felt like someone was in the room with me, trying to tell me something.

And then, the narrator spoke these words.

“Consider the subtleness of the sea; how its most dreaded creatures glide under water, unapparent for the most part, and treacherously hidden beneath the loveliest tints of azure. Consider also the devilish brilliance and beauty of many of its most remorseless tribes, as the dainty embellished shape of many species of sharks. Consider, once more, the universal cannibalism of the sea; all whose creatures prey upon each other, carrying on eternal war since the world began.

Consider all this; and then turn to this green, gentle, and most docile earth; consider them both, the sea and the land; and do you not find a strange analogy to something in yourself? For as this appalling ocean surrounds the verdant land, so in the soul of man there lies one insular Tahiti, full of peace and joy, but encompassed by all the horrors of the half known life. God keep thee! Push not off from that isle, thou canst never return!”

Moby Dick: Chapter 58, “Brit”5

For some reason, that passage felt like electricity running through me as the narrator spoke. And it has travelled with me for years.

The image of that peaceful little island, Tahiti, surrounded by hidden monsters, speaks to something I think most of us have felt, that strange analogy to something within us, whether or not we've ever read Moby Dick.

Melville's warning, "Push not off from that isle. Thou canst never return." struck me deeply. I think I cried myself to sleep that night. Because I felt that fear so deeply. I’ve always struggled with separation anxiety and homesickness ever since I was child. That was one of the reasons I decided to try move half way around the world. Previously, I had also decided to try doing the highest bungee jump in the world to confront my fear of heights - but, in the words of Michael Ende, “that is another story for another time.”

Lying there in strange tiny bedroom in a strange small town, in a foreign country so far from my normal world, I felt what it means to physically have pushed off that known shore. I had left everything behind.

From my vantage point now, having been away from my “normal life” for the better part of adult life, I can tell you that, having pushed off, it's not that we can't go back.

Melville’s warning is far more subtle than that. Once we turn to face the unknown and step into it, the you who returns afterwards is never quite the same you as the one who left. The unknown transforms us if we're brave enough to face it.

That sea - the half-known life - as Melville refers to it, is an almost prophetic image of what the psychologist Carl Jung would later call the unconscious6. Although we are not aware of it, it is the deep from where all the energy of our psychic life springs. The images of dreams, imagination, creativity in all its forms, sudden surges of emotion - all these things spring from that deep well within us.

All the stories we tell - whether about seemingly fantastic creatures or everyday occurrences, even the stories we tell about ourselves and our experiences - spring from that source.

In it, there is amazing beauty and strength, but it is also where we hide our monsters.

Exploring those uncharted depths through the vehicle of stories is what exploring The Inward Sea is all about. Because stories, more than simply giving us a means to survive an encounter with the unknown both within and outside ourselves, give us the tools and opportunities to navigate and plumb the depths of the great Inward Sea.

So, this podcast is a kind of charting, a personal and shared exploration of those inner waters. The stories we explore here, myths, folktales, and fragments of cultural memory, have passed through countless mouths and minds before reaching us. With each telling, they've been shaped, not only by tradition, but by the soul of each storyteller. Over time, much has been worn away. But what remains? The images and patterns that stick. Those that resonate so deeply with so many people across the ages that they feel timeless, even sacred—universal.

There are many characters, arcs, and symbols that keep showing up in stories and in each of us, even though we can't explain why. We catch ourselves opening pandora’s jar, or contemplating an act of trickery that would allow us to gain something we desire like Loki or Prometheus. We may even find ourselves staring at our own magic mirrors of social media, enraged that we are not “the fairest in the land”…

And by turning to these images in stories which have been relevant for hundreds of years and exploring them, not just to master what theywhat they mean, but how they still move in us, we can become more aware of unconscious patterns in our own lives.

Bringing awareness to these unconscious parts of ourselves is a great work. One that Carl Jung wrote about extensively. A popular quote from Jung, and one that bears repeating here is, “until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”7

And these old stories are very good at helping us accomplish just that.

A Disclaimer

Now, before we wade in any deeper, I should say something very important. While this podcast may at times feel therapeutic, it isn't therapy. It's not a substitute for professional support, and I am not a licensed therapist.

What I offer here is companionship, not clinical guidance. A space for reflection, not diagnosis. You are the one steering your ship. I'm just here with a few stories and symbols, maybe even some insights, or maps, that might help you navigate and make some new discoveries.

I believe that storytelling is a healing practice. Not because stories magically fix everything, but because they give us a language for what we carry. They help us name things that have previously been unnamed, and they let us feel the shape of things that swim beneath the surface of our awareness. They offer us a vessel, an alchemical container, for parts of our experience that rational culture doesn't know how to hold.

Much of what I share here comes from years spent reading and wrestling with the works of writers like Jaan Puhvel, Marie-Louise von Franz, James Hillman, Marion Woodman, Robert Johnson8, Lewis Hyde, and Dr. Richard Katz, to name but a few.

And like them, I don't see mythology as something belonging to the past. It's not a museum of dead stories. It's a symbolic language, one that helps us understand where we are. And like any language, it's one we learn by listening. Not just with our ears, but with the deeper parts of ourselves.

Of course, after listening, the best way to master a language is through imitation. And maybe you'll find yourself telling one of these stories. Not from a page, but in your own voice with your own breath. Maybe even just to yourself. That's really when these stories come alive for you.

Our Journey

So, what can you expect from future episodes and instalment here on The Inward Sea?

Each piece will revolve around a myth or folktale, or sometimes just a part of one. As I share the story with you, pay attention to what you experience as you listen - not in an analytical way, but simply in a way that allows you to notice what images or sensations rise to the surface as the story unfolds.

Sometimes we might follow a theme, like descent, betrayal, transformation, or longing. Other times we might center our exploration around a single image, a thread, a labyrinth, or the crew of a single skiff sailing through the underworld. You might want to jot down a note or two about what resonates with you as we go through the story together.

After the story, we will begin exploring associations with the images that appear in the story. In the podcast, I will be sharing common associations I have uncovered through personal experience and research - I’ll do my best to share my sources with you, but for this step to be relevant, it is important that you also allow yourself to remain open to exploring whatever associations come up doe you, personally, as well.

Once we are familiar with an image and its associations — both cultural and personal — we will begin to explore the dynamic relationships between images to see how they interact with one another and how these patterns and processes that take place within ourselves and the world around us.

Finally, I’ll offer you a point or two on which to reflect to help you see how the interpretation offered lands in your own life.

Now, although these steps seem neatly organised on paper when laid out like this, in practice, things will be a little more blurry. We will often flow between discussing the associations with a specific image and exploring its dynamic relationship to other images because here, too, new associations might be brought to light.

To keep us grounded in this exploration, we will always return to the image as it appears in whatever narrative we are dealing with, because it is that image that sprang from the psyche when we first heard the story. It is the unique, waking dream that rose from somewhere within us created by a part of ourselves that we don’t have direct control over. It bears the fingerprints of our soul and makers mark of the unconscious, and by examining it we can come to learn more about what other surprising strengths may be swimming in our depths.

Throughout the process, and no matter the format, the invitation will remain the same: to listen deeply and to wander without needing to solve — to see what stirs beneath the surface of your own life.

Occasionally, and hopefully, you might hear guest voices, not experts necessarily, but fellow travelers with stories of their own. And always we'll be listening for something rising from below. The slow arc of a barnacled fin breaking the surface. Some old truth rising for breath just off the bow. Not loud, not showy, but unmistakable once you've heard it. Because that's what this podcast is: a space for mythic thinking.

Reflections on the Sea

You know, when I think about that Moby Dick quote, I'm struck by how much our perception of the sea has shifted over the years. Today, we stream documentaries full of coral gardens and curious creatures for enjoyment. Our hearts are warmed by narratives of divers and octopuses forming seemingly emotional friendships, and our screensavers are swaying kelp forests.

The sea still holds mystery, but it no longer holds the same terror. And that's not because the sea has changed. It's because we have. We learned to look at it more closely. We explored with curiosity and wonder. We listened. And when we approach even the most terrifying of its regions in this way, we find beauty. Through knowledge, we find relationship.

And I believe the same is true of the psyche. The more we turn inward with curiosity and courage, the more beauty and wonder we uncover in aspects of ourselves that may once have frightened us. And the more we bring the light of awareness to what we find in those inner depths, the more we discover surprising strengths and healing.

But I want to be clear. Our exploration isn't about endless self-analysis. It's not about turning inward just to stay there. The purpose of examining these things is to undertake a kind of alchemical magnum opus - a great work of transformation. And this is not something we can do in isolation.

It was Abraham Maslow that placed Self-Actualization at the top of a pyramid structure, but later in his life9, he broadened his ideas on this topic. Many indigenous peoples see people as being actualised by the community - and this wisdom is something we will return to over and over in this podcast. We are actualised by one another community, by how we respond to one another, and how we interact even when we do not always agree. The Self - an archetypal image that is part of the story we tell about our own existence - can only exist in relation to “the other” or “others”. And so, to be “self-actualised” we need to learn how to bring these two seemingly opposing poles into harmony. We need to reach outward.

The great work - the truest act of personal transformation - is not when we achieve our fitness or financial goals. It is when we succeed in bringing strength and beauty of which we are unconscious into the light of conscious awareness so that we can choose to utilise it. That is integration.

I believe that tending to the inner world, learning to recognize the patterns of these stories at play within us, makes us more able to return to the outer world with presence, compassion, and clarity. It allows us to rejoin the collective story of the human species, not as experts or heroes, but as people who are whole enough to listen to one another and to respond — and, ultimately, to take our place in the wider human community, as flawed and as luminous as each of us are.

So I want to draw your attention to where you're standing, right now. We're standing at the edge, the very shoreline of this podcast. Before us lies an exciting journey.

When was the last time you felt yourself standing at the edge of something vast? Or felt the horizon pulling at something unnamed, and perhaps untamed, inside you?

What is your Tahiti? Your insular green and gentle island of comfort and safety? And what lives just beyond it, waiting for you?

If, like me, you've noticed a stirring beneath the surface, the call of something truer, quieter, deeper, something that doesn't demand answers, but asks for your attention, and if you've begun to wonder what might happen if you followed that feeling, gently, curiously, and compassionately, without needing to name it too soon, then this is your invitation.

Not to leap, just to listen, and to see what rises from within yourself.

So welcome aboard. This is where we weigh anchor and cast off. This is where we set sail.

And since we're travelling by boat, feel free to lean out over the rails. I'd love to know what you see moving beneath the surface of the swift waters that carry us.

Sometimes it may get deep, even dark. The sea, after all, isn't safe.

We may not have life jackets, but we will have stories. They'll be our maps, our lanterns. And if we ever find ourselves in waters beyond what we know how to navigate, don't worry: help has a way of finding those who stay open to the path.

And besides, as Melville has already told us, that insular island of Tahiti may be lovely. It may feel comfortable, but it's very small, especially compared to the vast undiscovered territory unfolding within us.

Final Thoughts

Next time, we'll dive into the myth of Minos, the king who asked for a sign from the sea, and we'll find out what happened to him when he refused to honour his covenant with the deep.

But for now, thank you. It's been a pleasure to share this space with you, and if this offering stirred something in you, I'd be honoured if you'd subscribe, or share it with someone who might want to travel with us.

You can also find the most comfortable place to listen to the podcast version of these essays here at my Podcast Hub page:

I hope to journey further with you soon. Until next time, I’m Dimitri, and you've been listening to the Inward Sea.