The Bull and the Burnout
A mythic reflection on creative identity and psychic disconnection.
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.
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.
If you are listening to the episode, I hope you will appreciate the effort I went to in order to try get the Mandarin tones into an English sentence structure… It is remarkably difficult to shift between Greek, English, and Mandarin pronunciation in one paragraph. My poor head!
The well-adjusted ego, according to Jung is one that is able to hold the tension between opposites without needing to identify itself with one side.
For Minos, this tension exists between his own identity as the king, symbolised by the white bull, and Poseidon’s authority; the Minos-ego must hold the tension between being the obedient servant and the king at the same time.
In his essay, On the Nature of the Psyche, Jung writes:
“The ego keeps its integrity only if it does not identify with one of the opposites, and if it understands how to hold the balance between them. This is possible only if it remains conscious of both at once. However, the necessary insight is made exceedingly difficult not by one’s social and political leaders alone, but also by one’s religious mentors. They all want decision in favour of one thing, and therefore the utter identification of the individual with a necessarily one-sided “truth.” Even if it were a question of some great truth, identification with it would still be a catastrophe, as it arrests all further spiritual development. Instead of knowledge one then has only belief, and sometimes that is more convenient and therefore more attractive” (CW 8, §425).
Marie-Louise von Franz, one of Jung’s closest students (some might say disciples) reminds us that this is not always the case:
“The particular and obvious problem in interpreting mythological material, which even well-known Jungians stumble over, is whether the hero has to be treated as an ego or not. We tend to say the hero is the ego, the beautiful woman is his anima, and so on. This is not an interpretation but a pinning of Jungian concepts onto mythical images. However, there is a temptation to call the hero figure the ego. It is as if this figure would lure us into that idea. That has to do with the trickster nature of the unconscious” (Franz, 2017).
We’ll definitely be talking more about tricksters and the trickster nature of the unconscious later!
As a substack writer, I also struggle with the white bull illusion of mastery. I frequently fear I am not good enough of a writer or academically learned enough to speak on certain topics. Many of my insights come from intuition, but I fear being judged so I don't speak about them or back it up with academic and religious sources when I find it.
Even in this very comment I am having doubts whether I should post this or not. Will I be misunderstood? I should post a reflection (probably).
Since childhood at school, we are thought to base our thoughts on established sources to avoid fake news. The "established sources" are mostly the consensus viewpoint. We are not taught to ponder "radical" viewpoints, because teachers can't teach something they don't know.
Even if they say "you are free to question", deep down, everyone knows profound questions aren't really welcome.
People have trouble in life because they don't know how to meditate. They don't know how to discern truth from lie without recurring to someone else. They don't know their innate gifts. They don't know thyself.
They blame their failures on society, politics, capitalism, their parents, their social class and basically anyone except themselves.
I really like your work here and how you present it—especially the questions at the end.
I found a lot of inspiration myself from the minotaur and the maze in greek mythology.