If the labyrinth is one of the original seats of religion and sovereignty, the history of the builder of the abode of the axe in Crete is rather telling. Daedalus built the labyrinth by order of King Minos, who wanted to hide in it the offspring of the relationship between his wife, Pasiphae, and a bull, a lunar animal, which Neptune had given to him as a gift. Ovid in the Metamorphoses:

Daedalus, a renowned master architect, did the work, confounding the usual lines of sight with a maze of conflicting passageways. Just as the Maeander plays in Phrygian fields, flowing back and forth and winding around in its ambiguous course so that sometimes it sees its own waters flowing toward it … So Daedalus made all those passageways wander, and he himself had a hard time finding his way back to the entrance of the deceptive building.¹

Sovereignty can be understood as an intricate labyrinth, even for those who know its nooks and crannies. Or may we compare it with the minotaur that hides in its center, a hybrid monster which excludes itself simultaneously from the animal and the human world? (0.10) Indeed, the first of the human sovereigns, the shaman, is a hybrid creature, belonging to both the human and the animal worlds, torn between the earthly and the divine. Perpetual inhabitant of the threshold between the natural and the supernatural (0.11). Giorgio Agamben arrives at a similar conclusion when he talks of the homo sacer and, by extension, the sovereign, as a caput lupinum or wolf’s head, a juridical expression that takes the werewolves as banned and proscribed creatures (0.17) forced to live in the threshold between the forest and the city.

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1. Ovid, Metamorphoses. VIII, 191-202. It is worth highlighting Ovid's simile between the labyrinth and the river Meander, which had already appeared in the fragment of Xenophon's Anabasis (0.3). The fact that this river—famous for its winding course, which survives in modern words such as “meander”— appears in the earliest Greek description of the paradeisos would seem to point to a certain labyrinthine and disconcerting quality of Persian hunting parks that is connected to the spiral, understood here as the primal figure of the threshold where the locus terribilis (0.5) “takes place.” ↩︎