. Barye : life and works of Antoine Louis Barye ... in memory of an exhibition of his bronzes, paintings, and water-colors, held at New York, in aid of the fund for his monument at Paris. her and mother of Minotaur, their properplace as symbols of heavenly bodies, because their respective sexes donot agree with the ordinary view of sun and moon. But if we remem-ber that the Germans retain the ancient idea of the sun as a womanwhich we find among the Lapps and Japanese we have the clew. Minosis the moon in its male form. Pasiphae (all-shiner) is the sun in itsfemale form. Minotaur is their offs
. Barye : life and works of Antoine Louis Barye ... in memory of an exhibition of his bronzes, paintings, and water-colors, held at New York, in aid of the fund for his monument at Paris. her and mother of Minotaur, their properplace as symbols of heavenly bodies, because their respective sexes donot agree with the ordinary view of sun and moon. But if we remem-ber that the Germans retain the ancient idea of the sun as a womanwhich we find among the Lapps and Japanese we have the clew. Minosis the moon in its male form. Pasiphae (all-shiner) is the sun in itsfemale form. Minotaur is their offspring and has like its father theideas of night, demoniac powers and the labyrinths of the underworld and the starry sky connected with it. Phoenician in origin, thesacrifices of children to the horned moon-god come to an end whenTheseus, the male sun-god of a higher race represented by the Greeksproper, makes his way through the labyrinth of night and destroys thedemon of darkness. As the Greek influence predominated the godswhich could be identified with another race were forced into repulsiveand degraded forms. The Minotaur occurs on coins of Cnossus, once a flourishing com- 84. THESEUS AND MINOTAUR ON COINS mercial city on the northern coast of Crete. He has a hnman form, but abulls head, the horns recalling the moon when at the crescent, exactlyas in the case of Diana, the female moon, according to ideas more purelyGreek. He is shown running or kneeling and holds in each hand alarge globe, for which reason Minotaur has been mistaken hitherto fora sun-god, together with the fact that on the same coin but on the oppo-site face the picture of the labyrinth is completed by a swastika or four-leg, which is generally a sign of the sun. The globes in the hands of therunning Minotaur however may be considered to mean the stealing ofthe world of light by the demon of the dark; the sun-emblem on thelabyrinth merely represents Theseus. On later coins we have a nakedyouth seated on a
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