Un labirinto di simboli. Sul doppio volto del potere attraverso Minosse e il Minotauro

In the collective imaginary the labyrinth intertwines, through the common thread of myth, anthropology, art, architecture, psychology, continually fascinating the most diverse scholars and artists. The present paper leads back the labyrinthine multiplicity – symbol of complexity par excellence – to the Minos-Minotaur couple: one king, the other monster. But is this provision really that strict? Following the archaeological data, together with René Girard’s famous unified theory of myths and rites, the face of the archaic monstrous double emerges, in which royalty and monstrosity cannot be distinguished. This mythical-political dyad – which in modernity we separate using the categories of legitimacy and illegitimacy – paradigmatically weaves the symmetry between the sacred and violence, at the origins of any power