Ariadne

"And so we may turn to him, as did Ariadne. The flax for the linen of his thread he has gathered from the fields of the human imagination... Furthermore we have not even to risk the adventure alone; for the heroes of all time have gone before us; the labyrinth is thoroughly known. We have only to follow the thread of the hero path, and where we had thought to find an abomination we shall find a god."
Joseph Campbell "The Hero with a Thousand Faces"

The Swiss psychologist, Karl Jung, once said that the most difficult thing a person had to do in life was to confront and integrate the 'shadow', or dark, negative side of the personality.
The ancient Greek story of Theseus and the Minotaur speaks metaphorically of this process. Briefly told; Pasiphae, queen of Crete, after insulting the goddess Aphrodite, is cursed with an inhuman passion for a bull from which she bears a genetic freak, half man, half bull. In shame, her husband, King Minos, has a network of intricate passageways built in which to hide his 'monster-son.' Every nine years the subject state of Athens is forced to send fourteen youths, male and female, to be sent into the maze to be devoured by the Minotaur (Minos' Bull). One year the son of King Aegeus of Athens offers to go with them. Although the venture is considered completely suicidal, the young warrior, Theseus, is aided by the Cretan king's daughter, Ariadne. She give him a ball of golden thread with which to find his way back once the monster has been met and overcome.
Ariadne can be understood to represent in symbolic form that aspect of the feminine that contains seemingly contradictory natures, the passivity of the deer and the fierceness of the wolf. She threfore becomes a mediator between pairs of opposites, the 'guide into the labyrinth' that enables the hero-soul to face the dark secret and return to daylight.