A thread of Ariadne
A way to navigate through difficulties
A path to follow to achieve a difficult result
A guide between two points that are difficult to connect
Take a large maze, place a Minotaur in it as far from the exit as possible, then send Theseus an envelope containing photos of the former and a small tape recorder that will tell him that his mission, if he accepts it, will consist of going to kill the creature shown in the photos.
Here is the starting point of this mythological story, which will introduce us to Ariadne and her famous thread.
In those days, then, there was in Crete, whose king was Minos, the Labyrinth, at the bottom of which the Minotaur, a monster with a human body and a bull’s head, a devourer of human flesh, devoured each year seven boys and seven girls that Athens delivered to Crete to prolong the peace with Minos.
To put an end to the sending of this odious tribute, Theseus volunteers to be part of the next shipment with the intention of killing the Minotaur.
But, assuming the mission succeeds, the problem then is to find one's way out of the labyrinth.
Fortunately, once he set foot in Crete, Ariadne, daughter of Minos and half-sister of the Minotaur, falls in love with Theseus.
With the help of Daedalus, the designer of the Labyrinth (and, incidentally, the father of Icarus), she then proposes to him a simple stratagem to easily find the way out of the trap: to unwind a spool of thread whose end is tied to one of the lintels of the entrance, a thread whose twists and turns he will only need to follow on his way back to find himself in the open air.
And indeed, once the Minotaur had been sent to his eternal rest, Theseus emerged from the Labyrinth thanks to Ariadne’s thread.
It is from this perfectly true story, of course, that our expression comes.
Much to the chagrin of the liberals, there is an Ariadne's thread between economic liberalism, on the one hand, and separatist movements, national uprisings, and racist demonstrations, on the other.
The Expansion - Article from April 28, 1995
(…) philosophers to whom wisdom, like another Ariadne, seems to have given a ball of thread that they have been unwinding since the beginning of the world through the labyrinth of human affairs.
Victor Hugo - The Hunchback of Notre-Dame - 1831
Have a good day
Marylena