Icarus (or ball of string) in order to help Theseus, the enemy of Minos, to survive the Labyrinth and defeat the Minotaur. Daedalus fashioned two pairs of wings out of wax and feathers for himself and his son. Daedalus tried his wings first, but before trying to escape the island, he warned his son not to fly too close to the sun, nor too close to the sea, but to follow his path of flight. Overcome by the giddiness that flying lent him, Icarus soared into the sky, but in the process he came too close to the sun, which due
The Silence of the Sirens Sirens. Canonically, Ulysses tied himself to his ship's mast so that he could experience the Sirens without being driven mad and jumping into the sea. He ordered his crew to stop their ears with wax, so that they would not be tempted by the siren song to steer the ship into the rocks on which the creatures perched. In Kafka's version, however, Ulysses puts wax in his own ears, and is then tied to the mast. Kafka's telling asserts that the Sirens' silence is an even more deadly weapon than their song, and further states that the Sirens fell silent