Since the death of Christine Rosamond Benton I have spent thousands of hours making her artistic legacy a BRAND. There is no money in this – yet. All the sales of Rosamond’s artwork, has grown cold. This is because the people put in charge of our creative family legacy, were like hogs at the trough waiting for IT to come and throw buckets of slop in.

Like all great endeavors and adventures, they begin with folly and misunderstanding. This is the case of Belle and my collaboration, which is an agreement for her to be my Muse. This means her job is to inspire me to do great and wondrous works. Whether these works will produce large sums of money, is to be seen. I am not interested in the money, as much as I love my work. I was interested in realizing money. But, after my daughter took herself and my grandson, and handed my Heirs over to a drunken, loud-mouthed, racist pig, I have chosen Belle Burch as my Heir. This includes any good work she is involved with, especially regarding the Homeless.

The terms of our agreement awaits to be put in a contract. As things stand now, Belle must submit for approval any use of my copyrighted material. This applies to anyone she knows. There is no promise of monies and property.

What is truly extraordinary, is that Belle’s mother and father have already done much of the work in regards to the Labyrinth. Let us begin at it’s entrance and work our way to the core.

Within minutes of meeting Belle, I am telling her my blog and my work centers around the Sleeping Beauty Princess named Rosamond. The legend of Fair Rosamond is linked to the story of Ariadne and the clew of thread. Ariadne is seen as a weaving goddess. My Rosamond ancestors were weavers. It is time to wake Ariadne from her long sleep.

Jon Presco

Copyright 2014

Brand is the “name, term, design, symbol, or any other feature that identifies one seller’s product distinct from those of other sellers.”[1] Brands are used in business, marketing, and advertising. Initially, livestock branding was adopted to differentiate one person’s cattle from another’s by means of a distinctive symbol burned into the animal’s skin with a hot branding iron. A modern example of a brand is Coca Cola which belongs to the Coca-Cola Company.

In Hesiod and most other accounts, Theseus abandoned Ariadne sleeping on Naxos, and Dionysus rediscovered and wedded her. In a few versions of the myth,[6] Dionysus appeared to Theseus as they sailed away from Crete, saying that he had chosen Ariadne as his wife, and demanded that Theseus leave her on Naxos for him; this has the effect of absolving the Athenian culture-hero of desertion. The vase-painters of Athens often showed Athena leading Theseus from the sleeping Ariadne to his ship.

With Dionysus, she was the mother of Oenopion, the personification of wine, Staphylus (related to grapes), Thoas, Peparethus, Phanus, Eurymedon, Enyeus, Ceramus, Maron, Euanthes, Latramys and Tauropolis.[7] Her wedding diadem was set in the heavens as the constellation Corona.

She remained faithful to Dionysus, but was later killed by Perseus at Argos. In other myths Ariadne hanged herself from a tree, like Erigone and the hanging Artemis, a Mesopotamian theme. Some scholars have posited, due to her thread-spinning and winding associations, that she was a weaving goddess, like Arachne, supporting this assertion with the mytheme of the Hanged Nymph (see weaving in mythology). Dionysus descended into Hades and brought her and his mother Semele back. They then joined the gods in Olympus.

Ariadne as a goddess[edit]

Ariadne as the consort of Dionysos: bronze appliqué from Chalki, Rhodes, late fourth century BCE, (Louvre)

Karl Kerenyi and Robert Graves theorize that Ariadne (whose name they derive from Hesychius’ listing of Άδνον, a Cretan-Greek form for arihagne, “utterly pure”) was a Great Goddess of Crete, “the first divine personage of Greek mythology to be immediately recognized in Crete”,[8] once archaeology had begun. Kerenyi observes that her name is merely an epithet and claims that she was originally the “Mistress of the Labyrinth”, both a winding dance-ground and in the Greek view a prison with the dreaded Minotaur at its centre. Kerenyi notes a Linear B inscription from Knossos, “to all the gods, honey… to the mistress of the labyrinth honey” in equal amounts, suggesting to him that the Mistress of the Labyrinth was a Great Goddess in her own right.[9] Professor Barry Powell has suggested she was Minoan Crete’s Snake Goddess.[10]

Plutarch, in his vita of Theseus, which treats him as a historical individual, reports that in the Naxos of his day, an earthly Ariadne was separate from a celestial one:
“Some of the Naxians also have a story of their own, that there were two Minoses and two Ariadnes, one of whom, they say, was married to Dionysos in Naxos and bore him Staphylos and his brother, and the other, of a later time, having been carried off by Theseus and then abandoned by him, came to Naxos, accompanied by a nurse named Korkyne, whose tomb they show; and that this Ariadne also died there.”
In a kylix by the painter Aison (c. 425 – c. 410 BCE)[11] Theseus drags the Minotaur from a temple-like labyrinth, but the goddess who attends him, in this Attic representation, is Athena.

The Vatican Sleeping Ariadne, long called Cleopatra, a Roman marble in late Hellenistic taste
An ancient cult of Aphrodite-Ariadne was observed at Amathus, Cyprus, according to the obscure Hellenistic mythographer Paeon of Amathus; Paeon’s works are lost, but his narrative is among the sources cited by Plutarch in his vita of Theseus (20.3-.5). According to the myth that was current at Amathus, the second most important Cypriote cult centre of Aphrodite, Theseus’ ship was swept off-course and the pregnant and suffering Ariadne put ashore in the storm. Theseus, attempting to secure the ship, was inadvertently swept out to sea, thus being absolved of abandonment. The Cypriote women cared for Ariadne, who died in childbirth and was memorialized in a shrine. Theseus, returning, overcome with grief, left money for sacrifices to Ariadne and ordered two cult images, one of silver and one of bronze, set up. At the observation in her honour on the second day of the month Gorpiaeus, one of the young men lay on the ground vicariously experiencing the throes of labour. The sacred grove in which the shrine was located was called the grove of Aphrodite Ariadne.[12]

In reading the account, the primitive aspect of the cult at Amathus would appear to be much older than the Athenian-sanctioned shrine of Aphrodite, who has assumed Ariadne (hagne, “sacred”) as an epithet at Amathus.