Icarus' wings

[The Perilous Dreamer]

Icarus' wings, which were made by Daedalus out of wax and bird feathers.

[The Perilous Dreamer]

Icarus

In Greek mythology, Icarus (/ˈɪkərəs/; Ancient Greek: Ἴκαρος, romanized: Íkaros, pronounced [ǐːkaros]) was the son of the master craftsman Daedalus, the creator of the Labyrinth. Icarus and Daedalus attempt to escape from Crete by means of wings that Daedalus constructed from feathers and wax. Daedalus warns Icarus first of complacency and then of hubris, instructing him to fly neither too low nor too high, lest the sea's dampness clog his wings or the sun's heat melt them. Icarus ignores Daedalus’s instructions not to fly too close to the sun. The wax in Icarus’s wings melts. He tumbles out of the sky, falls into the sea, and drowns. Thus sparking the idiom, "don't fly too close to the sun".

[The Perilous Dreamer]

Icarus's father Daedalus, a very talented and remarkable Athenian craftsman, built the Labyrinth for King Minos of Crete near his palace at Knossos to imprison the Minotaur, a half-man, half-bull monster born of his wife and the Cretan bull. Minos imprisoned Daedalus himself in the labyrinth because he gave Minos's daughter, Ariadne, a clew (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 to the heat melted the wax. Icarus kept flapping his wings but soon realized that he had no feathers left and that he was only flapping his featherless arms, and so Icarus fell into the sea and drowned. Daedalus wept for his son and called the nearest land Icaria, an island southwest of Samos, in memory of him. Today, the location of his burial on the island bears his name, and the sea near Icaria in which he drowned is called the Icarian Sea.

Hellenistic writers give euhemerising variants in which the escape from Crete was actually by boat, provided by Pasiphaë, for which Daedalus invented the first sails, to outstrip Minos' pursuing galleys, and that Icarus fell overboard en route to Sicily and drowned. Heracles erected a tomb for him.

[The Perilous Dreamer]

Seth Godin's 2012 The Icarus Deception points to the historical change in how Western culture both propagated and interpreted the Icarus myth arguing that "we tend to forget that Icarus was also warned not to fly too low, because seawater would ruin the lift in his wings. Flying too low is even more dangerous than flying too high, because it feels deceptively safe."