Icarus

[1][4] Icarus's father Daedalus, a very talented Athenian craftsman, built a 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.

Daedalus fashioned two pairs of wings for himself and his son, made of metal feathers held to a leather frame by beeswax.

[9] According to scholia on Euripides, Icarus thought himself greater than Helios, the Sun himself, and the god punished him by directing his powerful rays at him, melting the beeswax.

[10] 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's pursuing galleys, that Icarus fell overboard en route to Sicily and drowned, and that Heracles erected a tomb for him.

[15] Hyginus, among the Augustan writers who wrote about it in Latin in his Fabulae, tells of the bovine love affair of Pasiphaë, daughter of the Sun, that resulted in the birth of the Minotaur.

Ovid's version of the Icarus myth and its connection to Phaethon influenced the mythological tradition in English literature[16] reflected in the writings of Chaucer,[17] Marlowe,[18] Shakespeare,[19] Milton,[20] and Joyce.

[21] In Renaissance iconography, the significance of Icarus depends on context: in the Orion Fountain at Messina, he is one of many figures associated with water; but he is also shown on the Bankruptcy Court of the Amsterdam Town Hall – where he symbolizes high-flying ambition.

[29] In psychology, there have been synthetic studies of the Icarus complex with respect to the alleged relationship between fascination for fire, enuresis, high ambition, and Ascensionism.

Henry Murray having proposed the term Icarus complex, apparently found symptoms particularly in mania where a person is fond of heights, fascinated by both fire and water, narcissistic and observed with fantastical or far-fetched imaginary cognition.