Here are some traditions, customs and modern cultural aspects regarding Daedalus and Icarus:
- In Pliny's Natural History he is credited with inventing carpentry "and with it the saw, axe, plumb-line, drill, glue, and isinglass".
- Pausanias, in travelling around Greece, attributed to Daedalus numerous archaic wooden cult figures that impressed him: "All the works of this artist, though somewhat uncouth to look at, nevertheless have a touch of the divine in them."
- It is said he first conceived masts and sails for ships for the navy of Minos. He is said to have carved statues so well they looked as if alive; even possessing self-motion. They would have escaped if not for the chain that bound them to the wall.
- Daedalus gave his name to any Greek artificer and to many Greek contraptions that represented dextrous skill. At Plataea there was a festival, the Daedala, in which a temporary wooden altar was fashioned, and an effigy was made from an oak-tree and dressed in bridal attire. It was carried in a cart with a woman who acted as bridesmaid. The image was called Daedale and the archaic ritual given an explanation through a myth to the purpose.
- In the period of Romanticism, Daedalus came to denote the classic artist, a skilled mature craftsman
- In the period of Romanticism, Icarus symbolized the romantic artist, whose impetuous, passionate and rebellious nature, as well as his defiance of formal aesthetic and social conventions, may ultimately prove to be self-destructive.
- Stephen Dedalus, in Joyce's "Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man" envisages his future artist-self "a winged form flying above the waves ... a hawk-like man flying sunward above the sea, a prophecy of the end he had been born to serve”.
- Ovid's treatment of the Icarus myth and its connection with that of Phaëthon influenced the mythological tradition in English literature as received and interpreted by major writers such as Chaucer, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Milton, and Joyce.
- Bruegel's Landscape with the Fall of Icarus (ca. 1558), famous for relegating the fall to a scarcely noticed event in the background
- 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. The 16th-century painting Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, traditionally but perhaps erroneously attributed to Pieter Bruegel the Elder, was the inspiration for two of the 20th century's most notable English-language poems.
- Literary interpretation has found in the myth the structure and consequence of personal over-ambition. An Icarus-related study of the Daedalus myth was published by the French hellenist Françoise Frontisi-Ducroux.
- 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.
- In the psychiatric mind features of disease were perceived in the shape of the pendulous emotional ecstatic-high and depressive-low of bipolar disorder. 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.
This is just the tip of the iceberg of what can be collected and created regarding this myth. It can be related to modern political events:
- The 2001 twin towers disaster.
- Deadalus is an inspiration for Jesus Christ, who is depicted also with wings. The airplane shape is that of a cross in the sky, so it can explain modern Antisemitism.
- Theodore Herzel envisioned the airplane as something which will be depended of movement in order to stay in the sky. He wrote a novel about the inventor of the flying machine who destroy it after it create wars.
- The decision to build or not to build an airport or an airplane.
