The Labyrinth
On the windswept Cornish coast, in a valley that leads down to the sea, mist drifts and water thunders over granite and slate. Nestled between shaded woods and the wild seacoast, the desolate Trewethett Mill stands beside the river. Within its shadow the Rocky Valley Mazes, as they are commonly known, are carved into the rockface. Although they are of mysterious origin, the labyrinthine pattern echoes the Cretan Labyrinth and the Mediterranean, from where in the distant past, fine glassware and amphorae were brought to nearby Tintagel Castle. However, the origin of the labyrinth is older still, as ancient petroglyphs found in Nevada, Italy, and Norway among others. Long equated with transformation, the torturous path of life, and the inner process of regeneration and integration. The curves of the path may be compared to the circumambulation, or circulation of spirits in alchemy, and the churning of the primordial ocean which brings forth Soma, the elixir of immortality.
In North America, the Hopi of Arizona, used the “symbol of the Cretan Labyrinth, especially during their Wuwuchim ceremony…[Where] the labyrinth is connected to the emergence of myth… all the lines and passages within the maze forming the universal plan of the Creator which man must follow on his Road of Life… While to other Native American tribes, it was the point of emergence and path along which their distant ancestors entered the world.”
In ancient Egypt seals that bore a labyrinth design were intended to protect the dead, while Greek myth further alludes to the belief that the labyrinth was a prison where the entrance to Hades is hidden, and in the Sanskrit Epic of The Ramayana, it is an impregnable castle and the lair of Ravana the demon king.
The significance of the pattern of the labyrinth has been variously suggested as the return to Paradise, to the cosmic centre where man and the divine meet. “The circle of the labyrinth is time and its continuous line is eternity and the Centre, as has been said, is the principle of equilibrium, non-manifestation, the reconciliation of the opposites, the quintessence of the Alchemists and Aristotle's 'Unmoved Mover'.”
It is the path of the initiate, from the profane to the sacred, a symbol of both exclusion and difficulty and entering and finding. This may be seen with Theseus who is “spun into darkness by Ariadne’s ball of silver thread, in the way that skeins of light unwind from the ball of the moon until it’s all gone”. While Ariadne herself may be seen as a goddess of fate and a protector of heroes, she may also represent the soul, or psyche, whose thread leads the initiate through the darkness and on towards the centre.
Ariadne’s thread is echoed in the European thread and rope dances. These Labyrinth dances or maze games such as Troy, Shepherd’s Race and Julian’s Bower evoke the old myths of the sun goddess liberated in the spring from the dark prison of winter. A memory of ancient ritual and ceremony, Janet McCrickard in her excellent book The Eclipse of the Sun, explains that: “Several kinds of labyrinth or “paradise” hopscotch played in Germany’s evoke the Sun-Goddess, a mysterious lady whom the players seek in the centre, or at the “top of the stairs” – the game recalls the spring labyrinth rites of Baltic, German and Swedish folk-tradition, where the young sun goddess was sought in her prison by the twin-star gods as well as the Baltic image of the Sun-Goddess as a red rose in a high tree. In Sweden too, the sun goddess is a spinning woman who has to put in an early shift, getting the golden thread (sunbeams) ready for her dawning:
“Mistress sun sat on a bare stone
And spun on her golden distaff
For three hours before dawn.”’
The idea of the labyrinth as a celestial mirror was also suggested by Geoffrey Ashe in his book Ancient Wisdom, where “the seven coils of the maze represent the circling path of the seven stars of the Great Bear, with the pole at its centre.” Seven is also associated with the seven classical planets, the seven gates through which the Sumerian Goddess Inanna descended into the underworld, and the seven rays of the Theosophical tradition.
A lunar connection to the labyrinth is found in West Ceram in Indonesia, where it is said that at the beginning of the world, men danced the labyrinth while the women remained at the centre. This spiral of nine cycles links us back to the beautiful Celtic lands and to the Spiral Castle and the Silver Wheel. Often connected to death and rebirth,one of the most famous examples of spiral or triskelioncarvings are found at the megalithic site of Brú na Bóinne, or Newgrange in Ireland. Over five thousand years old, they echo the spirals found throughout nature, in galaxies, weather patterns, vine tendrils and fossils of ammonites. The spiral is also a universal symbol of growth and expansion, from ancient petroglyphs in Arizona, Australia and Europe, to the Armenian eternity symbol, the Māori’s ever-spiralling carved art and Koru tattoos.
This idea of growth and an inner unfolding may be seen with perhaps one of the most well-known examples of an initiation and a spiritual journey, Dante’s Divine Comedy. Within its pages, Dante teaches us to “unfold our eternal life” to understand that whether initiation takes place in a cave or a purpose-built labyrinth, ultimately it is the darkness within where we are transformed. As the great mythologist Joseph Campbell wrote, for “although our voyage is to be outward, it is also to be inward, to the sources of all great acts which are not out there, but in here, in us all, where the Muses dwell”.
