going in from the left, the other from the right. The game involved two young men racing to the center to see which one of them would reach the maiden first. A number of suggestions have been made as to what this game signifies. One is that the female in the center represents Helen, the acclaimed beauty over whom the Greeks and Trojans went to war. Another is that “saving the girl” is a metaphor for young men reclaiming their female energy in order to become whole human beings again. This pagan symbolism has also been found on a wall of a fifteenth-century church in Nyland, Finland where a painting of a labyrinth depicts a virgin waiting at the center.
Labyrinths in Popular Culture
In fairy stories, while labyrinths or mazes are seldom implicitly mentioned, the notion of the Prince hacking his way through a dense, complex forest in order to reach the Sleeping Beauty, is just one metaphor for the trials and tests one must engage in to reach a prized goal. Indeed, many such stories involve the protagonists enduring a series of tasks – for which they appear initially unprepared – that suggest a journey to find their female side (the “princess”) in order to become complete human beings.
The Jungfruringen or Virgin’s Ring, Sweden, with its two entrances. Young men would race each other to reach the maiden in the center first.
Given the richness and complexity of the labyrinth as a metaphor for life, this motif has captured the imagination of writers, most of who allude to intricacies or entanglements of one sort of another. In Troilus and Cressida, Shakespeare writes: “How now Thersites? What, lost in the Labyrinth of thy furie?” The poet Shelley opined: “From slavery and religion’s labyrinth caves, Guide us.” And from W.B. Yeats: “Does the imagination dwell the most, Upon a woman won or woman lost? If on the lost, admit you turned aside, From a great labyrinth out of pride.”
In the world of popular fiction, labyrinths – explicit or allegorical – appear in the likes of Mervyn Peak’s Gormenghast novel Titus Groan, in the description of the Stone Lanes region; as the Mines of Moria in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings and in Terry Pratchett’s Small Gods with the “booby-trapped labyrinth of Ephebe.” J.K. Rowling has even incorporated a maze in the Tri-Wizard Tournament, that her hero must navigate at the end of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire.
But my favorite example of a labyrinth in a book is in Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere, described as a dark, contemporary Alice in Wonderland. In the story, an ordinary man named Richard Mayhew becomes trapped in London Below and must negotiate the labyrinth and its beast in order to reach and vanquish the ultimate enemy – an angel who has “gone bad.” Mayhew alone succeeds where others (traditionally more powerful) in his party fail, despite losing the talisman that he had been told would ensure his safe passage through the labyrinth. After successfully killing the beast, our hero is told to apply its blood to his eyes and tongue so that he can negotiate the passages with ease.
The wonderful message of this part of the book is that facing and disposing of the “monster within” – a concept Jung referred to as our “shadow” – is a precursor to converting the journey from a puzzling maze into a labyrinth. By doing this, your way becomes “straight and true” during which you know “…instinctively every twist, every path, every alley…” Thus, Gaiman reminds us, tackling the inner Beast – whether that be our fears, our self-neglect, our cowardice or denial of reality – allows us to navigate life’s journey by tapping into our inner compass or intuition. In this way we discover that life’s path involves an easier and more straightforward approach than we originally thought. (For more on how we can change our own lives from resembling mazes to becoming more like labyrinths, see here.)
Also worth mentioning in this context is the movie Labyrinth, Jim Henson’s dark, allegorical tale of a teenager who wishes her annoying baby brother would be taken away by goblins – and he is; a classic case of “beware of what you wish for.” Our heroine, Sarah, is then given thirteen hours to rescue the boy, before he is turned into a goblin. She accomplishes her quest, which superficially involves solving riddles and a race against time, but in essence it concerns the process of growing up and discovering what is really important in life.
Labyrinths and Christianity
It may seem surprising that a symbol so obviously associated with pagan beliefs came to find its way into so many Christian churches. However, the taking over of pagan symbols and ideas was something the Roman Catholic Church engaged in extensively. For example, pagan communities tended to celebrate festivals every six to eight weeks, to mark the changing seasons and solar cycles. Because these were so well established throughout northern Europe, particularly in Britain, many were simply overlain with Christian symbolism. Hence, Yule or the winter solstice became Christmas, Samhain became All Saint’s Day, and the spring equinox became Easter. The latter festival, incidentally, is named after the German fertility goddess Eostre or Ostara, which comes from the same root as the female hormone oestrogen. Not surprisingly, given the fertility link and the nature of female reproduction, the symbol of Eostre is an egg – hence the notion of Easter eggs, which was a custom engaged in by pagan communities long before Christianity came on the scene.
Indeed, it has been argued that the Christian figure of Mary, mother of Jesus Christ was recreated from the ancient concept of the Great Mother Goddess in her triple archetypal roles of Virgin, Mother, and Wise Woman. There were certainly plenty of precedents for virgin births among the pre-Christian pantheon of Gods. The oldest of divinities, Gaia, appeared out of nothing to give birth to Uranus, the starlit sky, while the patriarch of the Greek gods was originally called Zeus Marnas or “Virgin born Zeus.” Any number of Greek heroes, including Perseus who slayed the Gorgon Medusa, and Jason of Argonaut fame, were said to be virgin born. The reason why the Christian church has resisted the worship of Mary as anything other than the earthly mother of Jesus was because she was based on a composite of many pagan goddesses. However, by giving this archetype a role to play within its religion, the Catholic Church ensured that their new, monotheist, patriarchal religion became relevant to people who were polytheist and largely matrifocal. As well as re-defining the Mother Goddess as the Virgin Mary, the Church changed many other pagan deities into saints. In one example, the Celtic goddess Brighid became St. Brigit (or Brigid).
In the same way that the Holy Roman Church appropriated existing pagan archetypes and festivals, it built its places of worship on sites which ancient peoples had long revered for their sacred energy. Many churches in England were built on “ley lines” (the phenomenon of electromagnetic energy sometimes called Earth “chi”) because the only way the Catholic church could integrate non-Christians into their own religion was to appropriate the sacred sites at which they already worshipped.
The labyrinth is a wonderful tool that engages people easily and that can be used to address deeper issues around spirituality and the best way to journey through life. So, instead of throwing the baby out with the bathwater, the Christian Church appropriated it for its own needs. The Christian church could not change people’s long-held faith, so they simply Christianized it. In the process, to set theirs apart from pagan examples, church labyrinths became more intricate in their design and ornate in their execution. They also became associated with Biblical cities, such as Jerusalem and Jericho – the latter possibly deriving from the Roman view of labyrinths as a kind of fortified city.
Contemporary Labyrinths
Aside from all the wonderful examples of labyrinths springing up around the world today – many of which we will read about in later chapters – this ancient symbol is proliferating on that most modern of tools – the Internet. If you are interested in the use of the labyrinth as a device in on-line and other interactive games, the World Wide Web will lead you, labyrinth-like, to the key resources.