Labyrinths | Ancient Labyrinths | Christian Labyrinths
Labyrinths
The archetypal labyrinth – a complex pattern starts with a simple trick of draughtsmanship. Mark out a cross, with four dots at the angles:
Where did this pattern originate? And when? It can be found far to the east, in China, and even on the pottery of the pre-Colombian people in the Americas. But its heartland seems to be Mediterranean countries, where examples scratched on pottery or stamped on coins date back several thousand years.
What was the pattern for? Nobody knows exactly. Obviously it decorated pottery, but did it have other levels of meaning? Could it have been scratched on the earth by ancient peoples and used for religious rituals? Some have suggested this but there is no real evidence.
But the ancient Greek tale of Theseus and the Minotaur embedded the labyrinth idea in the imaginations of the Europeans cultures that followed. It portrayed the labyrinth as a dark and threatening structure, produced by the dubious human ingenuity of Daedelus as a kind of cage for the dangerous divine-animal monster, The Minotaur.
What a contrast to some modern ideas of the labyrinth as a symbol of health-giving natural powers!