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lab·y·rinth [lab-uh-rinth]
1. an intricate combination of paths or passages
2. a maze of paths bordered by high hedges, as in a park or garden, for the amusement of those who search for a way out.
3. a complicated or tortuous arrangement, as of streets or buildings.
4. any confusingly intricate state of things or events; a bewildering complex.
5. Classical Mythology: a vast maze built in Crete by Daedalus, at the command of King Minos, to house the Minotaur.
6. Anatomy: a) the internal ear, consisting of a bony portion (bony labyrinth) and a membranous portion (membranous labyrinth). b) the aggregate of air chambers in the ethmoid bone, between the eye and the upper part of the nose.
7. a mazelike pattern inlaid in the pavement of a church.
Dictionary.com
Two types of labyrinths
Unicursal (single path)• “a single winding path leading inevitably to
the center and then back out again” (Doob 3)
Multicursal (many-paths)• These labyrinths are maze-like, with dead ends
and confusion
Labyrinth or Maze?
“Many contemporary researchers now distinguish between the terms labyrinth and maze. The term labyrinth is commonly defined as a unicursal design, meaning one pathway in and the same pathway out; whereas the more generalized term maze may include designs with obstacles, blind alleys or dead ends” (Muller and Coriell).
Asheville School’s Unicursal Labyrinth
• The school’s labyrinth is a part of the Classical Outdoor Learning Site that includes the Universe Story. It is a Classical Seven-Circuit Labyrinth, with “seven rings or circuits and no obstacles, with only one path in to the center, and the same path back out.”
• This type of labyrinth is “an ancient pattern found in many cultures around the world including Crete, Scandinavia, India, as well as the Hopi in the the southwest of North America” (Muller and Coriell).
The Cretan Labyrinth Myth
King Minos hired “Daedalus to construct the confusing and inextricable labyrinth in which to imprison and conceal the Minotaur. So bewildering were the maze’s paths that even Daedalus could scarcely find his way back to the entrance . . .” (Doob)
Other labyrinths
In literature, labyrinths can represent many things: complication and difficulty, interconnectedness, creativity, and even literature itself.
--from a publisher’s summary for Harold Bloom’s book The Labyrinth
Some of the symbolic meanings and connotations of labyrinth
• chaos/order• difficulty, prison, entrapment• a place of worship or judgment• a place requiring a guide• habitat for monsters [and heroes]• confusion, frustration• death, devil, sin, hell• need for patient endurance, persistence • the winding road• a metaphor for learning • a “voyage from confusion to clarity” (Doob pp. 24-25, 32, 49-51; 83)
The labyrinth is analogous to • crossroads, forests, deserts, oceans, caves • the chivalric quest that involves options • text/argument, interpretation • “life, fatalistically conceived” (Doob 48-51)
In the ancient world, prayer was an active, trance-inducing combination of chanting, music and dance, and initiates often danced the sacred spiral into the labyrinth. The classic labyrinth is a single path meant for meditative circling. To enter it is to experience a ritual death; to escape from it is to be resurrected. The danced line into the labyrinth was a sacred path into the inner realm of knowing. Dancers holding a rope signifying Ariadne’s thread (that allows participants to find their way in and out of the maze) followed a leader into the labyrinth, spiraling right to left, the direction of death. At the center they turned, dancing out in the direction of evolution and birth, all to the driving rhythms of the frame drums.
--Layne Redmond
The Tempest
• 3.3.2 (“Here’s a maze trod indeed” – Gonzalo) and 5.1.293 (“This is as strange a maze as e’er men trod” – Alonso)
• Prospero as Daedalus? (p. 196)
John Rolfe
• “To whom my hartie and best thoughts are, and have a long time bin so intagled, and inthralled in so intricate a laborinth, that I was even awearied to unwinde my selfe thereout.”
SourcesBloom, Harold, and Blake Hobby. The Labyrinth. New York, NY: Bloom's
Literary Criticism, 2009. Print.Doob, Penelope Reed. The Idea of the Labyrinth. Ithaca: Cornell Univ.
Press, 1990. Print.Muller, Marnie and Clare Coriell. “The Classical Outdoor Learning
Site”—Project Development and Site Design for Asheville School, 2002.
Redmond, Layne. “When the Drummers Were Women.” DRUM! Magazine, December 2000. Web. 7 April 2012. http://www.drummagazine.com/features/post/when-the-drummers-were-women/
Images from artstor.org
