![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
The Unending Mystery
Author: David Willis McCullough
Publisher: Pantheon
Labyrinths and mazes have always been sources of fascination. Some critics of James Joyce’s Ulysses even mapped the Dublin of the book to show that it’s a maze that Stephen Dedalus must walk and escape.
The most famous story about labyrinths must be the one of Theseus, Ariadne and Minotaur. It is so well-known that there is no need for me to repeart the story here. (The English word 'clew' - a ball of yarn, such as the one Ariadne gave to Theseus - evolved into 'clue', something that helps you solve a riddle.) For me, the horror of a maze came from reading a short story by M.R. James titled ‘The Maze’. The Maze in the short story was an ‘penetrans ad interiora mortis’ – the path to the centre of death. The lesson is that mazes are dangerous.
Wait. Is there a different between a labyrinth and a maze?
For centuries, the two words have always been used to refer to the same thing. But lately, they have different meanings: a labyrinth is a whirling, puzzling but not branched path heading towards the center, the goal; a maze has branches, traps and dead-ends, designed to make you difficult to get to the center or even to get out. A maze requires your decisions and memory, a labyrinth requires your patience and dedication.
In McCullough's words:
[Labyrinths and mazes] are both attempts at coping with chaos, but the older, unicursal labyrinth went to church and found the way through faith, by believing that the way—no matter how seemingly devious—will reach its goal. The maze, although it perhaps fell in with a bad crowd, is an antic and sometimes frightening celebration of learning and memory.
If you’re now considering approaching this book with cautions against New Age overenthusiasm, worry not. McCullough writes his book in a sceptical way. He presents facts, theories, hypotheses and evidence about labyrinths and mazes rationally and logically. His skepticism doesn’t make his book feel clinical and cold though – because a skeptic approaches his subject with love. His language fluid, his account amazing. ‘The Unending Mystery’ encompasses the history (and before that) of labyrinths and mazes, from the pre-historic to recent times. It shows how labyrinths and mazes have undergone profound changes not only in the meaning of words or designs, but also in their spiritual meaning and their purposes.
‘Spiritual’.
It doesn’t mean McCullough want to say that there is really anything spiritual or mystical or even divine about labyrinth, apart from the meanings human attach to it.
The design of a labyrinth may really seem uncannily mystical: different cultures from every corner of the earth have the labyrinth adorn their caves, buildings, parchments, or even their fields. The design of the labyrinth copies nothing in Nature, although it is easy to see its similarity with the convolutions of the brain. Our famous friend Jung even had to write something about labyrinths:
We are driven to the conclusion that there must be a transconscious disposition in every individual which is able to produce the same or very similar symbols at all times and at all places. … Knowledge of the common origin of these unconsciously performed symbols has been totally lost to us. In order to recover it, we must read old texts and investigate old cultures.
No need to, argues McCullough.
No one can be sure about ‘collective unconsciousness’. At least it’s not empirically supported. It can’t be confirmed in a Popperian way. But there is something that we can know for sure: the basic building of our human brains.
Many researchers and experts have long nourished the notion that the emergence of many similar shapes or tools in many cultures is preluded by a previous contact with other cultures. And that other cultures obtain their knowledge through contact with yet other cultures…
But there is a simple answer to all of the similarities, including to labyrinths and mazes. The thing that is the same in all cases is the human brain and its capacity to work things out. Similar or even different situations can bring the brain of human beings reared so far apart in time and place to come to the similar solutions or conclusions. The same way happens to labyrinth. So people from diferent parts of the world raised their ‘writing’ tools and made the shape: the circuited labyrinths…
McCullough doesn’t deny that to some, labyrinths and mazes hold important spiritual roles and aspects – for instance, for monks and priests before the Church decided that the labyrinth and the dances held on it were pagan. Neither he denies that the labyrinth give the walker a certain feeling. Of peace, of accomplishment, of hope. But even that can be explained by neurology, of which I won’t go into lengths here (nor does McCullough in his book, he only clearly implies). What McCullough tries to show is that labyrinths and mazes are human creations used as means for various purposes and for symbolizing a lot of things. Whatever the purposes and the things symbolized are, they only confirm the greatness of the shape probably as ancient as the humankind, the only shape sprung out from pure imagination: the labyrinth.
Author: David Willis McCullough
Publisher: Pantheon
Labyrinths and mazes have always been sources of fascination. Some critics of James Joyce’s Ulysses even mapped the Dublin of the book to show that it’s a maze that Stephen Dedalus must walk and escape.
The most famous story about labyrinths must be the one of Theseus, Ariadne and Minotaur. It is so well-known that there is no need for me to repeart the story here. (The English word 'clew' - a ball of yarn, such as the one Ariadne gave to Theseus - evolved into 'clue', something that helps you solve a riddle.) For me, the horror of a maze came from reading a short story by M.R. James titled ‘The Maze’. The Maze in the short story was an ‘penetrans ad interiora mortis’ – the path to the centre of death. The lesson is that mazes are dangerous.
Wait. Is there a different between a labyrinth and a maze?
For centuries, the two words have always been used to refer to the same thing. But lately, they have different meanings: a labyrinth is a whirling, puzzling but not branched path heading towards the center, the goal; a maze has branches, traps and dead-ends, designed to make you difficult to get to the center or even to get out. A maze requires your decisions and memory, a labyrinth requires your patience and dedication.
In McCullough's words:
[Labyrinths and mazes] are both attempts at coping with chaos, but the older, unicursal labyrinth went to church and found the way through faith, by believing that the way—no matter how seemingly devious—will reach its goal. The maze, although it perhaps fell in with a bad crowd, is an antic and sometimes frightening celebration of learning and memory.
If you’re now considering approaching this book with cautions against New Age overenthusiasm, worry not. McCullough writes his book in a sceptical way. He presents facts, theories, hypotheses and evidence about labyrinths and mazes rationally and logically. His skepticism doesn’t make his book feel clinical and cold though – because a skeptic approaches his subject with love. His language fluid, his account amazing. ‘The Unending Mystery’ encompasses the history (and before that) of labyrinths and mazes, from the pre-historic to recent times. It shows how labyrinths and mazes have undergone profound changes not only in the meaning of words or designs, but also in their spiritual meaning and their purposes.
‘Spiritual’.
It doesn’t mean McCullough want to say that there is really anything spiritual or mystical or even divine about labyrinth, apart from the meanings human attach to it.
The design of a labyrinth may really seem uncannily mystical: different cultures from every corner of the earth have the labyrinth adorn their caves, buildings, parchments, or even their fields. The design of the labyrinth copies nothing in Nature, although it is easy to see its similarity with the convolutions of the brain. Our famous friend Jung even had to write something about labyrinths:
We are driven to the conclusion that there must be a transconscious disposition in every individual which is able to produce the same or very similar symbols at all times and at all places. … Knowledge of the common origin of these unconsciously performed symbols has been totally lost to us. In order to recover it, we must read old texts and investigate old cultures.
No need to, argues McCullough.
No one can be sure about ‘collective unconsciousness’. At least it’s not empirically supported. It can’t be confirmed in a Popperian way. But there is something that we can know for sure: the basic building of our human brains.
Many researchers and experts have long nourished the notion that the emergence of many similar shapes or tools in many cultures is preluded by a previous contact with other cultures. And that other cultures obtain their knowledge through contact with yet other cultures…
But there is a simple answer to all of the similarities, including to labyrinths and mazes. The thing that is the same in all cases is the human brain and its capacity to work things out. Similar or even different situations can bring the brain of human beings reared so far apart in time and place to come to the similar solutions or conclusions. The same way happens to labyrinth. So people from diferent parts of the world raised their ‘writing’ tools and made the shape: the circuited labyrinths…
McCullough doesn’t deny that to some, labyrinths and mazes hold important spiritual roles and aspects – for instance, for monks and priests before the Church decided that the labyrinth and the dances held on it were pagan. Neither he denies that the labyrinth give the walker a certain feeling. Of peace, of accomplishment, of hope. But even that can be explained by neurology, of which I won’t go into lengths here (nor does McCullough in his book, he only clearly implies). What McCullough tries to show is that labyrinths and mazes are human creations used as means for various purposes and for symbolizing a lot of things. Whatever the purposes and the things symbolized are, they only confirm the greatness of the shape probably as ancient as the humankind, the only shape sprung out from pure imagination: the labyrinth.