The Motif of the Labyrinth
Regarding Paleolithic cave-paintings of western Europe - "in such subterranean galleries as that of Trois Frres in the Pyrenees, the marvelous figures of animals, and perhaps deities, may or may not be provably magical on the internal evidence. What clinches their character is that they are not painted in cavern where people lived, or even close to them. They are not simply art. They are far down in darkness through tortuous and hazardous passages, in shrines only to be reached by way of natural mazes antedating even legend by tens of millennia.
"Practices handed down from ancestors in a geologically different land - not, of course, the Pyrenean cave people themselves, but others like them - may have influenced Sumerian myth-makers. When wandering tribes settled in caveless Middle Eastern country, they still pictured hollows beneath their feet; and when they thought of this underworld, and imagined the dwelling of its inhabitants, a remembered subterranean complexity may have suggested a sanctum laboriously and circuitously approached. Indeed the same notion may in time have been extended to the architecture of real temples uniting surface and underworld at the sacred center."
"The idea of the labyrinth was in fact part of the Mesopotamian world-scheme. Furthermore it was connected with the underworld. Babylonian writings associate mazes the 'bowels of the earth' and the coiled intestines of animals killed by augurers. It was also connected with - or at any rate, present at - the cosmic center itself."
"Middle Eastern coins and plaques show spiral designs around the heads of gods. These may express superhuman life. In Babylonia as in Egypt, the maze, if embodied in a structure, had as its nucleus a holy-of-holies, a sacrosanct enclosed center which the tortuous route made it laborious to reach. The sacred enclosure might, in Egypt, be a tomb; but both here and in Babylonia it seems to have been a setting for religious acts such as fertility rites, symbolic combats, ceremonies on the death and rebirth of deified kings."
"Early ritual dances are thought to have imitated the track of snakes in motion, chthonic gods in serpentine form; and snakes come out of holes in the ground - thus, perhaps, out of the underworld."
"...Cretan coin designs...have continuous paths winding in to the center of a square or circle. These are complex, backtracking spirals that advance and retreat in a prescribed manner. Counting from the circumference to the center we find that the path goes round seven times. If a person threading the maze planted a flag on its periphery before going in, he would pass it seven times on his way to the center."
"The Greek shrine of the oracular god Trophonius (the architect, incidentally, of the temple of Delphi) was n a cave with a maze-like arrangement of spikes and railings, and the pilgrim who threaded it was supposed to pass into the infernal regions. When Virgil's hero Aeneas comes to Cumae in Italy to venture below and consult the shades, he finds a temple with sculptured scenes of Daedalus, the Labyrinth and the Minotaur. The Cumaean Sibyl then guides him down through a cave entrance, quite in the style of Ariadne."
- Geoffrey Ashe, The Ancient Wisdom
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