Labyrinth

• 1. Introduction

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  The Labyrinth of Greek mythology was built for one purpose: to hold a monster. King Minos of Crete commissioned the artificer Daedalus to design a structure so bewildering that the Minotaur trapped inside it could never escape. Daedalus succeeded so well that he himself could barely find his way out after finishing the work.

  That founding myth raises questions the story never fully resolves. What did the real structure look like? Where was it? And why, for more than two thousand years, did artists and coin-makers keep drawing the Labyrinth as a perfectly orderly single-path design, when every literary description insists it was a branching, dead-end-riddled trap? The answers cut through Bronze Age palaces, cathedral floors, Scandinavian coastlines, and a contemporary art installation stretching across every station on the London Underground.

• 2. A Word Without a Clear Home

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  Labyrinth is a word of pre-Greek origin, and scholars have argued about its roots for well over a century. In 1892, Maximillian Mayer proposed that it might derive from labrys, a Lydian word for a double-bladed axe. The archaeologist Arthur Evans, who excavated the Minoan palace at Knossos early in the twentieth century, endorsed the connection: double-axe carvings appear on the palace walls, and he argued the word could mean "house of the double axe."

  That interpretation lost ground when Linear B tablets were deciphered in the 1950s. A Mycenaean Greek rendering of the word appeared as da-pu2-ri-to, which may connect to the Minoan term du-pu2-re found on Linear A libation tablets associated with Mount Dikte and Mount Ida, two sites known for their caverns. Scholar Beekes finds the link to labrys speculative altogether, preferring instead a connection to the Greek word laura, meaning "narrow street."

  Pliny's Natural History, for its part, lists four distinct ancient labyrinths: a Cretan one, an Egyptian one, a Lemnian one, and an Italian one. All four are described as complex underground structures, which appears to have been the standard classical understanding of the term.

• 3. The Palace and the Cave

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  Arthur Evans believed the ruins at Knossos were the Labyrinth. The palace complex was architecturally dense, with bull motifs, images of men leaping over horns, and labrys carvings throughout. A passage in the Iliad reinforces the connection, suggesting the site held a dancing-ground that Daedalus made for Ariadne, where young men and women of the age of those sent as tribute to Crete would dance.

  Oxford University geographer Nicholas Howarth later challenged that identification directly. In the 2000s, his team explored the Skotino cave as an alternative candidate, only to conclude it was a natural formation. A more compelling site turned out to be a network of tunnels at Gortyn, reached through a narrow crack but opening into interlinking caverns with smooth walls and columns that appear at least partially man-made. A labyrinth symbol appears on a sixteenth-century map of Crete in a book of maps held at Christ Church, Oxford, and the French produced a map of those caves in 1821. German soldiers later used the site to store ammunition during the Second World War.

  Howarth's investigation was eventually shown on a documentary produced for the National Geographic Channel, bringing the debate over the true location to a wide audience without settling it.

• 4. One Path or Many

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  As early as 430 BC, Cretan coins were using a single-path, seven-course design to represent the Labyrinth, even though the myth plainly required a branching trap capable of holding a monster. That tension between visual tradition and narrative logic persisted for roughly two thousand years. From Roman times through the Renaissance, depictions of the mythological Labyrinth were almost invariably unicursal, meaning one continuous path with no choices and no dead ends.

  Branching mazes returned to the picture only when hedge mazes became fashionable during the Renaissance. Before that revival, the unicursal pattern showed up across an extraordinary range of contexts: painted or etched on pottery, pressed into basketry, tattooed on skin, carved into cave walls and church walls, and worked into Roman floor mosaics in tile and stone. Roman designers typically linked four copies of the classical pattern around a central image of the Minotaur.

  The medieval cathedral labyrinths followed a different formal tradition, the Chartres pattern, which appears in manuscripts as early as the ninth century and reached its grandest expression in the great Gothic cathedrals of northern France. Chartres, Reims, and Amiens all featured pavement labyrinths that dominated their naves. Whether clergy used them for Easter ritual dances, as pilgrimage surrogates, or for quiet devotion remains unclear; the earliest known use of the phrase "chemin de Jerusalem" to describe such paths dates only to the late eighteenth century, when it was applied to mazes at Reims and Saint-Omer.

• 5. Stone, Turf, and Troy Towns

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  More than five hundred non-ecclesiastical labyrinths were built in Scandinavia over roughly the same centuries that the great cathedral floors were being laid. Most were set along coastlines using stones arranged in simple seven- or eleven-course classical patterns. Many carry names that translate as "Troy Town," a naming convention found in Britain as well. Coastal fishing communities are thought to have built them as protective rituals: trapping malevolent trolls or harmful winds inside the coils might ensure a safe voyage.

  In Britain, the cathedral labyrinths are believed to have inspired turf mazes, examples of which survive at Wing, Hilton, Alkborough, and Saffron Walden. The Solovetsky Islands by the White Sea hold more than thirty stone labyrinths; a single small island there, covering just 0.4 square kilometres, contains about thirteen of them. Local archaeologists have suggested those labyrinths may be between two thousand and three thousand years old, though most researchers remain unconvinced.

  Far from Europe, the Tohono O'odham culture of the Sonoran desert developed a labyrinth design essentially identical to the seven-course classical pattern, featuring a figure called I'itoi, the "Man in the Maze." Two features distinguish it from the classical form: the design is radial, and the entrance sits at the top rather than the bottom. The oldest securely dated example from that tradition is commonly placed in the seventeenth century.

• 6. Sacred Paths and Modern Floors

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  Carl Schuster and Edmund Carpenter, in their cross-cultural study Patterns that Connect, documented the labyrinth symbol appearing across most parts of the world, from Native North and South America to Australia, Java, India, and Nepal. Their analysis suggested the figure carried meanings ranging from a sacred path to the home of an ancestor, to a representation of the ancestor itself. They also noted a recurring theme of the labyrinth as home to a trickster: in India, the demon Ravana holds dominion over labyrinths; Sumatran Bataks say the trickster Djonaha lives in one; European tradition makes it the dwelling of a rogue.

  In India, securely datable labyrinth examples begin to appear around 250 BC. Labyrinths appear in Indian manuscripts and Tantric texts from the seventeenth century onward, and are often called Chakravyuha, a reference to an impregnable battle formation described in the Mahabharata. Lanka, the capital of the mythic Ravana, is described as a labyrinth in a 1910 translation of Al-Beruni's India.

  The fourth-century pavement at the Basilica of St Reparatus in Orleansville, Algeria, holds the earliest known Christian labyrinth. The words "Sancta Eclesia" appear at its center, though how it was used in worship is not recorded. A labyrinth was set up on the floor of St Paul's Cathedral for a week in March 2000, part of a contemporary revival that has also placed labyrinth installations in hospitals, prisons, and hospices for use in meditation and stress reduction.

• 7. Art, Fiction, and 270 Tube Stations

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  Jorge Luis Borges found in the labyrinth an inexhaustible metaphor. His short story "The House of Asterion," collected in The Aleph, gave the Minotaur its own perspective, and his use of the image inspired later writers including Umberto Eco in The Name of the Rose and Mark Z. Danielewski in House of Leaves. Octavio Paz borrowed the figure for the title of his study of Mexican identity, The Labyrinth of Solitude, framing national consciousness as a condition of being orphaned and lost.

  The visual arts drew on the same imagery across the twentieth century. Piet Mondrian's Pier and Ocean dates to 1915; Pablo Picasso's Minotauromachy to 1935; M. C. Escher's Relativity to 1953. More recently, Mark Wallinger produced a set of 270 enamel plaques, each bearing a unicursal labyrinth design, one for every station on the London Underground. The plaques were installed over a sixteen-month period in 2013 and 2014 to mark the Underground's hundred-and-fiftieth anniversary. Each plaque is numbered according to its position along the route taken by contestants in the 2009 Guinness World Record Tube Challenge.

  Approximately six thousand labyrinths have been registered with the Worldwide Labyrinth Locator, spread across private properties, libraries, schools, gardens, temples, and cathedrals around the world, a figure that speaks to a late-twentieth-century revival of labyrinth building that shows no sign of stopping.