Labyrinth Or Maze?
In case it has escaped your notice, Saturday May 6th is World Labyrinth Day, an opportunity to celebrate these complex, often maddening marriages of geometry, architecture, and horticulture. According to Labyrinths in Britain, there are around five hundred labyrinths and mazes around the United Kingdom, each of which they have lovingly recorded on an interactive map[1]. They do not claim the list to be exhaustive and welcome details of any egregious omissions.
The map’s preface makes clear that the distinction between labyrinths and mazes is a sensitive subject for those who care, one into which the unwary wander at their peril. The group agonised over whether their map should include mazes, finally deciding it should because of their similar lineages and many crossovers in design.
To the purist the distinction between the two is perfectly straightforward: a labyrinth is “unicursal”, having just one path that leads you from the entrance to the centre, no matter how windy its passages are. A maze, though, is “multicursal”, with several paths, most of which lead to dead ends and, usually, only one which takes you to the centre. Mazes test the explorer’s ability to solve problems, while a labyrinth lends itself to a slow, contemplative meander.
Labyrinths and mazes have fascinated mankind for millennia, with early examples found throughout Europe, in North Africa, the Indian sub-continent, Indonesia, the American southwest and, occasionally, South America. Until the early centuries BC the principal design was a single pathway that looped backwards and forwards to complete seven circuits of diminishing size, bounded by eight walls that guarded the central point or goal.
One of the greatest labyrinths in the ancient world, the Egyptian labyrinth, situated just above Lake Moeris and opposite Crocodopolis, so impressed Herodotus that he wrote in was one of the most impressive labyrinths of the ancient world. Herodotus was so taken by the Egyptian labyrinth that he “found it greater than words could tell”, opining that “all the works and buildings of the Greeks put together would certainly be inferior to this labyrinth as regards labour and expense” (Histories Book 2). Little remains now but the foundations, one thousand feet long and 800 wide, bear testimony to the size, if not the splendour, of the structure.
As Geoffrey Chaucer related in The Legend of Good Women, Theseus was able to penetrate the recesses of the labyrinth at Knossos, slay the fearsome Minotaur, and return safely back to the arms of Ariadne by laying down and following “a clewe of twyn as he hath gon/ the same weye he may returne a-non/ ffolwynge alwey the thred as he hath come”. A clew was a ball of yarn, from which the sense of a clue as a figurative unravelling of enigmatic information was derived.
The Theseus myth is not without enigmas of its own: if it was truly a labyrinth, why did Theseus need help to get out and how was the Minotaur kept in the centre? Archaeology is unable to assist as no remains of a labyrinth-like structure have been found in Knossos, even though the city capitalised upon its mythological status by issuing coinage bearing its labyrinthine image in the fourth and third centuries BC.
[1] https://labyrinthsinbritain.uk/map-of-uk-labyrinths-mazes/
