You've just entered the theater of an alien sky.
If the words and images seem strange to you, there's a reason for this.
Our world was once a vastly different place.
To experience this won't hurt you, and there is nothing to fear.
The Labyrinth Window to the Ancient Archetypes
In previous Discourses, we followed multiple paths of evidence to describe
the mythic labyrinth, the dancing ground
of the legendary mother goddess and warrior hero.
Our claim has been that this enigmatic theme has its archetypal
origins in extraordinary celestial phenomena.
Events did not occur down here on any local landscape but in the sky, in
the original theater of the gods.
And so, as we gain insight into the most fundamental archetypes, we unavoidably
encounter the phenomenon of localization, a universal aspect of
storytelling in ancient times but only rarely discussed in modern day
treatments of mythic traditions.
Localization refers to the ancient habit of projecting the original mythic
archetypes on the familiar and accessible local landscapes, to the
extent that a thousand local symbols came to be confused with the celestial
forms and events of the original myth-making epoch.
Every sacred mountain on Earth, named after a cosmic prototype,
came to be remembered as a place where
the Creator God himself stood in primeval times.
Every sacred city came to be celebrated as the city of heaven,
the original dwelling of the gods.
This pattern of confusion was repeated thousands of times around the world, the
later symbol came to be seen as the thing originally symbolized, and that's
the pervasive mistake we're required to recognize and to unravel in any
investigation of mythic origins.
As for later symbolic elaborations, a good example is the appearance of
commemorative knotwork, the connection fitting perfectly with our earlier
identification of the labyrinth as the original Gordian knot.
In seeking out the later echoes of the mythic theme,
many useful clues will be found in the symbolic knotwork of Ireland and
Scandinavia, with striking parallels in the labyrinth.
I'm now fully satisfied that at root, the two mythic threads arose
from precisely the same human experience.
And so, it's no coincidence that familiar themes we've covered in these Discourses,
show up in the complex knotwork of Northern Europe.
From entwining twin serpents to the symbolism of the ram's horns.
The labyrinth and sacred knotwork also overlap in the Chinese image of the
Pan Chang called the endless knot or knot of happiness and here too we
discover that the knotwork theme can't
be separated from the mythic intestines of the labyrinth.
Chinese legends described the entwined Pan Chang as a
knot formed from the intestines of a slain enemy.
All of which remind us again of the so called Fortress of Intestines
to which Humbaba, the enemy slain by Gilgamesh, gave his name.
As we've discovered so consistently, it's when seeming absurdities fall into line with
an inherently logical expectation, that we know we're on the right track.
I should hasten to add that the most common association of the labyrinth
revealed by cross-cultural comparison was with the famous cave or cavern
entered by the hero, as we should also expect.
Dorothy Norman in her book "The Hero" writes, "In those cases where the
ritual has been preserved, the labyrinth itself, or a drawing of it, is invariably
situated at the entrance of the cave or dwelling."
Of course, that pattern is entirely logical if the labyrinth
entered by the hero meant precisely the same thing as the famous cavern of the
hero's initiation.
And so our conclusion; the predicted symbolic equations noted here can be
fully verified by any independent researcher who will follow the available keys.
The hero bound within a knot, as observed by the comparative symbolists
Chevalier and Gheerbrant, is equivalent to the hero being swallowed by the monster,
another universal motif, and so the disgorging of the hero by the monster is
simply a variant on untying the knot, signifying at the same time the god's
release and the defeat of the Chaos monster.
So the labyrinth is a challenge to the hero and conceptually it's only a short
distance to the mythic riddle or paradox, a common folklore variant of the
critical juncture in the biography of
the hero for his victory is synonymous with meeting a test.
In other words, the test turns out to be the critical turn
in the biography of the hero, meaning that it gives the hero his defining role.
When Oedipus answered the riddle of the Sphinx correctly, what happened next?
He was not only saved, but the devouring goddess plunged over the precipice.
Among those comparative symbolists who discovered the essential connections,
though certainly not accounted for them, I would list J.C. Cooper who writes in "An
Illustrated Encyclopedia Of Traditional Symbols", "The labyrinth is related to the
symbolism of the cave and with initiation rites, it also shares the
symbolism of the knot in binding and loosing, restricting but uniting... The
labyrinth in a square depicts the four cardinal points and the cosmos and may
be connected with the swastika."
Yes indeed, the very symbolic relationships we've already noted, but while Cooper's
summary of associated symbols is generally accurate, it offers no clue at
all on the origins of the pervasive labyrinth archetype.
For us that is a giant shortcoming, since uncovering the integral origins of world
mythology is our overriding purpose.
But now we can confidently say that the labyrinth theme did not arise from
anything in today's familiar natural experience.
The cavernous form was entirely celestial, towering over humanity.
Of course, that's been our message all along; it's only by seeing
the named mythic powers as planets close to Earth, that we're able to bring the
global patterns to light.
And as we're now prepared to demonstrate, that means a
concrete explanation for all of the acknowledged archetypal personalities of
world mythology, a coherent ancient story unfolding in an extraordinary phase of
solar system history.