Mythical, historical and altogether intriguing, these far-flung mazes are journeys in and of themselves.
By
Maud Doyle
on
August 07, 2013
The
wonder of travel lies equally with adventure and misadventure—there is
nothing like getting thoroughly lost in a riddling country or culture
that is not your own. But it is hard these days, with our ultra-planned
excursions, fixers and 4G service, to get properly disoriented.
Labyrinths, however, can remind us how it's done.
These mazes have appeared in
various corners of the world throughout history. One can be found in a
petroglyph on a river shore in Goa, India; cut into the stones of
Ireland's many medieval churches; and arranged in a contemporary
land-art installation at Lands End in San Francisco. Traditionally, they
kept evil in and invaders out. They have been used as pleasure walks,
meditative journeys and symbolic life-into-death pilgrimages.
Classical thinkers Herodotus,
Pliny and Strabo each praised the Egyptian maze of Middle Kingdom that
Pharaoh Amenemhat III constructed in the 19th century B.C. to protect
his Hawara tomb. (Strabo called it a wonder of the world.) Before taking
to the high seas, Scandinavian sailors built stone labyrinths to trap
sinister winds that might follow them. Daedalus famously used one to
trap a minotaur.
Literary figures also embraced
the labyrinth. Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges's peculiar love of
them is well known—he wrote once of gods who lived in them, encircled by
forking paths. Lesser known is Jane Austen's affinity, particularly for
the large rambling hedge maze at Sydney Garden in Bath, England (since
gone), where she wished to walk every day.
Proust once wrote, "The only
true voyage of discovery...would be not to visit strange lands but to
possess other eyes, to behold the universe through the eyes of another."
That heightened sense isn't developed so much by traveling the world as
by remembering to focus on where we stand. And the wonder of unexpected
encounters, the anticipation of what might lie around the next corner,
is a charm of labyrinths of all kinds, from the underground city of
Derinkuyu in Cappadocia, Turkey, to the overhanging gardens of
Marqueyssac in Périgord, France.
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