The Labyrinth
At Providence St. Joseph Medical Center, where I volunteer in the ER three hours a week, there's a courtyard with a labyrinth that got me thinking about the meaning of the labyrinth in Minoan iconography.
People nowadays think of a labyrinth as a network of corridors and rooms designed to confound, and while the temple complex of Knossos with its estimated 3000 + rooms must have seemed labyrinthine to the ancient Greeks, that might not be what the Minoans intended in their depictions of mazes on various Knossian sealstones.
In medieval tradition, nobles and well-to-do churchmen often had labyrinths on their estates. These mazes were for spiritual contemplation. In writing Knossos, I had to consider the evidence of the Minoan seals depicting the maze in terms of what it might have meant to the Minoans. Might those mazes, too, have been a depiction of a spiritual journey toward the divine?
One might notice, however, that Minoan mazes such as this one below don't trace a path to the center, or, indeed, to any particular destination. But the prevalence of maze seals at Knossos, a known religious and administrative center, must have conveyed some meaning, and I believe that it was religious.
