Entering the Labyrinth

Around the same time that I entered the Craft, a friend of mine gave me a present I wore for years, and may wear again one day when I have a good cord for it. It was a bronze disk with a labyrinth engraved on it. How Celtic, I thought. How witchy, how appropriate! I knew the story of Theseus from childhood. The Theseus of my childhood was an untarnished hero. He had come to Athens to find his father the King, and upon learning that the youths of Athens were sent off every years to be fed to the Minotaur, Theseus set out to stop it. Despite his father’s desire to save his newly discovered son, Theseus takes his place among the other youths and maidens and goes to Crete. There he meets the Princess Ariadne. We know so little of her. Minos is the son of Zeus, Pasiphae is the daughter of the Sun and a Goddess who is also a queen. In those days the line between gods and men was blurred. What is Ariadne? Has she lived in Crete for years and years, always a little princess? But this time around she is either ripened. or the vision of Theseus ripens her. Something happens between them, and she gives him the ball of twine, the Clew that he can tie outside of the labyrinth and wind his way through it in order to kill the Minotaur and get out. Next Ariadne gives the sword with Theseus can kill the monster.

 He has killed several monsters before. And it is important that Ariadne is sunborn, is of the family of goddess-sorceresses who are the daughters f of Helios and include Medea, Circe and Pasiphae. These women are all beautiful, and powerful, but creatures of a liminal and shadowy nature,  dubious even as they are daughters of the light. Ariadne is the sun’s light shining in the darkness of a night time where Theseus makes love to her,. Theseus comes into this night time with no real hope of making it out of the labyrinth. He does not know that Ariadne is here to deliver him. In that regard, Ariadne stands in the place of Sapientia, the Moon. She is the Virgin Goddess giving her aid. Her Clew is no ordinary Clew. It glows with her light. It leads the way home.

            In those first years that I possessed that little bronze labyrinth, I used to walk the stone labyrinth at St Mary’s College near my home, meditating, praying, trying to understand its importance. It wasn’t until several years down the line that I looked back and understood the importance of the labyrinth for the witch, or for anyone on a spiritual path. The labyrinth is the remedy to the myth of straight ahead progress. The seventeen years between the time when I walked out a church service, went down the street to the public library. and picked up my first book on witchcraft and now. has been filled with bumps, twists, short cuts and doubling backs. I have picked things up, put them down, and picked them up all over again. This can cause frustration, embarrassment, even a false sense of hypocrisy, but what this reflects is the natural, and magical, turns of the dance in the labyrinth and up the Spiral Castle. This long rambling turning back and twisting is the treading of the mill in every day life, the actual treading which completes what we do ritually. When so many give up, we keep on, and this is devotion, this is the divine treading. As did Theseus, we have the Clew, if we stop and pay attention, and it is the light of that Clew, and the voice of Ariadne that leads us to the center of the labyrinth not once, but over and over again.