Читать книгу The Magic of Labyrinths: Following Your Path, Finding Your Center - Liz Simpson - Страница 12

There is a complementary view that also bears mentioning. One that may also explain the mysterious origins of the labyrinth and that similarly speaks to our psychological need to feel part of a whole. This alternative view helps to demonstrate that we are not so different from peoples who lived on this Earth 10, 20, 30 or even 40,000 years ago. Indeed, contemplating the enduring facets of human nature helps to reinforce the relevance of the labyrinth as an archetypal symbol that is as psychologically valuable to us today as it was way back when.

Much of our popular historical knowledge cloaks the fact that considerably more early crosscultural contact took place than was once thought. For example, most children are taught that Henry the Navigator or Christopher Columbus “discovered” America in the fifteenth century. Some may even have heard of Amerigo Vespucci or John Cabot (Giovanni Caboto) who, controversially, claimed to have preceded them. This completely disregards evidence that expeditions to the New World had been undertaken by peoples originally from Siberia (c. 70,000–9,000B.C.). Other suggested early explorers of the Americas, with varying degrees of evidence, range from Indonesians (c. 6,000–1,500B.C.), the Japanese (c. 5000B.C.) and Afro-Phoenicians (c. 1000B.C.–300A.D.).

Certainly, some archaeologists and historians now believe that the Vikings may have traveled down from Newfoundland to New England and even reached North Carolina. And it seems likely that these expeditions were not all one way, given the record of two Indians having been shipwrecked in Holland around 60B.C., causing considerable interest and excitement at the time. There are many other examples that provide a richer view of history than most of us were taught at school.

Given that there was considerable cross-cultural contact between peoples much earlier than we have been led to believe, this can be linked with contemporary evidence for the way ideas originating within one small group can spread like wildfire. Hence, we can see how a symbol such as the labyrinth could have come to enjoy such universal popularity from a single source.

Today we call it “viral marketing” or “buzz,” but basically it is old-fashioned word of mouth. In his book The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell outlines three criteria or rules for the proliferation of social epidemics and he discusses how certain messages, behaviors, ideas, and their products spread like infectious diseases. The concept of a labyrinth, stemming from a single source, meets all three of these criteria.

First, you need a small number of people with both the creativity to understand the impact of a new idea and the personal magnetism or charisma with which to promote it. Such people in early times were called “shamans.” Shamanism, said to be the world’s oldest religion, spiritual discipline and medical approach, originated in Siberia – and it was here that a labyrinth carving was found, dating back over 7,000 years. The shaman worldview offers an experiential path to knowledge, gained through the process of ritual, meditation and a concept of trials or tests that is akin to the Hero’s journey through the labyrinth (see chapter 3). Like the labyrinth, while variations exist between cultures, the concept of shamanism is very similar whether in the Americas, Africa, and Australasia or Lapland, Malaysia, and Peru.

The shaman’s role within a society was to straddle the world of reality and the world of spirit. As such they demonstrated that all-important psychological need which is now being explored more actively through environmental and spiritual groups – that of the interdependence and unity of nature and humankind. Interestingly, the shaman did not simply represent the Divine, as priests and other religious figures do. The shaman is Divine, in the way that we have been urged to think of ourselves by many prophets and philosophers, such as the fourteenth-century Christian mystic, Meister Eckhart, who said:

Here, in my own soul, the greatest of all miracles has taken place. God has returned to God.

In the same way that the simple act of walking or tracing a labyrinth can unite body and spirit, the shaman demonstrated the spiritual affinity between plant, person, and place.

Malcolm Gladwell’s second criterion explaining why certain concepts can spread rapidly across societies is that of “stickiness.” By this he means the extent to which a message is memorable and impactful. Since Jung, together with Eastern mystics before him, have presented the image of life as a journey with a single pathway leading in to the center, it is not surprising that the labyrinth motif would have appealed to anyone who came into contact with it.

Given the potential of the labyrinth as a way of explaining the world and how we should best act on it, it can be imagined that one or a number of Siberian shamans found that this particular tool – a portable “mental map,” simple to construct and easy to explain – helped them disseminate their worldview to other cultures. This may have happened in the same way that the “peace symbol,” the original concept of one man, spread from being used in materials and on marches by the UK’s Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, to being a worldwide icon of peace. Being simple to produce and an image that resonated with billions of people around the globe, the peace symbol – like, possibly, the labyrinth – was one person’s idea that “stuck.” It was a local idea that fast became a global phenomenon.

The third criterion is “the power of context.” Here again, we can relate back to Jung’s hypothesis for the universal power of archetype and myth. The notion of something so simple yet complex as a labyrinth is as compelling to us in the twenty-first century as it was to our earliest ancestors. There is no reason to suggest that they would not have been concerned with the same big, philosophical questions that we still grapple with today – Why are we here? What is the purpose of our lives? What happens when we die? Like us, they would have wanted to better understand life and the purpose of it – and, in particular, how to feel happier and more fulfilled on this lifelong journey.

The psychologist, Abraham Maslow, formulated a hierarchy of needs in which security issues (such as the provision of shelter and food) are at the base of the triangle, with self-actualization (spiritual needs) at the pinnacle. However, this seems to over-simplify the human experience and before Maslow died he admitted that he might have got this the wrong way around. Just because prehistoric people had more pressing security concerns than most of us in the West today, that does not mean that they did not also seek deeper meaning and purpose in their lives.

The manner in which our ancestors explored these issues was through myths and there is considerable similarity in these stories, regardless of the culture. Indeed, rather than accepting that religious writers accessed the power of the collective unconscious, it may be that they borrowed and modified much earlier stories for which the power of context was universal. For instance, there is considerable similarity between archetypes appearing in the Assyro-Babylonian poem the Epic of Gilgamesh (c. 700B.C.) and the Old Testament of the Bible. Both feature a serpent, a woman who robs a hero of his innocence, and someone who survives a Great Flood.