Читать книгу The Magic of Labyrinths: Following Your Path, Finding Your Center - Liz Simpson - Страница 15

The links between the labyrinth symbol and goddess worship – the means through which early people expressed their love and respect for Mother Earth – are strong. The meander pattern (see here), from which the Classical seven-circuit labyrinth may be derived, has been found on bird goddess figurines dating back to c. 18000-15000B.C. by Lake Baical in the Ukraine. Additionally, rituals engaged in across Scandinavia (where the largest concentration of labyrinths from antiquity can be found) involved males competing with each other to see who can reach the female in the center first. These games, conducted most frequently in eleven-circuit labyrinths, were very different from the formulaic rituals of the seven-circuit Troy Towns. Indeed, there is a suggested link between the number 7 and male energy and the connection between the number II and female energy (see here).

Bird goddess figurines from the Ukraine showing characteristic meander patterns.

Within the eleven-circuit stone labyrinths that proliferate throughout Finland and Sweden the goal of negotiating the labyrinth involved rescuing a young woman at the center. At Kopmanholm, to the north-east of Stockholm in Sweden, there is a stone labyrinth known as the Jungfruringen or “Virgin’s Ring.” This particular design has two entrances, one going in from the left, the other from the right. The game involved two young men racing to the center to see which one of them would reach the maiden first. A number of suggestions have been made as to what this game signifies. One is that the female in the center represents Helen, the acclaimed beauty over whom the Greeks and Trojans went to war. Another is that “saving the girl” is a metaphor for young men reclaiming their female energy in order to become whole human beings again. This pagan symbolism has also been found on a wall of a fifteenth-century church in Nyland, Finland where a painting of a labyrinth depicts a virgin waiting at the center.