all fall down

Down the labyrinth with no idea how to get out. Seven ways to the center but only one route out. And at that center is a dichotomy; either a minoutaur lying in wait at the end of the journey or the serenity and spiritual lightness one feels as if making a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. The sacred and the profane collide, or slip by as ships before dawn. The idea goes back to Greek mythology and the Biblical Joshua of a Jericho that ma have been built as a Labyrinth, the kind of structure that both protects and can also imprison.

Labyrinth literally means a holding place of demons. It held the mythical  Minotaur, so iconized by Picasso and Salvador Dali, the latter finding its form going back to the work of Vermeer. The Minotaur was an adulterous offspring of Zeus and Europa, known to have a bull’s head but a human body and strictly a cannibal. In the myth Daedalus aids Ariadne and she aids and falls in love with Theseus, using a ball of thread. she is complicit  in killing the Minotaur and aiding him escape the Labyrinth.  King Minos  in response to what he regarded a treachery,imprisons Daedalus in the Labyrinth, who makes wings for he and his son Icarus to escape Crete; Think of a film like Flight of the Pheonix. Icarus flew too close to the Sun and ended up drowning in the sea named after him, Daedalus fled to Sicily pursued by King Minos’ who was also drowned. To play it safe, maybe its better to stay clear of labyrinths.

ADDENDUM:

It does remind of the Kafka scenarios where the individual, such as in Before The Law, is sort of locked in these imaginary worlds like Shutter Island, world’s where god does not exist; a post Heidegger meta space, the calm before nihilism. Even the false prophets have split. Spies sent to Canaan except Joshua and Caleb deny God’s ability to deliver the Promised Land. Its this world of the inscrutable truth that seems impossible to escape from. For these “rebellious”   Heaven is Earth, re-created in the mind’s eye; an alternative to reality without God. According to the apocalypse there will be a time when, the crap will hit the fan, and “All Hell will break loose”. …
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In the book of the Joshua, we come across the nation of Israel at a really pivotal time. The land they had been led to believe would be their “home” was already occupied. Joshua sent two spies into Jericho to investigate. They went to the house of Rahab, a prostitute. I know that the LORD has given you this land and that a great fear of you has fallen on us, so that all who live in this country are melting in fear because of you. We have heard how the LORD dried up the water of the Red Sea for you when you came out of Egypt . . . When we heard of it, our hearts
melted in fear and everyone’s courage failed because of you, for the LORD your God is God in heaven above and on the earth below (Joshua 2:9-11 NIV)….

We don’t know how she ended up as a prostitute. She knew this God that the Hebrews spoke of was big and powerful and was worth paying attention to. Then she said this to the spies: “Now then, please swear to me by the LORD that that you will show kindness to my family, because I have shown kindness to you. Give me a sure sign that you will spare the lives of my father and mother, my brothers and sisters, and all who belong to them, and that you will save us from death” (Joshua 2:12-13 NIV). Read More:http://storage.cloversites.com/roswellunitedmethodistchurch/documents/XP3%20Labyrinth%20S1_01.pdf
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“Medieval Jews who looked at the Jericho story imagined that Jericho was not just a walled city, but a seven-circuit labyrinth: that God had in fact asked the Israelites to walk the labyrinth to penetrate into the city and into the good land beyond it. Thus was born the ‘Jericho Labyrinth,’ a decorative motif found in medieval manuscripts of a seven-looped labyrinth, usually illustrated as a walled city, always labeled ‘Jericho.’ Read More:http://reformjudaismmag.org/Articles/index.cfm?id=2990

Unlike mazes, which they seem to be similar to,  the concentric circles of labyrinths contain no dead ends. It is aid that in medieval times, people walked  along the path of a labyrinth to symbolize a pilgrimage to Jerusalem; the labyrinth does not seem to be attached to any specific religion, but if its origins are Egyptian, there is dual nature to it; how Moses Cordovero, the famous sixt

h-century Rabbi and Kabbalist got implicated in it, and where he sourced his information for his diagram is unknown, since Judaism would not seem to be a natural habitat for something mentioned often in Greek mythology and to transform it as some have done into a kind of “map of the universe” seems outside the purview and onto the far margins of its theology or any for that matter.