[Maths-Education] Mazes and Labyrinths

[Dick Tahta]

Mazes are amazing.  So much so that wealthy people began having them in
their gardens.  With high hedges to amaze-amuse people.

But in mediaeval times they were flat like the English turf mazes
(mentioned by Shakespeare) or tiled examples like that on the floor of
Chartres and other cathedrals.  One story is that these were used for
ritual dances (fertility rites?  or think of schoolgirls hopping on chalked
patterns in the playground).  In Chartres the ritual was more sedate and
said to be a symbolic penitential path for pilgrims..

A labyrinth is often invoked synonymously today.  But in classical legend
it was the one that contained the Minotaur.  The Greek myth provides the
image of a complicated convoluted complex underground passage and this is
sometimes held to refer to the  passageways archaeologists found at
Knossos.  But the "labrys" was the Minoan sacred double headed axe
connected with a cult in which dancing played a large part.  And Homer
describes how "Daedalus in Knossos once contrived a dancing floor for
Ariadne".   A stylised flat  pattern appears on Minoan coins and it is this
pattern which often reappears in the mediaeval mazes.

Perhaps rather than an actual physical reality (whether two or three
dimensional)  a labyrinth  is now for us more like a metaphor - a place to
contain something dangerous,  a place from which the hero can find a way
out.  The mind has many mansions, they say.  (So of course do the
intestines - an image invoked by Freud.)

So in a sense I go along with Peter Gates' original suggestion:  a maze
provides a (ritual) pattern whereas a labyrinth is a (mental) structure.

Dick Tahta