Labyrinths: A Symbol To Share

I've never had much fondness for symbols, political, religious or otherwise. They usually end up being more trouble than they are worth. Just looking at how many people have died for the sake of a symbol over the course of human history is enough to convince me of their malignance.

They seem to be a hangover from the days before we had a written language with which we could express ideas and thoughts. Symbols are designed to appeal to the emotional aspect of our makeup, not the rational. In the hands of a skilled orator, they can be used to sway opinion and reach decisions that fly in the face of reason and logic.

Some may argue, and with a measure of validity, that during times of strife a symbol is useful for rallying people to a cause. But usually, someone else and their symbol have caused that period of strife. Perhaps if our symbols weren't the embodiment of abstract ideals they wouldn't be so problematic, although, given human nature, I have to wonder, if we used items as prosaic as vegetables whether or not we'd run into the same situations.

There is the argument that all language is really just a series of symbols; letters represent sounds that when combined together become words that take on a meaning in order to represent an object, action, or idea. While that is true, it is also true that this form of symbolism more often results in the pursuit of rational discourse than the brandishing of a device such as a flag or a holy relic.

The basic problem with so many symbols is that they seem to divide, or compartmentalize, which allows one group to formulate an opinion about another. If they follow that flag they are this, and therefore they are either good or bad depending on whether their flag is in accordance with ours.

Instead of being celebrations of distinctiveness, symbols have become a means of comparing, contrasting, and judging. Pride has been replaced by chauvinism and nobody seems to really care. It's easier to believe in one's superiority than to try and understand someone else's ways.

Given that this pattern of behaviour dates back into ancient times, long before Christianity, and the fact that there appears to be one symbol that has ever been even remotely universal, is amazing. But the labyrinth has appeared in media of one form or another, at one time or another, on every continent. Cave paintings, petroglyphs, carvings, chalk outlines, and countless bad movies about aliens, have all featured this ubiquitous, ever inwardly, descending spiral.

Before anyone washes their hands of me too much and thinks I'm about to embark on some wild theory about aliens, sorry to disappoint. I don't think it's that much of a mystery why labyrinths are everywhere people have been. No matter what your creation story is, we all came from the same place originally. I don't see why people are surprised that, in the earlier parts of history, our ancestors still had enough similarities to come up with the same images for similar ideas.

The idea of universal symbols, or archetypes, was the focus of Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung and his theories of the collective unconscious. In a nutshell, Jung said there were certain symbols, he called them archetypes, that all of us understand and we are born carrying that knowledge.

Article Author: Richard Marcus

Richard Marcus is the author of the forthcoming book What Will Happen In Eragon IV? and has had his work published in print and on line all over the world. The not so long-haired Canadian iconoclast writes reviews and opines on the world as he sees …

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