Labyrinths and Mazes

Ever get lost in a maze?

The most common types today are corn mazes, often coupled with Halloween, so they become a sort of horror fest, where spooky people will often jump out and try to scare you.

You’re probably at least as familiar with hedge mazes, though. Popular culture keeps giving us examples of these, even if they’re not terribly common in real life these days. Remember the iconic scenes from The Shining?

Very few tropes make us go “nope” like the horror concept of the maze.

Mazes are designed to perplex us. They’re supposed to confuse and confound us, so we spend time and mental energy working on how to get out.

Labyrinths, on the other hand, go back much further than mazes, and they have an entirely different purpose. This came as a bit of a surprise to me at some point, having conflated the two ideas in my young mind, but the reality is that they’re kind of opposites.

It’s certainly true that both are winding paths, but unlike mazes, a labyrinth only has one way in and out. The idea isn’t to confound, but instead to calm and center.

Some 3500 years ago, someone built labyrinths on the island of Gotland, in modern-day Sweden. Today, these little “Troy Towns” (Trojeborgar) are frequently associated with Vikings, who are said to have used these ancient labyrinths in important spiritual rituals.

You can visit these pathways today and see just how soothing they are, not at all designed to get you lost or perplexed.

What’s noteworthy about this observation is that mazes and labyrinths share enough similar characteristics so that I thought they were the same thing for most of my life, and yet they have exact opposite purposes. This is one of those little whoa moments I tend to cherish.

A labyrinth is a meditation and a reinforcement in certainty. Spiritual leaders and religious priests would often use them to keep this idea front-and-center, that you could trust in an outcome if only you followed a particular path.

Mazes, on the other hand, teach the lesson that nothing is certain about the path you’re on.

While it might be tempting to ask the question: which is more like life?, I think the answer is that life is both a labyrinth and a maze. Some things about our path are certain, while others are as-yet unknown.

We do have some guiding principles that can give us an idea of what to expect. The laws of physics give us the ability to make specific predictions that are accurate enough to land a rickety spacecraft with a human being in it on the moon, among the other things.

Principles of human rights imply that everyone should be treated with respect and dignity, and religious frameworks encourage a specific set of behavioral guidelines. However, neither of these predict who will actually follow these rules.

But wait, you’re thinking: can’t you make the argument that the laws of physics ultimately govern human behavior as well? Leaving aside philosophy for now, you wouldn’t be wrong, but the problem is that there are so many fundamental interactions that physics loses the predictive thread immediately.

That’s why we have more specific fields like biology, but even biology fails to predict how humans will behave. We have anthropology, too, but studying our past only tells us so much about the future, since it rhymes instead of repeating.

The truth is that we have a lot of guiding principles in life, so in many ways, the path we’re on is foreseeable. We have the laws of physics, and we have some sort of vague understanding that if we behave in a certain way, we can have a predictable life. Life is a labyrinth.

The truth is also that there’s a great deal we don’t know about the way things work, especially human minds when they interact with one another. Human nature is predictable, but wild card moments crop up all the time. Life is a maze.

Did you already know this distinction before reading this? Did I not watch Labyrinth enough times as a kid to know the difference?