THE MISTRESS OF THE LABYRINTH

Peter Mark Adams

To all the gods honey;

To the Mistress of the Labyrinth, honey 1

A clay tablet, lozenge-shaped; its rough surface, scoured with deep incisions,
declares an ancient syllabary whose precursory brevity reveals
a kind of short-hand, an aide-memoire, perhaps,
to guide propitiatory rites amidst the
lost palaces of Crete.

The lines, addressing a Great Goddess, employ her most archaic title,
to reveal her rightful portion: golden honey, measured to equal
that of all the other gods; only the epic poet
preserved the slender clue
to her true identity.

The poet sang,

The god of two strong arms with ingenuity wrought

upon the shield a likeness. A dance-floor,
such that Daedalus had so cunningly made
for Ariadne of Knossos.2

‘Ariadne’, drawn from arihagne, ‘the utterly pure’; and traced through hagnos,
‘pure’, to agios, ‘sacred’; but when combined with the epithet, ‘Aridela’,
the ‘utterly clear’; allows us to adduce the presence
of the full moon, as clear as terror,
in a cloudless sky.

The labyrinthos, as sacred dance, was ever a rite of invocation, a rhythmic path
for those who danced and drew down her ancient power
dissolving the walls that separate the worlds
the dancers keep step with
their ancestral spirits.
6
 The metaphoric imagery of the past obscures the latent meaning; and so
the significance of that fateful dance; Plato glosses ‘labyrinth’
as a place wherein the soul endlessly returns
to its point of embarkation; enjoining
the exigency of cyclic existence:

‘the soul that desires its body

loses itself in the visible world, 
and only after much resistance and suffering,
with violence and with difficulty,
is denuded of it by its appointed guardian.
Thereupon, it wanders in utter bewilderment
only to be carried by the force of necessity,
to a place of brief repose’.3

Ariadne’s thread, in the hands of her youthful dancers, retains the promise
made to all her acolytes: ‘I bestow ensoulment upon all living things,
consciousness of me is the awareness of the
essential unity of all sentient life
in all times and forever’.

NOTES

1 Linear B tablet Kn 702 M 11.

2 Homer, Iliad, XVIII, 590-593.
3 Plato, Phaedo, 108a-c.