Perhaps the most famous symbol of Crete is the labyrinth, the image of its plan, minted on ancient coins. According to the witty guess of Arthur Evans, who discovered in Crete an ancient Minoan culture that supposedly belonged to the first Indo-Europeans of the Mediterranean region (the Aryans), the very word “labyrinth” is etymologically related to the word – labrys: a two-sided ax that was an indispensable attribute of Zeus, a sacred symbol expressing the principle of the unity of secular and spiritual power in the hands of the king of the ancient Aryans.

So, Labrys is a symbol of royal power, and Zeus Labrandeus is a deity, the patron of the king. Here it is worth remembering the name of the founder of the great Hittite state in Asia Minor – the king Labarna. His name has a definitive connection with the name of the sacred banner of the Equal-to-the-Apostles Emperor Constantine ̶ the Labrum.

As for the Church, it placed images of labyrinths as a re-meaningful ancient symbol ̶ the path of the soul of the lost sinner to salvation. Such images can be seen in the cathedrals of Chartres, Reims, Amiens or in Vienna on the facade of the Franciscan church of 1611. In a Finnish church in Sibbo you can see a mysterious holy or even a pagan goddess in a labyrinth. A significant number of labyrinths can be seen on the Celtic lands. Especially a lot of them in Ireland, but they are found also on the outskirts of the Celtic world, in Spanish Galicia, carved into stone. The spiral as a symbol of the entrance to the underworld is known in the British Isles since antiquity.

If we talk about the most widespread form of labyrinths, known in Europe, Asia and America, then we must say that they have an entrance, but no way out. American Indians, Kurds, and other peoples have preserved in their rites the labyrinth as a figure protecting against evil spirits who are forced to wander in it, without endangering a person. In Arizona, New Mexico, Northern Mexico, Ecuador, Brazil and Peru, there are labyrinths identical to those of Europe. They are also in Nepal and Pakistan. In India you’ll meet them from the Himalayas to the Dravidian South, from where they have penetrated to Sumatra and Java. There is no doubt that Aryans brought their solar symbol to Hindustan from the North: on the shores of the White Sea, there are more than a third of all known labyrinths, and the monks of the Solovetsky Monastery knew that these sanctuaries were associated with the veneration of their ancestors in ancient times. The deceased compared their ancestors to the sun returned to people after getting lost in the labyrinth of darkness, and the Church began to understand by this return the coming of Christ.

The sacred dance and the solar cult of the Aryans in connection with the labyrinth are a special theme. There is a picture of the dance labyrinth depicted by the Polish guild of shoemakers. The dance in the labyrinth for the ancients had the same meaning as the Russian round dance – a sacred circular dance dedicated to Hors, the solar deity of the Slavs. It is not by chance that the words “dance”, “round dance”, or even “ball” mean χορός in Greek, but a popular folk dance of the modern Turks living in the former Greek Pontus (the historical country in Asia Minor opposite Sochi) calls “Horon” – an undoubted Greek borrowing. 

Let us recall the Russian dance around the birches for a famous song “in the field the birch stood …” Stone and earth embankments, labyrinths and “May trees” belong to a single sacred complex in the beliefs of the Aryan peoples. In the same connection, we point out that in the images of the Minoan Crete, dancers often are met in a fenced space around an olive or fig tree. Sometimes over them you can see a floating goddess symbolizing the goddess’s accessibility to the gaze or sensual contact of people entering the state of trance. Let us recall in this connection the Turkish “whirling dervishes” who learn God in their ecstatic dance.

The Iliad tells how King Minos built a “dance circle” for his daughter Ariadne. Next to some ancient tombs there were also special dance grounds. The ancient world allows us to conclude that the Aryan tribes brought to the Mediterranean a religious and magical idea of the labyrinth: the Pelasgians who lived in Crete before the arrival of the Greeks were considered by the latter barbarians because they spoke a strange language, and Herodotus believed that the original inhabitants of Crete were those Carians who later migrated to Asia Minor.

The unique labyrinth, created by the master Daedalus, was an underground structure and has nothing to do with the multistorel overground construction of the palace in Knossos. The fact is that no less magnificent buildings of the Minoan period were discovered after it on Crete in Faistos, Malia, Zakros and other places. Knossos was the first among equals. There are medieval Venetian maps, where the labyrinth is in the center of Crete near the ancient city of Gorthyn, the capital of the island in Roman times. There were found there, indeed, grandiose underground structures, but this in no way detracts from the sacred role of the Knossos palace buildings and doesn’t at all abolish their deep connection with the underground structure where the Minotaur lived. Cretan coins with labyrinth images don’t depict the complex network of Gorthyn underground passages: it’s only an ancient symbol brought from the northern ancestral home and applied to a new reality – a complex underground structure. Researchers of the story about the Minotaur believe that it’s possible to connect its origin with the symbols of the royal power, the rites of initiation and the inheritance of royal charisma. Probably, the myth reflects the echoes of ancient rites connected with transfer of royal power in the tradition of customary law. It’s very important to recall here, that in Crete the sun, like Zeus, was revered as a bull: so, the Aryans brought the metaphysical idea of ​​the labyrinth as a sacrificial altar dedicated to the sun. 

An exceptional fact for the Christian worldview is the find of the cross in the Palace of Knossos. The name of the palace Labyrinth, apparently, meant “House of Labrys” (of two-sided ax): there is almost no chamber in the whole complex without an image of this ax, and its geometric connection with the cross is obvious, since the intersection of two axial axes (longitudinal and transverse) forms a cross. Labrys images was also found in other palaces of the island, and the cross appears on Minoan plates: these images of it will be called later in heraldry the equilateral Greek cross or the Celtic cross in the circle.

Curiously, the Minoans buried their dead in small sarcophagi, transporting them to uninhabited islands. Everyone can see a complex of labyrinths on the Zayatsky Island of the Solovetsky archipelago (in Russia), which is uninhabited and used only as a burial place for the ancestors. In the Knossos palace, the royal throne room is decorated with frescoes of griffins – a favorite plot of Scythian and Slavic art. Another curious coincidence is that the Minoans often depicted the sacred labrys between the horns of a bull: often there was only the image of it between two horns. This surprisingly coincides with the design of the tridents of the Rurik family, starting with the emblem of Prince Vladimir the Saint, known for images on gold coins, where a straight bar or “spear” is depicted between the “wings”, crowned with a cross – the main part of this emblem can be seen on the State insignia of Ukraine.

Compiled from texts of Vladimir Larionov’s book “The Origin of the Russian Tribe”.  

O. Loginov