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reference Persephone, the maiden of
springtime. The relationship that exists between the symbolism of Persephone and
that of the labyrinth supports the interpretation of maze dances originally being
celebratory of springtime, fertility, and the sun.
Recall that in the ancient Greek myth,
Demeter’s only daughter, Persephone (also called Kore and Proserpine),
was admiring the narcissus in a meadow when "a chasm opened in the earth and out of
it coal black horses sprang, drawing a chariot and driven by one who had a look of dark
splendor" (Hamilton, 91). So it was that Hades, the god of the underworld,
abducted young Persephone, who was "brutally wrenched away from her girlish games and
dragged into the womb of the earth" (Mythology, 409).
Demeter’s sorrow at losing her only daughter caused her to withhold "her gifts from the earth, which turned into a frozen desert. The green and flowering land was icebound and lifeless because Persephone had disappeared" (Hamilton, 51). "The year was most dreadful and cruel for mankind over all the earth. Nothing grew; no seed sprang up ... it seemed the whole race of men would die of famine. At last Zeus saw that he must take the matter in hand" (Hamilton, 53). The compromise that was reached ended the crisis and dictated that Persephone spend one-third of the year with Hades and the remainder with Demeter. Each year, the onset of winter coincided with Persephone’s return to the underworld, while her eventual emergence returned springtime to the earth.
Therefore, Persephone’s annual descent into the underworld and subsequent emergence symbolizes the theme of death and rebirth, of both herself and the earth, as expressed by the labyrinth. The relationship that exists between Persephone’s symbolism and the labyrinth figure is illustrated by three Knossian coins dating from 500 to 430 BCE. The faces of all three coins display the profile of what is believed to be Persephone or possibly Demeter. The images adorning the reverse sides of these coins are a meander-labyrinth, a bull’s head surrounded by a meander frame, and a conventional labyrinth.
The British Abbots Bromley Horn Dance, thought to have originated as a maze dance, employs wooden replicas of reindeer heads with antlers carried by the dancers who alternately perform a single-file twisting dance and engage in symbolic combat. The ‘battle’ possibly symbolizes the struggle between life and death, and it has been suggested that the animal heads may have originally represented the Minotaur.
A spiral dance called ‘snails creep’ has been described in a book about Cornish folklore. The account describes young people, joined hand-in-hand, "keeping time to the tune with a lively step. The band, or head of the serpent keeps marching in an ever narrowing circle, whilst its train of dancing followers become coiled around it in circle after circle. It is now that the most interesting part of the dance commences, for the band, taking a sharp turn about, begins to retrace the circle, still followed as before" (Bord, 60-61).
Once a popular game in Britain, "The Troy game" or "Siege of Troy", which was also called "Nine Mens’ Morris" and "Merrils", had a board that displayed the design of an elementary labyrinth. This game is related to the French game of jeu de merrelles, or hopscotch. Some versions of this antique game incorporate spiral or circular movements, and the game’s earliest forms were circular in shape. Some scholars believe that, like maze dances, hopscotch originally reflected pre-Christian cosmologies by symbolizing the annual course of the sun through the movement of the stone. Another interpretation of hopscotch explains that "Hopscotch indeed symbolized the labyrinth