The fol­low­ing excerpts are from Joseph Campbell’s The Masks of God, Vol­ume 1: Prim­i­tive Mythol­ogy.

In a myth of the Melane­sian island of Malekula in the New Hebrides, which describes the dan­gers of the way to the Land of the Dead, it is told that when the soul has been car­ried on a wind across the waters of death and is approach­ing the entrance of the under­world, it per­ceives a female guardian sit­ting before the entrance, draw­ing a labyrinth design across the path, of which she erases half as the soul approaches. The voy­ager must restore the design per­fectly if he is to pass through it to the Land of the Dead. Those who fail, the thresh­old guardian eats. One may under­stand how very impor­tant it must have been, then to learn this secret of the labyrinth before death; and why the teach­ing of this secret of immor­tal­ity is the chief con­cern of the reli­gious cer­e­mo­ni­als of Malekula.

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Accord­ing to a num­ber of author­i­ties cited by W.F. Jack­son Knight in a highly inter­est­ing and sug­ges­tive arti­cle on “Maze Sym­bol­ism and the Tro­jan Game,” the labyrinth, maze, and spi­ral were asso­ci­ated in ancient Crete and Baby­lon with the inter­nal organs of the human anatomy as well as with the under­world, the one being the micro­cosm of the other. “The object of the tomb-builder would have been to make the tomb as much like the body of the mother as he was able,” he writes, since to enter the next world, “the spirit would have to be re-born,” “The maze form—which is an elab­o­rated spiral—gives a long and indi­rect path from the out­side of an area to the inside, at a point called the nucleus, gen­er­ally near the cen­ter. Its prin­ci­ple seems to be the pro­vi­sion of a dif­fi­cult but pos­si­ble access to some impor­tant point. Two ideas are involved: the idea of defence and exclu­sion, and the idea of the pen­e­tra­tion, on cor­rect terms, of this defence.” “The maze sym­bol­ism, he states fur­ther, “seems some­how to be asso­ci­ated with maid­en­hood…. The over­com­ing of dif­fi­cul­ties by a hero fre­quently pre­cedes union with some hid­den princess.”

pg. 68–69

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