This twilight is sometimes represented in the form of a labyrinth or, in its absence, as a spiral, which is its original symbol, its simplest shape. The labyrinth, says Juan Eduardo Cirlot, “symbolizes the unconscious, an error and a distancing from the source of life,”¹ it is a horizontal representation of the katabasis, the descent into the underworld.

But solving a labyrinth lies not only in reaching the center, the trick is getting out. The descent is only one of the polarities of a spiral/labyrinth, which also implies an anabasis, or ascent to the world of wakefulness by means of a journey from the center to the periphery. The Anabasis of Xenophon (0.3), also known as The March of the Ten Thousand, tells of the retreat of an army of Greek mercenaries which, after the defeat of Cyrus the Younger, must flee from the center of the Persian Empire to its periphery, the Mediterranean.

The two polarities implicit in the spiral/labyrinth are represented in the myths of Arachne and Ariadne, the first an expert weaver who dared boasting of being more skillful than Athena and who, after being humiliated in a competition with the goddess, was transformed into a spider and forced to weave and unravel her web perpetually (katabasis); and the second, the daughter of Minos and princess of Crete who helped Theseus defeat the Minotaur and flee from the center of the spiral/labyrinth/spiderweb with the help of a ball of yarn that traced the way back to the outside world (anabasis). A labyrinth is traced by drawing a spiral from the outside in and then from the inside out, like Arachne, or its unraveled by puling the spiral from the center to the periphery, like Ariadne.

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1. Eduardo Cirlot, Diccionario de símbolos, 274. ↩︎