Talk:Cultural History of Mazes

From Maze

[//bracketing for now] According to Kern, “the earliest depiction of a maze dates from about 1420 CE”. However, as Espen Aarseth argues, Architectural mazes: church mazes, Purposes of Labyrinths and Mazes:

1. Protection: “to protect places of importance in their immediate vicinities” (13)
2. Games: “Swedish peasants living in Finland used to use the stone mazes in that country for running games in which the young men would run through them to a girl at the centre” or alternatively “ a stone coffer grave at the center” (13).
3. Research: For the study of intelligence in humans or animals [NICE! Mouse in the Maze]
4. Dances patterns
5. Exclusion Ritual
6. Talismans to protect
7. Symbolic mazes:
   1. Path a soul takes…
   2. Birth, life, death
8. Exclusion ritual:

W. F. Jackson Knight. “The nine men’s morris is fill’d up with mud; and the quaint mazes in the wanton green, For lack of tread, are undistinguishable” -- A mid Summer night’s Dream.

Meaning of Ancient mazes and labyrinths. Bord turns from the origins of the form to the meaning its creators associated with the drawing. She describes “The Path” a sand tracing from west Malekula which represend the journey that the dead man must travel to the land of the dead. Significance