Labyrinth as Myth, Metaphor and Model

Year: 2003 Authors: Jiyun Park

Core claim

The labyrinth functions as a mythic and geometric model that connects natural forces, unconscious processes, and higher-dimensional form through knotting, rotation, and unfolding.

Topics

labyrinth myth, Ariadne’s thread, synchronistic forces, hidden order, higher-dimensional geometry

Domains

geometry, Golden Section, hyperbolic parabolas, hypercube, spiral forms, mythology, dance, mandalas

Methods

mythic interpretation, metaphorical analogy, conceptual mapping, geometric modeling

Media

text, dance, knot imagery, diagrammatic form

Paper text

The text below is the locally extracted OCR/Markdown version of the paper. Raw PDF files remain local and are not published here.

ISAMA The International Society of the Arts, Mathematics, and Architecture BRIDGES Mathematical Connections in Art, Music, and Science

Labyrinth as Myth, Metaphor and Model

Jiyun Park 203 E. Montgomery Street Baltimore, MD 21230 E-mail: jiyunpark@email.com

Abstract

Folding is to Hinging As Enveloping is to Eclipsing And Wind is to Water As Breath is to Sound

The Labyrinth, or Dancing Floor, was constructed by the first mythical architect, Daedalus, for Ariadne. Before the floor there was the dance, a dance of virgins upon the shore. Ariadne, according to Indras Kagis McEwen, knowing the dance of the “moving maze” spins a thread by the passage of “well-taught feet.” This thread allows safe passage for Theseus from the labyrinth’s duality or its minotaur, a half-god, half-bull. The ebbing shores where wind, water, earth and sky push, pull and rotate becoming measurable in the forming of the dancing floor embodies chaos.

The myth of the labyrinth and Ariadne’s thread re-told as a metaphor of forces in Nature are events of a personal journey, awakening the un[conscious] as something in[separable]. That is something simultaneously conscious and unconscious. And more, these forces are synchronistic. A term coined by Carl Jung, these energies/events are connected by similarity, by meaning, by resonance rather than by common causality. Un[common] causality, in physics, was the prediction of Wolfgang Pauli who searched for the neutral language between human psyche and physics. Ariadne’s thread of knots translates myth into a metaphor in physics as knots of a geometric expression. Fergus Murray says, “The phenomenon in question is known as quantum entanglement. Briefly stated, what is happening is this: Particles which are arbitrarily far apart seem to be influencing each other, even though according to relativity this means that what seems to be causing an event from one point of view, from another point of view doesn’t happen until after the effect being caused… hidden-variables theories of John Stewart Bell and David Bohm.” In David Bohn’s Wholeness and the Implicit Order, he writes of Brownian movements and the possibility of deeper individual laws that remain hidden. Anne G. Tyng models the hidden un[conscious], natural, and man-made forms. Her search reveals the phases of bilateral, rotational, helical and spiral geometries expressive in molecular formations, mandalas, space/time and causality as it relates to collective and individual cycles, and to life cycles. These synchronistic cycles occur in eleven phases over recorded time. Each cycle rotating through simple to complex solids towards the center of the labyrinth of all geometries eclipsing into a higher solids whose energy transmits color, light, and more. Unfolding symbolic form, phenomenon is less an abstraction to geometries, but literal. This bridgeless forming has an

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ordering principal known as the Golden Section; weaving disparate conditions into a single Tantric knot from which the many hinge.

As seen in the new work of Manuel Baez, Anne G. Tyng’s searchings have produced an extraordinary mapping, the labyrinth itself and moreover, the thread by which we may survive. Both are beyond what Alberto Perez-Gomez calls, our Scientific Instrumentality, towards the formation of a thirteen petaled rose, with petals of hyperbolic parabolas simultaneously rotating and unfolding/unhinging about a stem, resembling Tantric mandalas or labyrinths when frozen and sectioned. A fourth dimensional hypercube, one in which you can see the whole cube all at once, not just three sides, relates a new dimension to us. The labyrinth is but a rose, by any other name would still smell as sweet. *

*Shakespeare

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