Mito e realtà. Mythos und Realität

[Autom. eng. transl.] Beautiful were those times when the labyrinth was a real entity: one saw it, dared enter it, and whoever had the most luck reached the exit and earned eternal heroic glory. In any case, traversing the labyrinth represented the initiation rite of purification and renewal; the maze reflected a magical world or the sky with its stars that never got off the train. Maybe the labyrinth was also a tricky puzzle game, a chessboard on which you measured your self-esteem with an unknown enemy, or it was ultimately the shock of your own defeats. Even though the soul was never really invincible, it found its own way on this labyrinthine route without escape routes, hardly practicable and lonely; a way in which each step became an irrevocable and definitive decision. Pliny's enunciation of concrete labyrinths - the Egyptian, Cretan, that of Lemnos and Chiusi, described in the "Naturalis historia" (XXXVI, 19) - does not seem so vast in comparison to the figurative use of the term, the complicated, wistful, and hopelessness describes the marked state of the mind. In fact, one must wait for the sixth century and Boethius' "De consolatione philosophiae" (III, 12) to encounter much more terrible labyrinths than the real ones, namely the unfathomable paths created by the logic of the dream. The labyrinth of life stretches from the horizon of birth to that of death and runs along narrow winding paths. And we wish that the labyrinth would now and again reveal the unimaginable color of hope and, in countless encounters, the pure countenance of comfort and happiness - or at least a glimpse of it.