“I sent my soul through the invisible, Some letter of that after life to spell: And by and by my soul return’d to me, And answer’d: I myself am Heaven and Hell.” (Austin Osman Spare)
Watching ‘room 237’ and ‘stranger things’ with the kids, started me thinking about why these themes seem to resonate so much. I find myself drawn to the archetypal story of the beast in the labyrinth; The idea of the field of testing, which turns out to be a point of contact or a place for a last stand. Here we are, happily going about our business, but with the turn of a corner, we are suddenly confronted with an embodiment of all that has been hidden! The strange bulge in the wallpaper does need to be investigated at some point.
The Minotaur stalks our inner world, roaming the labyrinthine cerebral corridors. A creature that needs to be challenged with the heroic courage of Theseus. As Solzhenitsyn stated, ‘The battleline between good and evil runs through the heart of every man.’
This beast is the ‘dweller on the threshold’. It performs the role of gate keeper. It is a guardian that will either ‘tear us limb from limb’ or dissolve into nothing. A confrontation with this monster is inevitable for one who has set out on ‘a path’ and wishes to ‘travel further’. We find the inner and outer worlds are mirrors of each other. If the creature is not faced within, it will emerge and accost the traveller from without.
When the creature is tackled on the inside of the labyrinth, within the secret places of the mind, the conflict that results is called ‘the dark night of the soul.’ When the creature appears on the outside, ravaging through the ‘everyday’ tunnels of maya, then it is called ‘The Testing.’
William Blake called this outer form, ‘the spectre’, and once escaped from the labyrinth brain, it advances like the leviathan, ‘with all the fury of a spiritual existence’.
