Labyrinths and initiations by Elisabeth Storrs

Labyrinths have always been a source of fascination to me. None more so than the famous lair of the Minotaur in ancient Crete. According to Greek myth, this bewildering structure was designed by the inventor Daedalus (father of the doomed Icarus) at the behest of King Minos. The maze was built in the city of Knossos to hold the half man/half bull monster to whom 7 youths and 7 maidens were sacrificed each year as tribute owed by the Athenian King Aegeus to Minos for killing the Cretan king’s son. The minotaur was ultimately slain by Aegeus’ son, Theseus, who was sent as one of the sacrificial youths to Knossos. Minos’ daughter, Ariadne, fell in love with the prince and assisted him to kill the monster and then escape the labyrinth by giving him a ball of thread to enable him to retrace his path.

Classical pattern, medieval pattern, modern walking labyrinth and hedge maze

A seven course single path design known as ‘unicursal’ became associated with the labyrinth on Cretan coins as early as 430 BCE, and became common as a visual depiction of the legendary labyrinth from Roman times onwards. In later religious tradition, large labyrinth designs set into floors were walked and used for private meditation or for therapeutic purposes based on the concept of a pilgrimage from the entrance to the centre where God awaits. In comparison, a maze is a complex pattern with branches and dead ends known as ‘multicursal’ which require a series of choices to be made in order to safely navigate. Medieval garden hedges are a fine example of these.

In the ancient world, the feat of escaping a labyrinth was associated with a triumph of life over death. In some cases, navigating one was seen as a form of initiation where a boy was required to enter as a child and emerge as a man after surviving danger. One such initiation ritual was known as ‘The City of Troy’ in Rome and Etruria.

The City of Troy was a reference to the labyrinth of Crete. Yet what was the connection between the legendary cities of Troy and Knossos? An explanation comes from both archaeological evidence and the poetry of the Roman poet, Vergil.

Tragliatella Vase

In his great epic, The Aeneid, the Roman poet Vergil tells of the wanderings of Aeneas, the son of Anchises and Venus, following the fall of Troy. After fighting to defend the besieged city, Aeneas escaped carrying his father on his shoulders while leading his young son Ascanius (who later came to be called Iulus) to safety. According to Roman tradition, during the funeral games for his grandfather, Ascanius took part in a processional parade or dance called the Game of Troy (Lusus Trojae) while mounted on a horse given to him by the Carthaginian queen Dido. The young prince and his companions performed a complex weaving pattern by riding between and around each other as though threading their way through a labyrinth. Vergil drew a comparison between the tortuous convolutions of the rite to the twisting pathways within the Minotaur’s den at Knossos. He also referred to the manoeuvres of the game as mimicking the ‘Crane Dance’ performed by the youths Theseus saved from the Minotaur. From Vergil’s description it is clear that completing the game involved great skill to avoid injury or death.

The column split apart
As files in the three squadrons all in line
Turned away, cantering left and right; recalled
They wheeled and dipped their lances for a charge.
They entered then on parades and counter-parades,
The two detachments, matched in the arena,
Winding in and out of one another,
And whipped into sham cavalry skirmishes
By baring backs in flight, then whirling round
With leveled points, then patching up a truce
And riding side by side. So intricate
In ancient times on mountainous Crete they say
The Labyrinth, between walls in the dark,
Ran criss-cross a bewildering thousand ways
Devised by guile, a maze insoluable,
Breaking down every clue to the way out.
So intricate the drill of Trojan boys
Who wove the patterns of their prancing horses,
Figured, in sport, retreats and skirmishes                

(Aeneid, V. 5.580–593 Translation by Robert Fitzgerald)

Vergil conjured the image of the Lusus Trojae when writing in the 1st century CE, but there is archaeological evidence of its existence dating from the late C7th BCE. The Tragliatella Vase discovered near the Etruscan city of Caere (modern Cerveteri) depicts two horsemen emerging from a spiral marked with the word ‘Truia’. A line of marching warriors is also displayed on the wine jug which seems to suggest that the vase portrays a military ceremony similar to the one of legend. As the Romans were heavily influenced by the Etruscans, it is plausible that the equestrian ceremony that was later referred to by Vergil was in fact an Etruscan tradition.

Detail Tragliatella Vase City of Troy design

The Game of Troy was ‘revived’ by Julius Caesar who claimed to be a descendant of Iulus (Ascanius) and was performed by the young sons of high ranking families. It was not associated with any particular religious festival and was conducted at funeral games and in military triumphs. Suetonius and Tacitus also wrote of the Lusus Trojae which appears to have become more of a military review by the time of Nero.

With my love of all things Etruscan, I found the etchings on the humble Tragliatella Vase intriguing enough to inspire me to include an episode in my book The Golden Dice: A Tale of Ancient Rome involving the Troy Game. Yet what strikes me most about the Lusus Trojae is how legend, poetry and history are intertwined and held fast by a strong thread from two epic stories that inspired three great civilisations: Etruria, Greece and Rome. 

Elisabeth Storrs is the author of the A Tale of Ancient Rome series. Her latest release, is Fables & Lies: A World War II Novel about stolen Trojan treasure and the Aryan Myth. She is also the founder of the Historical Novel Society Australasia and the ARA Historical Novel Prize. Learn more at www.elisabethstorrs.com. 

Images are courtesy Wikimedia Commons

CROPPING AND CREATING - Teresa Flavin on writing her latest novel 'The Shadow Lantern'............. by Theresa Breslin

This post is a response to request from a follower of the History Girls Blog who asked for insights into writing. It follows on from various conversations I’ve had with the writer and illustrator Teresa Flavin, and to satisfy my own curiosity and fascination with labyrinths and magic lanterns and other sic things.

 Teresa Flavin is a Glasgow-based children’s author and illustrator. Her illustrated fantasy novel for 9-14 year olds, The Blackhope Enigma, was published in 2010 by Templar Publishing and was long and short-listed for numerous book awards, including the 2011 Scottish Children’s Book Awards. The sequel, The Crimson Shard, was published in 2011 and was also nominated for several awards. The final book in the trilogy, The Shadow Lantern, was published on 1 May.  
http://www.templarco.co.uk/fiction/teresa_flavin.html

I knew Teresa first as an illustrator. Originally from the U.S.A. she moved to Scotland a number of years ago and we met at a writers’ conference. The first thing I wanted to know was why, as an established artist and illustrator, was she attracted to writing novels for young people? She replied:

I had been illustrating children’s books for some time so the idea of writing children’s stories was a natural progression. I wanted to illustrate a wider variety of stories and decided to try my hand at creating texts that would excite me artistically. I also knew of editors who were interested in seeing picture book manuscripts from author/illustrators and set out to write stories that I could present with a dummy book and one or two finished sample images. But as I worked on texts of just a few hundred words, I was attracted to many complex ideas that were far more suitable for longer stories. They began as what Tim Bowler calls “a whisper in the head”, then became an insistent buzzing and eventually pulled me away from picture books altogether. I began to discover my inner fourteen-year-old and became caught up in telling the fantastic adventures of two art-enthused teens that bore similarities to myself at that age.

So then of course, the question that many of us are asked…. Why historical? In Teresa’s books this is a thread within the stories. She told me that she doesn’t recall making a conscious choice about this, and went on to say…

Preliminary sketch of Blackhope Tower for The Shadow Lantern.

I had been reading an intriguing and spiritual book about labyrinths and they were very much on my mind. My first novel, The Blackhope Enigma,was an exploration of this daydream/question: what if a young person could walk around a labyrinth and be so transformed by the experience that he or she is transported someplace else? And what if that place is below the surface of a Renaissance painting? I have been fascinated with such paintings since I was very young and have always wondered what it would be like to enter one.

I reckoned that for such a thing to happen there would have to be enchantment involved, but I was unprepared for what I found when I poked around the history of Renaissance art and magic. I became completely lost in research for some time, endlessly reading about grimoires and memory palaces, Hermeticism and alchemical imagery. Suddenly the idea of hidden worlds below a painting did not seem so far-fetched; plenty of people in sixteenth-century Europe would have believed it possible in a world where one was surrounded by magic and wonders.

One historical path led to another and I was discovering so many amazing things that my stories acquired layers, characters and details I could not have imagined at the start. I was hooked. I wanted to unearth and weave more fantastic elements into new stories, to bring odd bits of history alive in the adventures of young contemporary characters.

Teresa’s books are special in that Art and Language are melded in the narrative and I wondered how she tackled doing this. Her answer tells me as much about her views on painting as it does about language.

I wanted young readers to see and feel the richness and strangeness of the worlds I created, but I had to be careful not to weigh them down with description. When I make a painting, I hope that it’s not overworked or leaden; it needs to “sing” to the viewer. Therefore my approach has to be simple, confident and from the heart. I’ve come to think that writing about art is the same. There needs to be just enough detail to entice and to set the reader’s imagination alight. It’s a delicate balance and involves just as much cropping as creating.

I love that expression “as much Cropping as Creating”. I also loved the first book (and the rest!) and really wondered how she'd approach any follow up story and indeed how they would be linked them to each other.

The second and third novels, The Crimson Shard and The Shadow Lantern, grew organically out of The Blackhope Enigma. There was no over-arching story, no grand plan from the start. Instead there were fascinating strands to take up and some new elements to explore, such as trompe l’oeil murals, alchemy and art forgery in The Crimson Shard. Early magic lanterns and spirit photography were inspirations for The Shadow Lantern. I enjoyed digging into these elements, putting them together and seeing what could happen.

I discovered how easy it is to lumber a narrative with too much background information! I ended up identifying with young readers who had not read the first or second book. What do they need to know? Will they become confused? How can I help them? The problem was that I was a bit too ‘helpful’ at times and there was a lot of back-story pruning that had to be done. Again, this is a delicate balance, achieved after much feedback from my editors.

One of the great pleasures of writing a trilogy was in spending more time with my main characters. At the beginning I had the daunting prospect of getting to know them, challenging them, making them grow and change. By the second book, I had a good idea of who they were and how they moved through the world; by the final book, it was a pleasure to be with them and to find out how they would approach the next obstacle I placed in front of them.

It would be great to have feedback on Teresa’s thoughts and books – please do get in touch.

I’ll leave her with the last word about writing the series, and hope that others have the same experience in their own writing.

It’s been a wonderful journey…

The Shadow Lantern has recently been published in the UK by Templar Publishing. To learn more about Teresa’s novels and artwork, visit her new websites at http://www.teresaflavin.com/



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