Symbolic labyrinth, like the two-headed figure, 

 occurs as a standardized form in widely divergent 

 places and times: at an archaeological site in west- 

 ern India, ca. 3000-4000 B.C. (above); on a rock face 

 in Cornwall, England, ca. 1500 B.C. (top right); and on a 

 coin from Crete, ca. 280 B.C. (right). When the design is prop- 

 erly drawn, a single, continuous path connects the outside 

 and the center, with no possibility of getting "lost." (In the 

 Greek legend of the labyrinth and the Minotaur, Ariadne 

 gives Theseus a thread so that he can find his way back out, 

 but that should not have been necessary.) The labyrinth may 

 represent a pathway for the spirit to the realm of the ances- 

 tors, where it may achieve rebirth. 



those scholars is the French anthropologist Claude 

 Levi-Strauss, professor emeritus of Social Anthro- 

 pology at the College de France, who from his life- 

 long study of myths and rituals, has hypothesized 

 that the mind — and ultimately the brain — uncon- 

 sciously understands the world in terms of binary 

 opposites. "If social anthropologists were half as in- 

 terested in material culture as they ought to be," 

 wrote Levi-Strauss, with reference to physical arti- 

 facts, "they would probably have paid more atten- 

 tion to Carl Schuster's fascinating survey." 



Few have. Part of the problem lies in the excesses 

 of some popular theorists. Anthropologists have 

 (rightly I think) turned their backs on The Golden 

 Bough, first published 1890 by the Scottish anthro- 

 pologist Sir James George Frazer. Frazer's sweeping 

 attempt to define a common mythical element in re- 

 ligions around the world stripped them of their in- 

 dividuality. The German ethnographer Adolf Bas- 

 tian's belief that certain elemental ideas developed in 

 disparate places because of the "psychic unity of 

 mankind" had few takers among social scientists. The 

 same fate befell the innate "archetypes of the un- 

 conscious," proposed by the early twentieth-century 



Swiss psychologist Carl 

 Gustav Jung. 



Such interpretations 

 of symbolic meaning 

 may be more a projec- 

 tion of a theorist's mind 

 than a reflection of na- 

 tive intention. In con- 

 trast, to interpret tribal 

 designs, Schuster drew 

 on his experiences as a 

 cryptanalyst. Decoding, he knew, was 

 easier if you had some idea of what 

 was being transmitted. To decode 

 W ancient designs, he turned to 

 |k\ native artists. Instead of inves- 

 tigating how natives think — as 

 did the French philosopher, 

 psychologist, and ethnologist 

 Lucien Levy-Bruhl, in works 

 such as Mental Functions in Prim- 

 itive Societies (1910) — Schuster 

 isked the natives directly, "What do 

 you think?" 



A motif that appears frequently in Schuster's 

 archives is a human figure vertically split into 

 male and female halves (usually its right side is male, 

 its left, female). One common version is simply a 

 single body with the two heads, both facing forward, 

 the sex not necessarily distinguishable [sec photographs 

 on pages 42 and 43]. In more elaborate examples, the 

 two-headed figure bears a human face or eye at each 

 of its twelve primaryjoints: shoulders, elbows, wrists, 

 hips, knees, and ankles. 



When he encountered contemporary examples of 



Sketching a Labyrinth 



One way to draw a standard labyrinth, a deceptively sim- 

 ple design, is to begin with an array of twelve points 

 placed around a cross. Two lines, crossing at the center, 

 wall off the pathway; each line has two end points. 



May 2006 NATURAI HISTOIO 



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