I have been pondering the Labyrinth, not as prison or as maze, but as the house grown to monstrous proportions. Rooms festering without purpose cancerous within winding corridors. Ornamentations of a forgotten past, functionaries without masters.
The Palace of Minos was one such Labryinth. Its walls swelled with the riches of an ancient kingdom. It was the life bed of a man doomed to be a judge of the dead. Life sheltering death. It grew from resplendent garden to a tangled morose due to the seed of stolen sacrifice. A bull from stygian depth denied its proper return. Life clinging to death. That seed flowered into an unquenchable appetite. Death undeniable within life.
A labyrinth is built from the inside out. Every room carved out, filled up, entombed. It expands layer upon layer with each generation within it. What is the labyrinth but the outward expression of the manifold desires of its inhabitants?
What if that inhabitant is a god? Sobek, great god of appetite, resided within his labyrinth kept company by his crocodiles, his cunning priesthood, and his fearful pilgrims. Appetite is a desire that requires growth and consumption in equal measure. Life and death in masturbatory cycle.
To the ancients the Palace of Minos, the Temple of Sobek, were baffling constructs. Buildings whose sheer size made them unnavigatable to the uninitiated. Would modern man find them so?
In this rat racing aeon; in this landscape of malls, offices, campus complexes; would the Labryinth even register as an oddity. We are already so familiar with the cancer spiral of death chasing life. It has built far larger palaces than any ancient Minoan can dream.
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