August 2025, 10 Minutes

Circles, Spirals, Labyrinths

Symbolic Pathways Through the Psyche

“I live my life in widening circles
that reach out across the world.
I may not ever complete the last one,
but I give myself to it.”

- I Live My Life in Widening Circles, by Rainer Maria Rilke

White Sails, Black Sails

A Greek youth, forced from boyhood into manhood through will and deed, walks confidently down a dark tunnel, careful to unspool a thread in his wake. The thread is his literal lifeline. This young man was a prince of Athens - Theseus, born of Aethra, to either King Aegeus of Athens, or the sea god Poseidon. His journey into the Labyrinth was no accident. He sought it out, embracing the danger as a trial of courage and destiny. And it was not the first time he had undertaken such acts.

The Labyrinth itself, crafted by Daedalus, the master inventor, at the command of King Minos, lay beneath the palace of Knossos on Crete (though no exact structure survives). The Labyrinth was a single spiralling path, winding and coiling in endless turns, deliberately designed to disorient. From outside, it seemed ordinary, but within, all light and direction were swallowed by the stone. Even Daedalus himself, it was said, nearly became lost in its corridors.

At the heart of the vast construction, there dwelled something…monstrous.

The Minotaur was a creature of horrific tragedy (as was the fashion at the time). Born of Pasiphaë, Queen of Crete, and a divine bull sent by Poseidon (so, in a sense, sharing a common lineage with Theseus), he was known as Asterion (“of the stars”) in infancy before becoming only “the Minotaur.” With the head of a bull, the body of a man, and the spirit of both and neither, he was raised in shame, a dark secret hidden from the world by his reluctant father. He was too grotesque to live freely, and yet too sacred to kill. He was imprisoned by Minos within the Labyrinth. His hunger was relentless, and Athens paid the price for it - every nine years, seven boys and seven girls were sent into the twisting passageways as tribute. None ever returned.

Long before Theseus faced the beast, the shaping of his heroic destiny had begun. His mother had raised him in Troezen, in Peloponnesus’ northeastern corner. Before his leaving of his maybe-son, Aegeus had hidden a sword and sandals beneath a massive rock. When Theseus came of age, he lifted the rock with ease (once again we have a hero finding destiny in swords hidden in or under rocks, ala Arthur, Siegfried, Perseus), claiming his father’s tokens, and wishing to prove his worth and strength, chose to travel to Athens by land, facing monsters and bandits. By the time he reached the city of his birthright, he was already a hero, and in typical heroic fashion, Theseus volunteered to join the doomed youths on their one-way Cretan sojourn, vowing to slay the Minotaur and end the blood price.

Once in Crete, Ariadne, daughter of King Minos, (as so often happens in the tales of old) fell in love with Theseus and gave him a ball of thread, a gift from Daedalus himself. With it, he could find his way back out of the Labyrinth. Entering the dark corridors, Theseus unravelled the thread behind him, pressed forward, and met the Minotaur in its lair. It is unclear if he fought with sword or with bare hands, but the outcome was the same – he killed the beast, freeing Athens from its torment. Following his gory victory, Theseus retraced his path by the thread and fled Crete with Ariadne and the surviving youths from his retinue. Despite their shared destiny, on the journey home, he abandoned Ariadne on the island of Naxos. It is unclear if this was due to a divine command, forgetfulness, or betrayal.

When Theseus sailed at last for Athens, the final leg of his mini-odyssey, he forgot to change the black sails of mourning to the white sails of victory, as he had promised his father he would. Seeing the black sails, King Aegeus believed his son dead and threw himself from the cliffs into the sea that would henceforth bear his name (the Aegean). Theseus returned triumphant, but his victory was marked by grief and shame (for his father, for Ariadne). He inherited the throne of Athens, yet his later life became undone in tragedy. Plagued by failed quests, ill-fated loves, exile, and eventually an unheroic death - cast from a cliff by a rival king, facing the same ending his father had, though not, this time, by his own hand.

Themes and Symbolism

The Labyrinth, built beneath mysterious Knossos and tinged with the suggestion of magic, represents more than a prison for a monster, and a sacrificial plain for innocent youths. It is a symbol of the inner world, the unconscious mind. At its centre waits the Minotaur, the beast within, a primal force, repressed instinct, and trauma embodied. In mythology and psychology, the Minotaur can be read as the shadow self - that buried, shameful part of us we refuse to acknowledge. It is untamed instinct, rage, lust, fear, hunger. It is trauma, locked away and fed just enough to survive, never healed. It is also the cost of repression itself, how a society’s and an individual’s shame can harden and calcify into a curse that lives.

Against this inner darkness, the thread becomes a luminous counterpart. Memory, intuition, wisdom, and hope. It could also be seen as associated with femininity, for Ariadne provides it, guiding the hero as anima to ego. The story expands through other symbols, too. The black sails act as forgetfulness, psychological blindness, and unintended consequences; Ariadne’s abandonment becomes the fate of intuition once the ego triumphs; and the journey through the Labyrinth itself can be seen a more than heroic conquest - it is also a map of psychological growth, marked and annotated by both victory and loss. It is a quest of ultimate becoming.

Our own time feels to me dominated by the linear. Straight lines pull us toward futures written by machines and the dreams of other people. However, older “logics” remain, hidden in the shapes of things. The straight line belongs to the world of arbitrary rules, corporate order, and utility; the spiral belongs to the soul. Jung would have called these forms archetypal pathways through the psyche. They appear everywhere. In nature, in our dreams, in the myths that carry humanity forward. There is recursivity in them, but unlike physical entropic forces, there is no decay to be found in this metaphysic. Distinct from an orbit that collapses, the spiral elongates and expands, growing brighter with each turn. Its curves chart the most human territory of all, the landscape that is hardest of all to navigate: the inner one.

The circle is the oldest symbol of wholeness. It is eternity, completeness, it is the self drawn into unity. In Jungian psychology, the mandala (the Sanskrit word for a sacred circle) emerges during moments of transformation; it is the psyche’s attempt to centre and to heal itself. Across religions and cultures, circles embody the divine. For instance, halos sitting with gravitational defiance atop the heads of Christian saints, dharma wheels spinning an eternity, sacred dances (think of the whirling dervishes of Turkey, who create Sufi poetry through a counterclockwise spin-dance), circular temple complexes, such as the dome of Rome’s Pantheon, or Turkey’s Göbekli Tepe.

The spiral is the circle set into motion. It is not static but dynamic, suggesting growth through return, descent leading to ascent. In the cosmos, it is the pattern of galaxies and nebular storms; in the body physical, of shells and DNA. Psychologically, the spiral plots the process of revisiting old wounds and memories not to remain stuck, but to re-encounter them from a higher or deeper vantage, a place of hard-earned wisdom and greater perspective. Healing, grief, and transformation are never linear. Rather, they are spirals, journeys of repetition that change us with each revolution.

The labyrinth combines both the circle and the spiral. It is a circle drawn into a path, an inward spiral that leads us through disorientation and arrival. Unlike a maze, it has no tricks and no dead ends; it contains only a single winding passage. It does not brook excuses, appeals to illusion and sleight-of-hand. To walk it is to surrender to time, face the darkness, and trust the process.

I believe these symbols matter today precisely because we have largely forgotten their importance. Nowadays, our cultures outline life with calendars, productivity charts, and conventional timelines. But this is a problem for the ur-human, as the soul does not move in straight lines. Consequently, this can lead to anxiety, depression, burnout, and creative, social, or romantic “blocks”. Becoming human is slow, repetitive work, no doubt about it, but in order for it to be a successful becoming, a grammar, syntax and semantic of understanding and depth must be first learned.

These themes and symbols consistently reoccur across art. I invite you to look at Van Gogh’s Starry Night, with its vast cosmic spirals, and not feel moved. Even popular culture has absorbed the power of such imagery. Consider Game of Thrones, which used and discarded, without comment (as that show often did), the spiral motif, perhaps unconsciously echoing Celtic designs. Likewise, in the Wheel of Time series of novels, Robert Jordan used the wheel as a metaphor for, you guessed it, time. The labyrinthine works of M.C. Escher, meanwhile, both disorient and captivate, pulling the viewer into a puzzle that demands solving. And then there is Botticelli’s Mystic Nativity, where the top half of the composition feels almost Indo-European in its symbolism, as if inviting the beholder into a vision both familiar and otherworldly.

I Am Become Whole

I touched on Jung. Now I’m gonna press right into him (begging his pardon).

In his psychological work, the mandala represents the archetype of wholeness and the Self - the unifying centre of the psyche that harmonises conscious and unconscious aspects of the mind. Jung observed that patients in therapy would often spontaneously create mandala-like images during periods of deep psychological transformation, especially when confronting inner chaos or integrating repressed material. For him, the circular symmetry of the mandala symbolised the natural urge toward psychic balance and individuation (the process by which a person becomes their fullest, most authentic self). He linked the mandala to both personal and collective unconscious imagery, finding parallels in spiritual traditions from Tibetan Buddhism to Christianity to Islam.

Thus, by engaging with the mandala, be it through creation, contemplation, or dream analysis, individuals can navigate inner conflicts, discover hidden aspects of their personality, remember that which the mind chose to forget, and experience a sense of centeredness, much, if thought about, like a compass guiding them through the labyrinth of the psyche.

Jung himself wrote: “The mandala is the psychological expression of the totality of the Self. It is the center, the goal, and the means of psychic integration” (The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious). Additionally, in his autobiography he described how he used mandalas in his own inner work: “I sketched every morning in a notebook a small circular drawing, a mandala... which seemed to correspond to my inner situation at the time. With the help of these drawings I could observe my psychic transformations from day to day” (Memories, Dreams, Reflections).

Although Jung drew deeply from mythological traditions, I have found no evidence that he ever wrote directly about Theseus or the Labyrinth, or any other of the exploits of that particular mythman. He did, however, acknowledge the power of Greek mythology in general. In a letter to the mythologist Karl Kerényi, he confessed: “I am always profoundly impressed by the riches of Greek mythology, which have hitherto been presented so paltrily.” For Jung, myths were not just ancient stories, but expressions of human psychological realities that were, even in the modern world, as real and alive as ever. As he wrote in The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, Echoing a belief Tolkien had and applied in his great works: “Myth is not fiction: it consists of facts that are continually repeated and can be observed over and over again. It is something that happens to man, and men have mythical fates just as much as the Greek heroes do.” He also emphasised how myth and psyche interpenetrate, synthesising within the realised and actualised being: “Just as the unconscious world of mythological images speaks indirectly, through the experience of external things, to the man who surrenders wholly to the outside world, so the real world and its demands find their way indirectly to the man who has surrendered wholly to the soul.” (Collected Works, Vol. 9).

Lúb Cheilteach

“The heart of Celtic spirituality was simply living the life, following the Way, travelling the journey in the everyday ordinariness of life.”

Thus spake the Northumbrian Community, a contemporary Christian community rooted in the Celtic tradition, on its website. Despite not sharing their faith, I like this definition. The simplicity is beautiful, and I believe sums up “us” at our best quite well.

To my limited mind, the Celtic tradition is fundamentally an artistic one. While some cultures are often defined by warfare, economics, grand architectural achievements, or scientific innovation, the Celts, today clinging hopefully to the edges of Western Europe, are, in my estimation, defined by the art they produced and continue to produce; music, poetry, visual arts, craftwork.

But what is the “us” I spoke of in this context? Before exploring further, it is important to clarify that the term “Celtic” is contested. This stems from the blending of archaeology, linguistics, history, art, and modern, political identity. In its strictest academic sense, it originally referred to itinerant Iron Age peoples of central and western Europe, identified through La Tène (modern Switzerland) and Hallstatt (modern Austria) archaeological cultures and the related linguistic family of Celtic languages. Classical Greek and Roman writers used Keltoi or Celtae to describe certain tribes in mainland Europe (especially Gaul and Iberia), but there is no evidence that the people themselves used a unifying name.

However, from the 18th to 19th centuries, Romantic nationalism in Ireland, Scotland, Wales, and Brittany reimagined the Celts as a unified ancestral people with a shared culture, spirituality, and artistic tradition. This idea was, while necessary to fight for identity and against foreign oppression, frankly, pretty well divorced from the patchwork of historical realities. Archaeologists have long noted that material culture labelled “Celtic” is far more regionally diverse than the word implies, and that many motifs associated with Celtic art appear in societies with no linguistic or political connection to the historical Celts

I take no meaningful side in this controversy, as I don’t have the requisite knowledge to do so. Though those I trust the most are in agreement with the archaeological evidence of the diversity of the Celtic peoples. I am probably going to continue to use the term in the looser sense, if only for intellectual ease, and keep the debate about identity within the bounds of those who claim allegiance to the term. I dare any non-Celt to challenge me on that. As has often been said; respect existence or expect resistance.

Celtic knots and other forms of circular art are among the most enduring and intricate expressions of symbolism in the Celtic tradition. They blend artistry with spiritual meaning, and a looping double spiral on a clay milk jug I bought in a local thrift store is what caught my eye and inspired my writing of this piece (remember, folks, we meet inspiration halfway).

The designs of this artistic style are endless loops without a clear beginning or end, and are thought to represent the interconnectedness of life, eternity, and the cyclical nature of existence. In illuminated manuscripts like The Book of Kells or the Lindisfarne Gospels, knots and spirals are woven into borders, marginalia, initial letters, and full-page designs, often paired with animals, plants, and Christian or even pre-Christian iconography.

The older, pre-Christian origins of these forms can be traced to La Tène and earlier Celtic art, where interlace patterns, triskelions (basically three-armed spirals), and complex circular motifs adorned metalwork, stone carvings, and jewellery. Spirals, in their single, double, and triple forms, were associated with the cycles of nature, the turning of the seasons, and the flow of spiritual energy. Later, with the arrival of Christianity, these forms merged with biblical themes, creating a distinctly insular style that syncretically married pagan symbolism with Christian theology.

Likewise, scattered across Celtic Europe like ancient breadcrumbs, we find neolithic and megalithic stone circles. Most famous among them Stonehenge, but there are many more, such as Ireland’s Drombeg Stone Circle (“The Druid’s Altar”) or Germany and Austria’s Mittelberg Circles. Additionally, Ireland’s gem, Newgrange (did you know it’s older than the pyramids at Giza? I’m not sure they make that clear…), is a great circular burial chamber, but not just a burial chamber, overlooking the verdant Meath countryside.

Going back to Jung, who, being Swiss, probably had some Celtic blood in his veins, the intricate knotting and spiralling designs of Celtic art can be interpreted as symbols of the unconscious mind's complexity and the journey toward individuation, the central idea (the telos, if you will) in Jungian psychology. These patterns may represent the interconnectedness of all life and the cyclical nature of existence, resonating with Jung's ideas about the integration of opposites and the process of self-realisation. While Jung did not write extensively about Celtic mythology, preferring the pantheons and myths of the Greeks and the Nordic peoples, I believe his universal analytical framework offers valuable insights into understanding the psychological and symbolic meanings embedded in these ancient narratives and artistic expressions.

Or maybe I’m just trying to marry my darlings.

Endnote

I wrote most of this on an empty stomach, so take from that what you will.

I’ll leave you with this thought. Perhaps next time you feel like your mind or your life are tied up in knots, reconsider if maybe it’s the opposite – that your mind is too linear, too straight, too conventional. And remember, there’s a Minotaur within all of us. Don’t be afraid to face it, to understand it, to battle it bare-handed – you may just win that fight.

Photo by: Harrison Haines