labyrinth

On Crete, in the days of King Minos, there was a secret that had to be hidden where no eye could find it. The queen had borne a monster: the Minotaur, a creature with the body of a man and the head of a bull, that fed on human flesh and could not be allowed to roam free.

So Minos summoned the cleverest craftsman alive, an inventor named Daedalus, and set him an impossible task. Build me a prison, the king said, from which nothing can ever escape. Build me something no one can walk out of.

Daedalus built the Labyrinth: a maze of stone passages that folded back on themselves, corridors that branched and doubled and led nowhere, turnings so cunning that anyone loosed inside would wander until they starved. It was so intricate that Daedalus himself, the very man who designed it, could barely find his own way out again.

Into that maze the Minotaur was shut, and every few years young men and women were sent in as tribute, to be lost in the dark and devoured. It ended only when Theseus came with a ball of thread to unwind behind him, and walked back out alive by following the one line that told him the way.

From that terrible, ingenious maze we get the word labyrinth. We use it now for any structure so twisting and complicated that you can lose yourself in it, and just as often for the tangled and abstract kind — a labyrinth of rules, of streets, of paperwork you cannot find your way through.