Santiago Camacho - México, Méjico
As if was the signature of a supreme intelligence these forms they are inscribed at all the levels of the space and the time. We find them in the galaxies, in the solar system, in the universal code of the life, in the religion and in the art of all the human cultures. But, which is their deeper meaning?, which is the last sense of the message that they transmit us and what relationship do they have with our own existence like the same stars' children that illuminate our destination?
The Earth was born starting from the movement in hairspring of a cloud of gas and cosmic powder. From then on, the hairsprings are part of our daily environment. We can contemplate them in all the possible scales, as much in the space as in the time.
The own nature chose this form for its growth and development. The helical form is present in the most secret in the alive beings, like in the double helix of the DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid) that codes our inheritance.
The human body also contains the triple helix of the umbilical cord - formed by two arteries and a vein -. We have whirls in the hair, ripples or curls.
The prints dactilares, the glands sudoríparas and the follicles pilosos, as well as the structure torsionada of some bones and the snail of our internal hearing - one of the most perfect hairsprings - they also evoke the same form that also observe in the waves that culminate coiling, in the shells of the snails, the movement of the hurricanes or tornados and the divergent or centrifugal spiral curves of the galaxies.
All these cases constitute examples the nature repeats an and another time this reason that accompanies us of how since the solar system was born. After all, this is a hairspring that integrates another much bigger one: the immense whirl of the Milky Way that rotates vertiginously in the space repeating the same reason.
Perhaps for it, this he is formed it transformed from remote times into one of the Humanity's more universal symbols and we find it in all the civilizations like an omnipresent leitmotiv.
In the before Columbus cultures, the god of the rain, Tlaloc, represented era leaving the mouth of a giant snail, and Quetzalcóatl was closely related with marine snails. For the Mayan, the winter solstice was the moment zero in its cosmology and the hairspring symbolized that origin.
The Venus of Milo was represented rotating on itself in upward movement, with its superior part he undresses and the covered inferior, as if is abandoning the robe of the matter in its ascent in hairspring.
The hermetic caduceus, with twice as much enroscamiento of the snakes, reproduces the same form that twice as much movement of the Nâdi, some channels located to both sides of the spine that certain yoga practices put in movement in order to achieve the awakening of the Kundalini, so that this ascends until the chakra (energy vortex) located in the head. All these serpentine configurations reiterate identical leitmotiv.
In the Venus of Milo it becomes present the hairspring, since the figure rotates on itself and in upward movement.
The very old symbol of the Yin and Yang, are also a hairspring form that lacks principle and end. Everything expands and it multiplies, giving origin to the duality, to return again to the divinity, once concluded the process.
In the Hinduísmo, the spiral double represents the evolution, leaving of its center, and the involución, returning to the same one. It is the Kalpa and the Pralaya, birth and death.
For numerous African towns, this form symbolizes the dynamics of the life and the expansion of the beings inside that manifested. Among the Dogón, it represents the seed of Amma; that is to say, the verb or word of God.
This concept is expressed by means of a hairspring of red copper that gives three turns around a vessel of mud. Among the German ones, the same sign surrounded the eye of a horse together to a solar car that you/they represented the source of all light.
An archetypal key
It doesn't fit doubt that we are before an archetype of our deeper psyche: the collective unconscious of C. G. Jung. We can imagine the descent this exhale-helical way from the space, representing this way the journey that makes the universal energy so that, crossing different planes, levels and stadiums of the Cosmos, in their descent becomes more and more dense energy, until reaching the state of the matter, such and as we know it. If the journey is made in an inverse sense - that is to say, upward -, it will represent the evolution then.
If we transfer the helical form in the space and in a certain horizontal address, he will go taking the aspect of a jetty and it will also symbolize the human evolutionary process. This helix movement codes the development and the continuity of the different states of the existence. These they repeat, but always in different planes.
The grades of the Initiation also follow the same model. For that reason they usually express graphically low the form of a stairway of upward snail. «The Dragón of the Knowledge» or «the Snake of the Wisdom», they frequently appear coiled in the columns of some temples, leaving of their base that is the representation of the physical and material, to go ascending in a slow ascension toward the superior thing and the transcendent thing.
As the hairsprings, neither the labyrinths are exclusive patrimony of an or another philosophy, religion or culture. Already from the night of the times petroglifos spread all over the world with this reason appear. With the time, this geometric forms abandoned the stony flagstones to incorporate to the human being's habitat, appearing in doors and windows, and becoming recurrent ornamental reasons of the goldwork and the ceramic. He went this way I eat soon they ended up being part of the architecture. Palacios, hermitages, churches and cathedrals possess hairsprings and labyrinths of all type.
In any event, they don't always imply allusions iniciáticas. In numerous occasions, they were simply chosen as ornamental elements to beautify an architectural volume, a wall or the capital of a column. But even in these cases their selection reveals us that we are before a formal expression that impregnates the most universal human psyche.
However, when the hairsprings and the labyrinths possess an occult meaning, they generally appear together with other indicative elements that we are before a transcendent place and in front of symbols that us desvelarán their content, helping us to continue our experience of acquisition of new knowledge.
These hairsprings, and their multiple variants that can be observed through the wide world, have also been used as outline of the labyrinth, symbol that will allow to open up other doors and to reach other horizons.
The labyrinth of Abydos, in Egypt, era known as «the snail». In a circular way, in their corridors they took place the ceremonies iniciáticas of the old Mysteries, the same as it happened in Newgrange, Ireland in whose entrance a stone was erected with the symbol of the hairspring.
When it is the exciting world of the labyrinths it is forced to mention Teseo and the Minotauro. But our intention is not to remember this myth, but rather to elucidate its possible meaning.
When the prince Teseo arrives in Crete and it falls in love Ariadna, the king's daughter Minos, obtains of her an I wind in a ball to be able to penetrate in the Labyrinth. In fact it is a spindle with thread that he/she will go unwrapping as it penetrates in their interior. Once dead the Minotauro, and when Teseo picks up the thread winding it again, he/she makes it in a perfectly circular way.
This lengthened spindle of Teseo represents its interior being's imperfections that he needs to be unwrapped and to go by a series of tests. The sphere that builds when recovering the thread symbolizes the achieved perfection, once it completes that process and it leaves to the exterior. In some glasses found in the Ática we see the figure of Teseo an axe of double edge that he receives the name of Labris behaving and that it was the weapon of the god Plow-Dionisos who the first labyrinth traveled.
Inside the labyrinth
The axe or the sword have always been emblems of the will. To open up I pass inside our own labyrinth it is necessary above all this force rector. The thread that is good to find the one on the way to return is the memory that will avoid us to fall in the same errors that in the past. In fact, Ariadna gives a key, a personal solution. The Minotauro is the matter, the physical and mundane that catches us like a jail, the same as to Teseo.
When the symbols of the myth are understood, the knowledge is also acquired of how to find the exit to the exterior from the heart of the labyrinth. Then our interior Teseo can wake up, to destroy the Minotauro and to get this way the freedom.
The labyrinth is, essentially, a crossing of paths that you/they mix in a space the most reduced thing possible to slow the access to the center that is wanted to reach. It is a trip iniciático, only allowed to the elects. In that sense, this symbolism has intimate relationship with the you send it that it usually presents with labyrinthine aspect and it possesses the same properties.
We are before the last sense of the adventure of the Me that, once reached the objective, passes from the darkness to the light and of the ignorance to the knowledge. In this sense, the symbol represents the victory of the spiritual thing on the material thing, of the intelligence on the instinct and of the eternal thing on the perishable thing.
Perhaps the good known labyrinths, be those that carried out in the French Gothic cathedrals - during the XII and XIII centuries - the building teachers belonging to hermetic unions, as the calls «Children of Salomón», have more than enough who planned the lengthened shade of the Order of the Temper.
Poitiers, Amiens, Arras, Reims, Bayeaux, Mirepoix, Saint-Omer, Toulouse and Saint-Quentin, among other, possess labyrinths octogonales, squares or round, like in the case of the cathedral of Chartres, one of the good known ones whose labyrinth is based on the geometry of the circle.
In fact, these forms reproduced in the pavement of the cathedrals were known in the Half Age with the name of «on the way to Jerusalem». But it was not to evoke the image of the historical city, but of the «Jerusalem Celeste».
The king's secrets Salomón
This journey iniciático would be part of one of the many secrets that are attributed to the king Salomón and, in consequence, this representations so recurrent in the European cathedrals received the name of «Labyrinths of Salomón».
The center of these is an archetypal point in which the Supreme Principle that is necessary to look for resides. This point is in the sacred and orderly space of the temple. It constitutes the secret place and I hide to the layman to which you can only consent crossing the mythical labyrinth that goes from the atrium to the altar, from the periphery to the center of the temple, in a journey that evokes that of the human psyche during the process search iniciático.
The trip idea or «sailing», it is included in the place of the building that is crossed and that, significantly, it is denominated «the ship», generally guided from This to West, in strict correspondence with the journey that he/she carries out the sun from the dawn to the west. At the same time, it also summarizes the pilgrimage route to Earth Santa, becoming a sacred geography in whose center the Spirit resides.
All, without exception, we possess that thread of Ariadna that allows us to travel our own labyrinth and to destroy the Minotauro that prevents to reach superior levels of conscience. Hairsprings and labyrinths are the testimony of that cosmic twinkling that is the man and of their spiritual effort to transcend their condition and eternizarse.
