Not long after arriving at the Childress residence Cohle spots Errol and gives chase. After a brief pursuit in the swamps Childress leads Rust inside a labyrinth-like structure the show refers to as "Carcosa" (taken from Robert W. Chambers legendary piece of weird fiction The King in Yellow) that echoes the megaliths of Antiquity. As I noted in the second installment, this structure may have been partly inspired by the Irish megalithic site known as New Grange as well as the mythological Labyrinth of ancient Crete. It is here that the Tuttle cult likely performed their ritualistic sacrifices of children and others. The historic labyrinth of Knossos (the capital of ancient Crete) certainly had a clear association with human sacrifice.
"The confusing maze of corridors, moreover, is an inept design for a residence. But a maze is what one finds at Knossos. A labyrinth, to use his real name, a word assimilated into Greek from the pre-Greek language, as is the name of Knossos itself. A labyrinth is the 'place of the labrys.' A 'labrys' is a double axe, an axe with edges the cut in both directions. It was a symbol of the religion practiced at Knossos, like the crucifixion in Christianity. Ornamental golden exemplars have been found, as well as much sturdier implements for actual use.
"And like the cross, it was the symbol of the sacrificial death. The labrys was used to slaughter the bull, and the bull was the taurine manifestation of the bovine Queen's consort. Originally not a bull, but the consort himself, was the victim. Between the two edges of an axe that cuts in both directions is the sharp divide, the razor's edge, the midmost point – beyond which lies another world. The labrys symbolizes renewal through death, and when kings became less expendable, other humans came to be substituted in the king's role, supposedly as willing sacrificial victims, uniting the living with the dead to revitalize the fertility of the goddess and of the mortal women who joined as a trinity of sisters in her worship. The labyrinth itself, with with its contorted and confusing passageways, was emblematic of the Goddess, like a maze of entrails leading to the womb, which is the gateway for life and death.
"At the center of the labyrinth of Knossos was a courtyard, where the offering of human victims was performed as an acrobatic dance with a real bull. Both males and females were afforded this deadly honor, two groups of seven each year, at the time of the Theseus, before he put an end to the practice. As the bull lunged, the dancers were expected to grasp the bull's horns and attempt to flip themselves in a somersault through the horns and over the bull's back, to land gracefully upright behind bull. A difficult task, and more often, no doubt the dancer failed, but even a close brush with death might satisfy the need, or demonstrate the deity's moment of benevolence. The narrow and dangerous passageway through the horns was another way that these people symbolized the point where life and death convened."
(The World of Classical Myth, Carl A.P. Ruck & Danny Staples, pg. 28)
a labrys
When Cohle and Childress meet for their final battle, it is in a courtyard that also seems to be at the center of Carcosa. Childress attacks Cohle with a hatchet, which closely resembles the ritualistic axes used at Knossos. Childress stabs Cohle in the stomach with a knife and lifts him up into the air. This particular struggle almost has elements of a dance, or even wrestling, with a bull.
But let us return to the prospects of human sacrifices in labyrinth structures for a moment. Robert Graves believed that the bull-cult of Crete derived from an earlier partridge cult that sacrificed youths and maidens.
"It seems, then, that in the pesach bull-cult had been superimposed on a partridge cult; and that the Minotaur, to whom youths and maidens (from Athens and elsewhere) were sacrificed had once represented the decoy partridge in the middle of a brushwood maze, towards which the others were lured for their death dance. He was, in fact, the centre of a ritual performance, originally honouring the Moon-goddess, the lascivious hen-partridge, who at Athens and in parts of Crete was the mother and lover of the Sun-hero Talus. But the dance of the hobbling cock-partridge was later transformed into one honouring the Moon-goddess Pasiphae, the cow in heat, mother and lover of the Sun-hero, the bull-headed Minos. Thus, the spirally-danced Troy-game (called the 'Crane dance' in Delos because it was adapted there to the cult of the Moon-goddess as Crane) had the same origin as the pesach. The case is proved by Homer who wrote:
Daedalus in Cnossos once contrived
A dancing-floor for fair-haired Ariadne
"– a verse, which these scholiast explains as referring to the Labyrinth dance; and by Lucian who in his Concerning the Dance, a mine of mythological tradition, gives as the subjects of Cretan dances: 'the myths of Europe, Pasiphae, the two bulls, the Labyrinth, Adriadne, Phaedra [daughter of Pasiphae], Androgeuos [son of Minos], Icarus, Glaucus [raised by Aesculapius from the dead], the magic of Polyidus, and of Talus the bronze man who did his sentry round in Crete.' Polyidus means 'the many-shaped' and since the Corinthian hero of that name had no connexion with Crete, the dance was probably the shape-shifting dance of Zagreus at the Cretan Lenaea.
"Here some loose ends can be tied up. The maze pattern has been shown to represent 'Spiral Castle' or 'Troy Town', which the sacred Sun-king goes after death and from which, if lucky, he returns..."
(The White Goddess, Robert Graves, pg. 329)
The legendary mythologist Joseph Campbell believed that these various motifs --a subterranean megalith, spirals and a child-consuming monster, among other things --were all inked to initiation rituals concerned with birth and death from a very ancient date.
"The fear of the dark, which is so strong in children, has been said to be a function of their fear of returning to the womb: the fear that their recently achieved daylight consciousness and not yet secure individuality should be reabsorbed. In archaic art, the labyrinth – home of the child-consuming Minotaur – was represented in the figure of a spiral. The spiral also appears spontaneously in certain stages of meditation, as well as to people going to sleep under ether. It is a prominent device, furthermore, at the silent entrances and within the dark passages of the ancient Irish kingly burial mound of New Grange. These facts suggest that a constellation of images denoting the plunge and dissolution of consciousness in the darkness of non--being must have been employed intentionally, from an early date, to represent the analogy of threshold rites to the mystery of the entry of the child into the womb for birth..."
(The Masks of God: Primitive Mythology, Joseph Campbell, pgs. 67-68)
the entrance to New Grange
This association of the labyrinth and the spiral with the dissolution of consciousness will be especially relevant to the experience Cohle undergoes after his battle with Childress. As noted above, there is also a close link with death and resurrection to the labyrinth, two processes of which Cohle seems to undergo during his time in the labyrinth. But more on that in a moment.
Before leaving this topic, its also worth noting the association the Minotaur has with the sun. Of it, Kenneth Grant noted:
"... Crowley mentions the worship of Apis the bull, in a certain labyrinth in Crete. This worship derived from Egypt. The bull was white. At the Feast of the Vernal Equinox twelve virgins were sacrificed to it, twelve being symbolic of the number of houses through which the sun passes during his annual cycle. In each case the bull used the virgins after the manner of the legend of Pasiphae. The ceremony was performed with the intention of obtaining a Minotaur, an incarnation of the sun, a messiah. A variation of this sacrifice involved the immolation of the bull. A virgin was placed in the hot carcass and violated by the High Priest. She finally choked in the bull's blood, during orgasm."
(The Magical Revival, Kenneth Grant, pg. 46)
Now, let us reconsider Rust's final confrontation with Childress. He goes after the murderer clad in a white shirt (it is common in many tradition for candidates undergoing some type of initiation to be clad in white) and follows him into "Carcosa", a subterranean lair echoing various megalithic structures of Antiquity (most notably the Labyrinth and New Grange) and engages with Childress in an almost literal "dance of death." All of these things are elements present in numerous variations in the "killing of the divine king" custom that appears the world over.
does Childress actually say the above lines to Rust or is he only hearing them in his mind? ...
