Footnotes :  

251 Erik Hornung: “The Ancient Egyptian Books of the Afterlife”, Cornell University Press, Chicago, 1999, page 152 bottom.
 

252 Hermann Kern: “Labyrinthe: Erscheinungsformen und Deutungen, 5000 Jahre Gegenwart eines Urbilds”, Prestel Verlag, Munich. 1982, pages 117, 135, and 136.
 

253 Hermann Kern: “Labyrinthe... “, cited above, page 234.
 

254 Hermann Kern: “Labyrinthe ...”, cited above, pages 214 and 215.
 

255 Hermann Kern: “Labyrinthe... “, cited above, pages 117 and 119.

   The Religious Board Game on the Phaistos Disk. Copyright 2012 by Peter Aleff   
    by Peter Aleff    Scroll 34

6.5.2. Changes from Phaistos to Goose

6.5.2.1. Different perceptions of death

If the symbolism and location of the death fields in the ancient Egyptian-flavored games and in the Game of the Goose were identical, their effects were not because they mirrored the different perceptions of death by their players.

The ancient Egyptians denied death and pretended to see it as benevolent, a necessary step towards their ultimate renewal. They also constantly reassured themselves with their elaborate funeral preparations that the end of earthly life led to an even better and unending life beyond. The desire to deny the finality of death against all reason seems to be a natural human trait, a wish to be able to continue conversing with the deceased that is probably familiar to anyone who suddenly lost a loved one and sought for ways to not accept that fact or make it unhappen.

The ancient Egyptians built their civilization around this desire. From the earliest Pyramid Texts to the Books of the Dead and later magic papyri left with mummies, they kept telling the mummified corpses that they were alive instead of dead. This fervently proclaimed belief made them spend their earthly lives preparing for the next, with fancy tombs and grave goods and unending supplies of yummy meals painted on the tomb walls, next to vivid pictures of scenes from that afterworld. These pioneers of the beyond provided detailed descriptions of those afterlives in custom-tailored and wish-fulfilling paradises that were later also paired with frightening hells in lakes of fire to scare evildoers into compliance with the gods' commands. Those pioneers' richly illustrated reports about the life after death strongly influenced many later religions.

Since death was thus merely a way-station on a continuing road, it was required and could not be avoided. Accordingly, the Senet pieces could not proceed to their renewal at the end of the path until they had landed on the death square to get properly embalmed. 

Though mandatory, this square was made to appear desirable, even more than its still hard-to-sell counterpart in the real world. This square bore the hieroglyph "nefer" which meant "good" and "beautiful", as in names like that of Queen Nefertiti. Sometimes three "nefer" signs on that square further reinforced its magic power. True to the euphemistic habit of referring to anything connected with death, the same "nefer" sign also symbolized the foul-smelling and not-so-beautiful embalming shack through which every mummy-to-be had to pass on his or her way to a good burial and afterlife.

Some people, however, were more realistic and gave death no such sugarcoating disguise. As we saw above, even that late period Egyptian priest admitted that he preferred a moment alive in the sun to an eternity as Lord of the dead. The Mesopotamian dead sat in perpetual gloom and had their mouths stuffed with dust, and the Classical Greeks knew dark-dull Hades as their shadows' dismal destination, at least all those not saved by the Eleusinian Mystery rites or similar renewal beliefs.

Then came Christian preachers who gradually increased the emphasis on eternal hell fires and the high risk of landing there, to make their own exclusive brand of salvation all the more valuable.  They succeeded to the point that by Renaissance times, they sold access to it for more than any soul's weight in gold.

At some point on this slide of death towards an ever more negative image, the value of its gameboard field flipped from mandatory "good and beautiful" to “avoid at all cost”.  By the time the game reappeared, the Goose pieces which landed on that field lost all their hard-won gains and had to return all the way back to the beginning.

But the ancient hope implied by the “bough of life” in the gloomy Tartarus- field on the Disk survived.  Even in the Renaissance version of the game, death did not remain victorious because the gamepieces it set back so drastically were allowed to start over.

6.5.2.2. The relocation of the afterworld maze

The change in the effect of the death field was necessary since a good board game must reflect the world of the players, but it also created a conflict with the setback from the maze in Tartarus just one space later.

Since the Goose pieces have to arrive on the last field by an exact count, and excess points cause them to step backwards from there, the fields near the end of the path are the most active and most crowded part of the whole track.

Two setbacks right next to each other and so close before the goal would have presented an almost insurmountable hurdle to the dice-driven pieces.  They would have made the game a boring repetition of always the same "return, advance, return again" cycle. The new death field was too powerful, so the maze setback right after it had to go.

An even more compelling reason for doing away with the maze after death was that the late pagan and early Christian afterworlds no longer contained its equivalent. The maze had become a symbol for the life before death.

This change of bringing parts of the afterworld into the present one may have occurred around the time when early Christianity developed.  However, it was not exclusive to that religion. In Egypt, too, “the realm of the dead was brought into this life”²⁵¹, as the Egyptologist Erik Hornung observes in discussing the “Book of Traversing Eternity”.

These late funerary texts turned up in a few Ptolemaic and more frequently Roman-time tombs along the Nile, and unlike the earlier examples of the genre which place the dead firmly into a detailed beyond, they say little about eternity but describe mostly the return of the deceased to the world of the living.

And whereas the maze after death had long been an essential component of earlier afterworlds, followers of the then beginning Christian religion compared the twists and turns of life before death with those of a labyrinth.

They said they had to follow unerringly its winding path in their quest for salvation, and it became fashionable from about the fourth century on to decorate churches in North Africa, Italy, and later also France with wall paintings or floor mosaics of Classical-style labyrinths.

Surprisingly, some of those church labyrinths have at their center pictures of Theseus, the hero from Greek myth, and even of the blatantly pagan Minotaur. Their captions spell out these un-Christian names as well as those of Daedalus and of Ariadne, the daughter of King Minos who, in the Athenian account, had helped Theseus to escape from the Cretan labyrinth.

Despite these allusions to the Classical myth, some of the inscriptions next to those wall labyrinths explicitly identify the path through them with the Christian passage through life. 

For instance, the square floor labyrinth in the fifth-century basilica of Tigzirt-sur-Mer in Algeria was accompanied by a poem which compared the windings of its path with the pernicious errors of the sinful worldly life that lead the straying away from salvation and into perdition²⁵².

Similarly, a now lost round wall labyrinth in the church of San Savino at Piacenza, Italy, dated from 905, was placed next to the signs of the zodiac, and its Latin caption affirmed in four hexameters that the labyrinth was the world we live in²⁵³.

We find this message also in many medieval manuscripts where patient monks left us pictures of the labyrinth and descriptions of this metaphorical meaning. It never seemed to bother those writers that the labyrinth pictures they drew next to their admonitions against error were always unicursal, that is, the path had no forks or side branchings that could have confused a traveler. Whoever kept his hand on one of the continuous walls was bound to arrive unerringly at the center.

At the same time, labyrinth drawings appear also frequently in manuscripts of the “computus”, the complicated calendrical calculations clerics performed to establish the dates for Easter.  It is conceivable that the back and forth swings of the path may have evoked the annual advance or lag of the moon in its stately meeting-to-meeting ballet with the sun which determined these dates.

In addition, and with more support from available evidence, some scholars have argued that the authors of these works used the ancient renewal symbolism of the labyrinth to express the resurrection and salvation celebrated in this feast.

The tradition of the labyrinth as a metaphor for life and its renewal or salvation may have led to the magnificent pavement labyrinths in many French churches and cathedrals. These were typically placed in the center or “crossing” of their soaring edifices, and they were oriented with their opening to the West which is the traditional direction of sundown and death.

The fact of orientation confirms further that the labyrinth represented the world which the layout sought to match, and its sundown direction alluded to the death which is our fate in that world.

Special Easter rites also indicated that, here again, the design symbolized the overcoming of this fate. In several French churches, the clergy used their pavement labyrinths for elaborate “Easter dances” around them while singing paschal hymns about the resurrection of Christ²⁵⁴.

We also hear in later reports of pious pilgrims who perambulated the serpentine paths on those pavements, often on their knees, as a substitute for a pilgrimage to the more distant Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem which was the holiest spot and center of the world for Christianity.

As in the earlier parchments, the twists and turns in the labyrinth path represented the entanglements of sin, and the penitents who reached the center achieved salvation.

This particular custom is documented only from post- Renaissance times on, and some scholars consider it therefore to be a late invention. However, the association of the labyrinth center with the center of Christian faith existed much earlier.

The initially most common scene in church labyrinths, of Theseus slaying the Minotaur, was an allegory for Christ overcoming the otherwise inescapable death.

Some other examples require even less interpretation. For instance, a late Roman floor mosaic labyrinth in the basilica of Algiers, founded in 324 CE, surrounds a field of letters arranged to spell in all directions the words SANCTA ECCLESIA (Holy Church) in its center²⁵⁵.

The idea of making symbolic pilgrimages to the so exalted centers of such labyrinths may therefore be much older than its surviving documentation.

Similarly, the late reports that the labyrinths imitated a precedent from Solomon's Temple in Jerusalem seem to have been based on a well- anchored popular perception. The French church labyrinths were typically called "Méandre" or "Dédale" in memory of their perceived parallel connection with Crete, but they were also known as "Chemin de Jérusalem”, meaning “path to Jerusalem”.

The labyrinth had thus retained its symbolism of renewal, but it had moved from the afterworld to the world before death.  To match this development, the game-world labyrinth moved duly from the afterworld of Tartarus to a field before death.  The maze in the Game of the Goose is now on field 42, the former soul-weighing "Hall of the Two Truths", but the effect of that maze remains the same: it still causes a setback of twelve spaces in most modern versions of this game.

Instead of representing the dangers after death, the maze now corresponds to the pilgrimage which pious people made to anticipate those post-mortem obstacles and to de-fang them with credit-worthy deeds while still alive.

Travel to a holy and often faraway site was usually a major event in the life of a pilgrim. It typically required substantial sacrifices and sometimes involved real dangers or setbacks, and the maze was a perfect symbol for these.

6.5.2.3. The relocation of some geese

We saw above that six of the geese on the Goose board still occupy the same locations as six of the twelve "flock- of- geese arrows" from Phaistos. The other six geese moved, and it seems that the same gameboard re-designer who relocated the maze may also have been the one who tinkered with the geese because some of their new places seem to compensate for that change.

The two geese in 41 and 59 make up for the moving of the maze setback. The first one provides a counterweight to that setback from 42, and the other one replaces the maze in its former spot with a luckier sign that compensates at least partly for the newly acquired and overwhelming power of its neighbor the death field.

Similarly, the goose in 32 may have been meant as a compensation for Goose field 31 when it became an unlucky holdback for those who sat on its “well”.

Already in Senet and in the Game of Twenty Squares, the mid-life "Initiation" field had been of ambiguous value with signs of renewal but also of snares and death. The Phaistos rosette there conveys the same dual meaning, but the location of that field at the start of the second side suggests in that case more emphasis on the renewal and “new beginning” aspect of the symbol.

If a version of the Phaistos game was actually played in two parts, corresponding to the two sides of the Disk, then this location makes it appear probable that the initiation was, like the other fields with rosettes, one of the mandatory places the players had to reach to start the second segment of the path. Getting the pieces stuck in that must-go place, as they are now on the Goose’s “well”, would have killed the game.

Once field 31 lost that desirable status and was to be avoided instead of sought, one of its neighbors had to make up for that loss to maintain some balance in the flow of the game. This may be the reason why field 32 now harbors a jump- doubling goose.

The other new goose locations are 9, 18, 36, and 45, plus the extra and non-functional one in 63.  This apparent preference for multiples of nines points to Graeco-Roman times for the modification because nine was then considered a sacred number. 

Nine also had that renown in the then emerging Christian church. Early Christian theologians, for instance, often replaced the "Amen" at the end of their writings with the number 99 which they constructed from the letters of "Amen" by adding their numeric values.

(In both Greek and Hebrew writing, the letters of the alphabet did double duty as numerals, so each letter was also a specific number and could be interpreted as either.)

This type of numerology or "gematria" was deemed highly effective magic and remained popular for many centuries. It may well have led to the moving of the geese when the reasons for their initial arrangement (which we will discuss in Chapter 8) were either forgotten or no longer mattered.