The labyrinth occupies a singular position in depth-psychological thought as an archetypal image at the intersection of death, rebirth, initiation, and the feminine. The corpus reveals several distinct but interlocking lines of interpretation. Neumann and Layard, drawing on comparative ethnography, identify the labyrinth’s core traits as invariably connected to funerary and initiatory mystery: it is a passage presided over by a female figure, walked by men, sited at the threshold of the cave or constructed dwelling. Rank pursues a psychosomatic derivation, tracing the spiral labyrinthine form to the entrails and womb of sacrificial animals, arguing that the ‘palace of the entrails’ of Babylonian omen-lore is the structural homologue of the Aegean labyrinth—both imaging the body’s interior as a creative-cosmic matrix. Kerényi approaches the labyrinth through Minoan meander-patterns and the Knossos dance-ground, connecting it to Ariadne, to zoe as indestructible life, and ultimately to Dionysian religion. Campbell extends the symbol across cultures—from Malekulan mortuary rites to Virgilian epic to Irish megalithic spirals—underscoring its function as a threshold ordeal in which knowledge of the pattern is the condition of passage. The labyrinth thus condenses, across these major voices, the archetype of the dangerous, winding path through the maternal-chthonic domain: to enter it is to risk dissolution; to traverse it correctly is to be reborn.