The Blackberry Walk

Minecraft has a kind of archetypal cultural legacy on my generation. It is a game, after all, of Platonic Ideas: each block participates in a specific form, which it doesn't merely shadow, but holds perfectly. It is, in a sense, a Platonic heaven, an archetypal paradise, and an autistic meadow. Within the Minecraft world, we shall focus on the nether portal and the symbolism of these kinds of gates; for much like other aspects of the game, there is an ancient archetypal shape the nether portal apes, capturing the imagination of young boys like my younger self. The 'archetypal gate' is seen everywhere, whether it be in history or in present researches into neuroscience. A great example of an ancient gate is Stonehenge. Possessing much of the same form as a nether portal, Stonehenge is one of many henges built around the country. The builders of the monument are nameless, and it is hard to know whether the tradition is Celtic, or if the Celts simply imitated a tradition they discovered. Across Gall as well, henges of various descriptions are found, often with Celtic symbols engraved on them. What were they used for? It is hard to say. Like Stonehenge, many less impressive henges are aligned with astrological significance; but astrology could hardly have been their purpose, for they would have had to have the astrological knowledge to build the henge as it was. Instead, the astrological alignment is a secondary quality the henge possesses. The primary purpose many would say would be for some kind of sacred ceremony. Such assumptions are usually a cop out for anthropologists, to whom anything that looks a bit odd or that they don't understand is religious, but in this case I agree. These henges mark out a kind of sacred boundary, a kind of pomoerium, permitting connection between this world and another. Japan has their version of the archetypal gate also, in the form of a Torii gate. Walking through a Torii gate, one traverses from the mundane to the spiritual, as mediated by the gates. There are also tunnels of gates, like at Inari shrine in Kyoto, which forms a kind of sacred pathway. The Torii gate then helps to demarcate the small area of land which has been donated to the local kami (demon), as his small little dominion on Earth. For demons confer gratitude and aid once they are given an idol in which they can dwell in the world¹, and this small outlined area gives them a small kingdom they can govern. In Christianity, for pagan worship is born of the shadows and residues of the faith, whether by inklings of the natural law by the demons' envy of God, there is also a demarcated holy land, in the nation of Israel. Even before Joshua's conquests and the establishment of Israel's borders, the Mosaic law sets out how the ground of Israel is to remain holy, so that God can continue to dwell with the Israelites. This is done through dietary acts, such as not eating unclean animals, or not boiling a lamb in its mother's milk; it is done through cleanliness acts, such as excluding women from the boundaries of Israel's city of tents when they begin to menstruate; or, where the corruption of the land is most explicitly pointed out, when if you hang someone on a tree, the body must be taken down before nightfall. The rules are different within Israel, because the land within the boundary, as mediated by gates, is holy; and the land is holy because God dwells there. The Pomoerium of ancient Rome, as dug by Romulus himself, is a kind of sacred boundary. Within the Pomoerium, there can be no military men. Within the Pomoerium also, however, there is law and citizenship, and civilisation. The boundary and the city-centred worship is maintained through the city's sacred hearth by the Vestal Virgins. Within Rome's boundaries there are different laws in place - or rather, there are laws for citizen - because the land there is sacred and dedicated. And the gates of Rome act again as kinds of portals between the secular world outside, and the sacred ground within. We've seen in history that gates act as kinds of portals now, but there is also psychological evidence to back this up. Have you ever had the experience of forgetting something when you walk from one room to the next? This is a statistically significant occurrence, leading to the suggestion of some kind of psychological gate, common to all men. Jung would've called this an archetype. This kind of archetypal gate which divides zones, or portions of space, confers a transformative experience once its walked through. In the aforementioned case of moving from one room to another it is minor, and yet noticeable; whilst, in the case of the Torii it is a powerful change from the zone of the mundane to the zone of the sacred. To summarise, the gate or portal is archetypal and built into man's being. It shows up in religion, in history, in the present, in the everyday, and, as this article began, in Minecraft. The nether portal of Minecraft fits all these criteria: it is a gate which transforms you from the zone of the mundane to the zone of the underworld. Much can be said abut Orphic spirituality and its symbolism common to many practices of descent into Hades; and in Minecraft this is seen in the realm of the nether from which valuable goods and items can be obtained so long as you are careful. The nether portal of many of our youths with its obsidian structure and its purple swirling interior accesses some kind of deeper recess of the mind - the gate after all is core to how we perceive the world - and the partition it represents is but the most recent manifestation of an ancient tradition. 1. As St. Paul points out, an idol cannot dress itself, clean itself, nor right itself. It is a body created by the hand of man, rather than the hand of God; and through its body, the demon can now eat through sacrifices.