The Labyrinth & the Shadow You Summoned Yourself

A conversation with writer and poet Cael Lawenu of Enter Nyxus cracked this story open for me in ways I wasn't expecting.

 

I had always loved Labyrinth the way you love something you half-remember. In images more than story. The bog. The crystals. The creatures with their stitched-together faces. David Bowie in that ridiculous, magnificent costume, moving through Sarah's world like something she conjured from a book she shouldn't have been reading.

I sat down to talk with Cael Lawenu, a writer and poet whose work spans mythic sci-fi to essays for modern mystics. I wasn't prepared for the way he would reframe everything.

He said something I keep returning to.

"Maybe the Goblin King was a product of her. Maybe she really went somewhere and just saw a reflection of herself in this character."

If that is true, and I believe it is, then Labyrinth is not a story about a girl rescuing her brother. It is a story about a girl who has to walk into the darkest parts of herself to reclaim her own power.

That is exactly what the sacred dark feminine asks of us.

She Called Him Into Being

Sarah begins the story at a nearby park, reading aloud from a book about a goblin king who will take away whatever you wish for. She is frustrated. Overwhelmed. Carrying the weight of a stepbrother she didn't ask for and a life that doesn't feel like hers yet.

And so she wishes him gone.

The wish works. Of course it does. She has been building that wish for a long time.

What follows, the labyrinth, the creatures, the maze that shifts and deceives and opens and closes, is not punishment. It is an invitation. The dark feminine does not punish us for our shadowy impulses. She says: You called this forth, now let's see what's inside it.

Jareth, the Goblin King, is androgynous by design. David Bowie was not a coincidence. There is something in him that belongs to Sarah, a shadow energy she projected outward and gave a face and a name and a kingdom, because that is what we do with the parts of ourselves we do not know how to hold yet. We externalize them. We make them into kings and villains and threats.

And then we have to go find them.

Every Creature She Meets Is a Part of Her

Cael offered something that stopped me. The idea that the characters Sarah collects along her journey might be read as multiple aspects of her inner child. Different parts of herself, made visible. Her own internal landscape, populated and walking alongside her.

Think of Hoggle. The trickster who genuinely wants to help her but keeps sabotaging her anyway. How many versions of that live inside us? The part that knows the way forward and still, sometimes, hands us the poisoned peach.

When Hoggle betrays her and comes back full of shame, Sarah doesn't unravel. She looks at him and says: It's okay. I forgive you. Just like that. And they move on.

That moment passed in seconds. But it contains everything.

The dark feminine is not about never being hurt. It is about the quality of your return. It is about looking at the part of yourself that sold you out, the fear, the people-pleasing, the self-sabotage, and saying: I know why you did it. I'm not leaving you behind.

Then there is Ludo. Giant, horned, terrifying to look at. When Sarah finds him, the goblins are tormenting him. She doesn't run. She intervenes, she offers him kindness, and he becomes her most loyal companion.

This is the dark feminine seeing past the monstrous surface to what is actually there. Something huge and tender that just wants to belong. Something that has been misread its whole life. Something that, given love instead of fear, will walk through fire for you.

The dark feminine can look at what the world has deemed a monster and still love it, because beneath what looks monstrous is usually just a lot of pain.

The Bog of Eternal Stench Is Not a Joke

There is a scene where Sarah and her companions walk past a bog and Hoggle warns her: Don't step in there or you'll stink for the rest of your life.

The children watching laugh. But Cael paused on that line, and once he named it, I couldn't unhear it.

The bog is the fermentation stage. In spiritual alchemy, fermentation is where everything has to break down before it can be transformed. It is not pleasant. It is not fast. You will smell it on yourself. You will wonder why you started.

And you cannot skip it.

Shadow work has a bog. There is a point in the descent where your entire concept of reality starts to unravel, where the things you thought were solid reveal themselves as stories you have been telling yourself for a very long time. It is disorienting. Sometimes it is devastating.

But you do not go through the bog unchanged, and you do not reach the center of the labyrinth without first witnessing it first-hand.

You Have No Power Over Me

At the end, Sarah stands before Jareth in a strange void, floating rocks, collapsing space, and she reclaims the line she couldn't remember at the beginning of the film.

You have no power over me.

The Goblin King falls into nothing. The shadow, faced and named and refused dominion, dissolves.

The other creatures come back. Hoggle, Ludo, all of them reappear in her room because she calls them back. She still needs them. She welcomes them.

But not him. Not that part.

Some shadow aspects we integrate and carry forward. Others we have to let fall into the void once we have seen them clearly, not with cruelty, but with the quiet sovereignty of a woman who finally knows which parts of herself deserve a seat at the table and which ones have simply been running the show long enough.

Jareth turns back into an owl and flies into the moonlight.

The moon illuminates the watery depths, those emotional, intuitive places where our shadows live before we have met them. The ending shot of the film is the whole story compressed into a single image. Something dark, something that lived in her, released into the light it came from.

 

What This Story Is Really About

Labyrinth is a heroine's journey inward. The labyrinth is not outside Sarah. It is her. The creatures are her. The Goblin King is her. And the only way to get her brother back, to reclaim the innocent part of herself she wished away in a moment of despair, is to walk through every layer of shadow with enough love and enough sovereignty to say: this is mine, and this is not, and I know the difference now.

That is the work. That is what the sacred dark feminine calls us toward.

Not to destroy our shadows. Not to be ashamed of them. But to walk into the labyrinth we built, meet every creature we have been afraid of, and come home to ourselves on the other side.

I sat with Cael Lawenu for this conversation and came away with a completely new relationship to a film I thought I already knew.

You can connect with him and his writing on Enter Nyxus Substack.

Watch the conversation on YouTube:

What parts of your own labyrinth are you still walking? Share in the comments.  

For my own dark tales, visit my author Substack, Moonrise Mystic.

~Alysia Moonrise