Published on 2025-03-28
I am aware that the name of my website is peculiar.
To some it might sound mysterious, to others it might sound sinister. To me it has always sounded a little cringey. But actually it is none of those things. It is not that deep. But there is some history behind it.
The name Hades Labyrinth is relic of a prior era. It's an heirloom. I first bought the domain back in 2019. It was meant to serve as the name of a Minecraft server I ran very briefly from late '19 to early '20. There is an entire story behind that, but since it is not a chapter of my life I am especially proud of (not that anything egregious happened), I won't touch on it here.
That server actually went back many more years than 2019. Like a living ogranism it went through various phases of development, taking on a different form in each one. It had actually been around since 2015, but wasn't called Hades Labyrinth until 2019, when there was a major 'rebranding'. I intended, from then on, for it to be a public server, but that never panned out.
Afterwards I made the server private. It still exists, running on this very machine, but I rarely use it anymore. Despite that I have retained the name I gave it back in 2019, Hades Labyrinth. Not only did I retain the name, but I continued to associate all the content stored on this machine with that name, including the website you are now viewing.
There were a few a precursors to this website, too, and all of them have used the same Hades Labyrinth for a title and domain. Before this one, however, I changed it slightly to The Hades Labyrinth. That website had a black background and the main text body was textured to look like old parchment. It ran using the Silverstripe CMS. There was another version of the website that existed before that, which I believe goes all the way back to 2020, but I can't even remember what it was like, it was so inconsequential.
After I moved the main content I was serving on the previous version of the website to its own VPS back in 2024 (I am the owner of a few websites; nobody reads any of them), I stopped using Silverstripe (with Apache) and downgraded to a simple lighttpd instance. So extreme was this downgrade, that I even disabled PHP. Believe it or not, this entire site is static; no dynamically-generated pages, although I use a few python and bash scripts to automate things.
But even after all that, I have stuck with this name.
Believe me, there have been many times I have thought about changing it to something a little more suitable, a little more creative, a little more suggestive of the type of content that I upload here. But every time I have been unable to come up with anything. And the more time passed, the more unthinkable it became for this website to be known by any other name.
A lot of people think a name ought to boil down or summarize or otherwise stand for and represent the thing it names. But this website is really just a giant heap of miscellany. I have no overarching plan for it. It is, in the purest possible sense, a personal website. It's name is, therefore, just as arbitrary as most people's personal names are. It's just a string of letters, evoking a certain definite idea, that points to a discreet entity, but it does not in any way define the substance or essence of that entity. It just elucidates a certain heritage. Like the name "smith" tells you someone's ancestors were blacksmiths back in medieval times.
I wouldn't say the name is entirely arbitrary though. It does have a meaning. It's obviously a reference to the Greek god. But I have always equally regarded the word "hades" as an adjective. The Ancient Greek name for the god is derived from an adjective, ἀϊδής (aides), which means "invisible", "unseen". This, I have always thought, is a fitting adjective to describe a "labyrinth", a place of mystery, of convolution, a place where one can easily get lost, and lose sight of where one is going.
The truth is I have always been fascinated by such spaces. The concept of "liminal spaces" still intrigues me to this day, even after it has become a cringy meme. Such spaces do exist in real life, and always have. Consciousness by virtue of itself creates them, because consciousness has boundaries, and such peripheral spaces can never be seen and understood with the same level of confidence as normal spaces.
This, of course, means "liminal spaces", "hades labyrinths", are dangerous places. And that invokes the other meaning of "hades", a synonym for Death, that names the god of the Underworld, a name the ancients would not have dared to speak any louder than a whisper, let alone give to something as its name. That's another argument I have continually brought up in favor of changing the name of the website. It's an unlucky name. It will probably turn people away, regardless of what kind of content I post here.
Is the labyrinth dangerous? Absolutely. Is my website dangerous? No. Because, once again, it's not that deep. It's just a name. But even if that were so...
"Where the danger is, grows the saving power also" (quote from Friedrich Hölderlin)
Another piece of wisdom I have heard states:
"The Waters are the path of souls into incarnation, but also the Way to immortality." (from a book called Summary of Pythagorean Theology)
That's enough esoteric rambling for today. I'm afraid it has taken me too far off topic.
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