Mystical systems
Labrys
Direct answer
Labrys: The labrys is a double-headed axe, the most common religious emblem of Minoan Crete in the Bronze Age, later taken up as a symbol by feminist and lesbian movements.
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At a glance
- Also called
- double axe, minoan double axe
- Found in
- Mystical Systems
- Related
- Labyrinth, Ankh, Djed, Amulet
The labrys is a double-headed axe, the most common religious emblem of Minoan Crete in the Bronze Age, later taken up as a symbol by feminist and lesbian movements.
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What does the labrys symbolise?
A labrys is an axe with two blades set back to back on one shaft. On Bronze Age Crete it was plainly sacred: it is carved on pillars at Knossos, painted on pottery, set between the horns of bulls' heads, and made in thin gold and bronze too delicate to cut anything. In the images that survive, the figures shown holding it appear to be female.
What it meant to the Minoans is unknown, since their script has not been read. It may have been the tool of sacrifice turned into a sign of divine power. Greek writers later used the word for the axe of Zeus as worshipped at Labraunda in Caria. In the 1970s the labrys was adopted as a sign of women's strength by feminist and lesbian groups, a modern meaning with no ancient source.
On the tree of the hidden arts: Symbols.
What sets Labrys apart
The labrys is defined by its symmetry and, in the forms that matter most, by its uselessness as a tool. The votive pieces are sheet metal, sometimes only a few centimetres across, and the largest bronze ones stood on tall shafts in stepped stone bases as fixtures of a shrine. It keeps regular company with the bull, appearing between the horns of bull heads and beside the stylised horns Evans named horns of consecration.
- Form: two axe blades back to back on a single shaft
- Culture: Minoan Crete, Bronze Age, second millennium BCE
- Word: labrys, the Lydian word for axe according to Plutarch
- Major find: votive axes of gold, silver and bronze, Arkalochori cave, 1930s
- Debated link: labyrinth as house of the double axe, proposed by Arthur Evans
Often mistaken for something else: A labyrinth is a single winding path drawn or built as a pattern; the labrys is an axe, and the supposed link between the two words is a scholar's proposal.
The story behind Labrys
Plutarch, about 100 CE, wrote that labrys was the Lydian word for axe and used it to explain the title Zeus Labrandeus. Arthur Evans, who dug at Knossos from 1900, found the sign so often that he read the Greek word labyrinth as house of the double axe; linguists still dispute that derivation. Votive axes of gold, silver and bronze were recovered from the Arkalochori cave in Crete in the 1930s. A lesbian pride flag bearing a labrys was designed in 1999.
Why Labrys matters
Labrys is the clearest emblem of a religion that left images and no readable words, which shows the limits of reading symbols.
How to read Labrys
Archaeologists read it as a marker of sacred space in Minoan sites; modern movements wear it as a sign of women's independence.
Labrys in practice: an example
A visitor to the Heraklion museum sees tiny gold double axes that could never cut wood, and understands they were offerings.
Where readings of Labrys go wrong
Any statement of what it meant to the Minoans is a reconstruction, because no Minoan text explains it.
Sources and editorial method
This entry summarizes the tradition in the Almanac's own words; where no source is listed, it is an editorial summary rather than a primary text, and symbolic readings are named as the tradition's, not as fact.
- Source
- The Great Almanac Dictionary
- Category
- Mystical Systems
- Aliases
- labrys meaning, double axe, double-headed axe symbol, minoan double axe, labrys symbol
- Last updated
- 2026-09-26
See Labrys in your personal almanac
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Common questions
What does the labrys symbolise?
In Minoan Crete it marked sacred places and was probably linked with sacrifice and with a goddess; the exact meaning is lost. Today it is used as an emblem of women's strength and of lesbian identity.
Is the word labyrinth related to labrys?
Possibly. Arthur Evans proposed that labyrinth meant house of the double axe, and the idea is still widely repeated. Many linguists doubt it, and the origin of labyrinth remains unsettled.
Where does the word labrys come from?
Plutarch says it was the Lydian word for axe. It is not Greek in origin, and the Minoans' own name for the object is unknown.
