For saying something.
This and that.
- Image copyright 1985 by Christopher Manson
into the abyss . net
Solving Christopher Manson's MAZE and the Genre of the Immersive Puzzle
For saying something.
This and that.
- Image copyright 1985 by Christopher Manson
I think you have one where branches become roots. Upside down tree on top of right side up one.
http://www.intotheabyss.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/enterance-1000×288.jpg
Why does this image on the website have two upside down hands in it? Raven? ;)
SP,
I created several puzzles when I made this site, all relate to MAZE. You are the first person to notice one.
White Raven
Well, there are about a million in your discussion of puzzle theory, though those are only hidden in the sense that you have to be willing to see the word “theory” on the internet and keep reading in order to find them.
All the puzzles are in the header images.
Is the answer to that clue “11″ ?
No, how did you get 11?
The upside down hands are cloest to the 1st doors in each row. Was just a stab in the dark. Not sure what the question/riddle is.
A proposal about “solution” types:
The “odd one out” even if it is clear is still the “poor man’s solution” I think. It’s like “We could only find the bad clues, but not the real ones, but we still know the right door. Still – it is a solution.
At the far other end of the range are the things you could only possibly find when you have nearly solved the whole room. When you have used up nearly all the stuff, and you have just a tiny nagging suspicion that some of the non-random words have some puzzle related meaning still. Then when you only have those couple items left to work with can you find something like “stare decisis”. Hardly a word is random and not related to the solutions, I’m starting to think. Only minor words he needed to connect the meaningful words have no meaning. But those are bonus, and can only be found AFTER you have found the main solution for the most part.
Then there are the nice middle ground solutions, which we might think of as “main” solutions. These are more rule bound, and focus as Raven says on word values of objects in the room – solutions one might reasonably be expected to find.
SP,
I couldn’t find a free template that did what I wanted so I chose a basic template and went hog wild on the code. I am amateur at coding and for me building this site is part of the fun.
That said, I would love some suggestions. I suspect you know a lot more than I do about web design.
White Raven
I can’t do much from the peanut gallery. That being said, I’ve mentioned multiple times that your identity will not be compromised by making other people admins, editors, authors, etc. You haven’t responded to those messages, so I’ll assume you don’t want my help. I hope one day it will dawn on you that I don’t really care what your identity is, respectfully. There are plenty of free templates that will do the trick as well as forum software that would be better suited to what we’re using it for. Short of those options, I can’t help you. What I will say is that this site will atrophy if you keep using comments improperly and you will find yourself with a broken site and database.
What I would suggest though, is that you at least include “Christopher Manson Maze” in your title tags as this website doesn’t come up when you search for it in Google.
Yeah, David Gentile and I have made a real mess of this place.
Raven, Do we need a few solution bump ups? Maybe room 2? Room 23? Room 22? 43? 28?
David Gentile,
Rooms 2 – The spear – weapon – wrong door connection was made by Hello Gregor 2/5. He then tied in the broom 1/5. Nothing yet has been mentioned on the other deeper parts of this riddle.
Room 22 – This is the room I’ve got nothing on. I’m just waiting for one of you to solve it. Since is it in The Trap there is not a correct door.
Room 23 – The Riddle of the Path has been solved 1/5. Half of one of the riddles pointing to the door was solved by vewatkins 1/5. = 2/5.
Room 28 – No one has mentioned the rather obvious solution to this room.
Room 43 – The incomplete solution 3/5 to this room was posted by Janice, who got it from the John Bailey archive, it was posted by jmb184 (who may be John Bailey).
Room 2 – I made an elaborate connection involving “overbaring knights” and “gritty” freedom.
Room 22 – I posted a very elaborate solution there last night.
43 = I thought “Fair well” probably extended it.
Room 23 – I thought “bear false witness” or “witness false bear” was worth something.
I’m about halfway convinced about the “bear false witness” thing, because it involves a couple funny leaps; but on the other hand, it fits so damn well, and it makes sense of some disparate elements. But even given that, I think it’s just a funny thing, like an in-joke to Manson and whoever gets it, not much like a clue to the room. That is, if you’ve already figured out how the tablets and the broken pane clues to 8 (which you’d have to to make the “bear false witness” connection) then the pun doesn’t really add anything to helping you find the right door.
I think there’s similar stuff elsewhere–the drawing board in Room 1 I just hit upon today, for example, but also the extended Devil Bird metaphor in Room 26–you don’t need all that to get “ATLAS,” and you don’t need it to figure out the correct door.
This stuff is worth figuring out, too, whether it’s the solution to part of the puzzles or not. I guess that rather than thinking just in terms of clues to doors and narrator identity and etc., a more general question is just “why is this thing here?”
You would not need anything with the glass in 23 to get “bare false witness”. Procedure: Notice that 8 is on commandments and on wall. Say Hmm. Look up 8th commandment. See “bare false witness”. Notice animal in text. Look up animal – see “false bear”. It could be the first one you find – if you are twisted enough, lol
Comments can only reach a certain depth on here, but I’m actually replying to David Gentile’s comment beneath this one: You’re right again there! It’s cute now, but eventually I’m going to get very resentful about you always noticing when I’m wrong.
28 – I mentioned the darkness ahead, more than in 12. There are some “odd one in” options. Or maybe you mean “45 is simply the obvious choice to get to the center”.
David Gentile,
Do me a favor and post this comment over again on the Room 28 page.
You’re forcing my hand here, alright I’ll say it – all of that is wrong, keep at it!
Did you mean 28 or all of the above? Maybe just not the solution you were looking for rather than “wrong”? And anyway, how can you say 22 is wrong when you don’t have an answer?
All of the above – except a hint of 28.
On false leads: Yes there could be a simple red herring by itself. Although that might be unintentional, if not reinforced. Then there are clearly unified ones like above the doors here. I guess the trio here is a matter of taste as to if we should label it a “solution”. To me the fact that we can fine one indicator for each of the wrong choices justifies it. BTW – in 26 – I now think the “3″ “0″ is better than “odd one out”. The “gathered a round” seals it.
OK – and one final “facepalm” way to indicate door 26:
Down on the floor there is a “* E” = “starry” or “stare” pronounced same way. We have “decisions” in the text 3 times, and “decide” once. Together we have:
Stare Decisis [Latin, Let the decision stand.] The policy of courts to abide by or adhere to principles established by decisions in earlier cases.
The first full sentence contains this “Carefully At the Bronze Doors”. “C,A,B,D”. By Stare Decisis we take the first one, “C”, and that is the right door.
On the Odd-One-In principle:
We should be cautious in applying this principle to every room in which doors are indicated or pointed to in minor, varying ways. The problem is that in almost any room, you can pick any door, and find an object pointing to it, or something near it mentioned in the text, or three objects that contain the letters to spell the number…
The only uses of the OOI principle that are compelling are the ones in which every door is referenced but one, and by the same kind of clue. E.g. Room 1, with words/anagrams in the text, in the children’s statements, essentially right in a row; Room 12, with each of three paintings indicating a door.
That’s not to say that I don’t think there are red herrings pointing at particular doors in particular rooms; I just don’t think those are the solutions.
Consider, for instance, that I might say of Room 1: “21 has a paper leading under the door. 41 and 21 are indicated by the sun. The images on the drawing board seem to point to 20. Therefore, the answer is 26.”
Does that seem anything near as deliberate and satisfying a solution as, “Each of the words over the doors is referenced in the text, in the words of the children, except ‘fable,’ over 26. The guide mentions that silence in the Maze is as eloquent as sound. 26 is the correct answer.”
Actually, once you add the images on the drawing board pointing, which I did not have I DO find that a good “odd one in” example. There is as you say a better one, but that’s OK, we can have multiple indicators. The clincher is FABEL = A BELL, both in its general sound, and in the the fact that you can drop a little bar off the F, and flip it over and anagram A BELL from FABEL.
Yeah, but then let’s say, each door is marked with an image that corresponds to A, B, C, D. 26 has a D (drum) on it. Prominently featured in the room is a “d”rawing board. So that points to 26.
You might say, “Ok, that’s a stretch,” but I don’t think it’s any more of a stretch than disqualifying 41 because the sun is shining on both it and 21; that’s not even an suggestion that 41 is the right door, since it implicated 21 just as much!
“Well, but we can see 41 through the door in the prologue, and it has a “b”ottle on it, and there’s the bumbershoot, so…”
I just don’t think these things go together.
It’s on the handle of 41 – sun points t o41.
I think we have a trio of convincing false leads. Not a good indicator of 26 by any means, but there, I think. But another facepalm comming here too….
I agree that they’re false leads, deliberately put there to mislead us. I guess what I’m trying to distinguish here are non-clue (or anti-clue) red herrings, which are generally weak indicators of a particular door that involve no problem-solving or insight; and OOI clues, which are unified indicators of every door in the room except the correct one.
vewatkin,
Absolutely right, the odd-one-in principal can be used to justify any choice.
Making things more difficult, many of the times it is employed it involves more than one manner of indication, such as in the incomplete but already published solution to Room 30, in which one of the riddles indicates the correct door by pointing to 5 and 15 while Door 34 is mentioned in the text and embellished in the illustration. We often have to put two parts together to complete the picture – which makes it considerably more difficult to be sure that the parts are legit and not wishful thinking.
White Raven
I betook myself to linking
Fancy unto fancy, thinking
My apologies to David Gentile and vewatkin. Your comments with links/email addresses were spam filtered – I have approved them.
White Raven
Someone suggested an e-mail group. It may be a bit redundant, since there don’t seem to be that many of us and since there is a functional site here. But I set one up and will mention both places on my page. To subscribe, send e-mail here : Subscribe
maze-cmanson-subscribe@yahoogroups.com
That may have been me, and if so, I was misunderstood. I wanted to create a chatroom (a hangout, in googlespeak). I thought it might be easier to hash out small theories and observations that way. An email list would be more cumbersome than posting here, I suspect.
Yahoo groups can work like a chat room and/or an email distribution list. But set up a Google think if you wish.
On a recurring bit of reasoning that I do not think we should engage in:
I see it often repeated that when discerning the correct door to a room on the True Path, we can ignore a door leading back the way we came because that is obviously not the correct way. I do not think this is appropriate reasoning to employ, and our solutions to the rooms should account for all doors in the room.
The problem I have with it is that backtracking often is the correct move to make. Now, if we know we’re on the True Path then obviously we don’t want to backtrack; but the reason we know when we’re on the True Path is because we have mapped out the solution by examining the entire book. And if we allow information gained from general Maze exploration (i.e. off the True Path) to be part of the True Path’s solution, then I see no difference between saying “we don’t want to backtrack because we’re on the True Path” and saying “we don’t want to go to room 6 because that’s part of the Trap.” Yet, I can’t imagine anyone would consider the latter statement to be a legitimate part of a room’s riddle unless the room itself actually contained coded warnings about room 6.
In other words and for example, without outside information, if we went to room 26, and we had not already examined the entire book to ensure that we were on the True Path, then as far as we knew we could have just stepped the wrong way, and the correct move would be to return to room 1 and try again. That is exactly what we should do if we go to room 20 first, for instance.
Or, to put it another way: If the clues along the True Path require you to know what the True Path is, then why bother to have clues indicating the True Path?
I know, the response is probably, “In an ideal world, we have solved previous rooms so completely that we have no question but that we are on the True Path, and so while we’re not bringing to bear our knowledge of the Maze map as a whole, we are aware that we’re on the True Path.”
Well…nnnn…nuh uh.
I guess I still disagree with that, but I can understand the assertion.
OK gotcha. How about the audience guys holding up 1 finger also indicate the wrong door, just like the devils.
Maybe. Or maybe Saturn is pointing to 1?
Hey, I provide problems, not solutions.
Hallelujah vewatkin!
The only two rooms of The Path that make this kind of assumption are are Room 17 (entrance to 45) and Room 20 (entrance to 1).
For all the other rooms of The Path the correct door is indicated either by pointing it out or via the odd-one-in principle involving all the doors. This includes Room 45 and Room 4 (which also indicates order of the choices).
Similarly, one room of The Loop assumes obvious knowledge and all the others point out the correct choice.
A gold star in interpretation for you! :)
White Raven
As I said above, I’m not sure room 26 even makes this assumption. The “Odd one in” principle may be at work here too. The devils point to 2 doors, but the men have up “1″ finger. 30 is the only one left.
And really, even in 17 we have an indicator of 45. the 9 jars divide into 4 and 5 – ones that are amphorea , and those that are not.
The rest I agree with you on. 35 assumes obvious knowledge. 41 and 26 both indicate to take door “1″.
Does anyone here use Google Hangouts and want to form a Maze-based chat room?
I have google hangouts, but I would prefer to use a #maze channel in irc
irc://irc.efnet.net/#maze << if you're interested
I use Yahoo groups and had considered it. I’m open to something else, however, and I do have a google account.
I have a pretty heavy investment in google+/hangouts, as well as some other friends that I’m already harassing with Maze chatter on there, so I’d LIKE [spoken in an irritating, nasal whine] to use google if we can.
Contact me at vewatkin@gmail.com (Mr. Gentile, or anyone) if you want to form a hangout for Maze discussion. I feel a little guilty about mucking up these boards with my incomplete thoughts and irrelevant asides; it might be better if we could bounce some stuff around and get it in presentable order before making it part of the site.
Anyone else here a fan of The Ninth Gate with Johnny Depp? Love this movie!
SP,
I looked into it – an unsettling puzzle book – sounds familiar. I updated the Curious Imaginary Books section to include, “The Nine Gates of the Kingdom of Shadows.” Thanks!
White Raven
HELp
so how can I play this? I want to see the image of the room , but no matter how hard I try I can´t find the way to see it . I Only see small pictures , can someone help me , I´ve known this 10 minutes ago and I want to play , maybe I havent noticed something you do.
I have the book; I ordered it off Amazon from Goodwill.
Marco,
MAZE is a puzzle book, the only one of its kind, it is surreal and maddening. This site is for discussing the book. The book is available from Amazon.com (see the link at the bottom of this page). Occasionally an individual will post a working version online, this is copyright infringement. I have been given permission by the author to post the small images you see here. Buy the book, you will not be disappointed!
White Raven
I believe the drum over the door in room 33 is a symbol to refer to room 20, because the only other place it’s found is right on the door to room 20 from page 1. If you take this door on your way out, you can complete the Maze in only 12 steps! The out path would be 45 to 17 to 33 to 20 (drum) to 1. Someone said you can do it in 6 steps using unmarked doors. I’ll have to check into that.
Jenny,
This is one topic on which we have confirmed intel. Mr. Manson has said to others, and to myself in a phone conversation, that the ideal route is 16 steps, there are no shorter routes. Manson confirmed to me that the unnumbered doors are all locked on one side so that they are one way only, making it impossible to backtrack (i.e. to room 17 from room 33), also there no symbol-jumping of the kind you are describing (to room 20 from room 33).
The 6 step path would work if all doors were two way – but, alas, they are not.
White Raven
I see, so the drum door is coming from room 17 (killing the room 20 theory), but you can’t go back that way because it is “locked”. The only problem I have with that is that there is no door, so how can it be locked? It’s an open archway with no door. Being that it’s an imaginary place, I can imagine going through it back to room 17, and I am fine with that despite whether the author originally intended it or not.
Jenny,
The maze has three distinct elements – the numbered matrix of rooms, the illustrations, and the text.
The illustrations and text work together to provide the puzzles – most of which remain unsolved. The matrix of numbered rooms provide the maze through which the reader travels – this part of the book has been solved completely.
The rules of the game (as clarified in the book and by the publisher and the author) do not permit entering unmarked doors. The images of the doors are just decoration, the maze itself is made of numbers, that said, Manson said he reinforced the no back-tracking rule in some of the illustrations by removing the door handles (rooms 3, 11, 15, 29, 34, 44) or other changes (rooms 10, 25, 38).
If we take the fantastical architecture of the Maze seriously then between the door in one room and the door in another room is a twisting hallway or staircase. In regards to room 33: The archway to room 17 enters into an imaginary hallway which leads to an imaginary door, which is locked.
White Raven
I think we should start compiling a list of rooms that have the same objects in them and see how they relate. For example:
- Kids toy duck
- Umbrella
- Bowling pin
- Crown
- Sun dial
- Amphorae
I read online that you can get to the middle and back in six steps if you use unmarked doors. Can you use unmarked doors? Thoughts anyone?
There is a lot of ancient Persian symbolism as well.
There seems to be alchemy symbols in various rooms. Manson wrote another puzzle book, The Practical Alchemist. I wonder if there is an alchemy link?
Yes, the creep factor was seriously high considering that nothing really creepy happens. It weird, you begin to lose yourself in the book and forget about things like work, children, food, bathing… There is something about the shadows and the sense of deep silence.
Come back, Laura! Come back! Look away from the tree of bones!
What I think is creepy is what it does to a person. It is obsession inducing. Have you guys seen Dave Gentile’s supposed walkthrough of Maze? I think he may have been loosing his marbles. He sees anagrams for “Christopher Manson” everywhere. I got the feeling the book may have begun to play on his mind… Christopher Manson is everywhere!
[Update by White Raven: Dave Gentile modified his site. While still relying on anagramming he now takes "Christopher" as a reference to "St. Christopher." I have left this discussion as is since that primary topic is David Gentile's anagrams and so would apply to "Christopher Mason" or "St. Christopher" equally.]
I emailed Dave about this site. While he has clearly sucumed to the same obsession as the rest of us, he is a very sane and thoughtful guy. He spoke with Christopher Manson about his ideas who replied by saying that he had only included his name once on purpose. Dave now doubts his former position but is keeping it online as food for thought.
But regardless of what you may think of his walk-through on a whole, Dave’s solution to room 26 is brilliant.
Yep, it was on his site. From Dave Gentile’s “Walk Through”:
Postscript:
I wrote to Christopher Manson and he kindly replied. He said in part:
…while I dislike to go into much detail about what is or isn’t there, I do want to say that I have really only put my name in once on purpose, and besides a couple of references (nun, pair-o’-dice) used for their word value, I did not intend to incorporate any particularly Christian ideas, messages or doctrines. My first name is entirely coincidental to the book, and was not my doing in the first place.
I hesitate to say anything about the book usually…
He also elaborated that when he said his name was not his doing he meant that his mother chose it, not him. This alters my analysis of page 43, and certainly casts serious doubt, on most of the “Manson”s I identified in the text, since many pairs of words might contain these letters. However, I think most of the “Christopher’s” and at least a couple of the “Manson”s in the text are clearly intentionally present, and as a statistician, I believe it would be possible to demonstrate it to be extremely unlikely to be a random coincidence. I leave it to the reader to decide if I’ve done exegesis or eisegesis on the text.
I’ve left most of my work I did before receiving the above note unchanged, however. The reader can choose to accept my interpretation of the clues or search for another. The changes I have made involve removing a few Christian re-interpretations based on my analysis of page 43.
So, C. M. himself said that Dave was off his rocker and he still left his “walk though” (ha ha) up on his web page? WHY? Doesn’t he know that he is spreading wrong information about the book that makes people think less of it? And for the few people who actually know something about the book he just looks like an idiot.
If you read the walk through carefully and ignore the anagram references he has several good points. And the other material on his site confirms his obvious intellect. Sure, he is a bit hung up on the whole anagram thing, but haven’t we all been stuck on a wild theory about the book at some time or another?
I can hardly believe I am taking the time to write this.
Why Dave G. is obviously wrong:
Dave combines two elements to come up with “Christopher Manson” over and over again. 1. Anagrams of words from the text or the pictures, or implied from the illustration. 2. Word-picture analogies (such as eye = I). With this combination a person could spell almost anything. But Dave takes it further by finding words supposedly implied by the illustrations that are so distant and unlikely that his technique moves from being able to spell almost anything to being able to actually spell ANYTHING AT ALL.
For example, in the room with the dead tree. He finds the word “atrophied” in reference to the tree branches. The branches are not atrophied, they are dead. Tree branches do not atrophy. If you make the comparison to human limbs then the illustration is bones, not atrophied flesh. But most of all atrophied is an ridiculously remote word to have “found” here. Here is a small list of other words that he could have found that would be more appropriate: Dead, dry, brittle, cracks, decay, contortion, contorted, bones, sticks, limbs, decomposing, dieback, stripped, white, skeleton, or most of all, snag (look it up).
With this degree of leverage in finding words to take letters from I could spell “gold spatula” in just about every room.
Carl, I would like to see you try to spell “gold spatula” using the room with the devils in it. :)
“SALT” + “LOUD” (the bell ringing was loud) + “GAP” (there is a large gap between the left and right hand chairs) = “GOLD SPATULA”
Time from reading your challenge to solving it… 7 minutes.
Bye Bye Dave!
Yep, that ought to do it!
One more nail in Dave’s coffin:
A crown does not mean “Christ” any more than it means “Elizabeth” or “monarchy.” A crown could mean “Christ” but to do so there would have to be some indication other than just a crown. Expecially when the crown is juxtaposed with a jester like in room 16… and I suppose the jester is Judas?
Well that is updated even more – the bare crown stuff points to another place I now think I know. The ‘Manson’s are out the window , except for the 3 obvious ones, since one is legit for sure. All I ever thought he did there was ensure he had one word containing “son” and one containing “man” on every page, and it was almost true, but not quite. The Christopher’s – well – St. Christopher SHOULD be there some where , but that does not mean he is. I withhold final judgement. He did bare the weight of the world etc. Most of the Christopher’s are gone. Some are there. But they don’t help solve the Maze. My theory is that in the process of MAZE creation he made all possible anagrams of Christopher he could and used many of the things that fell out as parts of the puzzle. “Pitch eror s h” or “short perch I”. But once I was convinced I should find one nearly everywhere there were many that were too strained. But – onward.
Is it just me or does Maze kinda creep you out. It sucks me in and plays with my mind. When I was younger I used to have dreams about it.
But I tell ya, I tell ya, I don’t get no respect, no respect at all. I said to my wife the other day, my wife, oh boy, I said, “Honey, this house has too many animals, too many animals for a proper house.” She says, “Well, maybe you should step outside.”
No respect, no respect, I tell ya. My wife, she’s a tough one, tough, she’s downright mean. I tell her, “Honey, I think I left my shoe in 38,” and she says, “Funny, smells like you were stepping in number 2.”
But you know my wife, one thing about my wife, she likes to talk with me after sex. That’s why you always hear the phone ringing.
But I tell you, my wife, she gives me such stress. Stress! She gives me stress, my wife. She says, “Baby, I want to remodel. I need you to go pull up the floors.” I said, “Alright, honey, whatever you want. Where should I get started?” She says, “Room 33.”
yeah but all dogs are cool and so is vewatkin and that’s the end of the story
like that rabbit who keeps stealing my cereal
that’s what I call some “hare”-raising information