Labyrinths from the Outside In: Walking to Spiritual Insight—A Beginner's Guide

By Rev. Dr. Donna Schaper and Rev. Dr. Carole Ann Camp

The user-friendly, interfaith guide to making and using labyrinths—for meditation, prayer and celebration—updated, revised and expanded!

A labyrinth is a circuitous path that people have used as a form of prayer and meditation for thousands of years—a path that is being rediscovered as a spiritual tool in our own day. There are now thousands of labyrinths in North America, made of stone, cement, sunflowers, grass or canvas; indoors and outdoors; in Christian, Pagan and even nonreligious settings; and adaptable for use by people of all spiritual backgrounds. This guide explains how the labyrinth is a symbol that transcends traditions, and how walking its path brings us together.

Here is your entry to the fascinating history and philosophy of the labyrinth walk, with directions for making a labyrinth of your own or finding one in your area, and guidance on ways to use labyrinths creatively for:

Prayer • Stress reduction • Meditation • Commemorating personal or
family milestones • Faith rituals • Celebrations of all kinds

Labyrinths—a twenty-first century method of approaching the sacred—are a spiritual practice more ancient than Stonehenge or the ruins of Troy. This practical and inspiring guide will help you to explore them.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Turner Publishing Company
• Release date: Nov 17, 2000
• ISBN: 9781594734885

Rev. Dr. Donna Schaper

Rev. Donna Schaper is widely recognized as one of the most outstanding communicators in her generation of Protestant clergy. A minister of the United Church of Christ, she is author of several books, including Alone, but Not Lonely.

Book preview

Introduction

Labyrinths from the Outside In

LABYRINTHS are springing up everywhere these days, in likely places such as gardens and parks and in unlikely places such as the middle of a New York City street, a nursing home, and a veterans’ hospital. Their circularity challenges the millennial anxiety about where we are heading. Today’s spiritual seekers want something for the new age that is both ancient and substantial, not just New Age. The labyrinth appeals to seekers of every faith and seekers with no or very little faith background. The labyrinth has been used for centuries as a pilgrimage, a way back home. When Christian pilgrims could not get to Jerusalem, they walked the labyrinth. If we cannot solve today’s problems, at least we can walk in a way and with a posture that says we are not mired in the problems. We still hope for ways out. The ways out are less antiknot than they are knotted. We learn that inside the labyrinth. There, we do not deny complexity; rather, we walk it. Knots and webs and conundrums are the message of the labyrinth. We love them as they are, and we love them for what they represent. We are free to be with them; they pattern our lives toward home.

People often confuse labyrinths with mazes. In some ways, labyrinths are like mazes, but a labyrinth is more than a maze. In a labyrinth you are never lost, you are always on the path leading into or back out of the center. One finds the center if one walks the path. A labyrinth is like a maze with a certain answer. It is maze-plus—once you know the labyrinth, you know there is a way into the center. Mazes remain puzzles because they can perplex permanently. Labyrinths are designed with the eventual solution fully on display: if we but walk the path, we get home.

A BIT OF HISTORY

The labyrinth’s origins as a spiritual homing device are lost in prehistory. Scholars offer contradictory evidence. But regardless, it is a fact that people from both ancient and modern cultures around the world and throughout time have looked to the labyrinth as an archetypal symbol of journey and spiritual renewal.

Some archaeologists and historians believe that the first labyrinths were in Egypt and Ertruria (now central Italy) around 4500 BCE. There is evidence that they were built at entrances of tombs to keep them inviolate. Evil spirits apparently did not like the planned order of the labyrinthian pattern. Nothing survives of these early labyrinths. The archaeologist Marija Gimbutas found a meandering labyrinthian pattern on a figurine from the Ukraine dated at 15,000 to 18,000 BCE and concluded that the labyrinth-like pattern may have predated the labyrinth itself.

Many of the buildings called labyrinths in antiquity consisted of subterranean passages with many rooms. About 2000 BCE, a building in northern Egypt, just east of the Lake of Moeris, was said to be a labyrinth. Herodotus (484–425 BCE), the first Greek historian of the ancient world and author of The History of the Greco- Persian War, visited this building and writes about it as a grave guarder. Although Herodotus refers to this building as a labyrinth, it is not like our present-day labyrinths. Herodotus reports that the Egyptian labyrinth had three thousand chambers and twelve courts. Imagining how something this big could be labyrinthian in shape is something we have to do without benefit of photographs or other pictures.

The origin of the word labyrinth is not universally agreed upon either. Some think that the word comes from labrys, the sacred double-headed ax associated with the Minoan palace of Knossos on the eastern Mediterranean island of Crete. The legend says that King Minos had Daedalus build a labyrinth, a house of winding passages, to house the bull-man, the Minotaur, the beast that his queen, Pasiphae, bore after having intercourse with a bull. (Hybrid animalhuman creatures are often associated with the early labyrinth.) Minos had refused to sacrifice a bull to Poseidon as he had promised, so Poseidon took revenge by causing the queen to desire the bull. Minos then required tribute from Athens in the form of young men and women to be sacrificed to the Minotaur. Theseus, an Athenian, accompanied one of these groups of victims to the court of Minos, where Minos’s daughter Ariadne fell in love with him. She gave him one end of a long thread to take with him into the labyrinth so that he was able to kill the Minotaur and then find his way out again. This Cretan labyrinth was actually a maze rather than what we now call a labyrinth. Some scholars contend that this labyrinth of Crete and King Minos existed only in myth. Whether real or fictitious, this legend has come to symbolize a death and rebirth ritual, a kind of heroic or initiatory rite.

In other parts of the world, there is evidence of people’s connectedness to labyrinths, or at least to labyrinthian designs. The Nazcan civilization of about 500 BCE in southwestern Peru constructed a number of labyrinth-like figures on the Pampa Ingenio, an extremely dry, flat desert. Some of these figures of spiders and spirals range in size from 46 meters to more than 285 meters. Colorful pottery found in the area and attributed to the Nazcan civilization often depicts labyrinths. The Hopi Indians of North America used a symbol known today as the seven-path labyrinth. There is also evidence of crude stone labyrinths on the coasts of the Baltic and White Seas, designed and built by early Lapps.

It is believed that fishermen in Sweden, Finland, and Estonia built labyrinths and walked them before going out to sea to ensure a good wind and a good catch. The fishermen would walk into the labyrinth slowly, presumably with trolls, who represented illfated intentions, following them. Then they would run out of the labyrinths quickly and jump in their boats, leaving the slowthinking trolls behind stuck in the labyrinth.

During the early Middle Ages, European writers romanticized the story of the Trojan War, reworking the epic in their own medieval style. During this same period, many towns in northern Europe created labyrinths of various shapes, sizes, and styles in their towns. The builders of these labyrinths named them after the events in Troy. The reasoning behind their choice is something of a mystery, but the evidence is striking. In England, for example, there were labyrinths called Troy-towns, Walls of Troy, Caerdronia (a Welsh word meaning Troy), and Troja, Trojborg, or Troborg in Sweden.

Many of the Christian labyrinths appear relatively late in history, also around the twelfth century, although the first known labyrinth in a Christian church may be in the Church of Reparatus, Algeria, around the fourth century. When Christians could no longer make physical pilgrimages to their spiritual home in Jerusalem, they walked a symbolic pilgrimage on a labyrinth built into the floor of the nave of a cathedral. They turned a physical journey into a spiritual journey. If they could not get to Jerusalem, they made believe they were walking to Jerusalem on the labyrinth. Going into the labyrinth also symbolized a trip to the underworld, and the trip out was a resurrection; heaven and hell are both invoked in its pattern. Many of the churches containing labyrinths in France and Italy built during the early Middle Ages have been destroyed, although some have survived. The labyrinth in the cathedral in Rheims, France, built in 1240, was made of blue stones. The children walking the stone path made so much noise that the labyrinth was ordered destroyed in 1779. The cathedral in Amiens, France, which also contained a labyrinth, was built in 1288 and destroyed in 1825.

Plan of the turf labyrinth called Troytown, Somerton, Oxfordshire, England.

Labyrinth of the Church of Reparatus, Orleansville, Algeria, circa fourth century.

One of the most famous Christian labyrinths, and one that has survived intact, is found on the floor of the Chartres cathedral in France. The paving stones that make up the illustrious labyrinth trace a pattern that spans the entire width of the nave. Those who know of its existence and its history can find it hidden under the wooden chairs that litter it. The circle on the floor repeats the pattern of the stained-glass circle of the western rose window. This sort of architectural analogy of the medieval builders was essential to the thinking of the mathematicians and mystics who made up the school of Chartres. In the view of these Platonic philosophers, whatever existed on Earth could be only a dim reflection of a higher reality that existed on another plane, but the reflection had to remain true to the original in number and proportion. People were going to a real city called Jerusalem, in a faux pilgrimage, but they were also imitating a journey, which was understood as eternal and celestial.

Almost any labyrinth, like the one at Chartres, takes on the burden of representing other labyrinths while making its own particular spiritual statement. For example, from early on Christians thought the labyrinth to represent the soul’s journey to Christ. The whole cathedral at Chartres is a hymn of praise to the Christ. The rose window, its jewel, symbolizes heaven, with Christ at its center surrounded by four rings with twelve circles in each. Twelve is the number of the apostles. When this heavenly rose, which is composed of nothing but colored light, casts its image down to Earth, it is transformed into a maze, a place of confusion and suffering for a pilgrim.

Labyrinth of Amiens Cathedral, France.

Labyrinth of Chartres Cathedral, France.

In many of the medieval church labyrinth patterns, there is a curious juxtaposition of Christian and non-Christian symbolism. In the church of San Savino at Piacenza, Italy (c. 903), for example, the twelve signs of the zodiac encircle the labyrinth. The central stone at the Chartres labyrinth used to bear the following legend: This stone represents the Cretan’s labyrinth. Those who enter cannot leave unless they be helped, like Theseus, by Ariadne’s thread.

Christian penitents wound their way on their knees to the center of the labyrinth and out again. The center was variously known as Jerusalem or heaven. At Chartres, there is a unique mix of maze and labyrinth, confusion and centeredness, Christian and pre- Christian. In the cruciform cathedrals of Chartres, Amiens, and Rheims, the labyrinth is in the same place, in the nave. If one sees the design of the building as representing the figure of Christ on the cross, this would put the labyrinth approximately at his knees.

Mystic connections surround the number 666: the Chartres cathedral used Aphrodite’s six-lobe symbol in its center, mimicking the number of the beast in Revelation 13:18. These medieval Christians were borrowing from the Greeks, who might have borrowed from the Egyptians. No one can claim to know, but we can at least walk the labyrinth back to what might have been the beginning. We can imagine what might be way back there.

Not all labyrinths are the same, as though issued from some central certifying office. They take many shapes and forms. They are as different as cultures and as wide ranging as the early artists who drew them from some place inside themselves and their picture of the world. The classic seven-circuit labyrinth, for example, has been richly modified by many ancient cultures.

Early labyrinths are found not only in church naves and palace gardens but in many ordinary towns as well. The town of Saffron Walden, England, had a labyrinth with a single brick path that first appears in records of 1699, according to the accounts of the Guild of the Holy Trinity, who paid 15 shillings for cutting the maze. The Saffron Walden labyrinth resembles the shape of the labyrinth at Rheims Cathedral. Other labyrinths in England, many made of turf, encompassed a variety of shapes and sizes.

Different times and different cultures have attributed and continue to attribute a variety of metaphorical meanings to the labyrinth. In ancient Irish and English legends, fairies danced on labyrinth spirals in the moonlight. In Norwegian and Swedish folktales, ice giants created stone labyrinths. In other legends, labyrinths mark the entrance and doorways to underground palaces.

An idea that spirals in and out of many local legends is that labyrinths represent uterine energy. This comes from the fact that ancients thought that the intestine was the uterus, or womb.

In Kundalini yoga, the body is sometimes moved in a pattern that can be seen to imitate the labyrinth in miniature fashion. This movement meditation, called yantra, was used as a meditation by Hindu midwives to assist in childbirth and as a means of relaxation for the birth canal—again, improperly imaged as intestinal. The postures are called gateways and remind us of the way that many ancient peoples used

Reviews for Labyrinths from the Outside In

[melannen_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

The first few chapters of this book actually have some interesting stuff about the history of labyrinths and how labryrinths are used, both in the modern day and in the past, as to the layouts of historic labyrinths and some of the appendices. Then it descends into new-age self-help woo-woo stuff about 'finding your own spiritual meaning' and some suggested labyrinth rituals which are described with no discussion of how they fit into any context or have any meaning beyond "I thought of this with my head."So if you like self-actualization with a thin veneer of traditional spirituality, you might like this book.