There I sat in a conference room full of strangers with tears streaming down my face. It was mid-November of 2016, and a morning session of the Annual Gathering of The Labyrinth Society, “Steps Toward the ‘Other’ and Common Ground—The Labyrinth’s Role in Building Beloved Community,” was concluding with an opportunity to walk a labyrinth outlined in blue painter’s tape on the floor of this St. Paul’s United Methodist Church meeting hall in Houston, Texas. One of the conference organizers was gently and almost playfully pushing a wheelchair-bound conference attendee around the labyrinth. The simple act of human kindness prompted my tears to flow unexpectedly. But the welling up drew from other pools of emotion too, which probably included a mixture of grief for my recently deceased mother, from whom I learned simple (and complex) acts of human kindness; exhaustion from my quickly planned trip to Houston (made more interesting by my cell phone dying the night before my flight); and, well, stress over the state of the world and everything in it. A certain sadistic demagogue had been declared winner of the presidential election earlier that week, and for most of the people at this conference there was a collective sense of doom and horror at what was happening to our nation. Other labyrinth devotees shed tears about the election that weekend too. I would leave the conference a bit early to make it back to Asheville for a Bob Dylan concert, where the well-traveled bard’s opening number was “Things Have Changed.”
Labyrinths have an energy and a power and a magnetism all their own. Tangible proof is the revival of interest in the ancient symbol in recent decades that has prompted the installation of walking labyrinths at schools and universities, cathedrals and church grounds, public parks and private gardens, hospitals and prisons. There are online handheld labyrinth “walks” and meditations. There’s an annual World Labyrinth Day. Peace activists use labyrinths for communal reflection and channeling of energies. All of this labyrinth activity and interest has coincided with a growth industry of labyrinth scholarship and research, for example, on the psychological and physiological effects of walking labyrinths (a balancing of left and right hemispheres of the brain?). Interested in spreading the word? You can become a licensed labyrinth facilitator. Cynical about some of the cultish or new age tendencies of the labyrinth people? Hold on to your reason and skepticism, just walk the labyrinth with an open mind and see what happens. Maybe nothing, maybe something. Maybe something powerful. But the labyrinth appeal and mystique is undeniable.
One reason I made the labyrinth pilgrimage to the Houston conference, which highlighted the brilliant work of an innovative secondary school teacher named Reginald Adams, was academic. I wanted to reflect on incorporating the labyrinth into my Ancient Studies and American Studies classes at Asheville School, the North Carolina prep school where I taught through the early 2000s. A school alum, Billy Holliday, had donated funds for the creation of an outdoor learning site that included a Universe Story spiral with informative panels (inspired by the work of Thomas Berry) on a time-scaled-to-walking-space version of galactic and earth history, along with an adjacent seven-circuit classical labyrinth designed with stones outlining the grass pathways (a turf labyrinth) in a clearing next to the woods. The scholars Marnie Muller and Claire Coriell, specialists in sacred geometry, helped design the site and visited classes to introduce students and faculty to some of the meanings and history of labyrinths. It became a favorite outdoor classroom of mine in my last few years of teaching. And students seemed to like it too, or at least tolerate it—at least they got to walk outside (yay) and compose pattern poems in labyrinth shapes.
Before that school experience, I had the typical vague notions of labyrinths and could recognize the classical design and some of the symbolic meanings. But introducing students to our labyrinth walks pointed me toward the second circuit, as it were, of labyrinth knowledge. If I were to teach labyrinths, I’d better learn more about them. The next few paragraphs give a thumbnail introduction similar to what I shared with students.
Labyrinths are mazes and mazes are labyrinths. In the most broad and colloquial sense, the terms are interchangeable in referring to an intricate pathway of circuits and turns contained by a geometric shape, usually a circle, often a square, sometimes a rectangle or oval. This loose definition covers everything from corn mazes and coloring-book puzzle mazes to Roman mosaic labyrinths and the labyrinth at Chartres Cathedral. But notice how the Chartres diagram is seldom called a maze, and corn mazes are always mazes and not labyrinths. It’s corn mazes and lab rat mazes; mythological and cathedral labyrinths. Mazes are Jack Nicholson-as-Jack Torrance staggering through the snow and carrying a bloody axe; labyrinths are . . . David Bowie as the Goblin King? Or an increasing array of spiritual advisors and researchers and seekers who find spiritual solace and awakening in labyrinths and attend labyrinth conferences. Mazes are labyrinths’ evil twin. But already we see the terminological overlap and potential confusion.
As geometric figures or diagrams, then, two essential types dominate the world of labyrinths: 1) unicursal (single path) labyrinths with “a single winding path leading inevitably to the center and then back out again;” and 2) multicursal (many paths), which are maze-like, with dead ends and confusing routes (see Appendix C for images). “Many contemporary researchers now distinguish between the terms labyrinth and maze. The term labyrinth is commonly defined as a unicursal design, meaning one pathway in and the same pathway out; whereas the more generalized term maze may include designs with obstacles, blind alleys or dead ends.” But there are exceptions to this accepted usage rule, and since the ancients referred to both multicursal and unicursal patterns as labyrinths, why can’t we? The ancients who riffed on the Cretan labyrinth story used the term to refer to a confusing maze-like structure, designed by the don of architects, Daedalus. It would have to be a multi-path maze; otherwise, why would Theseus need a thread to make his way back out? But the ancients also made images of unicursal, single-path labyrinths on coins, walls, and other surfaces. So they meant that to be a labyrinth-maze as well. It’s as if the design of the classical seven-circuit labyrinth, which scholars call the Cretan type, also contains within it the confusion of multi-path mazes. It’s easy to call a maze a labyrinth and a labyrinth a maze. The headache has begun.
Putting aside terminological tensions (labyrinth or maze, unicursal or multicursal) for a moment, we can follow the logic of the path. The archetypal labyrinth pattern has identifiable characteristics, which include an opening or entrance, one pathway that winds back and forth and eventually arrives at a center, and the same pathway providing the exit from the center back to the entrance. Hermann Kern describes the form of this geometric, “linear figure”:
Its round or rectangular shape makes sense only when viewed from above, like the ground plan of a building. Seen as such, the lines appear as delineating walls and the space between them as a path, the legendary ‘thread of Ariadne.’ The walls themselves are unimportant. Their sole function is to mark a path, to define choreographically, as it were, the fixed pattern of movement. The path begins at a small opening in the perimeter and leads to the center by wending its way in circuitous fashion across the entire labyrinth . . .
The circuits of this “unicursal” pattern have distinct qualities, as Kern delineates. Applying numbers to the circuits of the classical Cretan-style labyrinth (with circuits numbered from left to right: 3 2 1 4 7 6 5 center 5 6 7 4 1 2 3), Kern analyzes how the different circuits traverse the quadrants, how some move centrifugally, how the circuits move to “the rhythm of systole and diastole,” and how breathing inhalations and exhalations, and chest expansions, fit as a metaphor for the winding of the circuits past the center. Dance choreography is another metaphor he uses (possibly moving beyond metaphor to ancient use of the labyrinth as a dance floor or pattern of dance movements). Inhaling, exhaling. And pendulum swings. Even the most scientific-seeming, analytical approach almost immediately crosses over into symbolism and figurative language. As if the labyrinth wants to embrace every possible pathway to meaning.
The precise defining of the Cretan labyrinth by Kern is a starting point and gives us some needed orientation. Another worthwhile approach to the labyrinth vs. maze distinction is from Emily Simpson, a labyrinth facilitator who spearheaded a $500,000 campaign to build a public labyrinth in Sydney, Australia. Reflecting on the uses of the labyrinth for healing during the pandemic, she wrote:
As an archetype the labyrinth has no opposite, but its shadow is the maze (ultimately just a complicated labyrinth). The labyrinth welcomes and soothes with the ease of its step by step journey, whereas the walls and dead ends of the maze are designed to frustrate and confuse . . . The maze is a game with more barriers than freedoms, whose primary goal is power and control . . . The labyrinth is a game with more freedoms than barriers, whose primary goal is flow and acceptance.
As a symbol, the labyrinth is amoeba-like, greedy and expansive. Is it the durable plastic of symbols, all-inclusive, capable of holding and conveying anything and everything? Probably not. But, as labyrinth scholar Penelope Reed Doob has identified, some of the symbolic meanings and connotations of the labyrinth include: chaos/order; prison, entrapment; confusion, frustration, difficulty; pilgrimage; a journey requiring a guide; a habitat for monsters; death, devil, sin, hell; endurance, persistence; the winding road; a metaphor for learning; a “voyage from confusion to clarity.” It is therefore a prime symbolic go-to for novelists, poets, screenwriters, composers, and other creatives.
The complicated cousins of the circle, square, and spiral, labyrinths are visual hallucinogens, dazzling the eye with their synergistic back-and-forth pathways. Like spider webs and concentric circles, they entice and ensnare the eye and the imagination. But those geometrical relatives of the labyrinth lack the unique, winding back-and-forth pathway that defines the labs. Humans are a back-and-forth species, an on-the-one-hand, on-the-other-hand oscillating animal a la Fiddler on the Roof’s Tevye. Ambivalence is a distinguishing trait of homo labyrinthicus. As is being ambulatory.
Anatomically, we might have labyrinths in our DNA. Textbook lateral-view diagrams of a brain look strikingly labyrinthine. Our ears contain little labyrinths of bones and membranous tissue. Our fingerprints trace tiny labyrinthine pathways. Our intestines have labyrinthine paths and turnbacks. An intestine-faced monster named Humbaba protects the cedar forest, a kind of labyrinth itself, in the Gilgamesh epic.
Does the anatomical connection account for possible origin? Why did the labyrinth pattern emerge around the world thousands of years ago, seemingly sprouting up spontaneously and cross-culturally like mushrooms? Did a Paleolithic Picasso see a friend get his head smashed by a rock in some violent encounter exposing the brain, then carve a round labyrinth shape into a rock or paint it on a cave wall? Did some Muse or god talk to an “early human” in a dream or vision and deliver the labyrinth archetype? Did the spiral Milky Way miniaturize itself into human consciousness and morph into a first labyrinth after three days of dancing and chanting and calling forth the ancestors, to the rhythms of bone percussion and goatskin drums? Was a labyrinth the token image of a meandering-river-worshipping tribe, one envied and emulated by others? Labyrinth etiology will remain obscure pending some remarkable archeological or anthropological discovery. But the spread and ubiquity of labyrinths, from the human body and rock art to the Chartres Cathedral, from Crete to California, from hand-size plastic or wooden labyrinths designed for meditation to giant turf and hedge mazes designed for walking, impresses.
The next NASA Mars probe or Starship Enterprise crew will likely find a labyrinth on the surface of the far planet, a maze in space. This discovery will be more significant than finding water, because it will confirm that Earth-labyrinth-lings are not the only confused symbol-mongers in the universe.
Labyrinths do not mean anything and everything, of course. But they possess and convey so many meanings—the spectrum ranges from confusion, terror, and fear on one end to self-awareness and healing on the other—and they have been attributed with so many interpretations that it is tempting to crown them as symbolic royalty, king and queen of all symbols. Labyrinths overflow (overwind? overtwist and overturn?) with ideas and significances, and present symbologists simultaneously with a goldmine and a snare—the meanings can unlock mysteries; the profusion of meanings can lead to hyperbolic claims and interpretive dead-ends. Are labyrinths the be-all and end-all signifier offering a key to the mysteries of life? Or are they a symbolic prison, at the center of which awaits a devouring monster who will rip the flesh of scholarly theories? Or are they both this and that and also the other?
Labyrinths are a game, a dance, a puzzle to be solved.
When I set out to go beyond the surface, I discovered a library of labyrinthia. Hermann Kern had done the herculean task of cataloging 5,000 years of labyrinth images and putting them into some kind of understandable interpretive framework. Lauren Artress, Robert Ferré, Lars Howlett and others had resurrected and revived the spiritual labyrinth, harking back to Chartres and other cathedrals. Jeff Saward had built upon Kern and put together impressive and exhaustive catalogs of labyrinth meanings and images, as well as editing, with Kimberly Saward, a long-running journal, Caerdroia, that continues to publish annually. Craig Wright had delved into similar material, tracing the labyrinth in medieval and classical music, and the warrior image in the Christian reworking of the classical labyrinth. W.H. Matthews, Helmut Jaskolski, Penelope Reed Doob, and Harold Bloom had published scholarly books exploring literary and other meanings of labyrinth symbolism. A maze of writers—Jorge Luis Borges, André Gide, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Kate Mosse—had used labyrinths for narrative springboards into fictive works of great imagination. What’s left? Why add to the pile of mostly obscure and often unreadable non-fiction books? Why not let the amazing works of literature represent the world of labyrinths and move on with my life?
One possible answer is that none of those scholarly books mentioned above consider labyrinths in the context of popular culture. While I learned to think seriously about such topics in college and grad school, and while I later found employment in an academy, thanks to the transformative effects of higher education, I’m also a child of the ‘60s and ‘70s and a student of Beatlemania, Star Wars, Mad magazine, and pinball machines. Maze puzzles in the Sunday paper (more fun in the print edition than electronic edition) were as likely to catch my eye as a title by Harold Bloom, probably more so. So it took little mental convincing to follow pop culture labyrinths and adding those works to the “high” or academic culture labyrinths I had been studying for years. And there is some overlap: John Comenius’s 17th century allegory, for instance, might have been “pop” had there been such a category then.
Before I found this angle and approach for the writing, however, I made one last attempt to fathom a scholarly title in my expanding labyrinth library: Patrick Conty’s The Genesis and the Geometry of the Labyrinth. To borrow an idea from his book, without knowing how this knot was tied, it was impossible to untie (to comprehend). Not since trying to read Kant in graduate school have I struggled so mightily—and unsuccessfully—with a text. My brain quickly tied up in knots when reading Conty, who asserts that knots and topology are keys to understanding labyrinths, and who “maps” the tying of knots to prove his thesis. Not having learned the ropes as a kid (boy, I wish I had been a scout!), and as someone whose shoes still come untied even after double-tying them, I humbly ceded knot theory and understanding to Conty in hope that someday, miraculously, my geometric and symbolic understanding would evolve to the point of being able to read and understand his book, translated from the French. (Interesting that Kern and his translators give short shrift to Conty too . . . they’re knot having it. Editor Robert Ferré writes, “Patrick Conty devotes many pages to describing the geometry of knots, which, lacking a single path and a defined center, are not labyrinths.”) Like Kern and Ferré, however, Conty is a stickler for definition. Labyrinths are not mazes, he insists.
Like most labyrinth writers, Conty feels obligated to retell the Cretan legend early in his book, and his summary is as good as any:
The story of how Ariadne fell in love with the brave and daring Theseus is well known. Betraying her father, King Minos, and her half brother, the Minotaur, Ariadne gave Theseus a ball of thread that unwound before him, showing him the way through the labyrinth built by Daedalus to imprison the Minotaur. Thus equipped, Theseus escaped from the inextricable labyrinth, and after having killed the Minotaur and liberated his companions, he set sail for Athens with Ariadne, whom, for reasons that remain obscure, he abandoned along the way on the island of Naxos.
Notice how this take foregrounds Ariadne and the thread. It might have started with Daedalus, or Pasiphae, or Minos, or Theseus . . . but the knot theorist centers the story’s ball of thread and the character most associated with it.
It makes sense, then, to end this beginning with confusion and the knots we don’t yet understand. And to ask for Ariadne’s help as we proceed.