TLC Labyrinth

A Short History of Labyrinths

Remarks by Lennijo Henderson for the Dedication of Richland College’s Teaching-Learning-Community-building Labyrinth

Walt Whitman said “all is procession; the universe is a procession with measured and beautiful motion.” And when I walk the labyrinth, I feel like part of a procession stretching far back into history, because humans in many cultures have been following the winding path to the center of the labyrinth for a long time. We don’t know why the symbol of a series of concentric lines, carefully connected, is so universal. Maybe it’s because we all have many labyrinths in our bodies. Think of your inner ear or the ten fingerprints on your hands. Whatever the reason, physical representations of this archetype go back 3500 years, and have been found all over the world.

The earliest traces of labyrinths are carved into stone, from Sardinia to Scandinavia, from Arizona to India to Africa. In Europe these spiral rock carvings date from the late Bronze Age, and the labyrinth spiral shows up on coins from Crete three centuries before Christ. In our own American southwest, the Hopi people used two square labyrinth patterns, one to represent Sun Father and one representing Earth Mother. The Pima tribe from that same area wove baskets with a circular labyrinth design that depicted their own cosmology.

Before recorded history in northern Europe, especially in Britain, labyrinths for walking were cut into the turf, usually in a circular pattern. These turf labyrinths were probably used for local fertility rites. Eleven examples of turf labyrinths survive today, including the largest one at Saffron Walden, England, which used to have a large ash tree at its very center.

Some time before the turn of the millennium in 1000 AD, the Christian church adapted the spiral labyrinth, making it less linear, with loops and turns that create the feeling of not knowing where the path goes next. They installed finger labyrinths, just like the one we have here, on church walls; and they constructed pavement labyrinths on the floors of many of the great medieval cathedrals. Six of the French cathedrals had labyrinths for walking just inside the west entrance. Some of those were octagonal and some circular. Of those six only the labyrinth at Chartres has been preserved, just as it was laid around the year 1200. Our labyrinth is based on the eleven circuit pattern of the labyrinth at Chartres.

For the medieval Christian, walking the labyrinth was probably seen as a symbolic pilgrimage to Jerusalem. It’s thought that some walked the labyrinth on their knees, as a substitute for actually participating in a Crusade. I like to think of those folks as thirteenth century peace activists.

After being out of use for a few hundred years, the labyrinth has reappeared in the last decade as a valuable tool for those seeking peace. The use of the labyrinth for meditation, for stress relief, and for celebrating the spirit has spread to many circles, including the wellness movement, and to many locations in this country and around the world. We are really privileged to have the opportunity right here on our campus to join the procession of labyrinth walkers down through history.

May we all walk in beauty.