Labyrinth

The Chartres labyrinth

The labyrinth in the nave of Chartres Cathedral is 12.89 metres across, its path 0.34 metres wide and about 261.5 metres long, according to the cathedral. It has eleven circuits, arranged so that a cross shows through the turns, 113 teeth round its rim and a six-lobed rose at the centre. Until 1792 a copper plate was riveted at the centre; around 1655, Fresson records, Challine saw on it the fight of Theseus and the Minotaur. Its entrance faces west, as every church labyrinth’s does. Fresson reads that as deliberate: the west is the side of death and the setting sun, Christ returns from the east, and the Middle Ages knew the labyrinth as a picture of the soul lost in sin. Since 1995 it has been possible to walk it again every Friday from Lent to All Saints’ Day.

Did people walk it instead of going to Jerusalem?

There is no evidence that they did. The story that pilgrims walked or knelt their way round the church labyrinths in place of a journey to Jerusalem, and that the pattern was called the chemin de Jérusalem, is told in many books. Matthews was already doubtful in 1922: the claim had been made “on what evidence is not clear”, and seemed to rest on a statement by J. B. F. Géruzez in 1817 that quoted no authority. Fresson finds no archive document that uses the name chemin de Jérusalem before the eighteenth century, and dates the first proven uses to 1856; older documents simply say labyrinthe or dédale. He cites Hermann Kern, the historian of labyrinths, who took the Jerusalem story for a romantic nineteenth-century reconstruction. What the archives do record is a dance. An ordinance of the chapter of Auxerre in 1396 describes the dean and canons on Easter Monday dancing round the labyrinth with a ball, in a three-step dance, to the Easter sequence Victimae paschali laudes. At Chartres an ordinance of 1366 kept the Chorea, the Easter dance-song, and in 1452 the chapter forbade dancing at Easter in the nave or choir.

Labyrinths in turf and stone

England has about thirty turf labyrinths, cut in the grass and mostly medieval, Fresson writes; several follow the Chartres design, and the one at Alkborough in Lincolnshire may go back to Benedictine monks around 1200. Scandinavia has far more, laid out in stones on the ground: some 340 in Sweden, 140 in Finland, 60 on the Baltic coasts and 20 in Norway, dated from about 1250 to 1650 and all of the Cretan type. They were used for group dances.

The Man in the Maze

The O’odham design called in English the Man in the Maze is a human figure and a winding path. The O’odham sources that describe it say its meaning is not fixed. Gila River Health Care, explaining why the design sits at the centre of the Gila River Indian Community’s ambulance emblem, writes that “there is no known precise meaning of the image”, that interpretations vary from family to family, and that “the symbolism is a guarded tenet of sacred belief”. What follows is only what O’odham communities and writers have published themselves.

In these accounts the figure is Elder Brother. The Akimel O’odham of the Gila River Indian Community call the Man in the Maze “the Se:he or the Elder Brother, the Creator”, Gila River Health Care says, and it writes of “Elder Brother I’itoi”. The University of New Mexico Press, describing The Maze of History (2026) by David Martínez, an Akimel O’odham historian at Arizona State University, says that in O’odham oral tradition the maze is the home of I’itoi, “our elder brother”, who taught the ancestral O’odham their himdag, their way of doing things, and that his home is in the mountains wherever O’odham live: South Mountain, Baboquivari or the Sierra Pinacate. The Tohono O’odham Nation’s Great Seal shows Baboquivari Peak, which the Nation calls the home of I’itoi; its cultural centre, Himdag Ki, writes that Tohono O’odham origin stories tell them they were created by Elder Brother.

The Great Seal of the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community is the maze, which the Community calls “an ancient pattern of the Southern Arizona tribes” and the house of Se-eh-ha, Elder Brother. In the Community’s words the maze “depicts experiences and choices we make in our journey through life”, the search for balance in body, society, mind and spirit, with a person’s dreams and goals at the centre, where the Sun God greets them and passes them into the next world. The Community also gives the story as Dorothy Lewis told it: Elder Brother, who could heal people and disappear, had many enemies and made the maze so that people who went in to find him would lose their way and turn back. Gila River Health Care gives a reading of its own: the path runs from birth to old age, its four major turns are the four directions, and the centre is death, which is the start of a new journey.

The oldest known basket with the design is a little over a century old. The Arizona State Museum’s earliest known example with the Man in the Maze is an Akimel O’odham plaque made around 1900 to 1915; the museum says the figure is usually identified as I’itoi and that O’odham describe the maze in a number of ways, most often as the path through life. Martínez has spoken on how the symbol of Elder Brother’s home, I’itoi kih, began to appear in O’odham baskets. The Tohono O’odham weaver Terrol Dew Johnson learned the design from Margaret Acosta, who was known for her maze baskets, the museum records.