• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

The spiral is literally encoded into the universe; it is a map for the growth and transformational processes of life itself. The world around us spirals in the scalar patterns of a pinecone, the glistening chambers of a nautilus shell, the vortex of water spinning down a drain. Our own bodies spiral: Trace the whorl of hair at the crown of your head, the point of contact with the divine in spiritual traditions the world over. We carry spirals from the winding code of our DNA to the cochlea of our inner ear to the whorls on our fingertips, those spirals whose imprints are uniquely our own.

Spirals—inscribed in stone the world over since Megalithic times—serve as threshold markers at holy sites in China, Egypt, Siberia, Europe, Mexico. These graven spirals delineate the boundary between secular and sacred in temples and burial sites, marking a person’s passage from—or death to—the everyday world and rebirth into the realm of the sacred by entering hallowed ground. Humankind invokes Spirit by moving in spirals. Sufi Dervishes whirl in ecstatic dance, spiraling the universe into being. Half a world away, young women of the South African Bavenda tribe perform the Python dance, spiraling around the old women of their tribe to invoke fertility and cosmic harmony.

According to psychoanalyst Carl Jung in Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, the process of healing and individuation most resembles the dynamic of a spiral: “We can hardly help feeling that the unconscious moves spiralwise around a center gradually getting closer, while the characteristics of the center grow more and more distinct.”

SPIRAL INTO LABYRINTH

This spiraling journey to a center is the transformational movement humankind has forever traced in the labyrinth. “The spiral or labyrinth depicted in ancient tombs,” notes Jill Purce in The Mystic Spiral, “implies a death and reentry into the womb of the earth, necessary before the spirit can be reborn into the land of the dead. But death and rebirth also mean the continuous transformation and purification of the spirit throughout life.”

The earliest known labyrinth is that mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, a petroglyph on the wall of a subterranean stone burial chamber in Sardinia called Tomba del Labarinto, or Tomb of the Labyrinth. Petroglyphs and drawings of labyrinths from the second millennium B.C. have been found in India, Greece, Syria, and Italy. Roman labyrinths—nearly sixty of them—have been uncovered throughout the former Roman Empire, from Britain to Spain to Yugoslavia to North Africa.

Labyrinths appeared throughout the world in the thousand years from A.D. 500 to A.D. 1500. Great stone labyrinths were built along the Scandinavian coastline from Iceland to Russia. Labyrinths were drawn and carved into cliff dwellings and mesas in the American Southwest. Turf labyrinths—made by cutting trenches into turf for the paths, with turf ridges delineating the path—were cut into the earth in Germany, Poland, and England. Stone and tile labyrinths were set into church floors in North Africa, Italy, and France.

At the new millennium, we are in the midst of a great labyrinth renaissance. Caerdroia (a Welsh word meaning “Troy Town,” an ancient word for labyrinths) was founded in Britain in 1980 to further the study of labyrinths. An exhibit in Milan in 1981 on labyrinths as archetypal images helped move labyrinths back into public consciousness, and individuals such as Sig Lonegren, author of Labyrinths: Ancient Myths and Modern Uses, helped continue the momentum. The Reverend Dr. Lauren Artress “rediscovered” the Chartres labyrinth during a workshop she attended in 1991 and has spearheaded the international movement to promote use of that labyrinth.

LABYRINTH THEMES

The labyrinth, echoing the spiral’s transformational theme, has invited journeyers and spiritual seekers through the ages to contemplate the mysteries of life. From my study of labyrinth history, four themes in