Exploring the Labyrinth_ A Guide for Healing and Spiritual Growth - Melissa Gayle West [15]
These same themes are important to today’s walkers. Understanding them gives us a better sense of how to use the labyrinth in our own times for spiritual and transformational work.
DEATH AND REBIRTH
Labyrinths have been connected with funerary rites for thousands of years. These ancient funerals were different from ours, not only grieving the passing of the deceased but preparing their spirit for rebirth as well. The labyrinth’s winding journey to center and back out again served as a map for this transition from life to death to rebirth.
The tomb in Sardinia is only one such example. Burial sites with stone labyrinths have also been found all along the Scandinavian coast, dating back to the Iron Age. Historians speculate that in the Chartres Cathedral labyrinth in France, choral dances may have been performed, and symbolic games played, that celebrated Christ’s death and resurrection at Easter.
INITIATION
Cretan coins from A.D. 500 show many variants of the seven-circuit classical labyrinth (now sometimes called the Cretan labyrinth). The designs are thought to refer to the legendary labyrinth at Knossos, where Theseus killed the Minotaur imprisoned at the center.
This powerful myth has captured the imagination of storytellers and artists for centuries. A classic heroic initiation—in which a hero faces mortal challenges and emerges victorious—the myth has been retold as a story about the journey we must all make into our own shadows, in order to move back out into the world as fuller human beings.
Petroglyphs at Val Camonica in northern Italy dating from 1500 B.C., represent several labyrinths. The first has a haunting face composed of only staring eyes in the center. The second petroglyph shows an initiate fighting this face representing initiation, or death and rebirth, at the center of the labyrinth. Petroglyphs from southern India, dating as far back as 1000 B.C., tell the story of death, rebirth, and initiation, with warriors fighting around the labyrinth and being sacrificed in its center.
FERTILITY
As labyrinths were used to signify literal and symbolic death, so they were used to symbolize and celebrate birth and fertility. This celebration of new life, of fertility, stemmed from ancient myths, similar to the Greek myth of Demeter and Persephone, in which a goddess was temporarily released from the underworld to bring spring and fertility to the earth.
Ceremonies, fertility rites, and games, often tied in to seasonal events such as solstices and equinoxes, were celebrated in Scandinavian stone labyrinths. These events celebrated the return of sun, warmth, and fertility to a frozen earth, metaphorically symbolizing the resurgence of new life we all experience after challenging times. One popular game placed a maiden in the center of the labyrinth, with youths racing, or dancing in to “win” her. In fact, some labyrinths in Finland were known as virgin dances.
These seasonal fertility ceremonies and games, it is conjectured, were also carried out in the turf mazes of Europe. As late as the eighteenth century, young men in England would challenge one another to a race through the maze to win the young woman at the center.
THE SPIRITUAL JOURNEY
After the Crusades, when the pilgrimage to Jerusalem became more difficult and too dangerous, Christian pilgrims could journey to designated cathedrals and walk the labyrinth there as the final metaphorical stage of their pilgrimage to the holy city. The labyrinths were often known as the Road to Jerusalem, and the center of the labyrinth was called Jerusalem. In a bigger sense, the labyrinth walk was understood as being analogous to the earthly journey through life to heaven; the center was often called ciel, the French word for heaven.
The Pima culture of the American Southwest weaves the labyrinth, known as Siuku Ki, into their baskets. The design symbolizes for them the pathway leading to the top of Baboquiviri,