Minotaur, Cathedral, and Modern Revival

Greek myth attached the labyrinth to Crete, Daedalus built it to hold the Minotaur, and Theseus threaded it with Ariadne's clew of thread, though the myth describes a branching prison-maze while the emblem drawn to illustrate it is the unicursal labyrinth, a mismatch that is itself old and unresolved. In medieval Christianity the labyrinth was set into cathedral floors, most famously the eleven-circuit pavement laid at Chartres around 1200, roughly twelve metres across and centred on a six-lobed rosette; it owes its survival to the hardness of its stone and to a shortage of restoration funds in the 1820s that spared it the demolition inflicted on comparable pavements at Reims, Amiens and Sens. Such floors came to be understood as figures of pilgrimage and of the soul's journey to God, though medieval sources say very little about how they were actually used, and the popular account of them as substitute pilgrimages walked on the knees is inference rather than record.

The labyrinth was largely dormant for centuries before a marked revival beginning in 1991, when the Episcopal priest Lauren Artress travelled to Chartres, had the cathedral's usual seating cleared so she could walk the pavement, and returned to introduce a canvas replica at Grace Cathedral in San Francisco; her nonprofit Veriditas, founded in 1996, has since helped install thousands of labyrinths in churches, hospitals and gardens worldwide as a tool for walking meditation, a genuine and now widespread practice but a late-twentieth-century recovery rather than an unbroken tradition.