Labyrinth

A labyrinth in the strict sense is unicursal, a single, non-branching path that winds to a centre and back, with no dead ends and no choices, which distinguishes it from a maze, multicursal and designed to confuse with forks and false turns; the two are routinely conflated in ordinary speech though the geometry is entirely different. The classical seven-circuit design is remarkably stable and remarkably old, appearing on a clay tablet from Pylos around 1200 BCE, on Cretan coins, in rock carvings and as graffiti at Pompeii, across cultures with no apparent contact with one another. The same essential pattern recurs worldwide as stone Troy Towns in Scandinavia, in the American Southwest among the Tohono O'odham as the Man in the Maze, and in South Indian kolam threshold drawings, under many names and evidently arrived at independently more than once rather than diffused from one source, a point that qualifies any claim of a single unbroken lineage stretching back to the Bronze Age.

The word itself is older than the unicursal figure it now names: Herodotus and later Greek writers used labyrinthos for a real multi-chambered building complex near Hawara in Egypt, a sprawling funerary and administrative structure of many rooms that Herodotus, who claimed to have visited it, judged more impressive than the pyramids, a building whose confusing plan, not the later garden and pavement figure, is the origin sense of the word maze-builders and mythographers alike inherited.

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.