Across America—and indeed across the world—curious designs are appearing on the landscape. The patterns have spread from back yards to churches, public parks, and even medical centers. Thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, of people have created and used the designs as meditative, spiritual, and even therapeutic tools. The pattern is the labyrinth, and though present in many places and eras, they have never been so discussed, used, and revered as at the turn of the twenty-first century. What began as a New Age fad has quickly gone mainstream, with dozens of books, magazine articles, organizations, Web sites, and seminars devoted to labyrinths.
On a physical level, a labyrinth is a single-path, maze-like pattern. Unlike a maze, however, you cannot get lost in the labyrinth; there is only one path in and out. You begin at an opening at the outside, make your way to the center (the “rosette”), and go back out. The labyrinth’s simplicity is both attractive and symbolic.
On a metaphysical level, however, the labyrinth is variously described as “a single path spiritual tool that is a right brain enhancer,” (Labyrinth Society 1999); “a lens that brings our collective unconscious into focus on a personal level while at the same time aligning us with the larger forces at work in the galaxy,” and a “sacred space, a place where you can take chaos and bring it to order” (Explorations 2000). A labyrinth is a bridge “between the ancient and the modern,” and walking one is a “simultaneous spiritual-aesthetic-political act” (Schaper and Camp 2000, 151). It is, in essence, anything the user wishes it to be.
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At first glance, labyrinth walking seems like little more than a harmless, if curious, pastime. And to some degree it is: As a skeptical investigator I enjoy labyrinths for their own sake and art, completely apart from any mystical meanings. My mother even got married in a labyrinth several years ago.
But the movement also has surprising—and disturbing—anti-science and paranormal roots. New Age feminism plays a prominent role in labyrinth literature, often denigrating “rational, male-centered thinking” in favor of feminine, “intuitive” thought.
For the woman who spawned the current movement, labyrinths are more than just an interesting design; they are a tool for reconnecting both with imagination and femininity. Walking a Sacred Path frequently portrays our modern world as too rational, unimaginative, and out of touch with wisdom, and the twelfth and thirteenth centuries as the good old days of unreason when our connection to the Earth was strong and women were valued. “The labyrinth stands with a tradition that recaptures the feminine sense of the Source. It utilizes the imagination and the pattern-discerning part of our nature.…Due to the loss of the feminine, many of us are out of touch with the depths of our beings, our Source. The feminine must be enlivened and welcomed back into our male-dominated world so integration can begin to occur—between feminine and masculine, receptive and assertive, imagination and reason.” Imagination and reason are apparently seen as mutually exclusive, with our world suffering from too much rationality and too little fantasy.
It is interesting that much of the feminist-influenced theory behind the labyrinths is rooted in Sigmund Freud, whom many believe to have been quite sexist and anti-female. It was Freud, after all, who developed the theories of penis envy (that women secretly felt inferior to men, lacking a penis) and hysteria (“wandering uterus”—that women have a condition in which unconscious emotional conflicts appear as severe mental dissociation or as physical symptoms. The underlying anxiety is assumed to have been “converted” into a physical symptom, and was considered to be a female disease brought about by movement of the uterus). One labyrinth source, www.sacredwalk.com, notes that “It is important to express these [painful] feelings so that we move through this to the next place in our lives, without taking the baggage of hurt with us.” This message, common in labyrinth literature, is Freudian through and through: our current problems won’t be resolved until we deal with their causes and begin a transition. Feminists have come full circle from deriding Freud for his antiquated and sexist notions of women to embracing Freud for his insight into resolving issues for transition.
Perhaps the most influential labyrinth book is Walking a Sacred Path by Rev. Lauren Artress, who gives seminars and talks about labyrinths. Walking a Sacred Path frequently portrays our modern world as too rational, unimaginative, and out of touch with wisdom, and the twelfth and thirteenth centuries as the good old days of unreason when our connection to the Earth was strong and women were valued. Artress goes so far as to claim that women were better off in the Middle Ages: “Both the imagination and the feminine were devalued when we moved out of the Middle Ages, and in their suppression lie the seeds of our present-day spiritual hunger” (p. 111). Artress sees the labyrinth as a tool for reconnecting both with imagination and femininity. “The labyrinth stands with a tradition that recaptures the feminine sense of the Source. It utilizes the imagination and the pattern-discerning part of our nature.…Due to the loss of the feminine, many of us are out of touch with the depths of our beings, our Source. The feminine must be enlivened and welcomed back into our male-dominated world so integration can begin to occur—between feminine and masculine, receptive and assertive, imagination and reason” (p. 14).
Artress provides no evidence that spirituality was all that great to begin with, and just assumes that our forefathers were happier, more imaginative, and more spiritually connected. This sort of false nostalgia is common in today’s New Age circles, with their emphasis on “ancient wisdom,” “lost knowledge,” etc.
Though this paradigm is appealing to many, it is also simplistic and somewhat contradictory. Barbara G. Walker, writing in the Skeptical Inquirer, cautions against taking the male/female paradigm too far: “We [feminists] are in danger of going too far into our own brand of dualism, when we label patriarchal and bad everything that is modern/scientific, while declaring matriarchal (or natural) and good everything that is primitive/magical. At the same time, we accept with off-handed ingratitude the gifts of technology that are made available to us every day: electric light, radio, television, telephones, trains, airplanes, cars, [and] computers .…Only science, with its objective, ‘linear’ approach, could have discovered bacteria, viruses, [and] antibiotics….. Almost everything that we can claim to know with any certainty about our world has been learned through science and not by subjectivity, instinct, or insight” (Walker 1993).
Artress discusses the value of imagination at length in her book (it is one of the longest sections), and it’s clear why: Imagination is very important to experiencing the powers of the labyrinth. “The labyrinth is an evocative tool. It works through the imagination and the senses…” (Artress 1995, 97). In other words, the more imagination you have the better the labyrinth will work for you.
Artress believes that the spiritual crisis that she sees in our society is partly the result of a lack of imagination. “We are beginning to realize that Western civilization—held together by rationalism, empirical research, and man’s control of nature—is coming apart.…As we in the West learned to use our rational minds, we developed a sense of superiority that denied our intuition and imagination their rightful place among the human faculties we need to survive” (Artress 1995, 106). (Non-Western cultures might find Artress’s implication that they never learned to be rational rather insulting.)
Yet this alleged cultural (and male driven?) loss of imagination is hard to find. We are surrounded by products of the imagination: hundreds of thousands of books, films, songs, plays, role-playing games, magazines, and works of art are produced each year. From Harry Potter to Law and Order, Pokémon to personal Web sites to John Grisham novels, works of imagination are everywhere in Western culture.
Other writers see labyrinths not so much as fulfilling a void of imagination as serving as a kind of user-friendly spirituality. Donna Schaper, co-author of Labyrinths from the Outside In, believes that many people are shunning the traditional, rigid rituals of religion and “widening their claim to worship in nature—hiking a mountain, for example, rather than sitting in a designated worship space” (Artress 1995, 31). In this way, labyrinths are a more accessible path to God or enlightenment. With some caveats, labyrinth walkers can take a spiritual journey on their own terms, when they wish, how they wish, and (using portable canvas labyrinths), more or less where they wish. Perhaps responding to a desire for easy spirituality, many churches have now embraced labyrinths and some even built them on their grounds.
Anti-Science
At times the anti-science and anti-rationality rhetoric surrounding labyrinths is alarming. A blurb from an organization called Mind Body Spirit in Walking a Sacred Path states, “One strong lesson of the labyrinth is the physical realization of the continuum of life.…[I]t is clear that linear, logical thinking is no longer a roadmap we can trust.” I hope this is most decidedly not the message that most labyrinth walkers take. To dismiss logic and rationality as fundamentally untrustworthy is deeply wrongheaded and dangerous.
Artress admits that “We do not really know how or why the labyrinth works” (Artress 1995, 177). This echoes the statements made by many promoters of pseudosciences: We don’t know why they work, they just do. Yet, depending on what exactly the claim is, we do in fact know why labyrinths “work.” If you believe that walking a labyrinth (or listening to trickling water or meditating in front of a candle) will calm you, then it probably will. There is nothing mystical about it; it’s simple psychology.
One woman quoted in Walking a Sacred Path went so far as to put her faith in the labyrinth because she doesn’t understand it: “It is precisely because I do not understand ‘how it works’ that I trust and honor it.” (Artress 1995, 11). In this view, the less you know about something the more faith you should put into it. One wonders if she uses the same strategy in selecting investments and trusting friends.
Labyrinth literature presents a dichotomy in which mazes represent the undesirable logical, rational side and labyrinths represent the intuitive, safe side. As Artress writes, “Mazes challenge the choice-making part of ourselves.…Our logic is challenged.” The labyrinth, on the other hand, “does not engage our thinking minds” (p. 52). Thus mazes, which force people to think logically and rationally, are rejected, and labyrinths, which are to be followed one way and without question or choice, are embraced. You don’t need to engage yourself at all to follow a labyrinth, and walking the path frees one from the burden of thinking.
It’s unfortunate that labyrinth devotees (and many New Agers in general) have embraced what is at its heart a patronizing, anti-feminist paradigm that dismisses critical thinking, science, and rationality.
References
Artress, Lauren. 1995. Walking a Sacred Path. New York: Riverhead Books.
Explorations: Visions of the past, memories of the future. 2000. Catalogue, Fall.
Labyrinth Society brochure. 1999. The Labyrinth Society Inc., New Canaan, Connecticut.
Schaper, Donna, and Carole Ann Camp. 2000. Labyrinths from the Outside In. Woodstock, Vermont: Skylight Paths Publishing.
Walker, Barbara G. 1993. Science: The feminists’ scapegoat? Skeptical Inquirer 18(1): Fall.
This piece is adapted from my article “Labyrinths: Mazes and Myths” published in Skeptical Inquirer magazine.
This reminds me of an old article by Noretta Koertge. In her article “On feminist critiques of science” she writes:
“As Daphne Patai and I interviewed faculty, students, and staff from Women’s Studies programs for our book Professing Feminism, there emerged a complex picture of what we call “negative education” – a systematic undermining of the intellectual values of liberal education.”
This article, found here http://woldww.net/classes/Principles_of_Inquiry/Noretta%20Koertge%20on%20feminist%20critiques%20of%20science.htm was written in 1995. It is sad to see this new “labyrinth” thing coming again on the spot.