On a chalk down beneath an iron-age hillfort and a grove of beech trees near my home in Hampshire in the south of England, a labyrinth has been cut into the turf. It looks almost like a tinted engraving. The short-cropped grass pillows up around the narrow pathways as if they had been pressed into something soft, and in the right light the milky soil shines through.
On the morning of my wedding, I walked the folded path to its centre. I say ‘walked’, but I was in a bit of a rush so it was more a trot – but I wanted to finish the thing, so I traced the path back out again. I could never have gotten myself lost. In the Mizmaze there is one entrance and one exit, and one route between them: by one definition this makes it a unicursal ‘labyrinth’ rather than a multicursal ‘maze’, which presents choices between alternative paths.
After performing my private little ritual, I continued on down the hill to the registery office in town, where I got married. Why had I felt the need to go labyrinth-walking? I am not prone to this sort of behaviour. I feel skeptical about confabulated New Age rites. And yet something about the Mizmaze drew me to it that morning. I wanted to understand what that thing was – to discover what, in human history and psychology, mazes and labyrinths are for.
More here-
https://aeon.co/essays/how-walking-a-labyrinth-can-trace-a-route-to-self-knowledge
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