the labyrinth project
by Liz Warren

Liz Warren at the Labyrinth Site
Project Background
In the summer of 1994, my husband and I were in The Gothic Image Bookstore in Glastonbury, England. There we found a wonderful book by Sig Lonegren called Labyrinths: Ancient Myths and Modern Uses. I was instantly captivated by it, and began to read it as we drove through the verdant English countryside.

I was seized by the idea of building a labyrinth. I decided it would be an excellent project for the students who would be taking my Mythology course in the spring of 1995. I had imagined our labyrinth with walls, and thought that we could use wooden stakes and butcher paper to make them cheaply. I didn't know that most labyrinths are flat, so as to better appreciate the beautiful pattern. When I presented the stake and paper idea to the students, they were unimpressed. They had envisioned their labyrinth as something larger and grander. They wanted fabric walls, which they reasoned could be used again.

So fabric it was, on a framework of pvc pipe, anchored by rebar pounded into the ground. The building process and the first labyrinth day are described in an article by Deanna Matus, who was one of the enthusiastic participants. The fabric labyrinth has been erected three times. In the subsequent years, we have also built labyrinths from sweet peas and luminarias. Our work has been featured in places such as the Arizona Republic and Phoenix Home and Garden magazine.

Why build labyrinths?
The easiest answer to this question is that we build them for the beauty of them. This was our particular motivation in building a labyrinth out of sweet peas. Beyond beauty, many modern labyrinth enthusiasts appreciate them for their ability to open us to mythological and spiritual realms of experience. By building a labyrinth, we are participating in something that has been significant to people all over the world for at least 3,000 years. Instead of just reading about mythology, we are participating in it.

We had several goals in creating these labyrinths. The first was to involve ourselves in mythology in a living way, and to create something though which we could have a direct and conscious experience of the power of archetypal symbols and myths. Building a labyrinth is a labyrinth experience in itself. So, while building the labyrinths, we had the opportunity to gain some understanding of how myth and symbol work in the world to give us models for proceeding and interpreting our experience on more than one level.

One student wrote that a labyrinth is a place to make peace with yourself, a place to take a problem, to seek a solution. Another said that people should know about the healing power of labyrinths.

Liz Warren
7/7/98