The Stone Path That No One Recorded
~ Saturday, October 17, 2020 ~
About 12.85 metres from one edge to the other, the labyrinth fills the nave of Notre-Dame de Chartres almost from pillar to pillar. It was laid in white limestone from the Berchères quarries and dark stone from Senlis, sometime in the early thirteenth century. No document from the chapter of Notre-Dame records why it was built, or what it was for, or what its builders called it.
The physical object survives intact; the institutional knowledge that surrounded it does not.
This is, depending on how one reads it, either a loss or a condition. The labyrinth at Chartres is the largest surviving medieval church labyrinth in the world, and it has been in this nave for eight centuries. What has not been present — at any point since the construction — is a medieval Chartres record explaining it.
Dimensions and material
The outer diameter, measured from the edge of the lunation ring, is 12.858 metres. The inner diameter — the labyrinthine field itself — is 12.455 metres. The path runs for 261.5 metres from entrance to centre, a figure that works out to 888 Roman feet (the Roman foot, 294.45 mm, was the measurement unit for the entire cathedral complex). The path width averages 343 mm. The white limestone came from Berchères, a quarry the builders used throughout the cathedral; the dark separator stones are from the Senlis region. The path makes 11 circuits, divided into four quadrants by the labyrinth’s cross-shaped turns.
At the perimeter, a ring of 113 lunation cusps — or 114, depending on whether the missing cusp at the entrance is counted — surrounds the outer edge of the labyrinth. Twenty-eight cusps per quadrant. The significance of the count is debated.
At the centre, a six-petalled rosette. Formerly, according to the antiquarian Charles Challine (writing between 1596 and 1678), a bronze plaque depicting the combat of Theseus and the Minotaur. The plaque was removed in 1792 and likely melted for metal during the Revolutionary requisitions. Whether it existed at all has since been questioned.
The silence of the records
No surviving document from the chapter of Notre-Dame de Chartres names the labyrinth, describes its construction, or records how it was used. The first written reference to it appears in the 1640s, when it is called a Dédale — a Daedalus, a maze — in the notes of a Chartres antiquarian. In the 18th century it was popularly known as la lieue, the league, a reference to the approximate length of the path. The name chemin de Jérusalem — road to Jerusalem — appears in 18th-century antiquarian writing, and may date to the 17th century. It is not documented before then.
This silence is complete for three and a half centuries. The labyrinth was built — probably between 1201 and 1221 — and then left undescribed for longer than most European institutions have existed.
The rose window
One thing the silence does not obscure: the labyrinth and the west rose window of the cathedral are the same diameter. Both measure approximately 12.89 metres across. If the western façade were folded flat onto the nave floor, the rose window would land on the labyrinth.
This is not coincidence. The cathedral’s geometric plan required it — the labyrinth’s centre corresponds to one of the master plan’s primary structural anchor points. The object on the floor and the object on the wall were designed together to relate to each other in a way that is visible to anyone who measures.
What that relationship was intended to mean is another question. The sources do not say.
In this series
- The labyrinths they destroyed — Reims and Auxerre
- The Jerusalem theory and its problems
- What the numbers say
- A rubric for the eve of Candlemas
Sources
- Craig Wright, The Maze and the Warrior (Harvard University Press, 2001)
- Penelope Reed Doob, The Idea of the Labyrinth (Cornell University Press, 1990)
- Jeff Saward, Chartres Cathedral Labyrinth FAQs (Labyrinthos Archive)
- Technical data of the Chartres labyrinth (mymaze.de)
- The labyrinth — official cathedral page (cathedrale-chartres.org)