The Labyrinths They Destroyed
~ Sunday, January 24, 2021 ~
Six cathedral labyrinths were removed from French churches between 1690 and the 1820s. In most cases, the reason given was the same: children were playing on them during services and disturbing the liturgy. This is probably true. It is also, as explanations go, worth sitting with. These objects had been in their cathedrals for four or five centuries before the canons decided they were furniture.
The two labyrinths we know most about — Reims and Auxerre — were both demolished within a century of each other, for the same stated reason, after lasting from the 13th century to the 17th and 18th.
What this means is that for most of their existence, the labyrinths were considered normal enough to keep. Then, within a fairly short window, they became inconvenient. The obvious inference is that the institutional understanding of what they were for had eroded to the point where their presence was more trouble than their absence. Whether that erosion was gradual or sudden is harder to say.
Reims: an architects’ monument
The Reims labyrinth was not circular. It was octagonal — a square with cut corners — with sides of 10.36 metres. The pathways were 27.94 centimetres wide, separated by lines of dark blue stone from the Ardennes. It was inaugurated on 6 January 1286, at the coronation of Philippe le Bel, and it stood in the nave for 493 years.
What distinguished the Reims labyrinth from all other French medieval examples was its inscriptions. The central area contained portraits and texts naming four master masons: Jean d’Orbais, who designed the cathedral and began the apse (1211–1231); Jean-le-Loup, who began the northern portals (1231–1247); Gaucher de Reims, who worked on the arches and western portals (1247–1255); and Bernard de Soissons, who built five nave vaults and the rose window (1255–1290). No other medieval cathedral labyrinth served as a memorial to the builders of the building it sat in.
It was demolished in 1779 by order of Canon Jacquemart. The reason given: children playing on it were disrupting liturgical services. Three documentary records survive: a survey drawn by Canon Cocquault in 1640; a second drawing made by Robin and Havé in 1779, just before the demolition; and a 16th-century drawing by the draughtsman Jacques Cellier. All three are in the Bibliothèque Municipale de Reims. The labyrinth itself is entirely gone.
Auxerre: the Easter ball game
The Auxerre labyrinth is less well documented visually — no equivalent of the Cocquault drawings survives. It is more significant liturgically than any other medieval French labyrinth, because it is where the most detailed account of an actual medieval labyrinth ritual was recorded.
In a chapter record from 1396, the Easter Vespers ceremony at the Cathedral of Saint-Étienne d’Auxerre is described as follows: the cathedral dean walked the path of the labyrinth while tossing a large ball — a pelota — to the canons arranged around its perimeter. The canons meanwhile performed a chorea, a linked garland dance, moving in time with the ball-tossing. The combination of labyrinth, Easter, dance, and ball has been the subject of considerable scholarly analysis.
Craig Wright, in his 2001 study of the maze and the warrior symbol in medieval culture, argues that this ritual — and its analogues at Sens and Amiens — is the key to understanding what cathedral labyrinths were originally built for: not penitential pilgrimage, but Easter liturgy. The ball was a solar symbol; the dance represented the movement of the celestial spheres; the dean walking the path enacted the harrowing of hell by a figure who enters, defeats the enemy at the centre, and emerges. Whether Chartres had an equivalent ritual is unrecorded.
The Auxerre labyrinth was destroyed in 1690. The reason: children. Same as Reims.
What the pattern of destruction tells us
Sens, Arras, and Saint-Omer were gone by the mid-18th century. Amiens survived into the 19th century before its demolition. The pattern holds: these objects lasted roughly five hundred years, then disappeared within a one-hundred-year window, concentrated in the 17th and 18th centuries.
What changed is not difficult to identify in outline. The institutions that made the labyrinths — cathedral chapters operating under a particular model of liturgical practice — survived, but the specific ritual culture that made the labyrinths meaningful did not. By the 17th century, the Auxerre pelota dance was the only documented instance of a labyrinth ritual that may once have been widespread. By the 18th century, even that had been discontinued.
The labyrinths had outlasted their meaning, and the canons were left with objects they no longer knew how to use. That children played on them is, I think, not the cause of their removal. It is the symptom of an institution that had stopped treating them as liturgical furniture and started treating them as floor furniture. The children noticed before the canons did.
In this series
- The stone path that no one recorded — the Chartres labyrinth
- The Jerusalem theory and its problems
- What the numbers say
- A rubric for the eve of Candlemas