Central Park Labyrinth

Rainy Saturday, April 23, 2005

The rain is keeping us from the work site today, but I was fascinated by the trellis design. It incorporates the 'Vesica Piscis'. So I went over and took a picture.

May 5th, 2005

The rain and the cool temperatures prevented us from completeing the labyrinth as planned. The tape that we use to layout and define the labyrinth would not stick to the cement. The various marking pens that we use would leave indelible marks on the concrete. The crew ended up by drawing the pattern in Sharpie marking pens to be colored by the community later.

Robert's lecture in Danville, Kentucky describes this symbol. Here is an excerpt from his talk on December 4th, 2002 at Centre College in Danville, Kentucky:

"This is a very basic geometric shape in which you take one circle, and then you make a second circle the same size, with the center on the perimeter of the first circle.

They overlap in this way. That overlapping space is of critical importance. Let's suppose that these circles are separate. We have these two worlds, we have the inner world and the outer world and there is no way to get from one world to the other.

You couldn't get from here to there. You could only do that if the two worlds somehow overlap. You could only do that if the worlds overlap, or intersect, or if there's a bridge. Geometrically speaking, this is how that's represented. The center space, is called the Vesica Piscis, meaning the bladder of the fish. I've never seen a fish bladder. I don't know. But if you do turn it horizontal, the center part does look like the Christian symbol for a fish used in early centuries. (It is also called the mandorla.)

This represents the transition between the inner and outer worlds. In all of Romanesque iconography, and interestingly, the Romanesque came before the Gothic, when the Romanesque Cathedral at Chartres burned down, the front was not destroyed. The new Gothic Cathedral was built around it. The front of Chartres Cathedral is Romanesque, although the rest is Gothic. It has Romanesque symbolism. In all the great Romanesque churches, you find this.

(Image of Jesus in the mandorla just above the west door at Chartres Cathedral)

You find Jesus in the center of that shape that I just showed you, in the center of the Vesica. Because Jesus is that bridge, fully human, fully divine. Jesus is that connection between that inner and outer world that we've been talking about with the labyrinth as a spiritual tool. This is the connection.

John James who has written extensively and studied Gothic to a degree that no one else has ever done, and whose work I really worship, made a very interesting statement. He said, that all the Romanesque churches had this, a Vesica Piscis with Jesus in the center. The Gothic Cathedrals did not have that. The Gothic Cathedrals had something else. What they had was the labyrinth.

The labyrinth! The labyrinth represented the overlap of the two worlds. The labyrinth represented the bridge of how you got from one to the other. "

It looks like the rain here in Burlington will keep us out of Central Park for a few days. Let's all focus on the weather being dry and clear for the next 4 days! I'll try to post Robert's whole talk to the website in the next few days. Golden Spirit offers representations of the Vesica Piscis in pendants, earrings and bracelets.

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