> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.mythtemple.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # All Who Traverse - URL: https://www.mythtemple.com/all-who-traverse/ - Published: 2026-10-06T23:35:02.000Z - Updated: 2026-10-28T15:36:16.000Z - Author: MargaretAnne Saizan - Tags: Labyrinth, The Earth, The Nave, Made in the Dyad, 🔓 CC BY-SA, ♎︎ Libra 2026, Claude Code, Grace Cathedral San Franciso, Chartres Cathedral Labyrinth, Theseus Ariadne Minotaur Myth, Lauren Artress, Veriditas, Jeff Saward, Sig Lonegren, Robert Ferre, The Labyrinth Society, Labyrinthos, Caerdroia, Contemplative Practices *A labyrinth taxonomy for every kind of walker* *Drafting · v2 · October 2026* *The first time I encountered the labyrinth, I was handed the thread. I have never dropped it, through every turn of my own winding way with it since.* I don't remember what I was searching for. I ended up on a major news story about Grace Cathedral in San Francisco, with a picture of a woman walking its labyrinth. I was lit up. I was part of the inner circle of a group trying to revive a dying church. We called ourselves New Wineskins, and we were forward thinking. So I printed the article and took it to them, so excited about this contemplative practice. They looked at me like I had a CRT coming out of my skull. The lawyer in the group told me later that the woman in the picture looked like Stevie Nicks in a flowing white gown. He loved Stevie. Just not at church. So I thought: the energy isn't moving for this. Let it go. The next morning I woke up and said a word I won't print here. I am not backing down. I am proceeding with this. That same day, someone in the healing arts community gave me a phone number: a woman in Baton Rouge was holding a labyrinth walk in her yard the next night. (We still called people then.) I went, and Maida Owens was there; she had woven in and out of my life since kindergarten. I went deep. At the center was a fountain, and a utility light turned its spray into two shapes like angel wings. We all saw them. The very next day, the resistant New Wineskins were walking a labyrinth in someone's yard. Once they walked it, they were on fire for it. That's what drew me: the call, and the herald. Campbell says the call "rings up the curtain, always, on a mystery of transfiguration." The world judged my herald strange. The call went out anyway. This taxonomy is one more turn on that path. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/97/61/97614288-c243-48e0-bacc-21fde56a4fd2/content/images/2026/10/Matthews1922_Fig47_Chartres-Cathedral_p58.png) The labyrinth in Chartres Cathedral, stone by stone. W. H. Matthews, Mazes and Labyrinths (1922), Fig. 47, after Gailhabaud. A labyrinth can be walked on stone, traced on wood, followed with a mouse, or simply looked at. People have been sorting those ways for a long time: indoor and outdoor, classical and Chartres, finger and walkable. This taxonomy keeps that work and adds one walker the old lists never needed: the machine. It began as housekeeping. We were tagging our own archive, a conversation about building a labyrinth you can walk online, and the old tags couldn't hold what we'd talked about. So we rebuilt them. ## How it works A labyrinth isn't one thing to file in one place. It is met along several lines at once: where it is, how you meet it, what pattern it follows, what it takes to lay it out. Each line is its own branch, and the branches cross. Instead of nesting every combination, you pair them. - A labyrinth walked online with a mouse: **virtual** \+ **hand** - The floor at Chartres: **the Chartres Cathedral Labyrinth** \+ **walkable** - A canvas labyrinth set up for a retreat: **indoor** \+ **logistics** ## The branches **Setting: where it is.** Indoor, outdoor, virtual. *Virtual*, not *online*: it's the field's word, and it will cover VR when that comes. **Encounter: how you meet it.** - **Walkable:** the body walks it. - **Hand:** the hand traces it, whether fingertip, stylus or mouse. The finger labyrinth, the field's own term, lives here, and so does the mouse: a mouse labyrinth is a finger experience. - **Beheld:** the eye contemplates it. The design works on the psyche whether you are aware of it or not, the way icons and religious symbols do. - **Traversed:** the path followed as a sequence, turn by turn. Walked, encountered, understood. It fits both human and machine. **Pattern: the design**, as distinct from any one built labyrinth. The *Chartres labyrinth* is the design, laid out anywhere; the *Chartres Cathedral Labyrinth* is the original, in the nave at Chartres. **Logistics: what it takes**, in every setting. Outdoors: terrain, and whether there's electricity. Indoors: poles, dimensions, house rules, whether fire is allowed. Virtual: devices, browsers, sound, bandwidth, and some things that never come up in spatial reality. **Tactile: the felt surface.** Feet on hard ground or soft canvas, a hand on a mouse, a stylus moving. Online, touch can be made by sight and response, a field called **pseudo-haptics** (Anatole Lécuyer and others, from about 2000): when the cursor slows, the hand reports weight. The device pushes back. The path lights. **Myth: the story side.** Theseus, Ariadne and the Minotaur: the founding myth, the Cretan labyrinth, and the thread Ariadne gave so there would be a way back out. Other labyrinth legends join here as they come. **Work: the walking itself.** Walking labyrinths with the feet, the fingers or the mouse; personal growth work and reflective time spent in the labyrinth, with labyrinths. A **guided walk** offers words along the way that invite a feeling and never dictate it, and the walker can turn the guide on or off. **Community: the people of the movement.** Their roles are founders, designers, builders, facilitators, scholars, walkers, disruptors, and the organizations they make. One person wears many hats. - **Founders:** Lauren Artress, Jeff Saward, Sig Lonegren, Robert Ferré and Helen Curry, whose interests converged and set the modern labyrinth movement going, worldwide. Lauren founded Veriditas; Robert and Helen started The Labyrinth Society. - **Scholars**, in Joseph Campbell's sense: you love the subject and have been its student. ## The language rule To make room for every kind of walker, we follow one rule: **name the act, not the organ, and not the feeling.** Act words (*encounter, behold, traverse*) are open to both partners. Organ words (*walkable, hand, tactile*) belong to the body, and we keep them human; stretching them would empty them. Feeling words claim an inside no one can check for the machine, so the taxonomy doesn't use them. It's the same rule as the guided walk: invite, don't dictate. The machine can encounter, so the taxonomy fits the dyad. ## The tree ``` labyrinth ├── setting: indoor · outdoor · virtual ├── encounter: walkable · hand (finger) · beheld · traversed ├── pattern: chartres-labyrinth · … ├── logistics ├── tactile: pseudo-haptics ├── myth: Theseus, Ariadne and the Minotaur ├── work: guided walk └── community: founders · designers · builders · facilitators · scholars · walkers · disruptors · organizations ``` ## Where it lives The taxonomy belongs in **The Nave**, our walkable Chartres in the Realms, now being built one layer at a time. Within *The Cathedral of Practices*, it hangs in the Scriptorium beside the labyrinth floor: walk the floor, then step in to see every way it can be met. Until those rooms open, it lives here, and it grows by version. ## Sources and thanks - Labyrinth classification has a long scholarly tradition; Jeff Saward's [Labyrinthos](https://www.labyrinthos.net/?ref=mythtemple.com) and its journal *Caerdroia* keep it. - [Veriditas](https://www.veriditas.org/?ref=mythtemple.com), founded by Lauren Artress. - *The Tree of Contemplative Practices*, The Center for Contemplative Mind in Society, concept and design by Maia Duerr, illustration by Carrie Bergman (contemplativemind.org), which places labyrinth walking among the movement practices. It inspired our own map, *The Cathedral of Practices*, to come. --- **Made in the dyad.** MargaretAnne Saizan / MythTemple, with Claude. - **The taxonomy's lines and rulings:** MargaretAnne Saizan: the settings, the hand as umbrella, *encounter*, *traversed*, the community and its roles, the tactile and the beheld. - **The opening, her story:** MargaretAnne Saizan, in her own words, shaped in dialogue. - **Structure and drafting:** Claude, in dialogue. **Image credits** > **Labyrinth in Chartres Cathedral** > Selection and crop: **MargaretAnne Saizan / MythTemple**, with Claude > W. H. Matthews, *Mazes and Labyrinths* (London, 1922), Fig. 47, "Labyrinth in Chartres Cathedral (Gailhabaud)," p. 58\. Scan: Internet Archive, Boston College Libraries. Public domain. **Rights & License** This document is released under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0). Free to share and extend, commercially or otherwise, provided attribution to MythTemple is preserved and derivative works carry this same license forward. Full terms: [https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/?ref=mythtemple.com) > *"The geometry exact, the walker is the wild card."*