In the late 60’s one of the shaman of the group that came to be called Le Cercle du Feu, (Circle of Fire), was a little boy. His mother had the habit of taking him to various kinds of religious services, and on this occasion he had been taken to a Roman Catholic church where the priest was very old, and very good at what he did.

This little boy, who had the sight from birth, was watching all the pretty lights and hordes of spirits hovering round the altar, thinking that everyone else could see them too, and had come for the show. As the old priest lifted the Host and performed the centuries old piece of magic, using the Latin, now alas not officially allowed, the boy saw an immense burst of light.

Suddenly he was no longer in that little parish chuch. He was standing as a man, dressed in a cloak and a coat of mail, in an enormous building lit by hundreds of candles.
As he looked down at the floor he saw that he was standing in a complex pattern made in the floor tiles. He looked all round in amazement, and then suddenly was an eight year old boy again and the priest was lowering the Host.

It wasn't until years later, when he was talking to Jean Houston after one of her lectures that he suddenly realized the significance of his trip. She was talking about the Dromenon, the labyrinth in the floor of Chartres cathedral in France that was used as a spiritual tool by priests and people. He had been standing as a Knight Templar in the labyrinth at Chartres. The huge building was the cathedral, lit with candles.

Later on, as an apprentice to a Blackfoot medicine man he encountered Shirley and myself as Elders of other groups, and told us of the vision that he had been given during a quest. It was of being on the Serpent Mound in Ohio, the amazing 1300 foot long model of a snake built in prehistoric times by Indians. It is in effect a slightly straightened out Dromenon. His task was to re-energize the Mound so that it became once again a part of the network of the Gaia energy meridians that passed energy from place to place.

Because of the electrical condition of his brain he didn't drive, and Shirley offered to get him to the Serpent Mound, and I of course offered to help both of them. As the time approached to do the work we were joined by others in various magickal groups who had been with us before, who wanted to help in what could be a very dangerous piece of magick for just two people.

It so happened that on January 23rd 1997 the planetary aspects, as placed on a plane chart made a perfect Star of David. By one of those coincidences by which Goddess remains anonymous we had just heard about a Chartres type labyrinth, the Dromenon, that Neal Harris had built in his own large back garden in Barrington.

A labyrinth, by the way is NOT a maze. It has no blind paths. It isn’t possible to get lost. You always end up at the center if you keep walking forwards, though it often looks as if you are moving away from it.

We made an appointment for the eleven people concerned to meet and walk the Dromenon together in a special order based on previous work done together, long, long ago. On the telephone Neal said, "That's going to be a very special day astrologically." "We know that." said Shirley. "That's why we chose the exact day and time to assemble."

We all walked the Dromenon at a temperature of 20 degrees. We assembled in the center as Gemini rose over the horizon and the cosmic pattern was perfect. As we did a bonding ritual to prepare for the March work, a flock of geese appeared overhead and continued circling until the ritual was over.

Then we retraced our path and assimilated insights, awarenesses, and in some cases new psychic talents that had spontaneously erupted. Neal and his wife followed us into the labyrinth. We all went into the house afterwards and drank warm ambrosia. Neal commented that everyone seemed to have lost their egos and were functioning as one being in eleven bodies.

We felt the cold not at all. And the walk in the Dromenon prepared us for the intense pressure of the complicated, multi-modality magickal work done on the Mound, in the open, in the dark and in the rain, the following March. It was done at such a time that we were finishing it in Ohio, when, because of the time zones, it was the next day in Paris, and the anniversary of the burning of Jacques de Molay the seventy year old leader of the Templars. That was deliberate, since five of the group had Templar connections. The ritual was very successful as reported by psychics in other states in the following days as they felt the expanding ripples of released energies, and by us when we returned to the Serpent in daylight the next day.

Some of you have been to the Ministry and have seen the very special circle made initially of eleven logs and now of eleven stones, in our back yard. Each one represents a person who helped in the work on the Serpent Mound, and then finished the pilgrimage by going with the group two days later to have the darshan of the White Buffalo Calf in Wisconsin.

Walking the Labyrinth together had bonded us into a group that could stand the tremendous energies involved in the time space work needed on the Mound. How could that be so?

Well, it all begins with Pythagoras the great Greek mystic and mathematician. His work on the spiritual meaning of numbers was known to Bernard of Clairvaux , now St. Bernard, who founded the Order of Knights Templars and persuaded the Pope to honor their work as ascetic warrior monks during the Crusades.

It was the Templars who worked with Sufi and Jewish mystics in the Holy Land and who discovered how to use the sacred geometry of Pythagoras and St. Bernard in which there was no number zero. Because of these people there were 85 enormous Gothic cathedrals and five hundred churches, financed and built in a 100 year period in France and Italy. Many are still used by their congregations more than 700 years later. Modern construction crews have been two years doing a mile of road in the village of Matteson, just down the block. It probably won’t last more than five years before IDOT has to do it again. Sniff! But I digress.

For the benefit of some readers I add that there was an esoteric college at Chartres from the sixth through the twelfth century. It did what most such schools did and in addition to the usual grammar, rhetoric and dialectic, it taught the ancient four ways of knowing about the world. These were arithmetic, the sacred science of numbers, geometry, the sacred science of space, astronomy, the science of the observation of significant patterns, and music, the science of universal harmony.

Note please that when we talk about geometry we are talking about the ability to do 3D visualization to a degree not recognized as plausible nowadays. When an architectural company designs a cathedral today, the architect produces hundreds of very large and very detailed drawings to allow the overeeing of the actual building process.

The designers of those cathedrals then didn't have large sheets of paper, or copying machines. They did it ALL in their heads, with the help of a cord with thirteen knots in it to help them set up right angles in the mundane world, and as a tool of their status.
The overseers of the buildings had the WHOLE THING visualized in their heads, in 3D, and always available no matter what part of the work they were overseeing. They drew pictures in large sand trays to illustrate their meanings to the craftsmen.

The carpenters knew on the ground what the scaffolding had to look like to hold the hundreds of tons of masonry over a hundred feet above them. The masons had to know exactly how to cut the masonry on the ground so that it would fit and rest on that scaffolding over a hundred feet above them.

And the overseers had to know how and when to lower the scaffolding away from the masonry so that the stonework settled down and fitted together, with precision cut joints, high above, by its own weight. They did this by cutting holes simultaneously in the huge bags of sand supporting the pillars that supported the temporary wooden scaffolding. As the sand poured out of the bags the scaffolding lowered away from the stonework until the stones settled into their prepared positions. There aren't people around who can do that sort of thing now.

Forward wind to today. For the jet set I note that the famous French, Templar built cathedrals of Amiens, Bayeux and Chartres (ABC) have labyrinths still, and so do the cathedrals at Lucca and Santa Marla in Rome. The geometry of the patterns of the masonry in these cathedrals and churches concentrated the earth energy and focused it into specific areas of the buildings. Like most other cathedrals designed and built by the Templars, the one at Chartres was built over a sacred pagan site This one happens to be a Druid well, still available to see if you talk nicely to whoever is in charge of the crypt, and oil his keys in an appropriate manner.

The Chartres pattern labyrinths were designed to act as substitutes for the long pilgrimage to the Holy Land, for those who could not afford to go. The geometry of the labyrinth is such that simply by walking, or in those days crawling it mindfully, a person experiences points of chaos and points of harmony. All sorts of things come to the surface that are not usually noticed in the hubbub of a worldly life.

One of our group said that when she walked the Dromenon it was like she was given letters of the alphabet, and odd words as she went in, and they were integrated into sentences for her as she came out. All the psychics noted the increase in size of the auras of the exiting participants compared with their entry dimensions. Several had vivid memories of previous lives.

The Dromenon has been called an instrument by which the soul is enabled to talk to the psyche. That is certainly true for most people.

Since we walked that rare Dromenon in 1997 over 150 others have been built in this country. One very famous one is in Grace Cathedral in San Francisco where hundreds of thousands have walked it, and had their first real, and realized, spiritual experience.The cathedral puts out the labyrinth newsletter Veriditas.

Our friend Neal Harris is now quite busy selling canvas patterns for people who want to build their own Cretan or Chartres Dromenons on their own land. One of our group, who owned land in Wisconsin, did so almost immediately after coming back from meeting White Buffalo Calf.

When his conservative neighbors freaked out at the sight of people walking the labyrinth in his yard, Neal had his own Dromenon transferred by volunteer helpers who moved the tons of rocks that delineated the paths from Barrington to Elgin in Illinois, where the labyrinth is now in the lot of the Unitarian Church there. Some people reading this took part in the task.

Another was built in Wheaton, IL at the HQ of the Theosophical Society, and recently Neal supervised the building of a Chartres pattern labyrinth on the tennis court, in the grounds of the Franciscan Sisters of St. Francis on Francis Road in Frankfort, IL a couple of miles from what was our working center in the store Practical Magick.

Anyone can benefit from walking the Dromenon in a self-aware manner. The geometry of it is based on the geometry of spirit. It can be walked many times. A dear friend of ours had an issue that most people would think would require hundreds of hours of analysis to deal with. She walked the Dromenon ten times in succession, and it was dealt with in one day.

Your experience will be yours, and as individual as yourself. One insight that hit me very hard occurred after our group, now expanded to the thirties, had walked the new Dromenon at Elgin, when we were invited, as magicians, to help in the inauguration ritual.

When we had done, there were other people still walking it. And as I watched them from outside it was like being in another space and watching lives unfold as a movie.

There were over a dozen people in the labyrinth. From my viewpoint they were moving in all different directions, just like all of us seem to be doing in life.. But they were all actually going to the same place at the center. Just like all of us. And I knew that as they passed each other in the to-ing and fro-ing, that some of them would suddenly remember past lives together, and long forgotten incidents that needed to be integrated for spiritual progress.

If you go onto the web and search for Dromenon you will find hundreds of sites. The basic book is Walking A Sacred Path by Lauren Artress, the dean of Grace Cathedral. It may be a karmic coincidence that her name isn’t all that different from Chartres. A basic video, which deals with the more ancient seven layer Mediterranean area labyrinths as well as the eleven layer Chartres type is, 'Labyrinths, their Mystery and Magic' by Penny Price Productions.

But walking one kind or the other is what is needed. As my own mentor said,
"The answer to a fundamental question is an experience, not a sentence."

There are medallions of the labyrinth available, and for the blind, there are beautiful wooden versions with polished grooves, so that they can finger travel the labyrinth. In France such labyrinths were often carved on the outer walls of the cathedrals by the master masons who knew the sacred geometry, the Companions. So read the book or see the video if you can. Then walk a Dromenon if you can. The ones at Wheaton, Elgin, and Frankfort are open to the public. My book, “An Introduction to the Templars” has more details about Templar Magick, and a large diagram of the labyrinth.

Just don't do what the unaware, and ignorant religious reporter for our local paper, who is a Catholic did. She walked the labyrinth to the center, looked at her watch, and walked out by crossing all the paths. She was the religious reporter, but she didn't see any point in retracing her steps because she was short of time!!!

Shirley phoned the lady, and pointed out that she had missed out on 80% of the experience of the Dromenon by not returning along the way she had come. She hadn't cognited that it ISN'T the same path going back. All the left turns become right and every movement away from the center is now towards it. Everything is balanced by completing the journey. The psyche and the body are balanced by simply walking the labyrinth. And if you know what you are doing, unlike the religious columnist expert, the results can be powerful.

Some of you reading this were, or are, associated with the people who originally made these cathedrals and labyrinths possible. All you goddess worshippers take note that the Dromenon was sacred to the goddess, and that the Mary to whom most of these cathedrals was dedicated was the Magdalene, the Virgin of the Templars. There was no depiction of a crucifix in Chartres cathedral for over two hundred years. It wasn’t built in memory of the story put out by the Church.

The esoteric story is that the Templar’s Mary, the Magdalene, took the rôle of Sophia as priestess in the Sacred Mysteries of Bethany, even as Jesus her husband, as priest, took the rôle of God. So it's all yours too. There are six little loops at the center of the Chartres Labyrinth. You follow them all round as part of the path. In the olden days when divination was done using three dice, the throw of three sixes was called the Venus throw. The Christians did their usual demonizing thing and made 666 the number of the Beast, instead of the Goddess of Love. The Templars deliberately put it in their labyrinth. It's all connected!

(For veterans…. The 7 layer Cretan labyrinth shows the best order in which to meditate on the chakras, 3,2,1,4,7,6,5. For energy healers who use Usui Reiki, Quantum Touch, Karuna, Metamorphosis, Cranial Sacral, Body Talk and Dar' Shem, the eleven layer Chartres labyrinth helps with insights into the 12 chakra system of the fully enlightened being.)