The Labyrinth, Postmodernity and Ritual

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Redemptive Hegemony

The strategies and situation of the Labyrinth are closely related to the notion of redemptive hegemony. The relationship of alternative worship to the arrangement of power in the church and the way in which groups manage to carve out space to empower them and maintain resistant and subversive identities whilst still remaining within the system has been discussed above. This is one aspect of redemptive hegemony. The aspect discussed here is how the participant in the Labyrinth is personally empowered.

Transformation

To walk the Labyrinth is to enter ritual space or a ritual environment. One of the most significant aspects of it is that the whole person, the ritual body, interacts with this environment. There is a circularity to this interaction. It is both generative of it and moulded by it in turn.

So the simple act of dropping a stone in water to let go of pressures and concerns at the 'letting go' station say, does not merely communicate the need to let go. It produces a person freed from pressure in and through the act itself. Or the act of walking slowly round the labyrinth with God rather than the usual rushing alone in urban life doesn't merely communicate the need to slow down, it is generative of a slowed down person aware of God's presence in life.

Many of the symbolic acts, as well as drawing on the Christian tradition, also draw from the insights of therapy in transforming persons. Schemes deployed in the labyrinth are then able to be used in a variety of circumstances beyond the rite itself. In the 'self' station the walker stops to hear some verses affirming their uniqueness from Psalm 139 as they look in a mirror. The next time they look in a mirror, they may well see themselves in a new way.

One walker who had a fear of heights somehow had enough confidence having walked the Labyrinth to then climb up to the whispering gallery in St Paul's directly afterwards - their fear was dispelled in the ritual. One priest on duty in St Paul's who walked the Labyrinth described the lingering impression of the 'noise' station and how he had been reflecting on it since. He had deployed this scheme of the Labyrinth back into the circumstances of his life.

Ritual mastery then is 'an internalisation of schemes with which they are capable of reinterpreting reality in such a way as to afford perceptions and experiences of a redemptive hegemonic order'. This can be very empowering for participants. Many described it using the words a 'powerful experience'. Bell clearly accepts that ritual transforms persons and succinctly explains how it does so. Alternative worship groups have also discovered this for themselves. Bell seems to subscribe this transforming effect to the process of ritualisation itself.

The alternative worship groups and planners of the Labyrinth, as well as recognising the power of ritualisation, see the transforming effect as more than a constructed experience. Their conviction is that the transformation is also affected by the Spirit of God whose presence is real, even though the Sacred always comes 'cloaked in cultural forms' (in this case ritual/the labyrinth). The powerful transforming effect of walking the labyrinth then does no less than produce new persons, enabled to see the world and act in it in a new way.

Consent and Resistance

The accusation could be made (and has been made) that those constructing ritual are being manipulative. However for this to be so it assumes that the walkers are easily duped. This is far from the case. In Cultural Studies much recent work has focused on how meaning resides as much if not more with users and audiences rather than producers. Meaning is located in the interchange between reader and text and the negotiated readings that result.

Similarly ritualisation involves a mix of consent (at least enough consent to walk the labyrinth in the first place) and resistance from participants. There are many ways in which participants resisted aspects of the labyrinth, whether skipping parts, disagreeing with them, or repeating parts several times. Because of the multivalence of symbols they were also able to create various levels of meaning relating to their own situations. Ritualised practices thus 'do not function as an instrument of heavy handed social control. Ritual symbols and meanings are too indeterminate and their schemes too flexible to lend themselves to any simple process of instilling fixed ideas'.