164 Grimoire for the Apprentice Wizard
From
Montfaucon’s Anti-
quities, 16th centuryrising point of the Sun at the Summer Solstice. Other
alignments, both to the Summer Solstice sunrise and
to certain bright stars such as Aldebaran, Rigel, or
Sirius, have been proposed for a number of Medicine
Wheels. The Wheels may thus have functioned as a
calendar to mark the longest day of the year. Presum-
ably, such a calendar would be used for the timing of
important rituals.
You can make your own Medicine Wheels al-
most as a game of Elven Chess, using stones that hap-
pen to be lying around. Sometimes such circles are
created on lawns or in gardens, and people will bring
in special rocks to mark the central cairn and the places
where the spokes join the outer circle. These may be
assembled in a rocky area, such as a park or wilder-
ness, and left standing for other visitors to come upon.Lesson 7: Henges and Stone Circles
If you have space to set it up, it can be really cool to
build a stone circle around your ritual space! Such
circles are often referred to as “henges” because of
the famous Stonehenge in England, but technically,
that is not correct. Typical henges (“hanging things”)
are simply circular enclosures bounded by a bank on
the outside and a ditch on the inside. One or more
entrances lead to the center. The oldest henges were
built beginning about 3300 BCE, and the largest en-
close up to five acres. The bank is outside the ditch,
so they would not have been defensive enclosures,
but were more likely a form of religious and ceremo-
nial gathering place. Some henges have stone circles
within them, while others once contained circular ar-
rangements of wooden posts.
Stone circles are much more common than
henges. At least 900 of them still exist, though many
more must have been destroyed in the march of
“progress.” The most famous is Stonehenge in Wilt-
shire, with an extremely complex history spanning
well more than a millennium. Most of what is visible
today represents the last phase of construction of stand-
ing stone arrangements inside the bank and ditch and
was probably completed about 1700 BCE. And no,
Stonehenge was not built by the Druids; they missed
out on all the hard work by more than a thousand years!
Many outrageous claims have been made for the
purpose of these circles, from UFOlanding pads to astronomical observatories. Most
evolved from the earlier henges, functioning as multi-
purpose tribal gathering places for ritual observances
having to do with the seasons and the fertility of the
Earth. As with Medicine Wheels, certain stones
aligned with particular bright stars and the rising of
the Sun at Solstices, thus serving as annual calendars
the same way a sundial marks the hours.
When the late Professor Alexander Thom sur-
veyed more than 1,000 megalithic (“great stone”)
structures in the British Isles and Western France, he
was amazed to find that they had all been built using
the same unit of measurement. Thom called this unit
a megalithic yard (MY) because it was very close in
size to a British Imperial Yard, being exactly 32.64
inches.Lesson 8: Labyrinths
The word labyrinth means “house
of the labrys,” and a labrys is the
ritual double-bladed axe of ancient
Crete. Legend tells how Theseus slew the
Minotaur at the center of the Labyrinth of
Knossos in Crete, escaping with the aid of a ball of
string given him by the princess Ariadne. Labyrinths
can be done as simple drawings or incised into a sur-
face of wood or clay so that you can follow their path
with your eye or finger.
A labyrinth com-
bines the imagery
of the circle and
the spiral into a
meandering but
purposeful path.
The labyrinth rep-
resents a journey to
our own center and
back again out into the
world. Full-size labyrinths
may be walked through as
a kind of meditation exer-
cise. Healing qualities are sometimes attributed to the
body’s movements when walking, or the influence of
the Earth’s magnetic field. Christian cathedral laby-
rinths were said to represent the “Road to Jerusalem”
and the soul’s journey to salvation in the Holy City at
the center—originally, penitent pilgrims would shuffle
painfully along the pattern on their knees.
Labyrinths and mazes have often been confused.
When most people hear of a labyrinth, they think of a
maze. A maze is like a puzzle to be solved. It has forks
and blind alleys. But a labyrinth is unicursal, with
only one circuitous path. There are no forks or blind
alleys. The single path leads you into the center (and
perhaps back out again).
The oldest design is the classical seven-ring laby-LabrysStonehenge- Rites.p65 164 1/15/2004, 9:08 AM