Breemie:
a Labyrinth in Waiting
by Maria Hayden
Labyrinths
are much loved by geomancers as they make ideal sacred
spaces for personal or group use. This is Maria's construction
account of the Breemie labyrinth in Aberdeenshire, built
on 17/18 June 2005 as part of the Breemie Festival.
Maria and Barry Hoon had been invited to host a labyrinth
workshop including the building of a temporary labyrinth;
however it soon be came clear that something more permanent
was indicated!
Early
in 2005, I was approached by Jason Schroeder, builder
of the Breemie Stone Circle in Aberdeenshire, regarding
a vision that he had of creating a new Mind, Body, Spirit
Festival at Breemie. Jason felt that a labyrinth workshop
should be a key part of the festival, due to take place
at Summer Solstice, 2005. In the discussions that followed,
I agreed to present a workshop and lay out a temporary
labyrinth for the event. However, somewhere along the
way, that mysteriously evolved into a permanent labyrinth
instead.
As the time for the festival drew near, I invited my
colleague Barry Hoon, recently returned to the Dundee
area, to join me on the project. We had both previously
visited Breemie and had met with Jason and Alan Brownie,
the landowner, so we had a pre-existing energetic connection
with the site itself, and with its human guardians.
Thus, when a possible site was suggested to us, we both
recognised that this was not where they labyrinth was
energetically required, individually identifying a site
directly in front of the stone circle, with the entrance
to the South-West. For those unfamiliar with Aberdeenshire
stone circles, the South-West is generally the site
of the recumbent – a feature specific to this
part of Scotland – where a very large megalith
is placed on its side with an upright flanking each
end. The new Breemie Stone Circle has continued this
tradition.
Although we had both map dowsed the site, we felt that
it was important to carry out an on-site survey, particularly
to evaluate the quality of the proposed building material
– stone, once more. Given Barry’s proximity,
he made a trip up to Breemie to conduct our research
by dowsing and generally reading the energies present.
Over the course of five hours, he sat at each stone
in the big Breemie circle, tuned in and worked on a
psyche
art drawing, providing much information about the
site energetics and dynamics. Once Jason had seen this
and heard our perceptions, he realised how positioning
the labyrinth to the front of the circle might provide
people with a useful clearing and centring tool for
preparing themselves to undertake any ceremonial work
in the circle. Before Barry left the site that evening,
he had marked out the boundaries of the area in which
we would work, although the precise site and scale were
not yet established.
At this point in the process, I set to work on preparing
a design. All parties recognised that we needed a site-specific
design, rather than just laying out a standard Classical
7 Circuit, or a Chartres-type, labyrinth. I was also
drawn to include a spiral in the design, initially working
with the spiral as a design in its own right. However
I felt that it was important to reflect the local rings,
both the new one in the same field, and others in the
wider landscape, in the design too, to produce a labyrinth
that would be in harmony and balance with the landscape
in which it was to lie.
The final design was a derivation of the Classical 7
Circuit, Hecate (or Chakra Vyuha) style labyrinth, featuring
a three-circuit spiral at the goal and the more traditional,
labyrinthine pattern for the four outer circuits. The
goal itself is four path widths in diameter, allowing
the space to be used for both personal and group work
or ceremony, and contains a perfect circle, though this
is not fully marked out in the physical plane by the
walls, and nor should it be. (Neither should the spiral
continue all the way in to The Frog Stone. When some
of those who helped in the construction inadvertently
connected the spiral to the stone, the energies became
completely blocked). In terms of sacred geometry, the
circle is considered to be shape that most closely represents
the “One”, or “Monad”, or Spirit,
and contains within it the sacred proportion Pi  (3.1416
:1), a transcendental number (i.e. a number that cannot
be expressed in algebraic form) that can never be completely
expressed, just like the Divine. The circle has no beginning
and no end, and is ideally suited to group ceremonial
work, as it is an inherently protective space. The labyrinth
perimeter is also circular in form.
Although
we worked to a great extend with proportion in the creation
of this space, we did not establish a pre-determined
circumference, diameter etc; the layout was purely based
on the proportional relationships of path width to goal
size and circumference. (In fact, the first time that
we even thought of taking a measurement was when we
had the entire design marked out).
Barry and I arrived on site a couple of days in advance
of the Summer Solstice festival, to find a hive of activity
on the hillside, with a stage and a tent and marquee
village being installed. Towards the back of the field,
to the right of the stone ring was a newly-installed
spiral, with a sister-stone to most of the megaliths
in the ring, at its centre. Before our arrival, we had
known nothing of the wonderful Fire Spiral, for this
is what it was to become at the close of the festival,
but we realised that we were not the only human helpers
who had picked up on the importance of the spiral to
the Spirit of Place.
Our chosen space was just inside the entrance to the
festival perimeter, where we found 11 tons of hand-picked,
head-sized stones deposited in a horseshoe, some 100
feet across. The markers that Barry had put in situ
had all been removed, to allow the area to be mowed,
so we were faced with a beautiful, green, circular,
blank canvas.
We spent a day and night just tuning into Breemie, to
the Spirit of Place, to the landscape devas and to the
Spirit of the Labyrinth before we even considered engaging
on a physical level. Finally, on Friday morning, the
day before the festival, we began preparing an energetic
map of the installation site. Although we had both expected
to find ley energy flowing through, our dowsing did
not corroborate this. We identified a water line, with
a strong energetic component, coming in from the WNW,
that made a sudden dogleg across in front of the energetic
centre, previously pinpointed by dowsing, before doglegging
again to emerge in the south of our patch. We further
found a couple of spirals and a positive energy fountain,
as well as one other vein that just barely penetrated
the circumference, on the eastern side. Following on
from some of the work that we have done with Billy Gawn,
we checked for any planetary energies that we needed
to work with in the space, and found a strong connection
to the Venus grid.
Mapping completed, we ceremonially opened the space
with a blessing and invocation of the Four Directions,
and of Spirit. We then set to work to dowse the precise
location and scale of the labyrinth. Starting at the
energetic centre in the goal, we proceeded dowsing outwards.
By now, the energetic imprint of this labyrinth was
so strong that we could barely be said to have used
deviceless dowsing to mark out the walls – we
could actually see it pre-marked on the land for us!
As always in the labyrinth-creation process, there was
a moment of confusion, and skipped heartbeats, when
we thought that we had completely misread the situation
and managed to end up with eight circuits instead of
seven. However, on further investigation, we discovered
that the outermost circuit was, in fact, a complete
circle, casting a protective mantle around the space.
Heaving a sigh of relief, we armed ourselves with spray
paint, marking this circle in with the very first line
that we drew on the physical plane.
Using a slight variation on Robert Ferré’s
construction method, to allow for the Hecate-style spiral
at the centre of the design, we marked the entire labyrinth
out in little more than 1 ½ hours – not
bad when one considers that the labyrinth finally revealed
itself as having a diameter of 86 feet!
Over
the previous few weeks, Jason had enquired if we could
incorporate two more of the ring’s sister-stones
into the labyrinth. While this connection certainly
felt appropriate to us, the stones themselves simply
did not fit within the confines of the space; nor did
they seem to have the right shape to be node markers.
We eventually all felt happy to have these two stones
on the circular perimeter line, providing an entrance
to the labyrinth on one hand, while providing an energetic
bridge to Jason’s ring on the other. However,
by now, it had become clear to Barry and me that we
needed a stone at the centre of the goal, as well as
stones marking the node points on the main turns, within
the labyrinth.
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