![]() With new customers lining up, Fisher took out a business loan, bought a computer, a printer, and a secondhand car, and reinvented himself as a full-time maze designer. The new Archbishop dedicated the Greys Court maze in October, 1981, and the resulting publicity generated more maze commissions. The Blenheim Palace maze, which Adrian Fisher co-designed in the eighties, is now featured on Britain’s five-pound note. Fisher cunningly combined the appearance of the old Christian labyrinth with the function of the puzzle maze, whose solution, taking its cue from Runcie’s metaphor, involves turning away from the center initially, to journey around the entire periphery. But at Greys Court a maze walker-or aspirant, to use the technical term-encounters a junction within seconds and has to make a choice. Medieval labyrinths of this kind aren’t puzzles there is only a single path, arranged in a snaking pattern of concentric folds, and to process along it to the center is to participate in a physical allegory of the soul’s progress through life and toward salvation. At first glance, it seemed to replicate the traditional Christian pavement labyrinth, the most famous example of which is found in the nave of Chartres Cathedral. His design was circular: a brick path, set in a lawn, that formed seven concentric rings winding toward a sundial in the center. Over scones and jam, she wondered aloud whether he might create an Archbishop’s Maze, inspired by Runcie’s words, in her garden at Greys Court, a Tudor manor house in Oxfordshire.įisher didn’t yet have official stationery, or even a typewriter, so he submitted his proposal as a handwritten letter. Lady Elizabeth Brunner, a former actress who was married to a chemical magnate, invited Fisher to tea. ![]() In his signature, Fisher styled himself a “Maze Consultant,” and, before long, this stealth marketing had reeled in a customer, and Minotaur’s first public commission. Runcie’s dream gave him an idea: Fisher wrote to the letters page of the London Times, briefly outlining the maze’s long history as a Christian symbol and noting that, as in the Archbishop’s dream, a maze’s goal is typically reached not by “pressing toward the center” but, rather, by “returning almost to the edge,” in order to find the proper path. “At first, I thought it was impossible,” Fisher said. ![]() He was increasingly drawn to the idea of designing mazes he’d even formed a company, Minotaur Designs, with a wealthy labyrinthologist and former diplomat, Randoll Coate. In 1980, Fisher was twenty-eight years old and working for I.T.T., a multinational manufacturing company, where he was responsible for productivity enhancement. “He said, ‘I had a dream of a maze, and in this maze blah, blah, blah,’ ” the maze designer Adrian Fisher recalled, when I visited him late this summer, at his home in Dorset, in southwest England. It is easy to get lost.” The Christian church, in Runcie’s slightly strained analogy, was in such a maze, and could progress toward its goal only by turning back, toward the periphery, in order to engage with those still outside the church’s embrace. “The trouble is to get to the center of all those hedges. “You know how sometimes in an English garden you find a maze,” Runcie said. Augustine, Runcie told the assembled ranks of bishops, bewigged members of the judiciary, and assorted royalty about a recent dream. For his first sermon following his ascension to the Chair of St. On the afternoon of March 25, 1980, Robert Runcie was enthroned as the hundred-and-second Archbishop of Canterbury, senior prelate of the Anglican Communion. This content can also be viewed on the site it originates from.
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