During the Second Great Awakening, the wave of religious fervor that spread through America in the early nineteenth century, a self-proclaimed prophet named John George Rapp founded the town of Harmony, Indiana. Around 1820, his followers built a labyrinth with a small shrine at its center; they used it to meditate on the many false paths the soul would face before the coming of the millennium. When the millennium failed to arrive and Rapp’s cult of personality began to fray, the settlement was sold to the wealthy Scottish industrialist Robert Owen, who renamed it New Harmony and invited hundreds of ordinary people, along with some of the great scholars of the day, to join his own utopian experiment. Owen’s libertine, rationalist “science of society” was diametrically opposed to Rapp’s ascetic, authoritarian “scriptural communism”; it failed all the same. The town descended into chaos, Owen abandoned New Harmony, and the labyrinth was neglected until 1939, when a local preservation society built a new one.
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