Walking the circle backwards – when the circle no longer builds, but unbinds

To close a jar, you turn the lid to the right. To open it, you turn it to the left. We never think about it. The hand simply knows.

Some rituals seem to have grown out of that same intuition of the hand. A circle walked in one direction tightens, gathers, binds. The same circle, walked the other way, loosens, unties, releases.

For thousands of years, people have walked in circles around what they hold sacred – around temples, mountains, wells, fires, tombs. Yet few of us ask why the direction matters. And, above all, what happens when the circle is walked in reverse.

Circumambulation – when the sacred becomes a centre

Circumambulatio is Latin for "walking around." The gesture is almost universal: you circle what you honor. You do not approach it in a straight line, as you would an object. You go around it, as you would a center.

In India, the gesture is called pradakshinaThe word comes from the Sanskrit dakshina, which means both "right" and "south." The devotee walks around the temple or the shrine keeping the sacred on their right-hand side – that is, clockwise. Tibetan pilgrims do the same on the kora, the 52-kilometre path around Mount Kailash. In Celtic Ireland and Scotland, the gesture had a Gaelic name, deiseal, "to the right," "sunwise." Martin Martin, a Scot who travelled the Hebrides around 1700, noted that people carried fire three times around houses, cattle and newborn children dessil, in order to bless them.

The link with the sun is not a metaphor. In the northern hemisphere, the sun rises in the east, climbs towards the south and sets in the west. Its shadow on a sundial turns in exactly the direction we now call "clockwise" – because the first mechanical clocks imitated sundials. To walk "sunwise" is to move in the rhythm of the growing day, of rising light, of ripening harvest.

This is where the associations that have survived to this day come from: the clockwise direction stands for growth, manifestation, calling in, building.

The other direction

If there is a path "with the sun," there is also one "against the sun." In Gaelic it was called tuathal – "to the left," "to the north." The Lowland Scots called it widdershins, from an old word meaning "against the way."

In British folklore, widdershins had a bad reputation. Walking around a church in the wrong direction was said to open a door into the fairy world or to invite misfortune. On a few islands off the west of Ireland there are so-called "cursing stones," round stones set on an altar, which local tradition says were turned against the sun when someone wished to undo an enemy's luck.

But the same direction had a less sinister side as well: what had been bound could be unbound. The reverse movement belonged not only to harm, but to undoing. It unravelled what the sunwise circle had built. In some contemporary pagan practices, this logic appears very clearly: the ritual circle is cast in one direction and released, at the end, by the opposite movement – like a thread wound up and then carefully unwound.

Romanian, my own language, holds the same pair in its everyday vocabulary. A lega and a dezlega and to bind and to unbind. A face and a desface and to make and to unmake.. We speak of legarea cununiei - the binding of a marriage, of dezlegarea farmecelor - the unbinding of spells, even of dezlegare la pește - the church's "release" that allows fish on a fasting day. What is tied by one gesture must, at some point, be untied by a matching one.

And so the second set of associations was born: the counterclockwise direction stands for release, ending, cleansing, unbinding, returning to oneself..

Same direction, different meaning

Here the story has to become a little more complicated – and that is exactly what makes it interesting.

Muslim pilgrims circle the Kaaba seven times, in the tawaf, counterclockwise. It is not a gesture of ending or parting. It is a gesture of devotion, of drawing near to the centre. The Mevlevi dervishes – whom I wrote about in the article on the Sema – also turn to the left, around the heart, with one palm facing the sky to receive and the other facing the earth to give. For them, the counterclockwise direction is the path towards union, not towards emptying. And around Mount Kailash, followers of Bön, a religion older than Tibetan Buddhism, walk in the opposite direction to the other pilgrims, without believing they are doing anything "negative."

Even within Christianity, direction has been contested. When Patriarch Nikon reformed the Russian Church in the 1650s, processions around the church began to move "against the sun." The Old Believers refused and kept walking posolon"with the sun." For some, it was a minor detail. For others, a matter of salvation. It was one of the causes of a schism that endures to this day.

So there is no universal law of directions. There is, rather, a polarity, which each culture fills with its own meanings. What remains constant is not the meaning itself, but the intuition that direction matters.

Perhaps the question is not only which way we walk, but also what we walk around. The same direction can mean unbinding in one tradition and drawing closer to the sacred in another. Direction does not work like a universal language with a fixed dictionary. It takes its meaning from the center around which the movement is made, from the intention of the one who makes it, and from the cultural story in which the gesture lives.

What an anthropologist sees: right, left, and the threshold between

Robert Hertz– the same French sociologist who wrote about "double burial" (I mentioned him in the article on Famadihana) – published an essay in 1909 on "the pre-eminence of the right hand." He observed that almost everywhere in the world the right is associated with the sacred, with power and order, while the left is linked with the profane, with weakness, with what is hidden or dangerous. Not because nature made it so, but because human beings need to organize their world in opposing pairs. The directions of the circle extend this polarity: you walk with the sacred on your right or on your left.

Around the same year, Arnold van Gennep described the structure of rites of passage: first a separation,threshold period,then a reintegration. We like to rush to the third stage – the new beginning, the new role, the new life. But van Gennep insisted that without separation, there is no passage. Something has to be left behind before something else can be received.

Victor Turner later developed the idea of the threshold, calling it liminality: a state of "betwixt and between," in which the old identity has come loose and the new one has not yet arrived. It is an uncomfortable place. And yet it is the place where transformation happens.

Seen through this lens, counterclockwise circumambulation can be read as a gesture of separation: it unwinds the thread before it is woven again. This is an interpretation, not a rule of ritual. But it gives a bodily shape to that empty space which van Gennep and Turner considered indispensable to every passage.

What remains of a ritual like this

Anthropology tells us what gestures people have made and what meanings they have given them. Psychology offers something else: an image of the inner world.

Carl Gustav Jung borrowed the term circumambulatio to describe the inner journey of a human being. In Memories, Dreams, Reflections he wrote that psychic development is not linear; there is only a circumambulation of the self, and all paths eventually point towards the center. We do not advance from one point to the next; we circle around a center, returning to the same themes, each time from a slightly different angle.

Perhaps this is where the two directions of the circle meet. One carries us out into the world: we build, we call in, we manifest. The other brings us back: we let fall what is no longer ours and turn back towards the center.

Systemic work adds a third perspective – not as proof of the other two, but alongside them. A new place cannot truly be taken up while the old one has not been acknowledged and released. What has not been ended keeps asking for attention – a relationship no one ever said was over, a role carried out of loyalty, a promise made to someone who is no longer here. Sometimes we do not need yet another beginning. We need an ending done properly.

And the emptiness left after an ending is not a failure. It is van Gennep's threshold. It is the space Turner called "between." It is the place where something new can, at last, find room.

Perhaps not every circle needs to be closed. Some need, first, to be carefully undone.

A gesture for you

If you would like to turn the idea of this article into a personal gesture, you can try the following symbolic exercise. It is not a ritual taken from any tradition, and the direction has no special power in itself. Here, the counterclockwise movement is used only as a bodily image of undoing.

Choose a quiet place – a room, a garden, a tree, a candle set on the floor. Think of something you want to bring to an end: a habit, a stage of life, an old story about yourself. Walk slowly around it three times, counterclockwise, and with each round, say silently what you are letting go. Then stop. Do not call anything in yet. Stay for a few moments in the emptiness that follows.

Three questions for you

What in your life are you trying to keep building, even though you sense it should first be brought to an end?

What "bindings" do you carry – promises, roles, loyalties – that once had their purpose, but now only hold you in place?

How long do you allow yourself to stay in the emptiness after an ending, before rushing towards the next beginning?