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"Let us eat and drink," you say, "for tomorrow we die!"
Wander into any card shop and you will find a plethora of ways to congratulate or commiserate: birthday cards, anniversary cards, cards calling to mind an ever increasing number of holidays, cards for weddings, births and bereavements. The Christian heritage of the country is still displayed in the section dealing with Baptisms, Communion and Confirmations. There is also a good chance that in the same shop you'll find various bits of costuming, balloons, etc., to be used for hen nights, stag parties, graduations, etc.
What most of these have in common is the element of communal celebration or action: in sending/giving such things to each other, we join in an event of significance to the other. The very human message is one of solidarity: you are not alone.
There is another characteristic these cards and decorations share: they tend to celebrate or commemorate events which can be called "moments of passage" - the celebration of these events are rites of passage.
Most societies celebrate these events, both as the occur in the life of the individual and in the life of the group,. It seems to be important to us to mark the change that these events demonstrate.
Human life does not advance smoothly from birth to old age and death. Rather, it seems to go in stages, as noted by texts as diverse as the works of Shakespeare and the riddle of the Sphinx. It is the transition between these stages that make the points of passage; and these seem to evoke from us a need to, not to put too fine a point on it, throw a party.
Moments of passage seem to me to be of two kinds, natural, that is, those that happen due to the natural processes of the body, and societal. The natural ones include ceremonies to marking the onset of menses, birth, perhaps ceremonies marking the end of a woman's childbearing years.
Societal passages tend to mark transitions which, while quite real, occur not at any set natural sage but rather due to human decision. Included here would be ceremonies marking entry into the adult state, or some milestone along the way, and marriage ceremonies.
Whether natural or societal, however, all of these events marks threefold movement. The person (or persons) involved begins the process securely established in a particular state: childhood, singleness, etc. They end the process when they are (more or less) securely established in the next stage; these two form the casing, the outer shell, if you like, of the event. The state in between, the state where the subject is neither one nor the other, the state of uncertainty and insecurity, is a liminal one: a state between states.
A liminal state is one of transition - it is, in a very real sense, a journey from one to the other, from the first state, to the second, by way of the uncertain middle. And, like nay journey, there is at least some level of danger involved. The essence of liminality is the absence of guarantees: it is not always certain that the traveller will arrive safe at her destination.
And hence, the celebration when that arrival takes place. To take what is probably the most obvious case, the family or community celebrates the mother's safe delivery: both she and her child have negotiated the difficult and (particularly before the advent of modern medicine) hazardous journey between pregnancy and separate existence. The process has all the hallmarks of a good, adventurous journey: pain, danger, blood, toil, sweat and tears.
The process is less obvious in relation to other rites of passage, but it is none the less real. The movement from the single state to the married (however conceived) is in many societies a change of allegiance for at least one of the partners: a leaving of the old, the familiar, for the new, the strange, the alien. Our own society perpetuates this in the practice of a woman leaving behind them their family names to take on that of their husbands.
Having undertaken the journey, then, having faced the danger, having traversed the liminal places, we celebrate. We call together a group - a family, a tribe, a community - and rejoice with each other.
But that's not all we do. Our rejoicing takes ritualised forms. Not only do we celebrate, we celebrate in specific ways, using particular motifs, repeating particular words, engaging in particular actions.
Ritual is defined as formalised ways of acting which are common to a group (Giddens 2001); it can be seen as a type of language (Levi-Strauss 1963). Putting your left shoe on first each morning is not ritual, if it is merely habit. If you attach certain beliefs to that action, and if you share those beliefs with others, (say, that if you put your right shoe on first, you will have bad luck during the day), then the action may be classed as ritual. It's the belief that changes habitual actions (pushing your hair back every time you adjust your glasses) into ritual (ensuring your hair is arranged in a particular way for a particular event, over and over again). We celebrate our successful completion of movements of passage with ritual - with rites of passage.
Of course not all celebratory rites are rites of passage - or at least, not obviously so. At the beginning of this piece I mentioned hat societies, as well as individual, at times needed rites of passage, and I think many of our rituals fit under this heading.
We humans seem to be the sorts of things who need signs, symbols, rituals. Every family will have a story that is always told when they gather, every group of friends shares "in jokes", professions share jargon which is often incomprehensible to outsiders. One of the functions of ritual is to form and solidify the group. This is perhaps never clearer than in dealing with societal rites of passage.
Anyone who was in England at the time of the death of the Princess of Wales will have noticed an extraordinary thing: a public need for and outpouring of ritual, both formal and informal, the highly structured and the spontaneous. There was a widely felt need to express grief and/or shock not only in words but in gestures.
This shouldn't really surprise us - especially not those of us who follow a cycle of celebrations. With a little examination, most o four rituals can be seen to have something to do with passage from one state, stage to another.
An obvious example is whatever festival/ritual we might use to mark the harvest. Whether this is the Cailleach made by the first farmer to finish harvesting his fields, and given to the last, or a formalised celebration of Lugnassah, what we are about is the recognition of the passing of the growing time and the arrival of the fallow time. It is (or was, in subsistence economies) a passage out of danger - in the sense that the danger to the harvest (whether weed, worm or weather) had passed with its safe gathering.
It is also, of course, a sort of initiation into another period of danger: either the harvest will be sufficient to feed the group through the winter or it will not. The light is waning, the dark returning, and the weather turning to the cold and wet - traditionally the conditions of spiritual and physical danger.
I have called these rites of passage, or celebratory rites. But to a large extent they may just as fittingly be called rights of passage.
These are things we need to do, events we need to mark: they are events which evoke a certain response from us and I'd argue that we have a right to exercise that response. In doing so, we overtly value both the journey through danger (whether individual danger in childbirth or societal danger in the exigencies of the harvest), and the arrival at our destination. The title of this article is not a misprint, but rather a claim made.
*****
Artz, S., Scott, D. G., et al. (1998). "Rites of Passage: A Conversation on Becoming Adult." Child & Youth Care Forum 27(5): 355 - 377.
Campbell (1949). The hero with a thousand faces. Princeton, Princeton University Press.
Giddens, A. (2001). Sociology. 4th. 1989 Cambridge, Polity Press.
Levi-Strauss, C. (1963). Structural Anthropology. Harmondsworth, Penguin Books, Ltd.
O'dea, T. (1966). The sociology of religion. Inkeles, A. Foundations of Modern Sociology. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, Presntice-Hall, Inc.
- Diotima
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