Betwixt and Between

“The category of liminality is useful in understanding such cultural phenomena as subjugated autochthons, small nations, holy mendicants, good Samaritans, millenarian movements, “dharma bums,” matrilaterality in patrilineal systems, patrilaterality in matrilineal systems, monastics orders and many more.” Victor Turner

I’ve been thinking and writing here for the past few months about pilgrims and pilgrimage.  This week I will take some ideas and terms from anthropology and from career consulting and try to apply them to what it’s like to go on a pilgrimage.

Victor Turner (quoted above) was a Scottish anthropologist best known for writing about ritual.  He lived with and studied the Ndembu people of Zambia and described extensively the initiation rites that their adolescents must undergo.  In particular, he used the work of an earlier French folklorist, Arnold Van Gennep, to describe three phases of all rites of passage.  First there is separation, where the individual is detached from the group.  Next is the phase Van Gennep calls limen or margin, where the status of the individual, called “passenger” or “liminar,” is ambiguous; “the liminar is betwixt and between,” he writes.  The final phase is aggregation, where the passage is completed and the individual returns to their secular or mundane social life. 

Having studied these three phases of the ritual processes in traditional tribal societies, Turner and his wife Edith turned their attention to these same kinds of passages in historical religious settings, publishing Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture in 1978.  They present case studies of various historic Christian pilgrimage movements, from Mexico’s Virgin of Guadalupe to European pilgrimages to Mary in Walsingham and Lourdes.  Since that time other anthropologists have studied pilgrimage movements in many world religions. 

The Turners define liminality as “the state and process of mid-transition in a rite of passage.  During the liminal period, the characteristics of the liminars (the ritual subjects in this phase) are ambiguous, for they pass through a cultural realm that has few or none of the past or coming state.  Liminars are betwixt and between.  The liminal state has frequently been likened to death; to being in the womb; to invisibility, darkness, bisexuality and the wilderness.”

The word liminality comes from the Latin word limen which means threshold.  The limen is literally the border on the floor between rooms, the board that stops the door or that you step over to enter the room.  You are leaving one room and entering another, but you are not there yet, you are betwixt and between, standing on the threshold.  “Subliminal” refers to the hints or inferences that come subconsciously, under (sub) the limen (threshold) between our conscious and unconscious awareness.

Limens are rich, scary, open, ambiguous, marginal and transitional times and spaces.  The Turners says, “Liminality is a no- place and no-time that resists classification.”

William Bridges, a minister, counselor and now management consultant, wrote a book as influential as Turner’s The Ritual Process, called Transitions.  His basic point is that we are wrong when we think that transitions have a beginning, a middle and an end.  Rather, a transition starts with an ending, a saying goodbye.  Then there comes what he calls “the Neutral Zone,” which he describes as anxious confusing time when the individual can be impatient to move on, but the phase must be experienced fully before they can achieve the final stage, the new beginning. 

I first read Bridges when I was in a quandary concerning my own career, and ready just to leave the old and jump into something new.  His advice was good, that I had to go slowly through all the phases, to say goodbye to the old career, then to “wander in the wilderness” for a while (my preferred rephrasing of the “neutral zone” – it can be a fruitful time with manna and grace) and only then would come the new beginning.  It worked!

The Turners argue that pilgrimages are “luminoid” because a pilgrim by definition is betwixt and between.  They leave their home and job and status and set off into an unknown time and place, a wilderness. They become “passengers” on the pilgrimage route, and during that time and place they give up their social standing and comforts/expectations of home.  Leaving these behind can be freeing, democratic, surprising.  Pilgrims take this risk because they are seeking a new beginning, like the adolescent initiation rite, into a new life phase.  By going through this passage they are seeking a new beginning, be it meaning or healing or reconciliation or just a new perspective.

But they can’t just go straight from their old life to the new, they have to wander a bit, which is what the French word for pilgrim means, pelerine, a wanderer.  But next comes what pilgrims often say is the hardest phase, coming home.  Like the adolescent who has done the walkabout or the wilderness camp, now they have to go back to so called normal life, be an adult.

Thresholds, limens, brinks are rich, scary, changing places. Shorelines, wilderness.  It is there and then that you meet, in Turner’s words, dharma bums and good Samaritans and monastic orders.  And pilgrims.

Copyright © 2016 Dale Rominger