What is a rite of passage, and what did we lose when initiation disappeared?

What is a rite of passage? #

A ceremony that marks and makes a change in someone’s life. The phrase comes from the ethnographer Arnold van Gennep, who worked in France and whose book The Rites of Passage (1909) showed that across many cultures the great changes of a life, such as birth, coming of age, marriage and death, are surrounded by rites with the same underlying shape: a separation from the old state, a time in between, and an incorporation into the new one. For van Gennep, “The life of an individual in any society is a series of passages from one age to another and from one occupation to another.”¹ There is more on him and his three stages in Who was Arnold van Gennep, and what are the three stages of a rite of passage?

A rite of passage does not only celebrate a change that has already happened. For van Gennep, the essential purpose of such ceremonies is “to enable the individual to pass from one defined position to another which is equally well defined.”²

What were initiations into Adulthood for? #

To make a true Adult. Because they understood how easily, as Humans, we can be strangers to our true, authentic Soul, hunter-gatherer cultures held initiation ceremonies around the time of adolescence, “designed to shock the initiate out of childhood thinking and help them step up to become a true Adult.” Being an Adult meant being connected to your true Soul, knowing your true Human nature, and taking your place on the Earth as an interconnected being, a member of the great tribe of all the PeoplesThe Peoples. The Animal People, Plant People, Standing People (the Trees) and Stone People: our elder kin, of whom the Human People are the youngest and least wise. A family, not a hierarchy. Read the full answer.³

To take part in the human middle-worldMiddle-world. Ordinary physical reality together with its energetic layers: the realm of individuality, separation and mixed intentions, and the only realm where harm is possible. “If there is a hell, then it is the middle-world.” Read the full answer we need a middle-world selfMiddle-world self. The everyday self (ego, persona, head-and-heart), made of our stories and experiences. A genuine and needed part of the Inner Tribe: of service, not in command. Read the full answer, and children build one as they grow up. But hunter-gatherers knew that we can become lost in the stories this part of us tells, and so the initiations “were designed to dismantle the middle-world identity that someone had constructed in their childhood, and replace it instead with a new identity. An identity rooted in their Soul and which grew from it, in the same way that Soul itself is rooted in Mother EarthMother Earth. The sacred Feminine pole: pure potential, from whom all the Peoples arise. The Lower-World is her realm, and she is all the realms: “The Earth is indeed our Mother.” More about this and grows from her.”⁴ See What does it mean to become a True Adult?

Why did initiation happen at adolescence? #

Because finding your Soul is itself an initiation into Adulthood, and adolescence is when a person is ready for it. “There is a reason why, in all hunter-gatherer tribes, people waited until adolescence before beginning the process of finding their Soul.” Hunter-gatherer children were raised by real Adults who modelled and embodied Adulthood, so that when the time came, “adolescents knew exactly what they needed to step into to make the transition.”⁵

Van Gennep made a related point a century ago. He held that initiation rites should not be called ‘puberty rites’, because the moment a society treats someone as grown up, social puberty, and the body’s own puberty “are essentially different and only rarely converge.”⁶ What the rite marks is a change of role and identity, not only a change in the body.

What did we lose when initiation disappeared? #

True AdultsTrue Adult. Not someone with a job and a mortgage, but a person shocked out of childish separateness who has taken up their place, interdependently, in both the human tribe and the more-than-human web. Adults decide; Elders advise. Read the full answer, to begin with. “These days, we no longer perform these initiation ceremonies, of course. The result is that true Adults are extremely rare in our society.” Most people never really grow up to become truly Adult: “we live in a society not of Adults but of adults; a society of children in adult-sized bodies”, people lost in human middle-world concerns who never step up to take their place in the more-than-human world, or the responsibilities that go with it.⁷ Most people are stuck in the middle-world identities they settled on when they were little, “unconsciously playing out childhood patterns in their ‘adult’ lives”.⁸

The loss runs on down the generations. Without initiations or a model of a healthy Adult, many children are now raised by people who are themselves still children, in adult-sized bodies.⁹ And because Eldership grows out of Adulthood, true Elders have become “vanishingly rare these days, and our communities desperately need them back.”¹⁰ See What is an Elder?

Is a rite of passage a betwixt-and-between place? #

Yes. All indigenous cultures understood that children are born with a strong sense of individuality, and that becoming a healthy adult means growing beyond that childhood self-centredness, so there needs to be a deliberately managed transition to shock us out of childhood and help us grow up. Without one, “most ‘grown-up’ people are effectively still children or functioning adolescents at best.” The middle of such a rite is an in-between time, full of potential and flux, in which a person is taken apart and reformed, like a pupa in a chrysalis, before returning to their community with a new role and place. See What are the betwixt-and-between places, and why do they matter?

Does initiation have to be dramatic? #

No, although it can be. Paul Francis’s own path to his Soul ran through a series of events that left him with severe post-traumatic stress disorder, and he looks on that time as “a kind of shamanic initiation”, like the ‘death’ before a rebirth that shamans undergo in many indigenous cultures. There is nothing about doing it that way, though, that he can recommend, and the process of finding your Soul “does not have to be a dramatic one.”¹¹

He also tells of an initiation journey into Adulthood that his GuidesGuides. The Lower-World and Upper-World beings a practitioner works with and learns from, of whom the Power Animal is the first and foremost. True Guides are ethical to their core; the shaman’s power comes from the depth of these bonds, not from the shaman. More about this told him he needed to make, which took months of preparation. After a series of tests and challenges he found his Lower-WorldLower-World. The realm of Mother Earth: pure, unspoilt, wild nature, with no technology and no agriculture. Home of the Peoples and of our own Soul, and completely safe: feeling threatened in a journey is a reliable sign of not having reached it. Read the full answer Soul, and was then asked to become Bear, then Eagle Owl, then Stag, and Animal after Animal. “And then I got it. One of the key things the initiation ceremonies are about is to teach you what it is to be Human. What my Guides were showing me was that Humans are shapeshifters.”¹²

Can we still be initiated today? #

In a sense, yes, through finding our Soul, which is the heart of what the old initiations did. “Finding your Soul is an initiation into Adulthood. It is about stepping into being your authentic, Adult self.”¹³ In Therapeutic Shamanism this is done through shamanic journeying to the Lower-World, the only place our Soul is to be found, and it is the start of a process, not a single event. See What does rewilding Soul mean, and how do we discover our gifts and life direction? and Can initiation be recreated today, and what makes a modern rite of passage safe?

Did every hunter-gatherer people initiate its young? #

The ethnographic record and the archaeological record answer differently. The archaeologist April Nowell notes that in all cultures human groups mark the passage from child to adult with some form of ritual or ceremony, and, citing other researchers, that female initiation rites in particular are typical of foraging societies. She also notes that there is no archaeological evidence for such ceremonies amongst the teenagers of the Palaeolithic.¹⁴ So the accounts of initiation in hunter-gatherer cultures come from peoples known to anthropology in recent centuries, and what happened in the deep past has to be inferred.