Liminality is the condition of being on a threshold, no longer what you were and not yet what you will be. The word comes from the Latin limen, a threshold, and was first used for the middle stage of a rite of passageRite of passage. The deliberate death-and-rebirth (separation → liminal → incorporation, after van Gennep) by which the childhood-built identity is dismantled and a new one, rooted in the Soul, is grown. The lost route to Adulthood. More about this, before spreading to any in-between time, place or state, from dusk to adolescence to grief. In Therapeutic Shamanism liminal places and moments are where fixed things loosen and become fluid again, which is why they are both unsettling and the places where transformation, connection and healing become possible.
What does liminality mean? #
The in-between. Someone in a liminal state has left one condition behind without yet arriving at the next, like the initiate who is no longer a child and not yet an adult, the bereaved person whose old life has ended and whose new one has not begun. The term was first used for the middle of the three stages of a rite of passage, between separation and incorporation, by the folklorist Arnold van Gennep, and the anthropologist Victor Turner made it one of the best-known ideas in the study of ritual, calling the person in that state ‘betwixt and between’. See Who was Arnold van Gennep, and what are the three stages of a rite of passage? and Who was Victor Turner, and what are liminality and communitas?
Where else is the idea used? #
Almost everywhere change happens. Times of day and year are widely treated as liminal: twilight and midnight, the solstices and equinoxes, New Year. So are places between one destination and the next, such as doorways, corridors, airports, shorelines and borders. Writers on politics and society have taken it up too. The anthropologist Bjørn Thomassen describes migrants and stateless people as living ‘betwixt and between’ home and host, and the sociologist Arpad Szakolczai describes whole societies in crisis as liminal, when the ordinary structure of social life is suspended for a time.1
Therapists use it for the special atmosphere of a session, set apart from ordinary time, and Jungian writers link it to the process of individuation. In the late 2010s ‘liminal spaces’ became an online genre of its own, with photographs of empty hallways and corridors, unsettling because they are places made for passing through, seen with no one in them. For Turner’s word for the chosen, playful in-between experiences of modern life, ‘liminoid’, see the Turner answer.
Why is the in-between both dangerous and full of possibility? #
Because nothing in it is fixed. A person or thing on a threshold belongs to no category, and the anthropologist Mary Douglas showed how cultures feel such states as dangerous, so that people passing through them are kept apart and surrounded with rules; see Who was Mary Douglas, and what did Purity and Danger show? Turner saw the other side, the in-between as a place of pure possibility where new ways of being can arise.
Both are true. What has come loose can be harmed, and it can also be remade.
How does Therapeutic Shamanism understand liminality? #
Through the betwixt-and-between places, the cracks between separations where things connect, and through an image taken from physics. In the double-slit experiment, an electron can behave as a wave passing through both slits, or as a particle passing through one; when it is observed, the wave potential collapses into a single physical thing. Shamans have always understood this to be the nature of the physical 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, where possibilities settle into separate, solid things. The problem is how far we take it these days. We have collapsed our perceptions so far that we mostly see only separation, and have lost our sense of connection.
Liminal places and moments are where that collapse loosens. In a rite of passage the first stage deliberately disrupts normality to shock the initiate into an altered state, un-collapsing the wave potential, and in the liminal stage that follows everything is full of potential, flux and interconnectedness; the initiate is taken apart and reformed, like a pupa in a chrysalis. The hunter-gatherer initiation at adolescence was designed to dismantle the identity built in childhood and replace it with one rooted in Soul, and we no longer have such initiations.2 See What is a rite of passage, and what did we lose when initiation disappeared?
The same happens in a shamanic journey. Moving from sea to sky, or descending from sky to land or underground, are among the most meaningful moments in a journey, because transitions suggest movement, change and a turning point. There is no resurrection without descent, and no new self without the death of the old. These transitions are liminal moments, “in-between spaces that are neither one thing nor another. And that is where the real magic happens.” The axis mundiAxis mundi. A real, physical place in nature where the veils between the worlds are thin; the world-axis (World Tree) from which a shamanic journey is entered. Read the full answer, where a journey begins, is one of these places too. See What are the betwixt-and-between places, and why do they matter? and What is an axis mundi, and why does place matter?
Is the collapsing wave a claim about physics? #
It is used as an image. The experiment is real and its interpretation is still argued over by physicists; what the teaching takes from it is a picture of two ways of being, one fixed and separate and the other fluid and connected, and of the shamanic task as learning to move between them. Shamanism has always known both, walking with one foot in each world. For a physicist’s own picture of an enfolded, undivided reality beneath the world of separate things, see What did David Bohm mean by the “implicate order”?
What happens when people are stuck in the in-between? #
They can be left neither one thing nor the other for good. Turner held that the liminal stage has to end, since it cannot last without some structure to hold it, and the rite’s third stage is the return, with a new place in the community. Some writers think modern life leaves people stranded instead. The scholar of religion and psychology Peter Homans described Jung‘s psychology as a kind of ‘permanent liminality’, and the sociologist Reuven Kahane argued that for many young people liminality has become a permanent condition.3
In Therapeutic Shamanism this is one face of a wider loss, since our culture no longer has the initiations that once carried young people through the threshold of adolescence and into a new identity rooted in Soul. See What does it mean to become a true Adult?
