Rites of Passage
How ceremony helps us move from one life stage to the next
My daughter graduated from high school on Friday. It was a nice ceremony, with all the elements you’d expect from a graduation: caps and gowns (descended from medieval scholars’ robes), a somewhat underwhelming commencement speaker, the ritual flip of the tassel from right to left. My daughter was excited for her ceremony and decorated her cap with flowers, a sun, and the words “this is where my life begins.” After it was over, my partner and I gave her a bouquet of flowers and sneak-attacked her with Silly String we’d grabbed in the checkout line at Smart & Final.
The ceremony was also weirdly liminal because my daughter’s real high school, the private school she’d attended for four years, suddenly went out of business at the end of her junior year. So we had to scramble to find somewhere for her to go for her senior year, and it ended up being a statewide online charter school. So when we attended her graduation, we literally knew no one there. Even my daughter hadn’t met any of the kids she graduated with. Nevertheless, we all had one thing in common: we’d made the trek to a random auditorium to participate in this rite of passage.
“Rite of passage” is an anthropological term introduced by the Dutch-German-French ethnographer Arnold van Gennep. It refers to a ritual in which an individual leaves one group and joins another, marking a significant change in their status in society. Van Gennep points out that even in modern, secular societies, many of our rites of passage have their roots in religious and magical ceremonies from past ages. Traditionally, they consist of three stages: first, an individual is separated from their old context. Next, there is a liminal or threshold stage. Finally, they are re-incorporated into the new group or status within society.
Today, we have ceremonies around birth, marriage, and death. But at least in the Anglosphere, we mostly lack rites of passage from childhood to adulthood, like the Jewish bar or bat mitzvah or the Latin American quinceañera. So for many, graduation from high school marks not only an accomplishment but the transition from the provisional world of adolescence to either the adult world of work, or the transitional world of university. And for many, it will be the only such rite of passage they will get to experience.
Most of the rites of passage we have in the modern world have been stripped of whatever religious or magical significance they might have had in the past, or in traditional societies. In other words, they have been disenchanted. This is why they often feel dry, or less meaningful than we’d like them to be.
In traditional societies, rites of passage tie the individual together with the community and also with the more-than-human world of nature and spirit. Like the ancient Mysteries, they combine elements of ritual theatre, music, dance, mythological symbolism, and other means of altering consciousness in order to produce a real psychological change in the initiate.
Absent any spiritual content, we end up with something like my daughter’s graduation speaker, a random real estate agent who talked to the kids about how he’d overcome his personal obstacles to become successful. (Truly inspiring stuff!) Actually, to his credit, the speaker did invoke mythological symbolism—sharing how Iron Man (a.ka. narcissistic tech billionaire Tony Stark) and other superheroes from the Marvel universe inspired him to overcome both the external naysayers and internal voices that stood in his way. Such is the mythology of late capitalism.
Don’t get me wrong, my daughter’s graduation ceremony still felt meaningful, not only for her, but for me and seemingly the majority of parents and family members in attendance. But it did make me wonder—How might we re-imagine rites of passage in order to re-enchant them? Could we create more meaningful ceremonies—even in our modern, secular, world—by re-incorporating some of the elements of traditional ritual? How do we invite soul back into our rites of passage? And could introducing real, meaningful rites of passage from childhood to adulthood help with the youth mental health crisis our society is facing?
That’s all for this week. As always, I appreciate your feedback on Mind, Meaning, and Magic. What did you think of this week’s edition? Let me know by replying to this email or leaving a comment, below.
Thanks for reading,
Chris Cordry, LMFT
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Sometimes we seen to forget, all of use have gone through some rite of passage. The real question may be did you change because of it?
Such is the mythology of late capitalism...
So well put...and sadly true.