Rites of Passage

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Rites of Passage

Contemporary American life pulsates at an enormously fast-paced tempo. Cars rush to work and rush home delivering overworked citizens to isolated dens where the television routinely takes over, anesthetizing viewers into a comfortable complacency until the next day's rush back to work begins the whole process over again. We hardly find time to catch our breath, let alone mark the passages of our lives with a ritualistic sense of the sacred. Ancient cultures and indigenous traditions around the world used to offer initiation rites into the various phases of human life, but modern Americans have largely lost this tradition. Our world was long ago demythologized leaving us bereft of powerful rites to provide the ongoing process of life with a sense of meaning.

Joseph Campbell (1907–1987), the American mythographer and folklorist, decries this loss of myth in a number of his works. He follows the Swiss psychologist Carl G. Jung (1875–1961) in championing the importance of myth and ritual, especially for uprooted moderns who so often suffer from alienation and a pervasive sense of meaninglessness—what Jung calls the disease of our age. Rituals provide avenues for "participation mystique," participation in mystery, the experience of the "numinous," or the profoundly awesome.

The journalist Gail Sheehy has also noted this glaring lack of ritual to shepherd us through life's transformations in her popular book of 1974, Passages: Predictable Crises in Adult Life. She remarks that although some attention is paid by psychologists to the difficult passages of childhood and adolescence, the successive stages of adult life rate hardly any notice. She cites Erik Erickson as one of the few psychologists to have offered any awareness of continuing passages after adolescence. The ruling concept appears to be that we fight our way through childhood and the confusions of adolescence only to plateau out into our twenties and cruise through to the finish line on a straight, unmarked path. This paucity of attention to passages through adult life, she says, leaves our potential for continued growth undeveloped. Her book seeks to contribute toward filling in these gaps. She lists these recognizable phases in life: birth, adolescence, and marriage, and also the passages into what she calls the "trying twenties," the drive to extend a root system in the thirties, the "mid-life crucible" of the forties, the sense of renewal in the fifties, then the culmination of life's work, the resting on one's laurels, and the "denouement into decline."

Certainly some rituals remain to mark the attainment of important stages in life. Many of us mark the reaching of a new year at our birthday with some sort of acknowledgment, though few among us may recognize it as an occasion to honor the commencement of a new cycle in our lives. We celebrate various holidays through the year, but what is missing is precisely a sense of the sacred. They are regarded largely as holidays—excuses to enjoy days off from work—but the metaphor has died. We no longer perceive them, by and large, as holy days.

Ritual still surrounds the culminating events of life such as weddings, graduations, and funerals, but what happens to us in between these momentous events? Sheehy notes that other cultures have done more to provide a lifelong nexus of ritual forms to recognize these passages, such as the Hindu system's Four Stages of Life. In this context the religious perspective offers a "sacred canopy" to use Peter Berger's language, providing a container for sacralizing the ongoing experience of life from the student phase, through householder stage, to dharma phase, the period entered in midlife when the natural tendency is to be occupied with a search for deeper meaning, culminating in the moksha stage in the sixties, and beyond, when all Hindus can aspire to take up some version of the life of the sannyassi (holy man) and his quest for salvation.

A similar ritual framework might be cited in the ancient Greek tradition of the archer-goddess Artemis, recognized as the goddess of perilous passages. Each of life's difficult transitions from birth to death was honored by prayers to Artemis to deliver the individual through the narrow passage, as if each such event were a new birth through a perilous birth canal, which could end in death: The perilous passage might kill us.

Today we lack such rituals and are left to flounder through the profound changes in life with a clumsy gait, a forlorn fear, and a nagging sense that there must be something wrong with us. If we had a ritual system to render sacred these predictable and perfectly normal passages in life, we might be able to combat this sense of meaninglessness and infuse our lives with a deeper experience of the sacred.

How different it used to be in the ancient past! Evidence from the Paleolithic cave paintings in France and Spain attest to a profound ritualistic sensibility. Many sites show evidence of adolescent initiation rites, based on the presence of footprints in the soft clay of the cave floors. These footprints, undisturbed for thousands of years, remain as a silent witness to the amazing power of ritual. Many of these ritual sites are miles deep in the caves, in areas very difficult to access. It is as if the ritual necessitated a journey deep into dangerous territory, to undergo an ordeal and a triumphant emergence for the transformed souls who are rebirthed out of the cave, the womb of the deep Earth Mother.

Jean Clottes tells of one spectacular archeological find. The eyes of late twentieth-century explorers were the first in tens of thousands of years to fall upon an incredible sight: At the back of a closed-in passage miles deep in the cave, they witnessed—still standing undisturbed—a bear skeleton. It stood upright on its hind legs with its skull on the ground between its feet and its skeleton covered with a much-maligned bear pelt. As researchers approached it, they discovered, still as fresh as the day they had been trampled in the earth, adolescent-sized footprints in the soft clay, going round and round the bear skeleton, its pelt showing signs of having been repeatedly stabbed by spearheads. Some ancient ritual of adolescent initiation to the mystery of the hunt was frozen here, to stand as a testament for all time, bathed in utter silence and the profound, absolute darkness of the cave's protective walls.

When we say that these adolescents were being initiated into the mystery of the hunt, we petition an important category that Joseph Campbell termed the "company of braves." Primal cultures typically feature such a community, a company of the tribe's brave men who are ritually inaugurated into a sacred duty to protect the tribe from danger and to provide for the tribe's needs by engaging in the hunt, a kind of ritualistic dance in which men and beasts are united in an unspoken pact to partake of each other's life energy. Providing sustenance and protection of the innocent are the archaic tasks, if not to say drives, of the males in the society. Are these drives "hard-wired," rooted at an instinctive level in the masculine consciousness? If so, these primal societies provided a built-in mechanism to honor and celebrate these vital energies, as adolescent boys were put through a ritualistic ordeal to achieve "bravery" and to earn the respect of the grown men who regularly participated in hunting magic. The well-known vision quest tradition among the plains Indians of North America is an example of such a profound initiation ritual: The youth who embarks on the quest returns a brave, as in the similar "walkabout" ritual of the aboriginal Australians and the circumcision and other cutting rituals adolescent boys endure in traditional African cultures.

This sort of initiation rite is almost completely lacking in our contemporary culture. The lack of a sacralizing ritual leaves adolescents to flounder through this stage on their own, bonding with peers who are experiencing the same passage, left to feel completely misunderstood and unappreciated by their parents, teachers, and guardians of the ruling social order into which they are tacitly expected to enter and assume their appropriate place.

Initiation rites are typically supposed to be provided by the religious traditions of a culture. And indeed, the dominant religions of our culture do retain some such rites. There are the Bar and Bat Mitzvah rituals in Judaism, and Confirmation in the church rituals in Catholicism and some forms of Protestantism. But these Western traditions long ago adopted intellectual and/or renunciative norms; their rites of passage into adulthood are characterized by a pronounced cerebral quality. The Jewish boy or girl memorizes Bible passages, leads the congregation in prayer and offers an address modeled on the form of a sermon. It is a ritual introduction into a legalistic framework that he or she now takes on as a personal responsibility. Similarly, the Christian youth undergoing Confirmation is ritually initiated into an all-encompassing system of dogma, with attendant rules and regulations to be followed with diligence. Certainly there is room within the ritual itself for the initiate to experience a profound, spiritual awakening, the presence of the divine filling his or her soul. But this kind of numinous experience probably happens all too infrequently in actuality.

Campbell and Jung claim that traditional Western religions have long ago ossified. The original core experience of the mysterious that rituals are designed to inculcate long ago faded to leave only the external forms of adherence to dogma and strict practice. Rituals like the Bar Mitzvah or Confirmation do not initiate the youth into the mystery of his or her own body. The surging energies experienced in adolescence are never engaged in the initiation rite. Unlike the powerful rituals of primal societies, the Bar Mitzvah boy is not newly initiated into a company of braves nor instilled with the sense of a new potency coursing through his veins. Leading the congregation in prayer may, indeed, be scary, but it is not primal. It is nothing like facing down a huge woolly rhinoceros charging at his face, armed only with a wooden spear.

As Joseph Campbell puts it, the ruling mythologies of our culture are at least two thousand years out of date for our contemporary experience. We do not inhabit the desert world of ancient Jerusalem anymore. Our world is a high-tech, fast-paced wonder of computers and the burgeoning information superhighway. To be initiated into the ancient law or the church is, in most cases, finally irrelevant to the immediate fascinations of the contemporary mindset. It does not provide a mechanism for participating in mystery, even if that is what it was originally designed to do.

This ossification of our traditional religions has left moderns craving for a genuine experience of the numinous. Currents in contemporary culture will always spontaneously invent new modes for such experience. These new ritual forms represent an authentic surging up of primal energies, authentic since they have been authored by participants in contemporary culture and stem directly from contemporary experience.

The contemporary practices of piercing and tattooing that were all the rage in the popular culture of the 1990s might be seen to represent precisely this. It is a new shamanism, as these are long-standing practices shamans have cultivated all over the world. The young person of the 1990s might have been through a Bar or Bat Mitzvah or Confirmation, but that was obligatory—imposed upon them by their parents' expectations and so, not authentic. But the night they went to get their first tattoo or piercing put them through a genuine ordeal. They chose to undergo pain that had to be endured over some period of time. They decided purposefully on the specific tattoo or area to be pierced. These acts of penetration into their flesh left them ritually scarred—marked for life with the proud sign of the ordeal. They forged a new identity during these rituals, as they emerged from out of the darkened tattoo parlor, a marked person, a changed person. The experience might have been entered into in solitude or shared with peers, but it was most emphatically not enjoined by, or typically approved of, by the parental units. It was the sheer intensity of raw, immediate, physical experience the youth was craving. The tattoo and piercing became sacred rituals, rites of passage into a new authentic self.

But what has become of the sacred company of braves? Where is the community of elders who welcomed the newly transformed youth into the mystery of the hunt? The youth today might sport a stylish new tattoo, but then he simply returns to regular life. There is no righteous fight to join to provide for dependents or protect them from harm, though this was not always the case in the modern world until very recent times.

The generations that fought both World Wars I and II had no lack of a righteous fight to engage their primal postadolescent energies. There was a strong company of braves to join as well as a sharply demarcated battle to protect the innocent and combat injustice. These generations experienced no emptiness, no longing for the intensity of experience. Boot camp forcefully—and ritualistically—inaugurated them into the mystery and power of their own bodies. These generations of young men had their primal need to join a respected company of braves well satisfied.

But in the postwar era, the battlegrounds of the righteous fight began to be profoundly obscured. Members of the generation that came into adolescence during the 1950s were rebels, but without a cause. This was the generation that invented rock and roll, the new, virtually exciting pathway for experiencing the numinous and for directly engaging the surging energies of the body. It was not precisely a company of braves, but it was an authentically created avenue for satisfying the desired intensity of experience.

This ritual form continued to engage the generation that came into adolescence in the 1960s. They also had a righteous fight to fight, as they inaugurated the "street-fighting" mode of powerful social protest. The war in Vietnam and the war against the war provided these youths with an avenue for the intensity of experience. But with the 1970s a kind of pervasive disillusionment set in, perhaps born of Watergate, and the young had no real righteous fight to join, no ritual introduction into a company of braves, the traditional model for this carried by the military brotherhood having been distinctly soured after the humiliations of Vietnam. Apathy and self-centered greed became the hallmarks of this age, culminating in the culture of greed of the 1980s.

The 1980s also brought in a conservative swing, a kind of backlash against the complexity that had marked the entire century. The harkening for a more simple, traditional set of "family values" and a swing toward fundamental—that is, basic, simple—forms of religion stamped the young of that era with a conservative quality. This almost seems unnatural for youth, a time in life when rebellion seems to be built in by nature. The youth culture of the 1990s was marked by this conservative legacy but seemed strangely schizophrenic—so often conservative in political values, yet wild in their quest for powerful experience in rave clubs and in the Gothic fascination with the macabre, the cult of death.

Still there was no righteous fight to join, no well-defined set of causes, as if the youth of the 1990s seemed to be resigned to worldwide destruction. It is as if they were "dancing in the wasteland," cultivating a purposeful sense of not caring while the world devolved into violence and chaos. This was apathy with an edge, and a real fascination for violence emerged. The primal company of braves has distorted into inner city street gangs and rural white supremacist and militia movements, filled with young men fascinated with guns and bombs and dedicated to an ugly violence. If there were an honorable avenue for channeling these energies, a way in which young men could earn the genuine respect of the peers and elders and be honored by society for their authentic bravery then perhaps we might avoid the drive-by shootings, gang violence, and school shooting rampages we experienced in the 1990s. In other words, if there were honored, recognized rites of passage for earning genuine power and respect, these distortions might be transformed.

But how do we reinfuse our culture with primal rituals? Not only are adolescents left without an initiation into a company of braves, but the subsequent natural passages of life remain without any ritual forms. The attempts of individuals like Robert Bly and Sam Keen to reintroduce shamanic rituals in the emergent "men's movement" reflect an authentic move toward the resacralizing of our lives, as the conservative Christian Promise Keepers might also be said to represent. These are rituals for adult males that perhaps go some distance toward re-creating an authentic company of braves. All well and good, but they are largely fringe movements, whereas the majority in mainstream culture remain unengaged.

And these rituals are for men only. Where are the primal rituals to initiate the female into the profound mysteries of her own body and to honor her continued transformations through the various stages of life? Such rituals virtually do not exist in our culture, and women are left to experience their own mysteries in isolation. Joseph Campbell said, "woman is the mystery," a profound comment with far-reaching implications. The awesome changes that render the woman capable of creating new life are going to happen within her body in any case. Still, these profound transformations need some ritual avenue to be made consciously meaningful.

While such rituals do not exist for the majority of women, the pagan religions of Wicca, Goddess, and the Earth have perennially provided spiritual containers for the mysteries of the female experience. The contemporary resurgence of such primal forms of religion is a result of the same thirst for the experience of the numinous, for the sacralizing of the stages of our lives. The fact that our contemporary culture has witnessed a strong welling-up of such primal religious forms demonstrates the extreme importance of the need for meaningful rites of passage.