Rite of passage

The rite of passage is the class of ritual marking a person's movement from one social status to another, birth, coming of age, marriage, ordination, death, and it is among the most durable analytic categories in the study of religion.

Arnold van Gennep established it in Les rites de passage (1909), and his contribution was to demonstrate that such rites, across every society he examined, share a common threefold structure regardless of what the transition happens to be.

Separation, the preliminal phase: the person is detached from their previous status and from the ordinary social world. Its symbolism is of cutting, leaving and dying, the initiate is removed from the village, hair is shaved, old clothing discarded, and in many cases the former self is explicitly spoken of as having died.

Transition, the liminal phase: the person is between statuses and belongs to neither. Its symbolism is of ambiguity, invisibility, darkness, wilderness, gestation and the tomb. This is where ordeal, instruction in the community's secrets, seclusion and the suspension of ordinary rules occur, and it is the phase Turner developed into the concept of liminality and located communitas within.

Incorporation, the postliminal phase: the person is admitted to the new status and reintegrated into society with new rights and obligations. Its symbolism is of birth, feeding, dressing, naming and joining, a new name, new clothing, a shared meal, the public assumption of new duties.

Van Gennep observed that the three phases are unevenly weighted in different rites: funerals emphasise separation, betrothal emphasises transition, and weddings emphasise incorporation. He also extended the scheme beyond life-crisis rites to territorial passage, to the reception of strangers, and to calendrical transitions such as the new year.

The scheme's explanatory power is considerable. It accounts for why initiations so consistently involve symbolic death and rebirth; why those in transition are so often secluded and regarded as dangerous; and why the same structure recurs in contexts far from its origin, military basic training, academic matriculation and graduation, and the induction procedures of professions and closed institutions all follow it closely, which is why the concept has been so widely borrowed outside religious studies.

Its limits are those of any universal formal scheme. It describes structure rather than meaning, and it says nothing about what a given rite means to those undergoing it, or about who has the power to conduct it and who has no option but to submit to it. Turner's development of liminality, and later feminist and postcolonial work on initiation, address much of what van Gennep's formalism leaves out.

Van Gennep's three-phase structure describes a shape rites tend to share; it says nothing about how formally, or how young, a particular body chooses to mark it, and the variation between traditions on that point is considerable.

The Jewish bar mitzvah, and its now widespread counterpart the bat mitzvah for girls, mark a fixed age of religious majority, thirteen for boys and traditionally twelve for girls, with a public reading from the Torah as the incorporation rite; the bat mitzvah's general adoption is a twentieth-century development, its first documented American instance usually dated to 1922. Christian confirmation performs a comparable function of admitting a baptised person to full participation, but denominations disagree sharply on both its age and its necessity: Catholic and Orthodox practice ties it closely to baptism and, in Orthodoxy, administers it in infancy, while many Protestant traditions treat it as an adolescent rite of personal affirmation or dispense with it altogether. The quinceanera, marking a Latin American girl's fifteenth birthday with a Mass and a celebration, developed as a blend of Catholic liturgy and regional custom rather than as a rite the church itself designed.

Secular society has not abandoned the underlying need so much as relocated it. Humanist naming ceremonies, secular coming-of-age events, and even graduation and retirement ceremonies reproduce van Gennep's separation, transition and incorporation structure with no religious content at all, which is usually taken as evidence for how deep the structure runs rather than for how essential religion is to supplying it.