Liminality

Based on Wikipedia: Liminality

You know that strange feeling when you're no longer who you were, but not yet who you're becoming? The disorientation of the first week at a new job, when you don't know anyone's name or where the coffee machine is? The unsettled days between getting engaged and actually being married? The weird limbo of graduating from university but not having started your career?

There's a word for that in-between state, and it comes from the Latin word for threshold: liminality.

It turns out this feeling isn't just a quirk of modern life. Anthropologists discovered that every culture on Earth deliberately creates these threshold experiences through rituals. And understanding why might change how you think about the uncertain periods in your own life.

Standing at the Threshold

In the early twentieth century, a French folklorist named Arnold van Gennep noticed something peculiar as he studied rituals across different cultures. Whether he was looking at coming-of-age ceremonies in tribal societies, wedding traditions in Europe, or funeral rites in Asia, he kept seeing the same three-part structure.

First, there was a separation. The person undergoing the ritual had to leave their old life behind, often in dramatic fashion. A boy about to become a man might be taken from his mother's home in the middle of the night. A bride might symbolically "die" to her family of origin.

Then came the in-between phase—the liminal period. This is where things got strange. The person was neither their old self nor their new self. They existed in a kind of social no-man's-land.

Finally, there was incorporation. The person returned to society, but transformed. They had crossed the threshold and emerged as someone new: an adult, a spouse, a full member of the community.

Van Gennep called this middle phase "liminal" after the Latin word limen, meaning threshold. Picture a doorway between two rooms. The liminal space is the doorway itself—you're neither in one room nor the other. You're standing on the threshold, belonging to neither space entirely.

Why Cultures Create Confusion on Purpose

Here's what makes liminality fascinating: cultures don't just tolerate this uncomfortable in-between state. They deliberately engineer it.

Think about what happens during a traditional initiation ceremony. The young person undergoing the rite is often isolated from their community. They might be dressed in strange clothes, or stripped of clothes entirely. They might be given a new name, or stripped of their name. Normal rules of behavior are suspended. Day becomes night, and night becomes day.

Why would any society put its members through such disorienting experiences?

The answer reveals something profound about how humans change. We don't transform easily. Our identities are sticky things, reinforced by the people around us who expect us to stay the same. Your family still sees the child you used to be. Your old friends expect you to act the way you always have. The social structure itself holds you in place.

To truly change, you need to be shaken loose from that structure. You need a period where the old rules don't apply, where your old identity is dissolved, where you're nobody in particular. Only then can you be remade into somebody new.

As the anthropologist Victor Turner, who did more than anyone to develop these ideas, observed: during liminal periods, "the very structure of society is temporarily suspended."

The Four Universal Thresholds

Van Gennep identified four types of transitions that trigger threshold experiences across virtually all human cultures:

Changes in social status. When someone moves from outsider to insider, from child to adult, from single to married. These are the most dramatic rituals, often involving elaborate ceremonies that mark the transformation publicly.

Changes in place. Moving to a new house, a new city, a new country. Even without formal rituals, these spatial transitions carry a liminal quality. You're no longer part of your old community, but not yet integrated into your new one.

Changes in situation. Starting university, beginning a new job, retiring from a career. These mark shifts in what you do and how you spend your time, even if you stay in the same place with the same people.

Changes in time. New Year celebrations, birthdays, anniversaries. These mark the passage of time itself, creating a threshold between what was and what will be.

Notice how these categories cover almost everything that matters in human life. We are creatures of transition, constantly moving through thresholds whether we recognize them or not.

The Strange Magic of Communitas

One of Turner's most interesting discoveries was that people going through liminal experiences together often develop an intense bond. He called this feeling communitas—a Latin term meaning something like "community," but with deeper connotations of shared humanity and connection.

You've probably felt this yourself. Think about the camaraderie that develops among strangers who get stuck together in an airport during a snowstorm. Or the intense friendships that form during freshman orientation week at college. Or the bonds between soldiers who go through basic training together.

What's happening in these situations is that the normal social structures that separate people have been temporarily dissolved. The CEO and the janitor, the popular kid and the outcast, the rich and the poor—in the liminal space, these distinctions fade. Everyone is equally disoriented, equally vulnerable, equally human.

Turner identified three forms this communitas can take.

The first, spontaneous communitas, happens in the moment. It's that electric feeling of complete connection with others, a "direct, immediate, and total confrontation of human identities." Time seems to stop. Social masks fall away. People experience each other as whole human beings rather than as roles or categories.

The second form, ideological communitas, attempts to capture and preserve that spontaneous feeling by creating utopian communities. Think of the commune movement of the 1960s, or intentional communities that try to live by different rules. These groups aim to make the exceptional feeling of communitas into an everyday experience.

The third form, normative communitas, is what happens when groups try to sustain connection over time through laws, rules, and institutions. It's an attempt to bottle lightning—to create structures that support spontaneous connection without killing it. Turner noted, somewhat ruefully, that this process often ends up "denaturing the grace" of authentic communitas.

When Entire Societies Cross the Threshold

So far we've been talking about individuals going through rituals. But Turner and others noticed something striking: entire societies can enter liminal states too.

The philosopher Karl Jaspers identified what he called the "Axial Age"—a period roughly from 800 to 200 BCE when major civilizations around the world simultaneously developed new philosophical and religious traditions. This was an era when "man asked radical questions" and the "unquestioned grasp on life was loosened."

Think about what happens during a revolution. The old order has collapsed, but the new order hasn't yet solidified. Social hierarchies are disrupted. Future outcomes that once seemed certain are suddenly up for grabs. People who were nobodies become leaders. People who were leaders become refugees or prisoners.

This is liminality at civilizational scale.

And here's where things get dangerous.

In a ritual passage conducted by a small-scale society, there's always a master of ceremonies—someone who has been through the process before and knows how to guide others through it. Everyone involved understands that the liminal period is temporary. There's a known way in, and a known way out.

But when an entire society enters a liminal state, there is no master of ceremonies. No one has been through this particular transformation before. The future is genuinely unknown. There's no guarantee that the society will emerge intact on the other side.

In such situations, what often emerges are "self-proclaimed ceremony masters"—leaders who claim to know the way through the chaos. Some of these figures may be genuine reformers who help their societies navigate the transition. Others may be demagogues who exploit the confusion for their own purposes, deliberately prolonging the liminal state because chaos serves their interests.

History is full of both types.

The Dark Side of the Threshold

Turner has been criticized for being too optimistic about liminality. He tended to see threshold experiences as opportunities for renewal, creativity, and positive transformation.

But other scholars point out that liminal states can also be periods of uncertainty, anguish, and existential terror.

Consider what it actually feels like to have your identity dissolved. It's not always a joyful liberation. Sometimes it's a facing of the abyss, a confrontation with the void where you used to be. When everything you thought you knew about yourself turns out to be contingent, changeable, not as solid as you believed—that can be genuinely frightening.

The breakdown of social structure during liminal periods doesn't just free people from oppressive hierarchies. It also removes the safety nets and support systems that structure provides. In the chaos of revolution, yes, old injustices can be overturned. But new brutalities can also emerge. The absence of rules doesn't guarantee freedom; sometimes it just means that the strongest and most ruthless have free rein.

Liminality is morally neutral. It's a crucible that can produce gold or ash, depending on what goes into it and how the process unfolds.

The Threshold in Your Mind

Psychologists, particularly those working in the tradition of Carl Jung, have found the concept of liminality invaluable for understanding personal transformation.

Jung described a process he called "individuation"—the journey toward becoming a fully integrated self, aware of both the conscious and unconscious aspects of your personality. This journey, Jungians have noted, follows a remarkably similar pattern to the ritual passages that anthropologists study.

First comes a withdrawal from normal life. The persona—the social mask you wear for the world—begins to break down. You can no longer pretend to be the person everyone expects you to be. Old certainties crumble. This is the separation phase.

Then comes a period of disorientation and darkness. You're lost in what Jung sometimes called the "night sea journey" or what one Jungian writer described as "the dark phase of liminality." Old ways of making meaning no longer work, but new ways haven't yet emerged. You're in the wilderness, without a map.

Finally, if the process goes well, integration occurs. You emerge with a new sense of who you are—not the naive identity of youth, but a more complex and authentic selfhood that incorporates aspects of yourself you previously denied or ignored.

The Jungian tradition particularly emphasizes the figure of the trickster as a symbol of liminality itself. Think of characters like Hermes in Greek mythology, Coyote in Native American traditions, or Loki in Norse myths. These figures live on the threshold between order and chaos, civilization and wilderness, the sacred and the profane. They're unreliable and dangerous, but also sources of creativity and renewal.

The trickster represents the permanent accessibility of liminality as what one scholar called "a source of recreative power." You can always step off the well-worn path into the borderlands where transformation becomes possible.

The Therapeutic Threshold

This understanding of liminality has shaped how many psychotherapists think about their work.

Jung himself conceived of the therapeutic relationship as creating what he called a temenos—a Greek term meaning a sacred precinct, a bounded space set apart from ordinary life. Within this container, the usual social rules are suspended. The patient doesn't have to maintain their normal persona. Difficult material can emerge safely because both participants understand that they're in a special space with its own rules.

The therapist in this model serves a function somewhat like the master of ceremonies in a ritual passage. They've been through their own version of the journey. They know the territory, even if each person's specific path is unique. They hold the space while the patient undergoes their transformation.

The humanistic psychologist Carl Rogers noted that effective therapy often has what he called an "out-of-this-world quality"—a sense of stepping outside ordinary time and space. Therapist and client enter what feels almost like a trance state together, emerging at the end of the session "as if from a deep well or tunnel."

This is liminality in a contained, controlled form. The therapy room becomes a threshold space where the hard work of personal transformation can occur.

Living on the Threshold

So what do we do with this understanding of liminality?

First, it might help to recognize when we're in a liminal state. That disorientation you feel during major life transitions isn't a bug—it's a feature. It's part of how human transformation works. You're supposed to feel uncertain and unmoored. That's the threshold experience doing its job, loosening your grip on who you used to be so you can become who you're becoming.

Second, it's worth understanding that liminality can be dangerous as well as generative. The absence of structure means the absence of protection as well as the absence of constraint. If you find yourself in a liminal period—personally or collectively—it's worth being thoughtful about who you trust to guide you through it, and skeptical of anyone who seems too eager to assume that role.

Third, the concept of communitas suggests that going through thresholds with others creates unusually strong bonds. This has practical implications. If you want to build genuine connection with people, shared liminal experiences—new challenges, unfamiliar situations, joint adventures into the unknown—are more effective than comfortable familiarity.

Finally, there's something profound in the recognition that every culture on Earth has found it necessary to create threshold experiences. We seem to need periodic disruptions of the normal order, controlled doses of chaos that allow us to transform. When societies lose their rituals, people may seek out liminal experiences in other ways—not always healthy ones.

Perhaps the question isn't whether we'll experience liminality, but whether we'll experience it consciously and constructively, or whether it will catch us unprepared.

The threshold is always there, after all. The only question is how we cross it.