Liminality and Madillah

According to Van Gennep, according to Victor Turner in his book, The Ritual Process; Structure and Anti-Structure, “…all rights of passage or “transition” are marked by three phases, separation, margin (or limen, signifying “threshold” in Latin) and aggregation.”

Chapter three in the book, headed:Liminality and Communitas, explores the above phases and describes separation as symbolic behavior …”signifying the detachment of the individual or group from either a fixed point in the social structure, from a set of cultural conditions( a “state”) or from both.”

In the Liminal phase the ritual subject “…passes through a cultural realm that has few or none of the attributes of the past or coming state.” Turner describes liminality and “threshold people” as “…necessarily ambiguous, since this condition and these persons elude or slip through the network of classifications that normally locate states and positions in cultural space. Liminal entities are neither here nor there; betwixt and between the positions assigned and arrayed by law,custom,convention… frequently likened to death, invisibility,darkness,the wilderness…they may be disguised as monsters.”

As for aggregation, well, Madillah hasn’t gotten quite that far.

ISBN 0-202-01043-0