I walk down the staircase in my white dress, bouquet in hand, veil secured at the base of my neck. I feel nervous, and excited. The stairwell is ‘in between’. I am neither in the rooms above, nor standing in the chapel below. I can hear the quiet murmurs of the guests as they move towards their seats. Dad waits at the bottom of the stairs. Waits to give me away to another man.
This other man, like me, is in a strange place. No longer my fiancé, not yet my husband. Together we are suspended between two ways of being. We spent last night apart, despite having lived together for over two years. It seemed important that he not see me the night before the wedding. It seemed important to a lot of people.
If you study ritual, it is inevitable that you will bump into Arnold van Gennep and Victor Turner, particularly when discussing ritual transformations. In anthropology liminality (from the Latin term limen meaning “a threshold”) is the ambiguity or disorientation that occurs in the middle stage of a rite of passage, when participants no longer hold their pre-ritual status, but have not yet begun the status they will hold at completion of the rite.
Van Gennep’s Rites de Passage posits that rites of transition are marked by three phases: separation, transition, and consummation. Ritual is, essentially, myth in praxis. The practical side of the myth-ritual relationship actively separates, breaks-down and rebuilds categories. This is why it all feels a little strange. You’re being broken down. Your familiar labels are being removed.
Bruce Kapferer is an Australian anthropologist who writes about ‘ritual virtuality’. He argues that ritual is ‘neither a simulacrum of realities external to ritual nor an alternative reality’. Ritual may share similar characteristics to our everyday non-ritual life, but it has its own distinctive qualities. It is neither a representation of the ‘real’ nor ‘virtual’ as in ‘not real’. ‘Ritual to non-ritual’ is ‘depth to surface’, with the surface being our everyday.
Kapferer describes ritual as a ‘self-contained imaginal space’. An imaginal space that changes the tempo of our everyday. In doing so it affords access to ‘processes that are otherwise impossible to address in the tempo and dynamics of ordinary lived processes’.
I’ll meet you where myth, storytelling and all the wondrous imaginings of the human mind dwell. Where past, present and future dissolve. Where, at depth, we are all leveled, and open to transformation.
When we think of repetition we often think of sameness. The same thing happening over and over again. The white dress, the veil, the bouquet … But while ritual is repetitive, it is not repetitive in the same way. While its constancy may, at first glance, seem rigid, unchanging or inflexible, it is, on closer inspection, a harbinger of change.
Woody Allen bemoans Nietzsche’s notion of ‘eternal recurrence’ in Hannah and her Sisters, saying: ‘He said that the life we lived we’re gonna live over again the exact same way for eternity. Great. That means I’ll have to sit through the Ice Capades again.’ The thing is, Nietzsche wasn’t saying that we would live the same life repeatedly. Rather, Nietzsche’s pro-human philosophies posit that human being is not condemned to repeat her past; that there is always the potential to continually create and recreate, in repetition. The capacity of ritual to change, alter or transform is achieved without the need to redefine or reshape the symbolic or practiced elements of the rite itself.
When we sprint to ideas, fail fast, hustle and head out on a quest to accelerate growth, we also risk losing the ability to change at depth. This is why we need to create, and play, in imaginal spaces a little more. Not despite the fact they have a tendency to interrupt our everyday, but rather, because they do.
References:
Bastin, R 2013, ‘The Politics of Virtuality’, Religion and Society, Vol 4, p 21.31
Kapferer, B 2004, ‘Ritual in Its Own Right: Exploring the Dynamics of Transformation’, Social Analysis: The International Journal of Anthropology, Vol. 48, No. 2, pp. 35-54