3. Life on the Edge

Liminality is every bit as important to Pagan culture as self-sovereignty. Unfortunately, most Pagans have never heard the word before. Depending on how you look at it, the concept is tremendously simple or extremely complex. The briefest explanation is that liminality refers to being “betwixt and between;” an ambiguous, intermediate category. A somewhat more complete definition would be that the word liminality derives from the Latin word for border, and comes to us from anthropology and mythology. In those contexts, it can refer to a place or a state of being or a time which cannot itself be clearly defined, because it is on the margin of, or allows access to, multiple contiguous places, states, etc. Dusk is a liminal moment. Adolescence is a liminal stage. A Wiccan circle is a liminal space. A shaman is a liminal figure. When one is in a liminal place, the laws of ordinary reality are relaxed, and possibility opens into infinity. I think that the term is so hard to define because the concept is, itself, on the edge of definition; it’s the shore between the mundane and the Mystery. [1]

To bring this a little closer to Paganism, let me quote from George P. Hansen’s The Trickster and the Paranormal: “…the paranormal, and the supernatural are fundamentally linked to destructuring, change, transition, disorder, marginality, the ephemeral, fluidity, ambiguity, and blurring of boundaries.  In contrast, the phenomena are repressed or excluded with order, structure, routine, stasis, regularity, precision, rigidity, and clear demarcation.”[2] Thus, we Pagans, who are so often drawn to ideas of magic, mystery, and various alternative lifestyles, communities, and interests, are liminal. This further underlines the short shrift given by many Pagans to order, organizations, and rigidity which we saw in the last essay on personal sovereignty.

There is a strong relationship between personal sovereignty and liminality. Because of the flux and resistance to convention and conventional structures, one has to have a strong sense of self or one can be washed away, dissolved into the chaos. Magic is liminal; Will harnesses magic so that it can be manifested in the ordinary world. Order to chaos and back to order again. Because liminal states can be so disorienting, one must keep one’s wits about them; if you go to Faery, you must be careful not to eat or drink, or you will be stuck there forever, never to see your kith and kin again.

Ritual is also liminal; the Wiccan description of the circle as “a time outside of time, a place outside of place,” explicitly shows this to be so. So, too, is the crossroads, whether literal or metaphorical. The point uniting land, sea, and sky is liminal. In fact, much of the early work on liminality revolved around the liminal nature of ritual, especially coming of age rituals. [3] Psychopomp work, seidr, trancework, pathworking … all of these are liminal practices, as well.

But liminality is not just about magic, ritual, and myth. It is also about recognizing the limits of standard boundaries. Those with alternative sexuality, for example, are liminal figures. In many Native American tribes, third or fourth gendered individuals are often considered to be particularly spiritually powerful. Among the Mohave, for example, it was thought that berdaches were particularly potent medicine persons or shamans, especially as related to issues of birth, death and sex. [4] Trickster gods commonly change gender and otherwise flout societal norms as an expression of their liminal nature. Thus, it isn’t surprising that LGBT, polyamorous and feminist Pagans are common.

Other, less primal interests, which are common to Pagans also arise from their liminality. Science fiction and fantasy literature, gaming, and fandom, for example, wherein one leaves ordinary reality by reading a book, watching a movie, or playing a game; and then returns, with the possibility of attempting to recreate that world in ordinary reality. Historical recreation, such as the SCA, with its sometime motto of, “The Middle Ages as they should have been,” is another good example.[5] Both the hippie and Goth countercultures are also commonly encountered, and both are explicitly representations of an outsider lifestyle. (That they commonly focus on the dangerous borderlands of sex and death is no surprise, either.)

Many Pagans grew up as social outsiders: freaks, geeks, artists, and other weirdoes. This can be a problem because outsiders often don’t learn, or outright reject, many of the social skills that insiders assimilate. When you have a bunch of folks, who don’t always know (or care) how to work and play well with others, attempt to work and play with others, it’s messy.

Adolescence, when many of us realized that we “aren’t like other folks,” is itself a liminal state, and consequently Paganism has a particular draw for adolescents. This provides Paganism with a constant influx of new ideas and voices, but it also poses a tremendous number of challenges, many of which are very serious, such as the responsibility or lack thereof for the education of young Pagans, while respecting the legal and ethical limits of teaching a minor without -- or, worse, in direct opposition of -- parental approval.

As with so much else in Paganism, liminality is both a strength and a weakness. It provides Pagans with the valuable skill of being able to evaluate a person or situation from a unique vantage point, but this outsider status can often have unpleasant emotional and psychological baggage attached. The need to differentiate, to go against the grain, can result in harm from the forces resistant to such differentiation. There’s a common traditional connection between magic and madness; this is not always such a good thing. The line between thinking different and thinking dangerous can be uncomfortably fuzzy, and Paganism attracts both types of individuals.

The social challenges of liminality include perceptions of Pagans as heterodox, even dangerously anti-orthodox, to mainstream culture and religions (although some Pagans embrace this status, as well.) At the same time, this negative perception of Pagans is often over-emphasized, even glorified, by some Pagans who exhibit a persecution complex or victim mentality. This can cause problems both within Pagan communities and in relation to non-Pagans.

Yet, as we noted earlier, many Pagans also have a strong yearning for continuity and tradition. In part, this is likely the case because most Pagan religions are relatively new, and there is a sense that the existence of a lineage will bolster their validity. In a culture to which very few of its members are born, lineage, history, and affiliation can create a sense of solidarity, community, even family. Being in a liminal state is stressful; it necessitates constant attention to and interaction with one’s environment. You can’t just follow the rules, because what rules there are are subject to broad interpretation and continual renegotiation. This, often ambivalent, need for tradition and continuity counterbalances that stress. At the same time, the traditions and communities must respect the ultimate authority of the individual, and their freedom to choose and change that which they don’t like. This has the unpleasant side-effect of those who manufacture fraudulent histories, titles or lineages in order to prove their validity and worthiness of respect.

On the other hand, all but the most extreme Reconstructionists, whose beliefs are founded on historical cultures and recoveries of past religious traditions, still acknowledge that they are, for example, no longer living in 10th century CE Scandinavia. It could be said that they are attempting to bring forward beliefs, otherwise lost to time, to enrich their contemporary lives, rather than trying to return to them in a wholesale rejection of modernity. This experience, of melding past and present into something at the same time new and old, is perhaps the best evocation of liminality within Paganism.

Notes

[1] If you’re interested in learning more about liminality, the best discussion I’ve found of it on the net is here. I first learned about the concept while studying Levi-Strauss and Structuralism in a college course on Greek mythology, which strongly impacted the way I look at myths (from a scholastic sense, which is not the same as interacting with them as living entities. But that’s another story.)

[2] http://www.tricksterbook.com/Intro.htm Let me also credit my partner for coincidentally (or not) having this book in her library so I could look at it more at length. It’s dense -- on the order of Hutton and then some -- but juicy.

[3] See the work of Victor Turner Also, this interesting quote: “While at [the University of] Virginia, his interest in performative play and theatre grew. Turner became interested in experimental theatre as a modern form of liminality where everyday reality is transformed into a symbolic experience.”

[4] Will Roscoe, Changing Ones: Third and Fourth Genders in Native North America, St. Martin’s Press, 1998, p 140ff.

[5] What, you live under a rock & don’t know the SCA? OK…perhaps you’re better off, but here's a handy explanation I like: “The SCA is a group that re-creates ‘the Middle Ages as they should have been’, which means that our portrayal of history is devoid of all the important sociopolitical factors which defined the character of the Middle Ages (such as religion, serfdom, disease, hereditary titles, religion, poverty, an accurate feudal hierarchy, and religion).” While it might seem that the supposed lack of religion, and religion, as well as religion, might keep Pagans from being interested in the SCA, nothing could be further from the truth.