The Encyclopedia of World Religions

rites of passage S 391

very traditional settings, the father giving the bride away. (What does it say about the relative impor tance of this ritual for men and women that the entrance of the groom is not so elaborate?) The liminal rites—the rites at, say, the ALTAR — mark the transformation in any number of ways. The bride and groom usually make vows. They often exchange rings. They may receive special blessings. In the last half of the 20th century many couples created rituals of transformation that had special meaning to them. Many others adopted innovations that they saw at the weddings of rela tives and friends. A number of post-liminal rites incorporate the new married couple into the community. These may include a line in which the newly married couple greets all the guests, photographs of the couple taken in that special period just after the ceremony, eating and drinking together, throwing the bouquet and the garter, and dancing. It is also customary in North America for the newly married couple to observe a period of seclusion. It is called a honeymoon. More recent scholars have added to our under standing of rites of passage. A psychologist has noted that the ordeals that are sometimes associ ated with puberty rituals help make these rituals seem more special afterward. The anthropologist Victor Turner found the concept of the liminal or “liminality” useful in many other settings as well. In many parts of the world today, people have been abandoning traditional rites of passage. But as a class, rites of passage remain important. They mark special occasions, such as graduations. They make people members of special societies, such as sororities and fraternities. By the beginning of the 21st century, some women in North America had developed rites of passage to celebrate other important moments in their lives, such as the onset of menopause. Indeed, the phrase “rites of passage” is an example of a scholarly term that has passed into popular or general use. Further reading: Jean Holm and John Bowker, eds., Rites of Passage (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994); Ronald L. Grimes, Deeply into the Bone:

up as adult members of the Buddhist community. According to tradition, highcaste Hindu boys went through a prolonged period of religious study in conjunction with maturing intellectually and spiri tually. In the best known rite, a boy between the ages of eight and 12 was “invested with” or given a sacred thread to wear draped over his left shoul der. In traditional H INDUISM , it became common for girls to be married before menstruation. As a result, the wedding was their puberty ritual. Funeral practices are equally varied. Jews and Muslims bury the dead in a simple wooden cas ket and white shroud. Hindus bury especially holy people, but they cremate most corpses and deposit the ashes in water, such as in the sacred river G AN GES . Parsees have traditionally washed the corpse and then solemnly exposed it so that birds of prey could devour the flesh. The above examples sim ply talk about what to do with the corpse. They do not begin to note the rituals associated with the process. Van Gennep proposed a scheme that is help ful in understanding rites of passage. He identi fied three clusters of rituals: “liminal” rites, that is, rituals that take place at the boundary (cf. limen, Latin for threshold) between two stages of life; “pre-liminal” rites, rituals that occur before that time; and “post-liminal” rites, those that occur afterward. Each set of rites has distinct purposes: Pre-liminal rites separate the person concerned from the old state of life; liminal rites bring about a change; post-liminal rites integrate the changed person into the community and restructure it. A “typical” North American wedding (shaped a great deal by P ROTESTANTISM ) illustrates each of these stages. Before the wedding, various actions separate the bride and groom from their previous state: announcing the engagement in the newspa per, the gift of an engagement ring, wedding show ers for the prospective bride, a bachelors’ party for the prospective groom. The wedding itself is held in a special, ritual space that functions as a thresh old: a church or chapel, a garden or a place of special significance to the persons being married. The rituals by which the bride enters this space also mark separation: a grand procession and, in