Who Does a Rite of Passage Serve?

The foundational differences between traditional rites of passage and their modern-day incarnation. Essay 4 in the series "Conjuring Rites of Passage in Their Absence".

Dec 14, 2025

A close up of a piece of cloth with tassels

There are foundational differences between what an intact or traditional culture would recognize as a rite of passage and what is being offered under the same name in the culture of the West. Bringing these differences to the light of awareness of anybody interested in the modern incarnation of rites of passage is an important piece to hold when considering the cardinal question that this essay series revolves around: Are rites of passage possible in this culture at this time?

The point of this list isn’t to be exhaustive, or prescriptive. It is constellatory—each point is a star in the dark night that makes up a constellation whose shape we are re-membering.

The contrasts I point to may be anti-climatic for those of you that have read this far, for they have been steadily dusting the previous essays the way the gentle falling of snow flakes blankets a landscape. But expecting climax is yet another layer of the human-centered, individualistic way of seeing the world that we need to notice and question. Does a river have a climax? A tree? A cloud? A frog?

Many of the contrasts are seemingly unresolvable when taken in the context of the current iteration of the culture of Anglo North America. Our ability to bring the intention forward is not cut and dry either. In a culture that centers the individual, our individual-centered lens is so prevalent that we are liable to project our present-day intentions into the past, rather than bringing past intentions forward. Only if we engage in the work of consciously and ongoingly setting that projection aside can we understand (literally, to stand under) the culture-centered intentions that lay at the heart of every rite of passage.

I will note here that I have not participated in or witnessed a rite of passage in an intact culture. I, like most European-descended people in North America, am an orphan when it comes to passage rites. The grief of that orphanhood combined with the corollary consequences that orphanhood en masse visits upon this culture are what galvanize and inspire me in my attempt to re-member how it could be.

But how something could be is not just based on intention and hope, or on how things appear in the present. The present is the visible and ascensional elements of a thing, it is the tree above ground. But the root system of a tree is as large as its canopy, and it’s those roots that shore up the above-ground growth.

By focussing solely on the ascensional image, all we bring forward are surface layer fragments—root-free and prone to collapse. By not paying attention, we invent intention, conjuring confused fragmentation where there was once belonging, meaning, and wholeness.

A thing’s being is rooted to its origin, whether we are talking about the seed that holds the tree, or the past that holds the future. A willingness to look at how things were in their origin form, and contrasting that with their form in the present is how the shape of their wholeness over time is made visible.

For people of Anglo North America, the wholeness of our rites can only be seen by tracking the differences between their origins and their current form. Our rites aren’t broken, they are eclipsed.

On Self-Designation

In a traditional culture, autonomy would be akin to banishment. (Stephen Jenkinson)

Earlier in this essay series, I named the mainstream’s enthronement of autonomy as that which is most corrosive to rites of passage in their whole form. My intention in the following pages is to illuminate how that autonomy and the individual-centeredness is manifest, centered, and summoned in modern day passage rites

The first point to notice is this: If you are participating in a rite of passage in the dominant culture of the West, it was almost certainly your idea. You decided you were ready, and you signed up for it, or engineered it from your own interest in the matter. I want to be clear that I am not saying that this is wrong. Your interest in rites of passage is one of the ingredients needed for them to survive, and your willingness to give yourself over to deep spirit and soul work is nourishment for this world.

But self-designation is a very different starting point than having a throng of village elders insisting that it is your time, with your individual opinion on the matter, or on your worthiness or lack thereof, having no bearing on the rite’s inception and formation. When it’s not your idea, your lack of certainty, your misgivings, and your resistance to the oncoming passage is part of the energy that feeds the ritual inside a rite of passage. Bombast, surety, and preordained outcomes are empty calories that starve a ritual, and a culture.

In a traditional rite, participation is mandatory, and it is designated. Gauging who is on a passage threshold is the work of the elders and the other people initiated into the passage-guiding roles of that culture.

You are on the threshold of a passage, and your community sees it, and then your community sees to it. Friend, it’s time, they might say when they bring the news.

On Compensation

Your choosing your participation in a rite of passage program also means that you have likely paid to be there. Giving compensation for rite, ritual, or ceremony is not new, nor is it problematic on its own. Exchanging value for value is an ancient human practice. In land-based and trade-based cultures, “payment” would take the shape of handmade wares, food, precious stones, and other gifts imbued with value in the way they were made, storied, procured, or given.

The culture of the West is commerce-based, not trade-based, and so we use money to assess and attribute uniform value to a thing or to a service. There is much to be said about what we have lost in doing so, but that goes beyond the scope of this essay.1

Your payment—whether a bundle of furs, a clutch of precious jewels, seeds from your most dependable crop, or crisp dollar bills—is needed. It is one of the main factors that ensures the ceremony is available for people in the future, by sustaining the human layer of the ritual in the present. Though rites are not human centered, they are human held. Their prescription and enactment relies entirely on the human realm. Humans are the stewards of rites.

Where the contrast lies, is the vein of entitlement that a consumer culture attaches to monetary transactions. We get what we pay for. In other words: what we receive in exchange for our money is only deemed valuable if it meets our expectations, and makes us feel the way that we want to feel.

The customer is always right began as a proposition of good will from a service provider towards those who choose to part with their hard-earned money for said service. When I hear this phrase now, it’s always from the point of the customer, and the original intention of good-will morphs into one of entitlement.

In the realm of rites of passage work the words client or participant are used instead of customer, likely to distance the work from the very thing I am pointing to. But that modern consumer-based inflection is often there, even if only minutely, and the entitlement it carries delivers an unspoken pressure to the participant, to the guides, and to the rite itself that the event works in the terms set by the individual participant.

The customer is always right is a vacuum that swallows nuance, ambivalence, and mystery. What could and should be an act of courting and conjuring wild expansion becomes a spectacle of contraction, comfort, and affirmation. After the post-ceremony glow fades, nothing really changes, and the haunt of individuality prevails again.

On Guaranteed Affirmation and Outcome

Traditional passage rites are mandatory, but their outcome is not guaranteed or pre ordained. This is because, to say it again, whatever happens in ritual space is part of the ritual. Bending or reconstituting what transpires in ritual space to fit an idealized image or intention that was made before crossing the threshold undoes the ritual.

The message that is received could be, for example, no, or not yet, or different ingredients are required. The translation of what is received is not the work of the individual who is inside the liminal space; they are entirely unreliable while being cooked inside the cauldron. Their work is to be cooked. The translating is done in congress with the ritual elders on the other side of the ritual threshold, and is entirely based on what happened and what did not happen inside the ritual thresholds. Further conversation through additional rituals, dreams, and divinations may be needed to clarify the message that was received.

Listening to (and then abiding to) what is said is as important as what you say, it’s the entire other half of the living conversation that you are engaged in. The contrast between pre-threshold ideas and what was received creates the strong tension that is the underwriter of meaning, sustenance, and vitality.

Modern day passage programs are thick with automatic and human-centered affirmation. In one of my guide trainings, we were instructed that our work as passage guides was to affirm the passage of the individual. This is very well intentioned and sweet, but it casts an immense shadow. In that shadow, ritual is turned into performance, mystery is made to heal, and comfort trumps or stunts transformation.

My picking at this doesn’t mean that the opposite is true either—that the guide is to intentionally negate the perceptions and desires of the participant. A passage guide’s job is to wonder what happened, what was said, what was received, and then translate that in relation to the intention of the ritual, from the place of image and soul. Literality, projection, and guarantee are no more than acts of subterfuge in this ground.

You may fail an initiation into adulthood or elderhood. The crucible of a matrimony rite may not result in matrimony. A death rite may not result in the birth of an ancestor.

Sometimes for a passage to be complete or achieved, a rite may need to be enacted again and again. This is part of that foundational repetition that is key to ritual and rite; it’s not doing the same thing over and over, so much as it is employing the same obligation to feed the world, and employing the same willingness to do a slightly different thing each time, until the ingredients present offer the nutrients that are required, and the offering is received, accepted, and affirmed by the more-than-human-world.

On Time, Place, and Return

Further complicating the unfurling and affirming of a passage rite are the elements of time and place. Chances are that if you are participating in a modern day rite of passage offering, you have travelled outside of your community to do so. This is consequential on a few levels.

For one, this means that your time with the people forming the container as guides, witnesses, and fellow participants is limited to the length of the program. This means that most of the preparation stage is undertaken with each person siloed from the others, and when the group comes together, all that is known of each other is what each individual has deemed worthy of sharing, and what they identify with.

Imagine what is left out when the individual is solely responsible for explaining who they are, why they are there, what purpose their life has served up to that point, what is missing, what is needed, and where their life is going. This is akin to painting a self portrait without the use of a mirror. It is your community that best reflects your ever-evolving identity.

This trouble compounds in the return stage of the passage, which begins at a rite’s culmination, and can last up to a year. In a culture literate in passage rites, the community supports the individual(s) in their incorporation back into village-life over that time, while affirming their new life stage by treating them as a member of their new stage. The elders and guides maintain close contact, continuing their work of listening and translating—not of just what happened in the ritual space, but in what continues to unfold on the other side of it.

When a self-selected passage is affirmed by a small group of people that are linked more by their interest in rites of passage than their environmental proximity, their ancestry, their life stage, and their literal community, how much weight does that affirmation carry once the container is disbanded and everyone returns back to their respective spaces and places?

No matter the integration practices offered in a modern day passage container, participants face a solitary return to a place where a vast majority of people have no understanding of, no recognition of, and perhaps most detrimental of all, no interest in what transpired. This means that there is no change in the fabric of the community to make room for, and employ the expanded and deepened person on the other end of the passage.

With the burden of remembering placed solely on the individual, and the gales of distraction that rage through the main streets of the overculture, what was ignited by the passage rite can be almost entirely snuffed out. Without continual deep and concerted tending, those embers turn to wind-blown ash. Tending that hearth fire used to be the work of the entire community. Now it is predominantly the work of one. It’s a hell of a lot for one person to bear.

A red rug with an intricate design on it

On Life Stages

Sibling to the above points is this: often in modern day rites of passage, the stage you are transitioning into is self-selected and sometimes even self-invented. How can your community affirm your passage, employ your specific gifts, and hold you accountable as a member of your new social stage if there’s no agreement, understanding, or recognition of the stages themselves?

Life stages in a culture with passage rites are defined and known. They are multi-dimensional and very specific functions that come with a bundle of new obligations, and a deeper layer of mythic and ancestral inheritance. The stages are yoked to service, not self esteem.

Your adulthood, your marriage, your elderhood serves the village, the land, the ancestors, and the Gods. Except for the specific rite of initiation, rites of passage are not inherently tied to a person’s life purpose, so much as they are tied to their life-stage role and function in both their ecological and cultural environment.

While the mainstream culture of the West recognizes and defines the social stages of adult, and married, and mother (to name a few), entrance into these stages is essentially automatic in that the designation is usually based on a single external factor. You are an adult when your odometer clicks to a certain number. You are a mother if you choose to have a child. You are married if and when you have signed the papers that make it legally so.2

Your identity changes, but almost everything in the culture is available to you whether you uptake these roles or not, and so they are in no way mandatory—in the eyes of the culture or the individual. On a cultural level, and from the heart of the culture, your participation in social-stage delineations and the transitions between them is made to appear entirely inconsequential. That has consequences.

On Identity

The main consequence of the culture not ritualizing, and then reflecting and affirming the stage of life you are in is obvious: your ecological, physical, and spiritual niche within your community remains unrealized and stillborn. In other words: you don’t know where you are, or what you are meant to be doing. The meaning of your life remains elusive, and the closest you get to belonging is finding other people who don’t belong in a similar way to you.

This deficit delivers a scarcity-cloaked neurosis to most modern people, one in which they attempt to fabricate their meaning from their identity, rather than their identity coming from their meaning.

Internally, this manifests as I am not enough. On one end of the internalized spectrum, the person shrinks away to the background of life, in full collusion with the dark weight of their perceived inadequacy, continually propping up who they are not. They are the victim, and they ensure that everyone knows it.

Or a person puffs themselves up through a manically self-enforced identity, continually propping up who they want to be. Often there is a moral high ground attached to this identity enforcement, which can appear as righteousness, cynicism, or smug indifference. They are the hero, and they ensure everyone knows it.

Some people oscillate between victim and hero so frenetically that a compound archetype has formed: the victim/hero. This person is the hero because they are the victim. They are the martyr, and they ensure that everyone knows it.

Externally, this neurosis is manifest as there is not enough. This is the domain of war and environmental degradation. Over-consumption on all planes of existence becomes the norm as growth—physical, spiritual, psychological—is deified. Competition trumps collaboration, and greed trumps gratitude. More, more, more.

This is where Darwin’s maxim survival of the fittest is intentionally misinterpreted to rationalize conflict and competition. When read in its full context, survival of the fittest is about accommodation, specialization, and evolution in service to interconnected coexistence.3

The air of panicked protectionism that this scarcity conjures usually extends out to one’s nuclear family, or to whichever small minority group a person identifies with and no further. It’s us against the world. The big fish eat the little ones. Slowing down is not an option. Every man for themselves.

On The Necessity of Grief in Celebration

I have written about the role of grief in a rites of passage previously, and I bring forth a few of those paragraphs here:

All passages in a human life contain a layer of grief, for all passages involve and invoke the loss of something that cannot return—perhaps this is your innocence, your childhood, the independence of your pre-marital life, your having a living parent in the world, or simply your old comfortable way of being that is no longer serving you or your community—a husk that you have outgrown that is meant to be shed.
Grief is not the loss itself. Grief is what you do. It is the active tending to the love for that-which-is-gone, while you actively release your attachment to how things were, or how you wish they were. Grief is an act of surrender that you consciously choose and turn towards, an honouring of the past in the present.
Grief is knowing how to say “goodbye”, and “I love you”, and “I miss you”, and saying it often. Not just to another person, but to a chapter of your life, or to a landscape, or to a dream. Grief that is honoured is grief that is welcomed in, and grief expressed enlivens and underwrites all that is meaningful in this world.

The guaranteed affirmation that is so common in a modern day rite of passage is a grief-bypassing act of serious consequence. This banishment of grief doesn’t come from the traditions of the rites, but rather, it is a direct (and yet unconscious) consequence of modern day rites being reconstructed from and in reaction to the overculture’s way with passages. This is the murky waters created by projecting our intentions into a rite, rather than bringing a rite’s intentions forward.

Energetically, when something is constructed in reaction to another thing, that which is formed contains elements of that which it is reacting against. Influence—or interconnectedness if you prefer— moves in both directions. The more unconscious an element is, the more heavy its influence. Another way to say this is: when a solution is born from the same cosmology as the problem, the problem survives in the shadows of the solution.

By looking at how grief is bypassed in the general passages and milestones of the overculture, we illuminate how that shadow is manifest in a modern day rite of passage.

When a modern day passage is publicly acknowledged, the focus tends to be on either celebration or sadness. The skill of grief—the ability to actively love what is gone, and to actively grieve what is not yet gone, is not just absent, it is banished.

If the event is one that aligns with the overculture’s definitions of good news, it is soaked in celebration. Setting a seat at the table for grief during a pageant of celebration is looked at as depressing, dark, and strange. Graduation is to be celebrated! Marriage is to be celebrated! Parenthood is to be celebrated!

And they are. The root meaning of the word celebrate comes from the Latin celebratus that meant “keep solemn” and “assemble to honour”. A celebration in its full form contains grief alongside joy. And the excitement present is also fear. Fear and excitement produce an identical set of physiological responses in the body.

Your childhood is gone. Your single life is gone. Your ability to blame your foils and fobbles on youthful inexperience and ignorance is gone. Your innocence has been turned to experience. If you’re paying attention below the surface, these blessings are also burdens. The fear belongs. The sorrow belongs. The joy belongs. The ambivalence belongs.

Counter-intuitively, grief is equally absent in the other direction too. When a publicly acknowledged passage is around an event of obvious hardship or literal loss, it is cloaked in sorrow or grievance. But sorrow on its own is not grief. And grievance is most certainly not grief.

Grief and love are twins of a kind, for you can only grieve what you love. If you are in deep sorrow, it’s because you love something. Otherwise, you wouldn’t be sad. Though this sounds obvious, in practice it doesn’t receive much conscious uptake. Your specific sorrow is the gateway, the midwife, to a specific love. The love doesn’t bypass the sorrow, it supports it and underwrites it. It makes it. Sorrow is a feeling. Grief is a practice.

When there is an exception to this dichotomy, and someone goes off-script (which thankfully, does happen from time to time), a deepening occurs for all who are present. If you were there when the man at his retirement party unexpectedly burst into tears for the end of his working life, or the woman minutes away from her medically assisted death broke out in a wide grin and began to laugh, you have felt the awesome power of both/and that grief conjures. At the time, because it was so unexpected, it likely felt unsettling to the group. But I would bet that looking back on it, it’s that moment that is most alive in your memory of the event.

Grief, in symbiotic partnership with love, is the initiator of meaning-making memory. A moment that braids grief, love, and attention has the ability to bring you right back to its happening anytime that thread is touched. Your willingness to engage and tend to your strong and visceral memory is what continues to feed and sustain the meaning that was conjured from that specific event. It makes you an ongoing and active witness, a mandatory ingredient for any endeavor of sustained meaning.

At Work In The Ruins4

If we don’t set a seat at the table for grief when discussing, participating in, and guiding ritualized passages, then the passages are not rooted, the rituals are not alive, and the appearance of a future rite from those rituals is not likely.

If the focus of ritualized passages continues to be on the individual—their desires, their validation, their intentions, all we are doing is gilding their life with their own self-wrought perception of it, and the appearance of rites of passage is not likely.

Similarly, if the impetus of ritualized passage work is on healing rather than whole-ing, and on affirmation over confirmation, the appearance of rites of passage is not likely.

If we are unwilling to consider that rites of passage are not possible in this culture at this time, and employ that uncertainty as the energetic force that fuels our labours on behalf of their conjuring, then the appearance of rites of passage is unlikely.

When faced with foundational discrepancies of this magnitude, it’s easy to collapse and ask why bother. But I am referring to rites of passage work, culture work, soul work—and as the saying goes: work is that which you are least inclined to do. An intact culture that practices ceremony would never refer to ceremony, rite, ritual, initiation, eldering, or anything else of meaning as work. Many indigenous cultures don’t even have a word that translates to work.5

Work is the consequence of a separation that has already occurred. Work is what is brought to bear when the natural flow of life has somehow been dammed. A culture that defines itself by outward progress, growth, and power is also one that deifies work. That culture will even convince you that the work is to build and then maintain that dam.

But if you listen to the poems, the trees, the wind, the fish, the elders, the children, and to The Sacred River, you will be reminded that the work that is in service to life is to dismantle that dam, one stone at a time.

There is work to be done. The time is now.

Sacred Gestures

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