Monday, July 5, 2010

Rites of Passage

Probably this explains the immaturity we see all around us - perhaps our rites of passage from childhood are way too weak, of too short a duration, tending more towards fun at times - and therefore the message of dying to childishness, and taking full responsibility for one's life - is just not getting through?


Rites of Passage

“…The so-called rites of passage, which occupy such a prominent place in the life of a primitive society (ceremonials of birth, naming, puberty, marriage, burial, etc.), are distinguished by formal, and usually very severe, exercises of severance, whereby the mind is radically cut away from the attitudes, attachments, and life patterns of the stage being left behind.

Then follows an interval of more or less extended retirement, during which are enacted rituals designed to introduce the life adventurer to the forms and proper feelings of his new estate, so that when, at last, the time has ripened for the return to the normal world, the initiate will be as good as reborn.


Getting stuck in childhood


It has always been the prime function of mythology and rite to supply the symbols that carry the human spirit forward, in counteraction to those constant human fantasies that tend to tie it back. In fact, it may well be that the very high incidence of neuroticism among ourselves follows from the decline among us of such effective spiritual aid.

We remain fixated to the unexorcised images of our infancy, and hence disinclined to the necessary passages of our adulthood."

Page 6, 'The Hero with a Thousand Faces' by Joseph Campbell

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