Being between two: van Gennep and the structure of passage

There is something no one says when a person crosses a great transition — whether it's the end of a relationship, the loss of a job, a radical move, the death of someone, or simply that diffuse sense of no longer knowing who you are becoming.

No one says: it is a structure.

We say « take care of yourself ». We say « it'll be all right ». We offer solutions, next steps, resources. We treat the « between two » as a temporary problem to solve, a disturbance to clear up as fast as possible.

But the between two — what the anthropologist Arnold van Gennep named in 1909 the margin — is not a problem. It is a state. A state with its own properties, its own logic, its own necessary duration. And understanding it deeply changes the way you can cross it.

What van Gennep discovered

Arnold van Gennep devoted his career to studying the ceremonies of transition in dozens of different human societies — marriages, funerals, initiations, seasonal passages, the crossing of borders. In 1909, in The Rites of Passage, he publishes a discovery: all these ceremonies, despite their apparent diversity, share the same universal structure.

Three phases.

The preliminal rites — separation. You leave something behind. You cut your hair. You burn an object. You speak a farewell. The act of separation is often physical, symbolic, and irreversible. It marks the end of what was.

The liminal rites — the margin. This is the middle state. « The underlying arrangement is always the same », writes van Gennep. The person in the margin is no longer what she was and is not yet what she will be. Neither here nor there. She is, in van Gennep's phrasing, sacred to the groups she has left, and still profane to those she has not yet joined. This ambiguous position is at once the source of her vulnerability and of her potential power of transformation.

The postliminal rites — aggregation. The return, the integration, the recognition by the community. The new state is socially validated. And van Gennep insists on this point: you cannot accomplish this phase alone. Personal transformation needs collective recognition to stabilise.

The margin: an autonomous state, not a crisis

What is remarkable — and often ignored — in van Gennep's work is his insistence on the margin as a state in its own right, with its own laws.

The margin is like the edge of a forest — neither the open field, nor the deep trees. A place where the light changes quality. Uncomfortable, sometimes. But alive in a way that the clear or dense zones are not.

The person in the margin is structurally ambiguous: she breaks the ordinary categories. She no longer has the status she had. She does not yet have the one she will have. This ambiguity produces two simultaneous effects that modernity tends to treat separately, as two different problems, when they are the two faces of a single state:

Vulnerability. People in the margin are less armoured by their certainties. They are more permeable, more easily destabilised, more open to being wounded or helped in depth. This is why the traditions that honour rites of passage surround people in the margin with guardians, with rituals, with protected spaces.

The power of transformation. That same permeability makes possible transformations that would be inaccessible in a stable state. Victor Turner, who deepened van Gennep's work in The Ritual Process (1969), speaks of communitas — that direct, unmediated, radical bond that can form between people in the margin when all the usual social hierarchies are temporarily suspended. That bond can exist only in liminality. It is one of the most precious things the passage can produce — and one of the least valued in our culture.

The threshold as materialisation

Van Gennep had identified, in traditional societies, a remarkable correspondence between the physical threshold and the ontological threshold.

To cross a doorway is never trivial. « The threshold object is never neutral ; it is the visible materialization of the invisible boundary between two states of being. »

The most ancient rites of passage invariably begin with a spatial passage: you cross a doorway, you enter a forest, you descend into a cave, you cross a river. This ritual geography is not decorative. It mobilises what the body knows before the head has formulated it: that a change of place can prepare a change of state.

Mircea Eliade, in Sacred and Profane, puts it from the perspective of the history of religions: « The road to the Center is a "difficult road", a rite of passage from the profane to the sacred. » To reach what is sacred — what matters, what transforms — asks for a crossing. You do not receive it. You cross to it.

The diagnosis for our time

Solon Kimball, in his introduction to the English translation of The Rites of Passage (1960), draws a link that van Gennep himself had not made explicit: « Individuals are forced to accomplish their transitions alone and with private symbols. »

Modernity has emptied the ritual functions that used to hold people in the margin. In most of our settings, there are no longer collective structures that officially recognise that a person is in passage — that offer her a protected space, a granted time, a communal witnessing.

This void is not neutral. It means that millions of people cross deep margins with no frame, no recognition, no accompaniment. They read their disorientation as a personal weakness rather than as the structural property of a universal state.

Malidoma Somé, from the Dagara tradition, puts this with an uncompromising clarity: « Without initiation, one cannot participate fully in community or access one's own power. » (Of Water and the Spirit, Principle 1.) The power held within liminality becomes accessible only if the passage is honoured as such — and it cannot be honoured alone.

What the margin amplifies: the signs

There is an empirical observation, noted by very different practitioners, that deserves to be taken seriously.

Robert Hopcke, in There Are No Accidents: « Virtually every genuine synchronistic event arrives during or immediately after a period of stuckness. »

The margin is the moment when meaningful coincidences grow dense. When doors open unexpectedly. When encounters arrive at the precise moment they can have the most impact. This is not a coincidence in itself — it is the structure of the margin. A person in passage is more permeable to meaning. Less armoured against what is trying to declare itself.

Which means that people in transition are not only vulnerable. They are also — if they have the tools to recognise it — in a period of exceptionally fertile reception.

Three disciplines for crossing the margin

Van Gennep does not prescribe solutions. He describes structures. But from that description flow three disciplines that make it possible to cross the margin without aborting it.

Name the state. The simple fact of recognising that you are in passage — not in crisis, not in a problem to solve, but in a structured state with a way out — has a stabilising effect. It turns confusion into a recognised, crossable state. Van Gennep: « The life of an individual in any society is a series of passages from one age to another and from one occupation to another. » It is not exceptional. It is the very structure of a life.

Hold the space without rushing the exit. The temptation of the well-meaning — friends, therapists, coaches, digital tools — is to want to speed up the way out of the margin. To offer solutions, next steps, insights. The initiatic discipline says the opposite: the margin has its own duration. To try to compress it is to abort the passage. Holding the space means: staying with what is there, without steering it toward a premature exit.

Look for witnesses, not rescuers. Turner describes communitas — that special bond that forms between people in the margin, with no hierarchy and no prescription. It is not support in the usual sense (which implies an asymmetry: the one who helps and the one who is helped). It is a mutual recognition between equals crossing similar states. The difference is decisive: the rescuer wants to get you out of the margin. The witness accompanies you in crossing it.

On duration

The question that comes up often is: how long does a margin last?

Van Gennep's answer is the only honest one: the duration of a margin is variable, and it does not depend on the calendar. The initiations that were accomplished in traditional societies could last days, months, sometimes years. What determines the duration is not the time elapsed but the maturity reached — the moment when the transformation carried by the margin is integrated enough for aggregation to be possible.

In our contemporary context, this does not mean transitions should be crossed without end. It means that the right question is not « how do I get out faster » but « what does this period ask me to integrate so that the way out is real? »

Stay in the edge for as long as it takes. The field on the other side isn't going anywhere.

To carry you further

• *Arnold van Gennep, The Rites of Passage (1909)* — The primary source. Short, precise, and still current. Kimball's introduction (1960 edition) is as illuminating as the text itself.
• *Victor Turner, The Ritual Process (1969) — On communitas* and what collective transitions can produce. What it means to cross a margin in the presence of witnesses.
• *Malidoma Somé, Of Water and the Spirit*** — The Dagara initiation as a lived experience of what van Gennep mapped from the outside.
• *Mircea Eliade, Sacred and Profane** — The threshold, the axis mundi*, and why reaching what is sacred asks for a crossing, not a reception.
• *Robert Hopcke, There Are No Accidents*** — Synchronicity as a phenomenon that grows dense in the margin. The link between transition and the reading of signs.

This article is part of the INFUSE series on transformations — an exploration of the deep structures that govern the passages of life.