Modern humans live in a world of time management, scheduling, multitasking, and keeping busy. Every moment seems to bring another technological breakthrough designed to remind you to join another group, track your steps, count your calories, book your flights, and post photos of it all on half a dozen carefully curated social media sites. There are books and apps and websites quite happy to tell you (or sell you?) what to expect when you’re expecting a baby or how to tie the matrimonial knot in just the right way. There are countless commercials depicting how perfectly lovely your family gatherings could be if you were to merely purchase from the right retailer on the correct day. The world—and indeed, your life—is given to the drudgery of deadlines, work weeks, and predictable life events happening along the way. Society sets rough timelines for us: graduate at eighteen; go to college from eighteen to twenty-two; plan to marry by twenty-seven; become a parent by thirty-two; get divorced by forty; remarry by forty-five; dead by seventy-eight, or maybe ninety if you are lucky.
Even though humans are more connected than ever, we live with the illusion of isolation. Many people move through life disconnected and distracted. You’re indoctrinated from an early age to become an individual success by pulling up your bootstraps and forging your own way in the world. If you don’t have it all today, no problem, you can rewrite your stories and build a stronger and brighter tomorrow. Just keep going. It’s no wonder anxiety and depression rates continue to rise. There are explanations and articles and insightful life hacks, but most of them suggest doing more. We’re so busy making our way in life, doing all the things, and running a successful side hustle that we often miss the most important parts of life that make it so wonderful.
It’s our (the two of us writing this book) belief that one of modern Western society’s most pernicious problems is a lack of mystery. One dictionary definition of the word mystery is “profound, inexplicable, or secretive quality or character.” 1 As you might imagine, secret, profound, and inexplicable experiences are hard to package in a box and even harder to resell online. There’s a secondary definition of mystery, and one that serves the purposes of this book more readily: from the Middle English mysterie, defined as a “hidden religious truth, rite or event with religious significance, hidden meaning.” 2
Humans live in a world chock-full of mystery and magick, but the often oppressive crush of civilization makes you blind to it—or worse, encourages you to rush past it. We believe part of “mystery blindness” comes from a lack of ritual and ceremony. Rituals and ceremonies create space to honor change, transition, growth, success, and loss. Rituals and ceremonies create places where you can give yourself over to grief, joy, love, and pain—and not just feel these emotions on a surface level, but really revel in them, fully immerse yourself in them, and potentially begin to process and move through them. Rituals and ceremonies, by their very design, encourage you to slow down and experience the moment you are in.
Now, you might be thinking to yourself, But wait. Rituals are written down. I can read books and talk with folks about these rites of passage. How then can they promote mystery? It’s a fair question. The thing to understand about rites of passage is that they need to be experienced. Mystery is mysterious by default and the depths of many mysteries cannot be learned logically. They must be experienced viscerally.
Rites of Passage: The Big and the Small
The liturgy of rituals, the practices of rites of passage, and the actions of ceremony have a level of mystery built into them in plain sight, but most folks don’t notice it. It’s those gaps between what is written and known, unwritten and unknown, where mystery lives and where rites of passage get their power.
In most religious rites, including Witchcraft and Pagan rituals, theurgy is observed, which is when a space is created that asks the universe, gods, or magick if they would like to intervene. As an example of this space—this place where the gods are asked to join the rite, where the mystery resides—consider wedding ceremonies you’ve attended or seen in movies. There is the question of whether the bride will show up or leave the groom at the altar. That’s a space for mystery. There’s that awkward moment of silence when the officiant entreats the congregation to “speak now or forever hold your peace.” What would happen if someone spoke up? And of course, there is a chance that someone won’t say “I do.” There is an uncertain quality, even in this most familiar ritual. There is still room for the gods to intervene.
For the most part, mainstream culture doesn’t honor many of the markers in life that might be called a rite of passage. It seems only churches, temples, and synagogues still hold formal ceremonies to honor personal changes, dedications, and dying. Rites of passage extend well beyond birth, marriage, and death, but these big moments seem to be the only moments our culture can see. How can modern Witches and Pagans create rites honoring all manner of significant moments in life? And how can ritual be incorporated to commemorate the rites of passage people go through in the modern world?
The weird and complicated thing about a rite of passage is that they aren’t always as simple as they seem. Sometimes you don’t know when they’ve started. It isn’t always obvious who is going through a rite of passage and why. There is also an awkward part in the middle when you are no longer the thing that you were, but you’re not quite yet the thing you are becoming. And how do you know when you’ve made it to the other side?
The point of this book is to give a framework for modern rites of passage to make them more recognizable and accessible. We’ll attempt to map out liminal space without intruding upon it, we will shed a little light on the concept of mystery, and we will address the serious and silly moments that come from life’s marking points. Our aim with this book is to simultaneously demystify and preserve the mystery of the rituals that impact life so greatly.
We have one last important note for you here. This book was written by two people, but (we hope) with one voice. Although we are a married couple, our backgrounds and feelings on some of the rites of passage differ. We spent many hours discussing, reshaping, clarifying, and even … ahem … arguing with each other about just how to write specific pieces. What you’re reading really is a joint effort. Many sections we wrote together or collaborated on to an extent that it is hard to tell whose voice is whose. However, you will notice throughout the book that there are anecdotes specifically attributed to one of us. For ease of reading, we will specify whose voice you are experiencing when that seems necessary.
Opening Anecdote by Gwion
Many years ago, I took a three-day “rite of passage” workshop. Fifteen participants and two facilitators gathered in a yurt on a gorgeous piece of land, surrounded by oak trees and vineyards. The teachers were skilled. They led us through a series of exercises and meditations. We shared dream journals, worked in pairs and small groupings, ate together, and slept in the same space. The work of the long weekend was lovely and sweet. But, try as I might, I couldn’t see what any of it had to do with a rite of passage.
A year later I took the same workshop, this time taught by a different facilitation team. The content was similar, but the emphasis of the work pulled on threads the first class had not. The focus still centered on dreamwork, but it brought in myths too. The question “Do dreams and myths have an effect on our daily lives?” was posed right at the outset. Something about that question resonated with me.
After the second workshop, I went back through my notes from both classes and an odd thing happened. Suddenly I saw connections between the two weekends that I’d never noticed as the workshops were happening. The classes weren’t really about rites of passages, or even a specific rite of passage in and of itself. No, this class was a portal, an invitation for me to acknowledge the sacred myth of my own life. The moment I accepted my life as a myth, complete with a cast of characters and events with me at the center of it all, I began to recognize patterns and signposts. Those markers begged for ritual.
A year later I became a student teacher in the same magickal tradition that sponsored the workshops. My apprenticeship lasted three years. During this time I taught with fourteen different facilitators and racked up hundreds of hours preparing and teaching classes, doing research, diving into myths, making magick, and honing my Craft. I taught the rite of passage workshop several times during my training period. As I shared the workshop with others, I began to find wrinkles in the magick and tapped into the magick I wanted to make. In short, I was putting my stamp on the class, adding to the potency of the body of lore and magick handed down to me by my teachers.
The irony is not lost on me that while I was busy becoming a teacher that facilitated a course focused on rites of passage, I was going through my own rite of passage. My connection to a magickal practice was growing in ways I couldn’t have imagined or predicted. The years of my apprenticeship flew by and I jumped headlong into teaching. In my first five years as a magickal teacher, I facilitated at least five workshops a year, planned eight annual public rituals, went to a gazillion meetings, and started taking on apprentices of my own.
My other life—you know, the one with bills and kids and a job—was changing too. There were promotions, layoffs, graduations, sickness, death, anniversaries, starting a business, closing a business, becoming a published writer, and gods know what else. Along the way, there were moments that clearly called out for ritual. In some cases, the rituals were short and sweet (a folded dollar bill secretly placed under the pillow), but other rituals required elaborate settings, multiple priestesses, journals, oaths, and witnesses.
What became apparent was that there were hundreds of opportunities to make life sacred and meaningful if I just slowed down enough to notice them. And when I did notice them, the rituals and rites of passage became clear, evident, and easy to fall into.
Opening Anecdote by Phoenix
I started practicing Witchcraft at the age of fifteen. At that time in my life I wanted to feel special, and let’s be honest, I wanted power. Not in a super villain’s I-want-to-take-over-the-world kind of way, but I wanted to feel more powerfull. As a plain, slightly awkward fifteen-year-old with a freshly broken heart, feeling like I possessed a bit of power would have gone a long way. Looking back, I can see that it wasn’t really the power I wanted. What I was craving was mystery.
Being raised in a nonreligious household gave me the opportunity to discover my own path and to determine what I wanted my relationship with the world to be. It allowed me to find mystery in plants, landscapes, and the land, but I often felt a longing for ceremony, ritual, and the kind of magick that is created when people come together with a common belief.
It wasn’t until I started practicing Witchcraft that I found a way of connecting to that sense of collaborative mystery and my own style of ritual. And now, getting scarily close to thirty years later, I understand something deep and profound about humankind. I’ve discovered one of the great secrets of what it is to be human and I’ll tell you what it is. Ready? We crave ritual.
My first ritualized rite of passage was my self-initiation ritual a year after discovering Witchcraft. It was a moving and profound experience. During that ritual I acknowledged stepping into the flow of something bigger than myself. For me, it was a ceremony where I fully stepped into my power and aligned myself with thousands of people across the globe who also called themselves Witches.
I performed the rite on my own, in the comfort of my bedroom, in my parents’ house. I used a stolen butter knife (with a groovy 1970s wooden handle) as an athame and a coffee mug as my chalice. I was very earnest in my desire to be a good Witch. I named myself as a child of the goddess. No one witnessed this ritual. No one celebrated it with me, and I told no one I had done it. It was secret; a rite of passage that was only for me. And I’ll tell you what, it totally, radically, and unequivocally changed my life.
Decades later, I initiated into a magickal tradition where there was a celebration and party at the end of the ordeal. Through that ritual, I knew what it meant to be supported by other Witches. I regret nothing about my teenage self-initiation, but I do wish that young woman could have felt the same support in her first magickal initiation that I experienced in my first traditional initiation.
That night in my room with the butter knife was the first of many rites that I have stepped into with awareness and an open heart. And I know there will be many more to come.