someone in my network, probably early 20s, reached out asking if I'd help contribute a challenge to a coming-of-age / rite-of-passage, for entering manhood I LOVE this idea in the abstract, and also it's very tricky, for a bunch of reasons
Why modern rites of passage into adulthood are so hard to build
35 tweets · December 2023 · 286 likes · 0 retweets · read on Twitter
reason number one is that part of the whole point of a coming-of-age ritual or rite-of-passage is that it's shared you become one of us because you do the thing we've all done and we all know a syncretic patchwork coming-of-age ritual can't recreate that
2: what it means to be an adult (or more specifically a man) is about a cultural role, ie something contextual if it doesn't change your role, then either you were already an adult, or you're still a kid
one of the reasons that 20-somethings in my subcultures don't feel like adults these days is that there are no actual kids around. they're not having any (yet) and they're not hanging out with friends/family kids either
my parents designed an epic coming of age ritual for my 13th birthday (prompted by me being jealous that my sisters were inheriting hierloom jewelry for their first 🩸) it was a cool birthday! but I was still fundamentally a kid. I had no new rights or responsibilities.
if I were to name my actual meaningful passages towards adulthood, they would be: 12: first job (scooping blueberries 🫐) 14: going to boarding school (expected to be responsible in a kinda-systematic institution with roles & rules, rather than just get along with family) 16: got a driver's license (not as real a deal for me as it would be for many, as I didn't actually have access to a car most of the time) 18: having sex for the first time 18: moving 1000 miles away for uni. but most vividly—the moment when I was at a party and realized that nobody outside the room knew where I was or was accounting for me (this one actually feels bigger than the rest of the ones here—I'll come back to it) 19: 🍷🍻 (🇨🇦) 20: internship in USA 22: made my own way and paid my own way to spend a month in SF and go to burning man. literally felt like such a big deal that I went and made a facebook "life event" for it at the time: 23: graduated uni and, as planned, didn't have to get a job because my business was making enough money (still a very tiny amount, but it was enough). sense of "I really get to do what I want now". I made a fb life event for that too. 26: getting married (in a rush; it didn't work out) 28: an experience of insight & worldview-synthesis that shifted my sense of "where does my worldview/paradigm come from?" from "my mentor" to "myself" (more on that here: ) 29: making the choice to end that marriage 30: travelling solo around the world 31: getting married with a big wedding, with the intention of having kids soon (that was just weeks ago, so we're caught up to the present. but I can already sense that when I do become a father in a year or two, that shift will completely dwarf all the rest of these put together in magnitude)
the 2 big themes here are: - autonomy - responsibility atm, outside ultra trad cultures, adulthood is initially more about the first, then more about the second, I'd say—simply insofar as most people are individuals for at least a few years before getting married & having kids
I've been thinking about a particular coming of age ritual that actually involves venturing solo in a context where nobody knows where you are and part of what it means to be doing that is that you're an adult, who can take care of themselves
but also, part of what it means is that you don't have anybody YOU need to be taking care of at that moment—if you have kids or other dependents, somebody else has got them covered and, if you're a responsible adult, you are sure that that's handled in order to be off-grid
consider baptism. baptism is at this point mostly a "you're a member of this now": - infants get baptized as one kind of welcome - converts get baptized as their welcome whatever other theological or social roles it has in each case, this is a common base
envisioning How we get there, I've wondered about the value of ritually marking peoples' experience of recognizing themselves as being welcome in this new kind of culture—which is reciprocally a recognition of their ability to be welcoming to the culture
and so I envisioned the need for a ritual that is used for BOTH: — as a welcoming ritual for adult newcomers — as a coming of age ritual for people who are born in that culture in both cases, the enacted meaning of the ritual would be "you are now an adult in this culture"
this thread is prompting me to notice that I haven't really mapped out what the new role or responsibility would be, after such a ritual, but on subtle levels it would affect peoples' expectations of emotional maturity and capacity for gnosis, perspective-taking, co-gnosis, etc.
I also have done very little to design what the actual ritual would be like. my sense is we'll have a clearer sense of it as we get further down the path although hmm it could be worth having prototype waypoint rituals marking our progress as we go.
at any rate, going back to the original question: is it even possible to create a syncretic self-created coming of age ritual? it's possible to do something worthwhile there. but it's a different thing than the usual meaning of a rite of passage
> the usual meaning of a rite of passage there's a reason RoP isn't in quotes: I don't mean the semantic meaning of the phrase, I mean the enactual meaning of the event itself a rite of passage MEANS something. it is transformational magic that changes you. speech acts: I do
huh. I just got married... part of the power of that ritual is its legal force & it just occurred to me that while the government shouldn't be trusted to directly legislate requirements for adulthood, it wouldn't be crazy to require going through a ritual (held by other adults)
like we had a lot of flexibility in what our marriage consisted of. legal reqs were just: - 2+ witnesses - us declaring intent to marry - a registered officiant declaring us married (any adult can register) beyond that, it was up to us and our culture to make it good/appropriate
so you could have a similar thing: in order to become an adult, legal reqs: - 2+ witnesses - person (>=16yo?) declares intent to be an adult - 2 sponsors who are themselves adults (probably higher min age, 20-30) confers new rights & responsibilities. but what? drinking? voting?
on it's own, this is super useless, unless the rights & responsibilities are serious but it's the sort of thing that could get lots of mythos about it, and lots of traditions and practices and challenges as part of it, that would vary by culture as weddings do
anyway, there's tons of work to be done here, both theoretically and in experimenting and I am glad to have been messaged about this, and am gonna give the guy a challenge or two, which I will also probably post here
@sidewayskoyote wrote some critiques, and I want to clarify that the rituals don't have to be identical, but they have to have enough shared meaning/framing/recognition that they actually are the thing they're trying to be
@sidewayskoyote part of the point I was trying to make with the drivers license example &+ is: our society doesn't have a clear rite of passage for adulthood aside from eg graduation, and thus even if you do your own epic ritual, that ritual will not be how you became an adult (to society!)
but one could start a subculture within which you DO become an adult* in that culture via some rite of passage (which could even have a tradition where you design the ritual!) *an autonomous bachelor pre-parent adult, prior to the later more real transition where you have kids!
ah, really good articulation about how there are two aspects of the alchemy, one social/external and the other internal (which in eg a handfasting could be internal to a group that commits to each other in a ritual not legible or not even known to others)
and I've mostly been focused on the social dimension of it here. I'm not sure why. (possibly some interesting shadow/blindspot stuff for me here, but I'm not ready to try to introspect that in this thread) maybe also in part because it seems hard to plan for eg Real Danger? idk
okay, I'll do a lil public introspection, as a treat. I'm noting that I was inclined to post to facebook those various life events that felt like part of my adulting process. wanting to be seen in my process. wanting recognition. I was also partially wanting to inspire others
reading the story about @sidewayskoyote's son fighting a fire, not only did I have a sense of "damn his son became a man that day" but I felt a sense of "have I gone through a proper ordeal like that? am I a man?" maybe I'm missing some key aspect of the inner alchemy
@sidewayskoyote feels scary to acknowledge this. also feels funny. I'm imagining replying to the guy who messaged me and saying "sorry. I can't initiate you to manhood—I'm not a man myself" something true/resonant, something relieving. hm
interestingly, I feel a clearer sense that I'm an adult than that I'm a man and the most vivid alchemical moment associated with that is when at 28 I healed a schism between the best paradigm I knew of, which was not mine, with the rest of my gnosis:
adulthood here is very metamodern & existentialist: the deep recognition that I cannot simply use someone else's worldview of what matters and how matteringness works (& goodness, ethics, truth.,) because ultimately I'm still the one who is picking which other person to defer to
it seems to me that this is one core dimension of what adulthood is to me, and it's an aspect I've studied a fair bit, and one that I was intending on bringing into whatever challenge I would design for the guy who messaged me! & probably yet will. maybe I'll write it up for all
the pith of the challenge is something like "to recognize that there is nobody you can trust more than yourself" ooh nice, good standalone tweet:
seems clear most adults don't have this recognition (if you, reading this, disagree, we're probably talking about different things). I'm not sure how old a kid has to be before they can have it. if I had to guess, some version possible 11-15, tho not really in our society
anyway, I'm gonna sign off and take this man's advice and sit with my own experience of feeling like I'm not a man for a bit