Manhood Rites Part two

When you think about Manhood Rites or Rites of Passage you can’t help but ask, why? Why bother? What is the value of the manhood rite? There must have been some value or the practice would not have been adhered to for hundreds of years. When you analyze the various manhood rights you find that most have three phases.

Separation

In the separation phase an individual must withdraw from their current status and prepare to move from one place or status to another. You can’t be somewhere else until you leave where you were. This concept is involved in the well worn phrase: cutting the apron strings. The idea is that a man child can’t begin to be a man so long as they are tied to mama.. In the beginning survival depended on that dependent relationship.. But how does one recognize that the apron strings have been cut without a string cutting ceremony?

For many males this breaking away from mother takes place between arguments, slammed doors and acts of defiance. The apron strings are not cut they snap. There are some symbolic acts that signal the boy is no longer a “mama’s boy,” One common symbolic act takes place when the boy shows up for boot-camp. This action is depicted often in movies: a recruit sits in a barber’s chair and with a few swift passes with an electric cutter, the hair drops away, like childhood. It is a particularly powerful act because after the military hair cut has been inflicted upon the boy, he no longer looks the way he looked before.

Transition

The transition phase is more than just the lull of time between who you were and who you will become. During the transition phase the time is for learning new skills, gaining inside, and getting use to the idea of being something you have never been before. Boot camp, college, pledging a fraternity or sorority all involve isolating you from the people and places that had defined you, and giving you tasks that teach you to see yourself differently, and to lean on peers and resources that have never known the former you, so you can dare to be different.

Re-incorporation

In more primitive cultures men have an essential role to play in the survival of the tribe. Hunters and warriors sustain the group, and ensure the survival of the group. In a tribal society, if the male children cut their ties to the past, but were never reincorporated back into the life of the tribe, in a very short period of time, there would be no tribe. If the village starves without a successful hunting party then reincorporation is a life and death matter. Our problem is that we live in cities, and have the option to move from one city to another. There is no core group that is totally dependent of you returning to fill an essential role in the survival of the tribe.

separate from their childhood, and/or their mothers, to have some experience in which they see themselves differently, and then they must return to the tribe, as a man. Because families, and groups can survive in most Occidental groups it is just not vital for the rite of passage to lead back home. We are a cut flower generation. We look OK but we have been severed from our roots. We can use our florist skills to create an environment to make us look OK longer, but we are disconnected from that which could’ve, and should’ve nourished and refreshed us.
In America reincorporation is not even see as possible. One of the great American Novels is entitled: YOU CAN’T GO HOME AGAIN. The phrase is emphatic. It is not, WHEN YOU GO HOME AGAIN, THINGS WILL BE DIFFERENT. No, the Thomas Wolf title says it just CAN’T BE DONE.

Walk of Don’t Walk

When my son earned his Bachelor’s of Science he had a walk/don’t walk option. He could go through the ceremony and wear a Mortarboard (the infamous square hat), and have someone he maybe never met hand him his diploma, or, he could have them mail the diploma. Universities offer this option because they have no building large enough, nor do they have the parking spaces available to accommodate the families of each person graduating. But my son also opted out walking for his Master’s Degree. Is the walk across the stage essential to the degree? No. Of course the walk is not about legitimizing the degree; it is about going through some ritual that serves as psychological Marker. Weddings don’t make you more married than a civil ceremony in the court house. You’re just as dead with or without a funeral. But ceremonies matter. The power is not in the ceremony it is in the mind of those who go through the ceremony, or who witness it. Ceremonies don’t change facts, they change minds, and when you change a mind, you have profoundly changed the owner of that mind..

Our society pretends that we are each independent self-sustaining people that we don’t need to go through the ceremonies. I count myself among them. I don’t want to dress up, drive someplace with not enough parking, and give up hours of time that I could have spent painting or writing. My mind keeps asking, “Is it worth all that grief?”

I want to say no, but I am starting to understand that rites, rituals, and ceremonies matter because it is an outward and visible action that represents something emotional, mental, and, if you’re bent this way, spiritual.