Deeply into the Bone is about the power of rites, both traditional and invented, to facilitate or obstruct difficult passages in the course of a human life. Not every passage is a rite of passage. We undergo passages, but we enact rites. Life passages are rough, fraught with spiritual potholes, even mortal dangers. Some passages we know are coming; others happen upon us. Birth, coming of age, marriage, and death are widely anticipated as precarious moments requiring rites for their successful negotiation. But there are other treacherous occasions less regularly handled by ritual means: the start of school, abortion, a serious illness, divorce, job loss, rape, menopause, and retirement. More often than not, these events, especially when they arrive unanticipated, are undergone without benefit of ritual.

Effective ritual knowledge lodges in the bone, in its very marrow.

Even a single rite of passage can divide a person's life into "before" and "after." An entire system of such rites organizes a life into stages. Some cultures litter the human life course with numerous rites, cairns to keep pilgrims on course; others hardly blaze the trail at all. These ceremonial occasions inscribe images into the memories of participants, and they etch values into the cornerstones of social institutions. Effective rites depend on inheriting, discovering, or inventing value-laden images that are driven deeply, by repeated practice and performance, into the marrow. The images proffered by ineffective rites remain skin-deep.

Passages can be negotiated without the benefit of rites, but in their absence, there is a greater risk of speeding through the dangerous intersections of the human life course. Having skipped over a major passage without being devastated by a major upset, we may prematurely congratulate ourselves on passing through unscathed. In the long haul, however, people often regret their failure to contemplate a birth, celebrate a marriage, mark the arrival of maturity, or enter into the throes of death. The primary work of a rite of passage is to ensure that we attend to such events fully, which is to say, spiritually, psychologically, and socially. Unattended, a major life passage can become a yawning abyss, draining off psychic energy, engendering social confusion, and twisting the course of the life that follows it. Unattended passages become spiritual sinkholes around which hungry ghosts, those greedy personifications of unfinished business, hover.

The notion of a rite of passage depends on three key ideas: the human life course, the phases of passage, and the experience of ritual transformation. Life-cycle theorists suggest that human lives follow a relatively uniform path. A life proceeds according to a scenario, a stock plot, with enough flexibility to allow for improvisation. The path of human development is intersected by a series of turning points that divide it into predictable phases. Each turning point is both a crisis and an opportunity.

Rites of passage change single people into mates, children into adults, childless individuals into parents, living people into ancestors.

Rites used for negotiating these turns proceed through three phases: separation from the community, transition into an especially formative time and space, and reincorporation back into the community. The effect of ritual passage is to transform both the individuals who undergo them and the communities that design and perpetuate them. Rites of passage change single people into mates, children into adults, childless individuals into parents, living people into ancestors. Rites of passage are stylized and condensed actions intended to acknowledge or effect a transformation. A transformation is not just any sort of change but a momentous metamorphosis, a moment after which one is never again the same.

Classical rites-of-passage theory, first formulated by Arnold van Gennep, invokes spatial metaphors to explain how rites work. According to this theory, a rite of passage is like a domestic threshold or a frontier between two nations. Such places are "neither here not there" but rather "betwixt and between." Just as a person moving from outside to inside a living room is met with ritualized gestures (handshaking, greeting, or hugging), so one who crosses a national boundary is subjected to passport checking and customs, the required ceremonial gestures. Since the threshold zone is a no-man's-land, it is dangerous, full of symbolic meaning, and guarded. A rite of passage is a set of symbol-laden actions by means of which one passes through a dangerous zone, negotiating it safely and memorably.

Ritual knowledge is rendered unforgettable only if it makes serious demands on individuals and communities, only if it is etched deeply into the marrow of soul and society. A rite of passage is more than a mere moment in which participants get carried away emotionally, only to be returned to their original condition afterward. Witnessing a moving play, attending weekly worship, or experiencing an orgasm can transport us into reverie, but a few days later our commitment needs rekindling. Ritual practices such as daily meditation and weekly worship are responses to recurring needs. These rites move but do not transform. By contrast, when effective rites of passage are enacted, they carry us from here to there in such a way that we are unable to return to square one. To enact any kind of rite is to perform, but to enact a rite of passage is also to transform.

Effective ritual knowledge lodges in the bone, in its very marrow. This metaphor first struck me with force while in a discussion with an archaeologist. He was explaining how certain values and social practices can be inferred from ancient bone matter. An archaeologist can deduce from bone composition that the men of a particular society consumed more protein than the women. On the basis of bone size and shape, it may also be evident that in some cultures women habitually carried heavier loads than men. Certain social practices are literally inscribed in the bones. Even though we imagine bone as private, and deeply interior to the individual body, it is also socially formed.

Of course ritual is not really a something that dwells in a literal somewhere. Rites are choreographed actions; they exist in the moments of their enactment and then disappear. When effective, their traces remain--in the heart, in the memory, in the mind, in texts, in photographs, in descriptions, in social values, and in the marrow, the source of our lifeblood.

To speak of meaning as if it resides in the marrow is, of course, to speak ideally, about the way a rite of passage of should work. As a matter of fact, rites can run shallow or become decadent. We should honor the corpses of dead rites. We can learn much by studying rites that are no longer practiced, especially if we understand why they died.

Rites do not always do what they ought to do. As a result, readers may know as many bad examples of passage as good ones. Rites can not only fail to achieve what they purport to do, they can also become a means of oppression, so we cannot afford to view them through a fuzzy, romanticized lens. If rites drive meaning to the marrow, then the criticism of rites must cut to the bone.

My aim is less to convey information about rites of passage in the world's religions and cultures than it is to instigate a conversation in which readers can fruitfully reflect on their own experiences of passages.

Deeply into the Bone is not a how-to book with step-by-step instructions on how to prepare for an impending birth or assemble a hasty funeral. I have little faith in such books. Like sex manuals, they may satisfy the curious, but the behavior they inspire is wooden. Techniques without understanding, like changed performances without changed attitudes, are more damaging than they are helpful. So my aim is to affect attitudes about ritual. This book articulates a vision and pursues an argument; it is not a value-free compilation of facts. I press readers to be both more imaginative and more critical of rites. By juggling personal accounts, local descriptions, persistent themes, and big questions, I try to lure readers into conversation: Is this how you and your experience passage? If not, then how?

I walk the thin line that divides popular from academic writing. I take popular writing about ritual more seriously than most scholarly writers do, but I also attend to scholarly writings more seriously than do most popular writers. Popular writing can make ritual seem more wonderfully promising, more completely understood, and more immediately transparent than it really is. Scholarly writing can make ritual seem opaque of boring. I want to avoid both pitfalls by providing a thoughtful, constructive discussion.

My aim is less to convey information about rites of passage in the world's religions and cultures than it is to instigate a conversation in which readers can fruitfully reflect on their own experiences of passages. My goal is to glimpse the variety of ritual practices from such an angle that readers will pause, remember, and reimagine practices that have become staid. If this reimagining precipitates renewed energy and will for actual ritual enactment, all the better.

This books cuts across cultures and religions, and although it addresses Western, especially North American, readers, it privileges no one religion or culture. Often it considers rites that spring up between converging or conflicting traditions. Climatologists were eager to have close-ups of Saturn and Jupiter not only to study those two planets but also to comprehend more fully the earth's climate by using comparative data. We study things distant to understand better things close to home.

Because rites of passage appear around the world and concern deeply human transitions, it is easy to lapse into universal claims: "When there is a death, you should grieve"; "Everyone rejoices at a birth"; "Weddings are dramatizations of love." Universalism allows us to glibly assert that rites everywhere mean the same thing. Reductions to the lowest common denominator are an invitation to stereotyping and pilfering. The point in examining other people's rites is not to steal or even borrow them but to evoke more fruitful thinking about our own.

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