Note on this edition: this is an electronic version of the 1999 book ...

The Ancestry of the Demonic 27scribed how traditional societies organised life and reality into meaningfulunits and orders; an individual’s life, for example, would be divided intoseparate periods. The powers of chaos were constantly surrounding andswaying such ordered life, and they were acknowledged – given a symbolicrole and function – in the rites of passage. Van Gennep’s examples includeterritorial passages, times of pregnancy, birth, initiation into adulthood,marriage, and finally funeral rites. He subdivides the rites of passage intorites of separation, transition rites, and rites of incorporation. 16 These formtogether a symbolic representation (and appropriation) of a potentiallythreatening break of order: after the separation from the old order and beforethe integration into a new one there exists a special moment, limen(‘threshold’ in Latin). The significance of the moment is dramatised to emphasisethe consequences of the transition; the initiation rites often involve aperiod of separation as the “old self” of the initiate is considered dead. Thepresence of something sacred, supernatural and terrifying, is suggested;sometimes daimonic beings are faced in this dangerous phase. After undergoingall the ordeals, the initiate is reborn in his or her new role in the community.17 On the imaginative level, an alternative level of reality is evokedduring these periods, one with different rules than the profane one.The liminal state exists between orders, or systems of meaning, and ithas continued to inspire research. Victor Turner has called it “antistructure”in his study The Ritual Process (1969). In his view, the exceptionalstatus of the anti-structure has important regenerative and creative significance.A male shaman dressed as a woman, or the prankish devils or skeletalfigures in carnivals all break the normal order of things, but they also ventthe pressures within a community in a particular, limited ritual. 18 Turner relatesthe liminal to our own time and culture; he thinks that one single systemof rituals has fragmented in our society into different cultural forms,some of them with liminoid potential. The liminoid features of art, sportsoccasions and other forms of entertainment (Turner mentions such customsas Halloween) are filtered through their more playful and marginal character.19 Applying the liminal thematics to the needs of cultural criticism, MaryDouglas’ study Purity and Danger (1966) has proved especially influential.She has stimulated many writers to pay special attention to the way identityis produced by articulating the limits of such an identity, and by rejecting orsuppressing transgressive figures. 20 The attitude towards liminal areas hasnot always been as tolerant as in the case of the ancient Greek daimon. I returnto these aspects in chapter two, in the discussion of the “daimonic.” 2116van Gennep 1909/1977, 10-11.17 Ibid., 65-115.18 Turner 1969/1987, 166-68. See also Doty 1986, 81-95.19Turner 1981, 162; 1969/1987, 172; Doty 1986, 93-95.20 Douglas 1966/1991; see also e.g. Stallybrass - White 1986/1993, 193-94.21See below, pages 65-80.