In 1909 van Gennep wrote a seminal text about these events, which he called The Rites of Passage. (He’s the person who coined the term.) He found that these processes—whether walking around the outback, hunting a lion in Kenya, tripping out on the Columbia River Plateau, or perhaps, even, undergoing a misogi—all have three key elements. The first is separation. The person exits the society in which they live and ventures into the wild. The second is transition. The person enters a challenging middle ground, where they battle with nature and their mind telling them to quit. The third is
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