"For groups, as well as for individuals, life itself means to separate and to be reunited, to change form and condition, to die and be reborn. It is to act and to cease, to wait and to rest, and then to begin acting again, but in a different way. And there are always new thresholds to cross: the thresholds of summer and winter, of a season or a year, of a month or a night; the thresholds of birth, adolescence, maturity, and old age; the thresholds of death and that of the afterlife - for those who believe in it.... Our interest lies not in the particular rites but in their essential significance and their relative positions within ceremonial wholes - that is, their order... The underlying arrangement is always the same. Beneath a multiplicity of forms, either consciously expressed or merely implied, a typical pattern always recurs; the pattern of the rites of passage."
Arnold van Gennep, The Rites of Passage 1909
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